Foursome (2 page)

It’s worth mentioning here that there has never – not even for the most fleeting second – been any kind of frisson between Alex and me. Nothing. Not even when Daniel and I split up for a couple of months at the end of our first academic year of living together, and Alex and I were left alone in the house for the summer while Dan went back to his home town to work in his father’s law practice and Isabel went off to fulfil a hastily made promise to go inter-railing around Europe with a girlfriend. Two and a half months by ourselves, an oversexed twenty-year-old boy and a newly single, heartbroken nineteen-year-old girl. Nothing. Not for either of us as far as I know. For a single second. Nothing.

Alex was always popular with the girls. He had that confidence that came from growing up knowing he was good looking, but his looks – he was slight, fair, pretty rather than handsome – were boy-band asexual rather than testosterone-fuelled manly. He was a teenage girl’s unthreatening pin-up boy. He was also insufferably vain but in such a transparent way that it somehow became a virtue rather than an affliction.

‘God, I’m gorgeous,’ he would say whenever he passed a mirror, but he’d camp it up to make whoever he was with laugh. Everyone agreed that he really believed it deep down, but for some reason no one disliked him for it. People would roll their eyes and agree that it was just Alex being Alex. He was witty – that was his saving grace. And things happened when Alex was around. There was never a dull moment. He was always the first person on anyone’s party list.

His looks have stood the test of time pretty well, actually. He still has a boyish quality, wide-eyed, smooth-skinned (I have no doubt that he moisturizes, and why not, it is the twenty-first century after all), with a thick shock of dark blond hair. I’ve just always preferred Dan’s dark earthiness, that’s all.

We adored each other, don’t get me wrong. We always have. While Dan and I have everything in common – not just the surface things like tastes in music and what we like to do on holiday, but proper things, values and politics and how we want to raise the kids – Alex could always make me laugh. He’s hands down the funniest person I’ve ever met. He can see the joke in everything – well, not so much at the moment actually; ditching his family seems to have affected his sense of humour. That summer, I remember, his favourite thing was to drag me to the local Pound Shop almost every day where he would pick out individual items and take them up to the assistant behind the counter one by one.

‘How much is this?’

‘A pound.’

‘What about this?’

‘That’s a pound too.’

‘Really? That’s too expensive. What about this?’

Rolling her eyes. ‘Everything’s a pound.’

‘And this?’

‘Like I said, everything in this shop costs a pound.’

Every now and then he would turn to me and shout excitedly ‘Hey, Bex, this is only a pound. Should I get it?’ and then he’d turn back to the assistant and say, ‘What if I buy two?’

‘Well, that would be two pounds.’

‘How about if I bought two of these?’

And so on. He got banned in the end. I guess you had to be there.

Both Dan and I have a tendency to take things too seriously, to worry about everything before it’s happened so, for both of us, having Alex around has always been the perfect antidote to that. He’s like a walking stress ball, or at least he was. A breath of fresh air. The bottom line is that he’s one of my best friends. He’s in the top three, after Dan but equal to Isabel. But that’s all he has ever been. A friend.

So let’s just say that I didn’t see it coming. His declaration. We get back to the flat and I’m just thinking that maybe he’s being a little bit weird. A little bit needy. And then, once we’ve established that Dan and the kids are all in bed, and we’re sitting in the living room because Alex has insisted we open a bottle of wine anyway, that’s when he tries to put his hand on my leg. I shrug it off, obviously, but in a way that I hope looks casual. I don’t want to draw attention to it, make it real. But he puts it straight back on and I say, ‘Alex, don’t,’ and that’s somehow an invitation for him to blurt it all out. Great. My best night ever.

In the morning I struggle to get up for work. I’m feeling blurry. Fuzzy round the edges like a partly rubbed-out version of myself. I can’t deal with getting drunk these days. I think my body’s trying to tell me I’m too old. My head hurts. Dan is sweet, getting up with me and offering to make me coffee and toast, which I can’t quite stomach. He’s surprised that Alex isn’t in the spare room and for a split second I think about telling him, but I decide against it. It was nothing. A momentary blip on Alex’s path to post-Isabel enlightenment. But it still might make Dan feel uneasy and I would never want that to happen. Besides, I have absolutely no doubt that Alex – if he even remembers it – will be in the throes of a spiritual as well as a physical hangover. It’s not every day you declare your love for your best friend’s wife. I know he’ll be feeling like shit, sweating about the prospect of me telling Dan what happened. I decide that the best thing to do is never mention it again. To anyone. Ever.

Thinking that, I realize that the only person who would appreciate the horror of what happened last night is Isabel, but I obviously can’t share it with her. So I go to work without saying anything to anyone and just hope that it’ll all go away.

