Best of Friends (21 page)

“Lizzie, darling, I’m so glad you could come,” said Sally, instantly making Lizzie feel welcome. “And Margo and Ken. Great to see you. Now, what would you like to drink?”

The problem with parties in small communities, Lizzie mused half an hour later, was that, after a few years, you never had the chance of seeing a stranger across a crowded room—you tended to know who everyone was. She knew, for example, that the tall craggy-faced man with the roving eye, who was standing at the French windows sizing up all the women, was unattached but a hopeless drip. Larry looked like every divorcée’s dream but after two dates listening to his history of failed relationships, how he’d never bonded with anyone like he did with his mother and how his sciatica ached, even the most desperate of women went running. Lizzie knew this because Clare Morgan had told her. Lizzie didn’t go out enough even to get on Hopeless Larry’s radar.

She’d just come out of the cloakroom when Abby and Tom Barton arrived. The Bartons had clearly had a row if Lizzie’s body language degree was anything to go by. They appeared to be trying to stand as far away from each other as possible, and both sported the clenched jaws of people afraid to open their mouths in case they said something they might regret.

“Hello,” said Abby brightly.

“Hi, Abby and Tom,” said Lizzie. “Lizzie Shanahan,” she reminded them. She didn’t know either of them very well and never expected people to remember her.

“Of course we know you, Lizzie,” said Abby quickly. “We met in the surgery.”

“Well, you must meet so many people,” Lizzie said, “it’s hard to remember names. I have a problem with that in the surgery and they’ve normally rung to make an appointment beforehand, so I’ve got their name written down and therefore have no excuse.”

“Oh God, names, don’t talk to me,” groaned Abby. “I am hopeless with names.”

Seeing the women doing that irritating female bonding thing they all seemed to be able to do after ten seconds, Tom smiled briefly at Lizzie, totally ignored his wife, and headed into the party proper. He needed a drink.

Abby glared at his retreating back.

“Husbands,” murmured Lizzie. “Can’t live with them and can’t kill them.”

“You said it,” agreed Abby fervently.

“Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.” Lizzie wished her mouth wouldn’t run away like that. Abby would think she was just chatting wildly to her because she was famous.

“No, you’re right,” Abby said politely.

They stood there for a moment in stilted silence, with Lizzie feeling like an idiot for trying to start a conversation with someone like Abby.

“Sorry,” she said again. “I hardly know you. It’s just …” She trailed off, embarrassed.

Abby looked interested. Lizzie didn’t know if she was being polite or not but she ploughed on anyway. What the hell, famous people must be good at walking away from conversations if they were bored, and all the magazine articles said Abby was very down to earth, so Lizzie might as well try.

“I got a sudden flash of memory of being married, having a row and convincing yourself that you can go out in public without screaming at each other,” Lizzie went on.

Abby felt the corners of her mouth lifting. So much for her theory that they could keep the row behind closed doors. “You too?”

Lizzie grimaced. “Not anymore,” she said. “My husband and I are divorced. We split up over five years ago, so we only row on the phone.” She considered this. “Actually, we don’t row at all now. Our daughter’s getting married and Myles and I are ridiculously on the same wavelength about everything.”

God, why had she said that? Talk about spilling the beans to someone you had only just met.

“So you’re saying divorce is the secret?” Abby said ruefully. “We’ve got a teenage daughter and, well, it can be hard to cope with teenagers, can’t it? Talking of Jess, here she comes.”

Jess, pretty in jeans and a sparkly turquoise T-shirt, her hair tied up in two jaunty pigtails with gorgeous violet scrunchies Sally had just given her, appeared with a tray of drinks.

“Hi, Mum,” she said sulkily. There had been no more rowing at Lyonnais that day but the atmosphere could have been cut with a knife, so Jess had worked out that her parents were fighting again. Not that
that
was anything new. It had been a relief to get to Sally and Steve’s, where the atmosphere was tension-free and all she had to do was keep the boys amused while Sally, Delia and Steve finished the party preparations. Now Jack and Daniel were fast asleep in bed she’d offered her waitressing skills. “I’ve done five rounds with the mozzarella rolls and the tapenade, so I thought I’d bring some drinks round too. D’you want some?”

“Yes, thanks,” said Abby, taking a glass of mineral water. “Jess, this is Lizzie, who lives near us. Lizzie, this is my daughter, Jess.”

