by Jenny Eclair
The trouble with Hugo was that he was very confident of his own allure. While other men approaching middle age were already receding, combing fragile strands of Brylcreemed hair across greasy pates, Hugo’s mane of thick blond hair waved back from his brow in true matinee idol fashion.
Natasha sniffs, she could always smell those other women on him. She had the nose of a bloodhound and her knowledge of the Harrods perfume department was such that she could usually identify the exact perfume his latest squeeze had doused herself in before meeting lover-boy Hugo.
It was how she had known about the little tart – not that she’d been able to identify her scent. Chanel it certainly wasn’t.
Natasha pushes the thought away and looks again at the ordered piles of packing on the bed and repeats, ‘Underwear, blouses, skirt, trousers, party outfit, cardigan, sweater, gifts, toiletry bag, shoes, nightie, dressing gown and slippers.’
She hasn’t bought anything for Annabel. Should she? No, it’s not her birthday. As for those sons? She will give them each a ten-pound note.
Her eyes alight on Lance’s gift, sitting on top of her neatly folded pants, and she wonders again whether it’s a good idea.
The dilemma of what to give her son for his fiftieth birthday had given Natasha many a sleepless night until she faced the fact that she hadn’t the money to buy anything extravagant, so the obvious solution would be to give him something precious that was already in her keeping. The watch is a good make, an Omega; she thinks it might even be quite rare.
Hugo had been fussy about things like that. He was particularly choosy where shoes and watches were concerned. According to Hugo, a polished lace-up and a decent timepiece were the sign of a true gentleman.
Not that he had been much of a gentleman, not in the end. The watch had been amongst her husband’s personal effects in the cardboard box she had picked up from the police station the week after he died. Natasha can still recall the shock of that sequence of extraordinary events. One day she was an unhappily married woman, the next, her husband had been taken into custody charged with embezzlement, then within twenty-four hours he was dead.
A silly, pointless passing, but a convenient one nonetheless, she concludes. ‘Sepsis’, according to the death certificate, or blood poisoning as it was more commonly known.
Someone once told Natasha she should have sued the police over her husband’s death. It was a disgrace: an innocent man, hauled from his office and dragged into Marylebone police station to be questioned over the embezzlement of thousands of pounds from the law firm where he worked.
Hugo had taken umbrage, as any gentleman would, and fought like a wild thing, protesting his innocence all the way to the police car. (‘You’ve got to remember we were taught to box at prep school,’ Benedict had commented, ‘but not with the constabulary.’)
As a consequence of his actions, Hugo had been held in custody for resisting arrest and knocking off a policeman’s helmet. The whole situation was absurd. What a load of trumped-up nonsense, his friends bellowed. Or rather, some of them did. Others remained very quiet indeed.
At some time during the night he was taken ill in his cell, but there were delays, no one thought it was serious – inmates were always trying it on, faking seizures, pretending to pass out. By the time they got him to hospital, his appendix had burst like a rotten plum and his body was flooded with toxins. He was dead by the morning.
All charges were immediately dropped, which was a relief, but as Benedict once muttered, ‘What else could they do? A dead man can’t go to court.’
No one else was ever charged with the embezzlement and although several colleagues turned up for the funeral, none of them came back to the house and a great deal of sherry and fruitcake went to waste.
Hugo hadn’t had many friends, Natasha recalls, but then why would he? She was his wife and even she hadn’t particularly liked him.
It was only after he died that she found out he’d taken out a second mortgage on Claverley Avenue and that, rather than the comfortably off widow she had expected to be, she had been left with barely a brass farthing. It was possibly the meanest thing her husband had ever done to her, worse even than the time he broke her arm in the South of France and she had to spend the rest of her holiday with her left arm encased in plaster. It was only thanks to Benedict buying her out of her share of the mews house they co-owned that she was able to run away and start her new life in France.
Exhausted, Natasha slumps on her bed next to the empty suitcase, kicks the piles of carefully chosen clothes onto the floor and shuts her eyes.
She is the only one who knows everything.
