The Best of Friends Page 8

  As I approach my own house, tawdry, squat, and ugly in comparison to Charlotte and Dan’s manor, I see my parents’ Ford Mondeo parked outside the front gate, exuding staid and stolid middle-age, just like Marjorie and Dennis themselves, who sometimes come across as pastiches of characters from an Alan Ayckbourn drama. I started calling them by their first names when I was in my teens and my younger brothers were born, wanting to distance myself from this family I no longer felt truly part of. It’s a habit that’s stuck, though Jamie and Luke think it’s weird and always call them Grandma and Grandad.

  Pausing for a moment, I take a deep breath before continuing up the path and through the front door. The plan is to have lunch and then go for a long, healthy country walk.

  That’s all I have to manage.

  In the end, the day goes well, considering. The only real flash point comes during dessert, when the cream precipitates the conversation about money and my lack of it that I have been dreading.

  ‘Sometimes we have to make do with what’s available in the village,’ I explain, seeing Marjorie’s raised eyebrows in response to being passed the pot by Luke. ‘I can’t afford Waitrose anymore and it would be too far to drive there for every little thing even if I could. I do a big shop at the Lidl ten miles away once a week and then incidentals – well, the general store down the road has to fill in the gaps.’

  Marjorie visibly balks at the mention of Lidl, as she had at the sight of the words UHT.

  ‘If only you hadn’t … I mean, it’s such a shame you—’ she falters, and stops abruptly.

  I reach across for the cream and pour it, slowly and deliberately, over my crumble.

  ‘Go on, Mum,’ I say, mixing the fruit and cream together with my spoon, ‘what were you going to say?’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ she snaps.

  Jamie is looking first at his grandmother and then at me, eyes wide with horrified curiosity.

  ‘I’m not sure that I do,’ I reply calmly – or at least as calmly as I can manage. I spoon stewed apple and oats and sugar and cream into my mouth and chew. It is sweet, smooth, calorie-laden, and delicious.

  Marjorie sighs. ‘If it wasn’t for … what happened.’

  My father Dennis coughs and puts down his spoon, letting it clatter noisily into the bowl. ‘Marjorie,’ he intones, his voice heavy with the bored disapproval that this particular subject always induces in him. ‘Is now the best time?’

  It seems that he, too, is conscious of Jamie and Luke’s pricked ears. Perhaps he’s even sympathetic to my plight, unlike Marjorie, who will plough on like the proverbial bull in the china shop if allowed.

  ‘If you’ve finished, boys, then go off and play.’ My words are an instruction, not an offer, and the children understand them as such. With a scraping of chairs and kicking of table legs, the boys depart, seemingly keen to get away from the tense atmosphere of the dining room.

  ‘The point is,’ continues Marjorie, as they are in the process of leaving, ‘that if Susannah had finished her university course and graduated instead of … well, instead of dropping out, she wouldn’t be in such a dire situation now.’ The ‘now’ comes out as a pronounced whine that grates on my nerves. ‘If she— If you were qualified, if you’d passed the exams, you’d be able to get a good job.’

  I feel myself crumple from the outside in and have to pause to quell the tears before I can speak.

  ‘Sorry,’ is all I manage to articulate.

  I give in. I’ll never be able to exonerate what I did, the trouble I caused, the consequences I brought down upon myself.

  ‘The actual point is, Susannah,’ interjects Dennis in the self-satisfied tone that particularly irritates me, ‘that whatever happened in the past, if you and Justin had saved a little more during the good times, you would have had something to fall back on when disaster struck.’

  I clench my spoon so tightly in my hand I think it might snap in half, and drop my eyes to my empty bowl where creamy swirls pattern the red earthenware. I refrain from mentioning that savings would have helped Dennis, too, when he lost his job and our world turned upside down. If he had had money put aside, I might not have had to change schools, for a start. I keep my reply firmly focused on Justin and on Dennis’s accusations.

