Second Chances (16 page)

Chapter Twenty-Eight

SHE NORMALLY HAD the constitution of an ox, but Liz had been feeling under the weather for some time. Work had been relentless, with three new clients coming on board as a result of the good word-of-mouth the Buckland conference had generated, and she found herself spending more time at the office or with clients than she did sleeping.

So,
she shrugged off the constant tiredness, blaming it on over-stretching herself. This morning, however, she just couldn’t find the energy to drag herself out of bed. She called Rose and told her she’d have to postpone all her meetings for the day. As soon as she’d hung up, she groaned, remembering that she was meant to have been briefing Jack that afternoon about an upcoming project. She rang Allegra and told her she’d have to handle it herself. Then she buried herself under the blankets again and tried to get warm.

Back
home, Allegra felt torn between dread and excitement that she’d be seeing Jack on her own that day. Don’t be ridiculous, it’s for work, she told herself, but she couldn’t quite still the tremor of anticipation that surged through her every time she thought about it. They’d had such a nice time that Saturday he’d come over to join her and the kids for lunch; she’d felt comfortable and at ease, and he seemed to have enjoyed himself as well. Nonetheless, when she walked into the Apex offices later that day, she could feel nervous butterflies fluttering around her tummy.

Jack
arrived shortly afterwards, and had looked enquiringly at her when there was no sign of Liz.

‘She’s not well, so it’s just you and me, I’m afraid,’ Allegra said. ‘I’ll do my best not to bore you to death, and we’ll have to find some way to manage without her colourful interjections concerning our parentage.’

‘And the constant Beatles playing in the background,’ Jack said, with a laugh.

They
worked quickly and efficiently through the afternoon, and Allegra was relieved to find that when it came to business, that’s just what it was. Jack was professional, attentive, asked smart questions, foresaw potential glitches and helped find solutions should these arise, and was, in general, completely winning and charismatic. As they filed the last sheaf of paper away in their folders, he had smiled and asked what her plans for the next day were.

‘A blessed day of nothing,’ Allegra said. ‘I’m not due in at the magazine until next week, and I don’t need to be back here until the day after tomorrow.’

‘Great… Listen, I was wondering if you’d like to have dinner with me,’ Jack said, shuffling his feet. This was harder than he’d expected, to ask Allegra out on what would officially be a “date”. ‘You were so kind to me that weekend, to invite me over for lunch, and I just wanted to do something nice for you, to say thank you.’

Allegra
smiled, tickled to see the boy squirming. It was like being a teenager again, asked out on a date by the cutest boy in school. At the same time, however, she wasn’t sure it was that good an idea. He had a girlfriend, didn’t he? But then again, he knew that better than she did, and he did say this was a “thank you” gesture in return for lunch the other day.

‘Sure, yes, that would be nice,’ she said. ‘So… what time and where? I’m allergic to all shellfish, I hate Japanese food and I don’t like avocados. That should help narrow it down.’

Jack
grinned, relieved beyond words that she hadn’t turned him down or, even worse, laughed in his face. What could he possibly offer her, anyway? He was pretty much broke most of the time, and she was probably used to being invited out to dinner by older blokes who had money and experience. She probably looked upon him as a younger brother or something. Well, that would have to do for now, he decided. He’d take whatever he could.

‘Why don’t you come over to my place? You can meet my puppy, and I’ll cook something nice. Prawn and avocado cocktails to start with, maybe,’ he said, teasing.

Allegra
hesitated. His place? But would that mean Abi would be there as well? And how could she ask without sounding like she’d assumed it would actually be a “date”, with that possibility of, you know, sex hovering over their heads all evening? What if that wasn’t what he was thinking of at all?

‘Abi’s out of town at the moment, on a training seminar in Bali, and it’s just that the puppy doesn’t like being left on her own,’ Jack said. ‘I know it sounds daft.’

‘No, it doesn’t sound daft. It just means that a small, furry animal runs your life,’ she replied, teasing him back. ‘And there I was, thinking you were a big, strong man.’

‘I am a big, strong man,’ Jack said. ‘And yet, I have been known to push the vacuum cleaner over the floor every now and then, plus I even know my way around the kitchen, too. I am New Age Man, darling.’

