“It was no-one else’s fault that I fell pregnant, Sophie, and I wouldn’t change what happened for the world. I was married, you know. It was hardly an accident.”
Jude’s eyes lit up as the love she felt for her children shone through. It burst out of her and Sophie could almost feel Jude’s heart thumping with adulation.
“I have Tom and Anna, and regardless of what you think of Clive, a wonderful husband.”
Sophie was wise enough to make no comment. She listened silently as her friend continued.
“I’ve simply realised lately that I just need to balance all of the above with the new job and that way everybody wins and Clive won’t have a problem with it. I need to prove I can do it first . . . therein lies the problem.”
“You mean everybody gets a piece of you while you struggle to cope and hit the deck?”
Jude held an assurance about her which Sophie couldn’t fail to miss. Behind those eyes of hers was a boldness which she didn’t recognise.
“I’m getting my life back, Sophie.” Jude filled her empty wineglass with tap water and sipped at it. “I’ll tell him when the time is right, I promise . . . but trust me on this one, that time is not now. Let him have his moment of glory because he deserves it.”
“And so do you.”
Jude turned to leave the state-of-the-art kitchen which sat above the split-level lounge. As she passed Sophie she grabbed her hand so tightly that Sophie was stunned. “I will never let you down, Sophie. I swear.”
A calmness washed over Sophie. Jude’s timing in allaying her anger was absolutely perfect. She had just been ready for a fight with Clive Westbury and it wouldn’t be the first time.
Roni sat on the stained wooden bench in the pool chalet, agitated and nervous. Her feet dangled just inches from the mosaic beige-and-blue tiled floor and her legs swung to and fro. Her posture was stooped like a child on a naughty step waiting for someone to release her and tell her that everything would be okay providing she didn’t misbehave again. As her swing deepened with fully extended legs, Roni winced as she scraped her big toe on the ridge of a tile. The blood-red colour from her nailpolish scratched across the pale blue tile with a rebellious streak and Roni looked at her toenail which remained unchipped. She was momentarily impressed. That was what happened when you paid a fortune for the best nail-polish available.
Up above, the skylight captured the sporadic bursts of rays which came and went as quickly as the ripples of water in front of her, and Roni stared up at its brightness until she was forced to look away when her vision became blurred.
At a loss as to what to do next to curb her ambivalence, she walked slowly around the pool, passing by the dividing glass of the newly refurbished bar area and, for once, she could see how daytime drinking could be easy – especially when the heat was on. She nervously rearranged the dark-brown wicker furniture, pulling the table away from the glass walls and closer to the bar. Then she tided the terracotta cushions, plumping them up before replacing them tidily. Next she moved each chair so that they sat around the table with inviting allure – the distance between them was precise when she had finished.
Roni looked over at Darren’s blue canvas holdall. That was all he had with him today – no cleaning equipment, no hoses, nothing but him with his teaching head on.
She froze, hearing a loud bang coming from a door beyond, and Darren walked in casually. He closed the door using the handle, leaving no memorial prints. He had learned his lesson and Roni felt bad for scolding him about the dirty smudges he left the first time he had visited The Tudors. She didn’t know why she behaved that way, but just sometimes the simplest of things got her down and she wished so much that she could be like Jude with her chilled-out temprament and easy-going nature. But she was what she was. Still, she didn’t like it, hadn’t liked herself for a long time now and it didn’t suprise her that others didn’t like her either.
Darren’s feet squelched along the floor as his flip-flops stuck to its dampness like suction cups, and Roni watched the muscles on his calfs protrude with the increased resistance from every step taken on the recently mopped floor.
He pulled his grey T-shirt over his head and she looked away fast, her head shooting in the opposite direction of its own accord and her chest thumping inside so loudly that she could hear nothing else, not even the classical music which played through the wall-mounted speakers. The girls had taken all the decent CD’s with them and Peter had most of his collection scattered amongst his many cars – so her choice was minimal.
“All set then?” Darren stood at the opposite side of the pool to her in his knee-length cotton trunks. He kicked at the water with his foot, smiling with boyish pleasure. “It’s like a bath,” he laughed. “That temperature is fine for recreation, Mrs Smyth, but for intense exercise your muscles would burn out way too fast with the heat from that water.”
Roni cast her eyes over his firm abdominals and up towards his chest. His pecs were tight and defined, scattered with a decoration of dark hairs which met in the centre and ran right the way down to his belly button.
She wished there was a security camera in the chalet.
Roni’s brain suddenly registered the word exercise and she became aware that she was being spoken to.
“Exercise?”
“Don’t look so shocked, I’m not talking right now!” he mocked her playfully. “It’s so we can pick up the pace a little.”
“What sort of exercise?”
“If you can get to the gym and work out to improve your cardiovascular fitness levels, you’ll find our sessions less tiring on your body.”
“We have a gym here,” Roni acknowledged as she tightened the belt of her white full-length towelling robe. Her initials RS were hand-sewn and swirled decoratively across the lapel on the right-hand side, pretty in pink. Like most of her clothes this one still had the tag on it. She had grabbed it from the set of wall-pegs which sat behind the slatted wooden bench in the open-plan changing room. Three more remained there barely used – Peter’s, Sarah’s and Evie’s. There was no need to guess whose was whose.
