“I’m as sure as I need to be,” Rose said. “Oliver’s got what I’m looking for.”
“Which is?” I said.
“He’s gorgeous looking. He’s generous. He’s well connected. And, Ellie, he’s fucking rich. There, I said it. I need to marry a rich man and Oliver asked me and I said yes because if I don’t I will be well and truly, totally fucked.” And she swept her scattered piles of papers together in front of her and put her head down on them and started to sob huge, keening sobs.
“Rose, what the hell is this about?” I put my arm around her and reached for the roll of paper towels on the worktop. “Come on, what’s going on?”
“Ellie, are you completely fucking stupid?” Rose said. “Do you know how much I earn?”
“How much you… no, of course I don’t.”
She mopped at her swollen eyes with a paper towel. “Well, I’ll tell you,” she said, and did.
I was shocked. Don’t get me wrong, working as a press officer in the charity sector is not exactly the career you choose if you want to live in luxury, and although my salary at Black & White was a bit better, it was still far from huge, but it was still double what Rose said.
“Shit, Rose,” I said, “that’s not much.”
“And do you know how many people apply for jobs like mine?” Rose said.
“No, I don’t,” I said.
“Hundreds. Every time Quinn’s advertises a vacancy for a specialist. Hundreds. And every single fucking one has got a rich husband or gets an allowance from Daddy, so they can start their own art collection and dress the part and go to the right places.”
“Shit, Rose,” I said again.
“What did you think, Ellie? How did you think I bought all this stuff?” She sort of waved a hand at herself: her Paige jeans, her T-shirt, which looked like any black top with a sort of squiggly gold design on it, but I could see the design spelled out Moschino, her Mulberry bag on the floor next to her. “This top cost four hundred pounds,” she said.
“Four hundred… Shit,” I said again, uselessly.
“And Gervase doing my hair costs two hundred and fifty quid every month,” Rose went on calmly. “Facials, manicures, pedicures, eyebrows, waxing – that’s another two hundred a month or so. Skiing holidays, meals out, bottles of champagne in clubs – all charged as taken. It’s what’s called investing in one’s future, and now the time has come for me to recoup my investment. Look at these.”
She pushed the pile of papers over to me, and I saw that they were credit card statements. I flipped through them. I’m no financial genius but I’m used to working with budgets and I could see that things in Rose’s world were badly, badly wrong. I quickly totted up the figures in my head and said, “You’re ten thousand pounds in overdraft and you owe more than thirty thousand on credit cards.”
“Correct,” Rose said. “I can’t even cover the interest. Let’s say the credit crunch has not been kind to me.”
I privately thought that the opposite was true, and the proliferation of easily available credit was what had been unkind to Rose, but I didn’t think I should say so.
“I’m fucked, Ellie. It’s getting so I won’t be able to pay my share of the bills here.”
“Okay, look, Rose,” I said, “You’ve been so stupid I could slap you. But this is all fixable. It’s only money. You don’t have to get out of this mess by marrying someone you don’t love. Dad would…”
“I am not fucking borrowing money off Dad,” Rose said. “How do you think it would look? I behaved horribly, I know I did, I’ve known all along. I went there yesterday to tell him and Serena about Ollie, and I also told them how sorry I am. Maybe one day Serena will forgive me, I don’t know. I hope so. But I’m not suddenly going to get all like, ‘Oh Daddy, I know I was rude to your wife and wouldn’t come and support you when you almost lost your babies because I was too insecure to spend a weekend away from my boyfriend, now please can I have forty grand?’”
“You were too…” I paused, thinking back, and I could remember all the opportunities Oliver had taken to make Rose feel uncertain, to keep her on her toes. His lateness, his unreliability, and of course most of all his flirtation with me, which Rose could hardly have failed to notice. I felt sick with shame. “You don’t have to do this, Rose, honestly,” I said. “There’s another way, I know there is, we just have to find it.”
