A Conspiracy of Friends (14 page)

“No, you’re right.” He was looking up at the ceiling now. “You were tied up with something, weren’t you? Are you still, or could I …”

She waited for his words. Already she had decided on her answer.

“… could I take you for dinner somewhere? I got paid today.”

She looked into her coffee mug. “As it happens, yes. Thanks. I was going to be doing something, but not any more.”

“That’s great. Well, could you show me the room? Not that I’m going to turn it down but I suppose I should take a look.”

She turned and led him to Dee’s old room. She felt light-headed. She would phone James and … and put him off. She could tell him … something, and he wouldn’t mind—or not all that much.

T
HE LIE WAS
very easy, as so many lies are. Of course, Caroline did not tell James that she was going out, simply explaining that she did not feel “one hundred per cent” and would prefer him to cook for her “some other time.” The words “one hundred per cent” were carefully chosen: none of us, she told herself, ever feels one hundred per cent—a state of health beyond the dreams of even the most cheerfully fit. Ninety-five per cent, perhaps—that was feasible, and would be a state of well-being spoiled only by the occasional physical twinge from the provinces of our body; but one hundred per cent, no, that was a state of bodily nirvana which none of us could claim. So she was not telling a lie, she reasoned, even if it
felt
like one.

There was concern in James’s voice. “You haven’t got this bug that’s going round?” he asked. “A friend of mine had it and he said he felt really awful. He brought up this green stuff, you know, and he hadn’t eaten anything green for ages. So where did it come from? Do you think it was bile? Bile’s green, isn’t it? Like envy.”

“No, I haven’t brought up any green stuff. It’s not like that.”

James was relieved. “Good, because that bug lasts for ten days. And you feel really washed out afterwards. Like a rag.” He paused. “You don’t think it would cheer you up to be cooked for? I don’t like to think of you sitting alone in your garret feeding yourself warmed-up gruel. Let me come and do the Florence Nightingale thing.”

“No!” She spoke rather quickly, and it sounded rude. “I mean, no thanks. I’ll be fine—I really will.”

“Well, I’ll think of you. I’ll keep the Arborio rice I bought, and the bottle of wine. But I don’t think the mushrooms will keep.
They’re rather old, I’m afraid—not that it’s easy to tell with mushrooms, as you know. Sometimes they get so
traumatised
by being taken out of the forest that they look quite
discouraged
.”

“It must be a shock for them. Poor mushrooms.”

There was a silence. “You’re sure you’re going to be all right? Quite sure?”

She closed her eyes; James was not making it any easier for her. “Quite sure.”

“Shall I phone you a little later?” James asked solicitously. “Just to check you haven’t taken a turn for the worse.”

“No, don’t phone.” Her reply was once again too quick, and she immediately backtracked. “I might phone you. But let’s leave it …”

“In case you’re sleeping,” supplied James. “Of course.”

They rang off, and Caroline sank her head in her hands. She had left Ronald in the kitchen while she made the telephone call, having told him that she needed to go to her bedroom to change. Another lie, even if one of no consequence and not rationalised, as had been her excuse to James, as some sort of half-truth. Lying could become second nature, she thought, as it was with some people—with spin doctors, perhaps, those manipulators of truth who must become accustomed to twisting everything; like a bowler who cannot bowl straight, or a pastry chef expert in the making of plaited bread rolls.

She stood up, combed her hair and looked in the mirror. She decided to change her top, and to add a necklace—the one with the single pearl and the gold heart. She picked a top with straps from her wardrobe and then slipped the necklace round her neck. She glanced in the mirror again, and froze. The gold heart caught the light and winked back at her. James had given her the necklace two birthdays ago; she had forgotten, but now it came back to her. He had denied himself lunch for three weeks in order to buy it, and now … She felt herself blush—a hot feeling of shame—and then unfastened the necklace and put it back in the small leather-covered
jewel box her grandmother had given her. Her grandmother would never have behaved like this with one of the young men she had coyly described as her
beaux
. She would never have cancelled an evening because something more exciting had turned up.

