Having It All Page 8

  She shivered slightly remembering the lost weekend she’d had in Cannes last month with an Italian film producer. They hadn’t got out of bed in thirty-six hours. He’d been the most incredible lover and had spent hours bringing her to the very edge of ecstasy before even starting to think of himself. When he’d produced the sodium amytal, she had to admit she’d been shocked. But then, she’d told herself, if you’re not going to have a relationship you could at least have some adventure. And she had to admit the effect was incredible. When they finally got out of bed he kissed her tenderly and wrote down her phone number. She told herself he wouldn’t ring. But she stayed in by the phone for the next three nights all the same. She wasn’t surprised when he didn’t call. It was no strings attached, after all, and that was the way she liked it. Didn’t she?

  Anyway when she looked at the company’s profits it was all worth it. Four years ago she’d had the idea to start a company making corporate videos and they’d had trouble scrabbling together a £20,000 overdraft. Now their turnover was £3 million.

  Britt Williams wasn’t doing badly, thank you. For a moment she thought of her home town, its abandoned mines, its ground-down grey feeling, its lack of energy. Such a depressing little place. It didn’t even have a Next. In this day and age! How her Mum and Dad could stick living there she didn’t know.

  The familiar bitterness set in at the thought of her parents. They were so blinkered! You’d think they’d be proud of her, but oh no. They still believed in socialism and what they called ‘solid working-class values’. They wouldn’t even buy their council house because they thought it was immoral! Dad was so busy despising the enterprise culture he couldn’t even see the good things the last ten years had brought, even to working people like him. All Dad harped on about was unemployment and inequality. Every time she went home they had blazing rows. So she didn’t go home any more. Not that she wanted to go back to that poky little house where everything was old and cheap and shabby.

  She thought about her converted warehouse in Canary Wharf with its dazzling views of the docks. Her father loathed it. He’d come down once on his way to a Miners’ conference and had got beside himself with rage at the Yuppies turning the old Docks into marinas and wine bars. He never came again.

  She gathered up her papers. Suddenly she didn’t feel like doing any more work. The office was deserted and she locked up and went down to the underground car park. Her red Porsche Carrera, the glossy symbol of success she’d given herself because the business was doing so well, was waiting for her. She stroked it lovingly and thought how she must be the only Porsche owner whose father was ashamed of their owning one.

  Her Mum and Dad would probably have been happier if she’d married some local fitter and had three screaming kids. Well, she wasn’t going to. Not now. Not ever. Marriage wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Look at Liz baring her soul to Steffi Wilson without even telling David she was having doubts. She’d have thought they told each other everything. It just showed you there was only one person you could depend on: yourself.

  Even though it was late she put down the roof and let in the summer night. Outside her office she heard Soho’s regular flautist playing Greensleeves on the steps of St Anne’s Church, and down by Shaftesbury Avenue a sax player foot-tapped alone while a huge swing band backed him up on the ghetto blaster. The smells of the city floated by, Chinese takeaway, Vindaloo, hot dogs. It was this mix of the exotic and the daring, the sense of people living on the knife-edge that made London so special, made it feel not three hundred miles from her home town but three thousand.

  It was so beautiful driving back that suddenly she felt lonely. The pavements outside every pub were crowded with people, each one like a party she hadn’t been invited to.

  It had been on a night like this that she’d first met David at a drinks do in the quad at Christ Church. They’d been the only Northerners amongst a bunch of pukka Old Etonians and their braying girlfriends and, without even being introduced, they’d drifted together, stolen a bottle of champagne and gone punting on the Cherwell. The two months that followed had been the happiest of her whole three years at Oxford – until he’d told her that he had to concentrate on work, but she’d known it was a polite way of rejecting her.

  As she drove east the streets became emptier and she found herself wondering how David was taking all this. David who was so much more like her than Liz. She’d never been able to understand why he preferred Liz to her.

