by Jill Mansell
“I’m fed up with being the goodie,” Cass announced. With a rattle of ice cubes, she finished her Cointreau and nodded at the bottle, holding out her glass for more. Not having eaten anything all day, her stomach was now nicely aglow. “I don’t want everyone to be on my side. Why should I be the doormat, the poor little wife they all feel so bloody sorry for? Why can’t I do something about it and get my own back?”
“Take a lover!” Cleo cried. Goodness, what a strange thing to be saying to one’s own mother.
But Cass shook her head. “I couldn’t. Not just like that.”
“OK. Take a ravishing man and pretend.”
“Still wouldn’t work.” Cass looked despondent. “Jack knows me too well. He wouldn’t be fooled for a second.”
“Is that Dad now?” Cleo’s head swiveled around as the front door opened. Ready for confrontation, her pulse began to race. “Right, I’m going to tell him what I bloody think of him.”
But it wasn’t Jack. It was Sophie returning from a geology field trip in Epping Forest. As the front door banged shut behind her, the phone in the hall began to ring.
“That was Dad.” Muddy-booted, Sophie came into the sitting room less than thirty seconds later. “He won’t be home tonight. He needs time to think. He says sorry.” Sophie’s face was expressionless as she removed her glasses, wiped the rain off the lenses with her crumpled shirttail, and looked across at Cass. “I did ask if he wanted to speak to you, but he was in a hurry to get off the phone.”
“I bet he couldn’t get away quick enough.” Cleo’s voice dripped with scorn. “Time to think, indeed. Bastard.”
“Cleo.”
“It’s OK. I have heard the word before.” Sophie slumped down onto the sofa next to Cass and pulled off her filthy boots. “I’ve got one for a father, remember? And I’m sorry to have to say this, but I am sick to the back teeth of hearing about it. Every single person on my field trip, teachers included, said what a shame it was about the trouble between you and Dad. ‘Your poor mother. It must be dreadful for her.’ Even batty old Mr. Melrose cornered me on the bus on the way back to ask me to pass on his very best wishes. Ugh.” Sophie shuddered at the thought of Edgar Melrose, who had a totally gross perspiration problem and moss-green teeth. “You’re welcome to them. That man makes me feel sick.”
Cass knew she was going to have to do something. The only question was what. While Sophie drank caffeine-free Coke and Cleo wolfed down a packet of chocolate cookies, Cass found her glass being refilled again and again with Cointreau.
“I’m going to have a terrible headache in the morning.”
“At least you’ll be able to sleep.” Cleo knew her mother would otherwise spend the night tossing and turning alone in the double bed, torturing herself with thoughts of what Jack was getting up to with Imogen.
“Lady Graham-Moon,” Cass suddenly announced. She sat up, excited. “You remember, the one who cut the sleeves off all her husband’s Savile Row suits! What else was it she did?”
Cleo recognized the woman’s name. It had happened years ago, but she’d recently seen a segment about it on an old TV show. Upon discovering her own husband’s infidelity, Lady Moon had wrecked his seriously expensive suits, thrown a couple of gallons of white gloss paint over his car, and…
“Got it!” Cleo exclaimed. “She raided his wine cellar and left hundreds of bottles of vintage claret on people’s doorsteps, like a cross between a milkman and Santa Claus. Brilliant.” She grinned at the perfection of the idea. “That’s what we’ll do to Dad.”
“Except we don’t have a wine cellar, and cutting the arms off Marks & Spencer suits doesn’t have quite the same ring,” Sophie pointed out. Keen to do something constructive but ever practical, she went on, “And you can’t copy someone else’s revenge anyway. It lacks impact.”
Five glasses of Cointreau were making their own kind of impact on Cass. She was enjoying this; deciding not to be an object of sympathy any more and planning a suitable punishment for Jack was cheering her up no end, but she was feeling decidedly woozy. She had to blink twice and concentrate hard on her watch to make out that it was, astonishingly, past midnight.