But it was different now. Today it was every girl for herself, and if that meant the occasional
ruse
, then it was within the rules, such as they were. If James had been a girlfriend there would have been no difficulty: she would have telephoned and explained the situation, and the girlfriend would have understood. The prospect of dinner with a man always trumped prior commitments to one’s own sex; everybody knew that.

But James was a man, and the rules about cancelling one man for another were very different. In fact, they forbade it, unless of course one was getting rid of the cancelled man. If a relationship had come to an end, then the outstanding commitments it entailed could be brought to an end too. If one had, for example, agreed to go on holiday with a boyfriend and then split up before the holiday took place, one certainly did not have to go; it was obvious. And yet, Caroline was not getting rid of James—she wanted to keep him—and therefore the analogy did not apply. It was all very complicated.

She was looking for another necklace when she heard a knock on the door.

“Caroline?”

“Yes.”

The door opened slightly. “Do you mind?”

Ronald stood in the doorway. She was not sure whether she minded or not.

“You didn’t show me your room,” he continued, advancing hesitantly. “Gosh, it’s really nice. Feminine but not … well, not too girly. What a view.”

She smiled. “Yes, it is nice, isn’t it? You’ll approve of the light, I suppose.”

“I’ll be perfectly happy with the room I’m getting,” said Ronald. “But of course it would be nice to be in here.”

For a sudden, heady moment she imagined keeping a boy in her room—a boy such as Ronald—like some handsome, exotic pet.

“We should go,” she said. “I’m actually quite hungry.”

R
ONALD HAD A
Greek restaurant in mind—a place in Islington that he had found a few weeks previously, when he came to London for his placement interview. It was cheap, he told Caroline, but the food was “absolutely genuine” and served in generous quantities. “None of your
nouvelle cuisine
,” he said, “so we won’t go hungry.”

They made the journey by tube. Ronald said very little on the way, but Caroline did not find the absence of conversation uncomfortable. James would have talked non-stop, and been more or less oblivious of his surroundings; Ronald, though,
watched
. And he was not uncommunicative; Ronald, she discovered, talked with his eyes, exchanging glances with her that conveyed a great deal. When a man with an eye-patch and a Salvador Dalí moustache entered the carriage, the look that Ronald exchanged with her was more eloquent than words, and when the Dalí-esque passenger got off and a nun carrying a guitar boarded the train, there was another meaningful look that said everything that needed to be said.

In the restaurant, Ronald ordered a bottle of wine that they broached while perusing the menu. Raising his glass, he smiled at Caroline. “To living together,” he said, and quickly added, “Well, sort of—you know what I mean.”

“To sharing,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s it. To sharing.”

They placed their orders and while they were waiting for their first course, Ronald asked Caroline about the others in the flat. Why had Dee left? Where was Jo? Did people share the cooking?

Caroline told him about Dee and her enthusiasm for vitamins. “You’ll still find little plastic bottles of vitamins all over the flat,” she said. “And colonic irrigation bits and pieces. That was another of her enthusiasms—colonic irrigation.”

Ronald blushed. “Oh. Well, I suppose we all need a hobby.”

“We don’t need that one,” said Caroline. “And then there’s Jenny. She sort of lives in the flat at the moment, but is away a lot with a new job she’s got. It’s half in Brussels, and so she’s over there most of the time. She’s some sort of
fonctionnaire
, and she says she has nothing, but nothing, to do all day. She’s very well paid, though. So until Jo gets back from Western Australia, it’ll just be me and you.”

Ronald sipped at his wine. “That’ll be nice.”

She caught her breath. There was only one way of interpreting that remark: he wanted to be alone with her. She found the thought oddly exciting, and while she knew that she should be cautious, she had no hesitation in enjoying the thrill it gave her.

Ronald looked about him. “Not very busy,” he said. “I suppose it’s Tuesday and people don’t go out on a Tuesday. Except people like us. Sad, Tuesday people.” He laughed. A small basket of bread had been brought to the table, and he selected a piece to dip in olive oil.

“Have you ever been to Greece, Caroline?”

She told him that she had been once—during a university vacation she and a friend had travelled to Rhodes.

