“You loved her too, remember? I thought you still did.”
Ben ate some more pasta. “I don’t think it was ever love,” he said. “I was infatuated with her, fascinated by her. And then I got sucked in by all her hysterics and drama, and once I got to the point of wishing I could end the relationship, she was threatening crazy things. I was devastated when she buggered off, because I felt so guilty about not having been able to make things right for her.”
“You’re too nice for your own good,” I said.
“Unlike you,” Ben teased. “Brazen hussy. Trying to shag your sister’s boyfriend.”
I cringed, feeling a blush creeping up my neck. “Don’t,” I said. “I feel so ashamed. I behaved horribly. But then so did Rose, of course.”
“What happened with her and Oliver in the end?” Ben said.
“Well, he found out that Rose had slept with Jamie, the night before she sat for his portrait, which was Oliver’s birthday, and afterwards too. And understandably he was absolutely livid, and dumped her. But Rose was like, ‘You can’t fire me, I quit!’ because she’d realised that things between her and Oliver were never going to work. She was only really with him because she’d got it into her head that she needed to marry a rich bloke because she was in such a financial mess. And then Jamie gave her half the money he got for the Gainsborough Prize, and that little cat picture of his Rose bought is worth loads more now than she paid for it.”
“Is that generous,” Ben wondered, “or a bit creepy?”
“Oh, generous, I think,” I said, “but generous with an ulterior motive. Jamie’s absolutely smitten with Rose, you can tell.”
“And Rose?”
“Smitten too, I think. Or at least ninety percent of the way there. Jamie’s lovely, and he doesn’t take crap from Rose.”
“And now,” Ben said, “why don’t you tell me you never shagged Peter Barclay?”
I looked down at my bowl of pasta. There was still rather a lot left. “I can’t,” I said. “I can’t even tell you it was rubbish, because it wasn’t, really. But I can tell you it was never as good as with you. Nothing is.”
“I was so fucking jealous of Oliver, you know,” Ben said. “I let you think something was going on with Claire and me, just to try and give you a taste of how it felt. And then Claire told me about you and Peter, and I realised it had all backfired totally, and then Nina got in touch with me, and I thought, what the hell, I’d see if it was worth giving things another go with her. But I realised it couldn’t work, and that I’d never really felt the same way about her as I did about you.”
“And that is?”
“Ellie, don’t be so needy. You know how I feel about you.”
“I don’t. You’ve never said.”
“Come on, Ellie. I was completely batshit crazy about you from the first time you gave me an impromptu lager shower in the student union bar nearly eight years ago.”
“Seven years, five months and sixteen days,” I said. “But are you still? Even though I’m a brazen hussy, and stupid, and selfish?”
“You have been a bit stupid and selfish,” Ben agreed, “but everyone is, at least some of the time. And you’re those things much less often than lots of people, and you’re funny, and brave, and brilliant and beautiful. And of course you’re a brazen hussy, and that’s really what I like best about you.”
“Only ‘like’?” I said.
“Blimey,” Ben said, “It’s like being under interrogation by the Gestapo. Okay, Ellie, I love you. I always have done. And unless something fairly drastic happens to change things, I suspect I always will. Now I have to be up at four in the morning to swim four kilometres, cycle a hundred and eighty, and then maybe knock off a quick forty-two K run, so we should probably get some sleep.”
I looked at his gorgeous, familiar face, and felt a flood of happiness. Here I was with my favourite person in the world, we were friends again, and he loved me. Everything was going to be all right. And mixed with the relief, looking at his strong hands, the way his mouth moved when he talked and smiled, the lean muscles in his arms and the breadth of his shoulders, I felt the delicious glow of desire that I’d always felt for him, that had been there so constantly I suppose I’d stopped noticing it. It’s a bit like when your favourite album is playing on your iPod, but you’re doing something else, like the ironing or working out in the gym or you’re looking out of the window of the bus or whatever, and it’s just there in the background, until suddenly a familiar phrase brings you back to the music, and you start to sing along without really thinking about it.
