Wishful Thinking (19 page)

‘You've lost weight,' he said, in a curiously similar tone to Sophie's. Accusatory. Critical. ‘You should be careful. You don't want to—'

‘Get anorexia? Yes, I know. I'm a long way off the twiglet figure just yet.'

‘You're looking pale, too. Poor Cookie. Been having a bad time?'

I stared at him, slightly baffled. He didn't look cruel or scornful, the way he had at our previous meeting. In fact he was looking gentle, lightly teasing, an expression I remembered too well. I muttered something about work pressure.

‘I'm sorry I was a bit hard on you last time. But you were pretty vile, booting me out like that. It was that harpy Georgie, wasn't it? Awful old slag. For God's sake, don't end up like her.'

‘She's not a slag,' I said. ‘She's—'

Nigel wasn't listening – a habit of his. ‘Poor old girl. You must have been pretty down, wasting away like that. I should've known it would hit you hard.'

Wasting away?
Wasting
 . . . ?!

‘You think I've been pining for you?' The surge of indignation that rushed through me was so violent I could feel the heat of it in my face. ‘Pining – for
you
? I've been on a diet. Not anorexia, not a green and yellow melancholy – a DIET. People do that. And now I feel good, and I'm told I look good, and I miss you like – like a pain in the gut. Goodnight!'

It wasn't a great exit-line, but I was pleased with it. In that moment, I thought I was well rid of him. How dare he – how
dare
he – assume I had been pining away, missing him, going into a decline? The fact that I had was immaterial. That wasn't why I'd lost weight – was it? I strode back to my table, plumped myself down and demanded more wine.

Someone said: ‘Perhaps we should move on.'

‘I don't care,' I said, ‘as long as there's alcohol at the end of the move.'

‘What did he say?'

I think I ground my teeth. There's nothing like anger to give you a lift. ‘Don't ask.'

Several wine bars later, the anger had worn off or been forgotten and I knew I'd blown it. Not that I wanted Nigel back – or if I did, it was only out of pride, nothing else – but I wanted to behave with dignity, to be coolly unattainable (while at the same time being a sizzling sex goddess), to see him torn by vain lust, racked by might-have-beens. What I didn't want was pity, sympathy,
kindness
. I couldn't decide which was more humiliating, kindness or cruelty – not that it mattered. Neither had shown me to advantage. Sunday morning found me hungover and depressed. I thought about eating, just for comfort, the way I used to, and found I had no inclination. Maybe I was becoming anorexic after all.

‘I
don't
want him back,' I told the bathroom mirror, spluttering toothpaste. But by evening, alone in front of the television, I was lapsing into fantasies about his abject return.

In desperation I put on a video, and went to bed with Hugh Jackman.

The following week Todd Jarman returned his manuscript, with most of my corrections re-corrected. I considered altering them again, sneakily, but decided that would be underhand. Besides, he had – as requested – added a new body. Surprisingly, instead of being a cab driver who Knew Too Much or another prostitute it turned out to be the gangsters' legal adviser, an ultra-smoothie who, in the previous version, had oozed out of the narrative like cream from a plastic tube. Of course he, too, Knew Too Much, mainly under the heading of client confidentiality, and his gory demise was particularly satisfying. As he was a lawyer, it would have been tempting to probe the incident for subconscious motives, but I guessed the truth was probably more straightforward. Ten-to-one Helen's social circle included a few slimy solicitors from the opposition team. I rang him up, feeling a strange uprush of confidence, to suggest a session to finalise disputed details.

‘It's really good you killed that guy off,' I said. ‘I loathed him.'

‘I aim to please.'

We fixed a date and I hung up, turning my attention to the rather more slapdash offering from Jerry Beauman. It was very much as expected. Upright hero, slightly naïve, inveigled into a criminal involvement by evil associates. He himself does nothing wrong, but is left to carry the can for their misdeeds. Sent to prison, a sort of
Shawshank Redemption
scenario ensues, as he becomes the confidant of the crooked governor and a role model for fellow inmates. Finally released, he sets out to prove his innocence and wreak revenge on the crooks who framed him and the corrupt judge who misdirected the jury and doled out his sentence. In a succession of action-packed chapters, he gathers together a band of ex-cons and other unlikely allies to entrap and expose the bad guys. It was a good story – or rather an all-too familiar medley of good stories – the only problem was the way it was written. There were gaps in the narrative, grammar and punctuation were both erratic, and many scenes needed extensive reworking. My heart sank. (It had done that a lot lately.) My editorial input was going to be a long, long job.

