Afterwife (27 page)

“Look at yourself in the mirror.” Ollie held her by the shoulders and swiveled her round to face the long gilt mirror. “Do you realize how beautiful you look, Jenny?”

She caught her breath. It felt like the corset had just been yanked two inches tighter.

“I think you should wear dresses like this every day.” He walked over to her and kissed her on the cheek. “Sam’s going to want to rip the fucking thing off.”

“Truly stunning,” said Penny, hand at her throat.

“It’s the one, Jen.”

She looked at her reflection again. Now that Ollie had given the dress his seal of approval she loved it too. It was the dress! It was an amazing dress!

“Sold?”

Jenny swallowed hard. “Sold.”

So why did her hand shake so badly as she handed over her credit card at the till? Penny grabbed one end of the credit card to take it. Jenny didn’t let it go. Penny pulled. Jenny didn’t let go. Her mind had started to whir with one word. D-d-d-d-d. Dominique. Dominique. Dominique. Why was it repeating on her now? She’d done her best to put it behind her and believe Sam’s explanation. She thought she’d put it to bed.

“May I?” Penny said tersely, strengthening her grip on the card.

“You alright, Jenny?” whispered Ollie, giving her a funny look.

“It’s so much money. I’ll only wear it once.”
Dominique. Dominque. Dominque.

Penny gave her a tight, mirthless smile, releasing her fingers from the credit card. “Perhaps you’d like to sit down and take a moment.”

“Jenny, you, more than anyone, deserve a beautiful dress.” Ollie
put an arm around her shoulder. “Don’t worry about the money. Don’t you love it?”

She could taste the salt of tears in the back of her throat. “Yes, but…”

“If you wouldn’t mind moving aside a little,” said Penny, irritated now, “I will serve the next customer while you…make up your mind. Thank you.”

The mother and daughter pair stood behind them, the mother clutching a flamboyant white feather headdress. They were still giggling.

“Stop,” said Ollie suddenly. Everyone turned to look at him. He dug into his back pocket. “I will pay for the dress.”

“No! Don’t be ridiculous. You absolutely can’t pay for the dress!” protested Jenny, mortified at the turn of events.

“I want to.”

“It’s not the money…” she began, suddenly not quite knowing what it was.

“Shh. My call.”

Penny’s hand shot up like a piston to grab Ollie’s credit card. As she determinedly shoved it into the card machine, she looked up at Jenny and winked. “It’s your lucky day.”

O
llie
bought
the wedding dress?” Sam is saying, hands gripping the steering wheel so hard his knuckles are white. He doesn’t look happy, not at all. From up here, somewhere near the car’s padded ceiling, I can see a vein pulsate on the top of his shaved head. Feel sorry for Jenny now.

“Yeah.” Jenny squeezes her lower lip with her fingers. She has Heathrow’s lost luggage depot around her eyes. She doesn’t look happy either. And she should do because the dress that Ollie bought her really is beautiful. When Jenny unzipped it from its cover last night I settled on its folds like a moth, absolutely still on its silk. She spent the good part of an hour just staring at that dress, walking around it, viewing it from different angles, like someone in a gallery puzzling over a painting.

“Is there anything the guy
can’t
do? No wonder half the women in north London are wanking off about him.” He gives her a sidelong, confused glance as he says this. Like he can’t quite work out
what’s going on. He senses change in her, I think, sniffs it like a wolf in a changing wind, but he can’t identify it. To be perfectly honest, nor can I. What’s going on with my Jenny?

“He’s just gay enough!” Jenny says brightly, sounding slightly rehearsed.

Sam doesn’t smile. He slams the horn at a van driver. “Yeah, yeah. Sophie probably cut his balls off.”

Jenny rolls her eyes and looks despondently out the window. Senses this conversation is not going perfectly to plan.

“That’s the problem with good-looking women.” He spits out the word “women.” “I see them in my office all the time. They castrate their husbands, thinking it’s what they want, but the moment he submits to her she runs off with her personal trainer.”

Jenny is gazing out the window, not listening, her wide blue eyes somewhere else. “It’s beautiful, Sam.”

“Sounds it. You two, out shopping.”

She turns to him and grins. “I’m talking about the dress.”

Natch.

Sam pulls up outside Tash’s house, today’s meeting venue. “That’ll be twenty quid, Miss Vale.”

“Will a kiss do?” She bends over to kiss him.

