A Secret Life

by Christobel Kent

  One of the girls over the aisle glanced across at Georgie and she smiled, feeling herself flush: the girl raised a glass as the train swung against a bend and they all jostled, laughing, against each other.

  Georgie leaned her head back and looked out of the window.

  The tracks were multiplying to either side of them and other trains came into view going in both directions, faces turning behind glass, a shuttling exchange and sudden darkness as they entered one of the wide old brick tunnels that meant they were there. Almost. You’d think, thought Georgie, standing for her bag and feeling anxiety mix with excitement as the train eased to a halt, that I’d never been out on my own before. The girls were clattering for the door ahead of her and she let them go, pushing their way into the commuters waiting patiently on the platform. Tired blank faces looking forward to a very different sort of Friday night but in that instant Georgie would even have gone for that life, the bustle of an office, the slog of the commute.

  Under the high curved girder roof the station was packed with people heading home, echoing with their noise. Pushing out at last Georgie was at the wrong end of the platform. Hurrying, bumping, apologising, she searched and searched the heads bobbing ahead of her because Cat had said she’d be there, she’d be at the barrier. A departure was announced, loud but inaudible and there was a surge of bodies, people carrying briefcases and takeaway cups, then it cleared and she did see Cat, beyond the barrier, in profile staring up at the arrivals board.

  For a second she wondered if something was wrong. Georgie stopped abruptly and a man ran into the back of her, muttering. Cat had had her hair done, she looked different and maybe it was the light or seeing her in profile but she looked older, and tired and – Is this all an awful mistake, aren’t we all too old for this, for anything? – Georgie felt a stab of panic. Then Cat turned her head, and smiled, and waved. And it was OK.

  Chapter Two

  The family room was at the top of the old building: low ceilings, dormer windows with a view of rusty-looking treetops and it had three single beds and one double. Georgie looked around, trying to stop her spirits dipping too much. The décor was standard: tired thirty-year-old furniture, limp curtains, floral carpet: on the outside the hotel had looked nice enough, a Georgian end of terrace but inside, from the minuscule veneer – unmanned – reception desk to the fraying stair carpet it was not much more than a fleapit. There had been a smell of stale food and bathroom cleaner on the stairs.

  Cat dropped her holdall on one of the singles with a sigh and looked around.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it was cheap.’ And shrugged. ‘We’re going to rattle around in here, aren’t we? Unless Holly does turn up. But hey.’ Patting the bed beside her and twisting to grab her bag. ‘All the more room for us, right?’

  Georgie peered into the bathroom: it looked clean enough, anyway. And felt her spirits begin mysteriously to rise again. She could hear the traffic from the Euston Road and around her, London. The red double deckers inching along and the garden squares and the railings and the tall old brick and stucco buildings and it was the neat little close they’d lived in ten years that evaporated, unreal. And when she turned there was Cat, struggling with the foil on a bottle of champagne. Looking up at Georgie and grinning, ‘It’s not cold, but—’ and the cork popped and Georgie had to run for the bathroom and grab the plastic-wrapped plastic cups.

  And it wasn’t cold but in a way, thought Georgie with the first sip, that made it even better. A taste of the old days, before fancy hotels and Tim making sure everything was perfect down to the number of cubes in the ice bucket. ‘Cheers,’ she said. Cat grinned, her glass already empty.

  Cat was thinner, since two weeks ago, was that it? She’d been talking about diets for as long as Georgie could remember, but they didn’t usually work.

  ‘You all right?’ said Georgie cautiously, and Cat frowned, comical.

  ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’ she said. ‘How long have we been looking forward to this?’ And sloshed some more pink into her glass, getting to her feet, stalking the room, peering out of the flaking dormer window.

  It suited her, whatever it was. It made her look older but mysterious, with shadowed cheekbones. Her dark eyes looked very dark. Georgie looked down at her own stubborn soft belly and sighed theatrically, but – maybe it was the warm pink fizz effect – her heart wasn’t in it, finding fault. She lay back and patted it, and the sigh was happy.

  ‘Sorry it’s just us,’ said Cat, turning back. Georgie opened her eyes and struggled upright.

