Fast Friends

by Jill Mansell

  * * *

  “You caused it; you do something to help,” said Loulou, her expression rigid.

  Roz, unused to criticism from anyone, particularly the woman she regarded as her closest friend, stared back at her in astonishment. A small knot of unease formed in the pit of her stomach. “Lou, you know damn well I had no idea that Jack was Camilla’s husband until a couple of weeks ago. It’s not as if I did it on purpose… That would have been really tacky. And now I’ve told you I have no intention of seeing him anymore. Isn’t that enough? Do I really have to help her as well?”

  “Of course you really have to help her as well, you selfish bitch,” yelled Loulou, causing her bar staff to smile and the customers at adjoining tables to nudge each other in anticipation of one of her famous outbursts. “She’s lost her husband, her kids, and her home. Right now, she’s upstairs wearing my last ex-husband’s robe because none of my clothes fit her and she doesn’t even have any of her own. Camilla has nothing left in the world at this moment. All I’m asking you to do is go to her house, pick up some things, and get some money from her old man so that she can start getting herself straightened out. I’ve offered to lend her some cash, but she’s too proud.”

  “You could go yourself,” Roz pointed out, relieved that Loulou had at least stopped shouting.

  “We’ve got people off sick and this place is a madhouse. I simply can’t take the time off at the moment. It’s your turn to do something decent for a change.”

  Loulou was looking grimmer by the second and Roz understood that she was cornered. By Loulou and…of all people…Camilla.

  “OK, I’ll go this afternoon,” she conceded, her tone deliberately casual. “But I think you should know that I’m not exactly Jack’s favorite mistress at the moment. He called me yesterday and asked me to live with him.”

  “And?” said Loulou, equally casually.

  Roz shrugged and smiled. “I told him to go play in traffic.”

  Chapter Six

  The moment Loulou emptied the four suitcases of clothes into a heap in the center of her living room floor, she realized she’d made a big mistake.

  Practically everything Camilla owned was beige with elasticated waists and miles of room for growth. It was all perfectly hideous, she thought faintly; just seeing it in the middle of her precious scarlet-and-gold living room made her feel slightly ill. Camilla, evidently thinking otherwise, gave Loulou an awkward hug. “It’s so kind of you to have gone to all this trouble. Having my own clothes…it makes everything seem less strange…”

  I can’t say it, thought Loulou. I mustn’t say a word, I simply mustn’t, but—oh dear—I can’t help it. “I’m sorry, darling, but you can’t possibly wear these clothes,” she burst out helplessly, her blond hair flying as she shook her head in despair. “They’re too awful…depressing… Most of them, anyway,” she amended hastily, glimpsing the stricken expression on Camilla’s face. “Cami, they really aren’t you.”

  “Of course they’re me,” protested Camilla. “I chose them!”

  “Well, maybe they were you,” Loulou explained, edging toward the heap that reminded her so much of a dead elephant and pulling from it a gray knitted dress with a high, frilly collar and fluted sleeves. “But they aren’t anymore. Just look at this, Cami. It’s hideous. It won’t do anything for anyone, least of all the person wearing it.”

  Camilla looked at it, drooping sadly from Loulou’s fingers, then transferred her attention to Loulou’s pencil-slim figure tightly encased from neck to knees in crimson velvet.

  “If I had a figure like you I might be able to get away with it,” she struggled to explain. “If I wore an outfit like yours I’d look like a hemorrhage.”

  Loulou laughed and tossed the dress behind the settee. “So you try to camouflage yourself instead. Don’t worry, darling, after a couple more weeks living on the food I cook for you, you will have a figure like mine. But, in the meantime, we’ll go shopping and buy you a few replacements for all this. It all has to go, Cami. I’m going to get you noticed in future. And,” she added sternly, seeing the woebegone expression on Camilla’s face, “I’m going to make sure you enjoy being noticed!”

  * * *

  Roz’s conscience was bothering her. And the mere fact that it was bothering her only served to alarm her all the more, since much of her life and almost her entire career had flourished simply because she didn’t allow her conscience to get in the way of anything at all.

  Since leaving the traumatic years of her adolescence behind her, she had managed to build herself an entirely satisfactory life. Her dazzling career in television had almost been too easily achieved. It had begun as a bet by a friend who had challenged Roz to sleep with a producer they had met at a particularly drunken party. The producer, proud of his reputation as a stud, had been so humiliated by his disastrous performance—blighted by at least a dozen tumblers of rum punch—and so grateful for Roz’s patient understanding that he had promptly offered her a job as his assistant. And from the moment that Roz had first stepped into the TV studios with their aura of chaotic glamour and barely controlled tension, she had known that this was exactly what she wanted to do with her life.

  From then on her natural drive asserted itself. Friendships were forged and lost, useful lovers came and went, and she quickly learned that clever ideas could be borrowed, adapted, and relaunched as her own. It wasn’t dishonest because everyone else was doing it too; Roz simply ensured that she was heard and taken notice of with greater efficiency than anyone else. And it had culminated, in just six years, with the glittering prize of her very own chat show, Memories.

