It Would Be Wrong to Steal My Sister's Boyfriend (28 page)

“Ellie, you… That’s just bonkers. I can’t believe you went and did all that stuff because of some stupid joke conversation we had. What were you thinking?”

“I really believed I was in love with him, Claire.” I looked down at my ice cream. Suddenly it didn’t seem so delicious any more, and I was feeling a bit sick. “I really did. Properly smitten, like a crush at school. I didn’t mean it to happen, but it did. I just wanted to be around him, hear him talk, have him look at me. All that bollocks.”

“But you’re not any more?”

“I’m not any more.” I told Claire about seeing Oliver at the polo, spending most of the day with him, and how glamorous and romantic and utterly perfect it had been, and how for those few hours I’d been able to imagine that he was my boyfriend, and forget altogether about Rose. I told her, my face absolutely flaming with mortification, how close I’d come to sleeping with him, but I’d brought proceedings to a screeching halt because it had
felt so totally wrong on every level. I could see Claire longing to ask for more details, but wisely and kindly she nodded, put her arm around me and snuck a spoonful of my salted caramel ice cream.

“But you’ve come to your senses now, right?” she said. “You’re over Oliver, Rose is bound to get over him soon too, and find someone lovely, and you can get back together with…”

“I am over Oliver,” I said. “And I’m over Peter too. I should never have gone out with him in the first place, it was stupid. I should have left it alone after the first night, but I thought he’d make Oliver jealous. In fact I think I might be over men entirely. But Rose isn’t. She’s going to marry Oliver. And he’s a lying, treacherous bastard and I can’t tell her he is because then she’ll know I’m treacherous too.” A tear slid down my cheek and splatted into my ice cream container. I passed it over to Claire. “You may as well finish this,” I said. “It’s salty anyway.” I explained to Claire about Rose’s terrifying mountain of debt, how she refused to ask Dad for help and saw marriage to Oliver as her only way out of the mess she was in.

At that point Pers decided to make a bid for freedom and go toddling off towards the door, so Claire pursued her and left me gazing morosely at the rainbow of ice cream tubs behind the counter, remembering that in addition to all this doom and gloom about Rose, I was going to have to talk to Claire about Ben and Nina.

“So here’s how I see it,” Claire said when she returned, slightly out of breath, carrying Pers. “There are three things that could solve the problem. One, something happens to put Rose off Oliver. Two, something happens to put Oliver off Rose. Three, something happens that will solve Rose’s financial problems and mean she doesn’t have to marry Oliver. You’ve ruled out playing a role in option one, which you could do at any time, because you
don’t want to hurt Rose. Which is fair enough. You’ve also fallen at the last fence when it comes to potentially seducing Oliver away from Rose. And that leaves you with option three.”

“But I can’t solve Rose’s financial problems,” I objected. “I mean, I suppose I could go to Dad and tell him I needed money, and give it to Rose, but she’d know it was from him and refuse to take it, because she’s feeling so bad about being vile to Serena.”

Pers squirmed off Claire’s lap and started to bleat a bit. “Come on, let’s walk,” she said, hoisting Pers up into her sling. We wandered out and headed towards the main square, jostling our way through the crowds of people who were taking advantage of the early summer sunshine and thronging the streets. There was the usual assortment of Brixton characters: the religious nutter with his megaphone, exhorting us all to find Jesus and repent; the Rastafarians playing drums and selling Jamaican patties; the beautiful young girls in impossibly short shorts; the dodgy geezers offering to buy used Travelcards outside the station. Normally I’d have relished it all: the vibrant mix of people, the sunny day, the company of my best friend and my gorgeous god-daughter. Today the sunlight and the summer fashion and smiling faces might just as well not have been there – all I noticed were the fag ends and splats of chewing gum staining the pavement, the newspaper and carrier bags that fluttered in the warm breeze, and the old bicycle chained up outside the station, its front wheel nicked long ago. I don’t want to exaggerate, but I was honestly feeling swamped by hopelessness, that I’d never be able to make right the wrong I’d done.

Fortunately Claire never has much time for such navel-gazing. “Come on Ellie, snap out of it,” she said, leading me through the entrance to the park and over to a bench, where we sat down and gave Pers her ball to play with on the grass.

“Rose needs another income stream,” Claire said. “That’s clearly going to be the
solution. What’s she good at?”

“Buying art,” I said. “Being charming. Going to parties. Remembering people’s names. Looking amazing.”