“You’re so sweet, Ellie,” Rose said. “But there really isn’t. This is what I wanted, remember? What I’ve always wanted. A lovely big chunk of status, right here.” She held out her hand and the diamond blazed in the morning sun. “I’ve made my bed and I’m going to lie on it, and it’ll be a really comfortable bed, one with five hundred thread count sheets and goose down pillows.”
“Rose, you can’t. I can’t let you.”
“You can’t stop me either.” Her face was a smooth, serene mask.
I thought, yes, I can stop you. I could tell you about me and Oliver and what happened last night, and then surely you would change your mind. But by giving Rose the knowledge that would stop her making this stupid, life-shattering decision, I would risk losing my sister’s love forever.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Claire, Pers and I were eating ice cream in Brixton Village Market. I had a scoop of chocolate and a scoop of salted caramel, and bugger the calories; Claire had a scoop of mango sorbet and a scoop of vanilla, and Pers was having tiny bits of all of them, but not too much because although she loved the taste, the cold made her scrunch up her little face and look perplexed. As soon as Rose had left the flat – to go and meet Vanessa to share her news and no doubt get swept away on a ridiculous tide of plans involving Vera Wang frocks and receptions at The Sanderson – I’d got on the blower to Claire and said we needed to meet urgently.
“So, what’s up?” she asked, offering Pers a micro amount of orange-coloured ice cream.
“Everything’s gone completely and utterly fucking pear-shaped,” I said. “Your genius plan certainly worked, but it’s backfired.”
“My genius what?” Claire looked bemused.
“Your plan. For me to get Oliver off Rose, remember?”
“Vaguely,” Claire said. “You don’t mean you… What did I say?”
“You said Rose was obviously Oliver’s type, and as Rose’s sister it would be really easy for me to make myself more like her, and be his type too. You said I could try hanging out at the places Rose goes, because I might see him there. You said I could do with spending a few quid on some designer clothes, and if I made more of an effort with Rose’s friends they’d start inviting me to their parties and stuff, and I’d see him there. You said I could get a new job to impress him, and a boyfriend to make him jealous.”
“Ellie, you… That’s just bonkers. I can’t believe you went and did all that stuff because of some stupid joke conversation we had. What were you thinking?”
“I really believed I was in love with him, Claire.” I looked down at my ice cream. Suddenly it didn’t seem so delicious any more, and I was feeling a bit sick. “I really did. Properly smitten, like a crush at school. I didn’t mean it to happen, but it did. I just wanted to be around him, hear him talk, have him look at me. All that bollocks.”
“But you’re not any more?”
“I’m not any more.” I told Claire about seeing Oliver at the polo, spending most of the day with him, and how glamorous and romantic and utterly perfect it had been, and how for those few hours I’d been able to imagine that he was my boyfriend, and forget altogether about Rose. I told her, my face absolutely flaming with mortification, how close I’d come to sleeping with him, but I’d brought proceedings to a screeching halt because it had felt so totally wrong on every level. I could see Claire longing to ask for more details, but wisely and kindly she nodded, put her arm around me and snuck a spoonful of my salted caramel ice cream.
“But you’ve come to your senses now, right?” she said. “You’re over Oliver, Rose is bound to get over him soon too
, and find someone lovely, and you can get back together with…”
“I am over Oliver,” I said. “And I’m over Peter too. I should never have gone out with him in the first place, it was stupid. I should have left it alone after the first night, but I thought he’d make Oliver jealous. In fact I think I might be over men entirely. But Rose isn’t. She’s going to marry Oliver. And he’s a lying, treacherous bastard and I can’t tell her he is because then she’ll know I’m treacherous too.” A tear slid down my cheek and splatted into my ice cream container. I passed it over to Claire. “You may as well finish this,” I said. “It’s salty anyway.” I explained to Claire about Rose’s terrifying mountain of debt, how she refused to ask Dad for help and saw marriage to Oliver as her only way out of the mess she was in.
At that point Pers decided to make a bid for freedom and go toddling off towards the door, so Claire pursued her and left me gazing morosely at the rainbow of ice cream tubs behind the counter, remembering that in addition to all this doom and gloom about Rose, I was going to have to talk to Claire about Ben and Nina.
