by Sue Margolis
Just then Max returned with her spritzer.
Lorna began to gather up her papers and put them in her briefcase. “Have fun, you two,” she said, standing up. Then she turned to Max, gave him not a double but a triple kiss and whispered directly into his ear, but so as Rebecca could easily hear, “I’ll call you when I get back from Chequers.”
She shot Rebecca the briefest of smiles and turned to go, her pert little bum wiggling inside its exquisitely cut Prada housing.
Max sat back on his chair, smiling and shaking his head. “Don’t you think Lorna’s just amazing?”
“I’ll call you when I get back from Chequers,” Rebecca mimicked under her breath.
“Sorry?” Max said.
“No, nothing.”
Max sipped some beer. “She has this phenomenally incisive mind. Absorbs information like a sponge. Watching her come to grips with a story is positively awesome. I’m good at the legwork, but she’s streets ahead planning strategy. I think we make a really good team.”
“She clearly thinks so,” Rebecca said icily.
“Of course, Lorna and I go way back. I’ve known her since we did our journalism course together. She had balls even then. Once, when Thatcher came to give a talk, she interrupted her and started tearing into her about everything from school milk to the Falklands.”
“I imagine she’d have been right up Margaret Thatcher’s street, though,” Rebecca said.
In her head, she could hear Jess begging her not to, but she couldn’t stop herself. She cleared her throat. “Max, you would tell me, wouldn’t you, if anything was going on between …”
But she didn’t get a chance to finish. Brian Woodhouse, the annoyingly matey fifty-something picture editor, had just come over and was busy slapping Max on the back. “So, you’re over the pox, then?” he bellowed.
Rebecca grimaced. As usual, Brian had no idea his white hairy paunch was hanging out, having burst his shirt buttons.
“Always worse when you get these things as an adult,” he went on. “I got mumps off the kids a few years ago. Fucking agony. Nuts swelled up to the size of potatoes.” He gave Max a conspiratorial dig in the ribs and lowered his voice. “So, you and the luscious Lorna, then, eh? Way to go, mate. Way … to … fucking … go.”
Rebecca hoped Max was about to make it clear he and Lorna were only working together, but before he had a chance, Brian had shot off to the men’s room.
They ended up going for a curry with the news desk people. By eleven everybody was still drinking, but Max said he was feeling tired and the two of them made their excuses. Rebecca hadn’t drunk much and drove them back to his flat.
“What’s this?” she said as she took off her coat. On his message pad by the phone he’d written in huge letters that were impossible to miss: “Parents’ evening Wednesday 25th.” “Why on earth would you be going to a school parents’ evening?”
For the briefest of moments he looked like he’d been caught in the headlights. Then: “It’s Amy’s. Her mother’s on her own. So I go with her to offer a bit of support.”
“You are so kind, do you know that? How many other godparents would do that?”
She couldn’t help thinking that kindness in a man was just the sexiest thing. She put her arms round him.
“I’m not really tired, you know,” he said, stroking her cheek. “I just said I wanted to get away.”
She smiled back at him. “You did?” she said.
He nodded. “I’ve missed you, these past few days,” he said.
“Mmm. Me too.”
A second later they were kissing. He tasted of wine.
“Max,” she said when they’d finished, “there’s something I want to ask you. About …”
She was going to say “you and Lorna,” but she didn’t get the chance because he had started kissing her again. Before she knew it, she was kissing him back and she was getting that delicious quivering feeling in her stomach that she always got when she was desperate to be ravished.
“Come on,” he whispered, taking her hand. He led her to the bedroom and began undressing her. Every so often he would stop to kiss her shoulders, her stomach, the tops of her breasts, trail his finger over the cotton crotch of her pants. When she thought her legs were about to give way, she moved toward the bed.
“I’ve got a better idea,” he said, grinning. He pulled her toward the glass table he used as a desk. Very gently, he pushed her over.
Soon his hands were stroking her buttocks, through her knickers. Then suddenly, without warning he slipped his fingers under the fabric. The next thing she knew he was pushing them hard inside her.
