It Would Be Wrong to Steal My Sister's Boyfriend (15 page)

“Ducks?” I said.

“Amphibious birds that quack,” said Oliver. “You’ll like them.”

I laughed. “All right then, lead me to your ducks.”

We walked in the direction of the Barbican and Oliver started talking about how one of his favourite things to do on weekends was to sit by the pond in the central square and throw bits of bread for the ducks. He’d just been to the organic shop on Moorgate to buy the special seedy rolls that were their favourite, he said. He explained that it was almost like a meditation, and that however crap a week he’d had at work, after sitting and watching the birds get all enthusiastic and eat his seedy bread, he felt better, soothed and sort of healed inside. Frankly it was the most bonkers thing I’d ever heard in my life, but it was also quite sweet, and of course I was so smitten by Oliver he could have said his favourite way to relax was train-spotting or potato-printing or something, and I would have gone ‘awww’ and thought it was wonderful.

After fifteen minutes or so I realised he had a point. There was something terribly cute and calming about how the ducks started this almost murmury quacking when they saw us, and came swimming over and started fishing the crumbs of bread out of the water with their beaks, and a couple of the braver ones even got out of the pond and came and milled around our feet. Oliver and I didn’t talk much, we just said asinine things like, “Look at that one with the blue feathers,” and “What are those black and white things then?” (They were
coots. So shoot me – I read English, not zoology.)

But by the time the bread was finished and the birds had swum away – a little lower in the water than when they’d started; the cavalier way in which they’d stuffed themselves made me understand how foie gras happens – I realised my jaw was slightly sore from smiling so much, and I felt relaxed and lighthearted, but very cold.

“Okay,” I said, “you’re right. I now see the appeal of ducks. How did you discover this form of therapy? GP referral? I haven’t done it since I was a kid.”

“I used to bring a kid here,” Oliver said. He suddenly looked stricken with sadness, and I remembered Rose mentioning his ex-girlfriend, the one that got away. I longed to ask him more about it, but something about his frozen face made me decide not to.

Then he said, “Fancy some lunch? Or tea and cake? It’s almost three.”

I realised I hadn’t eaten all day and I was properly starving.

We wandered through the deserted streets, and as we walked Oliver chatted about the City, the Wren and Hawksmoor churches and how you could tell the difference between them, the old layout of the streets and how the basic structure had changed over the years. It made me realise that although I’d lived in London for ten years, I’d more or less confined myself to the bits along the river, and that there were great swathes of the place about which I knew nothing. But mostly I was just enjoying listening to him talk, the lovely resonant quality of his voice, the way every now and then he looked at me and smiled, and I smiled back.

After a bit he stopped outside a little restaurant with white walls, and tables and chairs of various shapes and sizes crammed anyhow into the room.

“This do?” he said. “Not much is open around here on weekends, I’m afraid I
normally survive on microwaved stuff from Waitrose.”

I said it looked fine to me, and it was true – I’d have been happy to go just about anywhere at that point, I was so elated to be with Oliver.

We sat down and both ordered coffee. I could feel that my stomach was about to make a loud and embarrassing rumbling sound, but I also felt stupidly shy and awkward, and looked at the menu and felt as if there was nothing on it I could order without looking greedy or gauche. But Oliver said to the waiter, “We’ll have a triple chocolate brownie, a piece of lemon cheesecake and a piece of carrot cake, please.” He grinned at me. “The carrot cake’s so we get one of our five a day.”

I laughed. “And the lemon’s so we don’t get scurvy?”

“Correct.”

The waiter brought three plates absolutely heaving with cake and we picked up our forks, and Oliver said, “After you?”

I said, “No, after… damn, this looks too good to be polite about it.” And I dug in.

The cake was gorgeous and we finished it in record time, and then Oliver said, “I know it isn’t considered the done thing in the middle of the afternoon, but I think a bottle of champagne would go down rather well, don’t you?”

I said that now he mentioned it, it did seem like the sensible way to proceed, and he caught the waiter’s eye and ordered one, and soon we were sipping away, and it felt so deliciously decadent I wondered why I didn’t drink at teatime every day of my life. Well, I never would of course, because that’s the start of a slippery slope that ends with cans of Special Brew wrapped in blue plastic bags on the bus on the way to work in the morning, but you know what I mean – it was rather fabulous.

