Altar Ego (5 page)

I kissed him deeply. ‘Look on it as an undress rehearsal,’ I said, hand on his fly.

The fact that he didn’t freak out, of course, is the very reason I should have hightailed it back to the church and married him then and there, that split second. But hell – I must have been taking Bimbo pills, or something.

4
Send In The Crones

GUIDES TO CORRECT
protocol are so out of date. What we millennium girls need is an updated manual on modern manners. There are so many social dilemmas just not catered for in traditional etiquette texts. For example, what sort of small talk to make to the gynie while he has his hand up your twat? What, I wonder, is the correct conduct when you crap on your obstetrician, then meet him socially at a cocktail party? Or bump into a man whom you can’t quite remember whether you slept with or not? Or attend a Swinging Singles evening only to run into your husband? What do you say then, hmmm? And, most tricky of all, how do you greet the man you’ve just jilted at the altar over breakfast next morning?

‘I hope you notice that I’m still not discussing that thing we’re not discussing,’ Julian volunteered when I
shuffled
groggily into our recently renovated, urban-minimalist Conran kitchen with concealed white goods and handle-less drawer units for which we now had no implements, having sent back all our wedding presents. ‘Our parents don’t want to discuss it either.’ He worried a teaspoon around a cup of cold, teak-coloured coffee. ‘Actually neither side of the family are speaking to you.’

‘Oh well, that solves Christmas.’ I hazarded a tentative smile.

Julian raised one weary brow, then sipped despondently at his Nicaraguan Workers Co-op blend. ‘Are you ever going to grow up?’

‘What? And become the bewildered recipient of all those weird envelopes with cellophane windows? God, I hope not.’ I touched his arm timorously. He shrank away. I ground more beans, drowning out the clangorous silence.

Julian crammed some files into his briefcase and prepared to depart for the twenty-minute minicab ride from Belsize Park to the Inns of Court. Some case had come up overnight involving the usual battered Algerian unipeds or banned Lebanese lesbian political mime troupe. So instead of basking on a beach in Sri Lanka in wedded bliss, he could now embark on yet another unpaid stint as saviour of lost souls. Julian had even chosen our honeymoon destination to coincide with a cause: he only ever took me to countries where I ran the risk of being taken hostage by some guerrilla
band
or other. Our hotel bedrooms were invariably bugged, which didn’t matter as we were more often than not sharing it with bodyguards anyway. Most of our honeymoon I suspected, would have been spent in the cells of detained Tamil dissidents on the nearest death row to the beach.

I grabbed hold of his sleeve. ‘Yell at me, Jules! Tell me what a bitch I am! Hate me. I’d hate
you
if you’d jilted me. I’d hate you more than I hate Woody Allen for marrying his daughter. I’d hate you more than I hate the bastard Eurocrat who put VAT on tampons.’

‘I don’t hate you. And I could never leave you.’

He stood, crumpled, over his soggy cornflakes. That was the trouble with 1990s Prince Charmings. They were too fucking charming. There was no swashbuckling left in the poor bastards.

‘Jesus, Julian. Why can’t you be cruel and vindictive like a Real Man? Throw something at me … Throw me out even! You haven’t even asked for your engagement ring back …’ I tugged at the sapphire cluster ring on my left hand.

Julian picked up a dishcloth. For a moment, I thought he was going to chuck it at me, but he simply mopped up a coffee ring I’d made on the counter.

‘By the way, can you please stop using the floor wettex on the counter tops?’ he said. ‘It’s unhygienic.’

‘Can you please stop holding wash-cloth seminars? You’re supposed to be on your goddamn honeymoon!’

‘When you
do
work out why we’re a romance
fatality
’ – Julian rocked back on his heels, as though addressing an especially dim-witted jury – ‘a chalked outline in the marital stakes … you will tell me, I trust?’ He turned quietly and slouched out of the house.

It was typical that, despite his PLT (Personal Life Trauma), Julian would go to work. It underlined my misgivings about the marriage. When I’d first met him, it was his passion and politics that had magnetized me. He was a psychological Spiderman, weaving webs of words to catch evildoers. He was like the Caped Crusader minus the bionic underpants – Action Man in the IQ equivalent of combat khakis. A Superman, who fought for truth, justice and the legal way. When it came to tracing the bank accounts of corrupt African governments or crooked Scotland Yard detectives, mild-mannered Julian transmogrified into The Terminator.

