Fast Friends (32 page)

There was music playing in the
background, and the babble
of voices.
Nico sounded excited and a little drunk.

‘It’s lunchtime, you fool. How’s everything going? Are you
having fun – did you win me a casino yet?’

‘
Oh, I’m having fun. It’s
five o’clock in the morning and I’m
on my second bottle of Tequila.
Guess what I did today . . . no, yesterday now? Come on Lou, guess.’

He was very drunk indeed. ‘I can’t
guess. Tell me before
your dime
runs out. What did you do yesterday that brought all this on?’

The line grew fainter and the music
louder; jamming the
phone
against her ear she glanced guiltily over her shoulder at
Roz and saw that she was ordering herself another drink.

. . went
and got married, Lou.’

‘
Who?’ she
exclaimed in disbelief, and the transatlantic line miraculously became clear.

‘I did. Me and this girl. I met her yesterday . . . no,
the day
before, in a launderette, and we
married each other. No-one
else knows yet – you’re the first. My mother’s
going to kill me when she finds out.’

His mother wasn’t the only one, thought Loulou, her heart
turning somersaults. How the hell was Roz going to
react to
this? And what did Nico
think he was doing, marrying
someone he’d met only the day before – in a
launderette of all places?

‘Are you truly happy?’ she demanded ruthlessly, and heard
Nico hesitate for a second.

‘
What sort of question
is that?’ he protested. ‘Weren’t you
happy on all your wedding days?’

‘Hmm. Well, as long as you
are
happy, then
congratulations.
I’m sorry if I don’t sound
terribly enthusiastic, but you don’t
need me to tell you what a pile of
shit you’re landing me in. I’ll have to let Roz know about this before it hits
the Press.’

‘Yes.’ He sounded more sober now, and defiant. ‘But I
am
happy, Lou. I had to do it. You understand that, don’t you?’

‘
Of course,’ she said,
praying that what he had done was more
than
simply a means of escape. Few people had managed to
waste as many
marriages as she herself had, but that didn’t mean she didn’t take the idea of
them seriously. ‘I’ll look forward to meeting her when you get back. She must
be a terrific lady.’

‘Of course she’s a terrific lay,’ said Nico laughing. ‘We
both are. I’ll see you soon, Lou. Take care of yourself’

‘And you,’ she said, feeling helpless, but the line had
already gone dead.

‘
Come upstairs,’ she
urged Roz, wondering how she was
going to tell her.

‘No. I like it here.’ Roz clung obstinately to her drink,
then viewed Loulou with almost telepathic suspicion. ‘What’s up?’

Seeing that she had no intention of moving, Loulou
retrieved her stool and planted herself firmly upon it.

‘
That was Nico.’

‘
I guessed it might be.’ Eyes bright, Roz clasped her hand
and said rapidly, ‘I was about to tell you just now . . . yesterday
I phoned
him in Las Vegas and told him that we ought to get
married. Lou, he said maybe we should. Don’t you think that
means
he’s prepared to –’

‘
He did,’ blurted out
Loulou, realizing that, like dead soldiers,
it didn’t matter how she
said it. ‘Got married. Yesterday.’

* * *

 
Bastard, son of a bitch, bastard.

Staring ahead, her fingers seemingly
glued to the steering-wheel, Roz accelerated hard and tried to make sense of it
all.
As the dark blue
Mercedes sped along the M4 she struggled to
organize
the jumbled thoughts in her mind. Without realizing
it, she had pinned all her hopes, her entire
future, on Nico and
this searing, slashing betrayal was almost more than
she could
bear. She wasn’t Camilla, or even
Loulou, both of whom
seemed to expect, almost to invite, disasters – she
was Roz Vallender and until now she had always been in control, getting
whatever and whomever she wanted without even
having to
work at it.

It angered her still more to discover
that she couldn’t
overcome
the problems which faced her now. Other women
coped in the same situation, so why
was
she
finding it so
desperately
difficult to accept?

Shaking her dark head and tightening
her grip on the
steering-wheel
as the speedometer touched ninety and she
passed a car transporter loaded with Sierras, all
identical, she
wondered if it was that which
troubled her. The fact that from
now on she was going to be more
ordinary, more vulnerable .. . like so many other women.

Nico had done it on purpose, she
could see that clearly
enough. She had been
chasing
him, pursuing him like one of
his despised groupies, and he had
drawn back in horror and
disgust,
retaliating by showing her in the plainest way possible
that she no longer interested him. How many more obvious
ways were
there of letting her know than by marrying someone else?

The way she
had behaved was deplorable. Blackly, bitterly, Roz wished she could cut it out
of herself. It was a malignancy and she wanted above all else to be rid of it.

At that exact moment an eight-year-old
Mini doing seventy
in
the fast lane had moved over in order to allow Roz to overtake,
then unaccountably swerved back again,
just enough for its
front bumper to touch
her rear one. Shocked by the contact and over-compensating for the momentary
loss of control, Roz’s Mercedes careered along the edge of the crash barrier,
finally ricocheting off it and smashing back into the side of the purple Mini.

