“Hi, Ellie,” he said. “Sorry I didn’t get back to you. Been very busy – only three weeks to Iron Man and the training’s getting quite full-on. Work’s hectic too.” There was a pause, presumably intended for me to contemplate the busyness of Ben’s schedule and repent my selfishness in calling him. But instead I upped the brightness of my tone a few watts.
“Three weeks! Wow! You must be shattered!” I gushed. “But don’t you get to do that thing soon, that you do before marathons? Starts with a T? Trickle? Means sitting on your arse eating spaghetti?”
“Taper.” I could hear a bit of a smile in his voice. “Yeah, my last long session is this weekend. A hundred miles on the bike.”
“Blimey!” I said. “Impressive! Knackering! Anyway! Let’s meet up for a drink? Protein shake? If you can fit me in?”
Ben said a beer would be fine, and we arranged to meet in his local, the Bear and Bush, the next evening at eight.
And here I was, having spent three hours blow-drying my hair and putting on makeup and trying on and discarding clothes in a state of breathless excitement, as if I was going on a date or something, sitting opposite Ben, looking at the ice in my gin and tonic, in the middle of a horrible, uncomfortable pause.
First there’d been the awkward silence when he walked up to the table where I was waiting, which had come directly after he’d said, “Hi,” and I’d said, “Hi.” Then there’d been awkward silence number two, which had fallen as soon as he came back from the bar with our drinks and sat down. Then I’d gone off to the loo and checked that my face looked okay and brushed my hair, and gone to the bar as well and bought us a bowl of olives, and returned to our table just in time to catch the beginning of the third in a series that looked like it was set to run and run.
“You’re looking really well, Ellie,” Ben said, after what felt like about an hour. “Keeping up with the exercise?”
“Yes,” I said. “You’re right, it gets quite addictive. You’re looking well too.” He was, at that. Ben’s always tended to be sort of lean and stringy, but there was a new tautness to him, a bit more bulk on his legs and shoulders and less around his middle, and I could see his belt was on an extra hole. I imagined how flat and firm his stomach would be underneath his stripy blue and white shirt. I imagined the clear outline of muscles that I’d see when he stretched his arms over his head, pulling the shirt off without bothering to undo the buttons, as he always did, and how his body would feel under my hands, ridged and hard beneath his warm, soft skin. And by that stage we’d got ourselves right in the middle of a fourth awkward silence.
“Another drink?” I said, scuttling off to the bar, barely waiting for his answer. I wished I still smoked so I could go and stand outside for a few minutes and compose myself, but then I told myself not to be ridiculous – this was Ben, my friend, and I was acting like a total loser. So I took our drinks and marched back to the table and sat down, and forced myself to make bright, cheerful conversation about my new job and the political issues of the day, and even the weather, for about ten minutes, hoping to break the ice. But Ben remained as frosty as ever, and as soon as my flow of bright chatter dried up, there we were – smack in yet another awkward silence.
Every topic of conversation I could think of trying to introduce was fraught with difficulty. I thought about telling him about Serena’s babies, thankfully staying put and due in the next few weeks, but that would inevitably lead to the subject of Ben’s own fatherhood. I wanted to ask him how Winston was, but again, that would lead on to the topic of ghastly Benedict. After a bit I said, “It was just Alex and me the last time I did the quiz at the Duchess. We were rubbish. We missed you.”
Ben took a slow sip of his lager. His face was very brown, from all the running and cycling, I supposed, and it made his eyes look very blue. There were bleached bits in his hair, too, I noticed, where the dark brown, the colour of a polished conker shell, lightened to an ashy gold. Even his hands were tanned, with a sort of oval on the back of each of them, that I supposed corresponded to the holes in the backs of his cycling gloves. I reminded myself to tell him to put sunblock on his hands – you can’t be too careful. I wished he’d smile, reach across the table and squeeze my hand – anything, just give me some sign that he still cared about me, and didn’t hold me in total contempt. But he stayed sitting there, very still, apart from his hand slowly and carefully putting his glass back down on the table, precisely centred on a beer mat.
