Mixed doubles

by Jill Mansell

  ‘How on earth could you be just passing?’ she demanded, eyeing Eddie with suspicion. ‘This road isn’t on the way to anywhere.’

  ‘Well ... you know how it is. Promised Pru I’d keep an eye on the place.’ Eddie was waffling.

  ‘Make sure it’s secure .. .

  in case of burglars, that kind of thing.’

  Dulcie’s expression changed to incredulous. Would any self- respecting burglar be seen dead breaking into this hideous dump?

  Eddie had taken to driving slowly past Pru’s bedsit every day. He didn’t know quite why, it just gave him an odd sense of comfort. When he had seen the windows open he had experienced a thrill of almost teenage proportions. Pru was home early! She was back! He was going to see her again .. .

  now!

  Except she wasn’t and he wasn’t. He was being interrogated by Dulcie instead.

  ‘Anyway,’ Eddie decided the best method of defence was attack, ‘what are you doing here?’

  ‘Me? I’m polishing.’ To prove it, Dulcie aimed Mr Sheen inexpertly at the peeling paint on one of the window frames. She squirted for several seconds, rubbed vigorously at the paint with the scrunched-up knickers and leapt back as a shower of brittle flakes flew at her like shrapnel, just missing her eyes.

  Eddie frowned. As scenarios went, this was fairly unlikely.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Pru’s due back on Saturday,’ Dulcie replied airily. ‘I thought I’d give the place a good clean.’

  She gestured to the gleaming floor. ‘I’ve been busy for hours.’

  This was positively surreal. The idea of Dulcie scrubbing floors was on a par with Cherie Blair swigging meths from a bottle.

  ‘Have you heard from her?’ Eddie was suddenly overcome with longing, desperate for news of Pru. He hadn’t had so much as a postcard from Spain. ‘I thought she might have been in touch.’

  But Dulcie, shaking her head, looked infuriatingly unconcerned.

  Not a word.’

  ‘Too busy enjoying herself, I expect,’ said Eddie, a brave smile concealing the inner turmoil.

  ‘I expect.’ Spring-clean evidently completed, Dulcie began closing the windows.

  Out of sheer desperation, he said abruptly, ‘I swear, my memory’s like a sieve. I’ve forgotten the name of the friend she’s staying with.’

  ‘Me too.’

  But Eddie noticed Dulcie was smiling to herself, the kind of secretive smile that made you want to shake the person doing it until their teeth rattled.

  ‘What? Why are you looking like that?’

  ‘Me?’ Dulcie shrugged and looked innocent. ‘I was just thinking how badly Pru needed this holiday. I bet it’s doing her the world of good.’ She chucked Pru’s knickers over her shoulder into the sink and grinned at Eddie. ‘She’ll come back a different person, you’ll see.’

  Eddie gazed dispiritedly at the Mr Sheen-soaked knickers dangling over the hot tap. Just so long as Pru didn’t come back with a different person, he didn’t care.

  ‘You know, I reckon Eddie’s got a bit of a thing for you,’ said Dulcie mischievously as she hung out of the window once more. ‘He’s gone, by the way. It’s safe to come out now. Ooh, naughty boy. I thought he must be.’

  Pru crawled out from under her bed, shuddering as a cobweb draped itself across her face.

  ‘Must be what?’

  ‘Driving.’ Gleefully, Dulcie watched his Jag disappear around the corner. ‘Tut tut.’

  Pru looked worried.

  ‘He’s breaking the law.’

  And all because the lady might get burgled,’ Dulcie intoned, Milk Tray-style. She swivelled round and broke into a grin. ‘He couldn’t take his eyes off your knickers either. See, it must be love.’

  ‘My Janet Regers,’ wailed Pru, spotting her favourite pair hanging over the sink.

  Dulcie looked indignant. ‘It was an emergency, I couldn’t find a duster. I had to look authentic, didn’t I?’

  ‘They’re my seducing knickers,’ Pru said sadly, trying to imagine a time in the dim and distant future when she might feel up to a spot of seduction. Maybe in fifty or sixty years ...

  ‘Take it from me, said Dulcie, ‘if you want to seduce a man, the best way is no knickers at all.’

  Chapter 35

  One way and another, it had been an eventful day. By the time Liza arrived at Dulcie’s house, Dulcie was getting stuck into her second bottle of wine. Half-smoked, irritably stubbed-out cigarettes were piling up in the ashtray, which was only brought out in moments of great crisis.

