Bachelor Boys (11 page)

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Authors: Kate Saunders

BOOK: Bachelor Boys
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Now, as Peason shimmied toward me, I wondered if she would remember the time I decked her. It happened when we were thirteen. Peason had jeered at the huge sanitary pads Annabel's mother had made her wear, and Annabel had wept. Annabel often wept, but perhaps this was the proverbial last straw. I grabbed my school rucksack and whacked Peason's head with such force that she fell down on a desk and broke it. I don't know why I didn't get into more trouble. Peason made an incredible fuss, but I only got detention, and the supervising teacher gave me a biscuit. I suspect the teachers didn't much like Peason either.
“Poison” Peason had left school at sixteen, to be a model in Paris. She had been quite successful at one time. Her father was rich, so I assumed she had stopped modeling before she degenerated into catalog work. Until this moment, it had not occurred to me to connect her to the theater, but I could see that acting was probably the logical next move for a woman like her. She was still fabulous looking. I was sure she was still thick, lazy and morally bankrupt, but these qualities seldom stand in the way of a successful career on the stage.
She kissed my cheek. “This is so amazing! How long has it been?
You're like a ghost from another life! I try not to think about that time—but it's actually lovely to see you!”
I was ashamed of myself for automatically hating her. Come on, how old was I? If I had changed since school, why shouldn't Peason?
“And you're Fritz's brother, aren't you?” She directed a scorching smile at Ben, who beamed as if he'd been given chocolate.
“Ben,” he told her breasts. “Hi.”
Peason said, “I'd forgotten you lived next door to Fritz, until your name came up in our memory session.” She gave my arm a playful squeeze. “He says you and Annabel Levett tried to kill me.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“Oh, don't. I was a terrible bitch. There was so much tension at home, you see—so much that was unspoken. I'd love to explain it properly sometime. We should have lunch.”
“Mmmm, great.” Telling myself that Peason had changed, I tried to dredge up some enthusiasm. “That would be fascinating.”
“But it'll have to be after we open.” She turned her lustrous dark eyes to Ben, becoming slightly more animated. “We're going to be digging very deep. This is going to be an amazing piece of theater. I couldn't be more excited.” Her smile widened as Fritz came up to us. “This has been an incredible morning, hasn't it?”
“Incredible,” Fritz said. His brow was dark. “C'mon. Let's get out of this wank-fest.”
Without taking leave of the other actors, or checking that Ben and I were following, he sprinted out into the sanity of the street. Ben and I had to trot to keep up with him.
“Fritz, you know who that was!” I said breathlessly. “You didn't tell me you were working with Felicity Peason!”
“No. Why should I?”
“Because she's THE Felicity Peason. Old Poison, from school.”
“Oh, right.”
Ben asked, “Why was this morning so incredible?”
“I can't imagine. I thought it was a monumental waste of time.”
“Do you mean the emoting-and-repressing lesson?”
“Look, watch it, Ben—okay? I've got to work with those tossers for the next six weeks. I'm not in the mood to joke about it.”
“I am,” Ben said cheerfully.
Fritz's scowl faded. He smiled at me. “Sorry, Cass. I need a couple of minutes to get my temper back. It's been a very depressing morning.”
“Please try to cheer up, Fritz. We won't get a thing done if you're in one of your moods.”
“Sorry, all right? I've got low blood sugar, and I was too hacked off with the emoting and repressing to get any coffee.”
I decided we all needed some coffee. We went into one of the many interchangeable coffee places, and I bought huge cappuccinos and a heap of chocolate croissants. Ben had eaten one of these before we even sat down.
“Is it really that bad?” I asked Fritz.
He laughed briefly. “Terrible. I'm praying it improves when we start blocking the actual play.”
“Does that mean the play has finally been chosen?”
“It was nothing to do with me—but yes. God help us all. It's got disaster written all over it. No wonder we're not being paid for it. We don't deserve to be paid.”
“Oh well,” Ben said cheerily. “It keeps you off the streets. Anyone want that last croissant?”
Fritz picked the croissant off the plate and firmly rammed it into his brother's mouth.
Ben let out a muffled roar of protest, but spoiled the impact by starting to wolf down the croissant. Fritz reached into his rucksack, pulled out a paperback French's edition and threw it down on the table.
“Here it is. We open in three weeks. Don't you dare laugh.”
I was too puzzled to laugh. “This? You're not serious!”
He frowned. “Oh hell, yes. We're all so incredibly serious, we're about to disappear up our own bums.”
Ben pulled the book toward him to read the play's title. “
Rookery
Nook
. By Ben Travers. Pretty heavy stuff, I suppose—like that Strindberg thingy you did at college.”
“It's a classic comedy,” I said carefully, feeling for the positive spin. “A farce—from the 1920s, I think. Well, that could be extremely—”
“Have you seen it?” Fritz demanded.
“Yes, actually.” A couple of years ago I had seen
Rookery Nook
performed by my mother's patients in a secure mental hospital. I could only
recall that though the farce itself had been amusing, it had been difficult to forget that the juvenile lead had once chopped his wife into tiny pieces. “Do you know what part you'll be playing yet?”
“Not yet.” He was grim. “All I know is, we won't be playing it as a comedy. Apparently, it's about an obsessive relationship between a mad German and his nubile stepdaughter.”
“Oh.” I didn't recall anything like this—perhaps it was a good choice for my mother's patients after all.
Fortunately, my bewilderment made Fritz laugh. “It might get me a new agent, but it'll never get me a wife. We'd better keep prospective brides well away.”
He cheered up properly after this, and Ben forgave him for the croissant incident (as I think I've said, Ben was of a forgiving habit where his brother was concerned). The three of us—guided by me—headed down Oxford Street toward Liberty.