‘Don’t you mean you’re metrosexual?’ she asked. ‘I’ll go into your bathroom and discover that you have all sorts of girly moisturisers and stuff, and that you buff your nails, too.’

The
next evening, Allegra deliberately chose to wear clothes that were nice, but didn’t look like she was trying too hard. Following Jack’s directions, she drove along his street and there he was, in the fading sunlight, waiting by the side of the road with his puppy in his arms.

His
flat was smaller than hers, and a typical “boy” space: dominated by hardware in the form of a huge TV, various bits of audiovisual equipment, shelves crammed with DVDs and CDs featuring bands she had mostly never heard of. She settled down somewhat nervously on the sofa, as he opened the wine she had brought along. Time passed pleasantly enough, but when Allegra left just after 11pm, she couldn’t help feeling an odd sense of total anti-climax. It had felt like going on a first date in which the initial awkwardness is never overcome.

Jack
had been a bundle of nerves, chatting away non-stop, but not talking to her. He’d talked at her the whole night long, but it wasn’t until she was driving home that it had hit her that he hadn’t asked her a single question about herself. Instead, he’s talked about movies, about TV shows, about work, about his dog, about the food, about music… Everything and anything but themselves.

‘It was like hanging out with your best friend’s older brother,’ Allegra said, describing the evening to Liz on the phone as she drove home that evening. ‘It was as if we were both holding our breath, waiting for the other to… well, I don’t know what we were waiting for. It was all pleasant enough, but totally odd. Kind of like watching a porn movie with your parents, I should think, where you’re all talking very loudly and trying to pretend it isn’t going on.’

Liz
had paused thoughtfully, and then said, ‘First of all, I think you’re a screaming idiot to have agreed to go over to his in the first place. That aside, there are four possible explanations for how the evening panned out. Do you want to hear them?’

Pulling
over into a lay-by, Allegra switched off the engine and sighed. ‘Do I have a choice?’ she asked. ‘No? I didn’t think so. Go on then…’

Liz
had decided to ignore her regardless of what she said; she was going to speak her mind whether or not Allegra wanted to hear it. Taking a breath, she began: ‘Number one: it was simply a nice, if misguided, thank you gesture, just as he said. Number two: he does genuinely like you “that way”, but he’s scared of laying his cards on the table because he’s not sure how you feel about him, and he doesn’t want to ruin whatever friendship you have between you at the moment in case you don’t feel the same way. So he was waiting for you to make the first move, which you didn’t, because you’re a repressed Catholic bint. Number three: he was planning to make the first move himself, but freaked out as soon as you were there and in the space he shares with Abi, because what he was doing and thinking suddenly hit him.

‘So,
let’s say for argument’s sake that he does actually fancy you, and he’d planned it to be “the” night where he laid his feelings bare for you. Then you turn up, sit in Abi’s usual place on the sofa, eat off Abi’s plate, drink out of Abi’s wine glass, go to the bog and sit on Abi’s toilet. So, he got cold feet because it finally hit him that he was thinking about fooling around with another woman while his girlie’s away.’

‘And the fourth explanation is…?’ Allegra asked, pressing her fingers to her temples, not sure she really wanted to hear the answer.

‘He’s playing you,’ Liz said, flatly.

Allegra
didn’t know, couldn’t bring herself to think about it, to try to fathom Jack’s feelings or his intentions or what that entire evening had really been about. But as she turned the engine back on and drove off, she didn’t want to consider Liz’s final theory, because that would make Jack a bastard and herself a fool.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

CLIVE SMILED AT himself in the mirror, examining his teeth closely, and felt pleased. That was ten grand well-spent, he decided. He’d always been very self-conscious about his teeth. There was nothing wrong with them, except that there were too many of them, and they were overcrowded and overlapped on the sides. No one noticed until he pointed it out, of course.

But
he’d long nursed a quiet obsession about getting his teeth “fixed”, and the whole Abi fiasco seemed a good enough reason as any. He would rebuild the man that was Clive; better, stronger, faster… not quite Steve Austin in The Six Million Dollar Man (his own budget didn’t stretch as far as that), but the same concept. So he’d got himself a ticket to Bangkok, checked into the Silom Dental hospital and put himself in the extremely capable hands of their best cosmetic dentists.

