Almost a Crime (12 page)

was another matter I would like to discuss with him. He

was fairly unhelpful initially, but I did tell him I was already

hearing talk of Toshigate being bandied about among my

contacts down at Canary Wharf’

‘Toshigate?’

‘Yes. Tosh as in Macintosh, gate as in Watergate.’

‘Oh, I see. Yes, that’s very funny, Tom, I must say.’

‘Yes, I thought so. I made it up,’ said Tom modestly.

‘Anyway, an hour or so later, I got another call; I think

we’ll find that any lobbying we do on Euro regs vis-i-vis the

retail food industry will receive a sympathetic ear, and

there’s a good possibility of a parliamentary question on the

subject, or even an Early Day Motion, particularly if they

are persuaded of a broad span of interest. So I think, under

the circumstances, a quick photo session might be at least

worth considering, don’t you?’

‘Oh, I do,’ said Bob Macintosh. ‘Under the circumstances.

Certainly worth considering.’

Octavia arrived home at nine, after a rather tedious

committee meeting with the regional representatives of a

new client, a sponsor-a-child charity looking to raise their

profile - they all wanted to raise their profiles and they all

didn’t want it to cost anything, she thought despairingly.

She finally managed to persuade them into a series of

‘fasting’ lunches. ‘People pay to come and then eat bread

and cheese and drink water; it raises a lot of money, and at

grass-root level does a very good PR job. It’s what the

charity’s about, earns it respect, and it still gives the ladies

who lunch a reason to dress up and gossip.’

Tom was out at a dinner when she got home; the

children were all asleep. She had been hungry, but it had

worn off by now and that was good. Calories in hand, as

she thought of them. She made herself a large mug of

peppermint tea and went to check the answering machine.

There was only one message, left at ten that morning:

‘Hallo, Boot. Only me. Give me a ring if you have a

minute over the next few days. I’m not doing anything. As

usual. Seems ages since we talked properly. And there’s

something I have to tell you.’

Louise. She’d been thinking about her a lot lately,

missing her. They met far too seldom, separated by their

lifestyles, but they managed to remain close by phone,

picking up a conversation almost where it had been left off,

often after weeks of silence.

She dialled Louise’s Cheltenham number: it rang for a

while, then Louise’s husky, musical voice, breathless,

slightly fraught, said, ‘Hallo?’

‘Louise, it’s me. Octavia.’

‘Oh, Octavia. How lovely. Listen, can I ring you back in

ten minutes? No, make that half an hour. I’m just putting

Dickon to bed, he’s not very well, and there’s also a very

nasty case of outraged hungry male here, demanding its

food. Let me feed the beast and then I’ll get back to you.

Or are you going out?’

‘No,’ said Octavia, ‘no, I’m not going out.’

‘I’ll ring you nine at the latest. ‘Bye, Boot.’

That silly nickname; a diminution of Old Boot, which was

what Louise had called her whenever she was being bossy,

or humourless. Which had been a great deal of the time,

thought Octavia, putting down the phone, staring into

space, seeing Louise suddenly, vividly, as she had been then, this person who had been the most important thing in her

life for all her growing-up years. She remembered watching

her on almost her first day at Wycombe Abbey, running

across the lacrosse pitch at the end of a game, chasing after

two girls, laughing, and then catching them up, walking

between them, talking animatedly, her arms round their

shoulders, tall and graceful and golden haired, wondering

who she was, hearing someone say, ‘Louise Madison gets

prettier every term,’ and envying her, from her lonely,

frightened, friendless state, finding it impossible to imagine

what it must be like to be her.

For the first half term, she watched her from afar,

fascinated by her; they were in different houses, and

different forms, in spite of being in the same year, and their

paths hardly crossed. Louise would smile at her sometimes,

even say ‘hi’, and Octavia would nod at her, and say ‘hallo’

awkwardly back, but that was all. Louise was gloriously

popular, the star of the games circuit and settled comfortably

near the bottom of every academic subject; Octavia

was on a full academic scholarship, got top marks for

everything and couldn’t hold a ball if it was dropped into

her hands. Louise had already been at the school for a year,

having been been kept down because of her poor scholastic

performance; Octavia was still unsettled after two months,

wretchedly homesick, an only child, over-protected, young

for her age, while intellectually precocious and trailing the

glory of her scholarship.

It had been a strange friendship then, formed one

evening after supper as they met in one of the cloakrooms,

each emerging from a lavatory where they had been crying

silently, or as silently as they could manage — Octavia

because nobody liked her and her entire table had gone off

giggling without her, Louise because she had just come

from an interview with the headmistress and been threatened

with unspeakably nameless horrors if her marks didn’t

improve. They had looked at each other shamefaced, both

sniffing, smiling embarrassedly through their tears.

‘You all right?’ Louise had said.

‘No, not really,’ Octavia had said, too wretched to

pretend any longer. ‘What about you?’

‘Not at all,’ said Louise. ‘Should we go and talk about it,

do you think?’ and she pulled a great length of paper towel

from the wall unit, handed Octavia half of it, and then took

her arm, blowing her nose as she did so. And from then on

they had been inseparable. Had actually mingled their

blood, drawn with their compasses, to the accompaniment

of much giggling and squeaks of ‘ouch’ and sworn eternal

friendship, ‘For ever and ever. Amen.’

