Vanity (10 page)

He actually wished Eleanor would lighten up a bit. He was glad his wife was such a great mom, but after two miscarriages that had nearly destroyed their marriage, Ellie's overwhelming joy when Hammy had been born perfect was rendered almost maniacal by the relief. Her subsequent quest for perfect motherhood was both laudable and intensely wearing.

Poppy looked at Marty askance. She had thought that only the Americans in the middle of the States thought that way. The ones on the East and West coasts were meant to be a tad more liberal.

‘I've never been more fulfilled than I am now, staying home and looking after Hammy.' Poppy couldn't tell whether Eleanor sounded smug or pleading, as she turned to her with that earnest, slightly scared expression in her pale blue eyes.

‘It must be wonderful,' she started, trying to be nice, but her words were drowned out by two very drunken male voices. One was singing something that sounded like a Scandinavian folk song. The other – oh, good God, it was Damian – was trying to whisper, very unsubtly, ‘Shhhh, mate, they must be here somewhere.'

‘You musssht not worry, my friend, I have shhooo many shhhhares here, I practically OWN THIS PLACE!'

Poppy was just wondering whether hiding under the table or doing a runner would be the better option, when Eleanor leapt to her feet.

‘Omigod! Lars!'

The enormous blond man took a moment or so to register, then swept Poppy's boss's wife off her feet in a huge bear hug.

‘ELLIE!'

Once the Viking had put her down, Eleanor turned to Marty, eyes shining, cheeks flushed, and said, ‘Hey, honey, remember Lars, who used to work with me at Merrill Lynch?'

Marty stood up and held out his hand. ‘I believe we did have the pleasure once.'

‘Oh, Lars, all those hours you kept us going on the trading floor with your smorgasbord and schnapps!' Eleanor's mouth was running away with her. ‘Such fun times!'

Damian took advantage of this fortuitous new development to sneak up behind Poppy and kiss the back of her
neck. She turned round, glaring at him, and whispered,

‘You are pissed as a fucking fart.'

‘I know. Sorry. I'll do anything to make it up to you.'

Poppy turned her back on him, only to see that Marco and Chase (who clearly was not made of wood after all) were pissing themselves laughing, giving her the thumbs-up and pulling up a chair for Damian.

Eleanor, Lars and Marty were still standing up, talking, when Lars boomed, in his enormous voice, ‘ASH IT ISH MY BIRTHDAY, I WANT TO BUY SCHNAPPS! FOR ALL!' He turned to Damian and gave him an almost imperceptible wink. Damian, sitting in a chair between Poppy and Marco, smiled nervously.

‘Oh, honey, don't you think that sounds grand?' Eleanor said to her husband. Lars's arrival seemed to have relaxed her attitude to poisons somewhat. ‘It is his birthday, after all! And – oh, jeez, you cannot be Poppy's husband? My, what a coincidence. So how did you meet my old friend and colleague Lars then?'

Poppy pinched the tiny bit of flesh on the back of Damian's ribcage to tell him to think of something cool. To her relief, he came up trumps.

‘Hello. Eleanor, isn't it? I'm so sorry, we haven't been introduced properly. Yes, I am Poppy's husband. Damian …' He gave a repulsively insincere grin and stood up, holding out his hand. ‘I'm a journalist. I was interviewing Lars about the Scandinavian markets earlier. What a wonderful coincidence.'

Chase said to Poppy, with the first proper bit of animation she'd seen all evening, ‘Man, your husband is
hot.
'

‘My bloody husband is a useless bloody drunk,' she started, quietly, only to be hushed by the gay couple.

‘Babe, he is
hot
,'
they said in unison.

And despite herself, Poppy started to giggle. Who was she actually trying to impress anyway? Marty was an unreconstructed sexist that she could wrap around her little finger, and the rest of them seemed quite fun now.

The waiter brought the bottle of schnapps to the table and they all drank their shots as one.

‘SKOL!'

Eleanor was dancing on the table, singing ‘All That Jazz' from
Chicago
. Everybody else cheered her on, and joined in with all the words they knew (basically, the song's title!). The food, which nobody had touched, had been taken away about half an hour ago by the waiting staff after Lars had thrust several more hundred-dollar bills into their hands.