“Not so fast, buster,” I said. “I happened to be reading Triathlete’s World the other day, and I happened to come across an article that said the theory that sexual intercourse before a sporting event impairs performance was long ago disproven.”
“Is that so?” Ben said.
“Well, we don’t have the opportunity to test the hypothesis properly, over a series of randomised trials with a control group,” I said. “It comes down to one thing: do you trust Triathlete’s World or don’t you?”
“Implicitly,” said Ben, and he stood up, tipping Winston on to the floor, and folded his arms round me and kissed me as if he’d never stop. Breathless with urgency, we pulled each other’s clothes off and pressed our bodies together, rediscovering all the familiar things about each other and learning all the new ones (I felt rather smug about the fact that I was wearing really nice, lacy underwear that matched, and I’d had every bit of superfluous hair waxed off the day before, entirely co-incidentally), and it was as totally amazing at it had ever been. And afterwards, as we were lying sweaty and sated in each other’s arms, with Winston in his proper place on my hip, purring away, I said to Ben, “I love you too, you know. Just saying.”
If the love interest in your life ever asks you to come along and support him while he spends thirteen hours putting himself through mental and physical hell in the interests of raising money for charity, or just because he wants to see whether he can do it, my advice is, just say no. Step away from the lunatic fitness freak and go and find yourself some nice lardy bloke whose idea of vigorous exercise is walking to the fridge to get another tub of Ben and Jerry’s. Seriously. Because if you do what I did, and loyally go along, this is what will happen.
Ben set the alarm on his phone for four o’clock in the morning – a time that as far as I’m concerned has no right to exist, except when you haven’t been to bed yet. Then he made me set the alarm on my phone too, and found some online alarm clock and set that too. Then he was too nervous to get to sleep at all, and we lay next to each other and every now and then he’d say, “Why did I think this was a good idea, again?” Then Winston decided there was a mouse in the flat and spent about an hour thumping around, doing the special unnerving yowling he does when he’s hunting. Eventually we did fall asleep, and it felt like about ten seconds later that all the alarms went off at once, and we sprang out of bed and launched ourselves into a frenzy of getting ready, with me checking off the to-do list Ben had made on his phone (and backed up on his laptop, and written down on paper just in case there was some sort of superbug that wiped out the world’s electronic communications. Which I expect would have led to the wretched event being cancelled altogether, but I didn’t tell Ben that, he was too stressed already, bless him). He was so anxious that he’d literally noted down every single thing he needed to do: “Get up. Shower. Drink coffee. Eat porridge.” And so on.
Eventually everything on the to-do list was done, and we left the flat, laden with all Ben’s bags, and got a train and then a bus to the start of the race, where he’d dropped his bicycle off the day before. It was heinously early and still actually rather cold, and neither of us said very much, because I was too sleepy and Ben was too nervous. But he held my hand in a kind of death grip until it was time for him to go off and squeeze himself into his wetsuit and prepare to dive into the murky waters of the Thames, which looked as cold and unpleasant as anything I�
�ve ever seen.
“I’ll see you after the swim and at the halfway point on the run,” Ben said. “And at the end. If I get there.”
“Good luck,” I said. “I love you.”
Ben said, “Have you got my Marmite sandwiches?”
I said, “Durrr! Yes! Obviously,” and off Ben went to get changed and start his swim. But of course I didn’t have the shagging Marmite sandwiches, because, well, we’d been so busy shagging the night before that I’d forgotten to make them. His swim was only scheduled to take about an hour and a half, and I calculated that there was no way I’d have time to go back to his flat, make the stupid sandwiches, and get back in time to see him safely on to his bike. I was going to have to brazen it out. So I waited, watching all the totally identical swimmers ploughing through the cloudy water, until Ben emerged, changed again and set off on his bike, looking far less like the Creature from the Black Lagoon than anyone has any right to after swimming in the Thames. None of his fingers or toes had been eaten off by giant carp, or anything. As soon as he was gone, I retraced our steps – bus, train, Tube – back to Ben’s flat, and spent fifteen minutes slicing bread and spreading butter and Marmite on it and cutting the sandwiches into triangles, and I’m ashamed to say I may have given each triangle a little kiss before I wrapped them up, and then I got the Tube and the train and the bus back to the race. I was there when Ben finished his cycle, smiling brightly and holding the special needs bag that contained the sandwiches (and making the not-very-appropriate face) and watched him get changed and set off to run a mere forty-two kilometres on the last stage of his journey to raise money for a cause I cared about. If I hadn’t known before that I really did love him, I did then.
