Christmas at Tiffany's (51 page)

Suddenly, everything had changed again. She stood up slowly, like a sunflower stretching towards the light, the book resting on her open palms, and she saw that Jacques and Anouk were watching her in silence, a protective silence that was trying to pull itself like a sheet over what was really going on.

Cassie looked from Anouk to Jacques.

‘It was you at the park,’ she said to him. Not a question. A statement. A fact.

‘I don’t know what you—’ he began in protest, but his voice died away as Cassie looked back at Anouk, ashen-faced.

‘
Him?
’ Cassie was so shocked she could hardly speak.

‘No.’ Anouk shook her head firmly, walking further in to the room and shutting the door.

‘Yes!’ Cassie contradicted. ‘No one else would give you a book like this,’ she said, flinging the emerald-green leather notebook on to the table. A loose black-and-white photo fluttered out from the pages and the naked woman within it stared up at them all from the floor – as much a player as any of them in this unfolding drama, as her spread legs and hungry eyes exposed the carnal intimacy between the two secret lovers in the room.

Anouk swallowed hard and fell back into her defensive silence. Disgust simmered in Cassie’s eyes as the parallels of the deception began to dawn on her.

‘To think that I trusted you,’ she muttered, her cheeks beginning to redden, her voice to thicken. ‘To think that I actually put myself in your hands, actively sought out your guidance, accepted your advice, happily remade myself in
your
image . . .’ She gave a small, bitter laugh . . . ‘When all along, you were doing exactly the same thing to your best friend as was done to me. You’re exactly the same as
her
. And
I
was trying to be
you
.’

She shook her head – incredulous, stunned, her eyes swimming with tears at the thought of being so close to that dreadful scenario all over again. She looked back at Anouk. ‘Do you have
any idea
what it’s taken for me to get through this? Of how tortured I’ve been by the lies and the not-knowing what was real and what wasn’t in
my own marriage
?’

Anouk only blinked.

‘I’ll tell you what’s been getting me through it – the complete and utter belief in our friendship. I looked at you and Suzy and Kelly and I saw these crazy, full, chaotic lives that were all about glamour and the right jeans and good haircuts, and I thought
that’s
where I’ve been going wrong. It’s my fault he looked elsewhere. I’m too dowdy, too parochial, too unsophisticated to keep a man. I need to be more exciting, more mysterious, more sexy . . . I need to be more like
you,
I thought to myself. So I left
me
behind that night. I’m still upstairs in the Faerie Room somewhere, wearing a Laura Ashley dress and a saggy grey bra. I’m not
really
standing here, in a bony crypt, wearing a dress that costs more than a car, with brown fucking hair! I mean, if only you’d told me that being like you would involve becoming an unscrupulous, conniving bitch, it would have saved me thousands in airfares.’

There was a heavy pause and Cassie realized she’d started to shake.

‘A
bitch
?’ Anouk whispered, her usual
froideur
replaced now by a white-hot anger. ‘After everything I’ve done for you, this is how you repay me? I have been nothing but a friend to you. My relationship with him has nothing to do with you. How dare you stand in judgement of me! You know nothing about the situation.’

‘There’s nothing to know. You’re fucking your friend’s husband. It’s as simple and final as that. You chose him over her. You chose yourself over her.’

‘It is not like it is in—’

‘Oh, please – spare me!’ Cassie cried. ‘Don’t try to justify this with your crackpot explanation about how
relaxed
you all are about affairs over here, about how they don’t matter, they don’t mean anything.’

‘It
doesn’t
mean anything,’ Jacques interjected, a note of finality in his voice.

The makeshift room fell into a trembling silence and Cassie felt as if the walls might collapse in on them all, the opulence and extravagant excesses burying them alive.

‘It is merely a convenient arrangement, Cassie. Pierre has been very kind to step in and deflect attention away from us – and I pay him handsomely to do it – but nobody is going to get divorced as a result of this. Anouk knows I will never leave Florence, and if Florence knows about Anouk, well . . .’ He shrugged his huge shoulders. ‘She knows Anouk is no threat.’