Now, Eleanor was getting quite raunchy as she sang about ‘rouging her knees and pulling her stockings down' – raising her skirt and giving a little shimmy as she twirled inexpertly amongst the glasses and bottles.

Poppy, sitting next to Marty, was feeling a tad uncomfortable despite the neat liquor. Her boss had said earlier that mommies shouldn't be ingesting poisons, after all. She turned to him and saw that he was roaring with laughter and applauding.

‘Sorry about Lars ordering the schnapps,' she whispered to him.

‘Are you kidding? This is great! THIS is the woman I married.' And, stumbling slightly, Marty got up to join his wife on the table. Alas, his greater weight was too much and the table collapsed beneath them. Husband and wife lay, roaring with happy laughter, amongst the absolute chaos of broken glass and no-longer starched linen.

‘I love you, Martypoos!'

‘Oh, Elliekins, I love you too!'

And they had a very unseemly public smooch. Poppy thanked God that neither of them seemed to be hurt by the scary-looking green shards of ex-wine bottles that surrounded them.

Poppy was dreaming that Ben was going down on her, his tongue expertly flicking her clitoris, his long-lashed blue eyes looking up at her mischievously. Even in her dream, she hated him, so she bashed his head, hard.

‘Owww,' said Damian, who was the actual cunnilinguist. ‘I thought I was doing quite well.'

Awake now, Poppy said, ‘Sorry, darling. Bad dream. Please, don't stop.'

Damian didn't stop. He continued to lick Poppy's waxed cunt until he could taste her arousal. She moaned, and Damian opened her up with his fingers, feasting his eyes and keeping her waiting for a couple of seconds, before sliding the first two fingers of his other hand inside her. He bent his head again and resumed sucking, licking, nibbling. Poppy bucked against him, moaning more and more loudly until, with a sharp cry, she came.

He waited a second or two, then started moving his fingers in and out again, ever so slowly, sucking again to milk the very last drops of pleasure from her. Only when he felt her throbbing finally begin to subside did he
withdraw
his hand, then move up the bed to kiss her on the lips. Poppy kissed him back, liking the taste of herself on him.

‘Mmmm, thank you, darling,' she said dreamily. ‘That was soooo good.'

Damian leapt to his feet.

‘And now for the second course!'

He walked to the kitchen of their apartment, which was pretty much the interior brickwork urban cool ex-warehouse in the Meatpacking District that Andy had envisaged. He returned bearing a tray heaped with eggs, bacon and mushrooms, waffles and maple syrup, freshly squeezed orange juice, bagels and smoked salmon.

‘Blimey,' said Poppy, laughing. ‘Are we having guests or something?'

‘Just wanted to say sorry for last night.' Damian looked up at her from underneath his lashes and she laughed even more. ‘Am I forgiven?'

‘Oh, you totally lovable thing. Thank you – it all looks completely yummy. Yes, of course you're forgiven –
this time
. But you're bloody lucky that Lars and Eleanor go way back. It could have been a fucking disaster.' She tried to look stern but Damian looked so contrite, and she was feeling so blissfully post-orgasmic, that it was impossible.

‘Right, let's dig in. Hmmm, waffles or bagels to start … sooo tricky …' When Poppy remembered to eat, she had the appetite of a horse, yet never gained a pound. It was one of the many things that Bella envied about her.

Sam tried to ignore the whispering and muffled giggles as she walked into the college canteen. She had dressed as unobtrusively as she could, in jeans and an enormous black jumper that she hoped disguised her boobs. Contrary to what everybody thought, the boobs were natural, a result of her catching glandular fever when she was 14, just as she was starting to develop. Sam would no sooner have taken a knife to her young body than she'd have taken a knife to anybody else's body, but she'd grown tired of trying to explain. Practically everybody else in the glamour-
modelling
world had had ‘something done', and she'd learned quite soon that protesting her chest was natural just got her the reputation of being a stuck-up bitch.

At uni, she tried to disguise them, just as she played down the prettiness of her young face by half covering it in heavy-rimmed specs, and hiding her long dark red hair under unflattering baseball caps. She had an adorable face, peachy-skinned with enormous dark brown eyes and what Mark referred to as blowjob lips. Sam had got into glamour modelling by being discovered while walking the dog in a park near her parents' home in Romford when she was 17, two years earlier.

