‘Ugh, it’s getting really manky now,’ Caroline said. ‘I tried to wash it the other day but Laylah screamed like a dolphin and wouldn’t let me near Dolly.’
She had been sitting at the kitchen table, scrolling through gossip sites on her tablet, but she laid it down on seeing Frank.
‘She likes the dreads!’ Frank said, grinning. ‘Gets that from my side! Mind you, those are the rattiest dreads I’ve ever seen. Pongy, too.’
Laylah’s doll – to which she had given the very creative name Dolly years ago – was her fetish object. Dolly’s blonde hair was by now completely clumped into dreadlocks and, as Frank had said, smelt very musty.
‘She and Carmen have that in common,’ Caroline said. ‘They’re both obsessed with hair. Did you know that Carmen’s mother knits stuff out of her and Carmen’s hair? Carmen has a kind of head wrap she wears in the winter. Laylah was actually trying it on the other day.’
Frank shuddered.
‘There’s something very wrong with that kid,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Hey, did you just say she screamed like a dolphin? That’s bang on. You should be a writer or something.’
Caroline smiled up at him.
‘Funny you should say that,’ she said, standing up and going over to the built-in drinks fridge. ‘Because the book’s officially finished! I got an email from Gareth this afternoon. He loves the edits and he says he’s telling accounts to pay me my bonus!’
‘Fantastic news!’ Frank said, as Caroline bent over and pulled out a bottle of Veuve Cliquot from the fridge. ‘I still feel crap that you won’t take a penny for everything you’re doing for the kids. Honestly, you spend more time with them than Gabriela does.’
‘Oh, I couldn’t take money for that!’ Caroline said, sounding horrified. ‘I love spending time with them! It’s silly, but I’ve come to think of them as family just a little bit . . .’
She set the bottle on the table.
‘I bought this today when I went with Gabriela to pick the kids up from school,’ she said, getting two flutes out of the glass-fronted cupboard. ‘I wanted to get something to celebrate delivering the book. That’s what it’s called – funny, isn’t it? As if you just gave birth.’
‘Caroline,’ Frank said, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘You went out and bought your own champagne? What were you thinking? We’ve got cases of it here!’
‘Well, I’m living in your house for free, not paying bills, eating and drinking,’ she said humbly. ‘I didn’t want you to think I was taking advantage—’
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Frank objected, ‘stop sounding like Cinderella! You barely eat anything anyway!’
Frank strode around the table, took the bottle from her masterfully and started to peel off the foil.
‘I’m so excited! I couldn’t wait to tell you,’ Caroline gushed. ‘This means so much to me – actually finishing my first ever book! I know it’s not under my name, but still, Gareth thinks it’s great, and so does Miranda. It’s always been my dream.’
‘You’ll get your own name on a book soon,’ Frank assured her as he started to untwist the wire. ‘It’ll happen. You’re really good at what you do.’
Caroline giggled.
‘You don’t know that,’ she said with a flirtatious edge now. ‘You haven’t read a word of what I’ve written.’
‘Hey, I can’t!’ Frank said. ‘You know that! It’s all about Lexy – it would be much too weird.’
Caroline had known that Lexy would come up sooner or later; it was inevitable, with the book under discussion. Her strategy, on hearing her rival’s name, was to smile her way past it, make as light of it as possible. She had been monitoring Frank’s phone over the last few weeks, which was easy enough, as he regularly left it around the house. It had only taken a few attempts to find out that his password, annoyingly enough, was lexy. The block on Lexy’s calls and texts was still in place, as was the one on her emails.
A few days after Lexy had been turned away from Sandbanks, a letter had arrived from her for Frank: it had been very easy to spot, as the address was handwritten. A week and a half later, another hand-addressed letter had come, this one doubly easy to identify, as it bore a Swiss postmark; it was followed by another, about a week after that.
Naturally, they knew that Lexy was in Switzerland. Jason had rung Frank the day after the meltdown, saying that he understood that Frank was currently so angry with his wife that he did not want to speak to her, but assuring him that Lexy was heading to a very reputable and serious detox centre high in the Swiss Alps, and that, since Frank wasn’t taking her calls, she had asked Jason to tell Frank that she was going there to deal with her issue with alcohol.
