The One Before the One (14 page)

I guess I’d forgotten about the proposed dinner party of horror, or maybe I’d just erased it from my mind. Then, on Tuesday, there it is, sitting in my inbox.

I slump back in my chair and read the email over and over again, combing it for clues about her, their relationship. In just one paragraph, I manage to outline three major
personality flaws, which is quite a lot for one person, never mind one email.

Patronising and not very empathetic. Maybe he doesn’t want to have a bloody barbecue and invite me. That’s why he hasn’t sent the email.

Bossy (have heard about this) and tight.

Lazy. And making a joke at someone else’s expense.

Oh God, who was I kidding? She sounded nice. Lovely, in fact, and she was inviting me to her house. Could this get any worse? Well, yes, it could, actually. It could if I actually went, which I’m not going to. That would be insane.

I watch him as he receives it, flops back in his chair and looks at me as if to say ‘get a grip, woman’. I could have predicted everything.

Rach. I didn’t like ‘Rach’. What man who was falling out of love with his wife, still used abbreviated names? And I was getting a little tired of the book club, too. Hadn’t we moved on from there? The tedious book club/fuck club joke? Once you’ve slept (spent the night with) someone, taken a bath with them, watched TV in bed together and he’s plucked a stray hair from your cleavage, doesn’t that promote you to something more than stupid email flirting and in-jokes?

And since when was it good that Shona and Paul were going? That’s still two couples and me. Not in a couple. As if I didn’t feel bad enough, now I would be lying not just in front of Rachel, but Shona. The friend to whom, only days ago, I promised I’d call this whole thing off.

Sort of wishing I had now. At least then I wouldn’t have to endure the Barbecue of Horror.

Just as I am thinking this very thought, Shona emails me.

I decide to just call Toby. Some things one has to discuss.

‘You know I’m not going, don’t you?’ I whisper, eyeing him over the screen.

Toby fixes me with his eyes. Shit, he was gorgeous. Why was he so gorgeous? All this would be so much easier if he looked like Bernie Ecclestone.

‘Oh, you’re talking to me, then?’ he says. ‘You’ve been ignoring me all day.’

‘Lexi said she thought I was obsessed with you.’

He laughs, irritatingly. ‘Well you’re only human’

‘Shut up Toby, this is serious. I’m not coming. It’ll be hideous and …’

I’ll burst into hysterical tears the minute I see you with your wife.

‘I’m doing something on Saturday, anyway,’ I say, thinking backtrack, backtrack. If he thinks I’m that obsessed, he’s wrong.

‘What?’

‘Staying in and watching chick-flicks with Lexi.’

‘Liar.’

‘Bully.’

‘Just bring her, too. Rach won’t mind.’

There he goes with the Rach thing again. I’m gonna punch him if he says that again. ‘Do I have to come?’

‘No. But she’ll only ask again and start getting suspicious.’

‘God, is she always this pushy?’ It just pops out. I’ve always prided myself on never saying anything negative about Rachel. I do not want to become the embittered mistress; it’s bad enough being the mistress at all.

‘What am I supposed to do? She harasses me night and day and I’m counting on you. Please?’

I pass on the tube that evening and walk into Oxford Street, wander around Waterstones and gather my thoughts. This was getting a bit too tricky for my liking. I was beginning to feel that horrid feeling again, like nothing was in control. Up until now, Rachel has been a mythical figure, a presence in the shadows that if I tried hard enough, I could pretend didn’t exist. I could pretend what I was doing was almost okay, too. This
used
to be a book club, right? It morphed into something slightly different, but that’s not what it set out to be, that wasn’t my intention.

I hover around the 3 for 2 counter with its summer blockbusters, the wedding rom-coms, the Barbara Taylor Bradfords and the Costa award winners. I used to love coming here after work, sometimes as late as 9 p.m. if I’d been working late, and browse for possible book club reads; search for those I’d read about in the
Observer
books section, the ones advertised on the tube, or recommended by friends. I’d pick out books at random too, doing my ‘first page’ test to see if it grabbed me, pulled me into its world.