She had always wanted to go to uni, but now the fees were so high, it had seemed an impossibility until the seedy photographer accosted her in the park. Her mum and dad's small catering business was barely afloat with this horrible recession and her little brother Ryan was severely autistic. Much though Sam loved him, she realized what a nightmare (and expense) he was to look after. There was no way she could burden her parents with anything else, and if there was a way for her to fund her own education, then she'd grab it with both hands.

After the initial horror of taking her clothes off in front of men old enough to be her dad, she'd got used to it. Only a couple of them were lechy old pervs, anyway, and Sam was made of pretty stern stuff, rationalizing what she was doing in a clear-headed, logical manner. If this was what she had to do to get the proper education she craved, it wasn't such a big deal. It wasn't as if she cared what any of the people in the glamour-modelling world thought of her, after all.

But she did care what her fellow students thought of her. Sam had always been very careful to keep her assets under wraps at uni, as she wanted to be admired for her mind (although she'd come to appreciate her body, which she had thought was freakish, now that Marky seemed to love it so much). Sometimes, in seminars, the tutor would
actually say, ‘Could somebody other than Sam please
answer this question?', which made her secretly proud. She was only a girl from an Essex comprehensive, after all, and more than half of her peers had been to posh schools.

But yesterday, horribly, one of the really posh ones, a smug wanker called Josh, had walked into the Union bar brandishing a copy of
Nuts
.

‘Look what we have here,' he'd said, in his loathsome, drawling voice. ‘I think that somebody in our vicinity takes their clothes off for a living! Sammi-Jo, everyone! What's the matter, Sam, can't make it with that enormous brain of yours, after all? You have to rely on your enormous tits instead! Hahahahahaaaa – hardly the next Nietzsche after all, more like a little two-bit whore!'

Josh was on the same course as Sam and clearly hated the fact that she was a million times cleverer than he was. He had the enormous sense of entitlement of the seriously rich and terminally stupid.

Everybody in the bar had been jostling to see the pictures, and a couple of pissed third-year students had actually tried to lift up her jumper to ‘see what you're hiding, Sammi-Jo'. It was just horrific, worse than anything she'd ever
imagined
happening to her. She'd only ever worked hard and been nice to people. Her parents, while distracted, loved her unconditionally, and her schoolmates had pretty much left her to her own devices as she beavered away at her Maths and Science classes. She was completely unprepared for the humiliation of being jeered at by the community she had so wanted to join.

But she had to eat, and now she skulked into the canteen, feeling like the lowest bit of dog shit on the earth.

‘Tart,' giggled a couple of girls who'd been at Heathfield together, as she walked past, head down. Sienna Sax-Hoffmann was sitting next to them. God, she hated Sienna, with her wafty ways and her bloody lace parasol. How fucking affected was that?

Just as she thought she'd made it unscathed to the food counter, Josh, who she'd fervently hoped wouldn't be in the canteen today, stood up and shouted,

‘Oh, look! It's our resident glamour model! Not looking very glam today, is she? She might look better if she got her kit off though! What d'you think, guys? Kit off, kit off, kit off!'

The entire canteen started chanting, ‘KIT OFF, KIT OFF, KIT OFF!', and Sam dropped her tray, fleeing the canteen in tears. When she got back to her room she picked up every bit of crockery and started throwing it at the walls, sobbing so hard her heart thought it might burst. She couldn't understand why people could be so nasty. What had she ever done to them, after all? On balance, she found the glamour-modelling world preferable to the academia that she had so longed for all her short life. Thank God she had Marky.

She picked up the card her parents had given her and looked inside.

‘Were so proud of you Sam,' it said. ‘Your going to have the bestest time at Uni.' She cried a bit more as she read her mother's sweetly meant and ungrammatical message. ‘Loads of love from Mum and Dad.' They had each signed it, with flourishes of kisses. Ryan had written on the other side, ‘luv you sam hav fun' and drawn a surprisingly
accomplished
picture of her in a mortarboard.

Sam sat down on the floor and let herself cry until she thought she couldn't cry any more. She missed them so much. It was so tempting to give up now. What was she doing here anyway? She didn't belong with these people.