3

Lorna is full of the opening night, prattling on about who was there and how great this is going to be for Gary, until we go through the papers and discover that of the five reviews we can only find one that actually mentions him and that’s just to say that he was dreadful. He was, by the way, but what do they expect? This is a man who stood on a chalk mark on the studio floor and said his lines in the right order for most of his career. His greatest challenge was not to block one of the other actors from any of the three cameras that were running at all times. Actual emoting was out of the question. There just wasn’t time.

I briefly feel sorry for Gary and then think, What the hell? He earned a fortune on
Reddington Road
; if he’s deluded enough to really think he can act and risk his reputation then that’s his problem.

Besides, I have troubles of my own. Not least of which is how to get Lorna to shut up. I want some peace to think through exactly what happened last night.

She’s eating seeds while she talks. She’s always on some health kick or other and she brings them in a Tupperware box and chomps on them all day. It’s like sharing an office with a giant budgie: chat, chat, chat, peck, peck, peck. Maybe I should hang a mirror above her desk and hope she starts talking to her reflection so I can just turn off and ignore her.

‘Didn’t Melanie look fab?’ she’s saying in a voice that is making sure it’s loud enough for Melanie, reading through a script in the room next door, to hear.

‘Yep,’ I say, one of my stock answers. The others being ‘no’, ‘maybe’, ‘mmm’ and occasionally ‘really?’, although that one is dangerous because it implies I want to hear more. In actual fact, it makes very little difference what I say – once that boat has sailed there’s no stopping it. Lorna has decided to tell you something and she’s going to get to the end of what she has to say regardless. I could probably put my head in an oven in front of her and threaten to turn on the gas if she didn’t stop talking and she still wouldn’t miss a beat. Trust me, I’ve considered it, and if I thought it might work I’d probably give it a go.

‘I loved her dress! In fact, I tried on one just like it in Hobbs the other day but it didn’t suit me like it does her. She has those curves,’ she says. ‘Like you, you have curves,’ she adds as an afterthought, but in my case she manages to make it sound like a disease: ‘You have a severe bout of curves. Take two aspirin and go on a diet.’

‘And did you see the way Gary came over at the end and said thank you to me for organizing everything? He probably meant both of us, of course, but you were over the other side talking to your friend Alex…’

I am saved by the bell when the phone rings. Lorna has this trick she does where she manages to pretend she hasn’t noticed that the phone is ringing just long enough for me to answer it. Every time. This time, though, I am on it before the first ring ends. Anything to distract me from her wittering. It’s the booker for a club in South London looking for someone to do a personal appearance at very short notice. I ask what the money is and then pass him through to Melanie who manages to palm him off with the presenter of a recently cancelled kids TV show who, she knows, needs the money so badly he’ll agree to practically anything, including getting both abuse and glasses thrown at him by a load of drunk club-goers who were hoping to see someone they recognized.

Dan always says he doesn’t understand how the agency keeps afloat. Tonight’s job will earn us just forty-five pounds. But, I tell him, it all adds up. And forty-five pounds for a phone call lasting a couple of minutes is hardly bad going. I think sometimes he’s a little embarrassed by the fact that our clients are so down market. I bet he’d love to be able to tell his friends I was working for the company that manages Ralph Fiennes or Dame Judy Dench. Proper actors.

He, by contrast, has a very sober and grown-up job as a solicitor specializing in family law. I’m sure he must have fantasies of running away and joining the circus, but if he has he keeps them to himself. I’m making him sound dull and I absolutely don’t mean to because he’s not. He’s funny and kind and a fantastic father. Plus he has a romantic streak that pops out occasionally and which, even though I’m an old cynic and I would never admit this in public, makes me go weak at the knees.

He has a tendency to surprise me with things. Thoughtful surprises, not just the odd bunch of half-dead gerberas hastily grabbed at the petrol station. He once bought us tickets for the Eurostar to Paris. First class. But it wasn’t the fact that he’d planned a weekend away in secret that really touched me, it was that he had thought of
everything.

He’d arranged for the kids to stay with Alex and Isabel, asked Melanie if she’d mind if I had the Monday off, booked a taxi to take us to the station and one to pick us up from Gare du Nord, asked for a room with a terrace because he knows that I love to have somewhere to sit and look out when we go to a strange city, ordered champagne and chocolates in the room. Everything. It must have taken hours of planning and although, to be really honest, I was knackered and my first thought was that I would rather have spent my days off flopping around the house doing not very much, his thoughtfulness blew me away. In the end we’d had the best weekend ever. Just the two of us reminding ourselves why we loved each other. It wasn’t an isolated incident either. Over the years there have been hundreds of little surprises like that one.

