Gifted and Talented (23 page)

She reminded herself determinedly that Isabel was a grown-up – a clever grown-up at that. She herself was jumping to conclusions about someone she did not know, just as she had about Richard. And look how wrong she had been there!

‘What’s the matter?’ she heard him say, behind her. ‘You’re in a daze.’

Diana twisted back to him, wrenching her frown into a smile. She would not explain about Isabel, even though they had mentioned her earlier. Had they been discussing any other subject she might have changed it. But they had been talking about Rosie, Diana’s favourite topic.

‘You were saying she was at a good school . . .’ Richard prompted.

‘Oh, yes.’ And Diana plunged back in again.

The more questions he asked, Richard realised, the more he could gaze at her sparkling eyes and lovely face. Watching her mouth widening and puckering in reply, he found himself wondering what it would be like to kiss it.

‘Rosie is lucky,’ he said when she paused for breath.

‘Yes, the school’s great.’

‘Not that,’ he returned. ‘She’s got a great mother, was what I meant.’

Flustered at the direct compliment, Diana looked down at her plate. Something like a warm, slow explosion was taking place within. It was a long time since she had felt like this, if, indeed, she ever had before.

He leant forward. ‘I’d like to see you again.’

She looked at him, startled.

‘If you’d like to,’ he added, quickly.

‘I’d like to,’ Diana said, unhesitating. ‘When, do you think?’

She had expected him to say next week. Next Saturday night, perhaps. ‘How about tomorrow?’ was unexpected.

‘Tomorrow?’ she repeated, flustered but delighted. ‘That would be . . .’

Wonderful?

Amazing?

Exciting?

Incredible?

All of the above?

‘. . . fine,’ she finished.

Isabel walked back to Branston with Jasper in a dream of happiness. Everything was all right again. Back to normal. After his fidgetiness in the restaurant, Jasper seemed to have calmed down. The wine, perhaps, she thought. Or maybe – this with a surge of excitement inside – something else?

He had his arm around her and his warmth flowed into her with tremendous force. It was as if he were possessing her. His attention was entirely focused on her now; his phone had rung several times and he had ignored it. Eventually he had taken it out and switched it off, which made her feel absurdly flattered.

She would have been entirely ecstatic had it not been for the fact she had had to pay in the restaurant. She had been prepared to pay half – and was careful to budget accordingly in advance. So when, with a dazzling smile, Jasper had carelessly pushed the plastic saucer containing the bill over to her side of the table and said that he was out of cash at the moment, so could she do the honours, it had been a shock.

Naturally, she had obliged without fuss, but not without secret worry. For all Branston’s generosity, her term’s budget was both a shoestring and a knife-edge; unexpected expense risked cutting the shoestring right through. Asking Mum to supplement it was out of the question. Isabel quietly resolved to make fewer trips to the Incinerator next week. You could never be too thin, after all. Or so Jasper had claimed, teasing her once about love handles. She had worried about it since, though she had never thought she was fat before. The opposite, if anything. ‘Perfect figure’, Mum always said, but perhaps Jasper had a different, higher, idea of what perfection was.

She felt nervous as they approached the porter’s lodge – lair of the burly T-shirted beast – but Jasper breezed through without incident. She put this down to Jasper’s manifest self-confidence and felt quietly proud, although the porter was on the phone at the time and had hardly looked up. Rather to Isabel’s disappointment, there was no one about in the corridors to advertise the fact she was bringing back such a prize – Jasper would certainly have given Kate and Ellie something to think about. On the other hand, it was a relief not to encounter Amber.

Even as Isabel closed the door of her room, Jasper was standing on the bed, swiftly disabling the fire alarm. He put a finger to her lips as she started to protest, digging out a packet of tobacco and something wrapped in clingfilm with his other hand. She watched as he sat at the edge of the bed and quickly rolled a joint, steeling herself for the moment when he passed it to her. Isabel had never smoked marijuana; when the moment came, however, it was less alarming than she had imagined. Emboldened, she took a deeper drag, closing her eyes as she did so.

