Queen Bee
Page 32
He – Ted – knows all about Taylor and Amber’s parentage and couldn’t care less. In fact, I think he’s probably relieved that there isn’t another man around making demands to see them, negotiating a complicated relationship with his new wife. They both like to travel and eat fine foods and acquire beautiful things. They enjoy each other’s company. There are just no fireworks – on her part, at least; I can’t speak for him. Who knows? Maybe that’s a good thing? They’re building a future on a rational assessment of their compatibility, not on how much they want to rip each other’s clothes off. Maybe that’s the sensible thing to do if you’re in for the long game.
And now she’s living in this glass dream house. Taylor and Amber are happy. They’re fond of Ted, he buys them stuff. I’m sure I should have put a ‘because’ in that sentence somewhere. He leaves all the parenting decisions to Stella, which means the girls are pampered and spoilt. A year of living rent free has meant they barely noticed a change in their circumstances. But they must miss Al – Stella finally told them that he wasn’t their real dad, that he wouldn’t be coming back. They took it remarkably calmly. Too cool for school. Personally, I think they’re bottling it all up until they hit their teens and then they’ll probably both go crazy with drugs and resentment. They’re a pair of unexploded bombs, but at least they’re still wearing Gucci.
Al, well, who knows where Al is? He’s moved away is all we know. Living in a hovel with Miss Wife-Stealing Nanny 2019 like two star-crossed lovers, hopefully, Stella said. Eating soup out of a can and shagging each other in front of the gas fire. I hope, for his sake, he bounces back. His punishment feels disproportionate when you look at how Stella has got off scot free for her own mistakes. Although the way he has turned his back so completely on the two girls he brought up as his daughters for all those years means my sympathy has limits.
The ceremony is short. No need for drawn-out declarations of love here. Ted’s daughters – one a woman around Stella’s age, the other younger, courtesy of wife number two – look slightly po-faced throughout the whole thing. There was much talk of a pre-nup once the engagement was announced, but Stella put her expensively clad foot down. She had had one man try and leave her with nothing, she’d said. She’d be damned if she was going to let it happen again.
You’d be forgiven for thinking she’d learned nothing. That she still valued wealth and status over everything else. But I don’t believe that’s true. She’s been kind to me over the past few months. She’s put herself out. She came over when I first found out David and Michaela were moving in together. I was side-swiped by my reaction. I had no idea I still cared, that he still had the capability of hurting me. I thought I’d moved on completely, but it turned out I was mistaken. Admittedly, she was the third person I called, after Angie and Gail, both of whom were at work, but she got straight in the car and drove over with two bottles of Prosecco. Sat uncomplaining while I cried into her hair. Actually, that was the night I finally got back in touch with Danny, drunk on fizz and indignation.
‘Sorry I’ve been ignoring your messages,’ was the first thing I wrote. He’d contacted me a couple of times by then just to see if I was OK. ‘But I’m drunk and I’ve just found out my ex is moving in with my former friend.’
‘Not the friend who you thought he was seeing before you split????’ he’d sent back. No recriminations for the months I’d left him hanging. ‘Bastard.’
‘Utter bastard,’ I replied. ‘Both of them.’
‘Well, if it makes you feel any better, my ex-wife has just started seeing her personal trainer. He’s five years younger than her and his name’s Adonis.’
I’d laughed for the first time all day. ‘You’re joking,’ I sent.
‘Not even. He’s Greek.’
We talked like this for weeks before we finally decided to meet up. Jokey. Indulging the other in their resentments about their former partners. It probably wasn’t the most healthy way to start a relationship, but by the time we had a coffee in Marylebone one afternoon I felt as if I knew him. And as if I’d got all my sadness about David out of my system. From that moment on, neither of us really mentioned our exes at all. It was as if we’d purged ourselves of them.
Stella sees me and comes over as fast as her train will allow. She hugs me, hugs Betsy. Betsy runs off to play with Taylor and Amber, now their duties are over. No more letting them torture her with make-up and hair accessories. These days, she’s confident enough to put her foot down.
‘Happy?’ I say to Stella.
‘Happy,’ she says.
‘Are you smiling, because I can’t tell. Nothing is moving.’ The Botox is back with a vengeance.
She rolls her eyes. She’s used to me taking the piss. I think she actually likes it. ‘I’m smiling on the inside.’
‘Have you told Ted? Because he might not realize …’
‘Where’s Danny?’ she says, ignoring me.
I look round, and he’s deep in conversation with Gail and Ben. They’re all laughing, so it seems to be going well. Or there’s something in the wine. ‘Over there. Come and meet him.’ I grab her hand and pull her behind me. ‘Danny, this is Stella …’
He smiles and shakes her hand. He has a lovely open smile. It’s one of my favourite things about him. Stella leans in towards him. ‘If you ever treat my friend badly, I will kill you.’
