He pulled away, and linking his arm cosily through mine – Oliver was always touching you, which I found endearing, and Ed loathed – he looked Dick up and down like a farmer appraising a prize bull, which is what he rather resembled.
‘So, who’s man mountain then?’ he said, narrowing his heavily kohled eyes. ‘He doesn’t look like one of Kiki’s usual pretentious friends.’
‘Oh, hi Ollie,’ I said. ‘Actually, this is my brother, Dick Herbert – although most people call him Sherbet.’
‘Is that right?’ replied Oliver. ‘Pleased to meet you, Sherbie – and who are you?’
In one move Oliver had unlinked my arm and turned his eyes to someone who was standing slightly behind Dick. He stepped forward and I nearly choked on the large mouthful of Veuve Clicquot I had just swallowed.
It was Joseph. Or Joseph James Renwick, to give him his full name, which was etched on my memory, just as it had been in my teenage diaries, along with a lot of embarrassing variations on Amelia Jane Renwick and Mrs Joseph Renwick. He was my brother’s best friend from school and the first boy I had ever kissed.
I hadn’t seen him for years and was so surprised I felt a blush rising up my neck. He’d lived in America for ages
– Washington, I remembered – and I’d hardly thought about him since he moved there, but seeing him again so suddenly had spun me right out. He had been a spectacularly nice kisser.
‘Amelia,’ he was saying enthusiastically, and he sidestepped Oliver to come over to me. As he put his hands on my upper arms and gave me warm smackers on both cheeks, I felt the blush rise from my neck up to my cheeks. Actually, I think it may have gone down as well.
‘Well, I’d hate to interrupt…’ said Oliver pointedly, and I felt him brush past me as he went off in search of fresh quarry to insult and flirt with.
‘Joseph!’ I managed to splutter out. ‘Gosh, how lovely to see you. It’s been so long. Don’t you live in Washington now?’
He smiled broadly at me, his dark-blue eyes crinkling behind his glasses. He still wore the same kind as when I had last seen him, small, round wire frames. John Lennon glasses, we’d called them when we were teenagers, and they suited him now just as they had then. I was glad he hadn’t changed them for something more angular and modern. It would have spoiled the memory of the night I had kissed him behind the rugby club at Dick’s eighteenth birthday party. It was still surprisingly vivid, I realized.
‘I did live there,’ he was saying. ‘But I’m back in London now. I’m a professor at LSE, international law.’
‘Bloody hell, that makes me feel old,’ said Dick. ‘My best friend is a professor. Aren’t professors meant to be ancient?’
‘We are ancient,’ said Joseph. ‘Well, you are, Sherbet. I’m a child prodigy and so is Amelia, of course. What are you up to these days? You’re looking lovely, as always. Sherbet tells me you don’t have any kids yet, that’s probably why. Are you planning to?’
‘Maybe,’ I said bluntly. I hated that question. I found it incredibly rude and intrusive and it made me a lot less thrilled to see Joseph than I had been, although I couldn’t help thinking he was just as gorgeous as ever to look at. ‘Have you got kids?’ I asked, to return the insult.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘ Two. Well, maybe, two, or three.’
‘That’s lovely,’ I said, thinking it was a pretty strange answer, but I didn’t pursue it, in case there was some kind of tragedy involved. Whatever he meant, it didn’t seem like light cocktail-party chitchat material.
‘So, if I remember correctly, you married Sherbet’s friend from that unfortunate university in the Wash,’ Joseph was saying.
My heart sank a little more. I had forgotten all that tiresome Oxford–Cambridge bollocks. Dick’s crowd had loved all that. I’d preferred the anonymity of my London university, where you didn’t feel defined by where you happened to be taking your degree.
‘Yes, I married Ed Bradlow. He’s here somewhere, and I’m sure he’ll be delighted to tell you the results of the last ten Varsity matches.’
‘Yeah, and we beat you car-builders soundly in the last Boat Race,’ said Dick, warming to a favourite theme.
‘Oh, did you cheat, then?’ said Joseph.