“A snog, thank you.” He holds Jenny’s pretty, round face in his hands, thrusts his tongue into her mouth. It’s a short, sharp snog.

“Gosh,” laughs Jenny, hopping out of the car and away from that long, hot tongue pretty bloody quickly. “I shouldn’t be too long. It’s just a catch-up meeting with the girls, really. Hey, you shooting straight home?”

“Where else do you think I’d be going?” he says, suddenly defensive, face slamming shut like the car door.

Temper, Sam.
Temper
.

I
n a small monochrome apartment not far from St. Albans a woman is preparing for Sam’s arrival. She is zipping up a black dress. Beneath the dress is lingerie, black with pink velvet trim. It matches. She is lighting a scented candle—Invigorating Gingerlily—which illuminates the heart-shaped contours of her face. She sinks into her rose pink sofa, waggles one heel-shod foot back and forth, back and forth, slapping the sole against her skin, and waits. She doesn’t know that she has a fleck of red lipstick on her front tooth. There is something terribly vulnerable about this fleck on the tooth, the flaw in her makeup.

The distance between her and Sam narrows and narrows until there are just a few clouds between them, five miles, a street, a paved drive. He pulls up, squeezes the skin between his eyes, steps out of the car, shoves his blue shirt into the back of his jeans where it’s ruched up. He has a panel of sweat on the back of his shirt in the shape of a crucifix. He knocks three times, not softly.

She opens the door wide, face full of hope and lipstick. “Hey.”

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

C
risis!” Suze declared with rather too much relish for Jenny’s liking. She’d been hoping for a good nose around Tash’s apartment and a gossipy catch-up and instead it seemed like she’d walked into one of the government’s emergency Cobra security meetings. “Will someone tell me what’s going on?”

“There are rumors, Jenny. Rumors.”

For one dreadful moment she thought they might be inferring something about the wedding dress. She hadn’t thought how it might look. “What? What is it?”

“On Saturday night a friend of a friend of a friend saw Ollie out drinking with one of his mates at the Royal Oak.” Suze waited for her words to sink in.

Jenny felt a big sense of relief. It had nothing to do with her. “This is bad?”

“There was
a lot
of drinking,” added Lydia, pausing for effect. “And laughing.”

“It must be stopped,” Liz said in a German accent. “Immediately.”

Jenny laughed.

“Liz!” said Tash crossly. “This is serious.”

Jenny straightened her smile. “Was the drinking out of control?” She remembered Sam’s comment about them all being addicted to Ollie’s grief and felt a little uneasy.

“Well, they ended up in Chicken Cottage. You don’t end up in Chicken Cottage unless you’re trollied,” said Liz.

“Sorry, I’m not with you. What’s the big deal?”

“You tell her,” mouthed Tash to Suze. Tash’s eyes flashed dangerously.

“Jenny, I’ll cut to the chase. There was talk of a woman…” began Suze, wincing slightly as she said the word “woman.”

Jenny felt the hairs prickle on her arms. “A woman?”

“This friend of a friend…”

“…of a friend,” added Liz waspishly.

“…heard Ollie talking about how he had…feelings for this woman.” Suze stopped. “Well, sexual comments were made.”

So it had happened! He’d moved on. Jenny clamped her hand over her mouth. “Fuck.”

“Yes, that word was mentioned,” said Liz with a glint in her eye.

“It’s too soon,” said Lydia, her eyes filling with the inevitable tears. “He’s far, far too vulnerable.”

Jenny felt a wave of nausea whoosh over her. She was struggling to hold it together now and wanted so badly to dart out of that door and run down the hill, back into the crowded, anonymous fug of the city.

“What the hell shall we do?” asked Tash.

Breathe. That’s what she must do. Breathe. Jenny took a deep breath and gagged on her sip of wine. “I guess it was going to happen,” she managed.

Suze touched Jenny’s hand with her soft, pudgy fingers. “It’s more complicated than that. We think we know who the woman is.”

Her heart started to thump in her chest. “Who?”

“Cecille.” Suze spoke as if the answer pained her. “Cecille.”

“Cecille!”
Jenny sat bolt upright on the chair. “Cecille!”

“Now do you see why we’re concerned, Jenny?” said Lydia quietly, eyeing her with renewed curiosity, as if her reaction had given something away.

“He’ll get hurt,” said Liz knowingly, nibbling her way around a kettle chip. “Or Freddie will. Let’s face it, it’s unlikely to end prettily.”

