Fast Friends (8 page)

‘
It’s woman trouble, actually,’ she said now,
kicking off her
high heels and swinging her legs up
on to the
chaise. ‘Makes
a
change, I
suppose. And no, I’m not turning into a dyke,’ she
added, displaying the
first flicker of humour since his arrival at
the
cottage that evening. ‘You remember that letter I received
from someone I was at school with? She wanted to
meet me for
a drink.’

Nico nodded, returning to sit beside her and carefully not
registering any surprise when Roz curled up
against him,
kitten like and seeking
comfort. Her dark head nestled against
his
shoulder and he placed his free arm around her, enjoying
the unexpected, friendly intimacy and breathing in
the clean
scent of her freshly washed hair.

‘You didn’t want to see her,’ he remembered, ‘and I couldn’t
understand why. Presumably you did, though.’

‘
We bumped into each
other quite by accident in Harrods
and
she invited me to a dinner party. Loulou as well. I still
didn’t really
want to go – I suppose you’d made me feel vaguely guilty.’

Roz, he reflected, was a man’s woman, instinctively
mistrusting her own sex because she expected them to behave as she
herself did. It was odd, Nico felt, that in fact
the only female
friend she did have was Loulou, who was so very
attractive and who by any standards could be regarded as a threat or a rival.
Women like Roz, in his experience, almost invariably had plain or unattractive
friends who could never hope to compete with them.

‘What was she like?’ He was beginning to enjoy playing the
role of amateur psychiatrist. ‘Gorgeous?’ Had she somehow managed to make Roz
feel inadequate, he wondered, amusement mingling with disbelief.

‘
God, no!’ she almost laughed aloud at the
idea. ‘Camilla’s
turned into every teenager’s
nightmare of what it could be like
to hit thirty. She looks like the
before pictures in those before and-after-I-lost-a-hundredweight adverts. She’s
got two children,
no dress sense and she
looks so pathetically eager to please all
the time – like an optimistic
rabbit – that I just want to throw
something
heavy at her . . Roz’s voice trailed off as she
remembered how Camilla
had thrown that enormous bowl of
chrysanthemums
over Jack. She had been amazed at the time
that Camilla had had the
imagination to pull off such a magnifi
cent
stunt. Privately, she had been betting on a torrent of tears
and a rapid
retreat to a locked room.

‘
So why is she woman-trouble?’ persisted Nico, offering
her
his glass of Scotch and noticing as Roz
reached out to take it that several fingernails showed distinct signs of having
been bitten. That worried him more than anything else – Boadicea
was more likely to bite her nails than ice-cool,
perfectly
groomed Roz.

‘Because I’ve been . . . seeing,’ she chose her words
carefully, ‘her husband.’

The ormolu clock above the fireplace carried on ticking as
if
nothing had happened and Nico stared at
it, willing himself to
feel similarly unconcerned. He was an Italian,
but he had been
trying for months to
overcome – or at least hide – his innate
Italian jealousy. And it wasn’t
as if he hadn’t realized, he told himself carefully, that Roz was seeing other
men beside himself.
It just wasn’t
particularly pleasing to be told about them, even
if he had practically
dragged the truth out of her tonight.

‘You mean you’ve been having an affair with him,’ he said,
needing to hear it confirmed absolutely.
Christ, he thought, I
must be a bloody masochist.

‘
Yes.’

‘Do you
love him?’

Roz shook her head, then raised
herself away from him to
meet his gaze. Nico’s slanting green eyes were filled with pain and such
desolate sadness that she wished she hadn’t told him.
He was the last person in the world she wanted to hurt,
but the need to talk – her own selfish need to share her problems – had
overwhelmed her like a great tidal wave, and she
had been
unable to stop herself. Now she wished she hadn’t said it. It
was
just one more piece of evidence proving
that she was a total
bitch.

‘
So you’ve been having
an affair with this married guy, but
you
don’t love him,’ continued Nico, his voice an express
ionless drawl. Do
you love me, he longed to say, but you could
only
take masochism so far in one evening. Roz didn’t lie and
he couldn’t cope with her devastating truthfulness
at this
moment.

Please, please don’t ask me, prayed Roz silently at the
same
time, her fingers tightening on his
arm. She knew Nico well
enough to know exactly what was going through
his mind.

‘
So what’s the problem
– he doesn’t want to see you any
more?
I can understand that, of course,’ said Nico, attempting
to inject some
humour into the conversation. ‘An ugly, dried-up old spinster like you.’

Roz smiled bleakly, grateful for the
feeble joke but realizing
at the same
time that she was in danger of bursting into tears.
Kindness was a far more effective method of making her cry
than
arguments and recriminations.

‘
He wants to marry me.’

I want to marry you, thought Nico.
Aloud he said: ‘Doesn’t
he have a minor obstacle in his path at the moment – like his
wife?’

‘
Would you be an angel
and pour us both another drink?’
said Roz resignedly. ‘I think I’d
better tell you exactly what happened at Camilla’s disastrous dinner party.’

Chapter 7

’Right, your week of mourning is up.
Today is the first day of
the rest of your life,’ announced Loulou cheerfully, jerking
Camilla into wakefulness. It was the
first decent night’s sleep
she’d had
since leaving Jack.

