The girls slipped into the booth with me and ordered cosmopolitans, after which I think they were stuck for words. They’d probably already said all the things they wanted to say now. How Richard was a cokehead, a liar, a prick. There wasn’t any ground we hadn’t covered in the anti-Richard field and yet here they were, desperate to pick up the pieces of their girlfriend’s heart—the girlfriend they’d warned was going to have her heart broken if she persisted with her obsession with Richard. But they didn’t say, “We told you so.”
Actually, they didn’t talk about Richard or Sally or Charlie or me. Instead, we talked about old times, safe times, before all this had happened. Elizabeth started the ball rolling with how she had bumped into Clive that day.
“Clive the sherbet head?” I asked, remembering the story she had told at Aunt Camilla’s funeral ball—about the one bright moment of the evening.
She nodded. “Fizz Nose himself,” she joked.
Andy the barman approached our table then and handed out taster cocktails. “Something I’m working on,” he explained. “See what you think,” he told us as we dutifully knocked them back.
And promptly spat them out again. All of us giving Andy the barman the thumbs-down. “Not too good?”
“Andy, what is in that, it’s disgusting!” I told him, taking a sip of cosmopolitan to take the taste out of my mouth.
“Yes, what’s in it?” Josie asked, sniffing her glass suspiciously.
“Absinthe, vermouth, gin. I was reviving the Piccadilly cocktail, from the Savoy cocktail book.”
“Well, don’t,” I told him firmly, “it died for a reason.”
“A very good reason,” Elizabeth added.
twenty-four
“Good God, what an unhappy person I am, what injudicious dreams and fancies led me to believe that I could treat a man such as Charles in such a disobliging manner. For now I can see my love for Edward for what it truly is; the reckless and selfish fantasy of a child that has prevented me from loving my husband as he deserved.
I have begged Charles to dispose of me as he should, please, such is my shame, yet each day he writes to me of his undying love. My darling sister, I have made the most dreadful mistake…”
Letter from Lady Henrietta Posche to her sister, Elizabeth
Over the next couple of days I gave a lot of thought to Richard and why I had believed so resolutely that I was still in love with him. Because that’s the thing about the past and going back; that’s the thing about memory. We remember what we choose to remember. We remember memories of memories.
I had remembered how things could have been rather than remembering how they were. Richard’s cocaine usage and his lying had run like a bright acrylic thread through our time together, but I had convinced myself that if I tugged hard enough I could pull that thread out. Well, I had tugged, but all I’d succeeding in doing was pulling the fabric apart.
In the beginning he had swept me off my feet. He had loved me as no one ever had before and I was dissembled by the idea that someone could get me the way Richard made me feel he got me. But had I really loved him or was I just in love with the idea of his love for me, which as it turned out seemed to be fueled by cocaine and convenience more than any real affection. Maybe I did love the man I knew he could be. But he wasn’t that man anymore, and the more he aged the less likely he was ever to become that man.
These were my sane thoughts.
The insane thoughts ran along the lines of: the cheating, lying, arsehole bastard, I’m going to kill him. I’m not going to sit back and allow him to overturn my life. How dare he make me vulnerable, ruin my career and destroy my friendship with Charlie.
By the time he arrived at my flat on the Friday, though, I was quite composed in a cold, murderous, vengeful, de-ranged sort of way.
He shouldn’t be able to get away with messing up my life, I’d decided.
He should be made to pay.
By the time he rang my buzzer, everything was prepared. Jean was wearing her best Hermés ribbon, the brown nicely offsetting her eyes. I was wearing my new dress from Miss Sixty and there was a bottle of Dom on ice in the living room. On my bedside table there were several lines of the finest-quality A-grade sherbet chopped up and spread out like long lines of cocaine, on a mirror. I had placed a razor blade and straw beside them for added effect.
“Welcome back,” I cheered as he walked in the door and swung me around. I noticed the bags he had with him, but didn’t comment.