Sometimes, Toby and I would take a little trip to Waterstones at lunchtime to buy the book club book together. After the book club turned into a fuck club, we’d then trail the aisles, giggling at all the possible ‘ironic’ book club reads:
Notes on a Scandal; The End of the Affair.
I used to love those lunch-hours. They were illicit liaisons all on their own where just the two of us could be together, without anyone being suspicious as we huddled in the aisles – the hushed
tones, the in-jokes, the intimacy that comes of sharing ideas and a private joke.

Now, however, the book club joke doesn’t seem that funny any more. I don’t even come here now that the space that used to be taken up by books has been taken up by Toby. And Toby never even buys the supposed book club book any more. Could it be that he wants to get found out?

I don’t feel like rushing home, so I walk down Carnaby Street, via Liberty, where I buy the poshest bottled fake tan I can find, through Golden Square and down Piccadilly to Green Park. It’s one of those London summer early evenings where the hot air has built up so that the entire city is swathed in a tobacco-coloured fug that sits above the skyline.

I take the Number 19 home, deciding Toby may have a point. The only way I am possibly going to get through this Barbecue of Horror, is if Lexi comes with me. At least then she can wow them with her youthful charm and I can just melt into the background, only opening my eyes when the whole sorry event is over.

That evening over dinner, however, Lexi’s reaction isn’t exactly what I was hoping for.

‘Go to a
barbecue?
Eeugh!’ she said like I’d just suggested she join me at a Tantric sex workshop or a BNP march. (Lexi’s grown in confidence since she started at SCD and acquired an air of cheek). ‘When?’

‘Saturday. Why? What’s the big deal about a Saturday barbecue?’

‘It’s a bit
thirty-something,
isn’t it?’ she said, poking around at the food on her plate. In an attempt to be a proper big sister who sets an example of wholesome living, I had finally got round to making something out of quinoa. It was eggfried quinoa, a variation on egg-fried rice, just, it turned out, a lot less nice.

I laughed.

‘What’s so wrong about thirty-somethings? If your taste in men is anything to go by – Tristan Wanks, Wayne, Clark – you actually prefer them to your own age group.’

Lexi sighed.

‘How many times do I have to tell you? I don’t fancy Wayne!’

‘So, what’s the problem?’

‘I dunno. What do you talk about at these sophisticated affairs?’

‘Christ, it’s a barbecue, Lexi, not tea with the Queen,’ I say, stealing Toby’s line. ‘What do you
think
we talk about?’ She thinks about this very seriously.

‘The Recession,’ she says, her brown eyes all innocent. I try not to laugh. ‘Politics. House prices. You lot are obsessed with mortgages.’

I couldn’t help it, I snorted with laughter.

‘What do you take us for?’ I said, thinking back to a particular ‘relaxed afternoon barbecue’ at Shona and Paul’s where Shona got so drunk she fell sideways into a bush.

‘Where is this barbecue, anyway?’ she asked, changing the subject.

A bit of quinoa seems to get lodged in my throat.

‘Toby’s.’

‘
Toby’s!
As in Toby Delaney, your ‘colleague’?’ she asks, doing a sarcastic in parentheses with her fingers. ‘The man you’re obsessed with.’

I feel myself go red.

‘Lexi, shut up! I am
not
obsessed with Toby Delaney.’

‘You touched his face. And you email him all the time at work. I know, because I can see you watching to see when he gets them.

I fight the rush of blood that threatens to take over my face. I’m sure this was supposed to be the other way round.

‘Lexi, give it up, the man is married for a start. Look, will
you come? I just want some company that’s all and it’ll be all coupley with Shona and Paul and Toby and …’ For a horrid second I forget her name.

‘Rachel,’ prompts Lexi.

‘Yes, Rachel. So will you come? Pretty please? Please please please?’

Lexi narrows her eyes at me. ‘Only on one condition,’ she says.

‘What’s that?’

‘That I don’t have to finish this quinoa. I’m sorry, it’s just—’

‘Foul?’ We both start laughing.

I’m lying in bed hoping death comes quickly. It is morning, just after 7 a.m. (when I last threw up) and the room is dark, just a strobe of light from the gap in my curtains, but even that seems to burn through my head, cauterizing the main artery in my brain, which probably still oozes Sauvignon Blanc.

The barbecue was horrendous. Never mind the Barbecue of Horror, this was more the entire box-set of
Nightmare on Elm Street,
only live.

