Fast Friends (63 page)

Roz was trying not to, but Natalie
was inexhaustible. She
asked
endless questions and digested Roz’s halting answers so
intently that it scared her in case she wasn’t doing it right. What
if
she accidently said the wrong thing? She was a private person used to
interviewing others on the screen. Now she had her own
interviewer and it was a more nerve-wracking experience than
she
had ever suspected.

And to her shame, other aspects of Natalie’s sudden
eruption
into her life also irritated her.
The terrible adult suit she had
worn
on the occasion of their first meeting had been kicked
into a dark corner of the bedroom and Roz, to her
dismay,
found herself faced with an
eighteen year old who dressed like
an
eighteen year old. Slashed jeans, massive biker boots,
strategically ripped vests and micro-minis were
worn with
glittering chains looped around neck, waist and hips. The
shiny,
shoulder-length hair expanded into a
gelled, hedgehog mass
which didn’t even quiver when it hit solid wood.
Luckily the
vampire-red lipstick Natalie
favoured never lasted long, but
only
because she talked so incessantly. It was a toss-up which
Roz least
preferred, the horrific lipstick or the endless, probing questions.

And Natalie was as untidy as an
eighteen year old too. On the third day Roz went into the spare bedroom which
Natalie
had made her own and
found twelve mugs and glasses lined up on the windowsill. An opened tin of
raspberries was gathering
mould on the chest
of drawers and an ashtray lay upended on
the floor, ash and butts scattered all over the thick, pistachio
green
carpet.

When Natalie returned from a foray to the village shop
armed
with a bottle of sweet Cinzano, forty
Bensons and three more
tins of raspberries, Roz blew her top.

‘
Oh, for God’s sake,’ complained Natalie five
minutes later, hurling herself on to the unmade bed and wearing an expression
of such extreme truculence that she looked exactly
like Roz.
‘Don’t
nag
me. We’re
supposed to be having fun. You’re
beginning to sound just like my
mother.’

That evening, the fight patched over, Natalie asked the
question Roz had been dreading for days.

They were sitting together in the
garden basking in the
warmth of
the sun’s last rays and lazily brushing away midges.
Roz was drinking vodka and tonic, ice cubes clinking as she
played with her glass and gazed with lazy
pleasure at the garden.
The sweet scent of tobacco plants hung in the
air and overweight
bumble bees gorged
themselves on the nectar, the manner in
which they edged constantly from one flower to the next
reminding her of Loulou in her endless search for
a man who
could make her forget Mac.

Natalie, halfway down her bottle of
sweet Cinzano, was
looking
lovely tonight, Roz thought with something close to
pride. Having spent two hours tidying
her room, washing-up
the
mountain of hoarded mugs and glasses, then ostentatiously
dusting the sitting-room with a handful of tissues,
she had
clearly realized earlier that
she had gone too far. Now, by
unspoken
concession, she was wearing a plain white T-shirt
dress which almost reached her knees, her hair was
clean, gel-
free and shiny once more and she wore no make-up at all. The
truculent expression had disappeared and she had been making
Roz laugh, regaling her with dreadfully
exaggerated tales of
the horrors of her old school.

With a jolt of surprise Roz realized that she was actually
enjoying herself, and enjoying Natalie’s company.

And at that precise moment Natalie
asked the question she
had been
dreading. Glancing sideways from beneath dark lashes
she said in a voice which was casual yet utterly determined,
‘Roz,
I want to know. Who
is
my father?’

There was a long, long silence, during which Roz could
feel the steadily deepening thud of her own heartbeat. But when she
finally looked up and met Natalie’s steady gaze
the question
was still there; it hadn’t gone away.

‘If you don’t say something soon,’ said her daughter,
almost
kindly, ‘I’ll start assuming the
worst. Perhaps there was
something awful about him . . . maybe for some
reason you’re ashamed of the fact that you ever knew him . . .?’

Numbly, Roz shook her head. Then she
stood up, still
clutching her drink,
and rested a hand briefly on Natalie’s sun-warmed shoulder. ‘Wait here, I’ll be
back in a moment.’

When she returned less than a minute
later she pulled her
chair close
before sitting down once more. "There was nothing
awful about your father,’ she said slowly. ‘And I was certainly
not
ashamed to have known him. It was just a teenage holiday romance that . . . had
unexpected consequences. His name was
Sebastian
and he was clever and kind, fun to be with and
incredibly ambitious –’

‘
Show me,’ said Natalie,
her outstretched fingers trembling
as she reached for the snapshot lying
face down in Roz’s lap.

Her dark eyes filled with tears as she studied the creased
photograph taken nineteen years earlier on the banks of Lake Geneva. Sebastian,
blond and suntanned and shielding his eyes from the sun as he laughed into the
camera, gazed back at her.

‘
Oh, Mum, he looks nice.’

‘
He was nice,’ replied Roz softly, squeezing Natalie’s hand
as a lump
formed in her own throat. ‘And it wasn’t just a casual
fling, either. I loved him. It’s important that you should know
that
I really did love him.’

’Pernod or
lager?’ Martin had said, as he slid Loulou out of the enormous trenchcoat and
threw it over a white rattan chair.