“Think I’m going to have to go to bed.” She enunciated slowly and carefully so as not to make a mistake. “This is naughty, Cleo. You shouldn’t have opened that bottle. Don’t either of you dare sell this story to the papers…”
“Night, Mum.” Sophie leaned across and kissed Cass’s flushed cheek. “Sleep well.”
“We’ll think up more ways to teach your father a lesson tomorrow,” Cass promised fondly. “He’s quite vain, you know. How about shaving off one of his eyebrows while he’s asleep?”
* * *
The grandfather clock in the hall was striking three as Sophie and Cleo crept past it, their arms full of bags containing everything they needed to carry out the necessary revenge. Not that there was any need to creep; upstairs, helped along by the Cointreau, Cass was out for the count. If she hadn’t stirred when Sophie, up in the loft earlier, had tripped and fallen over a crate of china, she was hardly likely to be disturbed by the click of the front door.
With the car loaded up, Cleo drove and Sophie navigated as they made their way through the almost entirely deserted city streets.
Chapter 17
It had been Sophie’s idea, sparked off by Cass’s parting shot, to play on their father’s vanity.
“The trouble with the Graham-Moon thing,” she had explained to Cleo when Cass had gone up to bed, “is that it made the woman’s husband sound actually quite fanciable. If he wasn’t so ancient, of course.”
“As far as you’re concerned, seventeen’s ancient.”
“Yes, but you know what I mean.” Sophie shrugged. “He might be ancient, but he wears fab suits, drives a swish car, and drinks bloody good claret. Sounds like James Bond.”
Cleo had twiddled her fingers. Being talked down to by a fourteen-year-old was amazingly irritating.
“So?”
“So what would seriously wind Dad up is making him look stupid—more Mr. Bean than Bond—so that people laugh at him.”
They found Imogen’s flat without too much trouble, the only one in the silent, narrow street with empty window boxes and clinical-looking blinds instead of curtains, as Sophie had spotted in one of the photographs in Saturday’s Express. Parking the car at the far end of the street, they unloaded everything from the trunk and padded noiselessly back to their target.
“Is he here?” Sophie whispered.
“Of course he’s here.” Dumping the bags on the sidewalk and propping the stepladder noiselessly up against the garage door, Cleo rolled up the sleeves of her black sweatshirt. At least it wasn’t raining.
“What if we get arrested?”
Cleo grinned. She had a particular talent for dazzling policemen that, considering the way she drove, was just as well. One glimpse of her big, chestnut-brown eyes and apologetic smile was generally enough to soften the heart of the meanest traffic cop. Besides, was what they were doing now so terribly wrong?
“They can’t arrest us.” Confidently, she began to climb the ladder. “We’re playing a harmless prank on Daddy, that’s all. Big deal.”
“She won’t like it.” Sophie gazed up at the darkened windows of Imogen’s flat.
“So let her sue.” Cleo really couldn’t care less. “Good luck to her. Come on. Don’t stand there like a prune. Pass me up one end of that rope.”
* * *
Jack woke with a start at six thirty. Imogen, having thrown back the yellow duvet, was out of bed and heading for the window.
“What’s the matter?”
“Noises outside.” She approached the window with caution, ducking down to avoid being seen in all her naked glory. “I can hear people laughing.”
“Surely not at this time of the morning.”
It was meant to be a joke, but even as he said it, Jack realized with a pang of guilt that someone who definitely wouldn’t be laughing this morning was Cass. He hadn’t even had the guts to speak to her on the phone last night. But he’d been desperate; all he knew was he couldn’t carry on much longer like this. He loved Imogen. He loved Cass too, but the two kinds of love were poles apart. It was like being asked to choose between two exquisite dishes on a Michelin-starred menu. Jack wanted both, but that wasn’t allowed. And this wasn’t a menu. He had to decide in which direction his whole future lay…
“Shit!” Imogen dropped from her semicrouched position onto all fours. Yanking the blinds shut, she scuttled like a crab away from the window. “I don’t know what the hell’s going on, but there have to be fifty photographers outside. Bloody Cass must have blabbed that you were staying the night.”