  Her personal life had been equally ruthlessly planned, and she had always taken care to ensure that her career remained entirely separate from her private social life. The lovers from those two worlds were strictly segregated, her calendars a miracle of modern planning.

  The idea of marriage was anathema to Roz, a silly game she neither wanted nor needed to play. Other women’s husbands were fair game, but the thought of getting one of her own quite simply chilled her. Before you knew it, he’d be demanding to know where you’d been the night before and searching your pockets for clues.

  No, lovers were far more sensible and understanding, and until now, she’d always been lucky.

  Nico, it went without saying, was divine. Her horoscope had warned her that she was in for a spectacular weekend, and it had been even better than that. Meeting him at one of Loulou’s famously debauched parties and spending the next three days in bed with him had been a coup by anybody’s standards.

  After that, her very lack of interest had bound him to her and now, over a year later, the affair was still going strong. As long as Nico continued to propose marriage to her and as long as she refused to accept, there was no reason why anything should happen to spoil it…

  Darling Sebastian on the other hand… Roz’s lips curved into a smile at the thought of him. Sebastian would never dream of asking her to marry him, yet their long-standing affair meant more to her than almost anything else in her life. What could be more romantic, after all, than a relationship forged over fifteen years ago and maintained between two countries for such an amazing length of time. Sebastian took pride in her career successes, while spiraling equally dramatically up the banking ladder in Zurich. They were a couple of achievers, he was fond of telling her, who had their lives under perfect control and knew how to keep them that way. The brevity of her flying visits to Zurich and his own occasional weekends in England when he could manage to juggle his schedule were exactly what they both needed to keep their relationship exciting and alive. And if Roz ever felt that maybe their time together needn’t be quite so ruthlessly rationed, she made sure she kept those thoughts to herself. She and Sebastian were two of a very particular kind, and she wasn’t going to do anything that might risk frightening him off.

  No, Sebastian and Nico were perfe
ct, just as they were. Jack had been fairly perfect too. Until he had gone and spoiled everything, of course, by reminding her that somewhere, deep down, she did still possess the tattered remains of a conscience.

  * * *

  “Talk to me, Nico,” said Roz with a hint of impatience. “I don’t always just want sex, you know.”

  “You surprise me.” Nico grinned, sliding his hand slowly up her thigh and experiencing the usual thrill when he reached the top of her sheer silk stocking and the even silkier texture of warm, bare skin. Stockings and garter belts never failed to turn him on, even if his hand seemed to be having quite the opposite effect upon Roz this evening.

  “Sometimes,” she continued crossly, removing the offending hand as if it were a dead animal, “I’d prefer it if you treated me as a friend instead of a lover.”

  Nico responded with a wink. “Can’t we be both?”

  Glaring at him, Roz snapped back, “Can’t you be serious?” God, he was purposely trying to irritate her, and tonight of all nights she could do without it, she thought with rising frustration. Sebastian would have taken her seriously, would have realized that she wasn’t in the mood for jokes—if he weren’t in bloody Zurich. Jack was out of the window now, so Nico was all she had left. She really needed another man, she decided, closing her eyes and falling back against the chaise longue.

  Nico rose to his feet, crossed to the liquor cabinet, and poured himself a large scotch.

  “So tell me what’s on your mind,” he said eventually, still with his back to Roz. “It is man trouble, I take it?” It cheered him somewhat to discover that the thought of Roz with another man no longer lacerated him with jealousy. After thirteen months, maybe he was beginning to grow out of the obsession that, at first, had gripped him so fiercely that he hadn’t been able to control his feelings toward her. Falling in love—or lust—with a bitch wasn’t exactly conducive to happiness. He’d already realized that, to his great cost. But as Loulou had said when he’d last met her at Vampires, nice people were so unutterably boring that the only way to last an evening in their company was to either get drunk or fall asleep. And no one had ever fallen asleep when they were talking to Roz.

  “It’s woman trouble, actually,” she said, kicking off her high heels and swinging her legs up onto the chaise. “Makes a change, I suppose,” she added, displaying the first flicker of humor since his arrival at the cottage that evening. “You remember that letter I received from someone I was at school with? She wanted to meet me for a drink.”

  Nico nodded, returning to sit beside her and carefully not registering any surprise when Roz curled up against him, kitten-like and seeking comfort. Her dark head nestled against his shoulder and he placed his free arm around her, enjoying the unexpected, friendly intimacy and breathing in the clean scent of her freshly washed hair.

  “You didn’t want to see her,” he remembered, “and I couldn’t understand why. Presumably you did, though.”

  “We bumped into each other quite by accident in Harrods, and she invited me to a dinner party. Loulou as well. I still didn’t really want to go—I suppose you’d made me feel vaguely guilty.”

  Roz, he reflected, was a man’s woman, instinctively mistrusting her own sex because she expected them to behave as she herself did. It was odd, Nico felt, that the only female friend she had was Loulou, who was so very attractive and who by any standards could be regarded as a threat or a rival. Women like Roz, in his experience, almost invariably had plain or unattractive friends who could never hope to compete with them.

  “What was she like?” He was beginning to enjoy playing the role of amateur psychiatrist. “Gorgeous?” Had she somehow managed to make Roz feel inadequate, he wondered, amusement mingling with disbelief.

