“Well,” she said, “maybe it’s because I do them every evening, but my nasal folds are definitely softer. And look,” she said, turning her face to the side, “doesn’t my jaw line look tighter to you?” Her jaw line did look tight but as I couldn’t remember what it was like before we started these sessions, I couldn’t honestly say if it were tighter. “You’re so modest,” she laughed. “These exercises of yours are amazing!”
I wanted to burst out laughing and say: They are aren’t they! happy to have another person who shared my enthusiasm, but I reminded myself to remain professional, smiled and said, “Well we still have a few more left before we’re done today.”
“Oh sure,” she said and placed her bottom lip over her top lip, jutting out her chin as far as it could go whilst gently holding her neck back with fingertips.
“One, two, three, four,” I began counting slowly up to ten, “now release, and breathe. And let’s do that one again.” She assumed the position and I started counting and when I heard the Blackberry, laying on the counter, starting to vibrate with a received text message, I didn’t stop. Just smiled.
“Boyfriend?” Anita asked as I checked the text message after our session:
…Just wanted to say that I really enjoyed your company the other evening and whatever I have said or done to have caused you to become so distant toward me, for that, I am truly sorry. I hope that we will always remain friends. C…
“No. Not a boyfriend,” I said quietly, silently going over the scathing speech I would deliver to Isabella when I saw her, hopefully for the last time, on Thursday.
C hapter Fourteen
“You’re not really planning on wearing that today are you?” Portia asked cautiously, looking at me as if her next question would be: Rebecca, are you on medication? And: Are you taking it! I had deliberately decided to dress down for my meeting with Isabella Coombs today. I didn’t want to wear any of the smart, expensive clothes which she had bought for me, with motives which were now seriously in question. I wanted to show her in plain and simple terms that I was not ‘working’ for her anymore. That I was no longer going to be getting all dressed up, preened and plucked for the sole insane purpose of meeting with her husband, whom she should surely know, was no cheat! I wanted to dress in a manner that said Fuck You, and I thought my converse trainers, second-hand Levi’s and tie-dye vest, did the job nicely.
“I’m trying to make a statement,” I said simply.
“Oh? And what statement could that be? Is it that you actually prefer to be on social security?” she said sitting cross-legged on the forbidden chaise, filing her nails. “Because when Gwendolyn sees how you turned up for work today, social security will be your very next stop.”
“I’m booked out with Isabella all day. Gwendolyn doesn’t care what I wear when I’m with her.”
Portia looked at me pointedly, “Whether you’re out with her or not, you know as well as I do that if you’re representing Pamper Moi, Gwendolyn definitely cares!” She casually put her nail file away, obviously trying to fight the urge to say what was really on her mind. Then obviously not having the will power to fight it any further, looked at me in wonder and said, “How do you do it? How do you spend time with Isabella, talk to her, eat with her…all the time knowing you’re dating her husband?”
I leaned against the reception desk and groaned. “For the umpteenth time Portia, I AM NOT dating Charles Coombs!”
“Humph. I am many things Rebecca Hardy…”
“Ain’t that the truth,” I deadpanned. She ignored me.
“…but stupid is not one of them.”
“Oh whatever! Think what you like.” I looked at Lauren for some moral support, but she just half smiled and shrugged as if to say: Date who you want Becky, but don’t lie about it. “Great.”
“Anyway, I’ve got a spare outfit in my locker if you need it.”
“I won’t!” I snapped, praying that Portia would hurry up and leave for her personal shopping appointment. Or that Isabella’s car would arrive soon. At the very least…before Gwendolyn got here. Needless to say, it did not.
“Gwendolyn’s here!” Portia hissed, jumping up, but not quick enough, from the chaise. Gwendolyn closed the glass door slowly behind her and threw Portia quite a severe look. Then she looked at me as though I was dressed in rags drenched in urine.
“Are you not booked in with Isabella today?” she asked in an unfortunate serious tone.
“Well, I am, but…” I started but she cut me off.
“Change.”