A strange alliance it had been, between the awkwardly

difficult little girl nobody liked, and the charmingly easy

one everyone did, but for some reason it had worked;

Octavia had dinned her Latin verbs and her mathematical

tables into Louise, Louise had insisted that Octavia be

allowed to join the large gang of giggling, gossiping insiders

that she led, and mutual gratitude and need had grown

quite quickly into a lot of other things, not least affection

and a very real respect. They stayed with one another in the

holidays, at the lovely sprawling manor house in Gloucestershire

where Louise lived with her doting parents and her

two younger brothers, and the darker splendour of Felix

Miller’s Victorian Gothic mansion in Hampstead. From

those weeks came Octavia’s first experience of the happy,

easy, noisy family life that Louise so carelessly enjoyed,

Louise’s of the tension and discipline and fierce possessiveness

that drove Octavia; their very differences drew them

closer, taught them tolerance and respect for one another.

When they had left Wycombe Abbey — Louise to do a

secretarial training amidst the most dire prognostications of

a life wasted and ruined, Octavia to Cambridge to study law

- they drifted apart for a while; back in London at law

school, studying for her final exams, Octavia had seen

Louise’s lovely face in the Daily Mail one morning (not

greatly changed, even if the golden hair had been bleached

and teased into a shape that defied gravity and the brown

eyes had apparently doubled in size, with the addition of

several layers of dark brown eye shadow and three pairs of false eyelashes). She was tipped as the hottest thing on the

catwalk since Twiggy, the Mail informed its readers.

Octavia had contacted Louise through her agency and

they became close again, Louise taking Octavia shopping

(‘You look awful, you’ll never get a job wearing clothes

like that’), and Octavia dragging Louise to theatres and art

galleries (‘No need to be pig ignorant and empty headed

just because you’re a model’). Octavia went to supper

parties in Louise’s big sunny studio flat near Primrose Hill,

and met her friends — other models, photographers, dress

designers, fashion editors, rather alarming they seemed to

her, with their wild clothes and outrageous gossip. Louise

was invited to slightly intense evenings in the rather grand

flat Octavia’s father had bought her in the Old Brompton

Road, formal three-course dinner parties with Octavia’s

fellow lawyers and old friends from Cambridge.

Louise, by then, had a string of lovers, Octavia one fairly

serious one; they shared appallingly intimate details of their

sex lives, saw one another through pregnancy scares,

heartbreak, career crises — Louise was fired by her agency

for turning up late once too often; Octavia decided, just

into her first big case, that she hated law, could stay in it no

longer — and then Louise took off for America for five years

to work and Octavia met and became engaged to Tom.

Louise had approved of Tom: ecstatically. ‘Heaven!’ she had

said happily, over supper with Octavia the night after the

engagement party Felix had insisted on giving, and which

she had flown over for. ‘Too good looking and charming

for words, of course, but you can handle that, can’t you, my

darling?’

Octavia had said she was sure she could, but quite what

had Louise meant? Louise had got a bit flustered and said

nothing, nothing at all, it was just that terribly good looking

and charming men did tend to be a bit of handful, she

should know, and Octavia had said if Louise meant she

thought Tom was going to play around, then she was wrong, they had both agreed that fidelity was of paramount importance, or perhaps she’d meant that she, Octavia, was

less good looking and charming than Tom, in which case

she would rather Louise came out and said so.

Louise had become very upset and said she hadn’t meant

anything at all, and anyway it had been the champagne

talking and Octavia had obviously forgotten what a lot of

nonsense she did talk, champagne or no. Octavia had

forgiven her, of course, but it had cast a shadow over the

evening.

Louise had come over again, for the wedding, had been

chief bridesmaid, and in his speech thanking her, Tom had

said he half expected her to join them on honeymoon, so

integral a part of his bride’s life did she seem; Louise had

Stood up laughing and said was it an invitation because she’d

adore to accept; Octavia and Tom went to Barbados

without Louise, and when they got back td London she had

gone.

For a while they had lost contact; then the phone rang

one morning in Octavia’s office and the lovely voice said,

‘Boot? I’m getting married. He’s called Sandy and he’s

divine, and utterly right for me. Come and meet him and

approve — and keep quiet if you don’t.’

She hadn’t approved and she didn’t keep quiet: she felt she

couldn’t, felt it was her duty as Louise’s friend to be

truthful.

‘He is — marvellous of course,’ she had said carefully, ‘but

I don’t think quite right for you.’

‘But he is,’ said Louise, her blue eyes shining with

earnestness. ‘Almost everyone says he’s not right, even

Mummy says it, just because he’s in the army, and not a

photographer or something, but he’s what I want, he’s so

stable and utterly reliable and - and English.’

‘But your lives are so different, Louise. You’ll have so

little in common and—’

‘They are, but I’ve had enough of that life, Boot. It’s so

ridiculous, so excessive, and everyone treats you like shit in

the end. Sandy is so wonderfully old-fashioned. And romantic. He’s like — well, he’s like Daddy. Daddy’s the

one person who’s very happy about it. Now do stop

fussing, I know we’re going to be utterly, perfectly happy.’

And she had married him in a cloud of euphoria and wild

silk on a glorious spring day in the village church in

Gloucestershire, emerging to a guard of honour formed by

Sandy’s fellow officers, a cloud that broke up fairly soon

into a series of storms before changing heavily and

permanently into a grey mass, overhanging what clearly

was, to Louise, an endlessly disappointing landscape.

Octavia, saddened by the disappointment (unacknowledged

by Louise), had formed her own theory about the alliance.

Despite (or perhaps because of) more than half a decade in

the fashion industry, with its careless morality, its shifting

emotional sands, its frenetic concern with style and

appearance, Louise was extremely romantic. It was a joke

about her that her sexual fantasies were not of multiple

lovers, of night-long orgasms, of outrageous practices, but

were set in a time warp, Hollywood style; Louise dreamed

of eyes locking across a crowded room, meetings in slow