Cassie looked between the two of them. Anouk was staring at him, her eyes unblinking.

‘Florence will feel as devastated about the affair as I did,’ Cassie said finally.

‘
Peut-être
,’ he conceded. ‘But only if she finds out.’ Jacques put his head to the side questioningly. ‘You know, when Anouk came back from staying with you last year, she asked me the same question. Should she tell you? But she said you seemed happy enough in your ignorance. There was no point in you being hurt needlessly.’

Cassie felt the walls shift, the floor begin to slide as she realized what he was saying. Anouk had
known
?

‘But even when you did find out, she said you could have carried on happily enough too. There was no reason for you to make such a fuss the way you did.’

‘A fuss?’ Cassie echoed, looking over towards Anouk, who had grown visibly paler throughout the conversation. ‘I don’t remember raising my voice, throwing anything, hurling an insult even.’

Anouk didn’t reply. She seemed frozen.

‘
Non
,’ Jacques said, fighting her battle for her. ‘She said you went for quiet hysteria. I suppose you imagine it was dignified, flouncing out like that and breaking up the party.’

‘Breaking up the
party
? That’s your concern? I find out my husband has another family and you’re both more worried about keeping up appearances?’ She gave a laugh of disbelief, of bitterest despair to think that her friend could have thought all this about her whilst living with her. She thought back to their dinners in the apartment, sharing bottles of Beaujolais while the sun went down, relaxing together in the hammam and laughing at themselves in their endermologie stockings, when all this time Anouk had not only kept the worst of secrets, but had been mirroring it herself.

Cassie slowly picked up her own coat and moved past them, towards the door. She stopped just beyond Anouk and turned to look back at her.

‘I never thought I’d say this – to you of all people, Nooks – but I pity you. I do. You’ve lost your way. I used to think you knew everything. I wanted to be
just
like you – sophisticated, enigmatic, alluring. But now that I see your life close-up, I realize you’re none of those things. You’re just hollow and cold and cheap. And you’re no friend of mine.’

And she turned on her heel and stalked down the tunnel, tears streaming down her cheeks as she climbed up the steps and emerged for the last time into the night-time shimmer of the City of Light.

The knocks at the door grew louder, but Cassie just dived further beneath the duvet.

‘Come on, Cass! You have to speak to her sometime!’ Suzy called loudly, knowing full well that Cassie was burying herself under ten-and-a-half togs.

Nothing.

‘Tch. She can’t keep this up for ever. I’ll get her to call you back, I promise!’ Suzy said just as loudly down the phone, so that Cassie could hear.

She opened the door without knocking and sat down on the bed so heavily that Cassie felt a draught blow between her and the mattress. ‘Cupcake’ was nearly fully baked now – only seven weeks to go – and Suzy looked like she was having twins. Or at least a large fruitcake.

‘You’re going to have to talk to her sooner or later.’

‘No I’m not! Not after what she’s done.’

‘She hasn’t done it to
you,
Cass.’

Cassie poked her head above the duvet, outraged, and cried, ‘Oh yes she has!’, immediately regretting it.

‘What does that mean?’

Cassie didn’t say anything. She hadn’t told Suzy the full story about that last night in Paris. It was so damning, so devastatingly revealing of Anouk’s twisted priorities, that she felt the damage to the four of them, to their group, would be irreparable if she told the girls everything that had been said, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to be responsible for that. History counted for a lot. Weren’t your friends the family you got to choose?

‘Cass!’ Suzy said in a warning tone. ‘What else happened out there? What haven’t you told me? I know there’s something. I’ve never seen you like this before.’

‘I’m fine.’

‘You are not. You listen to your friend kill himself over the phone, have a fight with your best friend, leave all your new shiny dreams behind and turn up, unannounced, in the middle of the night, crying and shivering on my doorstep, and then don’t leave your bed for three days. That is
not
fine.’

