Mixed doubles

by Jill Mansell

  ‘Are you all right?’ said Liam when she had hung up. ‘Great. Just checking up on Granny.’

  Dulcie waved the phone at him. ‘She’s fine.’

  ‘Managed without you last night then?’

  Why was he looking at her in that peculiar way?

  ‘Oh, no problem.’ Wondering if for some reason he didn’t believe her, Dulcie began to elaborate.

  ‘She went to bingo, actually. Won eighteen pounds fifty. Granny’s always been lucky ... last year she entered a competition on the back of a cornflakes packet and won a scuba-diving holiday in Tenerife.’

  Liam, magnificently naked, pulled on a tracksuit. He didn’t appear to be listening.

  ‘I’ve got to get to the club.’

  Dying to have a private snoop around the flat, Dulcie said brightly, ‘Don’t worry about me, I can let myself out.’

  But he was already picking up her crumpled clothes, holding them towards her.

  ‘I’d rather we left together.’

  This was a bit of a shame but Dulcie consoled herself with the thought that maybe it was Liam’s way of being romantic.

  ‘Headache gone, then?’ he said as the flat door slammed shut behind them.

  Headache?

  ‘Oh!’ That headache. ‘Oh, absolutely.’ Relieved, Dulcie beamed up at his unsmiling profile.

  That must be why he’d seemed so odd; he was worried about her. ‘Completely gone, thanks.’

  But Liam still didn’t smile. ‘Good.’

  A gleaming red Parcelforce van was just driving off as Dulcie arrived home. Missing its bumper by a whisker as she screeched into the drive, she realised with a strange pang that the driver had strong brown forearms exactly like Patrick’s. No need for that V-sign though.

  Pru was in the hall clutching a parcel.

  ‘It’s for Patrick,’ she said, ‘marked Urgent. I had to sign for it.’

  Dulcie wondered what the driver had made of Pru’s bandaged head. With each passing day she was looking more and more like Frankenstein’s monster.

  ‘Some component for one of Patrick’s computers.’ Peering at the label on the parcel, she recognised the company’s logo.

  Their own computer evidently hadn’t been updated with his change of address.

  Dulcie dumped the parcel on the hall table and made her way through to the kitchen.

  ‘It says Urgent.’

  Following her, Pru sounded agitated. Pru, Dulcie recalled, was the kind of person who felt compelled to pay the electricity bill the same day it arrived. Preferably with a first-class stamp.

  ‘Okay, okay. Breakfast first. You make the tea and I’ll defrost the doughnuts.’ It was still only nine o’clock, after all. ‘Then I’ll take it round.’

  When Dulcie arrived at the office, however, the doors were locked. For a Tuesday morning this was unthinkable; Patrick had to have been abducted by aliens at the very least.

  Except he hadn’t. When Dulcie climbed the next flight of stairs she found the door to Patrick’s flat open and Patrick there, standing with his back to her, packing decidedly un-computerlike things into a holdall.

  Dulcie cleared her throat and he spun round.

  ‘Did I startle you? Sorry.’

  ‘Dulcie!’

  She half smiled.

  ‘I’ve never seen you looking guilty before. What is it, a couple of kilos of heroin?’

  The expression on Patrick’s face was exquisite. She couldn’t resist going over to the bag and taking a closer look.

  A beach towel. Swimming trunks. Factor 4 Ambre Solaire. A bottle of wine and a corkscrew. A frisbee.

  A frisbee, for God’s sake...

  She looked at Patrick, who had never blushed in his life. He was blushing.

  Dulcie said, ‘Don’t forget your bucket and spade.’ He zipped up the holdall.

  ‘What are you doing here, Dulcie?’

  She held out the parcel.

  ‘It says Urgent. I thought you might be desperate.’

  ‘Oh. Thanks.’

  Like a small boy reluctantly unwrapping a birthday present from a great-aunt, knowing it’s going to be socks, Patrick opened the package.

  ‘If I’d known,’ said Dulcie, to break the suddenly awkward silence, ‘I’d have bought you a beachball instead.’

  Recovering himself, as if realising he didn’t have to feel guilty, Patrick held up the polystyrene box of microchips and grinned.

  ‘No really, these are fine. Just what I wanted.’

  Dulcie felt something twist and tighten in her stomach. ‘You’ve closed the office.’