“So here’s how I see it,” Claire said when she returned, slightly out of breath, carrying Pers. “There are three things that could solve the problem. One, something happens to put Rose off Oliver. Two, something happens to put Oliver off Rose. Three, something happens that will solve Rose’s financial problems and mean she doesn’t have to marry Oliver. You’ve ruled out playing a role in option one, which you could do at any time, because you don’t want to hurt Rose. Which is fair enough. You’ve also fallen at the last fence when it comes to potentially seducing Oliver away from Rose. And that leaves you with option three.”
“But I can’t solve Rose’s financial problems,” I objected. “I mean, I suppose I could go to Dad and tell him I needed money, and give it to Rose, but she’d know it was from him and refuse to take it, because she’s feeling so bad about being vile to Serena.”
Pers squirmed off Claire’s lap and started to bleat a bit. “Come on, let’s walk,” she said, hoisting Pers up into her sling. We wandered out and headed towards the main square, jostling our way through the crowds of people who were taking advantage of the early summer sunshine and thronging the streets. There was the usual assortment of Brixton characters: the religious nutter with his megaphone, exhorting us all to find Jesus and repent; the Rastafarians playing drums and selling Jamaican patties; the beautiful young girls in impossibly short shorts; the dodgy geezers offering to buy used Travelcards outside the station. Normally I’d have relished it all: the vibrant mix of people, the sunny day, the company of my best friend and my gorgeous god-daughter. Today the sunlight and the summer fashion and smiling faces might just as well not have been there – all I noticed were the fag ends and splats of chewing gum staining the pavement, the newspaper and carrier bags that fluttered in the warm breeze, and the old bicycle chained up outside the station, its front wheel nicked long ago. I don’t want to exaggerate, but I was honestly feeling swamped by hopelessness, that I’d never be able to make right the wrong I’d done.
Fortunately Claire never has much time for such navel-gazing. “Come on Ellie, snap out of it,” she said, leading me through the entrance to the park and over to a bench, where we sat down and gave Pers her ball to play with on the grass.
“Rose needs another income stream,” Claire said. “That’s clearly going to be the solution. What’s she good at?”
“Buying art,” I said. “Being charming. Going to parties. Remembering people’s names. Looking amazing.”
“Hmmm, none of those are sounding particularly lucrative. Could she flog all her clothes on eBay?”
I pointed out that as it was partly Rose’s wardrobe that had created her mountain of debt, selling it would only recoup a fraction of its cost.
Claire shook her head. “No marketable skills,” she said. “That’s the problem with young girls today. Look at me, on the other hand. I have marketable skills, and once I found somewhere to market them my problems were over. Did I tell you Pers and I are moving to a new flat next week? It’s just down the road but it’s lovely, with a little garden and a decent kitchen and a bathroom that doesn’t have a small-scale penicillin factory on the wall, and everything.”
“Claire, that’s great,” I said. “I’m so pleased for you. But, how did you… I mean, is this something to do with Ben?”
“Of course it is,” said Claire. “It’s all thanks to Ben. He introduced me to Lucille in the first place.”
“What?” I said. “What’s Ben’s boss got to go with anything?”
Claire looked at me blankly. “I thought Ben had told you,” she said. “I’ve been giving Lucille public speaking coaching. She needed to brush up on her speech-making and Ben recommended me for a few lessons. I used to do it before I got involved in teaching drama to kids. It’s dull as hell but it pays quite well, and Lucille’s recommended me to a few of her MP friends and now they’re lining up around the block to have their As unflattened and their Hs undropped and their breath control sorted and stuff, and Pers and I can afford to live somewhere decent again.”
“Hold the phone,” I said. “Just wait one second. Are you saying that you and Ben aren’t an item?”
“Me and Ben an item?” Claire said. “Ellie, you doughnut, what on earth gave you that idea? I mean, I like him and everything, but he’s…” She stopped there, but I could almost see the words ‘your boyfriend’ forming on her lips.
