Do You Want to Know a Secret? (30 page)

Sweet baby Jesus and the orphans. I do not believe this. It’s Daniel Best. For definite. I’d know the voice anywhere. Not only that, but the minute the auctioneer moves on to the next item, he’s on his way over to me from the back of the room. I don’t even have time to collect my thoughts, barely even get an emergency conference with Barbara. Before I’m even aware of what’s going on, he’s standing right beside me, with the cheeky grin, looking as divine as ever, in a sexy, scruffy, yes-I-may-have-put-on-a-tux-but-just-look-at-how-dishevelled-the-rest-of-me-is way.

‘Surprise!’ he twinkles down at me, in that half-teasing way he has. ‘I saw you across the room earlier and, well, I just thought you deserved a treat.’

‘I . . . that is, I thought . . . you’re . . . supposed to be . . . aren’t you in America?’ is all I can stammer, I’m that stunned.

‘Got back this morning. So right now, I’ve been awake for about thirty hours non-stop, and my body thinks it’s tomorrow fortnight. In other words, I’m just about ready for a mortuary.’

‘How was your trip?’ I smile, trying my best to sound cool and you know, normal.

‘Fantastic, very productive. I’ve perfected my Robert de Niro impression AND my Clint Eastwood. Just in case there’s rumours going around that I was skiving over there. “
Go ahead, punk, make my day
.” What do you think?’

‘Did de Niro really say that?’ I’m aware of the silence around our table as everyone’s taking in this bizarre conversation, but you know what? For the first time tonight, I don’t care.

‘No, no, that was Clint Eastwood. My de Niro is: “
You talking to me? Cos, I don’t see anyone else here?
”’

‘Bravo, Robert de Niro to the life, I’d have sworn Raging Bull himself was here talking to me.’ I give him a handclap.

‘Ehhh . . . except that was from
Taxi Driver
. Now, of course, I could do my
Raging Bull
impression for you, but I’m not properly attired. I need the aul boxer shorts on for that. And of course to put on twenty stone.’

I laugh, and for a minute it’s like we’re the only two people there, and then from out of the corner of my eye, I realize . . . Barbara and Baldie are both staring at him, waiting to be introduced.

‘Sorry, Daniel, this is my best friend, Barbara Fox.’

‘I’ve heard a lot about you,’ she says, and you can practically see her assessing him, weighing him up,
taking
everything in, deciding whether she likes him or not.

‘And this is . . .’
Shit, shit, shit, what’s his real name?
Oh yeah . . . ‘Charlie.’

They all shake hands, then Barbara throws in. ‘Nice gift. Wish I worked for someone like you.’

‘It’s by way of a thank you, actually,’ Daniel smiles, turning back to me. ‘You have no idea the fantastic work this lovely lady has been putting in for Best’s over the past while, and I just thought, when all seven of the Original Sin commercials are in the can, you might fancy unwinding in style. That’s all.’

‘I’m really touched.’ I’m about to gush on a bit more, still a bit overwhelmed, when . . . Oh for God’s sake, I do not believe this. For the first time all bloody night, Peter decides to put his phone down and actually take notice of me. Arm on my shoulder, the works. Suddenly, out of the blue, he’s decided to act like a date again.

No way out, I’ll just have to introduce him. Rats anyway.

Then it strikes me, this is the second time I’ve met Daniel out socially and each time I’ve been with a different guy. He must think I’m Mata Hari, and the irony is, if he only knew the sad, awful, lonely truth.

‘And this is Peter,’ I eventually say, a bit unenthusiastically.

They shake hands and Daniel just nods and smiles pleasantly, taking it all in.

‘Well, great to see you, Vicky, but I’d really better get going,’ he eventually says.

‘You’re leaving now?’

‘I’m that jet-lagged that if I don’t go voluntarily, there’s a fair chance they may have to wheel me out of here if I stay any longer. So you take care and I’ll see you soon. OK?’

‘OK.’

And just as quickly, he’s gone.

Chapter Nineteen

The Butterfly’s next meeting. July
.

RIGHT. OUR PROGRESS
to date, in order of who’s doing the best and who’s, ahem, shall we say, lagging behind the class a little, and maybe in need of some remedial project-management. Or a kick up the bum, or whichever way you choose to put it.

LAURA
. In a flashback to our schooldays, she’s easily and effortlessly the gold star, top-of-the-class girl. Item one on the agenda, discussed at great length among the three of us, is a certain Mr Desmond Lawlor, proprietor of
Tattle
magazine, who true to his word gave Laura a weekly column to write, which is already in print (well, OK, maybe only two columns so far, but as a proud friend, I’m allowed to brag), and proving hugely popular.