Cassie sighed and sat up higher in the bed. There was little use in trying to keep Suzy in the dark. It wasn’t as if there was any way back for her and Anouk now. Too much had been said and done.

She took a deep breath. ‘Anouk knew about Wiz and Gil. She knew and she never told. She
kept
their secret for them.’

Suzy’s eyes widened in horror. ‘No! She couldn’t have!’

‘She did.’

Suzy stared at her in shocked silence. ‘
How
could she have known?’

Cassie shrugged. ‘I don’t know. We didn’t get into specifics. She came to stay for a long weekend last year. She must have seen something then. She probably saw the signs because she was in exactly the same position, having an affair with
her
friend’s husband.’

Suzy shook her head, aghast. ‘I just can’t believe it,’ she murmured. ‘That she would do that to you and put Gil first.’ Her face darkened suddenly. ‘Besides which, I sincerely doubt your situation was exactly the same. Yours was a lot worse. There was a child involved.’

The mention of Rory made Cassie crumple suddenly, and she hid her face in her hands as the tears rushed out again. They just wouldn’t stop now. It was as if all the bravery she’d been showing as her public face, had been nothing more than a wall that simply dammed the tears, until eventually just one little crack had made the whole edifice crumble, and all the grief and anger and betrayal was now spilling out from her all at once and was completely unstoppable.

She had spent the past nine months trying to avoid precisely this moment. She’d worked and played and dressed up with the girls, found love (of a sort) with Luke and found her ‘path’ with Claude. But now they were gone, all of them, and all she had to show for her adventures was chopped, dyed hair, toned, moisturized skin and a macaroon addiction she could only satisfy with daily trips to the Ladurée salon at Harrods, which wasn’t the same thing at all.

Suzy gave a sad little sigh. ‘God, the shit just keeps on coming,’ she said, rubbing Cassie’s arm protectively as her sobs settled down a bit. ‘No wonder you won’t talk to her. I don’t blame you.’

Cassie looked up quickly. She knew that tone. ‘Look, Suze, I don’t want you to feel like you have to . . . you know, take sides on this. It’s between me and her.’

‘I don’t think so!’ Suzy retorted angrily. ‘After what she’s done, exactly what kind of friend is she supposed to be? Not one I want, that’s for sure, and I think I can speak for Kelly on this, too.’

‘Wait, Suzy. Just let it settle, at least. I don’t think we should mention this to Kelly. You know those two have always been close . . . Tch, I shouldn’t have said anything to you.’

‘Oh? So you want Anouk on the phone and getting her side over to Kelly first? As soon as she realizes you and I aren’t budging, she’ll go straight for Kelly, and you know it.’

Cassie dropped her head down. It had been exactly as she’d feared. More splits and recriminations. When would it ever end?

‘God, I bet Gil would be delighted to know that he’s split us up at last. He was always jealous of our friendship, you know,’ said Suzy.

‘I didn’t know that,’ said Cassie, looking up in surprise.

‘Oh yes. Kelly and Nooks and I used to joke that he looked at us as if we were the Witches of Eastwick or something, there to corrupt you and steal you away from him. He was always so
nervous
when we were around. It always gave me the impression that he felt he had won you falsely, you know?’

‘Not really.’

‘Must have been the guilt, of course. He probably knew that we’d strip and flail him alive if we ever found out. Wasn’t he lucky that Anouk was the one to uncover his little secret?’

‘Mmm.’ It was shocking to hear how much her friends had hated her husband. Ten years, and she’d never known.

‘God, he really was a shit,’ Suzy continued. ‘I should
never
have let you kiss him that night at the ball. You’d have been far better off with Henry.’

‘Henry?’ Cass echoed in alarm, the tears coming to an abrupt standstill. Surely she wasn’t referring to their drunken embrace behind the curtains ten years ago? She was certain that had gone unnoticed. ‘You know about that?’