43
Bel is Beside Herself
Bel is beside herself. The party is in less than a week and she has failed to lose more than two pounds; an outfit she bought in the Hobbs summer sale a month ago mocks her from a hanger in the wardrobe, its size-twelve label might as well read ‘silly cow’.
Hoping for a miracle, she tries it on again but the thing won’t go over her hips. It’s a linen shift dress with sunflowers on and wrenching it off she hears the lining rip – good, it’s going in the charity bag, she never wants to see it again.
Catching sight of her doughy reflection in the mirror, Bel despairs. She had meant to go to Rigby & Peller and buy a decent bra, she was going to treat herself to gel nails and new knickers, and now time is running out. She should be tanned, she should be lithe, and yet with just days to go before her brother’s fiftieth birthday party she is still twelve stone of uncooked pastry.
Furious with herself and deciding that desperate times call for desperate measures, Bel throws a white waffle cotton dressing gown around her lumpy frame and sends out a frantic SOS. ‘Maisie,’ she bellows up the stairs, ‘can you come to my bedroom? I need some advice, please.’
Bel sits down heavily on the double bed and the wretched thing has the temerity to creak. Her immediate instinct is to get an axe and chop the thing up for firewood, only she hasn’t got an axe.
How can this have happened, when she has known about this weekend since April?
But deep down she knows how, because although every morning she has religiously rolled out a yoga mat and joined Adriene on YouTube for a daily workout, her virtual-reality teacher hasn’t noticed that instead of downward dogging and tensing her glutes, Bel has been wandering off mid-session to make herself a cup of milky coffee with two sugars.
Maisie finally appears and slouches against the doorframe. Despite not seeming to do any exercise at all, apart from shagging Ed, she is wearing a pair of sweat pants that threaten to fall off her.
Bel explains the situation and Maisie begins to rifle through her wardrobe, pulling out anything that might have party potential and throwing it on the floor. Sadly most of these garments, Bel realises, are over a decade old, remnants from the days when she possibly could have squeezed into those navy palazzo trousers and that polka-dot shirt with the dramatic ruffle down the front.
‘I don’t get it,’ Bel tells Maisie, ‘I’ve been exercising like crazy and it simply hasn’t worked, I think there’s something wrong with my metabolism. It’s so unfair, I used to be quite fit.’
Maisie looks at her as if to say, Yeah, right. Compelled to explain herself, Bel continues: ‘You might not think it, but I was quite sporty once upon a time. Not at school, I hated sport at school – hockey, yuck, I was always stuck in goal, petrified the ball was going to smack me in the teeth. Awful. But later, and this might surprise you, I was rather a whizz on skis. Sometimes having a powerful thigh can be an advantage, Maisie. Anyway, I loved it. It was Benedict who first took me, my uncle,’ she adds, dropping her robe and attempting but failing to wriggle into a bright yellow cotton A-line skirt with big red buttons on the pockets. ‘The one that used to own Kittiwake, where, you know . . . ’
Maisie looks bored. Bel discards the skirt and ploughs on with her story: ‘Well the thing is, Maisie, I took to skiing, turned out I had naturally good balance.’ Mais
ie, who has seen Bel fall off her yoga mat while attempting to stand on one leg, raises an eyebrow. ‘And I wasn’t scared . . . ’ Bel pauses and sits down; even to her own ears this sounds implausible, it sounds like she’s describing a completely different person, but it was true, as a young woman she had been completely fearless on the slopes.
Was it because back then I had nothing to lose, she wonders, deciding that love and motherhood are the two things guaranteed to turn a woman into a snivelling coward.
‘Anyway,’ she continues, ‘what I’m trying to say is that I was a complete ski ninja.’
For a moment Maisie stops rummaging and asks, ‘Is that why you work part-time at, thingummy, at Snow Patrol?’
‘Snow Nation,’ Bel corrects her, allowing herself a tiny smirk. ‘I think Snow Patrol is a band!’ Ha, she thinks, get me, being all cool.
‘Whatever,’ retorts Maisie unimpressed. ‘The ski place.’
‘Yes, it’s the ideal job for me, because I know what people expect from the staff in these places. I mean, it’s no good recruiting any old Tom, Dick or Harriet. Let’s face it, there’s nothing like having experienced a job to know what kind of skills are needed,’ Bel replies.