I reach for the glass of water on my bedside table. My throat feels like I’m trying to swallow a hedgehog – but I can’t sit up far yet without the room spinning, so end up throwing half of it up my nose, nearly drowning in the process.

Sleep it off, that’s what I need to do, although all I see when I close my eyes, is me (ridiculously drunk) going:

‘
Fever Pitch.
Yes. That’s what we’re reading, it’s an iconic novel of our times.’

Idiot.

Then Rachel, (ridiculously sober) going: ‘It’s not a novel, it’s a memoir.’

It’s not novel it’s a memoir. It’s not a novel it’s a memoir. It’s not a novel … You get the picture. That’s basically on
repeat play until I can’t take it any more and have to self-medicate some more with ibuprofen in the hope of oblivion.

In my defence,
Fever Pitch
-gate only happened because the book club conversation happened in the first place, and the book club conversation only happened because, despite everything Toby had told her, Lexi brought it up.

We were just finishing off the monkfish kebabs (this was no standard bbq, not a burger in sight) and I was already almost a bottle of wine and several vodkas down due to nerves and a whole catalogue of previous, equally excruciating
faux pas.

Rachel finally sat down after hours of hosting, since Toby’s idea of ‘doing the bbq’ as far as I could tell, amounted to chucking meat on there then forgetting about it whilst he got more drunk.

‘Can I just say, Toby,’ said Lexi – scanning the bookshelf that lined one wall of the kitchen, which looked out through French doors onto the garden – ‘considering you go to a book club and are meant to be some sort of bookworm, you haven’t got many books, have you?’

It was a typical flying brick comment from Lexi and one that had me down a glass of white in one.

Toby took a swig of beer, Rachel laughed. ‘Toby? A bookworm?’ she said. ‘I think the only thing he’d ever read before he started that book club was Allen Carr’s
How to Stop Smoking
and even then he borrowed it from some mate and had to buy another because he’d got a fag burn in the cover. Isn’t that right, hun?’ she teased. ‘That’s why I couldn’t believe that he was so into this book club malarkey.’

I look over at Toby. This was news to me. He’d always made out he was quite the bookworm to me – or did he just want to worm his way into my knickers?

‘You have no idea what books I read in my spare time,’ he said, folding his arms indignantly

‘What spare time?’ laughed Rachel. ‘You work, then you
come home and play Tomb Raider on the Playstation.’ Rachel licked her fingers seductively like Nigella Lawson and swung her tanned limbs over the bench to sit down. ‘Anyway, thanks, Lexi, that’s reminded me, I haven’t even asked you: How
is
the book club doing these days?’

Toby actually laughed – nerves most probably. I wanted to stab him with my kebab prong.

‘It’s cool,’ shrugged Toby, sounding anything but cool.

‘It’s a good club,’ I slurred, at the height of my communicative powers.

‘Shona, do you enjoy it?’ said Rachel, turning to Shona.

‘It’s … yeah, it’s fun,’ agreed Shona, face like she’d just had something stuck up her bottom.

‘How do you know?’ suddenly piped up her boyfriend, Paul. ‘You don’t even go any more.’

So much for Shona’s idea that Paul was always so stoned he never noticed when she went out. Lexi had gone quiet now. This was going from bad to worse.

‘I do!’ Shona protested

‘No, you don’t,’ Paul said.

‘I’ve just missed a few weeks, that’s all.’

Shona shot me a dagger and I closed my eyes. For a God-awful moment, the room fell silent.

Rachel took a long sip from her homemade lemonade. She was on a ‘health kick’. Course she was. No shameful daytime binge-drinking for her.

‘So, who
does
go?’ she said, cheerily, as I gulped down another glass of plonk.

‘Me,’ said me.

‘And me,’ said Toby

Lexi wrinkled her nose at me. ‘That’s not much of a club. You told me …’

A glare that could have frozen water stopped her short on that one. God, would she just let the book club thing lie?

I wanted to leave but I couldn’t, so I took the mature, executive decision just to drink some more.

‘So …’ You could almost see right inside Rachel’s smooth forehead and watch the cogs whirring as she served out more salad. ‘It’s just the two of you, then? Just you and Caroline?’

‘Um, yes.’ Toby nodded sagely.

‘Yeah,’ I mumbled lamely. ‘I guess it is.’

