Gifted and Talented (5 page)

Isabel nodded in delight. She was more than happy to fill the bestie gap. She’d never really had a bestie before.

‘That’s that then,’ Ellie said, pleased. ‘Maybe we could go to the Incinerator together later?’ She was rearranging a few things on her desk, including the large pinboard covered in invitations, postcards and notes that she had had since she was thirteen.

Isabel stared. ‘But I’ve hardly got anything in my bin yet, I haven’t been here long enough.’

Ellie was giggling. ‘The Incinerator’s what they call the dining hall.’

Isabel had not yet visited the dining hall and had been prepared to accept the official prospectus description of its being ‘a great, white, light-filled circular space occupying the central position beneath the college’s distinctive dome.’ But, according to Ellie, it looked like an industrial plant crossed with a hospital mortuary. ‘And not in a good way.’

‘And afterwards we could go to the Turd – that’s the bar, you know . . .’ Ellie continued.

‘Yes, I know,’ Isabel interjected, keen to dispel the impression she knew absolutely nothing about anything.

‘And then we come back here and watch a film on my laptop. I’ve got loads of romcoms.’

Ellie had it all mapped out, Isabel thought, happy to be bowled along in her slipstream. Bars and romcoms. It wasn’t the life she was used to, not at all.

Outside, in the garden, Diana was getting tired. Gardening was so exhausting when you did it all day. You ached all over, your extremities numbed. Hopefully she would get used to it; she would have to.

Perhaps she was overdoing it, working on Sunday when, officially, her first day was tomorrow, Monday. But the thought of sitting at home when there was so much to be done was impossible. There were issues with her new home that she chose not to face just yet: the neighbours, mainly.

Diana hastily reminded herself that, even in the wealthy part of London she had lived in, there had been neighbour problems. Different ones, perhaps. Her old neighbour, Sara Oopvard, she of the Queen’s gardeners, had been particularly ghastly. It seemed almost incredible, now that money was so tight, to recall how freely Sara had spent it – and no doubt still did – on services of such marginal necessity as the professional from the London Zoo aquarium who came to clean out the fish tank. Or the fashionable interior designer who, each December, came to ‘theme’ the Oopvard Christmas tree.

Sara, English wife of a rich Dutch banker, had been the first to drop her like a hot brick once divorce loomed, Diana remembered. But that had actually been a relief. Rosie need not, any longer, go for playdates with Milo, the Oopvards’ spoilt son.

Flashing now into Diana’s mind came the memory of Milo at his last birthday party. ‘Mu-um! Cassius and Ludo’ve dressed as Buzz Lightyear as well. They’ve copied me! You got me the same costume as everybody else. I
hate
it!’ He had ripped savagely at the Velcro on his spacesuit front. Diana felt a warm sense of relief that she never had to see the Oopvards again. However bad the new neighbours, they could not be as bad as the old.

Gathering her gardening tools, she pictured Sara in the gym, or on Twitter, or donning paper pants for a spray tan. Or competing away – and definitely not eating – in some fashionable organic café against other aimless and wealthy wives in the same boat – or yacht. Or perhaps having the muslin-covered fingers of a Hungarian facial specialist rubbing creams into her Botoxed forehead. Or as one of a privileged coven complaining around skinny lattes about Svetlana’s calling Moscow whenever she felt like it, or Imelda’s inability to manage the six-ring burner. Rosie’s own nanny, Hannah, had been a large, slow-witted creature employed solely because everyone they knew had such ‘help’. Diana, who had long wanted to look after Rosie herself, had been secretly glad to see the broad back of her.

Divorce had given her this opportunity. At first, accustomed to leaving the details to someone else, Diana had constantly found herself in sudden rain without a coat for her daughter, in a muddy park without a change of clothes. She had never had a bottle of water when Rosie was thirsty. She had not understood the importance of frequent loo breaks. Or how dips in sugar levels triggered mood swings.

Gradually, she had broken through. Among the things Diana now knew was that Rosie preferred crisps to chocolate and, while hating broccoli, would eat carrots. Rosie liked to draw and loved to swim. So far as books were concerned, she preferred Malory Towers to St Clare’s, Just William to Horrid Henry and, while she liked Harry Potter, she preferred Lemony Snicket’s ill-starred Baudelaire family, especially the baby, Sunny. She also loved Sherlock Holmes. Each new insight was a source of joyful fascination to Diana, mixed with guilt. She should have insisted Hannah went long ago. The person she was now would never allow someone else to take such a primary role in Rosie’s life, even if money was no object.