Maisie is completely uninterested now. She is sitting on the floor as if the ordeal of looking through Bel’s wardrobe has completely wiped her out. She’s staring at her hands, picking her nail varnish off. Small glittery purple flakes fall to the carpet.
Christ, thinks Bel, why is no one in this house remotely interested in anything I have to say? Even Andrew nods off now and again when she is halfway through an anecdote: she has caught him. He needs to learn to fall asleep with his eyelids open like snakes do. She makes one last concerted effort to engage with the girl.
‘Thing is, I used to work as a chalet maid.’
‘What’s a chalet maid?’ asks Maisie. She looks genuinely confused.
Bel seizes her golden opportunity. If she plays her cards right, she could have this girl on a flight to Geneva by the middle of September; she will even provide the salopettes.
‘Well, you could always sign up with Ski Nation and see for yourself. I’m sure I could get you some work experience.’
‘I don’t like the cold,’ Maisie sniffs dismissively. ‘I was only asking.’
Bel back-pedals, ‘The thing about chalet-maiding is that it depends on your experience: if you don’t know how to do anything, then you’re relegated to cleaning and bed-making. If you can cook, though, you don’t have to do any of the menial cleaning stuff, you make breakfast and supper for however many people are staying in the chalet – usually it’s about eight.’
Maisie screws her face up. ‘Why can’t they like make their own breakfast and their own bed?’
Bel swallows back a What, like you do? Ha! and simply answers, ‘Because that’s what you’re being paid to do.’
‘Like a servant.’
‘Well, I didn’t see it like that. It got me away from home, it gave me independence and it’s how I met Andrew. He was staying in one of the chalets and I was the maid and . . . ’
‘Kinky,’ sniggers Maisie.
Only it hadn’t been like that. Andrew had been with a group of his friends from university, a baying mob of over-entitled Hoorays, out of whom he had been the least privileged, the most grateful and by far the worst skier. Andrew was the quiet one who swept up broken glasses and helped stack the dirty plates into the dishwasher after a meal.
Inevitably he had broken his ankle on the third morning of his ten-day holiday and Bel found to her astonishment that, rather than dashing for the slopes the minute she had finished her duties, she chose to keep him company.
By the end of the week they were in love, an easy comfortable love, and two years later they were married.
Bel hauls herself back to the present. ‘Yes, well, anyway, Maisie, this won’t buy the baby a new bonnet.’
Maisie looks more confused than ever.
Bel gives up, she can’t keep trying to explain everything. There are some things Maisie will never understand and some things she is intrinsically good at, like clothes. The other day, she had worn Ed’s old school cricket jumper over a floral playsuit and had looked amazing. Somewhere in the pile of possibilities on the bedroom floor is her ideal party outfit, it has to be, otherwise she will have to go to Lance’s celebration in her dressing gown.
Half an hour later, the dressing gown is looking like the only plausible solution. Nothing that Maisie picked out as having any party potential fits; sleeves get stuck halfway up her arms, buttons refuse to meet buttonholes, and any zips that Bel manages to force up immediately start creeping down. Defeat stares at them from a large pile of discarded garments on the bedroom floor.
‘Don’t forget it’s late-night shopping on Thursday,’ Maisie reminds her. ‘You could always meet me after work and I could, you know . . . last chance ’n all that.’ And then she slinks out of the door like a cat.
Bel sits back down on the rudely creaking bed. Talking to Maisie about Snow Nation has reminded her that the last time she’d been properly thin was back in the early eighties when amphetamines had been readily available on the ski slopes where she worked. There had been lots of jokes for those in the know about where to go for the ‘best white powder’, and for a while she felt amazing, full of energy and a stone lighter than she’d been at school. At last, she’d found the solution and it was oh so easy. The occasional toot kept her hand out of the biscuit tin; she didn’t feel all that hungry. Even when she was back in London it was easy to find supplies – not that she’d ever had a habit, not really. But then Andrew had found out and read her the riot act and said that she was doing untold damage to her heart and that he didn’t want a drug addict girlfriend. She had a choice, he told her, him or the speed, and she had flushed her supply down the lavatory in front of him, pleading him not to leave her. Damn Andrew, it’s his fault she’s so fat.