I took it as my chance to scarper. I was relishing the sophistication of Kiki’s world and realized that I didn’t want to be reminded of my gauche teenage years, when an invitation to watch the Boat Race or some ghastly game of rugby with Dick and his friends was the height of my social ambitions. In fact, now I was over the initial thrill, seeing Joseph again was way too big a reminder of my Maidstone maidenhood for my liking.
So as they carried on trading friendly insults, I allowed myself to be sucked into the fast-flowing tide of the party. But as I moved away something made me turn back for another look at Joseph. I did it without thinking and jumped with surprise when I realized he was also looking back at me. I froze as our eyes locked.
It can only have been a fleeting moment, but it felt like an age as we gazed at each other. Nothing was said, there wasn’t even a shift of expression on his face, but as I whipped my head away again it felt like we’d had an entire conversation at some kind of cellular level. And not the kind of conversation a happily married woman should be having with another man.
I felt so flustered I pushed my way out of the room and locked myself in the loo in the hall to recover. I took some deep breaths to steady myself and looked at my reflection in the mirror with the intensity brought on by drinking several glasses of champagne in quick succession.
I examined my face, trying to see it as Joseph just had. Did I look very different from the girl he had kissed all those years before? More wrinkled around the eyes, I supposed, but not radically different.
I still had exactly the same hair, very long, very blonde, straight and parted in the middle. I probably looked pretty much the same, and now it seemed he still had the same visceral effect on me too. I had written him off years ago as an embarrassing teenage crush, resulting mainly from proximity, yet here I was, a thirty-six-year-old married woman, flustered like a schoolgirl by one penetrating glance.
My eyes closed, and for a moment I lost myself in the memory of that melting kiss twenty years before. Then they snapped open again as I remembered what it had led to. Joseph’s girlfriend’s best friend had come round the corner and caught us at it, then all hell had broken loose.
The repercussions of that one stolen snog had gone on for months, as the girlfriend and her posse bullied me at school, spreading vile rumours and not letting up even after Joseph had left for Oxford without a backwards glance.
It had been so foully unjust that all the blame for that kiss was taken out on me when he was the one being unfaithful to his girlfriend. It had been the unhappiest time of my life, and I hadn’t recovered from it until I left school and started a new life at university myself. Not until I’d met Ed, really.
Joseph Renwick had been nothing but trouble for me when I was a teenager, I told myself, and I wasn’t going to allow his disruptive energy into my life again.
I drank handfuls of water from the cold tap, smoothed down my hair and sprayed myself with a bottle of Jo Malone eau de cologne Kiki had put in there for her guests. Taking a few more deep breaths, I squared my shoulders and finally felt ready to go back out into the party, where I intended to give Joseph a very wide berth.
My first instinct was to look for Ed, and my heart surged with affection when I found him in the dining room, sitting at the table with an ageing rock star, a hedge-fund billionaire, the deputy editor of a Sunday newspaper and the younger son of a supermarket dynasty.
They were all Bradlow’s boys and they were sitting rapt as Ed told them a story of how he had uncovered a stash of incredibly rare old armagnac in the cellar of an obscure château on his last trip to France.
It was all true – I knew because I’d been with him at the time. I wondered if he had told them the bit about me distracting the sleazy old retainer upstairs,
at great risk to my girlish honour, while he had a good snoop around in the cellar before the marquis came in from shooting.
It was classic Bradlow’s stuff. The journal was very male interest in its content and appeal and, although I had often been his accomplice in this way over the years, I only ever made cameo appearances when it added to the story.
Not that I went with him much any more. I’d long come to the conclusion that one decaying French château was pretty much like another, and I was less fascinated by alcoholic wine-growers than Ed seemed to be. But I still appeared occasionally in the journal in my Bond Girl role – ‘Heady Bouquet’ was my name.
It was a bit patronizing, but I didn’t let it bother me. Ed was very impressed by Ian Fleming, and it seemed to resonate equally deeply with most of his clients. And, as I always reminded myself, I had been living very nicely off Ed’s business for fifteen years, so I was hardly in a position to complain.