“I used to go a lot,” he said. “Greece and Sweden. That’s where I liked to go. Still do. I remember my first trip to Greece. I had just discovered
The Magus
. You know it? John Fowles. I remember reading
it with complete fascination, although in retrospect I’m not sure what the story meant. But for those few weeks I was under its spell.”

“And Sweden?”

“I first went to Sweden when I was fourteen. My father’s sister—my aunt—married a Swede and so I’ve got Swedish cousins. They used to invite me to stay with them in the summer. They had a cottage on one of those islands in the Stockholm archipelago. Do you know they have about twenty-five thousand islands there? Imagine that. Twenty-five thousand islands.

“On the Swedish side of the family,” Ronald went on, “there was a great-uncle who was very friendly with the sculptor Carl Milles. The great-uncle bought quite a number of Milles’s works and I remember seeing them just sitting out in the garden—these gorgeous floating figures. I took it all for granted.

“We used to swim from a jetty in front of the house. You simply dived into the water and swam. It was very clear and really quite warm. All of us—all the cousins—used to swim together. I remember thinking: I wish I were Swedish. It’s marvellous being Swedish, you know. It’s such a rational country and everything is so beautiful.”

Caroline listened intently. There was something seductive about Ronald’s conversation and, listening to these observations, it seemed to her she was being shown a richer, more engaged way of relating to the world.

“But you can never really become Swedish,” Ronald went on. “You can become American; you can become British. But you can’t be a Swede just by living there or speaking the language. It goes deeper than that.”

The waiter lowered plates onto the table in front of them and flourished an impossibly large pepper mill over the food.

“I don’t know why they have those ridiculous pepper mills,” said Ronald when the waiter had gone. “Such clunky design.”

“To stop people stealing them,” said Caroline. “We have become so dishonest in this country that even the pepper mills aren’t safe any more.”

“Are we more dishonest than anybody else?” asked Ronald.

“Yes,” said Caroline. “I think we are. We didn’t use to be. But we are now. I read about it in the papers. It’s official.”

And at this point, as Caroline was pronouncing on dishonesty, forgetting her glaring lie of a couple of hours earlier, the door of the restaurant was pushed open and James walked in, accompanied by another young man wearing large-framed glasses.

James and Caroline saw one another at the same moment. James stood quite still. He looked at Caroline, who could not bring herself to meet his gaze. She looked away, and then, when she snatched a quick glance a moment or two later, James was still staring straight at her. She thought: The odds against this are ridiculously high; this restaurant, tonight, this exact time.
This shouldn’t have happened
.

“Do you know them?” asked Ronald, looking over his shoulder.

“Yes,” muttered Caroline. “Or one of them.”

James was conferring discreetly with his companion. The other young man listened, and then nodded. They turned round and left the restaurant.

“Are you all right?” asked Ronald.

It took her a little while to answer. “Yes, I suppose I am. Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”

Ronald reached for his glass again. “I wouldn’t mind working in Sweden,” he said. And then, changing the subject rather quickly, he asked Caroline if he could stay in the flat that night. “I’ve been staying with a friend in Hounslow,” he said. “But it’s such a long way out, and it would be easier to stay in Pimlico. I’ve got spare things in a bag at the office, and I can shower there. We have these showers, you see, for the workaholics. That is, if you don’t mind?”

She thought for a moment. She felt raw from being found out
by James and did not relish the prospect of returning to the flat by herself.

“Of course you can stay,” she said. “You can have Jo’s room if you like, because the bed’s made up.”

There was a momentary flash of disappointment in his expression, but it passed so quickly that Caroline thought perhaps she had misinterpreted it. He thanked her, and raised his glass again. “To Corduroy Mansions,” he said.

She returned the toast, but even as she did so she was thinking of the look James had given her before he left the restaurant: it was predominantly one of reproach, but there was sadness and regret too. She had lost the friendship, she realised, of her closest friend in London; and replaced it with what? The interest of a young man about whom she knew very little, and whose feelings for her—if any—were uncertain and untested. It was hardly a good exchange.
You stupid, stupid girl
, she said to herself; but not in her own voice, oddly enough—her mother’s.