  ‘Just for the day.’

  The something, she realised, was jealousy.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Devon.’ He glanced out of the window, at the traffic-clogged street below. ‘It’s hot, it’s sunny.

  We thought we’d drive down, find a beach.’

  And play fucking frisbee, thought Dulcie, biting her lip until it hurt.

  ‘You and Claire?’

  ‘Me and Claire.’ Patrick nodded.

  ‘Sure you can remember how to swim?’ She mimed the breaststroke. ‘It’s a leisure pursuit, you do it in water. Sometimes you splash about a bit and have something known as fun. Maybe if I drew a diagram—’

  ‘Dulcie, stop,’ said Patrick, but not crossly. He was being – ugh, far worse, Dulcie realised –

  patient with her. ‘You always told me I worked too hard. Well, now I’m taking a bit of time off to enjoy myself. You of all people should approve.’

  Inexplicably, Dulcie’s eyes filled with tears. She wanted to scream at his stupidity. He wasn’t supposed to take time off and enjoy himself now.

  ‘Are you crying?’ Patrick looked shocked. ‘You never cry.’ He unzipped the holdall, pulled out the beach towel and gave it to her to wipe her eyes on. Then he smiled briefly. ‘Must be your hormones.’

  Wrong, thought Dulcie, it’s you.

  Dammit, how thick could an intelligent man get?

  Chapter 34

  Since she was supposed to be in Majorca where the temperature was up in the nineties, Pru realised she was going to look pretty odd if she reappeared without at least some kind of a tan.

  By eleven o’clock, Dulcie’s back garden had turned into a suntrap. Reassured by its total seclusion, Pru dragged one of the padded sunloungers into pole position, slathered on half a tube of Factor 8, arranged herself so as to catch the maximum number of rays, and closed her eyes.

  She almost fainted twenty minutes later when a man’s voice said, ‘Jesus Christ, what happened to you?’

  Pru opened her eyes and shrieked. Liam was standing over her looking appalled, which was fairly understandable given that she was wearing her least exotic white bra and a pair of ancient green pants.

  ‘I wasn’t asleep!’ Gabbling, stalling for time, Pru sat bolt upright and tried to cover herself with her hands. Being found naked would have been better than being spotted in these pants. She peered across at the gate which led through from the front garden. ‘I didn’t hear the gate! How did you open it without clicking the latch?’

  The wooden gate was only four feet high. Liam gave her a pitying look.

  ‘I jumped over.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I thought you were Dulcie.’ He paused. ‘From a distance.’ Highly likely, thought Pru.

  ‘Dulcie isn’t here.’

  Liam was still staring at her head. Pru braced herself for the next question. In the event of emergency, she had an explanation ready. She had been in a car crash.

  But Liam said, ‘I thought you were supposed to be in Majorca.’

  ‘Yes, I ... well, I ...’

  ‘So what’s with the bandages?’

  Pru swallowed.

  ‘I ... had an ...’

  Accident, prompted her brain. You had an accident.

  ‘You had an operation,’ Liam suggested helpfully. ‘What, to pin your ears back?’

  Pru was outraged.

  �
��Who told you? Bloody Dulcie, I suppose—’

  Liam grinned.

  ‘Relax. Lucky guess. Actually, my cousin had it done years ago. You look like she looked afterwards.’ The grin broadened. ‘Drove her mad not being able to wash her hair.’

  Praying he’d go away wasn’t doing much good. Liam was now making himself comfortable on the grass beside her sunlounger.

  ‘Dulcie might not be back for ages.’

  He shrugged. ‘That’s okay. I’ll keep you company instead.’

  ‘Oh.’

  In contrast with Liam, Pru was feeling more and more uncomfortable. She sensed he had something to say that he hadn’t yet said.

  ‘So you’re the grandmother, I take it?’

  ‘Sorry? Oh ... yes.’ Unhappily, Pru nodded. ‘I didn’t want anyone to know I was here.’

  A glimmer of a smile. ‘I won’t breathe a word.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Liam idly picked a daisy from the lawn and rolled the stem between his finger and thumb.

  ‘You aren’t much good at lying, are you? Not as good as Dulcie.’

  Oh Lord.

  ‘I’m not sure what you m-mean,’ stammered Pru.

  ‘You know,’ Liam prompted. He sounded amused. ‘Fibbing. Bending the truth. Making up stories.’