“We think someone needs to speak to Cecille,” said Tash firmly. “You—”

“Ollie would go nuts if we interfered,” said Jenny quickly, remembering Cecille’s face that time when she was caught looking for the letters. Oh, the superiority of youth.

“I told you. We can’t just wade in there, Tashie,” Liz agreed. “It’s none of our business.”

Tash flicked her licorice hair crossly. “Makes me want to flipping hurl,” she said, summing up the general feeling in Jenny’s own digestive tract.

“We’ve put so much effort into helping him through this. To see all our hard work fall away because of some little French
minx
!” Lydia’s eyes watered again. “It’s too much to bear.”

“I’m afraid I can’t say anything to Cecille,” said Jenny. “She’ll only tell Ollie anyway.”

“Can you at least find out if it’s true, Jenny?” Tash said through a mouthful of chewed fingernails. “From Ollie, then?”

“It may be a way of stopping the gossip,” added Suze.

“Gossip?” Jenny’s sinking feeling sank some more. “Who else knows?”

Liz laughed. “The school gate is a-
blaze
, Jenny. Clinton and Lewinsky had nothing on this story.”

“Look, I think we at least need to let him know what the other
parents are saying, before things…blow up,” Suze persisted. “
I’d
want to know. Wouldn’t you, Jenny?”

“I could tell him,” began Lydia.

“I think it would be best coming from Jenny,” interrupted Liz. “Jenny’s closest. Plus she’s got a sane, rational head on her shoulders. She’ll be able to keep the conversation as unemotive as possible.”

“Thanks! And I wouldn’t?” said Lydia.

“No,”
said Liz, Tash and Suze in unison. “You wouldn’t!”

Jenny pushed her nails into her palms. Get a grip, she told herself. Ollie is not yours. He is not Sophie’s. Sophie is dead. You are about to get married. Ollie is free! He can do what the hell he likes. He can marry an au pair if he pleases.

“Jenny?” Suze asked, looking at her strangely over the neck of the wine bottle. “Are you okay?”

“Oh, Jenny.” Liz put an arm around her shoulder, just as horrifying unstoppable tears started to bubble up through her tear ducts. “Oh, Jenny, you’re really not okay, are you?”

I
watch her pad slowly out of my bedroom, naked but for Ollie’s big blue shirt. The dimple on her left buttock smiles at me. She has long tanned legs. Her lips are bee stung from kissing. Her skin is rashy on her neck, where his beard has been. So are her upper thighs. She walks past Freddie’s room, where Freddie, my poor darling Freddie, stirs in his bed. I hover a few feet from the carpet outside the bedroom door. I dance round her. She is oblivious.

I did not see it happen. I chose not to. But I did see the warning signs, her twirling hair around her index finger while leaning across the table, the way she rearranged her top so it showed more cleavage. I saw how after every glass of wine—four and counting—she moved closer to him, found ways to casually touch him, a knock of knee against knee, feather fingertips on his arm. I witnessed the small wrap of white powder and the two thin lines racked out on her Chanel compact mirror.

The kiss was hungry and urgent. Panting, grabbing at each other, they bundled up the stairs, heading for the privacy of the bedroom.
Ollie had the presence of mind to wedge a chair against the door, presumably to stop Freddie from joining them. Cecille is out. That was the last thing I saw, that chair. I sucked myself through that keyhole pretty damn fast. And I waited, guarding Freddie’s room while they did it, wondering where he was touching her, if she felt different from me. Wondering if he was thinking of me at all, even a little bit, or if, as is more likely, he was lost in the sensual tangle of limbs and skin and that luscious glade of hair.

I twist round the corner to peek into the bedroom. Ollie is lying there, spread-eagled on the white sheet, panting and naked, spent. There is something glistening on his cheek. He turns over and buries his head into the pillow. His tears make me feel better.

“Ollie?” She is pushing open the bedroom door with her hand. “Are you alright?”

He says nothing, head embedded in the pillow.

She starts to look vulnerable and hurt. I feel for her now. “Shall I go?”

He sits up, squints at her standing there in the puddle of hall light. “Sorry, I’m so sorry.”

She reaches for her top, pulls it down over her head. “Forget about it.”

“You are lovely. It’s just that I can’t…Sorry.”

“Stop apologizing. I understand.” She doesn’t look like she understands. She looks rejected. Dressed, she hovers for a moment, waits for him to tell her to stay, and when he doesn’t she slings her slouchy beige handbag over her shoulder. “See you.”