Her head spun suddenly and nausea blocked her throat. Her heart was hammering painfully. She opened her eyes wide and gripped the chair arms.

‘You OK?’ Jasper croaked over the ectoplasmic swirl of smoke he held in his mouth.

She nodded, fighting to right herself, to not seem pathetic and jejune before him.

He sat on the chair opposite the bed, his shod feet on the bedspread, looking at her steadily. The room was still spinning, but not so fast. Her hammering heart had slowed too and the furious jump and fizz of her nerves was subsiding. A heavy calm was spreading within her.

He smiled at her, a slow, unhurried smile, full of sensual promise. She smiled back, uncoiling herself from the hunch in which she had arranged herself, stretching her body out along the length of the bed.

She had fantasised about this moment, fantasised with no real expectation of gratification. Now it was here it was hard to believe. She watched the joint go slowly in and out of his mouth, mesmerised by the red glow at the end as he inhaled. She shook her head as he offered it.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked her. ‘Don’t you like it?’

Before she could reply he had ground it out in a tiny, antique porcelain sweet dish Mum had given her for her last birthday. The gesture knocked her off her stroke. She had been on the point of asking the Amber Question.

‘What’s the matter?’ he urged, laughing.

‘The Bullinger,’ she found herself saying.

She felt as surprised as Jasper now looked. As a subject, it had flown out of nowhere. Or so she thought. Perhaps it had been waiting, and confusion had dislodged it from wherever it had lurked. Now, awful as it was, it was too late to unsay it. She could only look brightly back.

‘What about the Bullinger?’ he said lightly.

‘Oh, you know . . .’ She tried to match his tone with a flippant one of her own.

‘What have you heard?’ His voice was flat, yet there was a warning in it.

‘Dwarves,’ she said, keeping up the smile as if it were a joke, which hopefully it was. ‘Strippers. Drugs. Tearing up fifty-pound notes in front of homeless people.’

He was looking away, perfect brows slightly knit. Her heart rattled with terror. Had she offended him?

Then, to her incalculable relief, he turned and smiled at her. ‘Don’t believe all you hear. We get a bad press. Mostly from people who are jealous because they haven’t been invited to join themselves.’

His smile widened to something brilliant and she found her mouth stretching in response, desperate to smooth the waters she so regretted ruffling. Had Olly exaggerated about the iniquities of the organisation? Was
he
jealous? Must be, she decided.

‘Besides, you know,’ Jasper continued, ‘I personally didn’t have much choice. De Borchys have always been in the Bullinger. My brother . . . my father . . . Family tradition. You know.’ He shrugged.

Isabel nodded eagerly, feeling another wave of longing for the patrimony referred to. Things like the Bullinger just went with the territory, she decided: rites of passage for the likes of Jasper. They meant nothing. All the same, she didn’t want to know any more.

‘It’s OK,’ she assured him, hastily.

He rose and bent down to her, pulling her tightly to him. She felt a surge of pure excitement. His fingers sought, then twined with hers: a dear, intimate gesture that moved her almost to tears. He was gazing at her, his beautiful face serious.

‘Isabel,’ Jasper said, ‘I want you. I’ve wanted you since the moment I saw you. I’ve never felt like this about anyone before.’

Isabel did not trust herself to speak. It was all too wonderful to believe, too good to be true. She closed her eyes as he pushed his face into her hair. ‘I need you,’ he murmured, inhaling as if she were full of oxygen, saving his life, even. She felt a powerful rush of protectiveness, of pride. She had never been needed before. She, the vulnerable baby, the poor student, had always been the needy one.

Then he unwrapped her, slowly, like a present, and only when the tension and longing seemed about to explode within her did he slowly peel his own clothes off. Naked, he was the god she had always imagined, his body perfect and clean-cut: a Caravaggio lit by a desk lamp. She rose to him, her skin blazing against his. The world was whirling around her and she felt herself reeling backwards beyond the shoebox confines of the tiny room, into the infinite space behind the stars.

