by Frances Pye
No question, the day had been a major success. Charlton had won, Paul had been great—he wasn’t even complaining about leaving, although Sean wasn’t all that surprised by that; he’d overheard the boy making an arrangement to meet Sally the following day—and Terry had fit right in. She’d got on fine with Ray, had become instant mates with Babs, and had even played with the kids.
Unlike Isobel. Sean’s ex-wife hadn’t liked Ray and Babs. Had thought them boring and dull, too wrapped up in family and children and home to have a good time. For a moment, he wondered how Lily would get on with his friends and then dismissed the thought; though she’d have charmed Ray and Babs, a Saturday night spent eating fish and chips, talking, and playing cards didn’t feel like her idea of fun either. Besides, meeting a lover’s childhood friends probably broke those strict relationship rules of hers.
More laughter came from the kitchen. Ray tilted his head toward the door at the end of the hallway. “You’ve got a good one there.” He sounded pleased. He’d never said anything against Isobel but Sean had always known that he hadn’t liked her.
“It’s not like that.”
“Why not?”
“She’s just a friend.” Or would you call her a friend of a friend? Sean wasn’t sure, but he didn’t want to explain to Ray about Lily and Paul and everything.
“You’re an idiot if you let her get away. Even more of an idiot than I thought.”
“Idiot? Me? The only kid in the street who passed maths O Level?” Sean deflected the conversation away from himself and Terry.
“You cheated.”
“Did not. You can’t cheat at those exams.”
“There was no way you knew enough to pass that.”
“Did.”
“Did not.”
The door to the kitchen opened to let Babs and Terry into the hallway. “God, no, you’re not arguing about the maths O Level again, are you?”
“Not arguing, love, no. Discussing.”
“Have we got to the point where Sean insists you can’t cheat?”
“We’re past there, Babs. Ray’s about to claim they mixed me up with another student.”
Babs turned to Terry. “It’s a ritual conversation. They’ve got lots of them. For some reason, they have to have one every time they meet. Okay, then, boys, get on with it. Some of us want to go to bed.”
Ray grinned at his wife. “You couldn’t even spell ‘algebra,’” he said to Sean. “Go on, spell it.”
“A-L-J-A-B-R-A.”
“Wrong. See. They must have got you mixed up with another Sean Grainger.”
“Couldn’t have.”
“Come on, admit it. You cheated.”
“Did not.”
“Did.”
“Okay. Okay. That’s enough. It’s late and I need my sleep even if you boys don’t. ’Bye, Terry.” Babs leaned forward to kiss Terry. “See you soon, yeah?”
“Very soon.”
Terry couldn’t keep the smile off her face. It had been a fantastic day. In fact, the best she could remember in a long, long time. Not only had she seen more than a glimpse of the old Paul, but she’d also met a new friend. Terry already felt as if she’d known Babs for years rather than just one evening.
The good-byes over, Sean held open the door for her. She walked out into the street, where a slight fog misted the lights. Back at the house, Sean was laughing at something Ray had said. And Terry realized what else it was that had made the day special. It was Sean. Here, with his childhood friends, he’d dropped the veneer of the charming, urbane builder-with-taste. Part of that was still there, of course—she wasn’t accusing him of living a lie—but today she’d seen the real Sean. Not the one her friends saw, not the one his clients saw, but the unvarnished, undisguised truth. With Ray and his family, Sean was different. Relaxed. Himself. And Terry was deeply flattered that he’d trusted her enough to invite her into his private world.
With a final laugh, a tease, a pretend punch, Sean left Ray. He put one arm around Paul’s shoulders, another around Terry’s. “Come on. Home time.” And the three of them started to walk together up the street, Sean’s arms still around the other two.
“What a great day,” he said.
With a final wave, Ray closed the door.
And from under an overhanging porch on the other side of the road, a tall, well-built man wrapped in a dark overcoat, baseball cap pulled down over his eyes, materialized out of the shadows. And furtively followed Sean, Terry, and Paul.