“Well, Ellie, maybe you should ask Oliver to come along next time,” he said. “Or Peter. Or whoever your fucking status shag is this week.” I don’t want to exaggerate and say that he spat the names out, but let me tell you, it was close. I felt a horrid flush of hurt and anger creep up my neck and over my face.
“Ben,” I said, “Please don’t be like this. Please can’t we just…”
But I could see he wasn’t listening to me. His eyes had slid away from my face and were focussing on a point somewhere over my left shoulder, and a moment later I heard a voice say, “Sweetie, sorry I’m late. Ellie, it’s been so long!” And there was Nina.
She was wearing a short shift dress in a sort of pistachio colour, and a trailing apricot and lilac chiffon scarf. Her shoes were cork-soled platforms that looked vintage, and she had a pair of outsize sunglasses pushed up on her head, holding back her mass of coppery hair. Her lips were painted the same vivid crimson she always wore, and I felt a stab of envy as I realised afresh how beautiful she was. Although she did have freckly knees – let it not be said that I don’t see the silver lining. Ben stood up and kissed her on both cheeks, and after a few seconds I did too – it would have seemed churlish not to. Without asking if it was okay to join us, she slid herself on to the bench seat next to Ben, and put a possessive, red-taloned hand on his leg and gazed up at him.
“Would you like to have another drinkie?” she said, “Or shall we go? Vincent’s on at the Jazz Café in half an hour.”
One of the things that Ben and I have always shared is a healthy contempt for people who talk about drinkies and nibbles and use similarly cutesy diminutives – we even have a name for them: twee twats. Another is our dislike of jazz and the people who listen to it. I looked at him with a kind of bemused horror, but he was smiling fondly down into Nina’s rapt face.
“I’m ready to go if you are,” he said. “Unless you’d like another drink, Ellie?”
It was clear that I was not included in this invitation to an evening of wine and song – or rather, atonal hooting saxophones and bourbon, which has always tasted like cough mixture to me.
“I’d better head off too. I’m meeting Peter for dinner. Lovely to see you again, Nina,” I said, lying on all counts.
Ben and I said a rather cool goodbye, and Nina fluttered about saying that we must arrange to meet up soon for a ‘girlie catch-up’. I refrained from saying that I’d rather stick pins in my eyes, and told Ben I’d call him soon. Then I got on the Tube and spent the entire, long journey back to Battersea trying not to cry, and managed not to until I was at home in bed.
I know there’s supposed to be nothing more cathartic than a good howl, but I’ve never really found that to be the case – crying just makes me puffy-eyed and blotchy-faced for about three days afterwards. So I snivelled into my pillow for a while, tried to fall asleep, and then got out my phone and had a look at my Twitter feed to cheer myself up. There was the usual assortment of random links to depressing news stories, tweets from various friends who were out doing glamorous things in fabulous places, and a few cute photos of cats. Then I noticed a tweet from @LucilleFieldMP – Ben’s boss. “Really sorry I was a cunt to @EllieMottram. Miss her lots.”
So, finally Ben had done the inevitable and posted by mistake from Lucille’s account instead of his own. And he was sorry. I tweeted, “Epic fail by @BenedictTheRed noted and apology accepted,” and fell asleep with the beginnings of a smile on my face.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
It was Saturday afternoon and I w
as sitting at our kitchen table, working. Since the apparently epoch-making success of the Black & White polo day, Barri appeared to have relented a little in his approach to my duties, so I was allowed to write proper press releases again and Daisy was one minion down. Unfortunately all the time I’d wasted colour-coordinating table napkins and evaluating the relative blackness of various types of olive meant that I’d missed a vital window to get press releases about our summer fast fashion line out to the weeklies, so I’d had to come up with a last-minute strategy for an e-campaign around the concept that we’d deliberately kept it all under wraps because it was so fabulous, hoping that all the media (okay, Vogue, which was the only medium that actually existed as far as Barri was concerned) would drop something and find space for us. Given that their high summer issues would have been planned and for the most part written, photographed, and laid out several months before, I wasn’t too optimistic about our chances, but it was such a relief to be doing my real job again I was giving it my best shot.