‘And what are you reading?’ asked Paul, as the cube of monkfish I’d just swallowed almost came back up. He was doing well, having provided the two conversation clangers in as many minutes.

‘Do you know, that’s a good question.’ Rachel was still trying to retain her air of breeziness. ‘When Tobes first started at the book club, he went on about it all the time. Now I don’t think he even buys the book, do you, Tobes? I think his commitment is wavering,’ she said, giving his arm a playful nudge.

Toby didn’t even flinch.

‘I read it at work,
actually,
Rach.’

‘Read what?’ said Rachel. ‘Come on, what’s the book?’

This is where it all went wrong. Horribly, desperately, tragically wrong. Nobody said anything. After her brief foray into alibi territory, I could tell Shona was hating every second and I can’t say I blamed her. Time stood still. The room span. I practically inhaled the wine from my glass. STILL nobody said anything. Then I spotted the bookshelf. My saviour in pine. I scanned it. My eyes flickering desperately for something I recognized. Anything, anything at all. Everything went into a blur.

‘
Fever Pitch
!’ I said.

‘
Fever Pitch
?’ Paul laughed. ‘But that’s a book about football, about Arsenal.’

‘Actually, I love Arsenal,’ I said. I’ve no idea why.

Everyone’s eyes fixed on me; Lexi had gone very quiet.

‘Look, I know people think it’s just a book about football,’ I slurred on, ‘but actually it’s an iconic novel of our time.’

That’s when Rachel pointed out it was a memoir. That’s when I wanted to die. That’s why I then reached a whole new level of drunkenness and why I am now merely slipping in and out of consciousness.

Perhaps it wouldn’t have been so bad if that had been the only conversational disaster at the Barbecue on Elm Street, but oh no. It was not.

I slide my Virgin in-flight mask up my forehead and open one eye to look at the time: 9.08 a.m. now. More than two hours since I last threw up. Hopefully, that’s the end of that at least. Maybe in another hour, I’ll be able to sit up without tasting bile.

I go through the catalogue of other events in my head. A sort of sadomasochistic torture session.

1. The most ill-advised aperitif of all time.

I would say it all went wrong the moment Rachel got out the Sangria but it started way before then – back when I dragged Lexi into the Sun in Clapham Old Town for a pre-dinner ‘loosener’.

‘Are you all right?’ she said, frowning, sipping on her Coke whilst I downed a vodka, then ordered another.

‘Yes, fine, why?’

‘You just seem weird, that’s all.’

‘Weird?’

‘Nervous,’ she said.

‘Nervous?’ I laughed. Ha ha ha! ‘No, I’m not nervous. It’s just you can’t turn up to a barbecue sober, Lex, everyone knows that.’

So, that’d be why, when Rachel answered the door ten minutes later, stone-cold sober, and offered us a drink, Lexi piped up:

‘Don’t worry about her, she’s already half-cut. She’s had two vodkas on the way here.’

2. The misleading double-chin photo.

As soon as Rachel answered the door, I realized she was beautiful. Not just pretty, but utterly beautiful. It turned out that the double-chin photo I’d seen of her on Facebook was hugely unflattering and bore no resemblance to her in real life. All the other ones, the ones I’d determinedly only glanced at, were the accurate ones. Only just not as gorgeous as Rachel in real life, with her flaxen blonde hair, curves in all the right places, sumptuous Billie Piper mouth and a few, sexy laughter lines around kind, hazel eyes. She was barefoot and wearing cool harem pants and a slinky little sun-top that showed a glimpse of tanned, smooth midriff. It was a look that said: I am still breathtakingly stylish when just chilling in my urban garden and totally at ease with myself in a genuine, non-pretentious way. My look – culottes (I know, I know) and what was basically a twin-set from Jigsaw – said: I have just won an award from the Guide Dogs for the Blind and am about to have tea with the Queen.

Still, I wasn’t the only one disgracing myself in the fashion department, thank God. It was clear as soon as I saw Toby, hiding behind the barbecue in their garden (I say garden, it was like something out of
Grand Designs:
decking, plants like triffids, high walls painted with brightly coloured murals) that he was over-compensating. He was wearing an Hawaiian ensemble: Bermuda shorts halfway down his bum and a sombrero and a wide open shirt that clung to his firm, broad chest.