  ‘Sorry? No! I’m happy as Larry,’ she said. ‘It was our plan, wasn’t it? We always said, if no one else comes we’ll still have fun.’ Which was true: she could hardly remember the others Cat had tried to recruit, mournful Katy, bossy Suzanne, giddy Lindsay. What she could remember was their old selves anyway and who knew what they’d have turned into, fifteen years later? ‘I might have got stuck talking to the one who bred dogs in Cornwall and never got to talk to you and then what?’ she said and Cat began to laugh, laughed till she sat down.

  ‘Well, Holly’s still a possibility,’ she said. ‘She’s here at least, in London, it’s down to whether she can get away.’

  ‘Get away from what?’ said Georgie and Cat shrugged.

  ‘God knows,’ she said. ‘The clutches of her many admirers? Or maybe just work. She’s in advertising now and it’s long hours.’ Rolling her eyes.

  ‘Ah,’ said Georgie, trying to stop herself deflating but as if Cat sensed it she was on the bed straight away and nudging her out of it.

  ‘So,’ she said. ‘What we wearing?’

  ‘Well,’ said Georgie putting her glass down carefully, ‘I wasn’t sure so—’ opening her case, but Cat was there at her elbow peering in. Pulling out the safe navy jersey dress, neat and modest, grimacing.

  ‘You’re kidding me?’ Turning to frown into Georgie’s face, smelling of wine and perfume. Laughing, but not unkind, Cat was never that. Dropping the dark fabric disdainfully on the bed. ‘So what else you got?’

  Spying the heels and dangling them from a finger. ‘Now you’re talking.’

  Leaned lower, and saw it, pulled it out, a flash of gold. Expensive, a surreptitious purchase passed off across two credit cards and never worn, because of the expression she could picture on Tim’s face. Gold silk, light as tissue. Georgie couldn’t remember what had possessed her to buy it – except— ‘I think it might be too tight,’ she said faintly, and Cat threw back her head and laughed.

  ‘As if,’ she said, collapsing on to the bed and leaning to pour them each another glass, sitting up, holding Georgie’s out to her. ‘We’re not talking parents’ evening, baby,’ she said, ‘This is ladies’ night.’

  Chapter Three

  The two of them, Georgie and Cat, had started work within weeks of each other, fourteen years ago. The big old office building on the roaring Euston Road, two girls – and they hadn’t been so far off being girls then, either, Georgie had been twenty-three, barely out of nappies it seemed to her now, soft, fair Georgie, dewy-faced, wide-eyed. Going to work for the man – the tax man, as it happened. Two girls among the men in their suits and ties, they’d had to stick together.

  The office offered excellent benefits, too, equal opportunities, prospects: good maternity benefits. Georgie had noticed that clause in the recruitment drive at her university: it turned out that Cat had too, though she didn’t learn that for a good couple of years, during which they had been determined to show the men and each other how good they were at statistical analysis and how unsentimental they were about sex. Cat had been the one, shouting it on the dance floor one Friday night under the influence of God knew what. Skinny as a bean back then. I’d love it, she said, half closing her eyes, arms out, spinning under the lights. A baby. And shrugging, unabashed in the ladies’ later, deftly wiping the smudge of mascara out from under her eyes. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with that. Wanting a baby.’

  Cat with her straight chopped bla
ck fringe and red lips and her tiny waist.

  It hadn’t turned out quite like they’d planned. Did it ever? Twelve years older, not much the wiser.

  So: drinks. Maybe dinner – but then maybe not. Dancing, a room in a fleapit for the night and they could pretend they were twenty-five again.

  And now, tottering down a warm dark street in Soho that smelled of beer and street food and pavement smokers and hanging on to Cat for dear life, Georgie wasn’t sure she wanted to be twenty-five again.