The impact of that second collision seemed like an
explosion.
When both cars had finally come to
a halt after what seemed
like hours
but which had in fact been less than twenty-five seconds, Roz fumbled with the
door handle, stumbled awk
wardly from her car and crawled across the
inside lane, finally collapsing on the hard shoulder beside the crumpled front
wings
of the Mini. Deathly pale and icy with
shock she lay there like
a stunned
rabbit, her dark eyes wide and staring, her breath
coming in short,
quickening gasps. Her dress was patched with blood and her fingers clawed the
road as waves of pain gripped her, dulling both her vision and her mind as they
slowly grew in intensity.

Shaken but miraculously unhurt, the driver of the Mini got
himself out through the passenger door and made his way round to Roz. He turned
away, sickened, and covered his eyes with a trembling hand when he saw the
swollen bulge of her belly and the ominous dark blood staining her dress.

It was all a blur to Roz. Dazed, she
realized that the police
and an ambulance had arrived and from then on she allowed
herself to think no further, sinking
into the oblivion of a
painkilling
injection and the soothingly matter-of-fact voices
of the
ambulance men as they lifted her with smooth efficiency or. to a stretcher.

‘
Is anyone hurt? Have I hurt someone?’ she
murmured, her
pale forehead creasing as she struggled to speak.

‘
No-one else
was injured,’ the burly ambulance man assured
her,
monitoring her pulse with one big hand and briefly lifting
the hem of
her dress in order to reassure himself that the flow of
blood was lessening. ‘We’ll have you into hospital in no time at
all,
Mrs Vallender, so don’t you worry.’

‘
But I am worried,’ she said through clenched
teeth. ‘It’s my fault, all of it. I’m pregnant. What am I going to do now?’

Having
smelt alcohol on Roz’s breath, the police waited in the
casualty department of Gloucester Royal Hospital until Roz
had
been examined by the doctors, and then breathalysed her. Although she had only
had two spritzers, they had been gener
ously
poured and consumed on an extremely empty stomach.
The level of alcohol
in her blood proved to be just over the legal limit and the charges were drunk
and reckless driving. She had
been
travelling at something in the region of ninety miles an
hour according to eyewitness accounts, and had also
told the
police officers, amidst
tears and confusion, that the accident
had been entirely her own fault.

Before you could say BUPA, Roz found
herself bang in the
middle of Gloucester
Royal’s busy obstetrics ward. Having recovered from the initial acute shock of
the accident, and after being strongly reassured that the baby was alive and
apparently
suffering no ill effects, she was
feeling much better, physically
at least. The spectacular laceration on
her left thigh, which had been sustained as she stumbled from the car on to
broken glass and which had bled so copiously at first, had been cleaned and
stitched, the pain reduced now to a dull ache. As
the shock
subsided however, her anger at this new trauma – just when she
least needed it – inflamed and grew. Her mood
blackened.
Niggling irritability vied
with plain bad temper. Together they
rose within her like a swelling,
slow-motion wave.

To her disgust she was surrounded on
all sides by openly
curious women whose
stomachs were all at least as large as her own. Their stares infuriated her, as
did the manner of the ward
sister, who was
brisk in her actions to the point of roughness
and was obviously a raving Socialist to boot, determined that
Roz Vallender wasn’t to get any preferential
treatment just
because she was well known.

‘I’m a member of a private health scheme,’ pointed out Roz
irritably, examining with distaste the
stiffly starched hospital
gown she was forced to wear. It hadn’t been
like this last time
round. ‘I don’t want to
be in a public ward. Don’t you at least
have side wards?’

‘
We have one side ward,’
the woman informed her tartly,
‘and
it is occupied, Miss Vallender, by someone much sicker
than yourself. You may make arrangements to be
transferred to
a privately run hospital as soon as the doctors here are
satisfied that you are stable enough to be moved, but I’m afraid that until
then you’ll just have to put up with us.’

Roz stared at her with dislike. "Then could I at
least have the curtains drawn around my bed? Ow, that hurts . .

‘We need to be able to keep an eye on you,’ replied the
sister,
continuing to pump air into the
thick cuff around Roz’s upper
arm
until it felt as if her hand would explode. Abruptly the
tautness was released and she wrote the blood
pressure reading
on to a chart at the foot of the heel.

‘You’ll have to learn to withstand more pain than that,
dear.’ Her tone was deliberately condescending now. ‘And you should
be grateful that that wee baby of yours is still
all right. You
might easily have lost it in that accident, y’know.’

Roz’s eyes narrowed; her fists clenched at her sides. ‘I
didn’t
crash the car on purpose. It
was
an
accident, so don’t try and
make me feel any worse than I do already.’

Evenly, the nursing sister replied, ‘I
wouldn’t dream of it,
dear. But even I can smell alcohol on your breath – maybe if
you hadn’t been drinking the accident
wouldn’t have happened
in the
first place.’

‘Oh, go away,’ shouted Roz, fighting back tears of
frustration
and anger. ‘Just get out of here
and leave me alone. You’re a
bitch and I’m reporting you to the
consultant. Women like you shouldn’t be allowed to look after people who are
ill.’