  Poor David, if the rumours were true then although the skids might not be under him, he must at least be losing sleep. How was he coping with Liz risking her job and causing all this stir just when he was under so much pressure himself? Liz was probably too caught up with Metro and the brats to notice that David must be feeling pretty insecure. That was the problem with trying to juggle a career and kids. You didn’t have any time or energy to think about your partner. David probably needed as much reassurance as Jamie and Daisy just at the moment. Except that, if she knew David, he would never ask for it.

  And, of course, she did know David. For those two glorious months before he met Liz, she’d known him very well indeed. And sometimes she thought that she’d never had quite so much fun since.

  Britt reached out, put a tape in her cassette-deck and turned up the volume. It was Eric Clapton singing ‘Wonderful Tonight’. And it had been a present from David. Just before he left her for Liz.

  CHAPTER 8

  Liz looked at her watch for the second time in half an hour. When the hell was this meeting going to finish? Only Conrad would dream of calling a routine meeting at five-thirty on a Friday.

  Downstairs in Reception Susie would be waiting with Jamie and Daisy in their pyjamas, David’s Mercedes parked outside packed to the gunwales with groceries, travel cots, teddies and Wellington boots. It was their six-weekly pilgrimage to the cottage in Sussex Liz’s grandmother had left her.

  David wouldn’t be coming yet of course. He’d put it off as long as possible. He hated going, loathed the fact that they were usually asked to Sunday drinks at some boring Colonel’s house and that Liz insisted it would be rude to say no.

  But Liz loved it there. She’d visited the flint and thatch cottage often when her grandmother lived there and had happy memories of walks on the Downs and childhood visits to the seaside three miles away. And nowadays there was nothing she liked more than to throw off her City clothes and put on jeans and wellingtons and dig the garden with Jamie and Daisy.

  Anyway, this Sunday they would be safe from dreary drinks. They were going to Ginny’s for lunch and Mel and Britt would be there too.

  Mel studied Garth’s face on the pillow next to hers for any signs of regret. She’d thought about slipping off before he woke so that she didn’t have to watch him open his eyes and notice her and wish she wasn’t there. But so far he was sleeping peacefully and he looked so beautiful that she couldn’t bring herself to get up and set out for lunch at Ginny’s. She thought for a moment about inviting him too. But at this tender stage of their relationship the merciless glare of her friends’ eager interest would probably be enough to murder the thing at birth.

  She couldn’t exactly recall how they’d ended up in bed. She did remember giving him a lift, arguing furiously, telling him that he and Liz between them would set women back twenty years.

  ‘You haven’t convinced me yet,’ he’d grinned back, flicking down her left indicator and guiding the car to a halt outside a garish wine bar called Hiccups, stuffed with rich Arabs and car dealers. The champagne was revolting and breathtakingly expensive and they’d drunk two bottles. And she still wasn’t convinced by his arguments.

  ‘Oh dear,’ he’d said, looking mock-dismayed, ‘I wonder what more I could do to persuade you?’ He ignored her car and flagged down a taxi, and without even consulting her he’d given his address.

  In the taxi she’d felt like a greedy kid at a party: everything on display was so tempting she wanted it all. In her excitement she even
forgot how she never went to men’s flats, always insisted they came to hers. Taking her clothes off made her feel so vulnerable that the only way Mel could handle it was being where she felt safe, somewhere she could set the stage herself, make sure the lighting was subtle and flattering, a kimono by the bed to camouflage the fab, with no knowing flatmates to bump into on the landing.

  But from the moment she’d got inside Garth’s front door she forgot everything except how much she wanted him.

  And Garth had been a revelation.

  He seemed to know instinctively what would turn her on without even asking. Where did he learn all this stuff? she remembered wondering, before she stopped caring. Maybe girls these days really were taking Femina’s advice and telling their men what they wanted in bed. Mel was amazed. She might be the editor of the modern girl’s bible but the most she’d ever asked a man to do in bed was switch off the light.

  And he’d even been as glorious naked as she’d expected. If this was what new men were like, she wished she hadn’t wasted so long on the old ones.