Jack felt sick. “No. Why would she say that? What good would it do her?”
“Well, someone told them.” Imogen knew scorned women didn’t always need a good reason. Scorned women had a habit of behaving irrationally. Her mouth narrowed in annoyance as she tugged an oversize orange T-shirt over her head. Her stuffy bosses at Hi! weren’t thrilled with her anyway for having waltzed off with the husband of one of her recent interviewees, feeling that it reflected badly on the image of the magazine and could deter future candidates. The prospect of losing her extremely well-paid job wasn’t funny, and it was a possibility that was strengthening by the minute. Why, Imogen wondered, should there be this many photographers outside her flat at such a god-awful hour? More to the point, why the hell were they all laughing like hyenas?
The doorbell started shrilling less than ten minutes later.
“Come on, Jack. We know you’re in there,” a gravelly voice shouted through the mail slot. “We aren’t leaving, so you may as well come out now.” The voice cackled with helpless laughter. “Get dressed and come and see what’s been going on out here while you’ve been…otherwise occupied.”
“You go.” How he wished now that he hadn’t come here. If there was one thing Jack hated more than being laughed at, it was not knowing why.
But Imogen, who didn’t have to go to work today, put her foot down.
“No. It’s you they want.” Defensively, she began rummaging through the wardrobe. “You go.”
The moment Jack opened the front door, he was dazzled by a firework display of flashbulbs going off. Some of the photographers even cheered; that haughty, irritable expression was perfect. He really was making their day.
When Jack turned, he saw why.
He guessed at once that Cleo must have been behind it; this wasn’t Cass’s style. No, it was definitely Cleo who had raided the loft, unearthing just about everything an intellectual, image-conscious forty-year-old wouldn’t want to have seen.
Two clotheslines had been rigged up along the front of the flat. Pegged to them were all his most embarrassing albums from his teenage years, ones by Cher, Billy Ray Cyrus, and Weird Al Yankovic. These were interspersed with a selection of slogan T-shirts featuring the Simpsons, the Beastie Boys, and the Muppets. Next to them swung a pair of bright yellow platform boots left over from a costume party. And most humiliating of all was a blown-up photograph, taken at a picnic during his university days, of him absolutely plastered, waving a pair of red frilly panties in one hand and pretending to kiss a bulldog.
A huge banner, slung across the garage, bore the hand-painted message: Sometimes I have no taste…
They were all Jack’s things, parceled up and stored in the attic because Cass could never bear to throw anything away. Completely unfairly, he saw that Cleo had also hung up a bottle of fake tanning cream, a huge medallion, and a nylon toupee left over from last year’s Christmas party, none of which he had ever worn in his life. The press, however, didn’t know that. They couldn’t stop clicking away and cracking jokes about the pegged-up banana-yellow platform shoes. Jack wondered if he would ever be allowed to live this down.
“Come on then, Jack. How about a statement?” bawled one of the reporters at the back. “You’re not denying this stuff’s yours, then?” He grinned at his companions. “Not even the Donny Osmond LP? How about giving us a quick blast of ‘Puppy Love,’ eh? Just to remind us how it goes.”
* * *
Cass, at home later that afternoon, knew she should be working through the script for tomorrow’s show. Instead, she found herself on her hands and knees in the kitchen, manically emptying out and scrubbing clean all the cupboards. Staring into space and endlessly going over and over in her mind the events of the past week was doing no good at all. Far better to wear herself out physically and have something to show at the end of it, even if it was only surgically sterile cupboards.
The phone rang just as she finished emptying the contents of the pantry out onto the kitchen floor. Cass had to tread a careful path through the bags of sugar, rice, and pasta to answer it.
“Hello, it’s me. Imogen.”
“Oh.” Cass wished she hadn’t picked the phone up now.
“Look, are you alone?”
“Why?”