Last week’s was called ‘Why No Self-Respecting
Mother
Should Ever Run Out of Threats on the Eve of a Bank Holiday Weekend,’ and it was all very funny and very Laura, involving a (true) story about how she caught Jake and George Junior having a major, blow-up row. Nothing unusual there, except that George Junior was actually taking a tiny drop of blood from his brother, with a rusty safety pin. When interrogated separately by Laura, always best, she claims, if you want the hard, cold facts (it’s a tactic she read that they use on terror suspects in Guantánamo Bay), George Junior claimed he needed the blood for a medical experiment he was doing, for which he’d promised his brother in return six Jaffa Cakes and a Cornetto. His defence was: ‘Oh come on, Mom, using a rat is just too cruel.’

In her column, Laura then segued into a hilarious diatribe about how all she has to look forward to is their teenage years, and ended up describing in detail a vivid dream she had had, flashing forward to five years hence, where she came home from a late session in King’s Inns to find a trashed house, toilet flooded, broken grandfather clock, smashed window-panes and the family dog drunk. Only to have her kids try to convince her that all of this happened while they were innocently out doing the Stations of the Cross.

I loved reading it, because it felt just like having a conversation with Laura, and nearly burst with pride when I saw her photo at the top of a page in
Tattle
, with
her
hair tied back, in the grey woollen ‘court’ outfit, neatly and sensibly dressed as always. But I hadn’t quite realized the effect she was slowly starting to have on the world at large till I was in a supermarket queue one day and overheard two harassed-looking mums talking about her column and actually
quoting
from it. Her lines that ran: ‘My all-time favourite household chore is ironing. My second favourite chore being banging my head on the bedpost until I’m unconscious.’ For a split second, I almost felt like I was friends with Carrie Bradshaw from
Sex and the City
.

Course the main item Barbara and I want to know concerns the same Mr Desmond Lawlor (it feels peculiar referring to him by his first name, trust me, he’s just one of those patrician, older and wiser types that have the effect of making me feel like I’m ten years old again), and his interest in our Laura. We both have a strong intuition that it may well go beyond the professional, but trying to get hard information out of her is like getting blood from a turnip. Every time there’s a bit of teasing or mild slagging when his name comes up, she clams up and goes all ‘politiciany’ on me. I’m not messing, at one point she even used the phrase: ‘I couldn’t possibly comment.’

So case closed. For the moment at least.

Anyway, whatever Mr Desmond Lawlor’s intentions are towards her, and whatever is or isn’t going on, it’s
had
one noticeable side effect. With that unerring sixth sense that men seem to be born with when it comes to a woman moving on with her life, George Hastings, ex-husband from hell, can practically smell that there’s something in the air. I can’t put my finger on it, the only signs I have to go on are that: a) he’s being an awful lot nicer to Laura, and even took the three older kids to see the new Harry Potter movie last week. Now, just to give you a rough idea of just how unheard-of that is, Jake apparently said: ‘Dad’s bringing us to the movies?
DAD?
Do you mean
OUR
dad?’ Point b) he’s referring to Miss Human Botox an awful lot less, but did let it slip that she’s going off to Ibiza with her pals for the summer break. So maybe the age gap is beginning to show, or maybe it’s just plain old-fashioned loneliness that has him behaving an awful lot more responsibly towards his ex-wife and children, but whatever the outcome, Barbara and I have made a non-negotiable pact.

If he as much as
attempts
to inveigle his wormy way back to her, we’ll club together and get that hit man we promised Laura after him. And not a jury in the land would convict us.

BARBARA
. Again, nothing but gold stars hanging out of her. Rehearsals have begun in earnest for
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
at the dance studios in town, so, to be honest, I haven’t seen nearly as much of her as I’d like.
We
still haven’t got around to organizing yet another Thursday night trawl around the town, but that’s as much my fault as hers.

Between finalizing a list of sponsors for the show, getting invitation lists together, not to mention publicizing its three-night run, myself, Paris and Nicole have barely seen the light of day. And that’s on top of the work I’m doing with Best’s about the upcoming commercial shoot, and all the press that’s involved, which . . . well, more anon.