“Hi, Jess,” said Lizzie warmly. “I love your sparkly top. Could we swap? I bought mine in HipBabe on the quays and it’s definitely more your age group than mine. I feel I’m falling out of it.”

Jess giggled. “It’s lovely on you. Do you want something to drink? We’ve water, wine, fruit juice and this punch stuff.”

Abby felt a ludicrous stab of jealousy that her daughter could get on so well with this Lizzie person, and not with her. Jess had offered
her
a drink like the pest exterminator offering a rat some poison. But then Lizzie hadn’t behaved like a bad, uninterested mother earlier, had she?

When Lizzie had taken a glass, Jess sailed off and Abby watched her go.

“She’s a lovely girl but it’s tough being mum when girls are teenagers, isn’t it?” Lizzie said perceptively.

Abby nodded, so Lizzie continued.

“My daughter Debra is twenty-three now and we get on like a house on fire, but there were years when I thought of calling in Kofi Annan.”

At that, Abby laughed. “I thought it was just me,” she admitted, then regretted it. She hardly knew this woman—why was she telling her such personal things?

“Oh, we all do. Women are programmed to think they’re the only screw-up in the universe and men are programmed to think they’re the smartest creatures in the universe,” Lizzie said, sitting down at the bottom of the stairs.

Abby plonked down beside her. “That sounds like a book title.”

“Hey, you could do a TV series on that theme,” Lizzie said with enthusiasm. “Millions of parents would watch it.”

Abby grimaced. “I have enough trouble with the TV series I’ve got. Sometimes I feel like packing it in.” Before it packed her in, was the unspoken thought.

“But you’re so good at it.”

Lizzie was genuinely admiring and Abby felt herself beginning to relax. Lizzie was so warm and easy to talk to, and after a week of nobody talking to anybody else at home, it was a relief to have a conversation that wasn’t like picking her way through broken glass.

“You sound so clever and nice on TV, everyone I know loves your show,” Lizzie went on, and then felt embarrassed. She never normally talked this much. It must be the sherry she’d had earlier. But Abby didn’t seem to think she was being an idiot.

“Thanks, that’s nice of you to say it,” Abby responded, “but I don’t feel clever. I feel as if I’ve taken all this stuff on and that everyone’s just waiting for me to fall flat on my face.”

“But you’re a big success.” Lizzie’s shyness evaporated in the face of her incredulity. “You’ve turned your life around—not like the rest of us who just think about doing it.”

“TV is easy if you’re doing something you enjoy,” Abby explained. “It’s the rest of life that’s hard.”

“Teenagers?” suggested Lizzie.

“And husbands.”

“Been there, done that, got the T-shirt, been handed the divorce papers.” Lizzie sighed. “At least you’ve still got the teenager and the husband.”

Abby didn’t want to think about her husband right now. She wondered why Lizzie had divorced hers.

“So, have you a significant other here tonight?” she asked instead.

Lizzie blushed. I wish, she thought. Abby would think she was hopeless. “I haven’t had a date since I first went out with my husband,” she admitted, blushing some more. “How pathetic is that? I came alone tonight and, unless I get plastered and do fall out of this ridiculous top, I’ll be going home alone too. Mind you,” she added, “I can’t imagine any man being overwhelmed with lust at the sight of me either in this outfit or out of it.”

“Don’t say that,” Abby remonstrated. “You’re very attractive, and that’s a sexy outfit.”

“You think so?” Lizzie sounded pathetically grateful for the compliment. “I didn’t think I knew how to do sexy anymore. I’m fifty next birthday. Fifty and sexy aren’t words you usually hear in the same sentence. Fifty is sadly linked to sensible skirts, beige cardigans and rubber-soled shoes.”

Abby burst into gales of laughter. “You’re a hoot, Lizzie. But come on, being fifty doesn’t have to be any of those things if you don’t want it to,” she insisted, conveniently forgetting how she felt as if forty-two was on a par with a hundred and forty-two.

“That’s the theory,” Lizzie said earnestly, “but if I dress like a teenager and start going to parties every night, people will think I’m in my second childhood, and if I head for the rubber-soled shoes and beige cardigans, they’ll say I’m not trying.” She’d thought about this so often recently she felt ready to write a thesis on it.

“Is it being divorced, do you think?” Abby said interestedly. “If you were still married, people would accept whatever role you went for, but if you’re single, they expect more from you.”

