Mad About the Boy

by Maggie Alderson

  Seven other students lived in the house, but we were the only couple, with a huge bedroom all to ourselves. We had an open fire and a four-poster bed, which was Hugo’s idea of basic student digs, and it was here that we finally ‘did the deed’ as he romantically put it.

  We’d been going out for several months by then and were an established item around the university. After confiding with one of the more worldly girls in the house, Julia, about my fear of pregnancy (although I didn’t let on we weren’t having sex yet, I was savvy enough to understand Hugo was a ‘catch’), I’d gone to the student medical centre and put myself on the pill.

  The big event happened the night after the Apollos had beaten the medics at rugger. The Apollos were a rugby fifteen made up of Hugo and his pals – chosen partly for sporting skill, but more importantly for looks. Their team strip was a pink jersey and their motto was Omnia vincit pulchritudo. Beauty conquers all.

  The miraculous presence of two really excellent backs and one zippy forward in the team won them the match against the thuggish medics, who had arrived at the field drunk and overconfident about thrashing the arrogant woofter toffs. But the toffs won and we celebrated with a party that passed into university legend.

  That night Hugo and I had sex. In retrospect, he must have been so het up after the scrum and the showers that playing hide the sausage (another Hugo-ism that pretty much sums up his attitude to our sex life) seemed an attractive prospect – even with a woman. In lieu of the far more sexy Number Eight, I now realized.

  I can’t say I enjoyed it much, but Julia had lent me a book about women’s bits, which had warned me that one’s early sexual experiences were unlikely to be the magical awakening of myth, so I was fairly realistic in my expectations.

  It did get better after that and although it didn’t happen very often, we had a good time in our way. The key thing for us was that we always had a laugh. A good laugh and lots of cuddles. I thought that was what being in a stable relationship was all about and I was very happy.

  I got pregnant the night we finished our finals. I hadn’t suited the pill and, as we had sex so infrequently, it didn’t seem worth suffering, so I got myself fitted up with a contraption called a ‘honey cap’, which all my girlfriends were talking about. As contraceptives go, it wasn’t a bad one, but it didn’t work very well in the drawer.

  To my amazement, Hugo was delighted with my announcement.

  ‘Marvellous,’ he said. ‘We always breed young in my family. Parents will be delighted to have another grandchild.’ He did a mental count. ‘Think it will be their fourteenth. It’s July now, so if we get married in early September the foliage will be beautiful around the chapel and the bump won’t show too much.’

  So we were and suddenly I was the Hon. Mrs Hugo Heaveringham. By April, I was sending out engraved announcements of the arrival of Thomas Frederick Xavier Heaveringham, we were living in the family flat in SW1 and Hugo was working at Cadogan’s. The Countess of Romsburgh was eagerly planning the christening and Tom’s ranks of godparents were off to Asprey’s for suitable silver tributes. What a perfect couple.

  Ha ha bloody ha.

  2

  We’d arrived in Sydney at the height of our Perfect Couple moment. The Pratler article had recently come out and I was amazed how many of the people I was meeting at the endless round of parties and dinners, arranged by Hugo’s colleagues so he could schmooze the most important (i.e. richest) clients, seemed to have seen it.

  ‘Oh, here’s the other half of the perfect couple,’ I remember one woman saying brightly to me, through expensive gritted teeth, as I sipped yet more champagne on yet another Point Piper terrace, overlooking Sydney’s astonishing harbour.

  We weren’t living on the water ourselves, although I had longed to. It seemed the whole point of Sydney to me, but Hugo had declared it ‘common’ the moment we arrived and we were living in a large terraced house in a neighbourhood called Woollahra, which an old school friend had told him was the place to be. It was also around the corner from his office. Hugo knew how to keep his life sweet.

  But despite my initial disappointment, I soon grew to adore Woollahra. ‘It’s Holland Park with New Orleans balconies,’ I told my sisters, Sarah and Rebecca, in an early e-mail. It was a perfect little microcosm.

