Forget Me Knot (20 page)

“Oh, please don’t go,” Tara said. “You and I haven’t had a chance to talk.”

Until now, Tara had been huddled in a corner gossiping to an equally haughty girlfriend. The girlfriend was now heading upstairs along with the rest of the women.

Abby sat down again, but Asquith, clearly feeling unwelcome, arched his back and padded off toward the door. Meanwhile, Tara made her way to the sofa. She sank into the feather seat cushion and tucked her endless legs underneath her.

Tara said that she had seen the newspaper write-up about Fabulous Flowers and positively gushed with admiration and compliments. Abby couldn’t put a finger on it, but there was something about Tara’s manner that seemed insincere and made her feel that the woman’s fulsomeness wasn’t genuine.

As they spoke, Abby had the distinct impression that Tara was assessing her. Maybe she was being paranoid, but she was convinced that Tara was desperate to find fault—to discover something about Abby that would prove to the others that she didn’t “fit in.”

The exchange was rapidly turning into an interrogation. Abby looked to see if she could draw somebody else into
the conversation to take the pressure off, but by now everyone, including Toby, was poring over Guy’s father’s latest acquisition, a sixteenth-century map of Wessex.

Abby felt that Tara was hoping for a “wrong” answer, almost as if she was trying to trip her up. Abby’s fears were realized when she let slip that she came from Croydon. Tara’s eyes positively bulged with delight.

“Hey, everybody,” she cried out, “guess what? Abby comes from Croydon. Isn’t that simply a hoot?”

“Never heard of it,” Guy declared, causing huge levity.

Abby was struck dumb, not only by Tara’s bitchiness but by the way everybody else went along with it. She looked for Toby to say something in her defense, but he had disappeared—presumably to the loo.

In the end, all Abby could manage was a thin smile. “I think I’ll go and have that bath now,” Abby said to Tara, “and then get changed for dinner.”

“Changed?” Tara came back.

“Yes, isn’t that what everybody’s doing?”

“Er… oh, yes. Yes. Absolutely.”

Abby went upstairs to the tapestry-walled, mullion-windowed bedroom that she and Toby had been allotted. She half-expected to find him there, but she didn’t.

The bathroom was a few yards along the corridor and was, of course, freezing. Not even the bathwater could warm it up, since by now several people had had baths and it was no more than lukewarm.

She got back to the room to find that Mrs. B had kept her promise and brought up a fan heater. It was blasting out hot air but fighting a losing battle against the bone-chilling draft rattling through the windows.

Toby still wasn’t there, but she knew he had been to the
room to get changed, because his bag was open and his electric razor was on the dressing table. She assumed he’d gone back downstairs.

Abby took time blow-drying her hair and doing her makeup. She dithered for ages about what to wear but finally decided on a slinky gray-blue silk dress. She covered her shoulders with a matching pashmina and prayed there would be a decent fire in the dining room.

When she got downstairs, the dining room was empty. Then she heard the buzz of conversation coming from the kitchen. She followed the sound. As she walked in, she froze. People were sitting at the long farmhouse table, drinking wine and smoking. More to the point, they were all still wearing jeans and layers of woollies.

Everybody, apart from Toby, burst out laughing when they saw Abby in her dress. “Nobody said that Toby’s little lady was leaving us,” Guy said, his eyes locked on Abby’s cleavage. “A dinner date at La Caprice, I assume?”

Abby felt the blush rise from her chest to her face. “Sorry, I just assumed…” Abby turned to Tara. “I thought you said everybody was getting changed.”

“Yes, but only in the sense that they were going to find more layers.”

Abby realized she could either burst into floods of tears and go tearing upstairs to her bedroom or stand her ground.

She was still undecided when Toby piped up.

“That wasn’t funny, Tara. Why can’t you pick on somebody your own size for once?”

“Oh, come on, Abby can take a joke, can’t you, Abby?”

Abby managed a weak smile and decided that, revenge-wise, she would bide her time. Meanwhile, Toby took off his sweater and put it round Abby’s shoulders.

Over dinner—Mrs. B’s glorious beef in ale—the men talked sport, specifically rugby and polo. They also got drunk. The women drank only marginally less but smoked more. As before, their conversation was mainly gossip and concerned women in their circle, whom Abby had never met. “You know she’s had over thirty lovers,” a blonde party planner named India said at one point, referring to an absent friend.