“That’s it exactly,” cried Lizzie. “I feel as if I’m being judged all the time. If I buy a bottle of wine in the supermarket and someone I know sees me, I think they’ll disapprove and decide that I sit at home drowning my sorrows in front of the telly.”

“I know what you mean,” interrupted Abby. “People now recognise me in the supermarket and I can see them peering into my trolley as though to say, ‘Look at her buying frozen convenience food—she should be ashamed of herself.’”

They grinned at each other, united in their dislike of people who judged. Lizzie was astonished at her own daring in talking so openly to Abby. If they’d met in a group, Lizzie would probably have just smiled shyly at her and not said a word, and now here they were, talking as if they’d known each other all their lives.

“It’s probably our own fault, though,” Abby added. “We wouldn’t give a damn who looked into our trolleys if we were utterly sure of ourselves. We’d be proud of our frozen pizzas and bottles of Californian Zinfandel.”

“I’d love to be utterly sure of myself,” Lizzie sighed.

Me too, thought Abby, but didn’t say anything.

“They have courses for that, you know: reinvent yourself courses,” Lizzie said wistfully. “Trouble is, I’d feel stupid going to one.”

“You don’t need a course,” chided Abby. “You have to think yourself confident.”

“Tell me the secret.”

“You imagine how confident people behave and just do it. Smile, look confident and talk to people.”

“It sounds so easy.”

“It is,” insisted Abby. “When you’re nervous, put yourself mentally in the shoes of your most confident friend. And you need to practise. For example, if you want to date men, you’ve got to go for it. How about if you went up to that good-looking guy over there and began to chat him up?”

“Hopeless Larry?”

“Is that his name?”

“Not really. I’ve never talked to him before.”

“Go girl!” ordered Abby. “He’s only hopeless because he’s never met you. Or if he is hopeless, you can practise your new confident-woman skills on him.”

“OK.” Lizzie surprised herself by saying this. Well, why not? Larry was single, she was single. He might not be as bad as Clare made out—he could be just the spur she was looking for to change her life. “It’s funny,” she revealed suddenly. “I’ve all these old friends who knew Myles and me for years and if one of them told me to chat up a man, I’d be insulted at the idea.”

“Old friends know the old you,” Abby said sagely. “Sometimes you need new friends to tell you new things.” She got to her feet. “I shall go and circulate,” she said, wondering if she ought to see if Tom was in a friendlier mood.

“See you later,” said Lizzie, feeling strangely buoyed up by their conversation. She wasn’t boring. She was interesting. She would go and talk to new people instead of sticking like a limpet to the “safe” couples she knew.

The party was going with a swing but Erin wasn’t. Steve and Sally had introduced Greg and Erin to lots of people but still she couldn’t summon up the energy to chat. She wanted to go home but it was only nine o’clock, and now Greg was embroiled in a heated political discussion and Erin was standing on the fringes of the group, not really paying attention and uncomfortably aware that she must seem cool and distant. Her eyes wandered round the room. Sally was perched on the arm of a chair, talking animatedly to a couple of women about children, while Steve was circling the room with a bottle of white wine and a jug of his lethal punch. Erin had had one sip of her glass of punch earlier and had quickly put it down. Greg said it actually wasn’t that strong but whatever alcohol Steve had used tasted strange to Erin. Delia was circling in the other direction with trays of canapés, chatting gaily and forcing food on everyone. “I cooked this, you have to eat it!” she would cry with good humour. She was being helped by a tall, fair-haired teenager, who offered food in a totally different way: shyly proffering her tray, a great smile lighting up her face when people talked to her.

Someone had turned up the music and the volume of conversation and laughter had increased accordingly—people were clearly letting their hair down. The television presenter person—Abby, wasn’t it?—and her husband were locked in a fierce discussion in a corner of the kitchen.

Steve had introduced Erin to both of them earlier and Erin did not feel as if she’d met a friend for life. Abby had been perfectly polite but brittle.

“Nice to meet you,” she’d said, but her eyes weren’t warm and her face bore an expression that Erin recognised: envy. Erin had experience of women being envious of her slenderness and her striking looks, but when they got to know her, the envy usually went. Was Abby one of those people who were threatened by other attractive women? Or maybe she was just in a strop with her husband, who’d seemed nice, if a little preoccupied. Erin watched them idly and wondered why some people didn’t seem to mind arguing in public.