I spend the morning drafting the new newsletter. We send one out to all the casting directors and producers three times a year, updating them on what all our clients are doing. This time Gary will, of course, feature heavily. It’s a skill to make it sound as if everyone is massively successful and drowning in work, and yet might still be available if there were any jobs out there. I am giving it the once-over before I show it to Joshua and Melanie for approval when the phone rings again and another Mexican stand-off with Lorna begins. I have no idea whether she has a telephone phobia or whether she’s just lazy. It’s become a point of principle with me now. I just want her to answer the sodding phone. Just once. There will be five rings before it will automatically put itself on to answerphone. Joshua and Melanie understandably go ballistic if calls go unanswered, but it always goes to the wire before one of us will relent and pick up. This time she’s pretending to be engrossed in typing a contract so on ring three and a half I snatch up the receiver.

‘Mortimer and Sheedy,’ I say, trying to sound unflustered and not give away that I’m fuming because out of the ten or so calls we’ve received this morning I’d swear I’ve answered eight of them.

‘Hey, you lost again,’ a familiar voice says at the other end. Alex. He knows all about Phone Wars and it has always amused him to see who he’ll get whenever he calls me at work. Thank God, I think. He hasn’t taken offence at my rejection of him.

‘Hi!’ I say with genuine enthusiasm. ‘How’s it going?’

‘OK,’ he says. ‘Not so good.’

‘Oh. Are you having a bad day?’ Post break-up Alex has bad days and not so bad days, but then I’ve always thought that Alex should have been the actor out of all of us. He’s a drama queen. In a way that’s always been part of his charm. An evening with Alex is never dull. He can turn the most mundane event into an epic comedy or tragedy. Plus he’s the only person I know who can make everyone feel sorry for him even though he’s clearly the villain of the piece.

‘Can you meet me for lunch?’ he says. And then he drops the big one. ‘I want to talk to you about what I said to you last night.’

I try to laugh it off. ‘It’s nothing. It’s forgotten. Don’t worry about it.’

‘No,’ he persists. ‘It’s not nothing. I need to see you.’

Clearly I’m boxed into a corner. He knows that I can’t talk to him about this with Lorna listening in on the other side of the room. So I have to agree to have lunch with him although, to be honest, now that I know what’s on his mind it’s the last thing I want to do.

‘It’ll have to be a quick one,’ I say. ‘I’m busy.’

I suggest that Alex and I meet at YO! Sushi because it’s fast and because if it all gets awkward I can bail out at any time without leaving loads of uneaten food on my plate. Something I’m genetically hard-wired not to be able to do. We both stare fixedly at the conveyor belt and I try to decide whether to wait for him to say what he’s got to say or whether to try to head him off at the pass.

‘Alex…’ I begin, just as he starts speaking too.

‘I meant it,’ he’s saying. ‘I know you think it was just because I was drunk, but it wasn’t. I’d been wanting to tell you for years. I never did, though, because of Dan…’ He trails off. I know the idea of betraying Dan is not one he would ever take lightly.

‘Alex, don’t do this.’

‘I just think that now I’ve said it, now you
know
, I have to find out how you feel. I can’t pretend it isn’t there any more.’

He reaches over the table and tries to take my hand and I move it away, knocking over the soy sauce in the process. I fuss around, trying to mop it up.

‘Why do you think things weren’t right between me and Isabel? She didn’t know but she must have sensed that my heart wasn’t in it. Bex, you can’t even begin to understand how hard it’s been for me being in the same room as you and her and having to pretend that everything was perfect all these years…’

I’m angry with him again. I want this to stop. How dare he tell me this? This is not how our friendship is supposed to be. I decide that I have to shut it down once and for all.

‘Alex, I meant what I said too. I have never thought of you like that and I never could. You’re in a bad way because you’ve turned your life upside down, I understand that. You’re going through something… some kind of… I don’t know what…’ I want to say mid-life crisis because that’s undoubtedly what it is, but I know that he would take offence. ‘… breakdown. But this is not the solution.
I
am not the solution. It’s never going to happen, OK? And what’s more you’re being disloyal to Dan. And let’s not forget Isabel. Actually, you know what? I’m pissed off with you. I’m pissed off that you would put me in this position when you’re meant to be one of my best friends.’

The conveyor belt is still chugging round but neither of us has taken any food. He lowers his voice to a near whisper.

‘I’ve felt like this for years. I just never had the courage. I –’

‘OK,’ I say, standing up. ‘You have to stop this now. It’s never going to happen and I never want to talk about it again. Let’s just forget you ever said it and try to go back to the way we were.’

‘I can’t,’ he says as I walk off, but I don’t turn back.