She cried out in delight. He carried on exploring her, she letting out tiny, soft yelps. Eventually he pulled her pants down to her ankles. She shuddered as tiny cold drops of rose-scented oil fell onto her skin. He began massaging it into her buttocks. Every so often he would stop to brush his fingers between them as they got wetter. The last time he did this he carried on down toward her clitoris. The second she felt his touch, her entire body trembled. He kissed the back of her neck and whispered to her how much he wanted her. The flicking and teasing carried on until she was crying out to him to come inside her. She was vaguely aware of him undoing his jeans belt. Soon his penis was teasing the entrance to her vagina. She cried out again as he pushed himself into her. His thrusts were slow and gentle. She heard herself begging him to go harder, to make her come. He seemed reluctant at first, clearly scared of hurting her, but she kept on. In the end it was almost painful, but all the time he carried on stroking her clitoris, varying the pressure, making her gasp for more, refusing her and then finally relenting. Finally the exquisite, jerky explosion began.
Afterward Max lay on her chest, trailing a finger over her face.
“D’you know which bit of you I think is really cute?” he said.
She looked up at him and shook her head.
“Your eyebrows. They’re gorgeous.” He started stroking them. “Make you look like Sophia Loren.”
“Not Noel Gallagher?”
“Well, maybe a bit Liam …”
He started laughing. She began thumping him playfully on his back, but he took hold of her wrists, pinned them down above her head and began kissing her again.
“So,” he said, “when am I going to get to see your flat?”
“God, it’s a bloody mess at the moment. And we wouldn’t be alone. There’s Jess, Lipstick, the baby, Harrison.”
“Come on, I don’t care if the place is a mess. I’d like to meet Jess and Lipstick.”
“OK,” she said. “What are you doing Saturday night?”
“Having dinner at your place.” He started kissing the back of her neck. “Now then, what was it you wanted to talk to me about before?”
“Oh, it’s not important. Work stuff. It’ll keep.”
“Sure?” He turned her over and began kissing her tummy. Immediately he began heading southward.
“Positive,” she whispered.
11
There were nine e-mails altogether: one from an ambulance driver, another from a cranial osteopath, two from male midwives and five from a prosthetic limb technician who lived in a mobile home in Shanklin.
Not one doctor among them. Rebecca couldn’t help laughing. “Gawd. What do you do with the woman?”
“What woman?” Jess said, coming into the bedroom. She was wearing pajamas and holding two mugs of coffee.
“My grandmother,” Rebecca said, taking one of the mugs. “She’s been advertising me on dateadoctor.com.”
“No.”
“See for yourself.”
Rebecca got up and let Jess sit down at the computer. She started spinning through the e-mails.
“You know, False Leg guy doesn’t sound so bad,” she said, clearly battling to keep a straight face. “Says he can play the theme to The Deer Hunter on his teeth. E-mail him back and ask him if he can do ‘Jake the Peg.’”
Jess snorted with laughter. Rebecca
responded by bashing her over the head with a giant bag of cotton balls.
“Why don’t you just tell Rose about Max Factor?” Jess said. “Then she’d stop all this matchmaking.”
“What, and have her go on and on about how disappointed she is I’m not going out with somebody Jewish?”
“But she’s been fine about Lipstick.”
“Precisely. That means there’s even more pressure on me not to let her down. Plus if I told her about Max, she’d want to meet him. Then she’d start cross-examining him about his prospects. He hasn’t even said he loves me yet.”
“He will.” Jess smiled. “But you’ve only just met. Give him a chance.” She paused. “So, what are you cooking tonight?”
“I thought I’d keep it really simple—Delia’s beef in beer. I’ve done it loads of times and it always works. Thing is, I was wondering if it was a bit seventies—you know, too earthenware Crockpot.”
“No, I think it’s great. I’ll dig out a Fleetwood Mac album and a wraparound dirndl skirt and we’ll be well away.”
Rebecca’s face fell.
“I’m kidding,” Jess said. “Sounds fab. Oh, by the way, I hope you don’t mind, but Mum sort of invited herself over tonight.”