“But I…”
“Now!” My knees felt like they would knock and I gulped remembering what Portia had said about social security. Gwendolyn started clacking her way to the spiral staircase, stopping at the bottom step to turn around and look at us. “Things are getting far too relaxed around here,” she said icily. “And some of you need to seriously consider improving your loose attitudes,” she said threateningly, looking directly at me, then made her way up the stairs. Maybe I was reading into it a little too much, but the way she had said the word ‘loose’ made me wonder if she had heard about me being out with Charles Coombs and whether that word had a different meaning altogether.
I turned to Portia. “Erm…about that spare outfit…”
“Isabella! I think you are a manipulative insecure bitch and you really don’t deserve to have such a lovely, sweet, LOYAL man as Charles for your husband!” No, no. Sounds way too personal. I have to keep it professional. I don’t want her getting me fired. I was standing in the staff room, dressed in Portia’s Chanel dress and Jimmy Choos, looking at myself in the mirror, practising my scathing speech for Isabella. Boy oh boy, was I going to tell her! Problem was, I wasn’t quite sure of exactly what I was going to tell or how I was going to tell it! It probably couldn’t even be quite as scathing as I’d like…or I’d run the risk of getting fired. I definitely couldn’t call her a bitch…or there’d be no risks involved in that, I’d just get fired! Hmm. What to say? What to say?
Lauren popped her head round the door. “Isabella’s car is here,” she said. “Are you OK?” she asked, which meant she’d probably heard me talking to myself.
“I’m fine,” I smiled at her, inhaled deeply, and headed out to the car fully mentally psyched, ready to face her. Right now. “Oh,” I said to the driver, “I though Isabella was meeting me?”
“No, ma’am,” he replied, “I’m to take you to Giuseppe’s. She’s waiting for you there.” Great! Just great! I was mentally psyched to face her now! Not in fifteen minutes! I slumped back into the sumptuous passenger seat of Isabella’s Bentley, and could almost feel the bravado dissipating from within me. I looked out the window as we pulled out of Sheridan Place watching beautiful, well-dressed people, go about their designer boutique shopping business, as if they existed in another world. A world without bills and debts, where their sole concern was looking good. A world where they could make insane demands and expect to have orders followed. A world which placed them on an iconic pedestal so they could look down at the rest of us peasants. A world where Isabella Coombs belonged. And Charles too. I felt my heart started to beat faster and my hands felt clammy as I twisted them in my lap. C’mon Rebecca. Pull yourself together, I told myself silently, try to remember the speech. The speech. The speech! How did it go again?
“Good morning Rebecca,” Isabella said sounding strangely happy. So much so, I thought perhaps she hadn’t heard about how Charles and I laughed and joked and danced on the Epiphany the other night. Without saying a word, I sat down opposite her at one of the little brunch tables Giuseppe had laid out in the patio area, and watched as she poured me a cup of herbal tea. “Well,” she said, sounding full of the joys of spring, “things seem to be going very well.” I gave her my neutral Oh Really look. “It seems Charles has taken quite a shine to you.” I studied her face hoping for some other plausible explanation for her cheery mood, but the way she smiled back at me and half nodded as if to say: Well done Rebecca, confi
rmed what I’d already thought, but could not quite believe. This woman, this deranged, disturbed and seriously unhinged woman, was actually glad to hear that her husband had ‘taken a shine to’ another woman. Me! I suddenly felt sick to the stomach thinking that maybe this was how she got her kicks, and she’d been getting them at my expense. My emotional expense! She had set me up perfectly and had me playing the role of the immoral woman in this surreal scenario, which she’d invented! Well no bloody more!
“Isabella,” I said trying my best to sound calm, “I’m not doing this anymore.”
She placed her teaspoon calmly down on the saucer and looked at me with a touch of amusement as though she hadn’t quite heard what I’d said. “I beg your pardon?” she said lightly, but her narrowed eyes made it quite clear that if she had heard me correctly, that I had better not repeat it.