44
Maisie’s Little Secret
Maisie retires to Ed’s bedroom, hoping she’s not going to have nightmares after seeing her boyfriend’s mother in her underwear. Seriously, who even knew knickers came in that size and shape? Closing the door with relief, she sits cross-legged on the pink fur bed throw she bought herself from TK Maxx and attempts to meditate like Russell Brand, but within a few seconds she is bored and decides to check on her party outfits.
Opening the cupboard, Maisie catches her reflection in Ed’s wardrobe mirror. She automatically drops her chin, widens her eyes and pouts. Now what? Maybe she should masturbate, send Ed a selfie, see if it turns him on?
He is getting a bit lazy about sex – which reminds her, she ought to get down to the clinic and have that implant put in. Idly she kicks off her sweat pants and knickers and has a brief forage around her clitoris, but her fingers freeze at the memory of Bel in her bra and pants. What was all that hideous pubic hair about? Maisie pulls her top and bra down with the hand that isn’t poking around her vagina and pulls a succession of porn faces over her naked tits. What if Jamie should walk in?
She knows he’s at home. He rarely goes out. Would he try and fuck her? She shuts her eyes and briefly attempts a fantasy about Jamie fucking her in this room, his brother’s bedroom, while Bel clunks around in the kitchen below.
But the fantasy does nothing for her. Jamie has bad breath, his teeth are yellow and his beard smells. At least she makes Ed put grooming oil in his.
This is hopeless, she doesn’t fancy Jamie, Ed is boring and she’s grown out of her secret Louis Tomlinson crush. Then she remembers – there is someone . . . and she reaches under the chest of drawers to retrieve the magazine she’s been hiding there for weeks and stares hard into his face. Dropping down to the floor, Maisie wedges her back against the door because the last thing she needs is Bel blundering in with a ‘nice’ cup of vile tea and a foul biscuit.
She had recognised him as soon as she saw the picture and her mind flips back to a night last December, before she had moved in wit
h the Robathams.
She’d needed extra money, it was Christmas, there were parties to dress up for and presents to buy, so she had agreed to apply for some waitressing work along with a mate.
An agency had put a call out: ‘good-looking personable girls needed for exclusive men-only festive celebration’.
Maisie’s friend Megan had spelt it out for her. Basically the evening would involve a load of middle-aged blokes off the leash and on the lash at some posh hotel down Park Lane. Having enjoyed a civilised dinner, the gentlemen would proceed to spend the remainder of the evening getting utterly hammered and behaving like dicks.
She had walked the interview, literally – they wanted to see how she moved. After she’d sashayed up and down for a bit, they asked if she could balance a tray. When she nodded, they asked if she had a nice black outfit: heels, shirt, skirt – short, but not silly short – and tights?
Maisie must have looked confused at the suggestion she wore tights. It was December, it was freezing, obviously she would be wearing tights. ‘Only, if you wear hold-ups or suspenders, they tend to get a bit over-excited,’ they explained.
So she’d worn tights (70 denier), a black elasticated skirt and a black satin shirt.
The shirt was too good for waitressing and she hoped she wouldn’t get gravy down it, but in the event she hadn’t carried a single dirty plate. The hotel staff took care of the dinner service, while the girls who’d been employed specifically for the ‘do’, like herself and Megan, were purely on drinks duty.
Once the complimentary wine on the tables had been finished, it was their job to collect extra orders from the bar – spirits mostly. ‘Whisky, brandy, or maybe a five-hundred-quid bottle of Grey Goose vodka, sir?’
Megan had been right about how the evening would pan out. At first it was pretty sedate, the gentlemen had eaten their beef Wellington without so much as spilling a drop of jus down their dress shirts, but after dinner when the bow ties came undone, the comic had been booed off (Maisie had seen him a few minutes later, desperately trying to exit the building via the service lift) and the raffle, featuring a fortnight on St Barts, proved which table had the most money, then things got a little wilder.