At first I’d Lois Laned to his Clark Kent; I’d Nicole Kidmaned to his Batman. I nobly sacrificed holidays, candlelit dinners, and gave up nights we might have spent cocooning in front of the TV, consummating our love in a variety of spine-realigning positions. I pretended I didn’t mind flying solo socially. I made excuses for his absence at posh parties and bought frozen dinners for two in M&S so as not to look too desperate.

But as he burnt gallons of midnight oil, whole Iraqi oilfields of the goddamn stuff, weekend after
weekend
, Christmas break after Christmas break, my foot gradually drifted further and further towards the stirrup of my high horse. What was the point of living together if I never bloody well saw him? Gradually my exquisitely sautéed gourmet spectaculars involving peeled grapes and marinated bats’ balls gave way to grilled chops. Peekaboo teddies to white bloomers. What was the point of buying Janet Reger if there was no one to linger longer over such lingerie? Crotchless knickers lay undiscovered between disappointed thighs. Chocolate body paint coagulated in its jar. Pretty soon I stopped making excuses for him at my work functions and his family reunions. ‘Julian
who
?’

When he cancelled the anniversary of our first meeting, I did actually swing up into the saddle of the old high horse, but one word from Captain Marvel – ‘But darling, I have to prepare a case that could save 250 people on death row in Jamaica’ – and I was forced to dismount again.

After he missed our second anniversary, I got a friend at Amnesty International to take a black and white photo of me in the window, looking dejected. I inked barbed wire around the frame captioned ‘FREE THIS VICTIM OF TYRANNY FROM DINING ALONE. LIVES WITH HUMAN RIGHTS LAWYER.’

By the third missed anniversary I’d developed quite a different response to his ‘I’ve got 250 people on death row’ spiel. ‘Oh, let them die. See if I care.’

The year after that I offered to fly on out there and hang them personally.

And then he asked me to marry him.

And I did still love him. The little place behind his ear that made him melt when kissed. The sweet way he cut the crusts off his sandwiches. The constellation of freckles on his broad chest, upholstered in pale down. The way he sang Broadway musical numbers, off key, in the shower. His wit – I’d never met a man who could thrust away for so long with his rapier. The way he filled his soliloquies with huge, majestic words. They steamed full bore into every sentence, a fleet of lexico-graphic ocean liners.

I
, meanwhile, remained linguistically landlocked. My entire education was osmotically linked to Julian. He’d taught me about chamber music, Wagner, five-star hotels, cuisine minceur, poetry, literature and love. Okay, he lived in an ivory tower. But, hey, for a girl from an inner-city comprehensive – what a Des Res.

I knew I should have been crippled with remorse for leaving him at the altar like that. Hell. I should have been taking my place in the International House of Self-Serving Bitches. So why did I feel like a kid who’d just been given a day off school? Why was I as light-headed as a maximum security prisoner who’s just tunnelled to daylight?

The truth was, I didn’t want to grow up. I was too young to grow up. I still had posters on my wall, for God’s sake! Not walking down the aisle had given me
a
renewed zest for life. Christ. I felt more alive than Kate’s cystitis-curing Greek yoghurt. But little did I know that Life was about to crowbar some fissures into my new-found confidence …

It began over coffee with Anouska. I
had
contemplated donning the sackcloth of lycra and punishing myself for the wedding debacle with a severe workout. But, hell, the hardest thing about push-ups is trying to keep your cigarette alight. And this was a morning I needed to smoke. A lot. The wedding-dress shop had just refused to take back the frock. ‘I’m sorry,’ the manager had said snidely, ‘but company policy stipulates that a refund can only be made if the customer has died.’

‘But I have, socially,’ I’d pleaded. It was true. The only people who hadn’t white-exed me off their Christmas-card lists were Kate and Anouska. So, instead of exercising at the YMCA, I met Anouska for breakfast in South Molton Street. When I say ‘breakfast’, I mean the glass of designer water and fag she calls a meal. Personally, I prefer the Seafood Diet – you see food and you eat it. But Anouska was busy chewing over other things.

‘Oh God, doll,’ she sobbed into her espresso. ‘I’ve had the most hideous morning.

I wasn’t too alarmed. The woman thought she’d had a tough childhood because she’d had to walk three feet to her Dad’s Volvo for the drive to primary school. ‘Why?’

‘Tressida’s just found out she’s got ME and Tabitha’s got ovarian cancer.’