He
then treated himself to a week’s R&R at the Chiva Som resort in Hua Hin, where he was massaged, scrubbed, wrapped, toned, cajoled, stretched and dieted back to full recovery. On the outside, at least. On the inside, he was still sore and bruised. Unable to face returning to Hong Kong just yet, he decided he might as well head north to Chiang Mai and go on an elephant safari, as one does when one’s heart is broken.

Lurching
through the jungle on a pachyderm’s back did make him appreciate the familiar comforts of Hong Kong, he found, not that these were lacking in Chiang Mai itself. Certainly not at the Tamarind Village where he was staying, a spacious village-style hotel located in the center of the “old town”. Divided into three private courtyards, Tamarind Village fenced out the city’s busy buzz in favour of calm serenity. A 200-year-old tamarind tree was the focal point of the place, and Clive found he could quite happily sit there of an evening, simply gazing up at the star-studded night sky.

‘Room for one more?’

Clive
looked up to see the smiling face of K. They’d met once before, very briefly, when he’d foolishly gone along to a casting she was conducting for another fashion shoot. She’d taken one look at him and burst out laughing, calling Allegra over. ‘I think this one’s for you, sweet child,’ she’d said to her, leaving Allegra to somehow find a way to tactfully burst Clive’s bubble.

That,
in fact, had also been how he’d met Allegra in the first place. K probably didn’t remember him, but Clive didn’t harbour any ill feelings over that botched audition. He’d been desperate for any sort of work at the time, and had fronted up knowing he was unlikely to meet the model grade.

‘You’re K, right?’ Clive asked, getting to his feet. ‘You probably don’t remember me but —‘

‘Remember? Of course I remember! You were that sweet boy who came to my casting for “White Maharajahs”!’ K said, warmly. ‘I believe your agent had told you it was a movie I was auditioning for… Mmmn, mmmn! Now, if you looked then like you look now… Tell me, what did you have done? You are looking very, very well indeed.’

‘Teeth,’ replied Clive, giving her a full-faced grin to show off his new dental work. ‘Nothing else. Sun, sea, no sex, just a lot of reading and relaxing. And elephants.’

‘Oh, don’t talk to me about elephants! I have had enough of them!’ It was only then that Clive realised K had a huge brace on her left leg, running from ankle to thigh. He hadn’t noticed it initially as she was wearing dark trousers, which made the black brace that much harder to spot. ‘I am calling it my “stairway to heaven”,’ K said, with a wink. ‘Don’t ask me how I did it…’

It
was, of course, the result of another K fashion shoot. This time, it was five models, seven elephants and their handlers, in the depths of the jungle, trekking through rivers and climbing halfway up trees and dangling models from rope bridges and suchlike. K, in the manner of Alfred Hitchcock, liked to insert herself into the background of one of the photographs of any shoot she did, and had climbed up onto the back of a large elephant she decided to christen “Bob”.

‘To cut a long story short, I wanted to go one way, Bob wanted to go another, we had a bit of a disagreement and I lost,’ K said. ‘I slid right off his back and ripped almost every ligament in my left leg as I fell, darling! Had to trek three days back through the jungle in excruciating pain before I could get to a hospital.’

‘Well, there aren’t many women who carry off that look, but you do it with remarkable aplomb,’ said Clive, grinning.

He
was glad to see K, even though they barely knew each other. Allegra talked enough about working with her for Clive to know that K was, if nothing else, a lot of unpredictable fun. Plus, he was starting to feel homesick for Hong Kong, and she was a living, breathing reminder of the smoggy city he had come to call home.

‘Thank you,’ K said, acknowledging the lie graciously. ‘It is very kind of you to say so, especially when I know I look ghastly, sweetie. I’ve been travelling non-stop for the last month — Hanoi, Singapore, Los Angeles, and now here. I have been living in a suitcase! … All I can say is thank God it’s Vuitton, darling!’ She burst into peals of laughter.