To Caroline’s great irritation, Frank had been impressed and elated by this news. She had countered it, however, by saying, wide-eyed: ‘Oh! Not actual rehab? I thought detox was more about losing weight,’ and watched his face fall.
Frank had never realized that Caroline had blocked Lexy’s number on his mobile, and until Caroline knew that Lexy was in Switzerland she had been monitoring the home phone very carefully. She had checked with Jason after his phone call to ask whether Lexy was able to make calls from the clinic; on hearing that she couldn’t, Caroline had removed the block and relaxed her vigilance on the landline.
So all she needed to do was monitor incoming letters, and that was easy enough. The post was brought in by Carmen every morning and stacked on the front hall table. Frank, who was very uninterested in paperwork, often left it there for days before going through the accumulated pile; it hadn’t occurred to him that Lexy might write to him. It could not have been simpler for Caroline to check through the stack every morning as soon as the coast was clear. She could have shredded Lexy’s letters, but she had preferred to burn them in the bathroom sink, fan on, window open. There was a drama in that gesture which she thoroughly enjoyed.
That’ll teach you to call me Ghost Mouse, she had thought, looking into her own eyes in the mirror as the acrid black smoke rose around her as if she were casting a spell. You treated me as if I was invisible most of the time. You never saw me as a rival, or important in any way. Even now that I’m stealing your life, you don’t even realize what’s happening. Even if you knew I was living in your house, you wouldn’t think for a moment that I might be after your husband, or that he might look at me with interest . . .
And you would be very, very wrong.
Frank was popping the champagne cork, starting to fill the glasses. Caroline exclaimed, as if an idea had just occurred to her:
‘Oh! This is probably going to sound mad, but – no, forget I said anything . . .’
Of course, Frank responded by telling her to keep going, as anyone would.
‘I want to toast to finishing my first book in the Jacuzzi!’ she admitted shyly. ‘Drinking bubbles in bubbles! Is that stupid? It’d make me feel really glamorous – like I was Jackie Collins for an hour, you know?’
Frank, holding the bottle, paused momentarily as he was about to fill the second glass.
‘Never mind!’ Caroline said quickly. ‘It was silly of me – we can toast here and then I’ll go to bed—’
‘Nah, you were right the first time,’ Frank said. ‘Why not? It’ll be a laugh. We don’t use that Jacuzzi enough. And we could both do with some R&R, couldn’t we? I’ve been non-stop today, and you did your run, finished your editing, picked up the kids and gave them dinner . . .’
‘Oh yay!’
Caroline clapped her hands girlishly, then decided that this was a gesture too far and dropped them to her side.
‘I’ll go and change,’ she said. ‘I won’t be long. See you down there? Will you take the drinks – do you mind?’
Frank, she knew, kept his swim gear in the pool changing room; he could simply head down in the lift. Whereas she needed to run upstairs, strip her clothes off and don the very expensive bikini that she had bought two weeks ago in anticipation of this evening.
She had planned this me
ticulously, even to the extent of wearing loose clothes today that wouldn’t leave any red marks on her skin, a trick she had picked up from Lexy’s stylists. Her bra was a soft sports one with wide straps, her leggings had an equally wide elasticated band at the waist so it didn’t dig in. She had been into Poole that morning for a spray tan at a beauty salon, the fourth in a package for which she had signed up the day after Lexy was locked out. The salon had also applied discreet fake eyelashes, which they swore would be waterproof, and dyed her lashes and eyebrows several shades darker. Her nails were newly varnished, of course: a shellacked French manicure on her hands, a light shade of rose on her toenails, pretty and elegant.
That afternoon she had straightened her hair, and after stripping off her clothes, she piled it on top of her head in a style she had practised several times, a seemingly careless knot that gave her extra height and made her cheekbones seem more prominent. She fastened it with plenty of pins, fixed it with hairspray, and applied a coat of long-lasting rose lipgloss. There was no point applying perfume or body lotion, as the water of the pool was chlorinated. The last thing was the bikini, and her hands were shaking as she pulled it out of the drawer.