“Oh, Lolly, I’ve missed you!” he said, placing me down on his knee.
“So how was it, did you have to scrub the toilet with a toothbrush and march in line with all the other coke-heads,” I asked, trying to keep an expression of fixed concern on my face, though secretly I felt that boot-camp tortures and scrubbing toilets with his toothbrush didn’t come close to the punishment he deserved. I kissed him again on the nose, just narrowly suppressing an urge to bite it off.
He laughed insouciantly, no idea at all of the dangers that lay ahead. “No, it wasn’t so bad actually, it was quite nice to have a break and just chill out. You know how it is.”
“So it was just a break?” I inquired lightly. “Not perpetual abstinence then?”
“I’m not saying I’m going to hammer it like I was, but well, you know what they say…”
I raised my eyebrows suggestively. “Never say never?”
He kissed me passionately. “I was hoping you’d say that. See, you get me, Lola, that’s what I love about you.”
I wondered at his capacity for keeping up this playacting. Then again I wondered about my own. I was matching him step for step, lie for lie, complicit in his game. He was like a reckless poker player, so certain he held the winning hand. “In fact, as you’ve been such a good boy,” I told him, ruffling his hair, “I’ve prepared a surprise for us for later. A well-done-Richard prize.” I kissed him on the cheek.
“Really?” He seemed genuinely surprised. “I thought you were really against it. In fact, you were the reason I went to the Priory.” It was the first time that evening that he’d looked surprised.
I opened the champagne and poured us both a glass. It was really quite remarkable the way we were both sticking to our lines in our charade, Richard pretending he was just back from a week at the Priory, me pretending I wasn’t planning on murdering him. In a hideous sort of way, we were fantastically well suited. “I did think it was a bit much the way you were so coked out of your head at Aunt Camilla’s funeral fete, but I don’t want you going all twelve step on me either,” I told him, passing him his champagne. “I presume you can still drink champagne?”
“Are you kidding?” he asked, grabbing the glass. I could almost hear the saliva rushing to his mouth. “Shall we have a toast then?”
“To Richard,” I said, raising my glass. “For all your hard work getting straight.”
“To Lola, for making me want to,” he toasted, snaking a hand around my waist and sitting me on his knee.
I kissed him lightly then wriggled off. “Actually, Richard, I’ve just got to go off to the shop to get something, but I’ll be back in a second.”
“I’ll come with you,” he offered.
“No, you stay here. It’s only across the road. Why don’t you unpack your things,” I suggested, pointing toward his luggage. Then I dashed off before he could question me further.
Once I was out of the building, I wandered down to the local shop and bought a bottle of Evian, which I took across the road to Berkeley Square and drank, watching the workers crisscrossing their way across the pathways toward their tube stations. Eventually I decided that Richard would have found my trap, and set off back to the flat.
I could hear the cries of pain from the moment I stepped out of the lift. What I found inside was not the scene Elizabeth had described when she spoke of the trick Clive had played on Damien, though.
Blood not sherbet was foaming out of Richard’s nose, quite a lot of it. He was clearly in desperate pain
and suddenly I was jolted out of my desire for revenge and in a state of high panic. I truly didn’t know what to do. I hadn’t calculated a plan B for this sort of eventuality. First I tried Elizabeth on her mobile but she didn’t pick up.
Richard was still howling with pain, so I held his head under the kitchen sink and ran cold water over his nose and face to try and wash out the sherbet. The sink quickly filled with his blood, though, and I really began to despair. What if he died, what if he bled to death in my flat? What if in my effort for adolescent revenge I ended up killing him?
His eyes were bloodshot and he’d stopped crying, but I didn’t take that as a good sign as he’d also gone a bit bluish. I envisaged calling an ambulance and describing what I’d done. I thought of calling the Priory but remembered that was never real, just part of the elaborate parlor game of head-fuck we’d been playing with one another.