Imogen sighed. “Come on. Things are getting out of hand. We need to talk.”
Cass wondered if the breakup, after over twenty years, of a perfectly good marriage counted as one of the things getting out of hand. She had had imaginary conversations in her head with Imogen over the past few days, but she couldn’t even begin to imagine how it would feel to actually see her again. Imogen certainly had plenty of nerve, but then Cass already knew that.
“OK.” Cass gazed at the piles of food on the floor. However had they managed to accumulate seventeen tins of pineapple chunks?
“If you’re alone, I’ll come around now.”
“OK.”
“I’m in a cab at the end of the road,” said Imogen. “I’ve just checked there’s no one at the bottom of your drive, so it’s safe.”
Extraordinary, thought Cass. Twenty-two tins of chopped tomatoes. She nodded into the phone.
“OK.”
True to her word, Imogen arrived at the back door less than a minute later. As she let her into the kitchen, Cass wondered if Imogen had done it on purpose, not even giving her time to run a brush through her hair or wash the Ajax off her hands. Still, at least Imogen was used to seeing the kitchen in a mess.
“I may as well say this.” Pulling out a chair, Imogen sat down and carefully smoothed her blue skirt over black-stockinged thighs. “I am sorry you had to find out. You weren’t meant to. I was perfectly happy for the affair to remain a secret.” She paused, her fingers brushing against a thin gold chain around her neck. “I certainly didn’t plan any of this, in case you were wondering. It wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“Oh,” said Cass with just a trace of irony, “that’s all right then.”
“I know, I know.” Imogen sounded impatient. “But it has happened, so we do need to sort things out. For your sake as much as ours.”
“Ours,” Cass repeated, marveling at her easy use of the word. “You mean you and Jack?”
Imogen’s eyes flickered. “For all our sakes. This morning’s pantomime, for example. Did your daughter even stop to think of the effect it could have on Jack’s career?”
“Daughters. They did it together.” Cass’s voice was like chipped ice. “And no, probably not. How about screwing some young bimbo journalist? Do you think that’ll do his career the world of good?”
Imogen flushed, the jibe catching her off guard. “I’m not a bimbo. And I didn’t come here to fight.”
No, just gloat, Cass thought bitterly, sitting back down among the tins of Scottish raspberries and rice pudding so beloved of Sophie. She glanced up at Imogen, sleek and businesslike with her hair swept up in a bronze barrette.
“So why did you come here?”
“It’s Jack. This isn’t easy for him.”
&
nbsp; Cass blinked. “Is this some kind of a joke?”
“He’s torn,” Imogen said bluntly. “He’s afraid to leave you because he thinks you won’t be able to cope, but I’m the one he wants to be with. This isn’t one of those silly flings, Cass. Neither of us wanted it to happen…it just did. Jack loved you, but now he loves me more.” Pale now, she leaned forward, her eyes alight with passion. “And if you love Jack, you’ll let him go. Torture him by clinging on, Cass, and you’ll only end up making him ill.”
This was outrageous. More humiliating still, it was coming from a girl Cass had taken such an instinctive liking to from the start. She had even nagged Jack to make an effort to be nice to Imogen when he had objected to her being invited to his party.
Maybe Jack was right. What was happening now was all her own fault.
Pop, pop went the plastic on a bag of basmati rice as Cass’s roughened fingernails sank through. She wanted to hurl something at Imogen’s head, but if she threw the rice, it would seem like a wedding, and if she whacked her with a tin of tomatoes, Imogen would only bleed everywhere, keel over unconscious, and probably die out of spite.
“OK, you’ve said what you wanted to say.” Cass wiped her perspiring palms on the sides of her old Levis. “You can leave now.”
Imogen stood up. “I really am sorry,” she said, “but if your marriage had been as good as you thought it was, this could never have happened in the first place. You can’t only blame me, Cass. I didn’t kidnap Jack. He wanted me as much as I wanted him. But I’m still sorry. I’m really not as horrible as you think.”
