Wish You Were Here (10 page)

‘It's lovely, Flora. Thank you.'

I could tell she meant it and was pleased I'd got it right. I crossed the room and opened the French windows on to the tiny balcony.

‘I thought you could sit out here and have breakfast if you didn't want to join the throng downstairs. Not everyone does.' Rachel, I knew, liked the morning to herself, usually to sketch in her room or go and paint on the hill behind the house.

She joined me outside, and we gazed down on to the drive below. ‘Oh, I'll manage a croissant with the gang. Don't worry about me, Flora.'

‘Well, we certainly will be a gang,' I warned. ‘When Sally and her boyfriend arrive we'll be thirteen – imagine – for every meal!'

She turned to me and moistened her lips. Looked
worried for a moment. ‘Yes, and that's what I want to talk to you about. Sally's boyfriend.'

‘Who is he, Rachel? Lizzie and Mum keep hinting darkly that he's entirely unsuitable and that, apparently, we know him. Sally doesn't know anyone that I know, not that I'm aware of.'

‘No. She didn't.' She groped for the words. ‘But you know how she looks up to you, Flora. Copies you, even.'

I blanched. ‘She copies me, but I don't think it's because she looks
up
to me. Quite the opposite, in fact.'

‘Oh, she does,' she said quickly. ‘She admires absolutely everything you do. Your recipes, your articles, reads everything you write –'

‘Yes, but we're both cooks.'

‘It's not just that. There's a very obvious hero worship going on.'

I made a face. Not from where I was sitting. More of a gleeful needling. I stared at her, wishing she was slightly more forthcoming. ‘What are you saying, Rachel?'

‘I'm saying that you mustn't blame her, really.' She looked truly concerned now. ‘Of course, it seems extraordinary in the cold light of day but, in the scheme of things, taking everything I've said into account, it also seems quite natural. That if she ran into him, and if the timing was right –'

‘Ran into who?' I interrupted, bewildered, wishing Rachel could just spit things out. At that moment, a car swept down the drive, headlights blazing, no doubt illuminating us on the balcony. It swung around the fountain and came to a halt right below us, just proud of the chateau steps.
The automatic outside lights had already sprung into action, so the interior of the sleek convertible clearly showed Sally's blonde head. She was in the passenger seat. Behind the driver's wheel was a dark, male one. For a moment, just a crazy, stupid moment, my heart stopped beating. I gripped the balcony rail. But then it carried on. My heart.
Don't be mad. Don't be idiotic. Not in a million years.

Sally's door opened and she got out, except – she'd changed. Enormously. She was much, much smaller. Slimmer. In fact … she must have lost about five stone. I gawped as she glanced up to us on the balcony. She waved and smiled triumphantly, her usually chubby face chiselled and heart-shaped.

‘We're here!' she cried.

I stared down in wonder. Her generally unruly mop of blonde hair, which hitherto had hung down her back in a messy heap, was cut in soft layers, ending around her chin – just the one chin, where there used to be many. My eyes travelled in disbelief down her figure. She was still statuesque, but totally devoid of fat, and not wallowing in a billowing smock but wearing trim white trousers and a smart blue blazer. She looked incredible.

Her companion got out of the car, a lean figure in a creased linen jacket and jeans, but Sally's eyes didn't leave my face for a moment. She would have seen me step back in horror. Would have seen my hand go to my mouth. Because, even before he looked up, I knew who it was. Before that head topped by floppy auburn hair, only faintly flecked with grey, turned, and that intelligent face looked up, blue eyes twinkling, I knew. That the man Sally had
met whilst cooking at a house party in Fife and had brought down to the south of France to plunge amongst my family was none other than my ex-boyfriend – my ex-fiancé, in fact. None other than the man I'd spent my formative years with and been very much in love with. His merry eyes met mine in the bright lights, and everything flashed. It was Max.

