Fast Friends (23 page)

‘Oh sweetheart, you know how I am with names. All school
girls sound alike to me. Which school are you
talking about for
a start?’

‘
Elm House.’

Marguerite’s eyes narrowed in concentration, then fixed
their gaze upon Roz. ‘I think I
do
remember. Wasn’t she the plump,
fair-haired one? Rather too eager to please?’

‘
Yes, that’s the one,’ said Roz drily.

‘
And she
wrote to you afterwards. I had to open the letter in order to find out the
address so that I could return it.’

‘Mmm,’ replied Roz, her expression thoughtful. ‘So it was
pretty ironic, discovering that she was this man’s wife. She also discovered
that I was his mistress, of course, and she left him. They’re filing for a
divorce now.’

‘
If it hadn’t been you,
it would have been someone else,’
declared
her mother with the fatalistic air of someone who had,
in her time, been
in all these situations.

‘Yes. Anyway, Camilla then met Nico through Loulou and it
appears that he took her under his wing, so to
speak. She became
his housekeeper,’
Roz explained, relating the news which she
had only herself learnt last week after telephoning Loulou.
‘And I think she must have developed some sort of
crush on
Nico because as soon as she found out that I was expecting his
child, she walked out of the job. I get the impression that Nico’s blaming me
for lousing up Camilla’s life and that this is his way
of paying
me back. He has . . . scruples, Mother. And I’m just not used to men with
those.’

Camilla stared at her fourth, slightly grimy-looking
living-room, turned away from the sight of an even grimier kitchen glimpsed through
the open doorway, and felt her toes curling with distaste inside her shoes. For
such an astronomic rent, she had at least expected something clean.

‘You innarrested?’ asked the skinny man who was letting
out
the flat, and Camilla forced a regretful
smile, while in her
jacket pocket she
fingered the slip of paper bearing the fifth
and final address she had
to see.

‘It’s lovely, but I’m afraid I was really looking for
somewhere with a larger kitchen.’

‘
You no innarrested
then?’ he said in a monotone. ‘Never
mind. Plenny more to see it. No
bother me, lady.’

Outside in the fresh air again, Camilla turned over the
slip of paper and prayed silently that the address in Ealing would have
windows you could see through. She had saved it
until last because it was a house-share, something she had wanted to
avoid. Living with Loulou had worked out, but she
was aware
that she had been very
lucky. Sharing with a stranger would be
a lot more difficult, all sorts of problems could arise. She
recalled a scene in her mind from
The Goodbye
Girl,
when
Marsha Mason was woken up at four in the morning by
Richard
Dreyfuss humming his mantra whilst
practising yoga in the
nude. Who knew what horrors might lie in store
for her at 43 Edgerton Avenue, Ealing?

When she reached the house twenty minutes later, however,
she began to feel fractionally better. The sun had
come out,
which always helped, and the slightly overgrown garden at the
front and side of the Victorian terraced house
looked peaceful
and reassuringly
normal. Two grey cats stalked through the
dewy undergrowth and from an
open upstairs window she heard
the halting,
childish strains of a Souza march being practised
on an out-of-tune
piano.

Camilla knocked on the blue front door and held her
breath.
Inside, the piano stopped playing, a
child yelled out, ‘Door’,
and Camilla heard the sound of high heels
clattering down a wooden staircase at speed.

‘
Hi! You’re either from
the Electricity Board or Home-
finders,’ declared a redhead with huge
conker-brown eyes and a wide grin. As she stuck out one hand in greeting she
pushed the other through her haphazard top knot of corkscrew curls and glanced
over her shoulder at the small red-haired girl who had followed her to the
door.

‘
I’m not from the
Electricity Board,’ said Camilla, shaking
the woman’s hand and smiling at the girl who looked to be
about
five.

‘Thank God, because I’ve fixed the meter. Do come in, you
don’t look a bit like the agency made you sound. I was rather expecting a
female bank manager.’

‘That’s nothing,’ said Camilla, straightfaced. ‘I was
expecting Richard Dreyfuss.’

‘
How disappointing for
you – you’ve found old Mother
Hubbard instead! I usually try and hide
the children somewhere inconspicuous when I’m showing people around. It puts
them
off, you see, they simply don’t want to
share a house teeming
with brats, but they really are quite well-behaved
brats. And it’s
too late to lock them in a
dark cupboard now,’ she added sadly
as another small girl appeared on
the staircase, ‘because you’ve already seen them.’

‘
I heard one playing the
piano,’ said Camilla, to be friendly
and show that it hadn’t put her
off. Turning to the five year old, who was unsuccessfully attempting to hide
behind her mother’s slender, jean-clad legs, she said: ‘Was that you?’

‘No,’ replied the girl, brown eyes wide with innocence.
"That was Mummy.’

‘I only bought the bloody thing last week,’ said the
woman, laughing delightedly at Camilla’s
faux pas
and waving aside her
attempts at apology. ‘Don’t panic, I know I’m
awful at the
moment, but I’ve always
wanted to be able to play a piano.
Every
year I challenge myself to learn something new. Follow
me,’ she went on, leading the way through to a
large, com
fortably cluttered kitchen smelling deliciously of cinnamon
and
hung with copper pans, upside-down
bunches of dried flowers
and several very amateurish paintings. Camilla
forbore to ask
whether the children had
executed these – one foot at a time
was enough for any mouth – and
besides, in her eyes the house was perfect. She already knew with absolute
certainty that this was where she wanted to live.