  Helplessly, Pru shrugged. She didn’t need a mirror to know her cheeks were absolutely scarlet.

  ‘No ... well, I suppose I’m not great at it. I just . .. just didn’t want people to know I’d had my ears done, that’s all. I’m very sensitive about my ears—’

  ‘You see,’ Liam’s tone, as he cut through the gabble, was conversational, ‘I know Dulcie isn’t pregnant.’

  Pru stared at him.

  ‘What? How do you know?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘How?’ repeated Pru, redder than ever.

  ‘The wonder of the double-bluff You just told me.’

  This was a nightmare. This was truly awful. Pru began to shake.

  ‘You mean you didn’t know? It was a guess?’

  Again the rueful half-smile.

  ‘Well, call it an educated one.’

  ‘Oh shit!’ wailed Pru. Dulcie was going to kill her.

  ‘Come on, calm down. The thing is, how I react depends on the reason she’s doing it,’ Liam soothingly explained. ‘I mean, if the whole thing was a con-trick, an attempt to trap me, I wouldn’t be too pleased. But if it was just for a joke, some kind of girly bet ... well,’ he shrugged, ‘I can take a joke.’

  ‘It was, it was a joke!’ The words tumbled out breathlessly. ‘Of course it wasn’t serious!’

  Liam’s blue eyes were cool.

  ‘Like I said, you’re a lousy liar.’

  Defeated, Pru fell back on the sunlounger. Somehow her horrible green pants didn’t matter any more. She watched him bat away a persistent wasp.

  ‘So how did you guess she wasn’t ... um ... telling the truth?’

  ‘Put it this way. What would you think if your pregnant girlfriend spent the night with you and the next morning you found a bit of cellophane bobbing around in the loo?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The kind of cellophane that comes wrapped round Lil-lets,’ said Liam. ‘The kind that’s hard to flush away.’ He paused. ‘Bit of a giveaway, that.’

  ‘Oh!’ Pru breathed a sigh of relief. ‘You mean Dulcie already knows you know?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘I needed time to think. I had to make sure I was right.’ Again, he almost looked amused. ‘Lucky you were here.’ Not lucky for me, thought Pru miserably. Somehow she knew she was going to end up taking the blame for this.

  ‘So what will you do now?’ she whispered.

  Liam stretched out on the grass, knees bent, and began performing energetic sit-ups.

  ‘What people normally do when they’ve had a narrow escape, I imagine,’ he said. ‘Celebrate.’

  Dulcie arrived home fifteen minutes later. Liam had by this time progressed to one-armed press-ups. Unable to bear the look of joy on Dulcie’s face when she saw him in her back garden, Pru rushed up to her room. Burdened with guilt and shame, sticky with perspiration and sun cream, she lay on her bed with the windows shut, terrified of overhearing what was going on outside.

  Whatever it was, it didn’t take long. Pru heard the slam of a car door and the crunch of wheels on gravel. When she dared to peer out of the window – through a crack in the curtains like some neighbourhood watcher – she saw Liam tearing off up the road in his red Lamborghini. Alone.

  The door to the spare bedroom was flung open. Dulcie, barely recognisable with her face streaked with mascara and tears, erupted into the room.

  Pru cringed.

  ‘He’s gone! He’s bloody gone,’ wept Dulcie, stubbing her toe on the leg of the bed and letting out a renewed howl of pain. ‘Oh! Ow! I can’t bear it ... he’s really gone.’ Clutching her toe, collapsing on to the bed, she stared wild-eyed at Pru. ‘And it’s ALL YOUR FAULT.’

  Pru couldn’t handle this. Too racked with guilt to argue – she knew it was her fault – and too stunned by the bitterness of Dulcie’s attack to even attempt to fight back, she knew she had to escape. Racing downstairs, dragging on a long red T-shirt as she went, she grabbed her bag and stumbled barefoot across the stinging gravel to her car in the garage.

  So much for being cosseted.

  Back at the bedsit, fusty and unaired, Pru discovered the money in the electricity meter had run out and everything in the fridge had turned to slime.

  She spent two hours cleaning out the stinking fridge and frenziedly scrubbing the floor. Not having worked for the last week and a half meant she was perilously low on funds. This reduced her to fresh tears of despair.