“Hmmm, none of those are sounding particularly lucrative. Could she flog all her clothes on eBay?”

I pointed out that as it was partly Rose’s wardrobe that had created her mountain of debt, selling it would only recoup a fraction of its cost.

Claire shook her head. “No marketable skills,” she said. “That’s the problem with young girls today. Look at me, on the other hand. I have marketable skills, and once I found somewhere to market them my problems were over. Did I tell you Pers and I are moving to a new flat next week? It’s just down the road but it’s lovely, with a little garden and a decent kitchen and a bathroom that doesn’t have a small-scale penicillin factory on the wall, and everything.”

“Claire, that’s great,” I said. “I’m so pleased for you. But, how did you… I mean, is this something to do with Ben?”

“Of course it is,” said Claire. “It’s all thanks to Ben. He introduced me to Lucille in the first place.”

“What?” I said. “What’s Ben’s boss got to go with anything?”

Claire looked at me blankly. “I thought Ben had told you,” she said. “I’ve been giving Lucille public speaking coaching. She needed to brush up on her speech-making and Ben recommended me for a few lessons. I used to do it before I got involved in teaching drama to kids. It’s dull as hell but it pays quite well, and Lucille’s recommended me to a few of her MP friends and now they’re lining up around the block to have their As unflattened and their Hs undropped and their breath control sorted and stuff, and Pers and I can afford to live
somewhere decent again.”

“Hold the phone,” I said. “Just wait one second. Are you saying that you and Ben aren’t an item?”

“Me and Ben an item?” Claire said. “Ellie, you doughnut, what on earth gave you that idea? I mean, I like him and everything, but he’s…” She stopped there, but I could almost see the words ‘your boyfriend’ forming on her lips.

“Ben wasn’t my boyfriend,” I said automatically. “But you and he were suddenly busy all the time, and I saw you together in town, and Ben didn’t call me for ages and ages, and then when Nina turned up again I didn’t know how to tell you because I thought Ben was seeing her behind your back.” I blurted all this out, feeling tears sting my eyes.

“Wait, what?” Claire said. “What was that about Nina?”

I quickly filled her in on things with Ben and Nina, and the unspeakable Benedict, and Nina’s plans to move herself and him into Ben’s flat and evict poor Winston the cat.

“Blimey,” Claire said. “I take my eyes off you for a few weeks and you don’t just get yourself into an unholy mess, you let your family and friends get into one too.”

I pointed out that it was hardly my fault that Nina had come back on to the scene – she was an unstoppable force of nature like a hurricane or a gas explosion or an epidemic of swine flu or something, and Claire had to admit that I was right.

“But it is your fault that Ben was available when she did manifest herself,” Claire said. “Your fault entirely. Anyone can see that you and Ben are meant for each other. If you’d been being Ben’s girlfriend instead of swanning off after Oliver and shagging Peter, Nina wouldn’t have had a chance.”

“That’s just not true,” I objected. “Ben fell for Nina like a ton of bricks when he first met her. One minute, happily single and occasionally shagging me, the next, totally
deranged with love. He never felt that way about me.” I sounded sad when I said it, I realised – sad and resentful.

Claire tossed Pers her ball. “That’s because you never gave him the chance,” she said. “That thing with Nina was ages ago, Ben was practically a child. And anyway, you were doing that daft thing of insisting you two weren’t together when all your friends knew you were basically going out and mad about each other. He won’t be feeling like that about Nina now, you just wait and see. You need to talk to him and find out the score. And I hope you’ve apologised to Peter for treating him so shabbily, because frankly, Ellie, you’ve been pissing about with other people’s lives for long enough.” She gave me a hug that took the sting out of her words. “There’s nothing you can do about Rose,” she went on. “Either she’ll come to her senses about Oliver or she won’t. Focus on the things that you can change.”

Claire gets like that sometimes – all Zen and calm. I suppose it must be the influence of the Acre Lane Hippy Mums and all those Baby Yoga classes. But her serenity affected me – suddenly I became conscious again of the beautiful day, the sunshine, the blossom weighing down the branches of the cherry trees, Pers’s little mouth pursed with concentration as she toddled across the grass after her ball. I felt my face break out into a huge grin.

“You say I need to talk to Ben?” I said.