It was Clive.
forty-eight
“Lils. Guess what?”
“I don’t know. Tony Blair resigned. David Beckham went to Barcelona. Guy Ritchie made a good movie.”
“No, silly. Paul and I laughed together.”
“Ter! That’s fantastic. Where? How? When?”
“We went to a football game with Sean’s friend Ray, then had dinner with him and his wife and kids. And Paul was fine all day and we joked together and he met Ray’s teenage daughter and I think he’s in love and he’s holed up in his room now but it’s a different kind of holed up. If you know what I mean?”
“Yes, I know.”
“And I loved Babs, Ray’s wife. She’s funny and down-to-earth and friendly and everything….”
Lily tuned out as Terry babbled on about her great day with Sean’s old mates. The wonderful Babs and the fascinating Ray and the precocious Sally and the charming younger kids. Yet again, she found herself with that clawing feeling in her gut that reminded her uncomfortably of jealousy.
She knew she had no right to be hurt that it was Terry whom Sean had taken to meet his friends, not her; she’d laid down the ground rules and they didn’t include nice social evenings with his pals. She had insisted that she didn’t want to get involved in Sean’s life…and she didn’t. But she didn’t appear to want Terry to do so either. And that was what confused her. Why wouldn’t she want her best friend to meet her lover’s friends? What on earth could it mean to her? She had no desire to go to Woolwich or Charlton or wherever it was and spend a day at a football game followed by an evening eating fish and chips and playing cards. It sounded like utter tedium. So why was she upset that Sean had taken Terry? Unless she was, indeed, jealous?
It was only later, when she was waiting for Sean to arrive for the evening, that she realized what was happening. It wasn’t him she was jealous about. She had only begun to feel bad when Terry had started going on and on about Babs. Of course. This was a throwback to life in the playground. She was jealous of Babs. She and Terry had been best friends forever, and for a moment she’d started to see Babs as a rival. That was all it was, a knee-jerk reaction to old school memories of friends made and lost in a day. Nothing to worry about.
“SO DID you watch it? All those weird characters hopping around on one leg? Grimacing and drooling. Gnawing on bones and mumbling at the same time. I think it must be an actor’s fantasy. They get the contract from the BBC and they pull out their pens and sign, dreaming about pockmarks and limps and the public’s openmouthed admiration when they demonstrate their talent for pulling faces. It drives me crazy. All of them imagining they’re giving a richly comic performance when we can’t understand a word they’re saying. God, I hate Dickens adaptations.”
Lily had been walking up and down in her living room as she’d delivered this speech. Now she looked over at Sean, slumped in an armchair opposite her, unmoving and unmoved. She supposed she should be grateful that he wasn’t heckling her.
She’d been talking to a concert-promotion company about her doing a stand-up/sketch stage show. She wasn’t sure it was a good idea—if she was scared before a taping, with a nice, tame, nonpaying audience who laughed when they were told to, she’d be hiding under the table if asked to go onstage in front of people who’d paid their money and expected to be entertained in return—but she’d agreed to think about it. It was true that over the years she’d collected a lot of material that wouldn’t fit in a sitcom or a short sketch, but stand
-up? She’d never done any, and even the best comics took time to learn how to do it. But it was tempting—the money was outrageous, and though she was earning more than she’d ever imagined she could, she’d also acquired some expensive tastes and cash seemed to exit her bank account as quickly as it came in.
So she’d decided to try out a routine on Sean. And had bombed. Okay, maybe it still needed a bit of work here and there, but she’d been expecting at least a laugh or two. A smile. But she’d got nothing. A big, fat zero. If Sean was anything to go by, she’d be better off staying at home. Lily saw her new career die before it was born. Then she looked at Sean more closely. And realized from the faraway look in his eyes that he hadn’t been listening.
She should have been pleased. Her routine wasn’t a complete washout; Sean hadn’t even heard it. But she wasn’t. She was peeved. Just a couple of weeks ago, it seemed he had hung on her every word and now he was daydreaming his way through her performance and their evening….