  How could I have been so stupid? she thought hopelessly. I’ve got new ears, and no food.

  As she was washing the grimy windows, Dulcie’s car rounded the corner. Pru leapt away from the window like a frightened rabbit and crouched on the floor, trembling. She wasn’t up to another tirade of abuse, she just wasn’t.

  ‘Oh, Pru, I’m so sorry. Can you ever, ever forgive me?’

  Dulcie, still looking a sight with mascara tracks dried on her cheeks, gazed miserably at Pru.

  ‘I’m such a stupid bitch. I’m so, so ashamed of myself. It wasn’t your fault, it was all mine. If you want to,’ she offered in desperation, moving closer to Pru on the front doorstep, ‘you can slap my face.’

  Pru made a noise halfway between a sob and a snort of laughter.’Go on,’ Dulcie said humbly, ‘I mean it. Hard as you like.’ She offered her cheek.

  ‘Don’t be such a berk,’ said Pru. ‘You’d better come in.’ When they reached the bedsitter, Dulcie wrinkled her nose at the overpowering smell of bleach.

  She watched as Pru filled the kettle at the sink.

  ‘I know I’m a berk. Are you still my friend?’

  ‘Stupid question,’ said Pru, dangerously close to bursting into tears all over again. ‘Lend me fifty pee and I’ll make you a cup of tea.’

  When Dulcie had finished shovelling coins into the meter – ‘Not that you’re staying here. You’re coming home with me’ – she delved into her massive handbag and pulled out a dark-green Jolly’s carrier.

  ‘I was going to buy you flowers, but that’s what guilty husbands do when they’ve cheated on their wives. So I got you these instead.’

  Pru opened the carrier containing six Lancôme lipsticks, four Clinique eyeshadows and seven Chanel mascaras.

  ‘Bit of a job lot. I was parked on double yellows in Milsom Street, didn’t want to get clamped,’

  Dulcie apologised. ‘I just raced in and grabbed what I could. Still, more useful than a bunch of roses.’

  ‘You went into Jolly’s looking like that?’ Pru was touched. ‘Like what?’

  Dulcie screamed when she saw her reflection in the mirror.

  ‘My God, no wonder they asked me if I wanted my mascara waterproof! I’m amazed I wasn’t arrested,’ she sa
id ruefully, ‘for wearing make-up without due care and attention.’

  Over cups of tea that tasted faintly of bleach, Dulcie told Pru just how cruel and hurtful Liam had been.

  ‘He called me a sneaky, low-down, conniving bitch,’ she said with a sigh. ‘He told me I was a sad case who needed to get a life. He said I was desperate and lazy and a pathological liar, and he felt sorry for the next stupid bastard I got my claws into because nobody deserved that much grief’

  ‘What did you say?’ Pru, who would have been finished off completely by such a slating, particularly one so perilously close to the truth, marvelled at Dulcie’s matter-of-fact tone. She had, it appeared, already got the worst of her misery out of her system.

  ‘I told him he was a washed-up, over-the-hill, failed ball-basher with delusions of celebrity,’ said Dulcie. ‘I said he was boring and health-obsessed, with about as much personality as a salad sandwich.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Oh, and I told him he was crap in bed.’

  Pru’s eyes widened.

  ‘Was he?’

  ‘Of course he wasn’t,’ said Dulcie, ‘but you always tell them that.’

  ‘Crikey.’

  ‘It niggles away at the back of their mind. They hate it but they can’t help wondering if— Who’s that?’

  The doorbell was ringing.

  Pru’s hands flew instinctively to her bandaged ears. No one knows I’m here. Don’t answer it.’

  But Dulcie, ever curious, was already hanging out of the open window, peering down to the street below.

  ‘Dulcie, hi!’

  ‘It’s Eddie,’ Dulcie murmured incredulously.

  ‘Don’t let him in,’ squeaked Pru.

  ‘I was just passing,’ Eddie called up, shielding his eyes from the sun. ‘Saw the windows open.

  Hang on ...’

  As Dulcie watched, the front door opened. A hippy in a drooping Woodstock T-shirt emerged and Eddie grabbed the door before it could slam shut.

  ‘Wait there,’ he yelled, waving cheerfully to Dulcie, ‘I’m coming up.’

  Dulcie greeted him clutching a can of Mr Sheen in one hand and a pair of Pru’s knickers in the other.