So I called Charlie, easygoing, capable, good-in-a-crisis Charlie, and told him what I’d done. Richard was lying on the floor in a pool of blood, moaning, and Jean was hopping around him looking very worried. What if he choked on his own blood?
I was still gabbling away when he told me he’d be with me “in a jiff.”
Only Charlie would respond to a cry for help with a phrase like that, but he was true to his word and minutes later he arrived. He buzzed the door and asked me if I could get Richard down in the lift on my own. I sobbed that I couldn’t and that in fact I was pretty sure Richard was dying, so he came into the building and moments later he was crouched beside Richard, who was now in a substantial pool of blood.
He dialed 999. “Ahm, hello, look, we’ve got a bit of situation, chap in his thirties, seems to have snorted a few lines of sherbet. Lot of blood, bit of a mess, actually.”
Jean hopped over to me and I picked her up. She had a little bit of blood on her paws from where she’d gone over to see how Richard was.
I nuzzled my face in her fur while Charlie replied to further questions. “Yes, that’s right, sherbet, you know, the white sweet powder stuff you lick off a licorice straw…yes, I know it’s a sweet…well, the chap’s lost consciousness and there’s a fair amount of blood… No, obviously you’re not meant to sniff it.”
Minutes later we’d managed to get Richard into Charlie’s Aston Martin and were tearing through the streets on our way to Chelsea & Westminster Hospital.
twenty-five
Your life is your poem. Each action, each decision, becomes an immortal word or phrase within the verse of one’s life. It is essential therefore to decide at the earliest age the style of poem your life will depict: a poem of love, a poem of loss, a poem of tragedy, a poem extolling virtue perhaps.
From the moment you make the decision on your poem’s theme, no movement, no word can be too inconsequential to ignore. The way you catch a pretty gentleman’s eye in the reflection of a looking glass, the way you tilt your head when you are in conversation, the way you laugh, the way you hold your glass, the way you love, the way you bear your sorrows, your losses, all these things form the phrases and verses in the poem of your life.
Extract from Hold Your Glass Like a Poem by Lady Henrietta Posche
The hospital staff saw Richard the moment we brought him in. Charlie and I struggled to complete the official forms, and after a long wait a young female doctor came out and spoke to us as if we were his parents. She explained that the blood loss had looked worse than it was and that Richard’s cocaine habit had been the reason he’d had such a marked reaction to the sherbet, and that casualty staff were rinsing his sinuses out, but that we could see him soon.
Charlie sat with me under the cold lights on the hard hospital chairs. We didn’t really say much, although I could just imagine what he thought of me.
“I suppose Sally won’t be too pleased with me,” I suggested as we waited for the doctors to report back on Richard’s nose job.
“I don’t know. I’ve told her what he’s like, she knows.” He squeezed my knee without looking at me. “She’s got to deal with this in her own way.”
I took his hand in mine and held it. “I hope she deals with it better than me.”
And then he lifted my hand to his lips and I thought he might be about to kiss it, but instead he squeezed it as he looked me in the eye.
“Thank you,” I told him lamely.
“Anytime.”
“I’m not really intending to serve up sherbet in lieu of cocaine anytime soon, you know.” I smiled.
“No, probably for the best,” he agreed, nodding his assent. “But you knew it was sherbet, though?” he asked.
“Well, yes, but I didn’t know it would do that to him. I just wanted to, well, be horrible to him because…” The excuse hung there unspoken.
“I see.” Charlie was looking at the linoleum floor. “He seemed to find it all pretty horrible, so objective achieved, I guess.”
I nodded. “He told me he was in the Priory.”
“I know, you said. Sally knows, too. He told her he was booking himself in there today.”
“I’m sorry about Sally,” I told him truthfully. “I feel really bad now.”
“Well, if it’s any comfort, she feels really bad too.”
“About being taken in by Richard, and his lies. What did she say when he said he was booking himself into the Priory?”
