The doorbell rang. I peered through the spy hole looking out for creditors or unwelcome suitors, but all I could see were flowers. They turned out to be a huge bunch of pink roses in a plastic vase, filled with green spongy stuff, into which was stuck a mauve bow on a hatpin. I hoped for a blissful moment they were from Jeremy and felt a ridiculous thud of disappointment when the note in loopy florist’s handwriting said: ‘Don’t cut me out of your life altogether, all love, Charlie.’
Charlie, I reflected as I rinsed and re-rinsed, was going to be as hard to get out of my hair as conditioner. I wondered how the hell I was going to survive the next 30-odd hours until I saw Jeremy again. I felt a restlessness like milk coming up to the boil, an excitement sometimes pleasurable, but far more often, painful.
Chapter Four
The heat wave had set in relentlessly. The traffic glittered and flashed in the sunshine as it crawled up Piccadilly. The park was full of typists in bikinis, sliding off the deckchairs as the park attendant approached with his ticket machine. I could feel the tarmac burning through the soles of my shoes as I crossed the road to Freddy’s. I nipped into the Ladies first to tidy my hair and take the shine off my nose. I was wearing new pale pink dungarees with nothing underneath. I toyed with the idea of wearing them when I travelled down with Gareth tomorrow.
‘Thank you very much,’ I said in a loud voice to the cloakroom attendant as I left, just to draw her attention to the fact I’d put 50p in the saucer. Since I’d met Jeremy, sheer happiness made me overtip everyone.
Freddy’s was packed as usual and giving off the same my-dear-punctuated roar as a smart wedding. Along the bar sat advertising executives with brushed forward hair and romantic looking young men wearing open-necked shirts. Chatting them up were beautiful girls, their streaked hair swinging, their blusher in exactly the right place, their upper lips painted a perfect crimson double circumflex. As they sat, fingers tapping on their slim thighs, eyes flickering over each other’s shoulders to see who had just come in, they constantly checked their appearance in the mirror above the bar. Freddy’s was the current favourite haunt of trendies and show business people, anyone in fact who was important enough to get in, and rich enough to get out.
Freddy, a mountain of a man with a face as red as a Dutch cheese, was serving behind the bar.
‘Hullo, ugly mug,’ he bawled at me. ‘How the hell did you get past the doorman?’ Nearby drinkers looked at me in admiration. Only favourites and the famous got insulted. Freddy leaned over and pumped my hand vigorously.
‘Where the hell you been anyway, Octavia? Sneaking over to Arabella’s, I suppose. Can’t say I blame you, I eat there too. The prices here are too high for me.’ He bellowed with laughter, then added, ‘Your no-good brother’s already at the table upstairs drinking himself stupid.’
I followed the smell of garlic, wine and herbs up to the dining-room, waited in the doorway until I had everyone’s undivided attention, then sauntered across the room. The pink dungarees definitely had the desired effect; the front flap only just covered my nipples.
Xander was sitting at a window table, flipping through a Sotheby’s catalogue. He looked up, smiled, and kissed me on both cheeks. ‘Hullo, angel, you look positively radiant. Have I forgotten your birthday or something?’
Waiters immediately rushed up, spreading a napkin across my knees, pushing in my chair, getting a waiting bottle of Poully Fuissé out of an ice bucket, and filling up my glass. Xander ordered another large whisky.
Perhaps it’s because he is my brother that I always think Xander is the best looking man in the world. He is slim and immensely elegant, with very pale patrician features, brilliant grey eyes, fringed by long dark lashes, and light brown hair, the colour mine was before I started bleaching it. Even on the hottest day of the year he gives the impression of a saluki shivering with overbreeding. As usual he was exquisitely dressed in a pale grey suit, grey and white striped shirt, and a pink tie.
Impossibly spoilt, with all the restlessness that comes with inherited wealth, he moved through life like a prince, expecting everyone to do exactly what he wanted, and capable of making himself extremely disagreeable if they did not. Few people realized how insecure he was underneath, or that he employed a technique of relentless bitching to cover up his increasing black glooms. He was always sweet to me, but I was very glad he was my brother and not a boyfriend. Part of his charm was that he always gave one his undivided attention. He didn’t need to look over your shoulder, because he was always the one person people were looking over other people’s shoulders to see.
On closer examination that day, he looked rather ill, his eyes laced with red, his hands shaking. He had placed himself with his back to the window, but still looked much younger than his thirty years.
‘How are you?’ I said.
‘A bit poorly. I ran into a bottle of whisky last night. Later I landed up at Jamie Bennett’s. We smoked a lot of grass. I’m sure it had gone off. There was a case of stuffed birds in the corner and Jamie started cackling with laughter, saying they were flying all over the room, then suddenly he was sick in a wastepaper basket.’
‘What happened to you?’
‘I started feeling frightful too, and decided I must get home, so I drove very slowly to Paddington, but it wasn’t there, so I came back again.’
I giggled. ‘So you never got home?’
He shot me a sideways glance. ‘Can I tell Pamela I spent last night at your place?’
‘Of course,’ I said lightly. ‘It’s only another point she’ll notch up against me.’
Pamela had never forgiven me for slashing my wrists the day she and Xander got married, taking all the attention from her.
‘How’s our dear mother?’ I said.
‘Absolutely awful! You’ve no idea how lucky you are not being the apple of her eye. She rings up every day. Gerald is evidently threatening to walk out if she doesn’t stop drinking, so she has to resort to having quick swigs in the lavatory.’
‘Does she ever say anything about me?’ I asked. Even now I can’t mention my mother’s name without my throat going dry.
‘Never,’ said Xander. ‘Do you want to order?’
I wasn’t hungry, but I hadn’t eaten since yesterday lunch-time, and the wine was beginning to make me feel dizzy.
‘I’ll have a Cobb salad and a grilled sole,’ I said.
‘You really do look marvellous,’ said Xander. ‘What’s up? Someone must be. Who’s he married to?’
‘No one,’ I said, grooving four lines on the table cloth with my fork.
‘There must be some complication.’
‘He’s engaged,’ I said.
‘I didn’t know anyone did that any more. Who to?’
‘An eager overgrown schoolgirl; she’s so fat, wherever you stand in the room she’s beside you.’
‘Unforgiveable,’ said Xander with a shudder. ‘What’s he like?’
‘Tall and blond — almost as beautiful as you, and so gentle and sympatico.’
‘Rich?’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t asked him; not particularly.’
‘Well that’s no good then.’ Xander broke a roll impatiently with his fingers, then left it. He watched his figure like a lynx. Then he sighed, ‘You’d better tell me about him.’
Conversation was then impossibly punctuated by waiters laying tables, asking who was having the smoked trout, giving us our first courses, brandishing great phallic pepper pots over our plates, and pouring us more wine. A quarter of an hour later I was still picking bits of bacon out of my avocado and chopped spinach.