A car was approaching the Campion Estate. In its driver’s hand was clamped Diana’s address.

Sara Oopvard had suspected that her former neighbour had slid down in the world. But never to this extent. Poor Diana! It was, Sara thought, marvellous to see that someone, at least, was worse off than she was.

Wild horses would not have dragged it from her, but it had been a tough few months since the divorce from Henrik. On the surface of it, she had scored victory after victory. Sara had hung on to the West London house with its basement swimming pool and penthouse home gym. Thanks to her divorce lawyers, she had amazing amounts of money, as well as custody of Milo, although this last victory was hollow, since Henrik, eternally at work, had barely seen his son, anyway. But something was missing; something that Sara, for all Henrik’s money, could not buy. And that something was status. Only now she had lost it, did Sara realise how important it was.

As all her friends were firmly in the Henrik camp, the one with the money, the Provençal villa and, above all, the work-experience placements, she had learnt the hard way that a woman like her was only as good as the man she was married to. She was adrift in a sea of yachts owned by the important husbands of others, fringed by beachside villas in which were being held the smart holiday gatherings Sara was no longer asked to. She had spent much time brooding on this lack of social clout. How could she get it back again? Make people take notice? Most pressingly of all, how, when and where would she find another powerful man to marry?

Not in London, it seemed. Women she had lunched with now had their chauffeurs drive straight past her. Charities wrote to say that the orphans, heroes, homeless and others with compromised life chances, whose committees she had adorned, no longer needed her help. Milo was disinvited from a Wild West party with real bison and cowboys imported from the family ranch.

Life was becoming impossible, weekends in London even more so. Sara took every opportunity to stay with people in the country, particularly people, like Diana, who had not exactly invited her and were not necessarily expecting her.

Before turning into the Campion Estate, Sara had to stop at a zebra crossing. She waited, rudely revving the engine, her manicured fingernails tapping on the pale suede padding of the steering wheel. Normally she drove straight over crossings, especially those with shaky old people hesitating questioningly on the pavement at the side. But there were too many people mid-road to do this now. She watched in disgust as a thin man in a baseball cap loped over, several small and scruffy children scurrying in his wake. I bet none of them can hold a pencil, went Sara’s burning thoughts. Their father included – if he
is
their father.

Across the road, a chip shop was enjoying a surge in custom. A row of large bottoms, their owners slumped against the pale blue counter, could be seen waiting in line through the plate-glass window. ‘They should spend less time stuffing themselves and more time trying to get jobs,’ the never-knowingly-employed Sara fulminated as a fat man with tattoos emerged, limping, from the establishment, passing a fat young woman, who was heaving a pram into it.

As, now, only a shaky old lady stood at the side of the crossing, Sara stuck her foot down and roared off, in spite of the fact she had to turn almost immediately. With her usual screeching of wheels, she threw her large, white four-wheel drive into the estate entrance.

Then, as the first of the pebbledashed semis came into view, Sara felt her Manolo on the accelerator pedal rise up slightly. The car slowed. She felt tight inside. She had, she realised, never been into an actual, real council estate before – let alone as darkness fell.

She caught her breath, felt her heart pump harder, felt the adrenalin swirling round her system. She was going in! She knew exactly how a war correspondent must feel in a combat zone. She glanced in the tinted, heated, oversized driver’s mirror at Milo in the back seat; he was, however, buried in a computer game, slowly eating doughnut after doughnut from the box intended as a house present, and evidently oblivious to his surroundings.

Sara raised her chin and flicked her eyes watchfully about, prepared at any moment for some armed and dangerous member of the underclass to come leaping out at her. Nothing happened, which was almost a disappointment. Driving into these badlands was giving Sara quite a frisson. A heat was rushing through her that had nothing whatsoever to do with the automatically warmed seat beneath her skinny bottom. The Campion Estate was the most exciting thing that had happened to her for months: an experience out of the ordinary; an exhilarating taste of the downmarket.