Oliver asked after Pers and Claire, and I said that they were both well, because I
didn’t want to mention Ben, so I steered the conversation on to more neutral topics and we chatted about books we’d read and films we’d seen, and who was going to win
Masterchef
, and to be honest it felt just like a first date – one that was going a lot better than my first dates usually do. I kept catching myself gazing at him, trying to commit to memory the way his long, smooth hands looked as he lifted his glass, the way his lips had a sort of half-smile even in repose, the way he lifted one eyebrow when he was being ironic. I tried to do that once, practising in front of my bedroom mirror for about half an hour before I gave up because it was too difficult and made me look ridiculous. I suppose it’s one of those things like wiggling your ears, which you either can do or you can’t.

I asked him about living in the Barbican, and he said that obviously it was convenient for his office in the City, where he often worked insanely late hours, but that he loved the architecture, the slightly alien feel of the place, and the fact that he was living in what had started out as a bit of a social experiment.

Then he said, “I love music, too, that’s another thing. When I first moved here I used to go to concerts and recitals a lot, but I’ve more or less stopped now.”

That pained, shadowed look had crossed Oliver’s face again, so I muttered something anodyne about pressure of work, and how hard it is for anyone to get time to themselves.

“I do miss green spaces, though,” he went on. “Hence the ducks, I suppose. I have a place in the country, which I suppose makes me one of those evil second-home owners proper country people complain about, but it was my grandmother’s and I can’t bear to sell it. I don’t get out there as often as I’d like to.”

I realised that must have been where he was at Christmas, when he came to pick Rose up after her horrible outburst over lunch, and I was abruptly reminded that this was
Rose’s boyfriend I was sitting with, drinking champagne with and gazing at. Rose’s boyfriend whose ankle was pressing against mine under the table. I hastily moved my leg away.

By this stage it was dark outside and the waiters were moving around the room putting extra knives and forks and glasses on the tables and lighting candles. Oliver looked at his watch, and poured the last of the champagne into our glasses, and I felt my heart sink, knowing that he was about to ask for the bill and our afternoon together would be over. But he didn’t.

“I know it’s a Saturday night and extremely short notice,” he said, “but if you don’t have any other plans, would you like to have dinner with me?”

I wanted to say yes. I wanted to drink more wine with him and pick at my food and flirt and meet his eyes in the candlelight across the white paper tablecloth. I wanted the spell of intimacy that seemed to have been cast around us to remain unbroken, and eventually to hear him ask me softly if I’d go home with him, and to walk back through the silent streets and past the pond where the ducks would wake up and quack drowsily at us, and up to the dizzy heights of the thirty-fourth floor, where he’d said his flat was, and make love to him with the lights of London spread out below us the way he’d described them. More than anything, I wanted to say yes. I remembered Rose’s stupid, bratty outburst to Dad and Serena, and how she’d been deliberately ignoring Oliver – almost as if she didn’t really want him. But then I thought about her careful control since their row, or whatever it had been, and how much effort she’d been putting into staying bright and cheerful, and how she shared everything with me: her thoughts, her clothes – but surely not her boyfriend. I looked down at my hands, clumsily pleating the tablecloth, and my voice sounded all croaky when I said, “Oliver?”

“Mmmm?” he went.

“What’s going on with you and Rose?” I asked.

His face sort of closed up, and he said, “You need to ask Rose that.”

I shook my head, and stood up and said, “I’m sorry, I think I’d better go. Thank you, it was a lovely afternoon.” I put thirty quid on the table and ignored Oliver trying to make me take it back, and ignored him asking me to wait, and I walked out into the street feeling tears stinging my eyes. I hadn’t been concentrating when we’d walked to the restaurant and the area was unfamiliar, so I shambled around for ages stopping to check the maps on bus stops, but eventually I found a bus going towards Waterloo and got on it, and then I got the train home. By the time I reached the flat I was feeling dry-mouthed and headachey – maybe afternoon drinking isn’t such a great idea after all – and I had a tight, sore feeling in my throat from not crying. It was after eight and I thought the chances of Rose not being home were pretty good, but she was.

She was all dressed up to go out, in a cream-coloured cashmere dress and slouchy boots with high, high heels, and waves of scent and happiness were radiating from her as she put on her coat and tucked her keys and her mobile into her squashy gold bag.