  ‘He’d probably have had to use it all to pay his debts. Or he’d have hidden it away somewhere. In fact, I don’t have any way of knowing that he hasn’t done that. Whatever, I’m quite sure there would be none left for me and the boys.’

  I get up and begin robustly clearing the table, roughly gathering crockery and cutlery towards me and piling everything in uneven heaps ready to carry into the kitchen. As I leave the room, I feel utterly, miserably alone. Despite all Justin’s failings, I miss him.

  In my nasty kitchen, I make coffee, taking an age about it so that I have time to compose myself. Biting my lip, I trudge back to the dining room with the tray. I hate all the mean, undersized separate rooms in this house but I know I’m lucky to have a roof over my head at all. I force myself to hold my head up high and determine that I’ll make finding a job an imperative. At least that way, I’ll be showing the world, as well as myself, that I can look after myself, that I’m neither a quitter nor a basket case.

  ‘Perhaps you could do a secretarial course,’ muses my mother as she pours milk into her mug. It’s as if she can read my mind. ‘Become a PA. It’s a steady job, reasonable money.’ She stirs her coffee even though she doesn’t take sugar. ‘Or what about teaching?’ She checks herself. ‘But no, that wouldn’t be possible.’

  ‘Let’s leave it for now, shall we,’ I request, making it sound like a statement rather than a question.

  The stony silence that follows is thankfully, if chaotically, broken by Luke coming back into the room saying that he’s kicked his football into next door’s garden and asking permission to climb over the fence and retrieve it.

  Later, we go for our walk. On the way back, we pass Charlotte and Dan’s mansion, the gates wide open, the driveway full of cars, indicating that they are also enjoying company, although perhaps the notion of enjoyment applies more to them than to me. I hope Dan didn’t get into trouble for being late back with the eggs and then wistfully imagine the brunch Charlotte will have rustled up, the huge table in that gorgeous kitchen groaning under the weight of delicious breads and salads, tortillas and interesting Mediterranean dips made of avocado and aubergine that I can’t afford and anyway, that my parents wouldn’t touch.

  Marjorie sighs over the beauty of the Queen Anne architecture and the sheer size of the property in her best ‘that could have been my daughter’ way.

  I sigh over the whole sorry mess of it all.

  Chapter 13

  Charlotte

  Dan comes back from the shop, his legs covered in some sort of white stuff, dried up and crusty, that looks like … well, I won’t say what it looks like but leave it to the imagination. I take the eggs as he explains that you bumped into him and caused him to drop a box onto the floor, hence the state of his jeans. You did strike me as someone who might be clumsy. Those carrying a bit of extra weight often are.

  Personally, all I seem to do these days is watch the scales and fight the flab. I make all this delicious food, but I don’t eat it.

  The Kitchen Aid whisks the egg whites with the sugar to perfection. When the mixture stands in stiff, tall peaks, I take out a palette knife from the drawer and spread the meringue, thickly and evenly, over the top of the key lime pie where it sits, like a blanket of the most immaculate snow, waiting to be blow-torched.

  We’ve lived in so many places that sometimes I forget which came in what order, whether Toronto was before or after Tokyo, Seoul a longer or shorter sojourn than Jakarta. But I know that it was in New York that I learnt to make this dish. Pregnant with the twins and over my morning sickness, I craved it, gorged on it. I put on so much weight – well, one does, with multiples – that oh God, I was enormous by the end.

  When the babies came, I
swore that would be it. Both for the overeating and the other thing. There would be so much to do, I wouldn’t have a chance to get up to anything I shouldn’t. And it’s true that having twins meant that I barely had time to breathe some days, let alone go to the toilet or clean my teeth. I think about four weeks went by after they were born when I didn’t even manage to brush my hair. But it’s amazing what time you can find when you really want to. The odd fifteen minutes when both boys were asleep, ten when they were playing on their mat. Oh yes, I found the time for the thing that really mattered. Even if it was the most destructive thing of all.