  Yet, as she studied his face on the pillow this morning, she realized there was something worrying her, some small detail nagging at the back of her mind. Finally she dragged it to the surface. It was the sense that in spite of the enjoyment they’d had in each other, a slight distance had remained between them. As though these acts, so intensely pleasurable and satisfying, were inspired more by skill than passion.

  ‘He did whaaaat?’

  Liz tried to keep the shocked amazement from her tone as she glanced round at the others. They’d all come to Ginny’s for a relaxing lunch and instead they were getting a rerun of the Kama Sutra starring Mel and her new boyfriend.

  For God’s sake, Liz, she told herself, you sound positively priggish. She was probably jealous. Just because she and David were too exhausted for more than five minutes in the missionary position. Funny to think how once they’d done it all over the house, the stairs, the kitchen table, even on one memorable occasion that made her smile to this day when reaching for her Philips Spray-Steam, on the ironing board. But of course that was all BC. Before Children.

  She wondered how the others were taking it. Ginny kept glancing nervously towards the children splashing in the paddling pool at the other end of the garden, but they were making far too much noise to have heard. Gavin was smiling mischievously and trying to catch her eye. Ginny turned to him and he winked. They’d obviously had quite a night too by the look that passed between them.

  David’s face was disapproving. He didn’t like Mel. He thought her raucous and insensitive. He was right of course, but that was what made her Mel.

  Britt was sitting slightly apart, a maddening been there, done it, got the T-shirt expression on her face. She probably thinks her Swedish origins make her an authority on sex, Liz thought bitchily.

  For a moment Liz’s eyes were drawn to Britt’s legs. They protruded long, golden, and wildly annoying from her designer shorts. Not a hair disfigured their tanned smoothness. How often does she have them waxed, Liz wondered, carefully tucking her own, which suddenly reminded her of a plucked chicken’s, under her sundress and hoping no one noticed the gesture, especially Britt. And how does she get that tan? Sunbed or break-between-bed on dirty weekends in Acapulco?

  Britt was always rushing off to some sunspot or other with a man they never heard of again. She liked her men powerful, older and preferably married. That way the presents were better. They bought her Janet Reger underwear and expensive watches and asked her to luxury hotels, the type where they gave you a fluffy white bathrobe. And not even, presumably, to stop you nicking it. One of her lovers, Liz recalled with a grin, gave her a flat with its own conservatory. Liz, crammed with two others into an Earls Court bedsit, had wondered why it was that she got daffs and Black Magic when Britt got three rooms and a walk-through closet.

  Liz looked at Britt’s legs again. Little luxuries like sunbeds and bikini-waxing seemed to be the first to go when you had small children and a job. Why do we feel more confident when hairless, she wondered. At the press conference the other day she’d been convinced someone would guess she had fuzzy armpits under her expensive new suit. And not by choice, you understand, not feminist armpits that make a statement, simply inefficient, overworked, uncared-for armpits.

  The worst sort.

  Mel was becoming unbearably smug. ‘It was wonderful,’ she sighed, her eyes soft with sentiment, ‘about nine inches long at least.’ She waited for gasps of admiration. None were forthcoming. ‘Ten then.’ She extended her hands miming what could have been a dachshund-shaped balloon or an unusually large French stick.

  Everyone laughed. They knew Mel.

  ‘I was looking through a Sex Aids catalogue once’ – Britt crossed and uncrossed her brown legs provocatively – ‘and the condoms came in three sizes: jumbo, colossal and super colossal.’

  Mel giggled at the vanity of the male ego. ‘Well, Garth’s super colossal,’ she announced proudly.

  ‘I thought size was no object.’ David tried not to sound pompous and failed.

  ‘Don’t you believe it!’ squealed Mel. ‘That’s a myth put about by men with small willies.’

  David looked curiously at Britt and wondered, as he was intended to, what she’d been doing reading a Sex Aids catalogue. Disconcertingly, an image of Britt, corny and stereotyped yet oddly powerful, dressed in a black rubber basque with five-inch stilettos, a Nazi cap on her short blonde hair, holding a whip, jumped fully formed into his consciousness. He looked away, embarrassed at how much it stirred him.