“Ellie!” she said. “My god, your hair is stunning! You look great! I didn’t realise you were coming home, otherwise we could’ve gone out to celebrate.”

I muttered something about being quite tired anyway, and Rose said, “Guess what? I decided to forgive Ollie. I’ve just spoken to him and I’m off to meet him now. Aren’t you pleased?”

CHAPTER TWELVE

“No,” said Ruth. “No, he’s away on holiday in Sardinia. He might be able to do it via his mobile. No good? Let me see if I can arrange something else. Yes. Yes, I’ll ring you back. Twenty minutes. Okay. Bye.” She crashed her phone down on to its cradle. “Shit,” she said. “Shitshitshitshitshit.”

“What’s up?” I asked.

“BBC News is up,” Ruth said. “They want to do a segment on our new ad campaign – apparently it’s caused some controversy in the right wing press, and bloody Duncan’s on bloody holiday and they want to record an interview with someone this
afternoon, and I said I’d take Chessie to ballet because Diana’s got her AGM.”

“Can’t Leda do it?” I asked. Leda’s one of the medics who man the minge bus – she’s super-glamorous and photogenic and does quite a bit of our media stuff when Ruth and Duncan aren’t available.

“She’s up in Aberdeen.” Ruth started frantically scrolling through the numbers on her phone.

“Can’t Ellie do it?” piped up Russell, our newest and most hapless volunteer.

“Yes!” said Ruth, at exactly the same moment as I said, “No!”

“Now, Ellie,” Ruth began. Back in the day, she used to be a primary school teacher, and every now and then you can hear that ‘quieten down, children’ note in her voice. Clearly there is a large part of me that is still six years old, because it has an almost mesmeric effect on me. “Please give this some thought. It’s only a ten-minute piece, they say. You’ve done radio for us before and you come across ever so well, and you’ve just had your hair done.”

“Go on, Ellie, you’ll be brilliant,” Russell said, clearly loving the drama. It must’ve made a nice change from updating our press contacts spreadsheet.

“Ruth, I…” I started to object, but then realised I didn’t really have any choice in the matter. With Duncan away and Ruth committed to taking a rare afternoon off to ferry Diana’s daughter around, and Leda up in Scotland going round to schools talking about the HPV vaccine, there really was nobody but me who was available to go on telly and talk about the ‘What have you picked up’ campaign. I was going to have to man up, stop acting like a wibbling baby, and do it. The alternative was YEESH missing out on precious free publicity.

I’ve done a few radio interviews for YEESH, as Ruth pointed out, and that’s been fine. But I have an absolute horror of lots of people looking at me. I first realised it at school,
when I’d beaten all other comers to get the coveted role of Juliet in the annual Shakespeare production. The real prize was not so much the part as the opportunity for endless on-stage snogs with Peter Barclay, the fittest boy in the sixth form, who’d inevitably been cast as Romeo, despite the fact that great swathes of his lines had to be cut because he could only remember about a dozen words on the trot. I rehearsed to within an inch of my life and was fitted for the costume department’s finest trailing gowns (some Classical and some Victorian in style, but I didn’t care). I knew my lines backwards and if I say so myself, I’d been pretty good in all the rehearsals. I’d even been nurturing a little dream of going to RADA after school and having a dazzling career on the London stage before taking Hollywood by storm. So on opening night I wasn’t even particularly nervous. Then my first cue came and I walked out on stage and looked at the sea of expectant faces in the front rows, and thought about all the people in the darkness beyond, hundreds of eyes on me, and I froze. I couldn’t say a word. I opened my mouth and nothing came out – not so much as a squeak, and certainly not, “How now, Who calls?” Fair play to the people playing Lady Capulet and the nurse who carried on without me, and maybe if you didn’t know the play you’d have thought I was supposed to be being virginal and demure. What felt like about five hours passed, during which a wave of heat swamped my entire body and my hands felt the size of watermelons. I suppose it must only have been a few seconds, because by the time it got to “It is an honour that I dream not of”, I’d recovered myself enough to speak. But for the rest of the evening the same thing happened over and over – each scene I was in, I dried completely and couldn’t get my first lines out. It was awful. I was mortified and Peter Barclay was furious to have been shown up, and later on at home I cried so much I was nearly sick, and the next day I pleaded a throat infection and Mandy Simms took over.