  They’d been in one bar already – they’d left the hotel in a taxi, both of them in the heels too high for walking and giggling about it – that Cat had directed the driver to. A big place off Leicester Square that was part of a chain: big and rowdy – and full of twenty-five-year-olds. Their laughter had subsided pretty much the moment they’d walked in but there’d been a corner booth miraculously empty and Georgie, too self-conscious still to remove her mac, had gone to buy drinks. She’d waited patiently to catch the barman’s eye then not so patiently as she was elbowed out of the way by a succession of blokes in suits smelling of aftershave, who didn’t seem to even see her.

  She didn’t want to be twenty-five and thoughtless. She wanted to rewind just a little bit, that was all. Past the train ride, past Lydia’s little yellow car on the forecourt and Tim standing up behind his desk to give her his blessing, further back than that, past these last four, five years of pacing out the rooms she lived in, bedroom, kitchen, school office, go into reverse. Not too far, don’t go back too far. Maybe as far as holding out her arms for Tabs to be put into them, all strange and new. That might work.

  Turning from the bar at last in the overheated noisy barn of a room, with two stupidly overpriced drinks in her hand, to look across at their table, she’d seen Cat – still bundled up in her coat too and that wasn’t like Cat, not when there was a nice off-the-shoulder dress underneath, tight and black – frowning down at her mobile. Gingerly, hands full and bag swinging from her shoulder Georgie negotiated a cluster of office girls still in their work shirts and finally collapsed on the banquette beside her. Cat looked up, absent, blank.

  ‘All right?’ said Georgie.

  ‘Ah, oh – oh—’ Cat blinked.

  ‘You were on the phone?’ Georgie said, setting down the drinks. It was deafening in the room and she had to point at the mobile, face down on the table.

  Cat’s face cleared, ‘Oh,’ she said, beginning to shrug off her coat finally – big and fluffy, leopard-printed – then changing her mind. She pushed the phone away a little across the table, and took the glass. ‘Holly. She’s just extricating herself from a situation, she says.’ Rolling her eyes, though without much conviction. Georgie could have sworn her mind was elsewhere.

  ‘Extricating,’ said Georgie. Holly coming back into focus now, with her high-arching eyebrows, rolling words like that around. Checking her lipstick in the mirror, talking about getting out of tax and into something glamorous.

  ‘Yep,’ said Cat, and pulled the phone toward her and turned it face up again.

  Georgie still couldn’t see the screen and couldn’t tell if that was deliberate. ‘What?’ she said.

  Cat looked up from the phone, pursing her red lips. Should have put lipstick on, thought Georgie automatically, not sure if she’d even brought any. ‘Holly doesn’t fancy this place much,’ she said, and looked around the room as if seeing it for the first time. A riot of wooden panelling and neon signs and barstools, something for everyone. ‘Says it’s for the bridge and tunnel crowd.’

  ‘Bridge and tunnel?’ Georgie had only a vague idea what she was talking about.

  ‘Like in New York?’ said Cat helpfully. ‘Not that I’ve ever been. People that come in from the suburbs. But I think she means it’s for provincials.’ Grinning broadly now. ‘Wannabes from out of town. People like us.’

  ‘Aha,’ said Georgie, taking a long drink from the glass, tasting mostly water now and setting it back down. Wanting something stronger, something that tasted of something. Something to take the edge off being ten years older than everyone else in the room, and the prospect of seeing Holly again. Grinning back, and then Cat was on her feet, reaching for her bag. Her glass empty.

  ‘Anyway,’ Cat said, reaching for her bag. ‘She’ll meet us some bar called Le Something. One of those streets off the square. Soho Square, we can just about manage that, can’t we?’ Wincing and reaching down to her stockinged feet in heels. ‘She says they know her there, you can dance. And if we get a move on we’ll catch the cheap drinks.’

  Ladies’ night. Women – ladies – get in free, first drink half price. And up ahead the neon signed loomed, green and red, and underneath it a shaven-headed bouncer, big as an ox with hands clasped in front of his crotch, turned to give them the once-over.

  He looked to left and right, his face in shadow under overhead light although there was no one else queuing for entry. Paused, stepped to the side and one arm was reluctantly spread to usher them through.

  They stepped inside, into the dark.