And when he eventually did cross the finishing line, he looked so amazing, shattered and sweaty but grinning like mad, and I felt so proud of him I just burst into tears. I thought how unbelievably lucky I was to have realised that this gorgeous, brave, kind, sexy man had been right there all along, under my nose, before it was too late. And I hugged him, and he wept a bit too, and I heard my voice, all muffled with crying, say, “Ben, will you marry me?”
And Ben, because he’s not the kind of person to be constrained by the social and gender stereotypes that say it’s the man who should propose marriage, and because he feels the same way about me, said, “Yes, please.”
Or it may have been because he was puking and hallucinating with exhaustion, of course. I can’t say for sure.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
A funny thing happened at Ben’s and my engagement party. Well, of course, any number of minor ones did, like Alex falling into the river when he tried to punt in a rowing boat, and Vanessa getting chased by an angry swan.
It was a totally perfect summer’s day, and we were all sitting outside in the garden of Dad and Serena’s house, and Rose did the catering and got predictably obsessive about it, except when she was being all neurotic and stressing about the strawberries needing to be chilled for the cocktails and there not being enough space in the fridge for them, Jamie took her face between his palms and looked into her eyes and said tenderly, “Rosamund, stop being fucking ridiculous.”
And Rose looked back at him with a kind of searing passion that could take paint off a canvas, and the two of them disappeared upstairs to Serena’s study for the best part of an hour, and Ben and I laughed and laughed about it, and said we expected that things would work out between the two of them.
Oliver wasn’t there, and nor was Nina. I’d have been happy enough to invite them, but they’d flown off to Hong Kong a couple of weeks before, which Oliver was pleased about because it meant he’d make heaps more money and pay heaps less tax, and Nina was delighted about because it was the East and therefore somehow more spiritual than London, and Benedict would become fluent in Mandarin.
Ty turned up looking as heart-stoppingly gorgeous as ever, without Olya, and fizzing with excitement. He told Ben and me that finally, after playing gigs to almost empty pubs for years, he’d had a breakthrough: a song he’d written had been bought by an ad agency to be used in a fabric softener commercial. How I kept a straight face I will never know. But then he went on to tell us that he’d given Olya the push.
“I tell you what, mate, something like this makes you realise what’s important,” he said to Ben. “Look at you, you’re settling down, like, stepping up to the plate, taking responsibility. I reckon it’s about time I…”
Then he caught sight of Claire emerging from the house, where she’d been giving moral support to Serena while she fed William and Verity, who were only a month old. Claire walked out into the sunshine, her long legs tanned and perfect beneath the hem of her orange dress, with Pers toddling along behind her, and Claire looked around and said something to Pers and squatted down on the grass and lifted her daughter up and kissed her, and shook her glossy hair and laughed, and Ty said, “Excuse me a second,” and raced off in her direction. I looked at Ben and Ben looked at me, and I knew he was thinking exactly the same thing I was.
We watched as Ty jogged up to Claire and took her hand and gazed into her eyes in just the same way he always used to. But Claire didn’t gaze back. She listened to Ty for a while, quite gravely. Then she said something to him, laughed again and patted him on the cheek in a fond but totally unemotional sort of way. And Pers giggled and tried to stick her fingers up Ty’s nose, and the moment was over. Ty sat down on the grass with Pers while Claire wandered off to get a drink and talk to Dad about doing voice-overs on his new game.
