Life Swap (36 page)

‘During the past week I’ve seen that I miss doing
something for
me
, something that engages my brain, makes me feel useful; and the other thing that I now see so clearly is that I haven’t been engaged in my life. I see you here, with your adorable children, and no help, and you manage fine. I’ve been so terrified about being overwhelmed by looking after my children myself, that instead I run away and spend my life being overwhelmed by this stupid charity work.

‘Oh my gosh, Kate. I’m so glad I came down to see you this weekend. I can so see where I’ve been going wrong, and what needs to be done to make it right.’

‘You see?’ Kate says cheerfully. ‘Everything happens for a reason. I just wonder how Vicky’s getting on, what epiphanies she may have had, and whether she’s had any huge realizations while she’s living your life.’

Amber shrugs her shoulders sadly. ‘I’ve been desperate to call home to find out, but it’s against the rules.’

‘Aren’t rules made to be broken?’ Kate grins.

‘Do you think I should phone?’

‘I absolutely do,’ Kate says, handing her the cordless phone. ‘And after you speak, let me have a word with Vicky. Although I have to say you’re a wonderful substitute and I’m having a lovely time with you, I do miss her.’

Amber picks up the phone and dials, quietly putting down the phone when the answering machine picks up, and she looks at her watch.

‘Should have known,’ she says. ‘Saturday means the kids will probably be on their way to the Little League
game, and Richard’s the stand-in coach this week so his cell will be turned off. I guess it serves me right for trying to break the rules.’

‘I know you must miss your children horribly, but isn’t it wonderful to be free?’

Amber frowns. ‘Yes and no. I think that a week’s life-swapping would have been perfect. Now I don’t know what I was thinking, agreeing to leave everyone for a month. The only thing that keeps me going is that this week has flown by, so hopefully the next three will go just as fast. The novelty of being able to do whatever I want whenever I want was amazing for the first three days, and now I just miss my family, I miss my life, but I’m still glad I did it.’

‘Well I must say I’m glad you did it too. I’ve loved having you around today. Are you going to stay all weekend?’

‘I’m staying tonight and then I think I’m going to get back tomorrow. This friend of Vicky’s wants to take me out to dinner.’

‘Which friend?’

‘Daniel.’

‘Ah. Friend in the broader sense of the word.’ Kate grins.

‘Yes, precisely. Not that I have to do what Vicky would do on this occasion,’ Amber smiles, ‘but he turned up the other night very late and very drunk, and seemed a bit taken with me. I hope he doesn’t think I’m a date.’

‘He knows you’re married?’ Kate asks.

‘Yes. Very much so. If anything I think that piqued his interest even more. He mentioned something like a joyful night of passion.’

Kate whoops with laughter. ‘And there were you saying your life was boring.’

‘I didn’t say that!’ Amber laughs back. ‘But I do want to get to know Vicky’s friends, so I think I should say yes.’

‘Absolutely you should say yes,’ Kate nods. ‘And there’s nothing nicer than having an attractive man flirt with you, especially when you feel like an old married woman that no one would ever even look at.’

‘True,’ Amber says. ‘And he is attractive.’

‘See?’ Kate says delightedly. ‘Maybe we can get you to develop an innocent crush after all.’

Amber gives Kate a huge hug when she leaves. She kisses the children, gives Andy a smaller hug, and thanks them profusely for one of the nicest weekends of her life.

‘Please come down again,’ Kate whispers into her ear. ‘It’s been so lovely having you here, and the kids loved you too.’

‘I’m sure I will,’ Amber says. ‘Vicky’s so lucky, having a family like you.’

‘And your family’s so lucky,’ Kate smiles, ‘having a mummy and wife like you.’

Daniel turns up to collect Amber at six o’clock, a bunch of full-blown peonies in hand.

‘These are by way of apology,’ he says sheepishly when she opens the door. ‘I’m appalled at my behaviour the other night. Turning up on your doorstep drunk was hardly the best way to introduce myself, but hopefully I’ll prove to you this evening that I’m not so bad after all.’

‘The flowers are lovely,’ Amber says. ‘Come in while I put them in water, then shall we go?’

‘Great,’ says Daniel, thinking that Amber is even more lovely than he remembered from the other night. She has a coolness and reserve that he has always found stunningly attractive, not to mention that exotic sophistication that a certain kind of American woman seems to hold.