  The more cigarettes she smoked and the more wine she put away, the more sorry for herself Dulcie became.

  ‘... and not just any old frisbee,’ as she thumped the kitchen table, ash cascaded down the front of her black T-shirt, ‘a pink frisbee with go-faster stripes round the side! I mean, can you picture it?

  Patrick, playing with a pink frisbee on a beach .. . on a Tuesday? Has Saint-sodding-Claire been slipping happy pills into his cocoa or what?’

  To divert her, Liza said, ‘Never mind Patrick. Tell me what happened with Liam. Careful—’

  Dulcie’s co-ordination had gone AWOL. Red wine splashed across the table as she tried to pour and missed. The bottle clunked against her glass, which in turn toppled over, drenching an almost full packet of Silk Cut.

  The trouble is, thought Dulcie, I do mind Patrick. I especially mind him being happy with Claire.

  Forcing her attention back to Liam, she related the morning’s events to Liza. Dulcie left nothing out because that was the beauty of best friends; you could moan for as long as you wanted, you never felt compelled to rush.

  ‘All that skulking off to the other side of Bath and secretly getting fit was a waste of time,’ she complained, drawingunsmiley faces in the spilled wine with her finger. ‘He said he knew all along I was a fraud. I bet bloody Imelda told him. Cow.’

  Liza watched as Dulcie tried inexpertly to light a sodden cigarette.

  ‘Let her have him,’ said Liza. ‘You can do better than that. Okay, he looked good, but the charm was all on the surface. Where was the real personality?’

  Dulcie gave up on the cigarette. She managed a brief smile. ‘In his jockstrap.’

  ‘There, you see?’ Heartened by the attempt at humour, Liza sat back in her chair and raised her glass. ‘Feeling better already. You don’t need him.’

  Dulcie knew that. She just wished Liam hadn’t laid into her quite so ruthlessly. Those hurtful things he’d come out with ... well, they’d hurt.

  ‘I told him he was obsessed because all he cared about was boring old sport.’ She kept her eyes fixed on the wet table. ‘And he said at least he was obsessed about something, and didn’t I ever wonder if there was anything missing in my life?’

  ‘Like what?’ said Pru.

  Dulcie shrugged. ‘I don’t know. He just looked at me in this weird way, then he shook his head and said: "You don’t do anything, Dulcie. That’s your problem. You just don’t do anything." ‘

  ‘Well,’ said Liza, breaking the awkward silence that had greeted this last statement – cruel, but true – ‘you’ve got something to do now. Get Liam McPherson right out of your system and find yourself someone a hundred times better.’

  ‘Oh right, it’s that simple.’ Wearily Dulcie rubbed her face. What with this morning’s encounter with Patrick, followed by the Liam thing, then the fight with Pru, she didn’t know if she had the energy to even think about finding herself another man. ‘Tell you what, you give Brad Pitt a ring, let him know I’m unexpectedly back on the market and ask him if he’ll meet me for dinner on Friday night. I’m free then.’

  ‘What you need,’ said Pru, ‘is someone kind. Easy-going. Not goody-goody,’ she argued because Dulcie, predictably, was already pulling I’m-going-to-be-sick faces, ‘but ... well, decent.’

  ‘Decent!’

  Pru refused to be put off. Having learned her lesson months ago, she was determined to get the message across.

  �
��You want someone you can trust,’ she said firmly. ‘The kind of man who turns up when he says he’ll turn up.’

  ‘The kind who doesn’t come home with lipstick on his tennis shorts,’ put in Liza.

  Dulcie groaned and covered her eyes. She knew, she knew what they were saying. It was just those words: decent, dependable, honest, trustworthy ... linked inextricably in her mind with a vision of some bumbling, good-hearted history teacher, always eager to help, in his woolly jumper, baggy corduroys and folkweave sandals.

  Men like that, thought Dulcie, decent men, simply didn’t do it for her. They didn’t make her heart beat faster and her stomach contract with longing. Apart from anything else, they were always ugly.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with decent,’ Pru insisted, ploughing on, refusing to give up.

  Dulcie refilled her glass with Fitou and drank it quickly before it could get spilled. As she did so, it occurred to her that she did know someone decent and not ugly. Someone of whom Pru and Liza both hugely approved. Someone who had in the past been eminently capable of making her heart beat faster and her stomach tie itself in lustful knots.