As Sara parked her white four-wheel drive outside the address she had been given, her soul lifted to see the Christmas light display on the house next door. It was a triumphant vindication in flashing neon of everything she had supposed and expected. The wall was absolutely covered! If people had money to burn on electricity bills in such quantities, the alimony-funded Sara raged to herself, why should the state support them by giving them houses? Parasites! There was one of them now, a fat woman, staring nosily out of the window. Sara glared back with all the outrage a top-rate-taxpayer-by-former-marriage could summon. She yanked on her handbrake with a crunch. ‘Darling!’ she trilled at her iPad-absorbed son. ‘Switch that thing off, will you? We’re here!’

Upstairs in the house, unaware of the impending visitor, Diana’s eyes met Rosie’s in the mirror. Her daughter had come up softly behind her and her face, too, now glowed in the sunset light from the window against which the dressing table was pushed. Rosie was changing, Diana saw. Her formerly round face was starting to lengthen, the plump cheeks melting to reveal ridges of cheekbone. Rosie’s eyes, mere slits when she was a baby, had lengthened and thick black lashes now fringed the candid blue eyes. Rosie was growing into a beauty, her mother saw, her gaze suddenly wobbly with tears. Her snub nose with its cinnamon dusting of freckles remained, however, the same.

‘What’s up, Mum?’ Rosie grinned. ‘You look as if you’re crying.’

‘Just a lash in my eye, darling . . .’

‘You’re smudging it all,’ complained Shanna-Mae, who had heroically offered to come and do her make-up again, as well as to babysit Rosie. Debs had insisted.

All things considered, there had been a lot of insistence surrounding this second date. Richard had insisted on picking her up, for example. He would be here soon, a prospect that knotted Diana’s insides. All day, she had been running over the previous evening in her mind, unsure she had not imagined it. Could it really all have gone so well? Had she been drunk? But this morning, she had not had a hangover; on the contrary, she had woken with a wonderful sense of wellbeing, tinged only, perhaps, with a slight regret that she found herself alone in the bed . . .

But, as the day had worn on, so had her nerves. And with the approaching darkness, her fears had gathered momentum. She glanced out of the window now, eyes peeled for Richard’s car. Did he even have one, given his reliance on his bicycle? Perhaps, Diana thought, it would be a tandem. She shot a guilty glance at Shanna-Mae, whose handiwork might be all too soon crushed beneath a cycle helmet.

At a sudden noise below, Diana’s eyes met Shanna-Mae’s in excited alarm. It sounded like a knock – yes, here it came again; it
was
a knock. Her heart galloped in her chest. Richard was early.

She had not imagined – not in a million years – that the enormous white people-carrier she had just seen pass the window might contain him. But she had seen it park, although not who was driving. Shanna-Mae had been finishing her lashes just after that and she had been obliged to stare at a stain on the carpet. There were many to choose from.

‘Watch it!’ Shanna-Mae warned as Diana now rose to her feet, half her hair still in the straighteners. Snatched from Shanna-Mae’s grip, they swung and hit her on the cheek. Diana hardly noticed. Her mind was a whirl of panic. Who was it that said you could never repeat successes?

Almost upsetting the dressing table, Diana hurried downstairs. She took a deep breath and smoothed her already-smoothed hair before reaching to the door-latch with a shaking hand and pulling it open.

The person standing outside, illuminated by the still-bare bulb hanging in the hallway, was not Richard Black. It was a skinny woman in improbable sunglasses – all the more improbable for its being dark now – and with long, highlighted blond hair, a tight, tiny denim jacket and very tight white trousers. She had on a fixed red-lipsticked smile, displaying dazzling white teeth. In one hand she held the handle of an enormous silver pod of a suitcase on wheels and on the other side stood a small, scowling boy of about nine. He was wearing a sweatshirt printed with neon skulls and clutching an iPad.

‘Sara,’ Diana said faintly. As she clutched the lintel for support, flakes of paint crumbled off around her fingers.

Two brown, clawlike hands, glittering with rings, came flying through the air and seized her shoulders. Two bony cheekbones crashed into hers. There was an overpowering wave of perfume. ‘Darling!’ exclaimed Sara Oopvard. ‘Here we are!’