“Sean?” She snapped her fingers. “Hey! Anyone home?”
“What?”
“I guess I must be one of those interminably dull people who just blather on and on and on while no one listens. Ah, well. What do they say? You’re always the last to know.”
“Sorry, Lily. I was miles away. Big meeting tomorrow. I’ll find out whether or not I’ve got the building Terry and I found. Remember?”
“Um, yeah.” Terry again.
“So what was it? What you were saying?”
“Nothing. I was just trying out a new idea.”
“Great. Let’s go. I’d love to hear it.”
“You already did.”
THREE HOURS later, Lily wasn’t peeved; she was worried. When Sean hadn’t appeared as interested in her and her material as he once had, she’d been disappointed; when he’d attempted to excuse himself from sex with her, she’d been stunned. They’d been seeing each other for only a few months. In total they’d spent about twenty-five nights together. Maybe thirty, but no more. And he was bored with her already?
Oh, he’d claimed hard work and tiredness and all the usual things, but she’d not believed him. A man claiming tiredness was like a woman claiming a headache—a sure sign that the person involved was losing interest. And that was something Lily was not used to. Her men were normally clamoring for more, not making sad, old, unimaginative excuses to get out of their duty.
She looked down at Sean gently snoring away beside her. Why wasn’t he as keen as he had been to start with? Was he just one of those people with a short attention span? Or was he ready to move on? At the beginning, he hadn’t been able to leave her alone. He’d arrive at the house and within a few minutes the two of them would be fucking away. She’d never had to cajole him into making love to her in the way she had tonight.
So what was it? Was it just accelerated entropy? The end that comes to all relationships, arriving early? Or had the years caught up with her? Was she beginning to look old?
She’d have sworn no one would have guessed she was only a few months off forty. Okay, close inspection revealed a few small lines around her eyes and mouth, a slight sag to her underarms, and traces of cellulite on her thighs. But a naturally spare frame, no heavy sunbathing, and hours and hours in the gym had done their job. Lily looked ten years younger than her age. Or so she had thought.
She jumped out of bed, naked, and stalked into the bathroom. She switched on all the lights until the room was ablaze, and then stood in that unforgiving glare in front of the mirrors, banked, three-sided, around the Starck freestanding bowl-like hand basins. She twisted one way, then the other, subjecting first her body, then her face to minute scrutiny. Hating herself for not being able to give the finger to her thirty-nine years, for caring so much about a few wrinkles, but unable to stop.
She was fine. Her tits weren’t those of a young girl—hell, she’d breastfed twins—but they weren’t around her ankles either. Her jawline was slightly blurred…but only very, very slightly. No one would notice unless they were specifically looking for it. Her thighs were chunkier than they had been when she was in her twenties, but her height allowed her to carry that off. Okay, nobody would mistake her for a teenager, but nor would anyone take her for thirty-nine. Whatever Sean’s problem was, it couldn’t be that.
Perhaps she’d overreacted and he was genuinely tired. Some percentage of the men who claimed that must be telling the truth. Five, maybe ten percent, say? Perhaps Sean was one of those. Perhaps he did have a major meeting the next day.
Or perhaps it was the scheme. Perhaps he’d lost interest in her because he preferred one of her friends. Jules or Terry. Or even Mara. As far as Lily knew, she wasn’t interested, but the two had seemed pretty close at that dinner party. Perhaps…
She stopped herself right there. She was being silly. This was just middle-of-the-night, can’t-sleep paranoia. Her friends were not plotting to steal her lover from her. She had lent him to them. And not one of them was interested in having more of him than they were already taking. The fact was that she hadn’t managed to spend this much time with any of the men she’d seen in the last few years. She’d always had to get rid of them long before this point. It was perfectly possible that this was the way of things nowadays. That three months was the limit for anyone at any age and it was all downhill after that.
forty-nine
Jules clicked off on the last of her e-mails. Unfortunately, she could communicate this way only with suppliers: caterers, tent people, booking agents, and the like. Most of her clients were the old-fashioned sort who would no more mess with e-mails than they would consider going to church without a hat. A handwritten note demanding a similar reply was much more likely. Or a phone call. Or a visit to the office. All of which were far more time and energy consuming than a blessed two-minutes-and-then-gone e-mail.