  Whatever else I was getting up to, though, I never neglected the children. But however well you cope with becoming a mother, something has to give and for me, as with a lot of new mums, it was sex. I was going to say that Dan did not take this lying down but sadly that’s exactly what he did. Just not with me.

  He began an affair – the first of many –with a work colleague. Her name was Anaïs, which is a slap in the face for any wife for a start, with its overt connection to the erotic writings of Anaïs Nin. Perhaps Dan was missing the Far East more than I thought, because Anaïs was of Chinese heritage. She was everything I wasn’t: tiny, perfectly formed like an exquisite doll, black-haired and dark eyed. Next to her, especially carrying twins and then the pregnancy weight that took ages to shift, I felt like a galumphing moose, too tall and raw-boned, too washed-out and pale.

  Whenever we met at company events – because I started insisting on accompanying Dan, despite the exhaustion and the childcare issues – she would always regard me with that supercilious gaze of hers. It seemed to me that she took a sadistic delight in deliberately standing next to me so that her petite frame would accentuate my over-large one. Sometimes she dropped hints, saying how much she admired financial acumen in a man, and how few men there were in the world who had immaculate dress sense.

  I’d turn around and see Dan, master of the hedge fund world, attired in a handmade Savile Row suit that fitted his lean, athletic frame like a glove, and know exactly what she was really saying. Which was, ‘I’m fucking your husband and it’s going on right under your nose and there’s nothing you can or will do about it.’ Because somehow, I’ve no idea how, Anais seemed to understand that something was tying me to Dan, that however badly he behaved, I would cling on like a limpet to a rock. She’d probably seen it before. Most wives don’t give up without a fight.

  She knew, and I knew, and Dan knew, that I would never, ever let him go. Because without him, I would have nothing, be nothing, own nothing.

  In the end though, the battle was won before it had been fought. Anaïs became an irritant to Dan. I’m sure she pestered him to leave me and he had never had any intention of doing that. Like so many men, he just wanted to have his cake and eat it. I confronted him and he promised me that he’d never do it again, never take a ‘mistress’, never have someone who everyone else knew about and who made me look like a total fool. And I trusted him on that.

  I really did.

  However, the experience with Anaïs, as I’m sure you would understand, made me wary. So far, though, she’s the only one I’ve ever been really worried about. I understood that all of the others were mere dalliances, nothing serious, never intended to be more than a way for him to pleasurably pass a few hours just because he could. Men who are that good-looking and that rich and that powerful know that they can have who they want, when they want.

  I always keep my eyes open though. I’m constantly on the lookout for the next Anaïs, always suspicious. Is it Naomi? In all truth, the jury’s still out on that one. But even if she hasn’t come along yet, there’s one thing I’m certain of.

  One day she will.

  And just the thought of it makes my blood boil and the urge for revenge swell in my belly. Sometimes I wonder what I would be capable of, if someone were to really come between me and Dan.

  Chapter 14

  Susannah

  Today is the day of the tennis match. I shouldn’t think Dan’s spent more than a few seconds, if that, anticipating it. I, on the other hand, have been obsessing about it since the time and date were set. My tennis whites are laid out in my bedroom, having been retrieved from the back of the wardrobe, and I pull them on and survey myself in the mirror. Their tightness testifies to the fact that I must be the only woman in the world who puts on weight after a break-up.

  Charlotte’s comment on my ‘sturdy arms’ floats across my mind and I push it away. I’m sure she didn’t mean to be hurtful and it’s not as if it’s untrue – though ‘powerful’ would have been a kinder choice of word, or ‘athletic’ perhaps. I’d even settle for ‘strong’. I scrutinise myself again, standing side-on and flexing my biceps, moving my forearm up and down. Sadly, I concede that ‘sturdy’ probably is the most apt description. Despondency threatens to descend and I shake it off. I’ve got the chance to do something I enjoy and, moreover, that I am good at for an hour and I’m going to focus on that, not on all my many and various physical faults.

  And not on what’s arrived in the post, either. I kick the letters on the mat to the side so I can open the door, not even bothering to pick them up and check them. I don’t want or need to know their contents right now.