I went to find Laurence.

‘This is a nightmare,' I said. ‘Have you been through any of it yet?'

‘A few chapters. I'll e-mail my notes to you.' He was looking grumpy and drinking coffee from a mug with a cartoon nude of Princess Diana on the side. ‘Remember, you'll have to polish his style.'

‘Has he got one?'

‘Okay, you'll have to polish his lack of style. Good luck.'

‘I've set up a meeting for you,' Alistair told me later. ‘Thursday week, at his flat.'

Venturing into the lion's den
chez
Jarman looked, in retrospect, like a stroll in the park. Oh, for the safety of publishers' offices!

I escaped to lunch and exchanged confidences with Georgie and Lin, only to fall alive into the babysitting trap.

Georgie and I went on Wednesday (Cal was coaching his son Allan's football team). Lin departed for her dinner-date looking sunnier than she had in a long while and the two of us, without prior discussion, adopted a Camp-Kommandant stance which worked very well. When the twins demanded suppers that were not on the menu, we told them flatly to eat what was on offer or starve. Sandy protested he was a growing boy; I assured him I would be only too happy to stunt his growth. Demmy, looking like a famine victim, said he wasn't hungry; Georgie said, ‘
Good
.' In the end, they both ate what was available. Meredith said: ‘Look what I can do,' and Georgie and I both ducked, but it transpired she only wanted to demonstrate a headstand. I pointed out that turning upside down was bad for the digestion, and once all three children were more or less the right way up Georgie rewarded them with a packet of chocolate brownies with which she had thoughtfully provided herself. Later, all we had to do was switch over from
Sex and the City
; I threatened them with a video of
Thomas the Tank Engine
, as a result of which they sat fairly contentedly through some unsuitable reality TV before being dispatched to bed. Georgie and I recuperated with a bottle of wine, feeling like the villains in a Dickens novel – the kind who refused to give Oliver Twist seconds of gruel. (I can't recall their names: I'm not a big Dickens fan.) We were very pleased with ourselves.

Lin, meanwhile, was sitting in Zilli's with Andy Pearmain eating bruschetta and wondering why she couldn't chat away to him as easily as in the past. After all, he was just the same as always. The beard was very short these days, little more than a shadow-line emphasising his jaw; there was a hint of grey in his hair; his habitual expression of sympathetic interest was enhanced by a myriad of tiny lines, smile-lines, thought-lines, furtive etchings of anxiety and stress. Unreasonably, she found herself blaming his fiancée for the latter. He really should have been gay. All the gay couples she knew (Laurence and partner) were in incredibly stable, comfortable relationships with no anxiety factors at all.

Of course, he could be stressed out by the problems of high-powered banking, but Lin's a romantic: despite experience, she thinks the only significant strain in life comes from love and family.

She began to ask him, rather awkwardly, about his bride-to-be: how and where they met, what she did, whether she was another of his otherworldly idealists. What campaigns she would be spending his money on.

‘Actually, Cat's a bit different from the others. She's into hunting and the Countryside Alliance. I know you won't approve, but you're not a country girl. They seem to believe hunting is pretty necessary. Foxes
are
vermin, apparently.'

‘Cat?'

‘Catriona. Her parents are friends of my mother's. All very cosy, you see. When it comes to really getting hitched at last, I return to my roots. She's not a glamour girl, just sort of clean and glowing. The outdoor type.'

‘She looks good in tweeds?' Lin queried. Her heart was sinking, though she wasn't quite sure why. Perhaps it was just chronic pessimism about all Andy's women.