Diana, stunned, looked helplessly at the box Sara had shoved into her arms. It was a battered container that had once evidently held twelve Krispy Kreme doughnuts, but now held four. Various grease-marks and drips of icing marked the places once occupied by the others.

Sara was looking at her, head on one side. ‘You were expecting me? Remember I mentioned it on the phone?’

‘Er . . .’

‘I wanted to show darling Milo here round the colleges. So he could choose which one he wanted to go to.’

Darling Milo did not even look up at this. He was frowning at his iPad, pressing it with his fingers and muttering under his breath.

‘So lovely to see you!’ Sara trilled. ‘I thought the TomTom had got the wrong place at first!’

Diana’s eyes flicked over Sara’s shoulder to the great white four-wheel drive she had seen from the bedroom window. It glowed at the kerbside beyond the broken gate and seemed, in the streetlight, to have an electric pink sheen about it. The number plate read, ‘SARA 1’.

‘Very
different
, isn’t it, darling?’ Sara remarked in her drilling voice. She had pushed back her enormous sunglasses now and her sharp eyes took in the bare light bulb, the battered hall and the underfelt in the passage in one forensic swoop. ‘Very, um,
understated.
’

Her bony profile – which looked even tauter than Diana remembered; her nose, certainly, was a different shape altogether – turned towards the small boy. ‘Milo!’ she urged. ‘You remember Mrs Somers, don’t you? She used to live next door to us in London, until it turned out Mr Somers was having an affair. And, when they got divorced, it turned out that they hadn’t any money either; remember all that darling . . . ?’

Milo took no notice. He had activated his iPad now. The real world was a closed book to him.

Sara’s words finally spurred Diana to action. ‘Was that necessary?’ she asked, her voice tight with anger.

‘Of course!’ Sara turned on her a surprised smile. ‘So important to be honest with children, don’t you think?’ she said in syrupy tones. ‘Terrible mistake, I always think, to brush things under the carpet.’ She looked at the hall floor. ‘Always assuming you have one, of course.’ She accompanied this remark with the laugh, which instantly transported Diana back to her former home. It sounded like a burst of gunfire; you could hear it through the walls. ‘I must say, darling, it’s terribly
brave
of you to live here.’

‘I like it here,’ Diana said doggedly. ‘My new neighbours are wonderful,’ she added pointedly.

Sara’s thin, manicured hand was at her mouth, as if pressing back amusement. ‘Oh, yes. Your neighbours. That Christmas light display is very . . . How exactly shall I put it?
Special.
’

‘Cheerful, you mean,’ Diana said firmly, aware of Shanna-Mae on the staircase behind her.

Sara giggled. ‘Well, it certainly made
us
laugh. Didn’t it, Milo?’

Shanna-Mae gave an audible gasp.

Diana was thankful, at this awkward juncture, to hear Rosie now start to come down the stairs. To her surprise, her nine-year-old daughter now took effortless command of the situation.

‘Hello, Mrs Upward,’ Rosie said politely. ‘You remember me, don’t you? Rosie Somers. And this is my friend, Shanna-Mae, from –’ Rosie left just the suggestion of a pause – ‘next door.’

Sara had no intention of acknowledging Shanna-Mae – too obviously the sort who’d have five different children by five different fathers just to get a council house and never do a day’s work in her life. Instead, she gave her entire attention to Rosie. ‘Goodness! I hardly recognised you. Is that really a school uniform you have on? Say hello to Rosie, darling,’ she urged Milo.

Milo took no notice. ‘He’s tired, poor little chap,’ Sara cooed, patting her son’s hair. He jerked his head impatiently. ‘The sooner we get him to his room, the better.’

‘His
room 
. . . ?’ Diana gasped. There were only two bedrooms; both were occupied. Panic swirled within her. Richard would be here any minute and that was nerve-wracking enough. But that Sara Upward and Milo had turned up unannounced within minutes of his arrival and required accommodation was nothing less than a nightmare.