Anyway, I do manage to snatch a quick brunch with Barbara for a lightning update session. It seems that she’s building herself up to play the part of Hermia (one of the ‘star-crossed lovers’, not that I’d know, but for those who care, the fact is it’s a leading role), with the same scary discipline and dedication that you’d normally associate with Russian teenage gymnasts training for the Olympics. Not only is she up at six a.m. every day doing voice warm-ups, but then she goes to the gym on her way into rehearsals, so she can be in peak condition to face the mighty Serena Stroheim.

Then absolutely no falling into the trap of ‘ah sure, let’s just go for the one drink after work’ with the rest of the cast. No, she’s straight home for a strict session of line-learning followed by a sensible early night. As she herself puts it, there’s no such thing as ‘just the one drink’ with actors. Many’s the time on occasions past
she’d
be dragged into the pub, full of noble intentions to have one margarita and then head home, only to find herself falling out the door at closing time, then being dragged off to a nightclub. Those days, she assures me, are now gone. This is the new, improved, ultra-professional, model of puritanical virtue and sobriety Barbara.

‘My God,’ I said, looking at her in awe. ‘I’ve never seen you working so hard.’

‘You’ve never seen me working, full stop.’

I really couldn’t be happier about the whole, wonderful way that ‘project Barbara’ is shaping up, and the only teeny fly in the ointment which is detracting from her coming top of the class is . . . you’ve guessed it: Evil Angie.

The stupid cow is cast as Helena directly opposite Barbara, so they’re kind of a Tweedledum and Tweedledee pairing as far as the show goes. Now I can’t be 100 per cent sure, as I’m only going on the few titbits Barbara has let slip, but it seems that there’s a lot of old ham-actor tricks going on behind the scenes here. Again, hard for me to gauge as I haven’t had nearly the amount of gossip-time I’d normally get with Barbara, but she did mention that Evil Angie has taken to coming home early after rehearsals, too. And ‘running lines’ with Barbara. And asking had she any ideas about how the scene should be played? And then going into
rehearsals
the following day and passing off Barbara’s brilliant ideas as her own. This on top of her slavishly copying any interesting new character quirks and traits that Barbara starts introducing.

I haven’t sat in on a full rehearsal yet mainly because, with everything else that’s going on, I barely even get a chance to fight with Useless Builder these days. Plus Serena was far too polite to discourage me, but did mention that she’d be far happier if I stayed away until the cast were in a position to do a full, off-book run-through, in a few weeks’ time. Barbara rowed in here, too, and said she’d never be able to concentrate if I was sitting on a stool watching her. Four hundred people in the Iveagh Gardens looking at her doesn’t faze her but me on my own, apparently, does.

Anyway, I haven’t time to argue, so for now at least, I agree.

My progress to date
. Well, there’s always one sent to the back of the class with a ‘must do better’ report to bring home, and guess what? As usual, it’s me. Needless to say, I’ve heard nothing from Peter since the infamous night of the PR dinner; he skedaddled out of there as soon as he reasonably could, presumably back into the arms of Clare, where I’m taking a wild guess he still is. Running their bloody language school together like some kind of TEFL Brangelina, good luck to them.
Nor
could Barbara and I even get in a decent on-the-spot post-mortem after he’d gone, on account of Charlie/Baldie still hanging out of her. And I was bursting to talk to her about Daniel, too, but had to wait until I could get her alone at brunch the next morning to really pick things through with a fine toothcomb.

So she went home with a guy and, typically, Cinders here went home alone. To the brand-new sheets that I had such high hopes were going to see a bit of action. Feeling very down in the dumps and despondent about the whole Peter situation, I blew the dust off my bed (you should have seen it, even Miss Havisham would have been mortified at the general mankiness), and snuggled under, with a copy of Laura’s
Tattle
magazine for company. A very different ending to what I’d thought the night promised.

Anyway, I flicked the magazine open at random and there was a feature on the new dating craze that’s sweeping through the States like wildfire, wait for it: eye gazing dating. Apparently, it’s the same principle as speed dating except that you don’t actually speak to the guy opposite you. The rules are, you just gaze into each other’s eyes and see if there’s a ‘non-verbal chemistry’. The theory is that by eliminating boring small talk of the ‘seen-any-good-movies-lately’ variety, you’re far more likely to find a guy you genuinely connect with on a physical level. Then there’s ‘read dating’, which is the
same
thing all over again except you are allowed to talk, hurrah for that, and it all happens in a bookshop. Except knowing me, some cute guy would catch me in the self-help section reading books with titles like
10 Reasons Why Single Women in Their Thirties End up Going Completely Batty, Why Singletons Die Alone and Unloved
or suchlike.