‘
What’s this?’ she asked
lazily, as a tray was thrust into her
lap,
and Loulou had to lift it for a few seconds whilst she
struggled into a
sitting position. The Georgian silver tray was
covered with an exquisite cloth of creamy Brussels lace; upon
it was a cereal bowl, a crystal vase containing a
single white
rose, and a narrow crystal glass.

‘
The cereal bowl is
empty,’ she ventured, and Loulou shook
a finger as she collapsed on the
side of the bed.

‘Your eyesight is worse than you realize, my girl. That
bowl
contains your breakfast. Here,’ she
thrust a soup spoon into
Camilla’s hand. ‘Enjoy.’

Once Camilla had finished her bowl of
breakfast Bollinger
with Loulou watching
over her like a nanny, they drank a toast with more of the same to "The
new Camilla.’

‘
But I’m thirty-two,’ she protested.

‘
You can be new at any age, darling. Personally I plan to
be new at seventy, when I shall dye my hair burgundy and take a
marvellous lover young enough to be my grandson.
Now hurry
up and drink your drink – it’s time to give your poor battered
ego
a boost. On second thoughts, I’ll drink
your drink and deprive
you of a few more calories. You go and jump on
the scales.’

Light-headed with champagne Camilla did as she was told,
tottering giddily towards the bathroom and shedding her night
dress as she went. It was amazing, she thought
hazily, how quickly her inhibitions had fallen away since she had been staying
here with Loulou. Until last week she would never
have dreamt that she could walk around naked in
front of
another person – she had
been far too self-conscious to do so
in
Jack’s presence – but when Loulou took her bath each
evening she demanded that Camilla sit on the loo
seat and hear her gossip, and it had made her own inhibitions seem
ludicrous.

‘I think I’ve lost weight,’ she called out uncertainly,
wishing she had her glasses and peering fuzzily down at the scales.

‘You daft, drunk, half-cut cow,’ said Loulou
affectionately,
appearing beside her and
scrutinizing the scales with the eye
of a connoisseur. ‘Last week you
told me you weighed nearly
eleven stone. You’re
down to ten stone and half a pound.
Between
your lousy husband and my even lousier cooking
you’ve managed to lose almost a stone. Didn’t you even
realize?’ she exclaimed and Camilla shook her
head, scarcely
able to believe it
herself. Loulou had given her a week in
which to get over Jack and since
she was used to obeying his
orders, she had
accepted it without question. Jack was almost
all she had thought about – there had been no time to consider
the fact that her bulk was disappearing almost of
its own
accord.

‘You’ll be a respectable size fourteen,’ said Loulou with
satisfaction. ‘Now get some clothes on, you brazen
hussy, and
we’ll go and stun Knightsbridge with it.’

It wasn’t until four o’clock that
afternoon that Camilla
realized
exactly how well planned Loulou’s campaign had been,
and she was
deeply touched by the enormous effort her friend
had made. Incredibly she was being transformed
before her
very eyes – and it was her
eyes which had been the first to be transformed. When the optician had fitted
her with tinted soft
contact lenses her
grey-blue eyes had instantly become a thing
of the past. Now they were of a sapphire blue shade so deep
they
bordered on violet, and the effect of the colour was almost magical.

Still blinking, she had next been
whisked into ‘Faces First’,
run by Suki, a friend of Loulou’s, for the first professional
make-up of her life. By shading and highlighting her face
with
squashy, feather-soft brushes Suki had
given her a bone structure
she had never known existed.

Stunned, Camilla watched her reflection in the stage lit
mirror as Suki deftly altered her appearance. She wasn’t just a changed
person; she was a completely different one. Now
she looked
like one of those women
whom she had always envied. She
looked
elegant, immaculate . . . and far, far more self-assured
than she felt. But at the same time Camilla
realized that she
was also beginning
to
feel
more self-assured than she had for
many years. It was as
if a small, new leaf was slowly unfurling within her, preparing to grow and
take root, and suddenly Jack began to seem less important. Guiltily catching
herself wondering for a moment what he would think if he could see her now,
she firmly thrust the thought out of her mind. A
far more
worthwhile exercise was wondering what an unattached,
non-philandering, thoroughly
decent
man would think if he saw her
now, for although the question was purely academic
at this
stage – it was still nice to think that other people might find
her attractive.

‘
I’ve finished, love,’ said Suki, standing back
at last and
surveying her work with
approval. ‘And if I say so myself,
you
look smashing. Special occasion is it, tonight? Got a hot
date?’

‘
It’s a very special
occasion,’ interjected Loulou firmly
before
Camilla could reply. ‘And yes, she’s got a hot date. With me.’

‘
Explosion’, with its
aggressively trendy black and gold
decor
and loud, finger-snapping stylists, was the kind of
hairdressing salon
Camilla would have run a mile from but with
Loulou
gripping her arm and dragging her up the front steps,
she didn’t have a
lot of choice in the matter.

‘
Don’t go green on me
now,’ she said briskly. ‘Rocco’s the
best scissor-merchant in town and
heaven knows, he’s what you
need with your
hair.’ Which was more or less what Rocco, a
blond Italian Cockney with
flashing green eyes and a bewitching
smile,
had to say when he ran disparaging fingers through
Camilla’s lank, dark
blonde hair.