I don't even remember when I met Max. He was just one of the crowd all those years ago, part of the scenery, and although he was incredibly good-looking, there were more interesting boys around. His sort of looks were too obvious, too conspicuous. I liked a bit more subtlety. A touch more light and shade. Six foot four – too tall for me, really; I'm five three – so I remember not considering him at all as we sat around the wine bars and pubs of Clapham and Fulham, me, Lucy, Gus, Fiz, Mimi, Parrot, the rest of the gang. Someone that handsome clearly knew it and he was exuberant and noisy too, with that braying, self-confident laugh. My girlfriends, particularly Mimi, were all over him. It made my lip curl. Everything about him was a cliché, from his floppy nut-brown hair and tawny, ski-tanned complexion to his huge smile, long legs and broad shoulders. The way he drank too much and partied too hard – he was an unusually good dancer, which annoyed me. Who wants a man who can dance? And he drove too fast in his predictable, red MG convertible. Ghastly.

And so I ignored him. And watched as Mimi's skirts got ever shorter, her tops lower as she crossed off the days until she'd see him at the next party, meanwhile, dragging me off to Oxford Street to find the perfect little top to go with her latest mini. We believed, in those days, as my daughters do now, that the perfect top could snare the
perfect man, and all day Saturday was spent in the pursuit of it, so that, even if you didn't have a boyfriend, it felt as if you did as you engaged in the ritual of whether he'd like it or not, whilst the boys played cricket, or rugby, never giving us a thought until the evening. We were just one part of their lives, whilst they, I'm ashamed to say, were all of ours. Time not spent shopping was spent discussing them, to a degree they'd have been amazed at. Oh, to an extent, we were involved in our fledgling careers – or degree, in my case – but it was very much secondary to the main event: the snaring, bagging and keeping of a boyfriend. Look, I'm sorry, I'm just being honest.

So I ignored Max, and he, it seemed, ignored me. Until one evening, at a particularly noxious and drunken party in Onslow Gardens, he pounced. As I was emerging from the kitchen, a glass of punch in each hand, one for me and one for Mimi, he put his hand above the door frame, blocking my way into the sitting room. I couldn't go forwards, and couldn't go backwards into the melee I'd just squeezed from. He smiled down from his great height.

‘Drinking for two? Not pregnant, are you?'

‘Yes, I am, actually. It's due next month.'

‘Have you given Charlie the good news?'

Charlie was the boy I was sort of seeing. An interesting, slightly dull but terribly intelligent cove reading bio-chemistry at Imperial.

‘I was politely toying with your witty opening gambit, Max. Didn't expect you to run with it. No, I haven't given Charlie the good news because, obviously, I'm not pregnant. We're not that stupid.'

‘No, no. Charlie's very clever, isn't he?'

It
was true, I did have a weakness for intellectual boys. Perhaps word had got about. I handed him one of the drinks and brushed his shoulder. ‘Is that a chip I see before me, Max?'

He grinned. ‘Yes, that's it, I'm insanely jealous of Charlie's gigantic Bunsen burner. Is this for me?' He took a swig. ‘How kind. Didn't know you were chasing me, Flora?'

‘I'm not, it's for Mimi. Deliver it, would you? I'm going to the loo.'

I ducked under his arm and headed for the stairs, and thence the bog. When I came out, having queued for ages, I was pleased to see he had at least given Mimi the drink and that her eyes were shining as he flirted madly with her. We shared a flat, and she was full of him that night in the taxi on the way home, then as we clattered up four flights of stairs in our heels to our pokey top-floor flat in Mendora Gardens.

‘Honestly, Flora, he got me a drink without me even asking, and then chatted me up for ages. It's the furthest I've ever got with him.'

‘Except he left with Coco Harrington,' I pointed out. I'd seen him lurch into a taxi with her, pinching her bottom as she got in before him.

‘Coco's his cousin,' Mimi said quickly. ‘There's nothing in that.'

‘Second cousin. And posh families don't take any notice of that sort of thing. They're all inbred.'