None of them had noticed ‘leggy blonde beauty, Heady Bouquet’, as Ed always described me in the journal, standing by the double doors, but I could see the competitive glint in their eyes as he told them that the story of the armagnac would be the main feature in the next journal when it was sent out in a couple of months’ time.
Hearing about something before everyone else was major currency in their particular elite, and they were all leaning in towards him so far they were practically sitting on his knee.
Ed was as much a player as Creeping Jesus in his way, I thought. I knew what would happen next. One of them would say he would buy the whole lot outright, then the others would try and top him – with the deputy editor desperately trying to memorize the details for the paper’s diarist.
Ed would refuse, saying he had to offer the armagnac fairly to all his members, but gradually he would allow them to ‘persuade’ him to put aside a few bottles each – for a premium – which would be delivered several weeks before the journal went out. He was masterful, my husband. And, as a result, we were probably several thousand pounds richer than we had been half an hour before. Or Ed was, anyway.
I melted away before any of them saw me. I didn’t want to ruin Ed’s pitch, especially as I knew he enjoyed that fly-fishing part of his business, as he called it, almost as much as he enjoyed buying the wine.
After that I strolled around the flat a bit, admiring my handiwork and looking for someone new to talk to who wasn’t Joseph Renwick. Heading back down the hall I was surprised to see an all-too-familiar squat figure pushing through the crowd.
It was Leo Mecklin, my boss’s indolent son and the supposed ‘deputy gallery director’, although the only thing I had ever seen him direct were waiters to bring him more food and drink.
‘Hello, Leo,’ I said, in tones which did nothing to conceal my undelighted surprise at seeing him there.
‘Oh, hello, Amelia,’ he replied with an equal lack of enthusiasm. ‘Yes, that’s right – Christopher said you knew Kiki.’
I shuddered inwardly. I hated the way he called his own father Christopher; it was so wrong.
‘I didn’t know you did,’ I said, with barely disguised hostility. I had long since stopped trying to get on with Leo. There was no point.
‘You might be surprised who I know, Amelia,’ said Leo and practically pushed past me into the drawing room.
What a monumental tosser, I thought, and was glad to hear Kiki’s laugh shrieking out of the dressing room. I turned carefully on my towering heels and went in there to see what the joke was.
‘Oh, here she is!’ she cried, when she saw me in the doorway. ‘Come here, darling, I want you to meet everybody.’
She gripped me tightly round the waist – she could barely reach any higher – and addressed the small crowd in the room.
‘Now everybody, this is my marvellous friend Amelia Bradlow. You all know clever Ed Bradlow with the wine, don’t you? Well, she’s married to him, which is great, but what I want to tell you is that it was Amelia who created Planet Kiki for me. She did this whole flat. So if any of you need your places sorting out, Amelia is the only person to do it. She’s a clutter-clearing genius.’
The assembled crowd – and there were quite a few of them standing around and draped over the chaise longue – made suitably enthusiastic noises. I was so surprised I couldn’t think of anything to say in response. I had only organized Amelia’s place as a favour, and I wasn’t planning on doing the same for a bunch of total strangers. I stood there grinning like a self-conscious goon while she introduced me to all of them, and it was mostly a blur, although I did recognize a few names.
There was the former wife of an infamous junkie aristocrat; the current wife of the rock star Ed was talking to; an actress who had been in an early film with Hugh Grant; and an antiques dealer who made the social pages even more often than his wealthy customers.
They all seemed delighted to meet me and I smiled back at them, dazedly. Then, not releasing her python grip, Kiki steered me out of the dressing room, announcing that she was going to introduce me to ‘everyone’ else.
I managed to stop her – after several equally gushing meets and greets in the hall – just as we were about to go through the drawing-room door.
‘Kiki!’ I said. ‘Hang on a minute – what are you doing?’
‘I want everyone to know how clever you are,’ she said. ‘It’s about time you got some credit for what you do, Amelia, and as neither your employer nor your husband seems to give you any, I’m going to.’