“Fine. The more the merrier.”
“She’s been feeling a bit down,” Jess went on. “She’d been planning this huge fund-raiser for some disease or other. Then last week, totally out of the blue, they announced a cure. I’m convinced that whenever that happens, a tiny part of her dies.”
Lipstick, who had left one of her beauty therapists in charge of the salon and taken the day off, said she’d do the dinner party shopping while Rebecca made a start clearing up the kitchen.
“I’ve got to pop into the butcher’s anyway. I thought I’d cook Harrison something really special for his supper.”
Rebecca pulled on the smelly rubber gloves. (On the rare occasions Jess did any washing up, she got water in the gloves and forgot to turn them inside out to dry.) The sink was overflowing with days old, mostly unscraped plates and pans. Grimacing, she started pulling them out, dropping sodden pieces of toast, dog food and bacon fat into the bin as she went. She had just turned on the hot water tap when the phone rang. It was Wendy, sounding exceedingly jumpy.
“I’ve had a couple of anonymous letters,” she said, “warning me off going to the press about what I overheard at Mer de Rêves.”
“Have they threatened you?”
“Sort of. Whoever wrote them said I’d live to regret it if I revealed what I knew. I don’t feel safe. So I’ve decided to go and stay with some friends in Scotland until this whole thing blows over.”
They spent the rest of the conversation discussing Lipstick’s plan to infiltrate the Mer de Rêves office in Paris.
“You’d need to find the lab,” Wendy said. “The only problem is it’s hidden in a mass of basement tunnels and almost impossible to find unless you know where you’re going. I know exactly where it is because I’ve been there dozens of times with my boss. I’ll draw you a detailed map and drop it off on my way to the station.”
Wendy arrived half an hour later, pale, jittery and petrified she might have been followed. She refused to come in. She simply handed Rebecca an envelope and a slip of paper on which she’d written her phone number in Scotland. Before Rebecca had a chance to give her a hug, tell her how much she appreciated what she was doing and that she would do her best to ensure that the Vanguard paid her a whacking fee for all this, she was gone.
By six the whole flat was filled with a glorious meaty-boozy smell and Rebecca was lying in a bubble bath with a glass of wine. She’d just finished topping off the hot water when Lipstick knocked on the door.
“Becks, have you seen that bag of meat I bought for Harrison?”
Rebecca said she hadn’t and went back to making shampoo horns with her hair.
“But it was in the fridge. You sure you haven’t seen it?”
“Positive.”
“It was blue plastic.”
“The only blue plastic bag I’ve seen is the one with my braising steak in it.”
“No, yours was in the white bag.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“It was,” Lipstick insisted. “I explained when I got back from the shops. I definitely remember saying, ‘Harrison’s meat is in the blue bag, yours is in the white one.’”
First one shampoo horn collapsed on Rebecca’s head, then the other. When Lipstick got back from the shops, Rebecca had been engrossed in Wendy’s map of the tunnels underneath the Mer de Rêves offices. She’d clearly misunderstood.
“But it’s all beef, right?” Rebecca could feel her heart rate rising. “I mean what difference if I cooked Harrison’s meat instead of the stuff you got me?”
“Well, personally I wouldn’t mind,” Lipstick said. “The French eat it all the time. It’s a real delicacy over there and extremely expensive, but I’m not sure how everybody else would feel.”
Feeling almost numb by now, Rebecca eased herself slowly out of the bath and opened the door. She stood in front of Lipstick completely starkers, dripping all over the linoleum.
“I haven’t made beef in beer, have I?”
Lipstick shook her head slowly.
“What I thought was braising steak was probably last seen running in the two forty-five at Epsom. I cooked horse, didn’t I?”
“’Fraid so,” Lipstick said.
“Horse in beer.”
“Seems that way.”
“That’s not a Delia recipe, is it?”
“Not so far as I know,” Lipstick said.
While Harrison demolished what the three of them were now referring to as Shergar stew, Jess stood in front of the open kitchen cupboards.
“OK,” she said, “it would appear to be a toss-up between Big Soup and mandarin-flavor Jell-O.”