‘You just don't like him because he doesn't flirt with you,' she said petulantly. I thought of his wicked blue eyes twinkling down into mine from under that floppy fringe, then roving up and down the admittedly rather tiny dress I
was wearing, which was backless and therefore bra-less, in an attempt to try to rev Charlie up a bit. He was more experimental with the mice in his laboratory than he was with me.

‘You're right, he doesn't,' I lied. ‘But he does with everyone else, Mimi. He's what another generation would call a rake.'

‘I know, but every rake has to gather a few leaves along the way and, one day, when he's mine and we're living in that flat in Chelsea his grandfather left him and I'm pregnant with our second child, gazing adoringly at our first in his cot, I'll be glad he got it all out of his system early and isn't cheating on me. I'm playing the long game, Flora. I've got all the time in the world.'

And off she went, singing drunkenly, to her bedroom, stopping en route for the Nutella and a spoon, then, remembering the long game, putting it back.

The next time he tried it on was at Charlie's birthday party. Charlie lived in now deeply fashionable but then extremely suspect Brixton. His particular dive was a dingy basement flat he shared with two other scruffy scientists. On this particular night it was throbbing with flashing lights and loud boy music – Hawkwind, or something hideous. Max arrived with Coco and some other exotics in his peacock-blue shirt and tight jeans, looking alarmed. He clutched his throat theatrically.

‘Where am I? I can't breathe. Have I died and gone somewhere penitentiary? Will the crumpet-catcher survive outside, or will I emerge to find its tyres slashed? So many questions. It's a mark of how much I fancy you,
Flora, that I follow you literally to the end of the earth, if not the Victoria line.'

‘Oh, shut up, Max,' I muttered, for more reasons than one. Mimi was in earshot, and a pointed glance told me she'd overheard. ‘You fancy everyone, so please don't believe I'm remotely flattered by that.'

‘Except that it's you I love!' he roared, grinning delightedly as I stalked off.

Mimi caught up with me. ‘You didn't tell me he flirted with you, too.'

‘He didn't, until last week. And he only does it to get a reaction.'

‘And because you don't fall for him,' she said slowly. She stared at me. ‘It's fine,' she added more coldly. ‘I won't stand in your way. If you want him, don't hold back for my sake.'

‘Oh, don't be ridiculous, Mimi. I don't even fancy him, and neither should you! I'm going out with Charlie, anyway.'

‘Only because you feel you should. Because he might invent the cure for cancer one day or something. And because you're too up yourself to go out with fun men.' She stalked off crossly.

‘Who are these people, darling?' Max was in my ear. ‘Are they all experiments of your boyfriend? Why are they doing that flappy chicken routine with their elbows?' Status Quo were playing to exuberant reaction. ‘Some don't seem to wash their hair.' He put his peacock-blue collar up for protection.

‘Are you gay?' I asked.

‘I am tonight.' He shuddered.

I had to admit, even by Charlie's standards, this lot were
geeky: skinny, lank-haired, hollow-chested, bespectacled. And the boys weren't much better.

‘Is that a boy troll or a girl troll?' Max asked in a mock-horrified whisper as a couple took to the dance floor, achingly uncoordinated, glasses clashing. My mouth twitched despite myself. He took my arm. ‘Come on. Let's show them how it's done.'

Before I could stop him he'd dragged me on to what passed for the dance floor – a patch of sticky carpet – at which point the music unfortunately changed from Quo to Al Green.

‘No!' I gasped as he clasped me delightedly in a tight clinch.

‘It's a dance,' he cooed in my ear, ‘not a sex act. You don't shout “No!” if a boy asks you to dance, it undermines their confidence. I could be crushed.'

‘Nothing short of a runaway truck could do that,' I retorted, wishing he couldn't dance so expertly and move me around the floor in a way Charlie couldn't, wishing I could stop my body moving with his, natural rhythm being about the only thing I'd inherited from my mother.

‘You're enjoying your-self …' he sang in my ear.

‘I'm no-t,' I sang back.

‘You're ly-ing. You lo-ve me.'

‘I don't even li-ke you.'