“I'm not saying we have to buy everything there,” I told them. “But it's a good place to start. I thought we could work our way down Bond Street, toward Armani.”
Ben gave a plaintive bleat. “That'll take ages!”
“Ben, we can't just nip into Mister Byright. Phoebe expects us to spend all that money she paid into my account.”
Fritz asked, “Are these the places Matthew gets his gear?”
“Yes. You're going to learn to appreciate things like tailoring and design.”
He was smiling, but there was a combative gleam in his eye I didn't like. “Will we be allowed to express opinions of our own?”
“Certainly not.” The silken labels in Matthew's clothes had told me all I needed to know about understated male elegance. I led them into the men's department at Liberty like Queen Boudicca, wishing I'd worn higher heels to emphasize my authority. Ben was (as it says on shampoo bottles) fairly soft and easy to manage. But I sensed rebellion brewing in Fritz, and prayed he would not make trouble. People never really change, and Fritz had always been famously naughty in shops. When he was four, he suddenly bolted in the middle of a shoe-fitting at Selfridges (wearing one Start-Rite sandal and one welly) and caused £15 worth of damage in Glass and Crystal before Phoebe caught up with him. Three years later
he was chucked out of Habitat for spitting on pillows. Phoebe said there was obviously something about shops that awoke a strange primeval psychosis in Fritz.
At the beginning he was obedient. He got through trying on two (extremely elegant) gray suits with nothing worse than an expression of festering boredom. When I handed him the third suit, he growled, “Gay.”
“Fritz, this will not make you look gay!” I pleaded. My jollying-along smile was starting to hurt. “It'll make you look smart, that's all. Go and try it on.”
I turned my attention back to Ben, who was proving difficult to fit. All the trousers seemed to be too short in the leg or too large at the waist, or both.
“Either they fall down, or they make me look like Tintin,” Ben complained. “It's all right for Fritz—he's the same shape as those plastic blokes in the window.”
A patient young man was assisting us. He assured Ben that the shop would be happy to make any alterations.
Fritz suddenly burst out of the changing room, his hair artfully tousled over his forehead. “Darlings!” he cried. He slung the jacket of the suit over one shoulder and pouted.
Oh hell—he was right. The suit made him look as gay as Ascot Week. Of course, I was laughing. So was the shop assistant. We should never have encouraged him. From that moment, Fritz turned the trying-on into a cabaret, assuming a new persona for every outfit—the mincing queen morphed into a barrow boy, then a naff estate agent, then a very thick toff. The climax came when he emerged from the changing room with his hair soberly parted on one side, irritably looking at his watch in a perfect imitation of Matthew.
“Okay, I've got the point,” I said, when the three of us were outside Liberty. “I know nothing about men's clothes. When we get to Emporio Armani—”
“Oh, I don't think we'll bother with Armani,” Fritz said.
“Not Armani?” I was mystified, to the point of being worried.
“It's a question of image,” Ben explained, kindly but firmly. “You're trying to impose something that's just not us. You might as well give up and let Fritz handle it. He'll be impossible until you do.”
I looked at Fritz. He did his Matthew imitation again (adding some very good business with an imaginary handkerchief) and I found myself laughing with almost savage intensity.
What was happening to me? Matthew—the man I loved and longed to marry—had been my idea of a perfectly dressed man. Yet here I was, absolutely howling when Fritz sent up his perfect style (his impression of Matthew taking off his trousers nearly changed my blood group; you had to be there). I wondered what made laughing at Matthew feel like laughing at the government.
“I give up,” I said. “Do it your own way.”
Fritz gave a theatrical sigh of relief and hailed a taxi. We went to Paul Smith in Covent Garden.
“This was on my list,” I said defensively. “We would have got here eventually.”
“Oh, I daresay,” Ben said, making for a pile of gorgeously colored shirts. “After you'd made us try on even more golf sweaters and safari suits.”
He, Fritz and the (formidably trendy) male shop assistant all roared with laughter.
“That's not fair! I was showing you perfectly lovely clothes—you just think being clean and tidy makes you look gay—”
“Off you go, Grimble.” Fritz turned me round and gave me a firm push. “Bugger off and look at the girls' stuff.”
Public argument is undignified. I retreated into the women's section before he threw me out.
Huh. Of course I'd thought of Paul Smith. It was just that Matthew disapproved of the clothes. He thought they were too noticeable. But I wanted Fritz and Ben to be noticed. And I saw that Fritz had far more definite ideas about style than I had assumed. It was possible that he had far more actual style than I did.
I couldn't decide whether the fabrics in the women's collection were fabulous or rather alarming. In the end, because I was waiting for such ages, it was impossible not to try on a few things. I was skint—editors of literary quarterlies are not high earners—but a couple of the suits were irresistible.
When Fritz and Ben did finally come to collect me, they were amused
to find me so cozily entrenched in the shop that one of the girls had popped out to get me a doughnut.
“Just like a woman,” Ben said. “I thought you were only shopping for us.”
Fritz said, “Hurry up—we're done. The suits will be ready on Tuesday. There's a whole heap of other stuff to lug home, and a gigantic sum of money to hand over.”
Ben asked, “Will Mum mind that we got socks and pants as well? Our knickers are in absolute rags.”
“It's all the wear and tear,” Fritz said, giving the pretty salesgirl a friendly smile that made her giggle. “Frankly, the pants haven't been built that can stand the strain.” He put his hands in his pockets and looked at me, narrowing his eyes. “Not that suit, darling. Far too old for you.”

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