  Curiously, when she had bumped into him this morning, it had happened again.

  Decent, mused Dulcie, turning the thought over in her mind. Like Patrick.

  ‘Like Claire,’ announced Liza, who had also been mulling the word over. Helping herself to a handful of peanuts from the bowl Pru had just placed in the centre of the table, shemissed the startled expression in Dulcie’s eyes. ‘That’s what Claire is. And look how happy she’s made Patrick.’

  ‘Hang on,’ Dulcie said slowly. ‘How do you know he’s happy?’

  Too late, Liza realised she’d said aloud something she should have kept to herself.

  ‘You said he was,’ she countered with a half-hearted bluff. ‘Anyway, if he’s playing frisbee with her, she must make him happy.’

  Dulcie sat up. She might be a bit pissed but she wasn’t a total dimwit. Not completely stupid.

  What was going on here that she didn’t know about?

  Her green eyes narrowed.

  ‘You mean you’ve met her?’

  Liza gave up. She nodded.

  ‘Well, only once or twice.’

  Pru managed to catch the bottle of Fitou, sent reeling across the table by Dulcie’s twitching elbow.

  ‘And you didn’t tell me?’ Dulcie gazed at her in bewilderment. ‘I don’t get this at all. How did you meet her?’

  It had been one of those silly situations where the longer you put off mentioning something relatively insignificant, the more significant it became. Liza wished now she’d told Dulcie straight away.

  ‘Okay.’ She hesitated. ‘But the only reason I didn’t say it before was because I didn’t think it would last.’

  Trembling, Dulcie lit a cigarette.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Her name’s Claire Berenger. She’s Kit’s sister,’ said Liza. Dulcie screamed. The foul-smelling cigarette landed in her glass of wine.

  ‘You lit the wrong end,’ said Pru as the filter sizzled and went out.

  ‘How could you know that and not tell me?’ Dulcie shouted. Pru jumped – she hadn’t had time to tell her – but Dulcie wasn’t yelling at her, thankfully. She was yelling at Liza.

  ‘I’ve just said, I thought it wouldn’t last. There didn’t seem much point.’

  Liza was on the defensive. Dulcie could imagine why. She had never felt so betrayed.

  ‘But now you know it will last, because she makes him so fantastically happy.’ Dulcie spoke through gritted teeth. Hot on the heels of betrayal came a great surge of jealousy. She imagined the cosy dinner parties for four, Liza and Kit sitting around a candlelit table with Patrick and Claire, gossiping together, about her.

  Laughing at her.

  And now that I’ve been dumped by Liam, Dulcie felt sick at the thought, they can even feel sorry for me, too .. .

  ‘You’re supposed to be my friend,’ she hissed across the table at Liza. ‘I thought you were my friend! What’s happened – did it all change while I wasn’t looking?’ Dulcie’s eyes flashed with contempt. ‘Are you Claire’s friend now?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Liza defensively. ‘I’ve met her a couple of times, that’s all. She seems okay. Not dazzling, but ... nice. You can’t not like her,’ she struggled to explain to a stony-faced Dulcie, ‘because there’s nothing to dislike.’

  ‘I met her too, don’t forget. She looks like an overgrown Girl Guide,’ sneered Dulcie.

  ‘I used to be a Girl Guide,’ said Pru.

  But Dulcie wasn’t listening. Her overwrought imagination had moved on. Now, instead of picturing Liza and Claire having a good old girlie gossip, she saw Liza and Patrick indulging in a meaningful heart-to-heart:

  ‘Oh, Liza, I never knew I could feel like this,’ Patrick confided. ‘Being with Claire is just incredible. She’s made me the happiest man in the world.’

  ‘I know, I can see she has,’ Liza murmured, ‘and I’m so glad for you. You deserve it, after everything you had to go through with Dulcie. You and Claire make a brilliant couple. She’s lovely, Patrick. You really are the perfect match.’

  ‘I can’t believe this,’ snapped Dulcie, fumbling in the soggypacket for yet another cigarette. ‘I can’t believe you’ve been sneaking off behind my back, whispering about me to my husband—’

  ‘Oh come on.’ Liza heaved an exasperated sigh. ‘You don’t seriously imagine I’d do that. Grow up, Dulcie!’

  ‘Me? Me grow up?’ Dulcie jabbed herself in the chest. ‘Oh right, that’s a good one,’ she jeered.

