Well Groomed (58 page)

He finally looked up from his biography after almost an hour to tell her off for leaving the sun-oil out of the shade so that it sizzled against his skin like hot cooking fat when he rubbed some on his belly – nowadays quite ample from so much drinking.

‘You had it last,’ she reminded him, flicking a fly from her face.

‘Well, in that case you should use it more often,’ he snapped. ‘Or you’ll burn.’

‘I tan more easily than you.’

‘But you have moles which are a danger sign,’ he said priggishly, picking up his book with a haughty sigh.

‘They’re not moles, they’re isolated freckles,’ she grumbled, but he was feigning fascination with a foot-note now. She stared at the pool, ultra-violet bright in the sun. ‘You once said you loved every one of my moles, Niall.’

‘All the more reason for not wanting them to develop into skin cancer now.’ He didn’t look up. ‘And I thought they were isolated freckles?’

She propped herself up on one elbow and shaded her eyes with one hand to look at him.

‘You still love them?’

‘Course I do.’ He turned a page with a carefully licked finger.

‘Is the biggest one to the left or the right of my belly button?’

But he considered this question too petty to answer.

Twenty minutes later she could bear it no longer.

‘Please stop stroking your sideburns like that,’ she pleaded. ‘It’s driving me to distraction.’

‘They itch in this heat.’

‘Well, shave them off.’

‘I like them.’

‘Fine – just don’t stroke them.’

He stopped, burying himself so moodily between the pages of his book that he was practically wearing it as a nose-shield.

Minutes later he had thrown it down.

‘Will you stop doing that!’ he snarled.

Just drifting off to sleep, Tash jumped so much that she pitched off her lilo, landing on the insect repellent which oozed out on to the paving stones.

‘Doing what?’ She blinked at him in bleary-eyed confusion. There was a foul smell of citrus and eucalyptus everywhere.

‘Those sort of shuddery sighs.’ He propped himself into a half sit-up and peered at her over his dark glasses, belly creasing like a German sausage.

‘Sorry.’ She clambered back on to the lilo. ‘I wasn’t aware that I had been. I was falling asleep.’

‘That stands to reason – you do it in bed too.’

‘Well, you should have mentioned it before.’

‘You were always asleep.’

Tash irritably wiped insect repellent from her knees.

‘Do you have to smear so much of that on?’ He rolled on to his side so that she was faced with his red, towel-pocked back, sweating at the neck where it had been in contact with the hot plastic of the lilo.

Ten minutes later they were both at boiling point, swatting flies and picking dust from their swimwear as they desperately sought excuses to pick on one another.

Ironically the final straw came from an entirely innocent source as one of Alexandra’s spaniels came trotting up, stumpy tail gyrating as it offered them a well-gnawed tennis ball to be thrown.

‘The dog wants a game.’ Niall didn’t look up from his book.

‘It’s asking you, not me,’ Tash pointed out as the dog dropped the ball eagerly on Niall’s sunburned bare foot.

‘I’m reading.’ He flipped a page with a morose snatch.

‘Well, I’m going to have a swim.’ Tash started to get up.

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, play with the wee dog for a few minutes first, huh?’ He glared at her angrily.

‘I’ll play with it afterwards.’ She pulled down her swimsuit where it was rucked up her bottom and searched for her scrunchy.

Niall was determined to win this bout. ‘Meanwhile it’s going to bug me, so I can’t concentrate on my book,’ he complained.

‘Well, you play with it then.’ Tash found her scrunchy half-hidden beneath Niall’s lilo and scrabbled to extract it.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ He shifted away.

‘Getting my hair-band.’ Tash noticed that the spaniel, thinking this was all part of the game, had started to join in, barking excitedly, snatching for the scrunchy and finally sinking its teeth into the lilo, which gave an ominous hiss so that the dog leaped away in alarm and almost fell in the pool.

‘Now look what you’ve done!’ Niall grumbled, shifting around as the lilo started to lose air like a hovercraft clocking off its shift.

‘I didn’t bite the bloody thing.’ She began to tie back her hair so furiously that her wrists became entrapped in the velvet band along with great hunks of hair until she had effectively tethered her hands to the back of her head.