Diana looked carefully about to make sure no tools had been left. She could not afford to lose a single one. Then she walked over to where Rosie was reading in the back of the car.

Diana’s afternoon had been punctuated by near-constant glances over to the battered blue banger, which contained the single thing most precious in the world to her. But Rosie had not moved.

‘You won’t be bored?’ Diana had asked, anxiously.

‘I’m OK, Mummy, honestly,’ Rosie said, smiling and shaking her light brown curls. ‘Don’t worry, Mum,’ she added reassuringly.

Rosie had been as good as her word, Diana reflected now. As good as gold. Autumn gold.

There were a couple of mature beeches overlooking the car park. Diana admired them as she carried the tools towards her car boot. She loved beeches, especially at this time of year, their formerly rich green leaves turning slowly through gold to burnished copper. Sometimes, to show off, one tree did all three at once. Whereas the poor old elms, so stately in the summer, lost their leaves like men lost their hair: the top was the first to go. Simon’s early-onset baldness had been a source of agony to him. Perhaps, Diana reflected, it was that which had made him vulnerable to predatory women. She blinked, recognising a sea change. She had been, up to this point, too angry with her ex-husband to care in the least about his motivation.

It was getting colder. There was a nip in the air, tweaking the tops of her ears and tightening the end of her nose. Diana felt glad of her hat, however unflattering. What did it matter if only stupid people like the cyclist saw it?

She opened the boot and placed the tools carefully in. Rosie was sprawled on the back seat placidly reading
In The Fifth At Malory Towers
. It took some time, even after opening the door and speaking to her several times, to catch her attention.

Diana got in, her heart sinking slightly at the mess. The front passenger seat was awash with battered cardboard boxes, empty plastic plant pots and plant markers. The days of valeted limousines were over, she reminded herself. And, on the whole, unlamented.

Apart from in one respect, possibly. It was not enough, Diana thought, that she herself had survived her own change in circumstances. Rosie’s great test was yet to come. None of what had happened was her fault, but was she about to suffer for the folly of her parents?

Diana could hardly believe how Rosie seemed amazingly happy, in spite of everything. She was sure she must be pretending in some way, and yet, Globe acting lessons notwithstanding, would a nine-year-old be so accomplished a dissembler? Nonetheless, she had worried herself sleepless that Rosie would miss her old lifestyle, her princess bedroom, her riding lessons, her friends and their birthday parties that seemed to get more elaborate and expensive every year. One of the last Rosie had attended involved stretch limos and party bags containing DVDs and Dior make-up.

More than anything else she had worried about how Rosie would cope with school. It was her first day at her new one, Campion Primary, tomorrow. Diana’s secret terror was that her daughter would be bullied. Would she be picked on for her refined manners and accent? For the fact she had come from a different world?

Smart’s Preparatory School in West London had occupied a white stucco town house with a portico. Rosie had worn a blazer and a stiff-brimmed straw boater. The school’s website was slick, as was the silver-fox headmaster, whose blog successfully balanced amusing with authoritative. Among Rosie’s fellow pupils, the offspring of media bigwigs, film stars, oligarchs, Cabinet ministers and royalty (both home-grown and European) had been two a penny. The school’s narrow hallway had been, on a daily basis, a combination of the
Vanity Fair
post-Oscars party and the
Newsnight
greenroom, as high-end TV presenters pushed past Westminster power brokers. Less-rich parents, it was said, took out mortgages in advance of the summer fête. This was so they could bid for raffle prizes ranging from trips in other parents’ private planes to walk-on parts in their films.

Meanwhile, Campion Primary was a state school of some two hundred and seventy pupils and had seemed, to Diana’s panicking eyes, a shanty town of prefabricated and temporary-looking units set on broken tarmac and cracked concrete. Of the notices stuck all over the walls, the emergency, anti-bullying and Childline numbers were the ones that leapt out. The acting headmistress, during their brief meeting, had seemed a severely harassed woman mainly in the business of crowd control.

To make things worse, the first term of the year had already started. Friends, Diana fretted, would have been made, alliances formed. It was into this alien world that Rosie would walk alone tomorrow. And yet she seemed utterly unruffled. Diana urged herself to feel the same.