  I take Jamie and Luke to the manor and see them through the gate. They gambol happily towards the house, chatting eagerly about the paper chase they’re soon to take part in. I’m grateful they’re engaged in a healthy outdoor pastime for a few hours. If the newspapers are to be believed, most pre-teen boys spend more time accessing hardcore porn on the internet than exercising in the fresh air. I don’t linger to watch them go inside but instead turn hurriedly away, hoping I don’t encounter Dan; I need the solo walk to psych myself up for the game.

  I get to the club bang on eleven and hesitate outside the automatic doors for a moment, debating with myself whether to wait or go in. Waiting might make me look feeble, as if I need Dan’s permission or accompaniment to enter those hallowed doors. Going in, on the other hand, carries the risk of looking too eager and overly keen, and I don’t want to give Dan that impression. I want him to think I’m like Charlotte: confident, self-assured, coolheaded.

  ‘Hi there.’ His sonorous voice, so cosmopolitan, rooted somewhere between the UK and the US, cuts short my dithering. ‘Sorry to keep you waiting.’

  ‘Oh no,’ I blurt out, ‘no, I only just got here myself. No waiting.’ I laugh, nervously and unnecessarily. Bang goes that idea of being like Charlotte.

  Dan is eyeing me up and down and I shift awkwardly from one leg to the other.

  ‘You’re changed already,’ he says, sounding surprised. He is in his jeans (a different pair, not egg-stained) and I kick myself. I should have realised that the cool people change when they get here.

  ‘Looking good,’ he adds, as if to mitigate my obvious discomfort.

  ‘Uh, thanks,’ I manage to stutter. He’s being so kind and trying to put me at my ease but I wish he didn’t feel he had to. At the same time, though, something stirs inside me, a twinge deep down in my belly that I haven’t felt for a long time. Since Justin and I split I’ve become invisible, a woman past her best, cast aside, unwanted. I force myself to relax, to take Dan’s compliment and enjoy it – a passing appreciation that’s better than being forever ignored.

  ‘After you.’ Dan gestures me ahead of him and we turn towards the doors. ‘I hope you don’t mind but it’s just us, I’m afraid, after all – the other couple have had to pull out. Family commitments or something.’

  He frowns as he says this, as if family getting in the way of anything is unfathomable, but then turns it into an infectious grin that has me smiling too, though I don’t really know why. We are inside the building now and I have a sudden, heart-wrenching assault of memory induced by the smell of rubber trainer soles, of freshly-laundered kit and, drifting in from open windows, of newly cut grass. It takes me back nearly twenty-five years, to when I was my county’s top female player for one blissful se
ason. It didn’t last. Things that good rarely do.

  Puberty made me heavy and sluggish and at the same time I lost interest in the constant training and practice, the gruelling matches and the relentless competitiveness. By the age of twenty I had given up competing and only took part on a recreational basis. I can still play a decent game; I was in the Barnes ladies’ team and I’m confident that I’ll be able to give Dan a run for his money, although I was looking forward to the cover that doubles provides. Singles is so much more exposing. Dan will be able to see clearly all my flaws and faults; as he doesn’t seem to have any himself, this is all the more troubling.

  A flurry of activity to our right catches my eye and, like a tornado coming into land, a woman whirls towards Dan and grabs hold of his arm.

  ‘Dan!’ The voice is earthy and has what might politely be called a ‘local’ accent. ‘The best player in the club! My favourite member!’ There’s a pause and then a loud, hooting laugh rings out. ‘As the actress said to the bishop!’

  I would have laughed myself in any other situation but I’ve realised, immediately, that this is the infamous Naomi, source of Charlotte’s anguish.

  ‘Naomi. Lovely to see you.’

  Dan’s greeting, cool and collected, confirms my supposition. On hearing his measured tones, Naomi seems to visibly calm down and shrink a little, like a mating bird that halves in size once its boastful, plumped-up and ostentatious feathers are smoothed.