He threw his head back and laughed, and I saw Mimi, in a corner of the room, snogging a friend of Charlie's called Derek. You'd have to be really desperate to snog Derek. Before the song ended, I was away, to the garden this time, to join fellow smokers and, hopefully, crowds of people Max didn't know and would hate. I was longing for Mimi
to disentangle herself and appear. But she didn't. In fact, Lucy told me she was under a pile of coats with Derek in one of the bedrooms, and since I couldn't leave without at least consulting Mimi – we'd shared a taxi here – and probably should stay because I was at Charlie's, that left me rather stuck. When Max finally left with the cohort of friends he'd brought with him – ‘What are we
doing
here, Max?' from the glamorous Coco as they all headed out to the MG – I was at least able to crash in Charlie's bedroom, taking any coats off the bed and depositing them in the hall, knowing, as host, it'd be a lot longer before he came to bed. Knowing I could curl up and go to sleep.

Charlie came in sometime later and I roused myself dozily.

‘Hi,' I said sleepily. ‘Has everyone gone?'

He grunted something, and I wondered if he was annoyed I hadn't been with him much. He'd either been drinking home brew in the kitchen, which I hated, or having long, intense talks with his lab buddies, and although I liked the intellectual stuff, doing journalism at college was very different to reading chemistry down the road at the real thing. Having bagged my Oxbridge type, I'd begun to wonder if he was for me.

‘Get into bed,' I said softly, knowing this wasn't the night to make any decisions or have a drunken row, and hoping he didn't want anything else. Unlikely. Charlie had quite a low sex drive. As he crept in naked beside me, a hand snaked over my tummy. Damn. I held it, hoping a little hand-holding might suffice, but as he moved in for a cuddle I froze. Scuttled to the edge of the bed and switched on the light.

‘Shit!'

In
bed beside me, naked and grinning hugely, was Max.

‘What the fuck are you doing here?'

‘You told me to get into bed.'

‘I thought you were Charlie!' I could hardly speak. Squeaked instead. ‘Where's Charlie?'

‘In the bath, asleep. He climbed in, having puked in the loo first; he seemed to think it was the next obvious step. I put him in the recovery position, rather considerately putting a cushion under his head. I did ask if he might be more comfortable elsewhere, but he said he was very happy there and, heavens, it's his house. Who am I to argue?'

I stared in horrified disbelief, clutching the duvet with both hands around my chin. ‘Are you naked?' I whispered.

He threw back the duvet to reveal a brown torso and pink boxer shorts. ‘Kept my shreddies on. Ever the gentleman.'

‘
Never
the gentleman! You must go,' I went on in a low, angry voice. ‘Go now! This is outrageous. Get out!'

‘But, darling, I can't. Coco took the car. So I have no suitable means of transportation, since the Tubes have long since terminated and I imagine taxis are an endangered species round here. And Mimi and a man who looks like a door are in the other bedroom and, what with your boyfriend in the bath and two pituitary cases coupling on the sofa …' He smiled winningly, clasped his hands behind his head and crossed his ankles neatly ‘ … what's a boy to do?'

‘I'll sleep on the floor,' I told him. ‘Turn your back. I want to put some clothes on.'

He frowned. ‘Seems foolish, with an entire double bed
at our disposal. I won't ravish you, you know. Or don't you trust yourself with me?'

I'd already reached down to the floor for my pants and a T-shirt of Charlie's, and wriggled into them under the duvet. I sat up in bed, arms crossed, furious.

‘I am
not
sleeping with you, Max.'

‘I can see that,' he laughed. ‘But what about sharing a bed? Surely there's no harm in that?'

There was a lot of harm, but since it was four in the morning and I was too tired to argue, we did, after I'd tossed him Charlie's dressing gown and ordered him to put it on, which he did, but only after having insisted on modelling it first, in the manner of a mad scientist, finding some test tubes on Charlie's desk, pretending to brew a potion, back hunched, scratching his head naughtily in the way that Charlie had, until even I laughed. It was at that moment that Mimi came in. She looked from one of us to the other and her face said it all.