The redhead clapped her hand over her
mouth in dismay.
‘How
rude
of me! I’m Zoe Sheridan, and this is Augusta, my
eldest. We call her Gussie. The one
on the stairs is Finola, Fee
for short. No doubt we’ll trip over her in just a minute when I
show you the bedroom, but they really are good children,
very quiet and their manners are far nicer than mine . .

‘I like children,’ said Camilla firmly. "Truly, I’m
not put off. I’m Camilla Stewart.’

They shook hands again with mutual relief, and Zoe showed
her the rest of the house, apologizing all the time
for the mess
and explaining that as soon as she got organized she would
be hiring a cleaning woman. The sunny sitting-room was dotted
with children’s toys and discarded clothes, but
Camilla saw
only the appealing warmth
of it; this was a real home, as she
had once had, and she felt at home
here already.

Her bedroom, very small but decorated with bowls of
scarlet
and white silk flowers to match the
wallpaper, was perfect.
Whilst Zoe was
fussing over a loose flake of paint on the
windowsill, Camilla said carefully, ‘I expect you have lots of
other people to see before you decide. May I just
say that I’m
very interested in moving in here, and leave you my number
so that you can contact me . . .?’

‘You’re
really
interested?’ cried Zoe, amazed and
delighted.
‘Well, in that case, I don’t need
to see anyone else, do I? You
can move in as soon as you like. Are you
sure
you don’t mind about Gussie and Fee?’

‘I’m sure,’ said Camilla happily. ‘And I’ve been staying
in a terrible hotel for the last few days, so I’d like to move in tonight, if
that’s possible.’

‘
Done!’ said Zoe "Thank God!’

C
hapter 22

’Buy a bottle of champagne, Lou,’ Joshua ran his hand
absent
mindedly over her bare back, sending
shivers down it as he
always managed
to do. Loulou breathed in, inhaling the crisp
scent of his aftershave
and looked fondly up at him. Josh looked
spectacular
in a dinner jacket, even though he had spent most
of the evening
complaining that the wing-collared shirt irritated
his neck. The gold silk bow-tie and matching handkerchief in
his
top pocket were the only splashes of colour; apart from their vividness,
darling Josh was as pure black and white as a Charlie Chaplin film. So long as
he didn’t open his mouth to reveal that wicked pink tongue of his, she thought
smugly as she searched her evening bag for her purse.

She giggled as his fingers moved and
the wide
diamanté
strap of
her dress slipped off her pale shoulder. She had chosen the extravagant Zandra
Rhodes creation specially, in order to match Joshua. The tight-bodiced,
full-skirted black taffeta was saved from indecency only by the single strap
which snaked up
from her left breast, over
her right shoulder and all the way
down her back until it reached her
left hip. The black taffeta, strewn with black-and-silver net butterflies, was
slit to the thigh
and lined with silver
satin. Loulou had happily made sure that
she looked spectacular, and her
current favourite press photo
graphers,
particularly excited by the sight of her new ‘close
friend’, had used up
several rolls of film on the pair of them.

‘
This is crap, man,’ Joshua had murmured out of
the corner of his mouth, quelling his Scottish upbringing and adopting a
heavier-than-usual Jamaican accent.

‘
I know, I know,’ hissed Loulou, clutching his arm and tossing
back her wildly disorganized hair. They had fallen into bed
earlier in
the evening, overcome with lust, and there had been
precious little time afterwards in which to get ready for the
ball.
But it’s publicity: For
both
of us.’

‘It’s still crap.’

She watched him now as he headed towards the champagne
bar, and shivered involuntarily, although the
2,000 guests
ensured by means of body
heat alone that she couldn’t possibly
be cold. The champagne bar was
situated in the old library and
had been
strung with what seemed like miles of fairy lights for
the occasion. It
was weird, mused Loulou, to think that she was finally back here, in stuffy old
Elm House, for a decidedly debauched all-night charity ball. She scarcely
recognized the oak-panelled library, but then, that wasn’t really surprising
since she had always made a point of avoiding anything to do with
books. The dining-room, where ranks of knackered
refectory
tables usually stood, was occupied now by a band too loud even
for her practised ears. The massive hall
where morning assembly
had been held was pounding with the music of a
rock group and
heavy with the scent of
cannabis. The washrooms, where she
and Roz had smoked innumerable
cigarettes, was now crammed
with bright young
things repainting their lips and snorting
cocaine.

Plus ca change,
thought Loulou with a wry smile. At
least
this
night would be making tens of thousands of pounds for
charity. The more the guests drank,
smoked and snorted, the
higher they got and the more they spent. Would the Renal
Transplant Unit really be bothered if it knew that it had
gained its donation largely by virtue of illegal substances?

Like hell they would, she thought,
draining the glass and
wishing
that Josh would return. And at least she wasn’t getting through the night on
coke or speed. No way. She was doing it
purely
on champagne. The champagne that she was buying at
£40 a bottle. Christ,
the amount she’d spent so far would surely buy a new dialysis machine. And –
the thought crept unbidden
into her slightly
muddled brain – Josh had paid for none of it.
Not a single drink. And quite abruptly, after several weeks spent
resolutely denying that any such doubts ever existed,
Loulou realized
that all those hidden qualms were finally, unwillingly, becoming a reality.