I gulped and tried to remember my speech, but the only bits I could remember: You are a manipulative insecure bitch, didn’t seem at all appropriate given the current climate. Plus I would’ve needed some guts to have said that, and guts right along with nerve had already walked out on me. “Erm…I just don’t feel comfortable doing this anymore.” She sipped her tea without looking at me and pursed her lips together. Tightly. “Plus I honestly don’t think your husband is the cheating kind. He’s had ample opportunity to make a pass at me but never has and I honestly don’t think he ever will.” I ignored the way she looked as if she wanted to leap across the table and gauge my eyes out, and gently tried to remind her of her supposed reason for starting this in the first place. “So you really don’t have to worry anymore. You wanted to know if he’d ever cheat, and now you know. He won’t. He’s loyal to you Isabella.”
She leaned her chin on her hand and looked at me as though she were seriously considering the consequences of decapitating me. “And you think for him to be calling or texting you at 7am in the morning is just him being loyal to me,” she said cynically. My mouth fell open. How on earth did she know what time of day Charles was calling or texting me?! Was she monitoring his BlackBerry? Worse still – was she monitoring mine? Then she looked me dead in the eye and said coldly: “Anyway, you can’t stop. I haven’t found out what I need to know and until I do, it’s business as usual.”
“I am not meeting with him again Isabella,” I said firmly.
“Oh really,” she said touching her fingers lightly around the teacup, “well that is a pity, because now I shall have to ask someone else to do it.” She looked at me. I looked back. “Yes, I think that’s what I’ll do. I’ll ask someone else to do it. Someone from…Pamper Moi.” I inhaled sharply, feeling as though Isabella had literally reached across the table and grabbed me by my throat and was squeezing so tightly I could barely breathe. She was blackmailing me and she had me by the scruff of my job! “Do you think that girl…oh what’s her name…Portia! That’s it. Do you think she would do it? Hmmm,” she mused, “maybe I should just have a little chat with Gwen, tell her how you’ve been helping me out… Maybe she could suggest someone. Oh, but then again, she’s such a stickler for rules. I get the impression she won’t be quite so understanding somehow.” Isabella knew as well as I did that Gwendolyn would fire me on the spot if she knew what I’d been doing. I’d be busking for food at Knightsbridge station. “Of course,” she looked at me and smiled sweetly, “you could always agree to do it just one more time? Just one more time. After that…you can forget either Charles or I ever existed.”
I desperately wanted to tell her where to shove her offer but the temporary satisfaction of doing so, versus the definite permanent unemployment that would soon follow, didn’t quite make the cut. “Just one more time?” I asked, not even trying to hide the hatred.
“You have my word,” she said.
“What an absolute bitch!” Abigail said, studying a hat that looked like a peacock strutting its stuff. Thankfully, not having to go back to the salon after my grim meeting with Isabella this morning, I’d arranged to meet up with Abby for some therapeutic, premature, Ascot hat shopping. I had just finished telling her about my failed attempt at a scathing speech, and how Isabella had cornered me earlier. “Do you really think she gets off on thinking about her husband being with other women?” she asked with more than a healthy amount of curiosity.
“What other explanation could there be? She knows her husband’s loyal,” I said flatly, ogling the astronomical price tag for a piece of felt with a few ostrich feathers stuck on it, masquerading as a hat. “Charles would never cheat on her.” Suddenly wondering how Isabella, a complete fruitcake, had managed to land someone as trustworthy and sane as Charles Coombs, who would never cheat, and here I was, trustworthy and reasonably sane, ending up with bloody Jeremy, who could do nothing but cheat! I tried on a beautiful pale pink Baron hat with a cluster of petals around the crown and looked at myself in the mirror, but the niggling thought at the back of my head, that none of this made any sense, still wouldn’t quieten down. “Strange though,” I whispered to Abby, not wanting the women shopping for mother of the bride hats to hear, “…strange how just for some kinky perversion she’d go to such extreme measures.”