‘Where are we going?’ Amber’s voice comes from the kitchen.

‘It’s a surprise,’ Daniel calls back.

Amber appears in the doorway, the peonies now in a glass bowl which she sets carefully on the coffee table. ‘I don’t like surprises,’ she says.

‘You’ll like this one,’ he says. ‘Look, please try and relax. I’m not going to flirt with you or make a pass at you. I’m just here having a friendly dinner, just as I would with Vicky.’

‘Except you’d go to bed with Vicky afterwards, no?’

‘True,’ Daniel shrugs. ‘But still, it’s not a love thing with Vicky and me. It’s friends with benefits, and I certainly don’t expect you to go to bed with me afterwards.’ Although, he thinks, if you’d like to that would be perfectly fine with me.

‘Okay,’ Amber smiles. ‘This just feels very strange. You have to remember I’m married with children, I don’t have dinner with men I don’t know, haven’t done anything like this for years, and even though I know it’s not a date, it just feels… well… like a date, I guess.’

‘It’s not a date,’ Daniel says, opening the front door and ushering her downstairs to the car. ‘It’s just an evening.’

Daniel hadn’t booked a restaurant. Instead he had bought out the local deli: fresh slices of prosciutto and Parma ham, exotic cheeses, crusty baguettes, pâtés, olives, roasted peppers with nutty olive oil and sprinklings of chilli, two bottles of Pinot chilling in the cooler.

‘Oh my gosh!’ Amber says in delight when they park on the outskirts of Regent’s Park, and Daniel produces the hamper and ice boxes from the boot of the car. ‘A picnic! How perfect!’

Daniel grins in delight. ‘I thought a quintessentially English picnic would be the perfect introduction to London for an American visitor. Unfortunately the food is mostly Mediterranean, but rather that than bangers and mash, I thought.’

‘No, it’s perfect. And on such a lovely night. Did you organize the weather too?’

‘Absolutely,’ Daniel nods seriously as they stroll through the park, avoiding the softball games being played, picking their way through other picnickers
dotted around. ‘Had a word with the man upstairs this morning.’

‘Okay, I’m relaxed now.’ Amber grins. ‘This isn’t a date. This is just a lovely thing to do on a summer’s evening.’

‘And they say I don’t know how to make a woman happy…’ Daniel rolls his eyes.

‘Well right now I’d say you’re making this woman very happy indeed,’ Amber says innocently, and Daniel resists the temptation to come back with a flirtatious wisecrack. Not now. Not yet. But God, she is gorgeous, and who knows what might happen after a few glasses of wine…

Chapter Twenty-seven

The jewellery sale was a huge success. Despite the food, about which Sonia was right, no one really ate anything anyway, they sold nearly everything. For a while at the beginning Sonia was worried, but once Heidi snapped up a gold necklace for $1,200, it seemed that everyone rushed in to buy something for themselves.

Every good party must have a drama, and sure enough Vicky’s jewellery party even had a little drama of its own when Nadine showed up, Suzy’s alleged best friend. The two of them – Nadine and Suzy – kissed one another hello, told each other they looked fabulous, and then spent the rest of the afternoon ignoring one another and whispering amongst the cliques that had formed on either side of the room.

‘What’s going on?’ a bemused Vicky had asked Deborah after she’d walked in upon Nadine, almost in tears in the kitchen, being comforted by two of the other girls, all of them whispering furiously, all of them silent as soon as Vicky entered, resuming their conversation when they saw it was only Vicky.

Deborah had rolled her eyes when Vicky asked her. Nadine had apparently confessed to one of the other girls, when slightly drunk and in a situation where she didn’t think anything would be repeated, that she
secretly thought of Suzy’s husband as Muttley, because of his unfortunate underbite.

It seems that one of the other girls had immediately told Suzy, and a war had begun. But this being a grown-up war amongst supposed women, there was no fighting, no direct confrontation, Suzy had just icily frozen her out, and Nadine didn’t know what she had done.

Nadine was ringing Suzy and leaving messages, and Suzy would just fail to call her back, had blocked all private calls so her callers were forced to reveal their caller ID, and if she saw Nadine’s number, she wouldn’t answer. And these were girls who had spoken five times a day, so after a couple of days of radio silence, Nadine figured something was up.