“I guessed as much,” said Darren.
The girls were great swimmers and had had private lessons from the age of three while Roni had sat back and watched in amazement, swelling with pride at their lack of fear. She’d built it for them more than herself and rarely did she come into the chalet now that the girls had moved out. The silence was too unbearable. That was the downside of having them so young – they had left to go off to pastures new when she was no age at all, leaving her too young to be alone. But she couldn’t blame them – their life was for the taking and they were indeed taking it, pleasures and all. She wasn’t.
Darren glanced across at Roni when he felt it was safe to. He saw how she kept tightening the belt on her robe, as also she kept wrapping the lapels around each other so that not an inch of skin could be seen bar the pale flesh of her middle-aged feet. This was going to be the difficult bit, he thought, getting her to remove the robe and actually getting her into the water.
Darren sensed the tension as it floated above the water like a thick smog. He wanted to reel it in and bin it forever, keeping it trapped in its net. He also wanted to help this woman so much that it had become a revelation to him and he had thought of little else bar Veronica Smyth since that first meeting.
He had always been a decent kid and done his bit for the church, ran the odd race for charity and so on, but there was something he saw in Veronica Smyth that told him she needed saving and that her life was wasted. Life is wasted on the living, Darren’s young, insightful mind repeated as he watched the nervous creature prepare to expose herself.
“Shall we get into the water now, Mrs Smyth?”
“It’s Roni – call me Roni.”
Darren pretended not to notice the quiver in her voice as he sat down, lowering his legs first before immersing his whole body into the warm liquid. “Just come in when you’re ready, okay?”
Wit
h his face in the water, he kicked off from the side and swam with long manly strokes.
Roni grabbed the opportunity to drag the robe from her body before Darren could raise his head for further breath. She flung herself at the edge of the pool, sitting and leaning forward to throw herself in. Not that he would be able to see her in the ridiculous state of red thighs and a burnt bikini line. It wasn’t right for anyone to see her so exposed, particularly in her current state, hence the bizarre wearing of shorts over her swimsuit.
Just as she was about to topple forward, Roni heard a bellow.
“Stop! No!”
Roni froze. The yell almost sent her in with fright. She shuffled her padded bottom right back to safety, using her arms to take the weight, wincing with the ongoing pain from her scalding incident. Still, the shorts over her new swimsuit hid the evidence nicely. It was the contorted facial expression that gave the game away.
Darren grabbed the concrete side of the pool gasping for breath, his hand only millimetres away from Roni’s knee. He had swum in double time to get there.
Roni’s heart thudded with his closeness and she hoped he couldn’t see up the leg of her shorts where her burnt thighs were hiding.
“You were just about to jump into the deep end, Roni.” Darren was mildly exerted as he spoke. “Now, I’m all for progress but perhaps we should take it slowly? Let’s start at the shallow end, eh?”
Sophie chewed on her nails just as she did whenever there was something bothering her. She felt uneasy about coming between Jude and Clive and much as she didn’t particularly like him, he was still her husband. She didn’t not like him. She simply chose to reverse judgement for now – for years actually. It was her prerogative.
One thing Sophie wasn’t good at was keeping things from people or pretending. She left that to people like Roni. Sophie’s life was cut and dried, transparent for all the world to see. Almost.
In need of distraction, she grabbed her coat from the staff room and quickly checked the diary to ensure there was nothing booked in for her, even though she had already checked the moment she arrived at work. She knew there was nothing scheduled for today, that was her plan. Still, it was better to be safe than sorry.
Sophie’s primary focus, these days, was the training academy which she had set up little over a year ago. The Academy had been a huge success and it had afforded her an increase in revenue of almost thirty per cent since her brainwave turned into a lucrative venture. She took in the majority of the county’s juniors, teaching them the theoretical material needed to do the job competently, and then training them in the practical side which they learned every Tuesday: student day. It had turned out to be a perfect plan. They benefited from a college-type education, achieving the necessary NVQ qualifications they needed to graduate, and at her own salon they became competent stylists by putting into practice what they had learned in theory. In no time at all Kane’n’Able had become one of the more favoured accredited providers of hairdressing schooling.
Sophie flung open the salon door and set off on foot back to her apartment. She had driven everywhere lately and was conscious that her body hadn’t been treated to its usual blast of fresh air or cardio work-out. Though the exercise she had being doing certainly did count towards her calorific reduction – bedroom aerobics was as gruelling a workout as the gym – moreso in fact. What better incentive did a girl need to have?
Inside the apartment, the place was a mess and the only evident attempt that had been made to clear up was the removal of dishes which had now been washed and dried courtesy of the hidden appliances. The rest of the the table was almost as it had been after the guests left – just before midnight – rubber place mats, black napkins and a single bowl which held the four secrets – each one belonging to one of the women. One of them had been opened and read.
Sophie tipped the glass bowl upside down until the papers fell onto the white curry-stained tablecloth. The smoked-glass table had been so expensive she had no choice but to protect it from cutlery scratches or slammed-down glasses.