  There were really nice delis and cafés in the next road, and divine boutiques and antique shops just a little further up the hill. I could walk to a harbourside park in ten minutes, drive to a beach in ten minutes, or jump into the pool in our own garden in ten seconds. We’d had a pretty good life in London, but this was the stuff of dreams, like being at home and on holiday at the same time.

  The other great thing about Woollahra was that so many of the people we were meeting through Hugo’s work seemed to live there too, so I would meet someone nice at a cocktail party one evening and then bump into them the very next day, getting a carton of milk. It made making friends effortless.

  Sometimes I even used to run into Hugo when I had popped out to get something and he was just coming back to the office from lunch. We would stand on Queen Street – the main Woollahra drag – and giggle like a pair of five-year-olds, we thought it was such a lark. I used to blush when I saw him coming. After all those years, he still had that effect on me. He was so handsome in his beautiful suits.

  Our social life had been hectic enough in London, a mixture of boozy drinks parties, dinners and weekends away at friends’ houses, combined with a few more glamorous dos that were part of Hugo’s job, but in Sydney it was amazing – one long round of designer yachts and catered cocktail soirées.

  So much for the fabled laid-back Australian lifestyle, we found people in Sydney much more formal than in London. At home our friends only had caterers for weddings and twenty-firsts. In Sydney people had them for Sunday brunches.

  And I couldn’t get over the women. Talk about high maintenance. They seemed to get their hair and nails done every day and even the ones who didn’t work wore suits all the time – even in summer. Chanel suits, at that.

  My own droopy pastel-coloured Ghost skirts and cardigans, all spot-on in London, with a pair of jewelled flip-flops and a mad old Mexican basket, didn’t seem right at all among this crowd and in the end Hugo took me shopping for a ‘social’ wardrobe of sexy little cocktail dresses and stiletto shoes. I always felt like I was dressing up as a grown-up when I wore it, but it was all part of the crazy hoot of it all. For the first year, Hugo and I never seemed to stop laughing, we were having such a good time.

  And people were being so nice to me. From the moment we landed I was adopted by a small group of women, who had clearly decided I was their responsibility. Well, that’s the way I saw it at the time.

  The one I liked best was called Suzy Thorogood. She was a friend of a friend of Hugo’s very bossy older sister, Anastasia (we called her ‘Stasi’ for short and it suited her) and I knew I’d be in terrible trouble if I didn’t follow her up as Stasi had ordered me to do.

  ‘Meant to be terribly nice,’ she had barked down the phone at me, just before we left London, sounding like one of her own Labradors. ‘Some kind of a financial PR. Husband’s in insurance or some such. Chloe loves her. Worth giving her a call.’

  But Suzy rang me first, when we’d only been in town a week, and invited me for lunch with herself and two girlfriends. It was at a fish restaurant on the water, she’d told me, so I wore a sundress and my flip-flops – well, I didn’t know, I thought we were having fish and chips. They were all in Chanel and Armani suits.

  I liked Suzy immediately. She was tall with short blonde hair and a very fit, tanned, sporty body, which made her look more like an Olympic swimmer than a corporate whizz-kid. She had a very firm handshake and an open smile and she immediately dispelled my embarrassment about my overly casual attire by joking about it, in a nice way.

  ‘Oh you Poms are a funny lot,’ she said indulgently. ‘I did my MBA over there – that’s how I know your sister-in-law’s friend, Chloe
– and it gave me a great insight into your race. The scruffier they are, the grander they are,’ she said to the others. ‘I never quite got the hang of it myself. So you must be very grand, Antonia, turning up here like that.’

  She had such a warm, cheeky smile, I took it in good heart and insisted that I wasn’t grand at all, just clueless.

  ‘But your husband’s grand, isn’t he?’ said one of the other women, narrowing her eyes, which I noticed were very bright green. Very bright green contact lenses.

  ‘Oh no, not really,’ I answered, embarrassed. ‘He’s the youngest son, so he’s not going to inherit anything.’

  ‘But isn’t his father an earl, or something?’ said the woman, still looking at me in that beady way.