Anyway, the funny thing happened right after Dad made his speech. I took a lovely gulp of champagne, and all of a sudden I was transported back to one hungover morning a few years ago when Ben and I had been to the Edinburgh Festival together, and I’d woken up on the floor of Rose’s student flat and seen a can of Irn Bru on the floor next to me, and taken a huge thirsty swig of it, only to find that someone had used the can as an ashtray the night before. My champagne tasted just like that, and I promptly turned green and vommed into the nearest ice bucket. Ben ushered me inside and said, “Ellie, do you think…” and I nodded queasily, realising that all Rose’s plans for our fabulous wedding would have to be put on hold, because there was no way she’d want to design things around a pregnant bride. Ruth and Duncan were there that day, and I’d been planning to ask them if they’d think about giving me my old job back, but Ben suggested I take a look at my contract at Black & White, and see what the maternity leave allowance is like, and I’m glad I did. I can’t wait to see Barri’s reaction when he finds out that I’m going to be starting a year off on full pay almost exactly twelve months after commencing my employment there, I really can’t. I may have to remind him that there’s no ‘I’ in ‘Team’.
And now for a sneak preview of Sohpie’s next novel, A Groom With a View, due to be published on June 20th…
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Last night of freedom
Mate
Just a quick one to say all the best on your last day as a single man. If your stag night was anything to go by, tomorrow is going to be one hell of a party! See you at noon – I’ll keep my hip flask handy and resist finishing the contents until my ushering duties are over. Shout if you need anything. Hope you get some kip tonight.
Nick
I don’t remember very much about the night it happened, because we were a bit pissed. That sounds so bad, doesn’t it? I know a proposal’s meant to be right up there in the high points of a girl’s life, along with the wedding it leads to, but there you have it – I was wankered and so was Nick. And neither of us can clearly remember, even now, exactly when he demanded to make an honest woman of me, popped the question, went down on one knee (actually, that was when he tripped up the stairs coming out of the Tube station), or asked for my hand in marriage.
Nick loves to quote some rock god idol of his who apparently once said, after some or other shameful rock god antics o
n stage at a gig, that everyone, from time to time, behaves badly and everyone, from time to time, gets drunk. I’m afraid that was us at Iain and Katharine’s wedding. Okay, there were no screaming groupies involved and no mic stand to wave around in a manner contrary to all health and safety guidelines, but we worked with what we had. We behaved as badly as we could have, really, considering it was your typical civilised London wedding.
Iain is Nick’s former business partner, and the two of them used to play in a band together before they got respectable and started a graphic design agency, and although they certainly didn’t set the world on fire, they were quite well thought of at one stage, opening for Snow Patrol back in 2004 (admittedly only at a tiny gig in a pub in Bournemouth, but still). Since then, Iain’s gone via more respectable to extremely respectable – the old Iain, with his waist-length hair and squat in Dalston, wouldn’t have stood a chance with Katharine; the new one, with his designer suits and penthouse in Shoreditch, married her.
In all the years I’d known him, Iain had never been single. First there were groupies who he’d take to bed, take to his gigs, then invariably cheat on and be dumped by amid screaming rows. Later there were work experience girls who he’d dazzle with expense-account lunches at Itsu, sleep with and then part from with some relief when their three-week stint at the agency ended. Then, about three years ago, Katharine came on the scene. She’s the marketing manager at Brightside.com, a toe-curlingly stylish interiors e-tailer that’s one of the agency’s biggest clients. I’m not sure if it was fear of losing the account or fear of losing Katharine, but Iain seemed to clean up his act and stop shagging around, and in due course he proposed. I liked Katharine – she was sweet and a bit kooky but had a will of iron and an impressive ability to get what she wanted.
Anyway, the point is that there was no expense spared at Iain and Katharine’s wedding. They hired the ballroom at The Mortimer. They had gulls’ egg canapés with gold leaf stuck to them. I overheard two girls talking in the ladies’ saying the flowers cost six thousand pounds, but they must have been joking, because of course no one spends that on flowers for a wedding. Do they?
It Would Be Wrong to Steal My Sister's Boyfriend Page 25