“That’s nothing,” Tara snorted. “I must have had at least a hundred.”

“Gosh,” Abby said sweetly, “if you’re lucky, they might name an STD after you.”

The whole table, with the exception of Tara, burst out laughing. For all her brazenness, she blushed.

It was a minor victory for Abby. Tara’s humiliation hadn’t come close to Abby’s, but at least Abby had shown this woman—not to mention the rest of the group—that she was capable of giving as good as she got. As the weekend wore on, she felt that Toby’s friends were starting to warm to her. The problem was, she loathed them all and couldn’t have cared less if they liked her or not.

TO ABBY’S
profound relief, Tara couldn’t make dinner at Feng Wei. Apparently somebody had given her a
gîte
in the Périgord. When Abby heard this, she laughed and said she hoped it wasn’t catching.

No sooner had everybody exchanged greetings and sat down than the men started making bets with one another about who could drink the most champagne and stay upright.

Guy seemed to be winning. He was knocking back
Moët as if it were Coke. As usual, the more he drank, the more obnoxious he became. Abby had lost count of how many times he had clicked his fingers at one of the waiters and cried out: “Oy, Chairman Mao, more bubbly over here.”

The waiters didn’t seem to mind being insulted like this—presumably because the restaurant was making a huge profit on the champagne—but Abby was mortified. Several times she nudged Toby and whispered, “He’s your friend, can’t you make him behave?” But on each occasion Toby had hissed at her to shut up and accused her of being oversensitive.

When Guy put his hand on a waitress’s bottom and addressed her as “my little prawn cracker,” Abby decided she’d had enough. She turned on him and told him to stop being so damn offensive.

“Abby’s right, Guy,” Toby agreed. “That’s enough.”

Guy ignored both of them. “OK,” he slurred between glugs of champagne, “what do you call a Chinese woman with a food processor on her head?… Brenda!”

Toby rolled his eyes while the rest of the men snorted their approval. Somebody let out a long, loud belch.

“OK, I’ve got another one. How can you tell if your girlfriend’s dead?”

“I don’t know,” the men cried out as one. “How do you know if your girlfriend’s dead?”

“The sex is the same, but the dishes pile up.”

More hoots and guffaws. Abby glanced at Toby, who was looking distinctly embarrassed. This time the women smiled and exchanged maternal “what do you do with them?” looks.

“Gahd, Guy. You are such a bloody chauvinist,” ventured a blonde, horsey-looking girl named Santa, whom
Guy had apparently picked up at the Met Bar the night before.

“Ooh, a dumb blonde who can use words with more than two syllables,” Guy came back. “That makes a change.”

“Only I’m not dumb,” Santa shot back. Then, pausing for effect, she simpered, “And I’m definitely not blonde.”

This was met with drunken
wuurrrgh
noises from the men.

“What do you call a smart blonde?” Guy persisted, snorting with laughter. “A golden retriever.”

Toby was always telling Abby that she shouldn’t be put off by his friends’ brashness—and Guy’s in particular. He said it was all a front and that they were great chaps when you got to know them. Abby couldn’t see it.

By now the blonde jokes were coming thick and fast. Why do blondes wear ponytails? To hide their air valve. Soon, even the women were laughing, albeit reluctantly. What’s the mating call of the blonde? “I’m sooo drunk,” the girls chorused, giggling.

Abby wasn’t so much offended as bored. She couldn’t have been more grateful when she spotted Soph and Martin walk in.

While they were handing in their coats at the coat check, she got up and went over to greet them. She established that Soph, Martin and Lamar had come together in Lamar’s car, which he was now trying to park.

A few moments later, the door to the restaurant opened again and in walked a tall, handsome man in jeans, sneakers and a rust-colored cashmere V-neck that looked stunning against his dark skin. Lamar was exactly as Soph had described— drop-dead gorgeous and an apparent amalgam of Wesley Snipes and David Duchovny.

“Hi, Abby,” Lamar twinkled, taking Abby’s hand. “It’s great to meet you at last. Soph’s always talking about you. She’s just been telling me how you got stuck in the elevator at Covent Garden. Must have been terrifying.”

Whoa, charming and sensitive as well as gorgeous. Abby wasn’t having any difficulty understanding why Soph had fallen for this man.