But she couldn’t think of what she had done. Didn’t remember her confession about Muttley, and so she left a few messages pleading with Suzy to let her know if she had done something to upset her, telling Suzy that she was such a wonderful friend, Nadine would never knowingly do anything to hurt her.

And Suzy didn’t respond. Instead she drew the battle lines and set about recruiting her army, ensuring that the coolest, prettiest, richest women were on her side. ‘What a B-I-T-C-H,’ she would say about Nadine, and the others, delighted to have an opportunity to be one of the queen bee’s workers, would shake their heads in professed bewilderment at how Nadine could have been so awful.

Nadine only knew for sure that she had been
completely snubbed when she drove past Suzy’s house two days ago to see the driveway full of cars, each of which belonged to one of Suzy’s friends, and where Nadine’s Escalade was supposed to have been – right in the front as she would normally have been the first to arrive, to help Suzy organize what Nadine knew must have been one of Suzy’s infamous coffee mornings – was Heidi’s Lincoln Navigator, mocking her in all its champagne glory.

Nadine had been tempted to stop the car. To walk in as if nothing were wrong, as if she hadn’t been deliberately excluded from an event at which she would usually be number two bee, but of course she didn’t have the courage, would never do something like that, so instead she drove home through a sea of tears and left messages for three of her friends, including the girl who had passed the Muttley message on to Suzy, and asked them what she might have done, why Suzy was now ignoring her.

Suzy would never be so obvious as to ignore Nadine in person. Her torture is far more subtle than that. To Nadine’s face she will always be charm itself, it is only when her back is turned that Suzy’s knives will be drawn.

‘God,’ Vicky says after Deborah has told her the whole story, Deborah refusing to take sides, although well aware that she is neither cool enough, pretty enough nor rich enough for either side to have made much of an effort to recruit her. ‘It sounds like they’re all still twelve years old.’

‘I’m not sure that women ever change that much,’ Deborah says the next day, the two of them standing waist-deep in the pool while the kids splash around, screaming with laughter. ‘Maybe it’s an American thing, or maybe it’s a suburban thing, but the cliques here are pretty much exactly the same as when we were all at school.’

‘Suzy’s obviously the queen bee,’ Vicky says, remembering back to her own schooldays when Catherine Enderley had been the queen bee. The prettiest – and bitchiest – girl in the class, who would one day grant you the gift of her friendship as if it were the most precious pearl, and the next day would treat you as something distasteful she had found on the sole of her shoe.

‘And everyone wants to be around the queen bee,’ Deborah says. ‘Which gives her far more power than she deserves, so she can get away with being bitchy and two-faced, because she’s still the one that everyone wants to be friends with.’

‘But why?’ Vicky asks, not understanding. ‘Why would they want to be friends with someone so awful?’

‘I think maybe some of them just have incredibly low self-esteem. Nadine, for example. She’s not a bad girl, but she has no self-worth at all.’

‘You’re joking!’ Vicky says. ‘But she seems to have so much. She’s pretty, she seems bright, funny. Nice husband, kids. Why would she have no self-worth?’

Deborah shrugs. ‘Why do any of us? But I think she attached herself to Suzy because that’s what gives her a sense of worth – intertwining herself so deeply with
someone who has what she wants, who is what she wants to be. If that person deigns to be friends with Nadine, then some of that sparkle will inevitably rub off on Nadine too, and then she will be good enough.’

‘And what about Amber?’ Vicky asks curiously. ‘Where does she fit in?’

Deborah smiles. ‘Ah yes. What about Amber? Bloody good question because Amber is Suzy’s number one rival, even though Amber’s completely torn about whether she wants to be.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well Amber is a Winslow, which over here counts for a hell of a lot, and however much money Suzy’s husband makes, he’ll never be “old money”, he’ll never come from one of those grand patrician families like the Winslows, whose forefathers came over here on the
Mayflower
, so that’s something she can’t compete against, which immediately gives Amber a head start.

‘And then Richard is hugely successful, and they’re about the only people who live in a house that truly compares to Suzy’s, and even though Amber is much lower key than Suzy, doesn’t feel the need to impress quite as much except when she’s feeling hugely insecure or there’s a committee meeting, Amber is the only other one who can basically afford the same lifestyle.’

‘But it’s only money,’ Vicky says, bemused. ‘Is Suzy really so shallow that she’s judging everyone by money, by what they have, what size house, what designer clothes?’