‘Bugger – my – ouch – hands are – shit!’ Struggling to free herself, she tripped over Niall’s legs, now flailing around beneath her as he fought to stay comfortable on the sagging lilo. As she pitched forward, hopelessly off-balance, she was faced with the split-second choice of falling on to hard tiles or soft Niall. The latter seemed the more attractive option in the moment that she had to contemplate it and she landed quite hard on top of him.

‘Fucking ouch!’ he howled, trapped underneath her. ‘I think you’ve just smashed my ribs – get off.’

‘I’m trying!’

Still unwillingly adopting the armpit-flashing position of the hands-on-head scrunchy prisoner, Tash tried and failed to roll away. Their skin, oiled and re-oiled in the past hour, formed a messy suction which let out scatological noises every time she moved, but stubbornly glued them together.

‘Just came out to see if you wanted a drink!’ cried a cheerful voice from the balcony. ‘Oh – on second thoughts.’ Alexandra slipped tactfully away, calling back the excited spaniel which was now trying to devour the belt string on Niall’s trunks, pulling them almost over his hips as part of the fun.

Finally freeing her wrists, Tash heaved herself off him and straightened up sheepishly, surveying the damage. He was looking exceedingly pissed off and his book was very flat and oily, but his body seemed relatively uncrushed.

‘What the hell did you do that for?’ he complained, dusting himself down and peeling the book from his chest, eyes blazing furiously over his sun-specs.

‘You tripped me up,’ she muttered, backing away and turning to dive into the pool before he could push her in.

Unfortunately she belly-flopped in her haste, stinging her chest and legs as though diving on to burning sand, and sending up a great splash of water which doused Niall and his precious book.

When she resurfaced, he was waiting on her lilo for the attack, his own having deflated fully now.

‘Okay, what is it?’ he growled as she clambered out of the pool via the slippery ladder and headed for her towel, inadvertently dripping all over his melting packet of M and Ms.

‘What is what?’ She wrapped herself in the fluffy rectangle and searched for somewhere to settle. Niall’s slippery, deflated lilo didn’t tempt her, so she perched on a grubby sun-lounger instead.

‘You obviously want to have a go at me.’ He brushed his hair out of his eyes and glared at her. ‘So now’s your chance.’

Tash felt her heart lurch, aware that he had stopped peering at her frustrated moodiness through the letter-box and had now opened the door to beckon her in. This was her chance. She just wished she didn’t feel quite so sun-boiled, tetchy and baited. She longed to be serene, sympathetic and sophisticated, and approach him as Zoe would – all gentle probing and quiet persistence. Instead she felt like listing every single complaint she had about him, down to leaving the loo seat up.

‘I don’t want to have a go at you, Niall,’ she started cautiously, anxious not get this wrong. ‘It’s just that you’ve been so uncommunicative and grumpy lately, I feel very uncomfortable with it, that’s all.’

‘I’ve been fine,’ he protested sourly. ‘It’s you who’s been snappy and sulky.’

‘I’m under a lot of pressure right now!’ She rubbed her forehead.

‘Me too.’ He rubbed his too until they resembled a pair of chess masters stuck in stalemate.

For a moment they stared at one another in silence. Tash wished he’d take his dark glasses off; it was like trying to talk nicely to a beefcake bouncer at a night-club – the dark wraparound goggles were terribly confrontational.

‘You have no time for me or my interests anymore,’ she tried again, horribly aware that she was starting to recite a list. ‘You keep cutting me out of your life.’

‘So do you!’

‘I don’t think our lives encompass one another’s any more – they’re in different universes.’ She reached for a cigarette. ‘I’m frightened by the people you work with, Niall – they’re arrogant and self-seeking and capricious. I have nothing in common with them, and sometimes, when you seem to be so in love with them, I wonder if I have anything in common with you.’

‘How dare you say that of my friends!’ He snatched the fag packet from her and lit one up himself. ‘Especially when the eventers you hang out with are snobbish, shallow, and boorish to buggery.’

Tash took a deep breath. ‘Perhaps that’s how you see me too?’

He didn’t answer, confirming her worse doubts and pinning down her determination to have this out.

‘We shouldn’t be getting married, should we?’ she whispered.