Sophie unravelled each piece of paper, one at a time, smoothing them out until all four of them lay in a neat line, face up and flaunting their content. She grabbed the one she had read out, lying it down at the end of the neat row.
Sophie knew she could get thrown out of the club by doing what she had done, but no-one would find out.
As she glanced down at all five slips, each one of them relayed exactly the same message, typed by the same person: her. “Why do women have to sacrifice their lives while the men have it all?”
Sophie’s stomach flipped as she reread all five pieces of paper. But she’d had to make Jude see that she had to move onwards and upwards and to do this she knew she needed the opinions of the other women. Yes, it was called cheating but there was a valid reason behind it.
Kath, always in favour of equality, had led the debate towards working parents, stating that both men and women had a right to have an identity other than being a mother, a wife, a husband.
Helena too was on Kath’s wavelength but her slant came from an entirely different angle. Helena was tired of existing in a one-sided relationship and was in need of a little give and take. She would have loved for both her and Nathan to be working and earning and it would have taken immense pressure off her. She wondered if it was the same for the husbands? If so, she pitied them, the pressure on their singular shoulders; for she knew how it felt.
It was only Roni who spoke of women going to work as being subservient and degrading – a woman’s place was in the home with her family where she belonged.
They expected little else from a millionaire’s wife.
Jude said as little as she could get away with. She had listened to every word of advice and input from her friends and she had felt it significant that during their entire debate neither herself nor Sophie dared to meet each other’s gaze. They both knew why.
As Sophie scrunched the papers together, she touched the bin lid, waiting patiently as it sprang towards her. She had tried to find a bin which opened with sensory perception, its lid popping up as she stood before it, but she couldn’t. Set to discard the evidence of the five mirror-images, she stopped dead seeing the original questions staring up at her angrily from where she had thrown them after her guests had left – which of course she had sneakily replaced with her own interventions when no-one was looking. She certainly wasn’t proud that she had broken the rules – nor had she planned to do it – but something inside her just flipped and she had to make her friend see that life was for living and if Jude could do this the right side of forty, or simply sooner than later, then all the better for her.
If it ever came to light and she was thrown out of the club, at least Sophie knew that she would have suffered in a worthy cause. Yes, she was a bitch, but this time she had behaved like a bitch for the good of someone who she knew deserved better. She had put her position as head of the club at risk and that was a testimony to the faith she had in her friend and to the life she so desperately wanted to see her rekindle.
Jude was like one of her own projects. She was like a listed building, solid and reliable on the outside, but dig deeper and it became clear that the foundations were starting to subside and that the cracks which had started to show a long time ago were now in hazardous need of repair. Sophie had seen the cracks widen over the years but it had taken her until now to be able to orchestrate a plan to fix them and she hoped more than anything that Clive did not stand in Jude’s way. If he did, he would also be standing in her way and nothing stood in the way of Sophie Kane.
Roni flapped about in the water, hands extended as she gripped the poolside, clutching at its built-in ridge and kicking her legs out behind her. As each leg kicked out, an explosion of water sailed metres high with the velocity of each determined blow.
Darren made no attempts to suppress his delight at how hard Roni was working. He had imagined it might have been different, that she might have behaved like a chi
ld with its favourite toy removed, difficult and stubborn, but Roni so far had been a pleasure to teach.
He wasn’t sure about the strange choice of clothing, but what did he know of women’s fashion? Still, he knew enough to understand that shorts plus a swimsuit was slightly unusual. He grinned internally – everything about this woman was unusual.
“Roni, instead of kicking from your knee joints, can you try kicking from the hips like this?” He held both arms out in front of him, demonstrating smooth moves with long, straight arms. “Do the same as what I’m doing here but with your legs. It will create more buoyancy that way and you won’t drown yourself – even if you are in the shallow end.” Darren couldn’t resist the dig. Of all the things he had expected, Roni plunging herself into the deep end on her first lesson wasn’t one.
Roni smiled a half smile which quickly dispersed into a grimace as her muscles ached. It was all that she was capable of doing, letting the pain escape through expression as she concentrated hard on applying the correct techniques just as Darren had instructed.
She wobbled from side to side in the water, gripping the poolside ledge hard to stop herself going right over like a canoeist, and wondering what the hell had just happened. Water ran into her mouth which she spat out. She closed her mouth tight, once again throwing herself back into her lesson, kicking and splashing the water as her legs and feet pelted against it.
She was suprised at herself. She had never dared go past thigh level in the pool before and her hair had never been made wet of its own accord, but today as Roni pushed herself hard, the ends of her hair floating in the water like graceful seaweed which lapped around her mouth with rebellious buoyancy, it felt good. She was almost swimming – in her own mind – and it was one of the most invigorating experiences she had ever had.
And she had yet to leave the safety of the poolside.
“Are you breathing, Roni?” Darren, out of the pool, knelt down to take a closer look at his student. He saw her flushed, puffed-out cheeks and pursed lips. “Okay, that’s enough, I think, Roni. Let’s take a break so you can get your breath back before we move on to the next technique.”
Some Like it Hot Page 12