  ‘Yes, he is. But it’s a very old title,’ I added, which back home might have been enough to convey that the Heaveringhams had been very grand about four hundred years ago, but now were only grandish and rather poor in cash terms. I wasn’t sure it got the message across to this one though. She was still looking at me like a dog looks at a biscuit.

  I didn’t feel so much at ease with either of the other women as I did with Suzy, but she was so nice, I was determined to give them a chance. The one asking all the questions was the youngest of the three and the prettiest.

  She had long dark-red hair and the kind of kitten face that reminded me of a young Brigitte Bardot. She must have been astonishingly pretty all her life, I thought. Girls like that don’t have an awkward phase, they just go straight from cute to devastating. I could just see her, aged ten, beaming out of a photo frame, doing the splits in a sparkly leotard, all the sequins sewn on by her doting mother.

  The conversation had moved on, but she was still eyeballing me as though she was trying to find out something I was keeping from her. But when I looked back questioningly, she just beamed at me with the most radiant smile, like the sun coming out. I couldn’t help but smile back. Her name was Nikki Maier.

  The older of the three was a very attractive, if hard-edged bottle blonde, called Caroline French. As well as diamond studs the size of boiled sweets in her ears, her engagement ring was the most enormous diamond I had ever seen. Although it was all immaculately set off by a French manicure and a beautiful pale blue Chanel suit, there was something claw-like about those hands that I found repellent.

  They were never still, always flicking and picking and fluttering around, sometimes slapping down on the table quite hard, like a simultaneous sign language translation of her real feelings. Mind you, it was hard to judge what she was feeling from her face. She’d had so much botox and collagen injected into it, it was more like a mask than a human phizog.

  But lunch was pleasant enough and as the conversation unfolded it became clear that Suzy had a very serious career, with her own large PR and marketing company, specializing in the financial sector. The other two didn’t appear to work, although I heard quite a lot about their husbands’ careers. Caroline’s owned one of the biggest paint companies in Australia and Nikki’s had a large cosmetics empire.

  Suzy’s husband, Roger, had been the boss of the Australian arm of a huge international insurance company, as well as having numerous other business interests, but now he had stepped down from his job to become an MP in the NSW state parliament, which made it quite clear to me that the Thorogoods were a serious power couple in town. The other two were clearly in awe of Suzy, who happily accepted her role as the most popular girl in school. It sat easily with her.

  There were a few questions about Hugo’s career and when they asked me what I did, I explained that I had never worked formally, as I’d had Tom straight after university and hadn’t wanted to leave him with a childminder.

  Nikki, who had two kids herself, looked at me as if I were insane. I found out later that she had two nannies – one for day and one for night – and that her children slept in a separate granny flat over the garages, not even attached to their house.

  ‘I thought Chloe said you were an interior decorator,’ said Suzy. ‘She said your house had been in Interiors and that all the smart arty set in London used you to make over their places. She said you were very successful.’

  ‘Did she?’ I asked, amazed that one of Stasi’s snobby friends had even noticed I existed. ‘Crikey, how nice. But I wouldn’t go that far, I used to do houses for friends of friends, for fun really, and people would come to my house and buy bits and pieces. But it wasn’t a proper business, I just really enjoy decorating houses and finding interesting old things.’

  Well, they loved that, they were all mad about decorators. Caroline used to be one, she told me proudly. She’d done a course. I should go over some time and see her swags. Nikki was more straightforward in her approach.

  ‘We’ll have to come and see your place when you’re settled in, won’t we, Antonia?’ she said, her green eyes flashing like traffic lights. ‘See if you’re any good. I need my house redecorated actually, maybe you’re the one to do it for me.’

  ‘I’d be delighted to have a look,’ I answered, thinking that people like her were the reason I only ever worked for friends of friends and I didn’t count her as one of those yet. Then I had an idea.

  ‘Actually, you three might be able to help me,’ I said. ‘I’m thinking of opening a homewares shop. Now that Tom is at school, I’ve got time to do it and it’s always been a fantasy of mine to have a proper shop. So I would love to know what you think of my style and whether you reckon it would work here.’