  ‘You’re the one making an idiot of yourself with a boy ten years younger than you are, but for some reason I’m the one who needs to grow up!’

  Liza went very still. All the colour had drained from her face. Pru, in the middle of mopping the wine-logged table top, realised this had gone far beyond the usual level of good-natured bickering.

  ‘Okay,’ said Liza, ‘it’s nine years actually, but point taken.’ Her voice was low and not altogether steady. ‘Now let me just say this. Liam might be a jerk of the first order but he was right about one thing. You definitely need to get yourself a life.’

  ‘What—?’

  ‘Because you are wasting the one you’ve got, and it isn’t doing you any favours,’ Liza continued remorselessly. ‘What Liam said was true: you don’t do anything. You’re bored out of your skull and you don’t even know it. I mean, what’s the plan, Dulcie? When we’re sixty and we look back over our lives, what will you be able to say?’ Mimicking Dulcie’s flippant manner, she chirruped, ‘Well, I was good at shopping and brilliant at telling lies ...’

  Pru stared in horror as Dulcie, red-cheeked, leapt to her feet.

  ‘You are a bitch,’ Dulcie shouted at Liza, ‘and you are way too old for Kit Berenger—’

  ‘At least I’d never dream of telling a man I was pregnant—’

  ‘He’s too young for you, he’s too young for you—’

  ‘And Patrick’s definitely well rid of you—’

  ‘STOP IT!’ shrieked Pru, launching herself across the table and pushing herself between the two of them like a boxing referee. She grabbed one of Dulcie’s wrists and shook it, forcing Dulcie back into her chair. ‘Just stop this AT ONCE.’ Dulcie rubbed her wrist. Ouch, it really hurt.

  ‘Why should I? She started it.’

  ‘I did not start it,’ Liza snapped back. She glared at Dulcie. ‘This is all your fault. Just because you were dumped by Liam.’

  Liam. Dulcie conjured up a mental picture of him playing a brilliant backhand cross-court volley, blond hair flying, eyes flashing .. .

  She closed her eyes. No, this had nothing to do with Liam. When Dulcie didn’t speak, Liza rose to her feet. Pointedly she addressed her words to Pru.

  ‘Time to go.’

  Clearly still shaken by her own bravery, Pru went with her to the front door.

  Left alone at the kitchen table, D
ulcie heard them murmuring together in the hall. Ah well, she was getting used to it.

  She stubbed out the cigarette she’d forgotten to smoke in all the excitement, and refilled her almost empty glass.

  Straining to overhear, Dulcie managed to make out Liza’s words: ‘No, no, I’m fine. Kit’s waiting at home for me.’

  Dulcie took a great slurp of wine. Raising her own voice, she called out, ‘Don’t forget to warm his bottle before you tuck him into bed.’

  Chapter 36

  Unlike Pru’s bedsitter, which – as Dulcie had pointed out to Eddie Hammond – wasn’t on the way to anywhere, Bibi’s house was situated on the main road leading into Bath.

  This meant you couldn’t help passing Bibi’s house even when you didn’t want to.

  Like today.

  Dulcie felt her stomach begin to tense up as she approached the first bend in the road. One twist to the left, one twist to the right, then the traffic lights. And there, on the left if you were unlucky enough to be caught at the lights, was Bibi’s house with its sloping front garden and narrow, hard-to-get-into drive.

  Dulcie had a thumping headache, thanks to finishing off all the red wine Liza hadn’t stayed to drink last night. She had woken up sensing something was wrong, then groaned as the awful memories seeped back.

  Pru hadn’t helped.

  ‘You should apologise to Liza,’ she told Dulcie.

  ‘Oh God, why do I always have to be the one to apologise?’ Dulcie wailed.

  Pru hadn’t stated the obvious, she had simply given Dulcie a long look.

  And since in view of the Liam thing it seemed sensible to steer clear of Brunton Manor for a while, Dulcie could think of only one other sensible way to pass the time.

  Go shopping.

  She especially didn’t enjoy passing Bibi’s house today because it served as a horrible reminder of yet another occasion when she had tried to improve a situation, only to end up making it much, much worse instead.

  At first, in the weeks following Patrick’s eventful surprise party, Dulcie had crossed her fingers each time she approached the traffic lights, praying that when she rounded the second bend she would see James’s car parked on Bibi’s drive.