It had cost nearly two hundred and fifty pounds, and she had spent one whole agonizing afternoon on Oxford Street tracking it down. Caroline would never feel comfortable in those tiny triangles, more strap than fabric, which naturally slender women could wear; this was much more structured, but cleverly cut not to show how hard it was working. The cups were underlined, lifting and separating her breasts, a halter neckline that was very flattering to the full-bosomed. The bottoms were high-cut, with plenty of coverage, but trimmed on each side with sexy large gold rings that were echoed on the halter straps.
And the colour was the bravest thing of all. White, clear pure white. Hence the regular spray tans. Caroline would have liked to have gone even darker, but if she stripped down to reveal a tan that looked as if she’d come back from a week in Ibiza, it would have looked as if she were trying much too hard.
She couldn’t look at herself in the mirror. The contrast between her still imperfect figure and her memory of Lexy’s high, artificially symmetrical boobs and flat stomach would have scared her too much. Pulling on a towelling robe and slippers, Caroline took a deep breath.
Asking herself the question ‘what would Lexy do?’ in these circumstances might be the height of irony, but it definitely gave the right answer. If Lexy were about to try to seduce a married man in his own spa, she would sashay to the lift with total confidence.
Frank was ensconced in the bubbling Jacuzzi, which was set in a raised aquamarine and emerald tiled cylinder at the far side of the swimming pool, positioned to give a view out over the lawns that sloped down to the sea. He had placed the bottle of Veuve on the tiled surround, which had cobalt tempered glass panels sunk into it for holding drinks, and was sipping from his flute, gazing out through the huge glass doors at the distant view of tiny twinkling lights of the boats moored in the Poole Harbour marina, the nightlife of Poole town curving away behind it.
As Caroline came in, he turned to look at her. This was the ultimate what would Lexy do? moment, the defining point of transformation, everything for which she had been working out and starving herself over the past few months. If she behaved like herself, like Caroline, she would shuffle across the pool surround like a granny in her robe and slippers, slip them off at the last second and then duck into the warm bubbling water with the furtiveness of someone profoundly ashamed of her own body.
But no one would be attracted to a woman who behaved like that, especially not a man who had chosen to marry a sexpot like Lexy O’Brien . . .
Taking that robe off by the door was like shedding the old Caroline, a snake transforming itself by sloughing off its skin. She knew what she needed to do, had rehearsed it many times over the last few days: as Frank smiled at her, raising his glass in a friendly greeting, she kicked off the slippers, met his eyes and, holding his gaze, dropped her hands to the belt of the robe and unfastened the loose knot, pulling the robe open.
She saw the exact split-second that Frank’s expression changed, his eyes widening, his jaw sagging open, his entire body rigid as he took in the sight of Caroline in her bikini. Ideally, she would have dropped the robe behind her to the floor, but that would have looked suspiciously seductive. So, sucking in her stomach with everything she had, she swivelled to hang the robe on one of the pegs by the door; she was delighted, on turning back, to see Frank still gawping at her, struck dumb by the curves on display.
Now came the worst part. Walking towards him in the bikini, feeling like a contestant in a low-grade seaside beauty competition; sure that her stomach was wobbling, feeling her thighs slide against each other with every step, her bare feet slapping like flatfish on a fishmonger’s slab as they landed on the tiles, her breasts bouncing; hoping that, as a boob man, he would be so mesmerized by those that he wouldn’t notice all her other flaws . . .
As she got closer, however, she could no longer hear the sound of her feet over the rumble of the Jacuzzi. It was the longest walk of her life, and climbing up the steps to the side of the Jacuzzi, her hand slipping on the rail, her thighs and stomach briefly at eye level with Frank, plopping her bottom awkwardly down to the edge and then sliding in, water displacing with her entrance, she felt as big as a manatee, acutely conscious of absolutely everything that was unattractive and heavy about her.