  They all promised to help, which was a good thing, because up until that moment, while I’d always dreamed of having a shop, I hadn’t seriously imagined doing it. Now, it seemed, ‘Anteeks’ was going to be a reality.

  After that lunch I saw quite a bit of the ‘girls’ as they called themselves. I could never quite understand why somebody as nice and as intelligent as Suzy hung out with the other two, but I continued to bow to her better judgement and we became quite a little gang.

  Nikki, in particular, took it on herself to ‘look after me’. Rather as a Rottweiler looks after a postman, I decided later, but at the time, I was glad of the help. She gave me the numbers of the best gynaecologists, acupuncturists, masseurs and dentists, told me the ‘right’ places to get my hair done, my nails polished and my eyebrows plucked and where to find all kinds of services I’d never heard of, like Brazilian waxing, which sounded terrifying, but which, she assured me, ‘men adore.’ More inclined to thinking in the singular where men were concerned, I didn’t think I’d risk it.

  Insisting on picking me up one morning, to take me on a tour of Sydney’s best (i.e. most expensive) clothes shops, Nikki practically rammed the front door to get inside when I opened it. It was like a home invasion.

  ‘Oh, this is great,’ she said, doing a 360 of my hall. ‘Can I have a quick perve? Better check out your decorating, Antonia. See if you’re any good.’

  With that she was off, going through every room in the house, like an auditor. As she looked round, taking in every detail, that hectic, beady expression I had seen on her face at the first lunch came back. She was particularly taken with anything that looked grand and English.

  ‘Oh, I love that big cupboard, where did you get that? Did Hugo’s parents give it to you?’

  ‘The armoire? No, I got it in France at a country auction …’ But she didn’t appear to be listening. She had opened my cutlery drawer and was looking at our silver.

  ‘This is nice stuff,’ she said. ‘I like the crests. Did you get that in France too?’

  So she was listening.

  ‘No, Hugo’s parents did give us that. It’s got Hugo’s initials on it, but in fact it belonged to his great-grandfather …’

  ‘I like your chairs, they look good painted that grey colour, what do you call that?’

  ‘Well, it’s sort of a Gustavian grey – you know, old Swedish style. I painted them myself actually …’

  She darted a mean little look at me. Smug pity mixed with raw covetousness.


  ‘Well, I like them, anyway.’

  She even commented on Hugo’s slippers.

  ‘Oh, he’s got those velvet slippers. I’ve seen those in a catalogue. I’ve ordered some for David with stags heads on them. These look a bit old though, doesn’t he need some new ones?’

  I laughed. Hugo adored his old slippers.

  ‘He’s had them since he was at school. He really likes them …’

  By the time she’d finished, I was exhausted. I felt like I’d been strip searched. I tried to get out of it, but she was determined to take me round her favourite boutiques, as planned, where she instructed all the assistants to look after me, because I was going to be a good customer. I had the distinct feeling there was something in it for her – discount, or commission maybe. She was in for a big disappointment there, I thought. I had no intention of ever going back to any of them.

  After all that she insisted on buying me lunch and although I found her constant barrage of questions extremely intrusive, I felt she was being kind to me in her way and it seemed rude and churlish not to go along with it all. And I have to admit, there was something rather appealing about Nikki. There was a vulnerability under all that pushiness that I found strangely touching and then she had that megawatt smile. It was captivating. She knew it, but that didn’t lessen the effect.

  A few days after her home invasion, Nikki rang me and said she wanted me to come and have a look at her place.

  ‘I like your house, Antonia,’ she said, as though she were bestowing a very special honour on me. ‘It’s got a really good English feel to it. It looks classy. I want you to come and take a look at my house’ – not ‘our house’, I noted – ‘and tell me how I can get that look here.’

  I dutifully went. It was down in Double Bay, which was a neighbouring suburb to Woollahra, with smart shops and the most beautiful little white sand beach, but which was, somehow, much more brittle and showy than our little neighbourhood. The Maiers’ house was particularly flashy.