I don’t know what I’d expected, I thought, looking down at my hands as a fresh awkward silence descended, but it wasn’t this. I suppose I’d imagined Ben and me slipping easily back into our old friendship, minus sex, of course, as long as Nina remained on the scene, but apart from that, everything being the same. The same shared jokes, easy companionship, and sense of being each other’s most important person. But of course that
isn’t the way it works – you can’t be the most important person of someone who’s been co-opted into the role of most important person to someone else.

Ringing Ben after so long had felt strange – I was used to finding his number in my phone’s call log, where he was normally about the second or third on my recently dialled numbers. This time I’d scrolled and scrolled, all the way down, but his name wasn’t there, and I’d had to look him up in my contacts list. It made me feel a bit sad, as if I’d lost or broken something important. But I told myself that everything would be fine, that all friends go through patches when they’re in touch less often, and dialled. He didn’t answer. I left a cheery message along the lines of, “Hey Ben, it’s me. Just catching up. Let’s meet soon for a pint – it’s been too long! Speak soon. Bye.” But he didn’t respond to my message, nor the one I left the next day, nor the one the day after that. So in the end, in the manner of a desperate teenager stalking a boy who’s dumped her and won’t tell her why, I’d called him from my landline at Black & White, a number he wouldn’t recognise, and then he’d answered. Which made me feel just brilliant, of course. But I forced the bright and breezy note back into my voice.

“Ben! Hi! Long time no speak!” I said, even though I have always been of the opinion that people who say ‘long time no speak’ are pseuds of the highest order and will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes, along with those who use the phrase ‘the below’ in emails and men who wear skinny jeans.

“Hi, Ellie,” he said. “Sorry I didn’t get back to you. Been very busy – only three weeks to Iron Man and the training’s getting quite full-on. Work’s hectic too.” There was a pause, presumably intended for me to contemplate the busyness of Ben’s schedule and repent my selfishness in calling him. But instead I upped the brightness of my tone a few watts.

“Three weeks! Wow! You must be shattered!” I gushed. “But don’t you get to do
that thing soon, that you do before marathons? Starts with a T? Trickle? Means sitting on your arse eating spaghetti?”

“Taper.” I could hear a bit of a smile in his voice. “Yeah, my last long session is this weekend. A hundred miles on the bike.”

“Blimey!” I said. “Impressive! Knackering! Anyway! Let’s meet up for a drink? Protein shake? If you can fit me in?”

Ben said a beer would be fine, and we arranged to meet in his local, the Bear and Bush, the next evening at eight.

And here I was, having spent three hours blow-drying my hair and putting on makeup and trying on and discarding clothes in a state of breathless excitement, as if I was going on a date or something, sitting opposite Ben, looking at the ice in my gin and tonic, in the middle of a horrible, uncomfortable pause.

First there’d been the awkward silence when he walked up to the table where I was waiting, which had come directly after he’d said, “Hi,” and I’d said, “Hi.” Then there’d been awkward silence number two, which had fallen as soon as he came back from the bar with our drinks and sat down. Then I’d gone off to the loo and checked that my face looked okay and brushed my hair, and gone to the bar as well and bought us a bowl of olives, and returned to our table just in time to catch the beginning of the third in a series that looked like it was set to run and run.

“You’re looking really well, Ellie,” Ben said, after what felt like about an hour. “Keeping up with the exercise?”

“Yes,” I said. “You’re right, it gets quite addictive. You’re looking well too.” He was, at that. Ben’s always tended to be sort of lean and stringy, but there was a new tautness to him, a bit more bulk on his legs and shoulders and less around his middle, and I could see
his belt was on an extra hole. I imagined how flat and firm his stomach would be underneath his stripy blue and white shirt. I imagined the clear outline of muscles that I’d see when he stretched his arms over his head, pulling the shirt off without bothering to undo the buttons, as he always did, and how his body would feel under my hands, ridged and hard beneath his warm, soft skin. And by that stage we’d got ourselves right in the middle of a fourth awkward silence.

“Another drink?” I said, scuttling off to the bar, barely waiting for his answer. I wished I still smoked so I could go and stand outside for a few minutes and compose myself, but then I told myself not to be ridiculous – this was Ben, my friend, and I was acting like a total loser. So I took our drinks and marched back to the table and sat down, and forced myself to make bright, cheerful conversation about my new job and the political issues of the day, and even the weather, for about ten minutes, hoping to break the ice. But Ben remained as frosty as ever, and as soon as my flow of bright chatter dried up, there we were – smack in yet another awkward silence.