Wandering
into town and finding a wonderfully grubby bar, Clive and K sat up late into the night, exchanging horror stories of vacations and trips they had had and getting steadily more tipsy. He was reaching that stage of inebriation when he began to wonder what K would look like without her clothes and whether it would be a good idea to put the suggestion to her, when she accidentally tipped her drink into his lap.

Apologising
furiously, she attempted to dry his trousers with a paper napkin and Clive excused himself to go to the bathroom. Trust him to wear camel-coloured chinos; that dark wet patch where her drink landed was right over his crotch… and there was no joy in the men’s room either, which wasn’t equipped with a hand-dryer. He did the best he could with paper towels and decided that would have to do.

Returning
to the bar, he was put out to realise that K was gone. Then he heard shrieks of laughter coming from a table outside and, sure enough, there she was. She hadn’t left, just moved the party outdoors. She was talking to a small group of men, whose accents informed Clive they were from Australia or New Zealand. His ear wasn’t quite keen enough to make out the subtle difference.

‘Clive! Darling! Just in time,’ K said, waving him over to their table. ‘You’ll never guess who my friends are…’

‘Well, you’ve got me there,’ Clive said, grinning. K wasn’t even aware that she had said anything remotely funny. ‘Hello, I’m Clive and you are…?’

‘Jeez, mate, K said you’d be excited to meet us, but this is going too far,’ one of them said, grinning, looking directly at Clive’s wet crotch.

‘Don’t flatter yourself,’ Clive said, embarrassed, trying to blag his way out of it. ‘This was all K’s doing. She’s just too sexy for me and, well, I lost control, what can I say?’

The other three men laughed. Clive heaved a sigh of relief. At least they all seemed to have their senses of humour intact. It turned out they were from New Zealand, in the film business and scouting locations for a new movie they would begin shooting early the following year. K didn’t know them from Adam, but had introduced herself as they walked into the bar and won them over with the sheer force of her personality. Clive, being an actor, was thrilled to meet them, but was careful not to be seen to be trying to inveigle his way into their forthcoming production. K had no such qualms, however.

‘This must be a sign from the heavens,’ she declared. ‘You are making a movie. My good friend Clive here is an actor. You must at least audition him; in Hong Kong, he is a star, you know. Very famous. Highly acclaimed. Won all sorts of awards.’

‘The most recent of which was for penmanship in fourth grade at school,’ Clive said, smiling ruefully. ‘I’m afraid K tends to review my abilities through rose-tinted lenses when she’s in this good a mood. I’m a jobbing actor, that much is true. Don’t do as much film work as I’d like, as Hong Kong’s market is mainly for Cantonese-language productions… So I tend to be cast as “scowling white man number two” and killed off within the first five minutes. If I’m even lucky enough to stay alive that long in the movie.’

The
other men had laughed, and a lively discussion on the pros and cons of working in the film industry ensued. It was close to 4am before Clive and K finally headed back to their hotel, contact details and promises to stay in touch having been exchanged with their new friends.

Pausing
under the tamarind tree back at the hotel, Clive took K’s hand and kissed it, saying, ‘K, it has been a pleasure.’

‘Oh, you are so old-fashioned! Such a gentleman!’ K exclaimed. ‘I think you have a decent heart, Sir Clive, and I shall knight you for it. On your knee, my good man.’

Clive
sank unsteadily down onto one knee and K proceeded to “knight” him using a swizzle stick she had taken with her from the bar. ‘Arise, sir knight!’ she said. ‘Truly wondrous good deeds shall you do, and truly wondrous good things shall befall you. Now, I must get myself to bed before I truly wondrously fall on my backside out here.’

‘Goodnight, dear lady,’ Clive said, smiling. ‘Thank you for a very pleasant evening.’

K
walked off, waving her hand in farewell, then suddenly stopped. Turning round to peer at Clive, she said thoughtfully, ‘Truly wondrous good things shall indeed befall you, Sir Clive. I feel it in my bones.’

Clive
watched as she headed off towards her room. It would be great if she was right. He was just starting to realise how long it was going to take him to recover from Abi’s betrayal of Jack and himself, and wished that maybe something might come along to take his mind off the whole thing. Ah well. He’d ploughed on through other setbacks in his life and career; he’d just have to continue doing the same now.