Thank God for champagne! Frank was shifting on his side of the built-in seat, turning to face her, but clearly still in shock. His mouth was open, his eyes dropping to her cleavage, then up to look at her face again; he hadn’t made a move to hand her the glass that was waiting for her. She reached out to take it herself, feeling much more confident now. The parts of her body she didn’t like were hidden underwater, and on display was the face that was so carefully adorned with fake lashes and subtle make-up, her firm arms, round shoulders and large plump breasts. Below the bubbling water, she squished her breasts together with her elbows, deepening her cleavage as she raised the flute.
‘To finishing my book!’ she said, flashing a sweet smile, and Frank gathered himself with a visible effort, shook his head as if he were trying to get rid of a fly buzzing round him and reached out to chink his glass with hers. Caroline, pretending that she couldn’t quite reach, moved closer to him along the tiled seat, tilting her breasts enticingly towards him.
She saw him look down at them and keep looking this time, and the sight of him unable to tear his glance away from her bosom made her whole body fizz.
‘Cheers!’ she said, and watched him almost miss his mouth with the glass before he dragged his gaze up again.
‘Men are incredibly basic,’ Lexy, via Caroline, had written in her upcoming book.
‘If they like you, trust me, you’ll know. And if they don’t like you, who gives a fuck? Move on to someone who does! The trick is to like men who like you back. You can’t get all huffy if you’re into a man who likes tall black girls and you’re short and white, you know what I mean?
I’m always seeing covers of women’s mags that tell you ten or twenty or fifty ways to snag a man, and most of it’s bollocks. I mean, if you’re reading this, you know what I’m like, right? I’m hardcore. I go in for full-on teasing when I’m flirting. I like to mess with their heads and get them going so they don’t know which end’s up.
But if I were going to write one of those articles, here’s what I’d say: men are basic, so keep it simple. If he’s a boob guy, get your tits out. Boob guys are the easiest, by the way. It’s like they literally get hypnotized by them. If he’s a leg guy, wear a short skirt. If he fancies you, he’ll come after you and all you need to do is laugh at his jokes and play with your hair and tell him he’s being naughty, even if he isn’t. Guys really love it when you say the word ‘naughty’. Pathetic, I know, but it works.
Basically, you’ll know if he likes you, and not just by spotting his stiffie. He’ll ask you qu
estions and actually sound interested in the answers – which, honestly, you should enjoy while you get it, because it never bloody lasts! And he’ll give you really clumsy compliments, which’ll probably sound cheesy. But don’t be sarky about it, just say ‘Thank you!’ really sweetly, like he quoted Shakespeare or something.
So just keep staring into his eyes and smiling at him and playing with your hair and every so often touch your tongue to your lips, if you can manage that without looking like a complete fuckwit. And when you want him to kiss you, lean in, make your eyes go really big and take a deep breath so your boobs look great. That always works, and believe me, I’ve probably snogged more men than you’ve had hot dinners . . .’
Caroline drank half of the champagne in one go, and noticed that, very unusually for the mostly abstemious Frank, he had followed suit.
‘Can I get a top-up?’ she said, holding out the glass. Anything to keep leaning forward, showing off her boobs. Besides, if he filled her glass up, he would probably refill his, and it would be very beneficial if Frank had several glasses of champagne.
‘You look in really good shape,’ he said as he picked up the bottle. ‘I didn’t realize you’d been working out so much. Uh, of course I did, because you’ve been going running! I just meant . . . you’re in really good shape . . . I didn’t realize . . .’
‘Thank you!’ Caroline cooed.
It was extraordinary how accurate Lexy had been in her guide to flirting with a man, or rather letting a man flirt with you. There was the awkward compliment, just as Lexy had predicted, and clearly ‘Thank you’ was all Frank needed to hear to feel acknowledged.
‘I’ve been watching my diet too, of course,’ she said, drinking the champagne and blocking out her new knowledge of how many calories it contained. ‘That’s really helped.’
Killer Affair Page 26