‘I love this film,’ Ellie sighed joyfully. ‘It’s the best bit, too.’

Isabel, snuggled amid the teddies and the cushions on Ellie’s bed, felt almost ridiculously happy. Uni was bliss, as Ellie herself might say. Dinner at the Incinerator had been great fun, despite all the hard concrete surfaces making for a deafening noise of clattering plates, clashing cutlery and voices. But Isabel had loved looking about at all the other new students from the safe haven of Ellie’s companionship and thinking how alone and vulnerable she would have felt without her.

The food had been, at best, unremarkable. ‘We used to have something like this at school; we used to call it “Dead Man’s Leg”,’ Ellie said, poking the unidentifiable meat about her plate. ‘And that pudding of yours is just like one we used to have at St Mary’s. “Nun’s Toenails”, we used to call it.’

Isabel had laughed. Even the bad food at Ellie’s school sounded fun. In the Turd, afterwards, she had sat against the blue-lit, curved concrete walls and – after Ellie’s example – drunk vodka while her companion assessed the romantic possibilities. ‘Not great,’ was Ellie’s conclusion after a swift scrutiny of the available talent. ‘Fat hippies, mostly, and Goths in guyliner.’ Isabel wasn’t sure what guyliner was, but there was no disagreeing with the rest; large, shambling long-haired types in black T-shirts seemed overrepresented in her view.

‘No one to practise my snogging skills on,’ Ellie lamented, then giggled at Isabel’s expression. ‘You looked so shocked! But that’s pretty much all we learnt at school: how to snog and how not to get a hangover.’

Isabel stared at the vodka in her hand and felt she didn’t have much of a clue about either. She felt lumpishly unsophisticated in comparison. But Ellie must have learnt something else at school, surely, or she wouldn’t be here.

They went back to Ellie’s room and set up the laptop.

‘We spent our lives watching DVDs at school,’ Ellie said.

Isabel was beginning to feel she had attended Ellie’s south-of-England girls’ school herself. Perhaps she just wished she had been part of the jokes, the camaraderie, the communal atmosphere. It certainly seemed more real to her than the far-distant lochside where, right this moment, her mother would probably be sitting alone in front of the TV. Isabel pushed the thought away – she would ring tomorrow – and tried to concentrate on the film,
Dog For Christmas
.

‘Two lonely people who, after hilarious misadventures, misunderstandings and mistakes, are brought together by a loveable mongrel just in time for the festive season.’

Isabel, feeling warm and woozy after the vodka, was conscious of missing various crucial plot twists because of her eyelids drooping. She tried, now, to concentrate as a bespectacled actor of the handsome geek variety and a dark-haired actress of the pouting temptress variety were making passionate love on a sofa. A blonde actress of the wholesome-but-beautiful variety was coming in the door.

‘What’s going on?’ Isabel muttered.

‘It’s the scene where the heroine walks into her flat to find her boyfriend at it on the sofa with the sexy neighbour,’ Ellie explained. ‘And this is the bit when they all shout at each other and the relationship’s over,’ Ellie popped open a tube of Pringles without her eyes ever leaving the screen.

The film’s blonde heroine now lay on a sofa, sobbing while a woman with a long nose, pink hair and electric-blue leggings was tottering about unsteadily in lime-green high heels.

‘The heroine’s wacky flatmate,’ Ellie snorted. ‘This is the bit where the flatmate tells the disappointed-in-love heroine that she’s just gotta get up off her ass and get out there, that there are plenty more fish in the sea.’

Right on cue, a high-pitched, nasal, female American voice filled the room: ‘. . . just gotta get up off your ass and get out there. Plenty more fish in the sea, babe,’ the flatmate added, with a toss of her pink hair.

The camera cut to the woman on the sofa. ‘Yeah, but all I ever get is plankton!’ she sobbed.

Isabel roared with laughter, but then a terrible thought struck her. The excitement of the evening, of making friends with Ellie, of discovering the college in her company had completely eradicated all thought of Olly, who had been so kind to her; who had, in fact, been the first to befriend her.

The vodkas now curdling in her stomach, Isabel sat bolt upright amid the cushions. ‘And this,’ she gasped, her voice shaking, ‘is the bit where I remember I was supposed to be meeting someone,
hours
ago, for a drink.’