The door to her office opened. Jules didn’t look up, expecting it to be Claire. Her capable, unflappable assistant had been with her for five years. And Jules lived in fear of losing her. Particularly now that she was going to spend more and more time out of the office. She needed Claire’s composure, her dedication to the job, and her way with a file if Dunne Parties was to continue to run smoothly in her half absence.
“Juliet!” Jules’s father’s voice rang out.
She jumped up. “Daddy!”
“I’m sorry, Jules. He insisted.”
Jules smiled at her assistant. She couldn’t blame her for the force of authority that was Ian Dunne. “It’s fine. Don’t worry.”
Claire slipped out of the room. Jules looked at her father. “Hello, Daddy. It’s nice to see you.”
“And you, Juliet. And you. Are you well?”
“Yes. Yes, I’m fine.”
“Good. Now, get out your diary.”
“My diary?”
“Yes. Is that it?” Lord Dunne pointed to a large, black leather book, the word “DIARY” embossed on it in gold, that was lying on the desk. It was clear he’d come intending to set up a date for a lunch or a dinner with him and her mother. For a moment, Jules contemplated pretending it was next year’s, that she’d left the relevant one at home. But it was pointless. He’d never believe her.
“Yes.”
“Then open it. Open it.” As always, Jules obeyed. Sometimes she felt just like a wayward ensign. Her father must have been a wonderful officer. He had such a commanding way with orders.
“I suppose you’re going away for Christmas again?” Jules nodded. She’d not stayed in England for Christmas for the last couple of years; arranging to fly off to the Caribbean meant she got a bit of sun when she most craved it and at the same time avoided pressure to go home for the holiday. Dunne took a calfskin-bound notebook out of his pocket and consulted it. “Then what are you doing on the twelfth December?”
Jules flipped through the diary. “It is our busiest month, Daddy. Yes, here we are. There are two parties that night, one in Chelsea, one in Little Venice.”
“Then, the tenth?
”
“No, I’m sorry. I’m sure we’re booked up every evening in December.”
“Then November. November the tenth. Or is that one of your busiest months also?”
Jules decided not to answer this one. She prayed that there would be something written in the diary for that night. She found the page. They were busy. A midweek anniversary party in Wiltshire. Phew. “I’m afraid not.”
Lord Dunne returned to his list. “November twelfth?”
A weekend. It was unlikely. Jules flipped two pages forward. “No.”
Her father didn’t seem bothered by her refusals. It appeared he was prepared to suggest dates until he found one when she was free and couldn’t refuse. “The fifteenth, then?”
It was a Monday. There was little chance she’d be busy; Mondays weren’t the day of choice for high-profile parties. She could hope for a book launch or a birthday. She turned the pages. There it was. Monday, November 15. A blank page.
“Capital. We’ll agree on that, shall we? Dinner at my club. All the family. Eight sharp.”
Jules could see no way out, for the moment. “Fine. Of course. Er…thank you, Daddy.”
“And Juliet? I do not expect to receive one of your little notes calling this off. I will accept no excuses. Understood?”
“Yes, Daddy. Understood.”
When her father had gone, Jules tried hard to think of a way out of the dinner. But short of her being in hospital, she couldn’t. And she wouldn’t put it past her father to come and drag her out of the Cromwell or the Lister or wherever it was she’d managed to persuade someone that she needed to be taken in overnight. Or, worse, to convene the whole family around her bed. Without the distraction of food and drink. No, unless she had some major inspiration between now and then, she was going to have to go. And endure her mother’s constant barbs. She wasn’t even likely to get a good meal out of it. The club specialized in return-to-boarding-school dinners. Overcooked meat and veg and steamed suet puddings with thick, lumpy custard. Yuck.