‘Maybe not.’ He shrugged, tugging at his cigarette and looking up to the house, from which they could just make out Polly shrieking as her father played chase with her through the rooms.

For a second they lapsed into silence, both realising that this was the moment they’d been waiting for with squirming, agonising self-doubt, terrified that the other would not feel the same way. Yet now that the fuse had at last been lit, there was the inevitable explosion of disappointment and failure to be faced. So they hovered on the brink, almost too afraid of facing such catastrophic emotions.

It was a case of the bravest risking the first step forward. After an aching pause, Tash knew it had to be her. Niall had always been a terrible coward.

‘I think we should come clean before you pickle yourself in Bushmills and I expire in a puff of Camel Lights.’ She sighed sadly. ‘We’re both monumentally unhappy with the way things are right now. We have to sort this out.’

He let out a breath that went on for so long Tash wondered if he’d somehow punctured the second lilo. Then, his lungs empty, he croaked out a low half-laugh, half-sob which twisted her chest with emotion. Pulling off his dark glasses he rubbed his face furiously with his palms, breath sharp and laboured as the feelings he had kept bottled up for so long tried to rush out all at once.

‘Do you love me, Tash?’ He suddenly gazed up at her, his eyes huge and troubled.

She didn’t hesitate. ‘To distraction – you’re the kindest, brightest, funniest and most talented man I’ve ever met.’

His face was alight with relief. ‘I love you too, Tash – you’re gentle and loving and totally bloody potty to boot.’ He had tears in his eyes.

‘So why do we drive one another to distraction?’

‘Because,’ he laughed sadly, tears seeping out on to his craggy, tanned cheeks now, ‘love is bloody blind, and we’re a classic case of the blind leading the blind.’ He leaned forward and brushed away a petal which had stuck to her calf.

They looked at one another, eyes searching for reassurance. Tash wanted to melt into his arms and make up now that they were talking honestly at last, but she found that she couldn’t. There was still a barrier between them, as thick and impenetrable as bullet-proof glass, and there was no way that Cupid’s arrow was going to get through it this time. She loved Niall, she always would, but she no longer wanted him for good, bad and ever. And, looking at his tears, she knew that he was crying because he had finally accepted that something had died, not because it had suddenly been given a chance to live again.

‘Like a house on fire, sweethearts!’ Alexandra whispered happily. ‘I think we must have read it all wrong – they were all over one another. I felt a bit of an old voyeur out there.’

Sophia wrinkled her nose. ‘I don’t really believe it, Mummy, I’m sorry. Every time one mentions weddings, Tash looks as though she’s having her teeth pulled, and Niall just shuts up completely, as though his have already come out. I think they’re in a real pickle about this. Let’s face it, they haven’t lifted a finger to help organise it.’

‘They are terribly busy, darling.’ Alexandra scratched a spaniel’s head. ‘And all this friction between them could just be wedding-day jitters.’

‘Jitter-bugs, judging by Tash’s legs. Bitten to shreds, they are,’ Ben snorted, finding his own brand of humour acutely amusing.

The others stared at him blankly.

‘So do you want me to cancel zis reservation or no?’ Pascal was pacing around in the door, anxious for a decision.

They were all supposed to be setting out that night for a very expensive meal at Alexandra’s favourite local restaurant, La Filature, yet again paid for by the reluctantly benevolent Pascal. It was intended as a celebration both of Tash’s recent birthday and the forthcoming nuptials. He was eager to scrap the plan as the nuptials looked increasingly unlikely.

‘Oh, let’s go, darling.’ Alexandra turned to him dreamily. ‘I do really have a feeling that everything is going to be just glorious between Niall and Tash.’

‘She said that about Fergie and Andrew,’ Sophia told Ben in an undertone.

At the restaurant – a spectacular converted industrial mill – Tash and Niall could barely bring themselves to talk to one another, despite the recent truce. There was so much that had been left unspoken, so little of their real feelings that had been confessed and such confusion as to their future, that they were desperately coasting through the night, like actors improvising a show in a nightmare with no script, plot or set and with endless corridors between them and the stage.

Her doubts confirmed by their odd behaviour, Sophia spent a large portion of the night winking at both her mother and Ben, to such a degree that Niall politely enquired whether she had something trapped beneath her contact lens.