“What about the real beef?” Lipstick said. “That’s still in the fridge.”
“No time to cook it,” Jess came back. “Braising steak takes forever.”
Rebecca asked what time Waitrose shut.
“Fifteen minutes ago,” Lipstick said.
She suggested getting something ready prepared from the Italian deli round the corner, or simply ordering takeout.
“But I told Max I was going to make something. Now I’ve decided it’s an OK time in our relationship for me to cook for him, I wanted to impress him.”
Jess shut the kitchen cupboards, turned and grinned at Rebecca. “I know how you can really impress him,” she said, “What about Minge?”
“Hmm, but isn’t that more an after-dinner thing?” Rebecca said.
“No, stupid,” Jess came back. “I mean Thick Minge.”
Thick Minge, short for Araminta, was Jess’s überposh best friend from Slapton Gusset. Although not one of the brightest, she now ran a successful catering business in Notting Hill.
“But I wanted to cook,” Rebecca moaned again.
“Well, you can’t,” Jess barked, sounding exactly like her mother. “There isn’t time. And Minge is brilliant. Plus she always makes too much. She’s got this chest freezer full of stuff. Why don’t I phone her and see if she can let us have something?”
They were in luck. It turned out Minge was on her way to Crouch End to deliver the food for a golden wedding party. She said she’d dig a boeuf en croûte out of the freezer and drop it round on the way.
By eight o’clock everybody was ready and they were sitting in the living room knocking back Shiraz and smoky-bacon-flavored Doritos. Lipstick was wearing thick lip liner, and a sparkly, tassely more-is-more creation from Karen Millen. Jess was in her cargo pants because she hadn’t packed any smart clothes. Rebecca had changed nine times and eventually settled on jeans and a cropped-sleeve T-shirt, because she didn’t want to look like she’d tried too hard.
“What time did Minge say she’d be here with the beef?” Rebecca asked for the umpteenth time.
“Quarter past,” Jess said wearily. �
�Stop panicking. She’ll be here.”
“What do you think of my napkin swans, then?” Lipstick said, nodding toward the table, which they’d brought in from the kitchen (the tanning bed and treadmill having been shared out between the two bedrooms). “I could have done teapots if you’d preferred. Or clogs.”
Rebecca smiled and said swans were great.
Lady Axminster arrived first, immediately noticed Woman Wanking and winced. She brightened up no end, though, when Lipstick came over and introduced herself with a deep curtsy. Lady Axminster then air-kissed Rebecca. When it was Jess’s turn, her face fell again. “I know you’re under a terrible strain, darling, but letting oneself go is so terribly bad for one’s morale. Surely a bit of rouge wouldn’t hurt. And look at you. Who wears fatigues to a dinner party? If you want to win Ed back, you have to start being more feminine.”
“OK,” Jess said, handing her mother a Shiraz, “how’s about I grow a third breast?”
“You know, Jessica, sarcasm really is the lowest form of wit.”
“Smoky-bacon Dorito, Lady A?” Rebecca cut in, sensing a situation brewing.
Her ladyship raised a polite hand in refusal.
“And what on earth makes you think I even want Ed back?” Jess went on irritably.
“Well, if you don’t, you should. Diggory needs a father. And it’s not as if he actually cheated on you.”
Jess was clearly confused by her mother’s pro-Ed stance, since Lady Axminster had never approved of her marrying outside her class, and in particular to a tabloid journalist.
“And Ed loves you,” Lady Axminster went on. “You only have to look at him to see that.” In a virtually unprecedented show of emotion, her voice softened. “I don’t think your father was ever really in love with me.” She sat down on the sofa.
“What, not ever?” Jess said, sitting down next to her.
“Well, I suppose there was that time just after we met when he lost interest in the cricket for a couple of days.”
“Well, my Stan’s an angel,” Lipstick piped up.
“Lucky old you,” her ladyship said. “My Vere is still alive.”
At that moment Harrison burst in and leaped onto Lady Axminster’s lap, almost knocking the wine out of her hand.