‘What? Two It Girls at one blow?’

‘If
they
can be given charity balls to organize, why can’t
I
? Because I’m not married, that’s why. Not even engaged …!’ Her haywire hair corkscrewed from her cranium, as though she’d had a million brainwaves simultaneously.

‘It won’t take long. Literature’s full of Willoughbys and Wickhams prowling for heiresses …’ I daubed cappuccino froth from the tip of my nose and abstemiously pushed away the doughnut remnants. ‘You’ll meet your perfect man one day, Annie.’ She should too. Anouska had been on more laps than a portable PC.

‘Perfect!’ she shrieked. ‘Who said anything about perfect? Interestingly flawed would do. Vaguely bearable.’

‘Two corpses short of a serial killer, even, in the case of Darius.’ What shocked me about Anouska was not how much she expected from a man, but how little. Her latest representative of the Ring-Buying Sex, Darius Gore, possessed everything that makes the English upper class so interesting: an attic-dwelling, Hitler-sympathizing sibling, a recent political scandal and looming bankruptcy. If there’s one thing the Nouveau Poor need, it’s a niche with the Nouveau Riche. After leaving Vivian’s mother, Mr Johannes de Kock made a fortune in armaments, meaning that Anouska fitted the bill, literally.

Somewhere in the dim recesses of Anouska’s strange brain, it suddenly registered that raising the marriage topic with me was akin to asking a paraplegic if he was running late. ‘Um …’ she curled one leather-trousered leg up beneath her butt. ‘You know I don’t agree with what you did, doll, but it must have taken a lot of bottle.’

‘It did. Moët Chandon.’ I polished off the doughnut in one bite. ‘I know everybody thinks that what I did is totally immature, but hey,’ I grinned, ‘at least I’ve never deluded myself into thinking I’m an adult.’

She pushed her plate towards me. ‘Do you want mine as well?’

I shook my head virtuously. ‘Look, I’m not a bad person, Annie.’ (I noticed that she didn’t rush to agree with me.) ‘Okay, I’m not Mother Teresa … But, hey, I’m probably somewhere between her and Hitler … right?’ No response. ‘Well, aren’t I?’

She stared at the floor directly in front of her Charles Jourdan sandal.

I inhaled her untouched doughnut with the speed of an industrial Hoover.

The second blow to my confidence came in Selfridges, at the make-up counter, awash with deeply sensual scents, shapely bottles and exotically coloured vials.

‘Doll, you’ve just bought a one-way ticket to
disaster
and you’re worried about skin elasticity?’ Anouska had whined as I dragged her into the colonnaded edifice in Oxford Street,

‘Yeah, but at least I’ll look good on the way … Night cream, please. Light.’

The Estée Lauder make-up assistant appraised me, sucking her teeth as though about to make an urgent, whispered phone call to a surgical dermatologist, ‘
Light
, madam?’

Madam?

‘I think it might be time we moved on to a more … nourishing cream. The Super Strong Ultima Extreme for Mature Skin is very good …’

Mature?

She swivelled the magnified mirror towards me and I was confronted by an elephantine version of my own face. ‘Wrinkles. Etched either side of your mouth. This cream contains marine algae to boost circulation and …’

‘They’re not wrinkles. They’re fellatio lines,’ Anouska explained helpfully. ‘App
ar
ently.’

‘Freckles, dry patches, blotches, loss of pigmentation, broken capillaries … A neck cream would also be advisable …’ The wind-up, white-coated doll prattled on with a lot of euphemisms for the war against decrepitude – refining, enriching, recovery, rejuvenate, protection …

I glowered at her.

‘I’m just trying to give you a clearer view of your
flaws
and provide helpful hints on how they can be overcome.’

‘Oh truly, your selflessness knows no bounds.’

‘There’s also an Electrolysis special on offer,’ the android added in that professionally insulting manner they have.

Wielding a cotton bud like a miniature police truncheon, she pointed to one small black hair I’d never noticed sprouting from my chin. It looked, in the magnified looking glass, like a sequoia tree.

‘Where the hell did
that
come from?’

‘It’s normal as we age that …’

‘Would you stop with all this ageing crap, already. I have one facial hair. It’s not as though I’m about to start baying at the moon …’

‘Well then, why not try this.’ Lunging forward, the saleswoman attempted to sandpaper my face off with a brusque rotary action that would have been better employed in the resurfacing of airport tarmac.