  “God, no!” She almost laughed aloud at the idea. “Camilla’s turned into every teenager’s nightmare of what it could be like to hit thirty. She looks like the before pictures in those before-and-after-I-lost-a-hundredweight adverts. She’s got two children, no dress sense, and she looks so pathetically eager to please all the time—like an optimistic rabbit—that I just want to throw something heavy at her…” Roz’s voice trailed off as she remembered how Camilla had thrown that enormous bowl of chrysanthemums over Jack. She had been amazed at the time that Camilla had had the imagination to pull off such a magnificent stunt. Privately, she had been betting on a torrent of tears and a rapid retreat to a locked room.

  “So why is she woman-trouble?” persisted Nico, offering her his glass of scotch and noticing as Roz reached out to take it that several fingernails showed distinct signs of having been bitten. That worried him more than anything else—Boadicea was more likely to bite her nails than ice-cool, perfectly groomed Roz.

  “Because I’ve been…seeing”—she chose her words carefully—“her husband.”

  The ormolu clock above the fireplace carried on ticking as if nothing had happened and Nico stared at it, willing himself to feel similarly unconcerned. He was an Italian, but he had been trying for months to overcome—or at least hide—his innate Italian jealousy. And it wasn’t as if he hadn’t realized, he told himself carefully, that Roz was seeing other men besides himself. It just wasn’t particularly pleasing to be told about them, even if he had practically dragged the truth out of her tonight.

  “You mean you’ve been having an affair with him,” he said, needing to hear it confirmed absolutely. Christ, he thought, I must be a bloody masochist.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you love him?”

  Roz shook her head, then raised herself away from him to meet his gaze. Nico’s slanting green eyes were filled with pain and such desolate sadness that she wished she hadn’t told him. He was the last person in the world she wanted to hurt, but the need to talk—her own selfish need to share her problems—had overwhelmed her like a great tidal wave, and she had been unable to stop herself. Now she wished she hadn’t said it. It was just one more piece of evidence proving that she was a total bitch.

  “So you’ve been having an affair with this married guy, but you don’t love him,” continued Nico, his voice an expressionless drawl. Do you love me, he longed to say, but you could only take masochism so far in one evening. Roz didn’t lie, and he couldn’t cope with her devastating truthfulness at this moment.

  Please, please don’t ask me, prayed Roz silently at the same time, her fingers tightening on his arm. She knew Nico well enough to know exactly what was going through his mind.

  “So what’s the problem—he doesn’t want to see you anymore? I can understand that, of course,” said Nico, attempting to inject some humor into the conversation. “An ugly, dried-up old spinster like you.”

  Roz smiled bleakly, grateful for the feeble joke but realizing at the same time that she was in danger of bursting into tears. Kindness was a far more effective method of making her cry than arguments and recriminations.

  “He wants to marry me.”

  I want to marry you, thought Nico. Aloud, he said, “Doesn’t he have a minor obstacle in his path at the moment—like his wife?”

  “Would you be an angel and pour us both another drink?” said Roz resignedly. “I think I’d better tell you exactly what happened at Camilla’s disastrous dinner party.”

  Chapter Seven

  “Right, your week of mourning is up. Today is the first day of the rest of your life,” announced Loulou cheerfully, jerking Camilla into wakefulness. It was the first decent night’s sleep she’d had since leaving Jack.

  “What’s this?” she asked lazily as a tray was thrust into her lap, and Loulou had to lift it for a few seconds while she struggled into a sitting position. The Georgian silver tray was covered with an exquisite cloth of creamy Brussels lace; upon it was a cereal bowl, a crystal vase containing a single white rose, and a narrow crystal glass.

  “The cereal bowl is empty,” she ventured.

  Loulou shook a fing
er as she collapsed on the side of the bed. “Your eyesight is worse than you realize, my girl. That bowl contains your breakfast. Here.” She thrust a soup spoon into Camilla’s hand. “Enjoy.”

  Once Camilla had finished her bowl of breakfast Bollinger with Loulou watching over her like a nanny, they drank a toast with more of the same to the “new Camilla.”

  “But I’m thirty-two,” she protested.

  “You can be new at any age, darling. Personally, I plan to be new at seventy, when I shall dye my hair burgundy and take a marvelous lover young enough to be my grandson. Now hurry up and drink your drink—it’s time to give your poor, battered ego a boost. On second thought, I’ll drink your drink and deprive you of a few more calories. You go jump on the scales.”

  Light-headed with champagne, Camilla did as she was told, tottering giddily toward the bathroom and shedding her nightdress as she went. It was amazing, she thought hazily, how quickly her inhibitions had fallen away since she had been staying here with Loulou. Until last week, she never would have dreamed she could walk around naked in front of another person—she had been far too self-conscious to do so in Jack’s presence—but when Loulou took her bath each evening, she demanded that Camilla sit on the loo seat and hear her gossip, and it had made her own inhibitions seem ludicrous.

  “I think I’ve lost weight,” she called out uncertainly, wishing she had her glasses and peering fuzzily down at the scales.