I was working on variations on a headline around ‘Summer’s best-kept secret’ when I got the feeling I was being watched. I turned around and there was Rose standing in the doorway, looking ever-so-casually at her phone as if she hadn’t been loitering there for ages waiting for me to notice her.
“Oh, sorry, Ellie,” she said. “Did I interrupt your train of thought?”
Well, she had, obviously, but I said, “No, of course not. What is it?”
“I was just wondering,” Rose said, “if you’re busy tonight?”
I said a fond farewell to my plans to finish my work, go to the gym, then spend the evening catching up on the new series of Mad Men while eating greasy takeaway pizza and drinking tea.
“No,” I said, “I didn’t have anything on.”
“Great!” Rose said. “Because it’s the Gainsborough Prize award ceremony tonight – you know, the portrait prize? It’s like the Turner Prize except the artists have to enter one portrait only, and it’s generally a more figurative work. It’s all top secret, my boss is one of the judges and even I don’t know who’s won.”
I wondered why she was giving me all this background information. “Sounds fascinating,” I said, “but why would I want to go? You know I don’t know anything about art.”
“No particular reason,” Rose said. “I just thought you’d have fun. There’ll be lots of interesting people there. And I’ll be working, so you can look after Oliver for me while I mingle.”
Really? I thought. Oliver was surely able to look after himself, and as a keen art collector he was bound to know most of the people there anyway, and would probably be quite happy doing his own mingling. Rose was clearly up to something. Was she trying to set me up with some random single acquaintance, I wondered. But a look at her pinched, anxious face convinced me it couldn’t be that.
“Okay,” I said. “If you insist. What do I need to wear?”
Rose whittered on a bit about it being a really casual, low-key event, you know how people in the art world are, they turn up in paint-stained smocks to just about everything, so don’t go to any trouble, Ellie, honestly. So I went and showered and spent half an hour straightening my hair and another forty-five minutes on my makeup, and put on a gorgeous navy blue silk DKNY dress that I’d found in the Black & White sale rail, and even painted my fingernails, because Rose is my sister and I’ve known her long enough to know when not to believe a word she’s saying.
And I was right, of course. The function room at Quinn’s was simply heaving with art types, and while I had no doubt that they were as paint-stained and scruffy as anything when they were working, they certainly scrubbed up well. Almost all the men were in dinner jackets, and if there hadn’t been a slight tendency towards long, flowing hair, you’d never have known they weren’t bankers or marketing execs or whatever; most of the women were in evening frocks, although quite a lot of them were vintage. I was glad I’d made an effort, partly because I was feeling really apprehensive about seeing Oliver again, for the first time since our disastrous evening together following the polo tournament.
When I heard his voice behind me saying, “Hello, Ellie,” I felt the familiar lurch of excitement and apprehension in my stomach, and I turned around, fixing a careful smile on my face.
Honestly, it was as though the Oliver I had lusted after for all those months had been replaced by a not-very-convincing doppelganger. At least that’s the only explanation I can think of for the fact that every last flicker of desire I’d felt for him had been extinguished. His hair was as silky as ever, but now when I watched him push his floppy fringe off his face I could imagine Claire saying, “Tory-boy hair.” His voice was still deep and mellifluous, but now when he spoke to me I couldn’t help remembering him whispering, “Gorgeous girl.” Just, ick. His suit was another wonder of bespoke tailoring, but I looked at it and thought, “More money than sense.” His hands were as long and slender as they’d always been, but now looking at them made me wonder what kind of vain tool he must be to spend his time sitting in a salon having manicures. I mean, really. That whole metrosexual thing is so noughties.
But I smiled sweetly and said, “Hello, Oliver, how lovely to see you,” and accepted a glass of champagne from a passing tray, and chatted brightly away to him for a bit about the shortlisted artists and which one he thought was likely to win. He must have thought I’d been replaced by a doppelganger too, actually, because it was the first time I’d been able to sustain a conversation him without blushing and stumbling over my words and generally acting like a crush-struck schoolgirl.
“My money’s on Jamie Cunningham,” Oliver said. “Literally. Ten grand at six to one at Ladbroke’s this morning. If he wins I’ll make far more than that, of course, because I have three of his paintings and they’ll all escalate hugely in value – by a factor of about ten, I’d imagine.”
