‘Crumbs,’ I said, rocking back on my chair. ‘You’d jolly well better make lashings of it, then.’ Even Jack, I thought, might lose his appetite once confronted by this khaki-coloured mush, but I stopped myself from saying so out loud. Lulu might have been a pain in the neck, but Duncan, for some reason best known to himself, was fond of her. And I didn’t want to upset Duncan.
As usual when Lulu was being obnoxious he was keeping a low profile. He was sitting at the far end of the kitchen table, retouching a print he’d promised Jack as a belated birthday present. It was a photo of Alicia draped in a black veil, standing among the tombstones in Kensal Rise cemetery. Duncan might have gone off horror movies, but he had never quite managed to kick the cemetery habit. It was a striking photograph — made even more striking by his signature, which automatically added a bob or two to its market value.
Duncan had once stepped out with Alicia, and he had the photos to prove it. He made a habit of keeping in touch with his ex-girlfriends, even when they insisted on marrying jerk-offs like Jack. Duncan and Jack seemed to get on quite well — they were always discussing manly topics such as fast cars and football. You had to know Duncan as well as I did to realize that fast cars and football didn’t interest him at all. He was just trying to keep up appearances.
Alicia was usefully photogenic, so long as you overlooked her weak chin, and Duncan still used her as a model in some of the arty, non-commercial work he liked to turn out occasionally. He had photographed her in the nude when she’d been pregnant, and then he’d done some more nude studies of her with the new baby; the baby had been nude, as well. Alicia had framed one of the pictures and hung it over her dining table. Jack and Alicia were a thoroughly modern couple, and to look at them you would never have guessed that he had bribed her to give up her career so she could concentrate on breeding.
Lulu started chopping up parsley with a wicked-looking knife — rather closer to me than was necessary. ‘Watch out, Dora,’ she said. ‘Better move back, or you’ll lose another finger.’ Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Duncan glance up sharply. Lulu was being spiteful, but he refrained from giving her the ticking off she deserved. Once again, it was left to me to show her up.
‘It’s only the last joint,’ I said. ‘All the best villains have the top joint of their little finger missing.’
Lulu paused in her chopping and said ‘Huh?’ I adored making her look stupid in front of Duncan. Every so often, he had to be reminded that he had more in common with me than with her.
‘The 39 Steps,’ he said without bothering to look up again. ‘Or is it The Yakuza?’
Lulu repeated ‘Huh?’ and, pretending not to care, went back to her parsley. When she’d reduced it to a sloppy green mulch, she forced me to move even further away from the table so she could reach the blender. I’d been rocking my chair so much that one of the legs had worked itself loose. Now when I scraped it back across the floor, there was a faint but ominous splintering sound. The chair didn’t give way, not quite, but I sat quietly for a while, not wanting to push my luck.
To my face, and especially in front of Duncan, Lulu was all intimacy, but I knew she disliked me almost as much as I despised her. On her side, at least, it was nothing personal; she was the sort of woman who regards all other women as rivals. She hated leaving me alone with Duncan, even for a short while, imagining I was ready to jump on him the minute her back was turned. If she’d been at all perceptive, she would have realized it wasn’t his body that interested me. He was too thin and pale and neurotic-looking to qualify as beefcake. But she sensed there was something between us, and she was envious of that. Duncan and I had been through something she could never be a part of.
Like Duncan, Lulu didn’t talk much about her past. Unlike Duncan, this was not because she had something to hide, nor was it because she wanted to forget — it was because she realized her past just wasn’t terribly interesting. Her real name was Lorraine. Once, as a joke — because I knew she wouldn’t have the faintest idea what I was talking about — I asked her if she’d called herself Lulu after the heroine of the Frank Wedekind plays. She looked blank and said no, as a little girl she’d been rather partial to a pop song called 'I’m a Tiger’, and had named herself after the singer.
It had been easy for her to get modelling work, but she had never had the luck or drive to make it into the top ranks — only as far as one or two of the middlebrow women’s magazines, the sort you find on sale next to supermarket checkouts. I always reckoned she could have had a successful career posing topless for some of the cheesier tabloids, but she was too much of a snob. She had masses of streaky blonde hair and enormous breasts, and liked to pretend she was even more dimwitted than she really was. She was convinced that all men fancied her, and equally convinced that all women hated her because they were jealous of her face and figure. She was right about women not liking her, but wrong about the reasons. Women didn’t like her because she was a complete bonehead.
She’d latched on to Duncan because he was famous. Not a household name, exactly, but he was getting there; he’d already appeared on one or two TV chat shows, moaning about how tedious it was to be constantly jetting off to the Seychelles to take pictures of fifteen-year-old cuties in string bikinis. At twenty-five, Lulu was too old for this sort of lark, but she was still offered work when occasion demanded the sort of dollybird who could fill out a bodice. I suspected it wouldn’t be long now before she decided to pack in the career altogether in order to concentrate on family life. She was already pouncing on the flimsiest of pretexts to steer the conversation round to babies. Come to think of it, this was probably why Jack and Alicia had been invited over. Lulu would be able to display her maternal tendencies by cooing over Abigail.
When I had first caught up with Duncan again, eight years or so after all the unpleasantness, I found him living in the same building, but the place had been transformed. Previously, it had been a gloomy warren of rooms painted in bright peeling colours left over from the sixties: red and black, or purple, with gold stars stencilled on to the bathroom ceiling. The communal hallway, with its crumbling cornices and soggy carpet, had always been packed with bicycles and stacks of junk mail. Then an uncle had died and Duncan had inherited the leasehold, and he had started to do the place up. It was partly the physical effort of that which had hauled him up out of the slough of self-pity.
One by one the tenants had moved out, mostly because they were fed up with the constant hammering and drilling. Duncan sold the other flats at a vast profit and used the money to refit his own. Some of the interior walls had been removed to make one enormous living room with floor-to-ceiling windows and stripped-pine floorboards. When I first saw the changes, the place was barely recognizable. Which was probably the whole idea; he was trying to obliterate all trace of what had happened there.
Lulu didn’t bring much with her when she moved in — just a couple of Swiss Cheese plants and a trunkful of clothes and make-up. She insisted that Duncan sell two-thirds of his book collection so the remainder fitted neatly into a couple of alcoves instead of cluttering up the entire room. Each month she bought Vogue and the rest of the glossies and arranged them in neat stacks on the coffee table. She also bought a lot of imported Italian fashion magazines, though her knowledge of the language was limited to words such as l’uomo, donna and lei.