‘She looks good. Wholesome – no makeup – like fresh fruit and wild flowers. Sorry: I'm not much good at the poetic stuff. She reminds me of the way you used to look, when I first knew you.' Lin stared at him, suddenly stricken. ‘Shit! I didn't mean that to come out that way. Cat isn't beautiful like you, but she has that untouched aura. She's only twenty-four; life hasn't done anything bad to her yet. I hope it never will. You know, you always reminded me of a wild flower, transported to the big city and stifling in the fumes.'

‘Wilting,' Lin said. The sinking feeling had become a pain, sharper than regret. Twenty-four, she thought. Untouched.
Innocent
 . . . Why did it hurt so much?

‘Just – drooping a bit. Stuck in a formal bed by a busy street when it should have been growing on a mountainside in the fresh air.'

‘You never said.'

‘It wasn't my business to say,' he responded. ‘First there was Sean, then Garry. You chose your own life. I just wanted to be there for you, when you needed a friend. Sometimes, I wanted to say to you: “I'll take you away from all this. I'll take you home” . . . but you wouldn't have listened.' Lin's eyes filled with treacherous tears. One escaped down her cheek, and splashed on to the bruschetta. ‘Never mind. Maybe you'll go back one day. Who's the latest unsuitable man?'

‘Oh – umm – he's – he's not unsuitable . . .' She couldn't tell him there was no one – not when he had wholesome Catriona, who looked good in tweeds.

‘Sorry, didn't mean to sound cynical. Bring him to the wedding: I'd like to meet him. I really want you to be happy, Lin. You deserve to be. You're a very special kind of person.'

He was looking at her with an expression of tenderness which hurt her somehow. She thought it must have been there before, only she hadn't seen it, hadn't cared, and now it was too late. Too late . . .

‘You're getting weepy,' he said gently. ‘No need for that. Save it till I go up the aisle. There's nothing to cry for now.'

‘I'm not weepy,' Lin said. ‘It's – it's the garlic.'

‘At least you've got good friends here. It was nice of your mates to babysit. What're their names? Georgina and—'

‘Cookie.'

‘The thing is, they belong here. You don't. To continue the horticultural analogy, Georgina's clearly an orchid, something out of a hothouse anyway, Cookie – maybe a rose. One with
lots
of petals. But you're just a little Scottish flower which misses the wind off the loch.'

Lin had been born in a village nowhere near a loch and moved thence to Edinburgh, but she wasn't going to argue with his imagery. Groping for something to say, for a way out of the emotional morass, she returned to the standard questions. ‘What does Catriona – Cat – what does she do?'

‘She's in publishing. Coincidence, isn't it? But she's going to give up work after we're married.'

‘Oh?'

‘She wants to concentrate on having babies.'

‘How lovely,' sighed Lin.

‘How was it?' we asked her when she came in. ‘Did you have a good time?'

‘Fine.' In the full glare of the living-room light she looked almost ravaged.

‘Did he tell you any more about the environmentalist?'

‘The—? Oh, it isn't her. This is another one. Her name's Cat.'

‘As in Saving the Wildcat?' I asked.

‘Catriona.' Lin ignored the pun, which was probably what it deserved. ‘She wants to Save the Hunt instead. Countryside Alliance. She's twenty-four and wholesome and glows.'

‘In the dark?' said Georgie, at sea.

But Lin wasn't registering our side of the conversation. ‘Like me,' she said. ‘Like I used to. He said I was a wilting flower.'

‘He can't have done!' I was horrified.

‘Not wilting, drooping. He was very poetic – and Andy's never poetic. He said I missed the wind off the loch.'

‘I should bloody well think so,' said Georgie, shuddering. ‘I went to Scotland once. Awful climate.'

I poured Lin a glass of wine. So successfully had we bullied the children, we hadn't even needed to finish the bottle. ‘You'd better start at the beginning,' I told her.

Fortified by the wine, she related the conversation in a more coherent form.

‘Oh
shit
,' Georgie said when she'd finished. ‘You haven't decided you're in love with him, have you? After all these years? After several million missed opportunities?'

‘Of course not,' Lin said hastily. ‘It was just – he talked as if he'd cared for me, though he never mentioned it before. And he said Cat reminded him of me, only . . . younger, cleaner. Sean once talked about my purity, but it's gone. He took it. They all took it. And now I'm old, and – and soiled, and used up. A drooping flower, missing—'