  Ginny got up to get the lunch and Liz joined her, eager to get away from the curious tension in the atmosphere. All this talk of sex was unsettling. Three times in one night! She couldn’t even remember when she and David had done it more than once in years.

  What did other people do about keeping the passion in their marriages? She’d heard about a couple who made an appointment with each other once a week, no doubt writing it in their Filofaxes, and retired to bed with a plate of sandwiches and a bottle of wine.

  Did they get in a babysitter? Liz wondered idly.

  Following Ginny into the kitchen she was struck again by what a delightful room it was. The heart of the house, so welcoming that whenever you stepped into it, you wanted to stay there, for ever blanketed in its aromatic warmth.

  It was a real dream kitchen. Not one of those adman’s fantasies you saw in the colour supplements where the stylist’s idea of homeliness was to add a Labrador and five dozen dried roses suspended from the ceiling. Ginny’s was a real kitchen with delicious smells drifting from the blue Rayburn, blue-and-white china on the dresser, a dog basket next to a pile of newspapers for the fire, a tattered sofa with a patchwork quilt thrown over it.

  Mementoes of holidays, outings, fossil hunts, romantic trysts from their past and anyone else’s Ginny liked the look of hung from every spare nook and cranny. It was like a great tapestry of experience, guaranteed to drive anyone who liked their kitchens neat and clinical into a nervous decline. Liz adored it.

  She stopped wandering round the room and looked at one of the samplers lining the walls. Collecting samplers was one of Ginny’s hobbies. Ginny loved the idea of someone sitting there – maybe even in this part of Sussex – sewing homilies which would seem, a hundred years later, as trite and true as they ever did.

  Liz hadn’t seen this one before, and like a horoscope you only believe if it tells you what you want to hear, it suddenly seemed touchingly true.

  Houses are Built of Brick and Stone

  But Homes are Made of Love Alone.

  She thought of her own kitchen with its wall-to-wall units, its vast fridge-freezer imported from America where they really know how to bulk-buy, its microwave, every labour-saving device on the market, the noticeboard with its rotas and lists and instructions. But there was one thing missing. And with a sharp pang of envy she hadn’t felt for Mel with her sex or Britt with her money, she realized what it was.


  What Ginny whipped up among the souffés was love.

  My house feels like a hotel, Liz thought with a shock. An elegant, orderly, smart hotel. It comes of neither of us being there. My house has no heart.

  For a moment she saw herself waiting at home for Jamie to get back from school, like Ginny did. She heard him shout ‘Hello, Mum!’ as he ran into her arms, his cheeks cold from the winter air.

  And what would it be like to be waiting for David, a meal in the oven instead of microwaved M & S? Would he welcome it or be stifled by the love she baked into the home-made steak-and-kidney pudding?

  Picking up one of Ginny’s paintings and examining the intricate beauty of the thing, Liz wondered how she could ever have felt sorry for her. She’d always thought Ginny was wasting her talent on piffling flower paintings; stencilling every bit of furniture because she hadn’t got anything worthwhile to do with her talent. Now she wasn’t so sure. Everything might be small-scale and trivial but Ginny had so much in her life: this lovely house, her flower paintings, Gavin, her kids. Ginny was the lynchpin of her family.

  Liz looked at Ginny stirring a sauce for lemon pudding, the smell of the fruit sharp and tangy.

  ‘You know, Ginny, I envy you.’

  Ginny nearly dropped her wooden spoon in surprise. ‘You envy me?’ Her voice rang with astonishment. ‘But you’re the high-flyer. You’re the one with the brilliant degree, the job in TV, the handsome husband. I’m just a housewife, but you –’

  ‘I know, I know,’ Liz interrupted, ‘I’m bloody Superwoman, the one who’s got it all. So people keep telling me.’

  Ginny looked concerned. She’d never heard bitterness like that in Liz’s voice before.

  ‘Is everything OK?’ She hadn’t had a real chat with Liz in months. ‘Why don’t I come up to town next week and we can go out for a meal and really talk?’