Charlie looked sad as he shook his head and shrugged his shoulders. “She said, perhaps he will after this.”
“Oh.”
“No, she told him to piss off and hung up.”
“Good on Sally, more sense than me then. Are you going to tell her about the sherbet?”
He smiled. “I think I’ll find it difficult to resist.”
I nodded, suppressing a smile of my own as the doctor came out and told us we could see Richard. I looked at Charlie and Charlie looked at me. Then I looked at my hand and saw it was still in his. I didn’t want to let go of his hand and so I didn’t, and so we went in to see Richard together—holding hands.
Richard looked truly buggered.
“Sorry about the, erm, you know, the sherbet. I meant for it to be a joke…obviously not a very funny one as it turned out.”
Richard nodded feebly and closed his eyes, and after a while Charlie motioned with his head toward the door and we left. We were still holding hands and I was worrying about the part where we’d have to stop. Would it be in the lift? Would it be when we were getting into the car? I tried to imagine how we could manage to get into the car while holding hands. I pictured us struggling to shuffle over the seats, and the gear stick. It would be quite hard, and then, of course, reversing out of our parking space would be very tricky while holding hands. I pictured us driving up the Kings Road and around Hyde Park, Charlie negotiating all the turns and bends while still holding my hand.
It seemed unlikely, though.
In the lift he took both my hands and, ignoring the white-suited men with the cart, he kissed me on the lips and I kissed him back and my heart pounded so hard my tummy did a little flip. The white-suited men got out of the lift with their trolley and the doors closed, but we carried on kissing.
Charlie pulled away first. He was smiling. “Quite funny, though, the sherbet business. I mean, when we think of it later. Obviously not the blood, that was pretty nasty.” Then he went back to kissing me.
“No, we shan’t mention the blood,” I agreed when the lift finally stopped and the doors opened out onto the car park.
Halfway toward the car he kissed me some more, which made up a bit for having to let go of his hand so we could climb into the car. And then he kissed me again at the traffic lights. I liked the way our mouths fitted over one another.
“I’ve wanted to do that for so long,” he told me as we drove onto the Kings Road.
“You never mentioned it,” I replied, placing my hand over his hand as it rested on the gear stick.
“You never seemed the type,” he teased.
“The type for kissing, you mean?”
&nb
sp; “Oh no, you always seemed the type for kissing. You just didn’t seem the type to kiss me.”
“What?”
“Well, you were always so professional. So calm, cool and collected. I never saw a chink.”
“A chink?”
“A gap, you know, a chance to get my kiss in.”
We were driving along the park now. “So you waited until I was an emotional mess, jobless with a boyfriend OD’d on sherbet before you made your move?”
“It was the first time I saw a chink,” he said, a grin spreading across his face. He turned to me at the lights at Hyde Park Corner.
“A kiss-a-girl-when-she’s-down strategy, then.”
“I prefer to call it a damsel-in-distress strategy.”
That night we stayed in with the bottle of champagne that Richard and I had never properly started. We called up Scotts and had oysters sent round. Convenience food, as Kitty would call it. Then Charles announced (right at the point where things were getting rather steamy), “The walls are closing in a bit here, what say we head back to the House?”
Slightly harassed that he was disentangling himself from me, right at the point I wanted him to entangle himself in me, I agreed. I watched from the sofa as he gathered up Jean’s kit and popped her in her bag.
“Besides, I have to move the car,” he remembered, referring to the draconian Westminster Council parking inspectors.
He pulled me up and, taking his hand, I submitted to his desire to be out of my flat and back at work, mollified by the way he stroked my leg on the drive there.
Carl smiled knowingly as we walked in hand in hand, giving the whole event a teenlike atmosphere. Then as we reached the door to the secret passage, Charlie went into the spy mode we’d been in the night I spotted Richard with Hamish and Jeremy.
Sex with the Ex Page 22