‘Better
make it lager,’ said Loulou dolefully. ‘Three Pernods and I’m anybody’s.’

He had turned and grinned, and she
had been struck afresh
by the contrast between his boyish looks and that deep,
authoritative, extremely cultured voice.

‘
Well, since you’re mine now anyway, you may as
well have Pernod. Poor darling, you look as if you need it.’

That had been a week ago. Martin
Stacey-Thompson had
seduced
her with delicious expertise and had carried on doing
so ever since. To her delight and
relief she had found herself
falling in
love again, and this time with a man who was worthy of it. Cheerful and good
tempered, he was so much
nicer
than either Mac or Simon. Martin looked
after her, adored Lili and
made her feel
precious again. No barbed insults, no jealousies,
no apparent hang-ups. He cosseted her, seducing
her mind as
well as her body, and
encouraged her to talk as much as she
liked about Mac, telling her that
she shouldn’t bottle it up. She needed, he explained gently, to talk it all
through, in order to exorcize her mind of hate.

The past week had been idyllic,
decided Loulou as she
stretched out in the suntrap of Martin’s tiny patio garden with
Lili sleeping contentedly on a yellow
blanket beside her, and
there was
absolutely no reason why the idyll should end. Martin
knew everything about her and loved her anyway, spending
long
hours discussing their future together, and hinting that his current financial
position was about to undergo a drastic change for the better.

Not that money was all-important, of course, but the riches
to-rags novelty had certainly begun to wear a bit thin of late.
Almost all her clothes now were old and although
she was
happy living with Camilla she
was aware that the situation
couldn’t go on indefinitely. An inveterate
and unselfish splurger,
she longed to be able
to buy extravagant gifts for her friends
and family, but where once she would have blown a small
fortune on
first-night theatre tickets, a rented villa in Antibes at the height of the
season, irresistible jewellery and flagons of
exquisite
perfume, she was now unhappily confined to the
smallest of gifts and no matter how much Camilla enthused
over the delicate rose silk scarf or the new
ultra-violet eye-
shadow from Dior, the knowledge that she could have
bought a hundred of each for herself had she so wished spoiled the joy of
giving for Loulou.

And while Lili was perfectly happy wearing the cheapest
chain-store outfits and playing for hours with bunches of keys,
Loulou longed to shower her with expensive toys and
dress her
in really good clothes.

Now that Martin had come into her life, she thought with
mounting excitement, she sensed that everything was about to
change for the better. And if this lucrative deal
– about which
he was being so
deliciously secretive – came off, maybe she
would be able to stop worrying about her own appalling
financial situation. Not that she wanted to sponge
off him, she
told herself hastily as
she adjusted her dark glasses, wriggled
into a more comfortable position on the lilo and glanced across at Lili,
who was smiling in her sleep, but the way Martin spoke
of their future together gave her such a feeling
of security .. .
and it would bloody well serve Mac right if she were to
marry again. She
was
almost thirty-four, after all . . .

Camilla, in sharp contrast, was having a hideous day, one
of the
very worst. Having drastically
overslept, she awoke to the sounds
of
a full-scale screaming match downstairs as Toby and
Charlotte battled to the death for the last
Shredded Wheat. By the time she had staggered into the kitchen Toby was wearing
the contents of the marmalade jar and
brandishing a pair of
scissors at his sister. Charlotte was in floods of
tears and her
uncombed brown hair was six
inches shorter on one side than
the
other. Rocky, wriggling in ecstasy – such excitement at
eight thirty in
the morning was a lamentably rare occurrence as
far as he was concerned – hurled himself at Camilla and smeared
marmalade
paw prints over her dressing-gown.

By the time she had thrown Toby under the shower, trimmed
Charlotte’s drastically uneven hair, fed Rocky, driven
the children to school and returned to find practically an
entire swarm of wasps feasting on marmalade, she
was ex
hausted. The phone rang three
times for Loulou, who was still
at Martin’s flat. The doorbell pealed,
and only when the young
man on the front
step had been talking for five minutes did
Camilla realize that he was
recruiting new members for some
obscure
religious cult. By the time she got rid of him and
returned to the kitchen, the wasps had paged all
their relatives
and invited them to
join the party. Feeling hot, sticky and in
need of both strong coffee and a cool shower, Camilla pulled
off
her baggy scarlet T-shirt and switched on the kettle. She had to bake cakes for
Toby’s school fete, which was being held tomorrow, do at least three loads of
washing and buy a birthday present for Zoë.

And all I want to do, she thought irritably, is collapse in
front of
the TV and watch the men’s semi-finals at Wimbledon. At that moment, Rocky
sidled into the kitchen.

‘
No,’ said Camilla sternly as he edged towards a cluster of
wasps gathered around his waterbowl. The next moment, he
yelped and stamped all over them and the whining insects rose
in fury to defend themselves. Stung on the nose, he went
berserk.
Camilla grabbed him and hauled him unceremoniously
through the kitchen door. Like a nightmare, the phone rang
again, water was spreading across the floor from
Rocky’s
upturned bowl and a sharp stabbing pain on the sole of her foot
told her that she had trodden on another wasp.