Not like it really made a difference. But in those twenty-one years, I was pretty sure that I'd put up with just as much from her as she had from me. More. I added tonight's party to the balance against her. She owed me at least a year of good behavior for that one.
She might at least have warned me.
Pammy aside, I wouldn't have minded a drink, just to have something in my hands. A drink, held debonairly aloft, goes a long way to inspiring social confidence. It's as much the pose as the contents. Combine it with a tinkling laugh and an appropriately rapt expression and, after a while, even I might be fooled.
But Colin was standing at the bar, like a linebacker guarding a goalpost, or whatever it is that linebackers guard.
Right, I told myself. This was it. Just to prove that he didn't mean anything to me at all, I was going to walk right up there and say hi, just as I would to any other random person on whom I had never had the teeny-tiniest hint of a crush.
"Hi!" I said brightly, following it up with a little wave. "How are you?"
Okay, maybe I was overdoing the gushing bit.
"I'm fine," said Colin. No gushing there. His entire demeanor gave a whole new meaning to the word "chill." "You?"
"Vodka tonic, please," I instructed the man behind the bar. Pammy's mother only allows drinks with a clear base, for the sake of her carpets. It's a long-established policy, dating back to their days in New York. Pammy and I were only allowed to have Coca-Cola in the kitchen and den. This, by the way, was in effect even before the Marshmallow Fluff episode.
"I'm doing well," I said over my shoulder to Colin. "Same old, same old."
The bartender fumbled with the tonic bottle, one of those funny little half-sized bottles, rather than the big, plastic ones we have at home. It was empty. Kneeling, the bartender started scavenging under the table.
Colin propped an elbow against the table. "You didn't bring Jay."
Jay? Oh, right. "He went home for Thanksgiving."
"And didn't take you?"
Under the table, the bartender's progress was marked by the clink of glass and crackle of cardboard. I was half tempted to tap him on the shoulder and tell him to give up already; I would just take my vodka straight. Anything so that I could take my glass and go.
"You know how it is," I said, trying not to peer too visibly over the edge of the table. "I had work to do."
"Hard on you." He didn't sound terribly sympathetic.
"I'll live." I accepted my long-awaited glass from the bartender, and smiled a stiff social smile at Colin. "I really should go say hi to Pammy's mother. Good talking to you."
"You, too." Colin raised his glass a fraction of an inch in farewell.
"Later, then. Bye-eee!"
Yes, I actually said "bye-eee." There is no accounting for what the brain will produce under stress.
Since I really did have to say hi to Pammy's mother, I wandered in that direction, wondering how I had contrived to sound quite so moronic in all of three or four sentences.
I glanced back over my shoulder at Colin, who was not glancing at me.
How dared he ignore me when I was working so hard at ignoring him? It was downright ungentlemanly of him.
Oh, wait. It wasn't supposed to matter anymore. I didn't care what Colin Selwick thought of me. I took a sip of my vodka tonic. Heavy on the vodka, light on the tonic, it tasted a bit like window cleaner (not that I've ever tasted window cleaner, but I imagine it has the same astringent properties). Drink any more of that, and not only would I not remember that I was supposed to be totally indifferent to Colin Selwick, I wouldn't be capable of coherent thought at all. Feeling my lips go numb from that one small sip, I deposited the glass discreetly on a small table next to an unnaturally lush potted plant and went to exchange hellos with Pammy's mother.
Mrs. Harrington was still holding court on the small sofa in the front room, her ash-blond hair cut in a neat shoulder-length bob, brushed to the shiny patina of the Bombay chest in the hall. Her face, with its retroussй nose and wide cheekbones, was more piquant than pretty, clear illustration while I was growing up that grooming and charm get you much farther than raw good looks.
Pammy was going to look just like her in another twenty years or so. I could see it happening already, although Pammy would vehemently deny it.
"Hi, Mrs. Harrington!" Under the influence of old habit, my voice went up half an octave into schoolgirl sweetness. "Thank you for having me here tonight."
"Eloise!" Mrs. Harrington lifted her cheek to be kissed. After so many years in the States, her accent was neither recognizably American nor English, but faltered somewhere in between. "We couldn't leave you alone for Thanksgiving."
"Mom and Dad send their love."
"How is your sister?"
"Enjoying college."
Mrs. Harrington narrowed her eyes shrewdly. "Not too much, I hope."
"You know Jillian," I said, with a grin. "But somehow she always pulls through in the end. I don't know how she does it."
Mrs. Harrington wagged a finger at me. "It's those Kelly brains. I don't know how Pammy would have gotten through algebra without you."
Well, that much was true.
I made modest noises of negation, anyway. It was part of the ritual, a strophe and antistrophe of compliment and demurral as stylized and immutable as the recitation of the litany, with Mrs. Harrington's Chanel No. 5 taking the place of incense.
The amenities having been observed, she smiled and gestured to someone standing behind me. "Do come over! Don't be shy."
The word "shy" should have tipped me off. Most of Pammy's friends don't answer to that description. Like her, they tend to be the self-assured product of a transatlantic education. There was only one of Pammy's circle I could think of to whom the adjective applied.
Stepping aside, I made room in front of the couch for Colin's sister.
Serena didn't look anything like her brother. Where Colin was big and blond and tanned—like the worst sort of Abercrombie ad, I thought disagreeably—Serena invited trite and mawkish analogies straight out of Victorian children's literature, phrases on the order of "as delicate as a woodland fawn." She shared Colin's hazel eyes, but in her narrow, high-cheekboned face, they had the wistful cast of a Pre-Raphaelite Lady of Shallot gazing through her casement window at faerie lands forlorn. Her skin was as pale as Colin's was browned, and her hair was a sleek chestnut that vindicated all the conditioner manufacturers' claims about their products.
Under her shiny hair, Serena's face seemed even paler than usual, the hollows under her eyes more pronounced. In contrast to the bright raspberry of her pashmina, her skin had a sickly cast to it that suggested a lack of food, or sleep, or both.
Pammy had mentioned a bad breakup in the not so distant past, but I wondered if there was more to it than that. The wrists protruding from under her pashmina were as brittle as the winter-bare twigs outside the drawing room window.
"Eloise"—Mrs. Harrington's voice recalled me to the conversation—"have you met Serena Selwick? She was at St. Paul's with Pammy."
Not only did I know Serena, I had held her head over a toilet bowl during a sudden bout of food poisoning. That sort of thing enhanced acquaintance in a hurry. It was also not the sort of story one related to one's friend's mother right before the consumption of large quantities of food.
"We've met," I said instead, leaning in to brush a kiss across the air next to Serena's cheek. "It's good to see you again."
Serena brushed her already immaculate hair back into place in a habitual gesture. "I'm sorry I missed you in Sussex."
Sussex. Scene of my ignoble crush. I was glad Serena hadn't been there to witness me making eyes at her brother. For all her timidity—and that perfect hair—I rather liked Serena.