‘Well, that’s lovely,’ I said, deciding to ignore the wider implications of what she had just said; it was a classic Kiki shock statement, and this was not the time or the place to argue it out. ‘But please will you stop telling everyone I’m going to do their places for them? I only did this for you because you’re my friend and I care about you. I’m not going to do it for anyone else.’
Kiki put her glossy head on one side and raised a sculpted eyebrow. ‘Well, maybe you should,’ she said.
I finally escaped from Kiki’s grasp when she ran into her Melbourne pal, Jan Delmo, and let go of me to throw her arms around her. I fled back to the dining room to find Ed.
He was still there, as I knew he would be: that was his party style. After an initial bit of milling around to check out the scene, he’d find a commanding spot and stay there for the rest of the evening, letting people come to him. They always did. But on this occasion I was delighted to see he was on his own, with just a glass and a bottle of champagne for company. I smiled when I saw it was vintage Krug. He would have put half a case of that in with the rest of the less rarefied delivery, for his own consumption, and for any clients who showed up. Ed left nothing to chance and, still, after so many years, there was something I found enormously reassuring about that.
I sank down into the chair next to him and put my head on his familiar shoulder. He put his arm around me and kissed me on the forehead.
‘How are you, Heady Bouquet? Having a good time?’
‘Lovely,’ I said. ‘But my feet are killing me.’
Ed chuckled. ‘ That’ll teach you to wear stupid shoes. I like you in your elegant flats. You don’t need to trick yourself out like a tart. Leave that to Kiki.’
‘Oh, don’t be so horrible, Ed,’ I said. ‘She’s just a naturally girly girl, and high heels are all part of it.’
‘And she needs the height…’ he added, stroking the length of my thigh. I pinched him on his flabby middle bit and made him jump. He pretended to pull my hair and then coiled it round and round his hand, as he liked to do.
After that we sat in companionable silence for a while, enjoying a little oasis of calm in the shriek and hum of the party. Nestling into his neck I breathed in that familiar smell which I still loved as much as I had the first time he’d kissed me all those years before.
In the same instant the memory of the other kiss which had been on my mind earlier in the evening came rushing back into my head. I batted it away like an irritating fly, then I kicked off the shoe
s and wiggled my toes, suddenly feeling exhausted.
‘You never told me Dick was coming,’ I said eventually. ‘You sneaky old thing. Did you see him?’
‘That was Kiki’s idea. She thought it would be a nice surprise. She’s very sweet like that, and she clearly adores you, even if I don’t like her shoes…’ I pinched him again and he laughed. ‘And yes, I had a long chat with Sherbet and that weaselly friend of his, Joseph Renwick. I didn’t invite him, by the way – your brother brought him along.’
‘Do you really think he’s weaselly?’ I said, trying to remember if Ed knew about my unfortunate romantic history with him. I was fairly sure he didn’t.
I tried to put it out of my mind as I sat there with my beloved husband, but it kept sneaking back in. It made me feel guilty and uncomfortable, as though I were being mentally unfaithful to Ed just by remembering it. Because the truth of it was that I still couldn’t think about that twenty-year-old kiss without a serious frisson.
‘I don’t like the cut of his gib,’ Ed was saying. ‘I never have.’
‘So you wouldn’t have him as a Bradlow’s member, then?’ I said, teasingly and to keep things light.
‘Definitely not,’ he said.
I was surprised he felt so strongly but decided not to pursue it any further. I really wasn’t that interested in Joseph Renwick.
8
I’d been at work for precisely half an hour the next morning and I’d already had two phonecalls that had put me into a total spin. And my head was on the fragile side anyway, after all the champagne.
The first one had come in on the main gallery number at 10.03 a.m. It was as though someone had been waiting for us to open.
‘Is that Amelia?’ said a woman’s voice I didn’t recognize. She sounded quite young, and not like the kind of person who usually rang CJ Mecklin & Son.
How to Break Your Own Heart Page 8