‘Hey!’ he said, throwing his arms wide open. (How could he look so damn
relaxed?)
‘So, you made it out of Battersea? Feeling homesick yet?’

Lexi kneed him in the goolies.

‘All right, Munter,’ she said. ‘What’s with the Club
Tropicana get up? Liking the Tommy Hilfiger’s, too,’ she said, giving him a wedgy. Then she wandered off, leaving me stuttering something about a marinade and wanting to snog him so much I had to cross my legs so that I didn’t just hurl myself at him.

3. The Grand Tour.

I’d probably say, in retrospect, that on a list of Things You Would Rather Avoid When Visiting the Home of Your Married Lover (if you had to go in the first place), seeing their marital bed might rate number one.

‘Hey, I’ll give you a tour, if you like?’ said Rachel, after I’d stood in her hallway and said something inane about her achingly-cool flamingo-print wallpaper.

‘That’d be great!’ I lied.

Highlights included having to pretend to be pleased to see their amazing, glossy, kitchen extension and hear how they really went to town on it because ‘we spend so much time as a couple here just hanging out, entertaining mates, having lots of parties’. (Bully for you, I wanted to say, bully for you …) This was made far worse by the fact that, halfway through her telling me this, Toby wandered into the kitchen, put his arm around her and started stroking her back. Speak? It was all I could do not to cry.

Then came the bedroom. The marital bed! Could this get any worse? Well, yes it could, because whilst Rachel went into detail telling me how this was a Louis XV-style French antique bed, which they bought at a Parisian flea market on a romantic weekend away, Toby stood in the doorway, beer in hand, as I tried to ‘mm’ and ‘aah’ in all the right places and make sure my face didn’t go into spasm with the effort.

Then Rachel went to close the window. ‘Sorry, is it draughty in here?’ she said, touching me on the arm. ‘It’s just Toby likes a fag out of the window after … well, you know …’ She giggled.

Yes, I knew.

And there I was thinking post-coital cigarettes out of the bedroom window were an idiosyncrasy of the book club. Silly old me. Stupid little Steeley.

I decided I needed a breather after that, but even on the toilet I was surrounded with pictures of them: them moving into the house, them skiing, one of Rachel asleep on Toby’s shoulder – that was the killer. I composed myself and left the bathroom, only to bump into Toby on the landing.

‘Hello, gorgeous,’ he said as he put his hand down my top.

‘Toby,’ I hissed, ‘what the hell are you doing?’ He looked divine (James Dean gone Hawaiian). But seriously, in his own house? With his wife downstairs? Did he have
any
shame?

4. Then they tried to matchmake me.

By the time we ate, I was a lost cause, and already seeing two of the monkfish kebabs. Thankfully, Lexi, as I’d hoped, was hogging the limelight with her hilarious anecdotes of teenage life, so I could sink down in my chair, fade into the background and just get more drunk until this was all over – couldn’t I? No, I couldn’t. Because then Rachel piped up:

‘Do you know, we were just saying whilst you were in the bathroom, how can such a babe like you (why did she have to be beautiful
and
nice?) possibly be single?’

Lexi made some sort of
hear! hear!
noise. Shona made a sound like a dog about to be sick.

‘Well, I …’ (am clearly morally void, shagging your husband and destined for hell) was on the tip of my tongue, but then Rachel started: ‘Tobes, come on, what men do we know? We must know
someone
we could match Caroline up with?’

I couldn’t even look at Toby. I concentrated very hard on my seventeenth glass of wine. Then Rachel got out the photo album. I was about to enter a sort of dating agency in my married lover’s house. This couldn’t get better if I tried.

‘Now this is Jamie,’ she was saying, pointing at someone who looked like Ian Hislop. ‘What do you think of him? And this is Hamish, nice bloke, bit autistic. Oh, what about Daniel, Tobe?’ she was saying to Toby who was actually leaning over her shoulder. ‘He’s quite a catch, no?’

Toby looked at the picture.

‘Oooh yeah, Caroline loves a bit of stubble, don’t you, Caroline?’ My mouth fell open. Was the man I have had an affair with for six months, the man I am in love with, actually being active in setting me up with someone else?

I chewed on my kebab. What had once tasted like succulent white fish, suddenly felt like trying to eat custard powder. I had to get out of there fast, which I did, five minutes later.