“Ben wasn’t my boyfriend,” I said automatically. “But you and he were suddenly busy all the time, and I saw you together in town, and Ben didn’t call me for ages and ages, and then when Nina turned up again I didn’t know how to tell you because I thought Ben was seeing her behind your back.” I blurted all this out, feeling tears sting my eyes.
“Wait, what?” Claire said. “What was that about Nina?”
I quickly filled her in on things with Ben and Nina, and the unspeakable Benedict, and Nina’s plans to move herself and him into Ben’s flat and evict poor Winston the cat.
“Blimey,” Claire said. “I take my eyes off you for a few weeks and you don’t just get yourself into an unholy mess, you let your family and friends get into one too.”
I pointed out that it was hardly my fault that Nina had come back on to the scene – she was an unstoppable force of nature like a hurricane or a gas explosion or an epidemic of swine flu or something, and Claire had to admit that I was right.
“But it is your fault that Ben was available when she did manifest herself,” Claire said. “Your fault entirely. Anyone can see that you and Ben are meant for each other. If you’d been being Ben’s girlfriend instead of swanning off after Oliver and shagging Peter, Nina wouldn’t have had a chance.”
“That’s just not true,” I objected. “Ben fell for Nina like a ton of bricks when he first met her. One minute, happily single and occasionally shagging me, the next, totally deranged with love. He never felt that way about me.” I sounded sad when I said it, I realised – sad and resentful.
Claire tossed Pers her ball. “That’s because you never gave him the chance,” she said. “That thing with Nina was ages ago, Ben was practically a child. And anyway, you were doing that daft thing of insisting you two weren’t together when all your friends knew you were basically going out and mad about each other. He won’t be feeling like that about Nina now, you just wait and see. You need to talk to him and find out the score. And I hope you’ve apologised to Peter for treating him so shabbily, because frankly, Ellie, you’ve been pissing about with other people’s lives for long enough.” She gave me a hug that took the sting out of her words. “There’s nothing you can do about Rose,” she went on. “Either she’ll come to her senses about Oliver or she won’t. Focus on the things that you can change.”
Claire gets like that sometimes – all Zen and calm. I suppose it must be the influence of the Acre Lane Hippy Mums and all those Baby Yoga classes. But her serenity affected me – suddenly I became conscious again
of the beautiful day, the sunshine, the blossom weighing down the branches of the cherry trees, Pers’s little mouth pursed with concentration as she toddled across the grass after her ball. I felt my face break out into a huge grin.
“You say I need to talk to Ben?” I said.
I don’t know what I’d expected, I thought, looking down at my hands as a fresh awkward silence descended, but it wasn’t this. I suppose I’d imagined Ben and me slipping easily back into our old friendship, minus sex, of course, as long as Nina remained on the scene, but apart from that, everything being the same. The same shared jokes, easy companionship, and sense of being each other’s most important person. But of course that isn’t the way it works – you can’t be the most important person of someone who’s been co-opted into the role of most important person to someone else.
Ringing Ben after so long had felt strange – I was used to finding his number in my phone’s call log, where he was normally about the second or third on my recently dialled numbers. This time I’d scrolled and scrolled, all the way down, but his name wasn’t there, and I’d had to look him up in my contacts list. It made me feel a bit sad, as if I’d lost or broken something important. But I told myself that everything would be fine, that all friends go through patches when they’re in touch less often, and dialled. He didn’t answer. I left a cheery message along the lines of, “Hey Ben, it’s me. Just catching up. Let’s meet soon for a pint – it’s been too long! Speak soon. Bye.” But he didn’t respond to my message, nor the one I left the next day, nor the one the day after that. So in the end, in the manner of a desperate teenager stalking a boy who’s dumped her and won’t tell her why, I’d called him from my landline at Black & White, a number he wouldn’t recognise, and then he’d answered. Which made me feel just brilliant, of course. But I forced the bright and breezy note back into my voice.
“Ben! Hi! Long time no speak!” I said, even though I have always been of the opinion that people who say ‘long time no speak’ are pseuds of the highest order and will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes, along with those who use the phrase ‘the below’ in emails and men who wear skinny jeans.
It Would Be Wrong to Steal My Sister's Boyfriend Page 22