  Chapter Four

  Frank had watched the tall guy working out how to break in on the women for half an hour now but they weren’t interested. He had been watching them under the low lights, and it didn’t look like they even knew he was there but every time he took that crucial step closer there was a shift and a back was turned on him. The tall guy was patient, though. Frank had observed that, too.

  The first one through the door had smiled at him, uncertain, then switched it off. Standing awkwardly, soft and fair in a mac, something shining underneath it that she was a bit unsure about. She was holding a handbag tight against her front. And then her friend was bustling in behind her, shoving her on so she laughed, a big laugh, tripping over herself and then the pair of them hesitated, on the edge of the dark room.

  Frank caught Lucy’s head turning from behind her little mahogany counter: Lucy the queen of hat-check, married to the boss. She must have seen the new arrival smile at him. Not much got past Lucy.

  The blonde nervous one still had her coat on and he liked that look, a shy Brigitte Bardot in a trench coat, but the other one was swinging her big fake fur number from a fingertip and looking around. She was the one in charge, turning her friend in towards the bar before they got to Frank.

  Down at their end of the low-lit bar Dom was polishing a glass slower than you could think was possible when they approached, choosing him – Christ knew why, Dom from North Island, a fuzz of beard and a daft bow tie and no fucking clue how to make a reasonable Sidecar, what was he even doing in a place like this? – to take their order. Frank would have said the women were late thirties.

  Dom was nodding slowly as the women leaned down over the cocktail menu and Frank’s radar saw movement in the big dark room. No one was dancing yet, Dom was keeping the music on his early setting. The into-the-groove setting.

  Frank had customers to serve. Vince and a couple of cronies were in, working out if they were going to wait it out till it got busy. There’d been a flurry at eight, a dozen suits coming in off some conference or other singing ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’ until Dom looked up, affronted, from his laptop and his mood music. Then only one suit was left in the room: they’d gone without him, not a backward glance. Survival of the fittest, leaving the weakest one to fend for himself, was it? – only he didn’t look like he needed looking after, come to think of it.

  Had he even been with them in the first place? Giving off confidence, anyway, even if there was something not quite right about the suit, too short in the sleeve. Something not quite right about the set of his head, either, the angle of him, looking round. Eyes in the back of his head. Older than Frank? Maybe.

  The guy was sitting on a stool around the corner – half out of sight in the window that was curtained for night-time in the same red velvet – when Frank saw the small movement that meant he had noticed the women. Shifting, one leg going down to meet the floor.

  Then there had been something different ab
out him that made Frank, still with his hands flat on the chrome bar top, lean forward. He didn’t know if it was the way the lanky bloke shifted, the careful way he set his glass down – but then the moment was gone because then another woman had arrived. Tall, leggy, model-girl stride and to his surprise she was with the two at the bar because she swooped from behind them and the fair one jumped. Frank could smell her scent from where he stood and he wondered if he knew her from somewhere. Big smile sweeping the room as she leaned between the two early arrivals, her hand cupped round her ear, making introductions.

  She had a little wheelie suitcase with her and was straight off to the Ladies’ Cloaks, swish, swish, head up, pausing only to order a drink, an Old-Fashioned, waving it at Dom with her hand in passing. Leaning across the counter to exchange a word with Lucy.

  Dom had blinked awake to stare at her, then scrabbling for the right bourbon while Frank restrained a sigh. On the dance floor a few girls had started dancing. In the corner directly opposite to where the tall, quiet guy had paused halfway down from his stool. Quiet guys – everyone thought they were harmless. Not always, they weren’t.

  The blonde was standing, uncertain, closer to Frank than to Dom and she half turned and there it was, they were looking at each other. ‘All right?’ he said, first thing that came into his head but also, she didn’t look quite all right. Waiting for her drink. There was a hint of panic in her eyes. ‘Dancing gets going around ten,’ Frank said and it seemed to have been the right thing because she smiled, a beautiful smile.

  ‘I like a dance,’ she said and he heard it in her voice, unmistakable.

  ‘You’re not from out of town after all then,’ he said, leaning in. Tilting his head, pretending to consider, but not too long. ‘Crystal Palace?’ he said, musing. ‘No.’ Lifting a finger. ‘I know.’