“And expense!” Abby added, trying on something that looked a bit like a chandelier with tassels. She looked at me for approval. I shook my head; a definite NO. She shrugged. “Maybe,” she started with that mischievous twinkle of hers, “maybe she’s asked him to have a threesome with her and he’s flatly refused.” A few mothers of the brides shot disapproving glances at Abigail, which she ignored. “Maybe he won’t even use a dildo or a butt plug on her,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone. The mothers of the brides started grumbling all at once, removed their hats, and hurried far away from the two of us as was possible in a fifty foot boutique. “Maybe that’s why she’s been forced to think up some kinky scenario that involves him, but without him even knowing, so she can enjoy it all from a distance.”
“That’s absolutely barmy!”
“But she is a bit barmy isn’t she,” Abby laughed.
“Yes but you’d need to be a real sex fiend to think that lot up!”
“Hmmm, maybe,” she agreed half heartedly. “So how many more times do you have to see him?”
“Once.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Turn up, chit chat, watch the clock, then go home.” Abigail gave me a look as if to say: I don’t think so somehow. But I, of course, ignored it. I really had no idea of what I was going to do the next time I saw Charles. Would I say goodbye? Tell him I couldn’t see him again? I picked up a huge peach coloured floral bonnet. “What about this for Juju’s wedding? I asked as a joke. Abigail didn’t find it funny at all, and her face suddenly looked as though she’d just eaten something quite distasteful. “What?” I asked.
“Look, just don’t talk to me about Julia! Or her bloody wedding! Which is probably not even going to happen now. Seb’s such a stupid sod for putting up with her!”
“Oh no,” I said trying to tie the bonnet under my chin, “don’t tell me she’s cancelled the wedding again!”
“Worse!” Now I was confused. What could Julia possibly have done that was worse than cancelling her wedding for the third time? “She’s cheating on Seb!”
“WHAT! She actually told you that?”
Abby looked to the heavens. “Of course she didn’t tell me. She didn’t have to. I know these things. And she’s hardly being very sensitive about it either!” Then she looked at the bonnet tied under my chin in a huge Bo Peep bow and said in a monotone: “Rebecca, please take that thing off your head.”
“Abby! Julia would never cheat on Seb,” I said dismissing her allegations. “You know how prudish she is.”
“Well she’s crossed over to the dark side now. I spoke to Seb yesterday and he made a comment about the fun we girls were supposed to have had when Julia stayed over at mine Monday night.”
“I didn’t know Julia stayed over at yours on Monday.”
Abi
gail looked at me. “Because she didn’t.” She picked up a stunning huge black and ivory polka dot dupioni silk hat, with a black taffeta sash, a single red fleur, and black silk organza leaves.. “And I told Sebastian just as much. ‘Darling,’ I said, ‘you must have misheard Juju. She definitely wasn’t at my place on Monday.’ And do you know what he said then?” she asked trying on the blue hat. I shook my head no.
“He said, ‘Oh, well maybe she was at Becky’s…but I’m sure she said she was at Becky’s on Tuesday, not Monday’!”
“Why would he say that? Juju wasn’t at mine on…Tuesday? Wait a second. Are you trying to tell me Juju stayed out two nights?!” Abby raised her eyebrows.
“No Way!”
“Afraid so darling.” Abby looked in the mirror and adjusted the hat on her head to a more elegant angle. Hats really suited Abby and she looked truly amazing in this one. Like a real high society lady. Royalty even. But it wasn’t blue blood that ran through Abigail’s veins. “Personally I don’t give a fuck if Julia wants to start screwing around or not. But it’s not fair on Seb,” she said sounding a little frustrated. “She should let him go.”
“Split up with Seb?!”
“Why not?” she said flippantly. “Sebastian deserves to have someone who doesn’t constantly dick him around.”
“I’m calling Juju right now,” I said tapping her number into my mobile phone.
“She won’t answer. I’ve been calling since yesterday. I left a few scathing messages of my own too.”
I held the phone to my ear, listening to her answer machine message. “Juju, it’s me, Becky. Can you please give me a call back as soon as. I really do need to talk to you,” and clicked my phone shut.
“She won’t call you,” Abby said simply.
“Well she needs to call me before Sunday. Suppose Seb asks me about her staying over? What am I supposed to say? Do you think we should still go on Sunday?”
A Moral Dilemma: A Romantic Comedy Chick Lit Story Page 18