“It was, but I think it’s really got me over my phobia of elevators. I took another ride in one today and I barely flinched.”

Soph overheard this. “You’re kidding. That’s amazing. Good for you. Come on, let’s celebrate with a drink. Knowing Toby’s lot, they’ve probably got a vat of champagne on the go.”

“Does Elton John wear a toupee?” Abby smiled.

“Actually,” Soph said, “I’m not sure he does anymore. Didn’t he have some kind of new high-tech transplant thing?”

As Abby led Soph and the others into the restaurant, she warned them that things were a bit raucous at Toby’s table. “You don’t say,” Soph said. She had been out with Abby and Toby and Toby’s friends several times and knew what to expect.

As they walked across to the table, Martin whispered in Abby’s ear: “Isn’t Lamar to die for? I am sooo jealous. Why do all the beautiful ones have girlfriends?”

Introductions were made, extra chairs supplied and more champagne ordered. Straightaway, Martin got chatting to the Sloaney girlfriends. Abby got the impression that somehow Martin’s gaydar had sensed possible hostilities from the drunken male camp and, in order to protect himself, he was seeking refuge among the women.

While Soph studied the menu and tried to convince herself that she was entitled to take the occasional night off from her diet and order a portion of deep-fried chili beef, Abby chatted to Lamar about his research into the dangers of formula feeding. “It’s not so much an issue in the West, where people understand that bottles have to be sterilized and the water used to make up the milk must be clean, but in the Third World, babies die every day from drinking contaminated milk.”

As well as his research and charity work helping to promote breast-feeding in the Third World, he put in a full week at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children.

She imagined him on the wards, chatting away to sick, frightened children. She could see him telling daft jokes, making faces, going to endless pains to gain their trust.

As they talked, it emerged that Lamar’s childhood had been far from easy. “A lot of Jews didn’t want to know me because I was black, and blacks rejected me because I was mixed race. For years I just didn’t know who I was or where I belonged.”

“God, that must have been awful.”

Lamar gave a half laugh. “They say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and after that, dealing with the middle-class white medical establishment has been a breeze.”

Abby was in no doubt that this thoughtful, mild-mannered man would provide the perfect counterweight to Soph’s neuroticism. He would be good for her.

At this point Guy piped up again: “So, what’s better, to be gay or to be black?”

Abby felt herself cringe. She and Soph exchanged anxious glances.

“Guy, for Chrissake…” Toby hissed.

“Oh, shuddup, Toby. You’re such an old woman.” Then: “It’s better to be black, because at least then you don’t have to tell your parents.”

Everybody looked at Martin and Lamar, who, to their credit, both managed to laugh.

“So, Lamar,” Guy blustered, “do you believe in an intelligent creator, or are some of us, at least, descended from apes?”

Toby turned on him. “Guy, for fuck’s sake. That’s enough!”

Guy ignored him and grabbed a passing waitress by the wrist. “Hey, gorgeous, fancy coming back to my place?”

Santa, who was meant to be Guy’s date, opened her mouth to protest, but Lamar was in there like lightning. “Are you sure there’s room for two people under your rock?” His comment cut through the atmosphere like a machete, reducing the table to an embarrassed silence. Then Soph added her two cents’worth: “Guy, you are an ignorant, drunken lout. May your gonads shrivel and die.”

A few people tittered, but Guy merely heaved himself out of his seat and announced he was adjourning to the loo because he fancied he might be about to chuck. They all watched as he staggered off.

“So, who’d like to see my engagement ring?” Abby ventured, anxious to alleviate the awkwardness round the table.

“Wow, Toby finally got round to buying you a ring,” Soph cried. “About time. So, c’mon, let’s see it.”

Abby presented her hand for inspection. All the women leaned in and offered the appropriate oohs and aahs.

The men—instantly bored by talk of engagement rings—went back to their drunken banter. Toby disappeared to the loo, while Martin, apparently sensing that
Lamar was feeling a bit left out, began regaling him on the subject of his occasional bouts of gastric reflux.

“God, that is one helluva of a diamond,” Soph said, squinting, clearly looking and failing to find any occlusions. “How many carats is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know? You have to know for insurance purposes—not to mention divorce purposes. If the two of you split up, you need to know how much you can get for it.”