Then I’m afraid I did blush, because I was remembering the huge, blue nude in Oliver’s bedroom, beneath which he and I had had our brief tussle on the sheepskin rug. Thankfully he didn’t see, because he was looking across the room at Rose, who was standing talking to a tallish, gingerish man. I realised that as soon as we’d arrived, Rose had sort of melted away into the crowd and started networking away like mad, and I wondered with a shiver of concern whether the real reason she’d wanted me to come was so that she could avoid spending time alone with Oliver. “That’s him,” Oliver said. “Care to wander over and say hello?”
I said we might as well, because I didn’t know anyone else there and didn’t particularly want to be abandoned, and we pushed our way through the throng of people to Rose.
“Hello, darling,” she said to Oliver, with a smile that was just a little too bright. “Hello, Ellie, are you having a nice time? This is Jamie, who’s got a painting on the shortlist tonight, only he won’t tell me any details about it. Come on, Jamie, it’s going to be revealed soon so there’s no point keeping us in suspense.”
Jamie grinned and shook his head. “You’ll have to wait and see,” he said. He was looking at Rose the way most men did, as if unable to believe his good fortune at being in the same room, breathing the same air, as her, but he clearly wasn’t going to let her get her own way on this one. I decided I rather liked him.
The lights in the room suddenly dimmed and a spotlight was trained on a raised dais, where a bearded man in evening dress stood at a microphone. “That’s my boss, Edmund,” Rose whispered to me.
He trotted out the usual platitudes about how glad he was that everyone could come, how the judges had had an enormously difficult task choosing between entries of such undoubted talent, how anyone who said that portraiture was a dying art would be proved wrong tonight, and so on and so on. After about ten minutes of it, people started to stir restively and cast longing looks at the waiters hovering by the door with their laden trays of canapés.
“And so it falls to me to reveal the results of hours of deliberation by our panel of judges,” Edmund said. “Whilst s
electing a long-list from the thousands of entries we received, and reducing that to a shortlist of ten, was challenging to say the least, I know our judges share my confidence that we have selected a worthy winner from this quite dazzling pool of talent. But although there can only be one winner, there is still acclaim – and large cheques, thanks to the generosity of our sponsors – due to the second and third placed entries. So please join me in congratulating Geraldine White, our second runner-up.”
On the screen behind him flashed up a huge image of a teenage boy with bad skin, plugged into an iPod and glaring sullenly.
“The judges praised Geraldine’s portrait of her son Glenn for its sensitive depiction of the tribulations of adolescence.” A little ripple of laughter and applause spread round the room, and a large woman in brown shambled up to collect a white envelope that presumably contained the generous cheque. I glanced at Jamie to see if he looked nervous, eager or disappointed, but his face was unreadable.
“In second place, Marcus Brand, last year’s winner.”
I’d seen Marcus Brand’s work before, of course, in brochures and things that Rose had left lying about the flat. His style was exactly what you’d expect from a wild child of Brit art: garish, brutal, undeniably brilliant, when he actually painted as opposed to just gluing discarded fried chicken wrappers to canvas. The subject of the painting was an elderly homeless woman, slumped against a wall in what looked like a Tube station, a toppled-over can of cider next to her and a scrawny looking dog lying sleeping with its head in her lap. Although the subject matter was shocking, I couldn’t help admiring the obvious pain and empathy that had gone into producing the work, and wondered briefly whether the judges had simply felt it wouldn’t be appropriate for the same person to win two years in a row, because it was hard to imagine that whoever got first prize could be any better. Marcus loped up to get his cheque, all flying hair and black leather, and made a little speech in which he said that Pam, the lady in the painting, was no longer on the streets, and while working on the picture he’d persuaded her to talk to various homelessness charities and addiction counsellors, and that she and her little dog were now living in Eltham and doing very well. I had to dig around in my bag for a tissue and dab at my eyes before my mascara started to run, he was so sweet and sincere.
It Would Be Wrong to Steal My Sister's Boyfriend Page 23