Thankfully, he realizes she’s joking and laughs. It could have gone either way, because she didn’t really give away any clues. ‘Nice to meet you too. Congratulations, by the way.’
‘He’s cute,’ she whispers to me later.
‘It’s early days,’ I say. ‘But yeah, I like him.’
Back home later, just me and Betsy (Danny is yet to stay over. It feels wrong with Betsy in the next room, at least until I’m sure if he’s more than my transitional relationship), we flop on the sofa, fresh from our showers, pyjamas on. The party will still be going on, but they announced no kids after 7 p.m., which actually seems like a good idea to me, and gave me the perfect excuse to get away before it got messy. Right on cue, at about ten to, the nannies started to arrive to collect their charges, and that was my prompt to leave. Felix curls up between us, purring, content, snoring like an old steam train. We look through the day’s photos on my phone.
‘I should send this to Angie,’ I say of a picture of Eva looking particularly pained. Not that I want to encourage my daughter to make fun of the way people look, but I do get nervous that she’ll start to think the things her surrogate aunts do to their faces are just what it’s normal for women to do. So I indulge in a bit of gentle mickey taking here and there. With Angie, obviously, it’s different. She’s met Stella a few times, and even Jan, Eva, Katya and Anya once, at my place on my birthday. She’s obsessed by their ever-changing features, their expanding and contracting (mostly expanding) chests. She finds them all hilarious and ridiculous at the same time.
‘Send her the one of Auntie Stella’s new boobs,’ Betsy says, yawning, and I laugh, even though I shouldn’t.
It’s a hot late-August night. I can’t open the front window because of the traffic noise, not to mention the possibility that someone might climb right through it and steal all my meagre possessions. I’m sweltering, though. Betsy is falling asleep where she sits. It’s been a long day.
‘Bed,’ I say, and for once she doesn’t argue. Because she’s so tired, she even lets me tuck her in. I turn the fan on in the corner of her room. ‘Love you,’ I say as she closes her eyes, already out for the count.
‘Love you too,’ she mutters.
I make myself a cup of tea and take it out to the little back garden. It’s still not quite dark and I can hear various of my neighbours pottering around, drinking, laughing. Even though I can’t see any of them because of the high brick walls, and I’ve never spoken to any of them beyond a hello in the street if I see a familiar face, I like the sense of community you feel just from knowing there are all these different lives going on in proximity to your
own. It’s never quiet. Aside from the traffic and the neighbours, there’s the sirens and the beat of music from the pub on the corner. But my garden is an oasis. Betsy and I spent hours out here in the spring, planting up pots and the thin beds around the edges of the flagstones. It’s a riot of colour. Although, if I’m being honest, it still smells a bit of take-outs and traffic and cat wee.
I stretch my feet on to the other wrought-metal chair. Lean my head back and look at the sky. Felix wanders out and sits washing himself and watching me. He can’t go anywhere beyond the garden, because the walls are too high, but he doesn’t seem to mind.
My phone beeps with a message. Angie. Blimey. Wouldn’t like to bump into her on a dark night! It makes me laugh.
I drag myself inside. I need to get some sleep. I’m supposed to be dropping Betsy off with David and Michaela first thing, because the wedding has eaten into his weekend time with her. She doesn’t want to go. Since Michaela became a fixture, she never wants to go. It’s something we’re going to have to address one of these days.
‘I want to stay here with you,’ she said to me yesterday as we got ourselves ready for the wedding. ‘I want to stay home.’
It still gives me a thrill every time she says that word. She loves it here. She loves the noise and the chaos and the fact that she’s near all her friends and her school and her ballet class. And because she loves it, I’ve come to love it too. That’s one of the reasons I’m in no rush with Danny. Or anyone. Because what matters at the moment is that she and I are together. That I’m back where I’m supposed to be, living with my daughter. That I’m back in my own life. Shabby and imperfect as it may look from the outside – and from the inside too most of the time, let’s face it – it’s enough. In fact, it’s more than enough. I don’t need anything else.
Acknowledgements
As this is book number ten I thought it was about time I did some more comprehensive thank yous to the amazing team of people who contribute so much behind the scenes. So here’s to Maxine Hitchcock, my fabulous editor, superwoman Louise Moore, Claire Bush, Gaby Young, Clare Parker, Liz Smith, Lee Motley, Christina Ellicott, Beatrix McIntyre, Alice Mottram, and everyone else at Michael Joseph and Penguin Random House.
And to my agents and their teams: the wonderful Jonny Geller at Curtis Brown, along with Ciara Finan, Kate Cooper and Nadia Farah. Peter Macfarlane of Macfarlane Chard for relentlessly drumming up interest in the film and TV rights, and Melissa Myers at WME for never minding that every time she asks me if I want to go to LA and write something I say no.
THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING
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First published 2020
Copyright © Jane Fallon, 2020
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Cover images © Getty Images
ISBN: 978-1-405-94335-2
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