Dog Handling (2 page)

She makes a very decent living having very rich boyfriends and immaculate hair. Her Gucci is always paid for by someone called Richard who has the same surname as a large American bank. Dinner is usually courtesy of a shipping tycoon, and the penthouse in Holland Park was a good-bye present from a seventies rock star who wanted his past to remain a secret when he got married to a French heiress with a Catholic mother. See, it’s easy when you know how.

Alex discovered how by accident really. Her natural habitat as a book reviewer led her to late-night conversations with many a literary lion who would thrill at her knowledge of allegory but much prefer the journey around her Amazonian body. Alex would fall in love and give them five-star reviews and then they’d suddenly remember that they had a lioness and cubs in some den in Primrose Hill. Adieu, literary lion. Soured and fed up with men who evidently preferred her bra size to her IQ, Alex tumbled along with the old maxim if you can’t beat ’em beat ’em up and sometimes whip ’em, too, as long as you never have to see your own credit card statements. Which she’d been doing lucratively for the past three years to some of the most powerful and rich men in the world. Though she claimed not to do much sex anymore.

“You just don’t have to. It cheapens the product.” And she would never kiss before the third date unless he was under forty and passably sexy. What’s more, all her spending money came in useful for her brothers. Alex’s parents had died a few years ago, leaving her solely responsible for her two younger brothers, Luke and James. She’d kept them in trainers, driving lessons, private schools, and university since that day. They didn’t come cheap and they didn’t get any cheaper. Luke had just been accepted to Yale University in the States and James was about to start his second year at Exeter. All bank-breaking stuff, so she gratefully accepted all the help she could get from her suitors.

Liv and Alex met via one of the literary lions five years ago. Liv was his accountant and teaching him to collect as many receipts as possible from lunch dates so they could all be written off as business expenses. Alex was his current mistress, whose shoes and salads were being written off as a business expense. The girls met in his hallway one day when his wife was in the Mull of Kintyre. They were instantly bonded in hilarity over his misconception that shiny trousers made him look taller than his five-foot-two in Cuban heels.

“It’s the happiest day of your life. You can’t wear black.” Alex, for all her career choice, was much more an old-fashioned romantic than Liv in many ways. Just a frustrated, hard-bitten, cynical one. She hovered outside the wedding shop changing room as Liv emerged looking like a trussed-up governess who had just escaped a grim Victorian novel—austere, harassed, and deep in mourning.

“It’s slimming. And I can’t wear cream or I’ll look like a bedspread.” Liv scraped back her hair into a governess’s bun.

“Definitely virginal, but you look more like a candidate for female circumcision than a wench longing for a rampant deflowering.” Alex walked over to the rails and plucked out a few shimmery, ethereal nightmares for Liv.

“Ees such a shame your friend is not getting married. She would make ravenous bride, eh?” Delilah, the irritatingly pretty French assistant who was begging to have her face slapped, stepped forward and tittered.

“Sorry?” bristled Liv.

“She would wear these dresses well,
non?”
Delilah assessed Alex’s perfect proportions, which were only enhanced by combat pants, and longed for her to try on the Dolce number she couldn’t bear to sell to any old person. “Per’aps you keep it simple, eh?” Delilah’s face pinched with horror as Alex handed Liv the diaphanous numbers. Thankfully Liv was spared the guillotine stare when a gleaming beauty strode in through the door and Delilah hurled herself to the other side of the room.

“Ciao.” Beauty kissed Delilah on the cheeks and tossed her handbag onto a nearby sofa. “Is it ready?”

“Ees ’ere.” Delilah hurried into a back room and emerged with a wedding dress so perfect that Liv thought perhaps she’d forget weddings altogether in the face of such unfair competition and plan her funeral instead.

“Alex, I just can’t do this. Look at me. I’m not a bride. Unless Frankenstein’s up for it.”

Alex stared long and hard at Liv as she stood before the mirror in a delicate dress that showed off everything she had and hid what was better left unsaid. “Yes, you can. You look gorgeous.” And Liv really did. “But this isn’t about dresses, is it?” Alex shoved her hands seriously into the pockets of her combats and assessed the damage. “It’s Tim. Do you really not love him?”

“Love him? Yes,” Liv granted. “In love? Not exactly. You can’t be, can you, after all this time? Which is why I really shouldn’t be doing it, should I?”

“Let me explain something to you, Livvy. It’s Darwinian, you see.” Alex gave her the look that the lions hankered after. Authoritative and sexy. “Love as we think of it is a chemical imbalance. Humans were designed to have babies. A couple meet and have mad sex for three years. No rhyme or reason; often they hate one another. Then if no babies are made they stop fancying each other. It means they’re not compatible mates. If, however, you actually get on with that person but still have no babies you’re consumed with doubt during the sex drought. It’s a common problem in the postpermissive era of the pill.”

“Which means what exactly?” Liv pulled the thread off a delicately embroidered rose until the whole flower vanished.

“Nobody has sex after the first three years. And at least you
like
Tim, which, trust me, is a huge blessing.” Alex took the thread from Liv’s hand and hid it in her pocket before Delilah could accuse them of shoplifting an embroidered rose.

“But sex? Passion?” Liv looked forlorn. “I want to have lunch with a man I hardly know and not wear any knickers.”

“It’s overrated and chilly. You’ll have a fantastic life with a man you love. Tim is that man. Someone you can trust not to shag the chief bridesmaid. He’ll still love you after childbirth. It may not be passion, but god, it’s the most romantic thing ever. You’ve no idea how much I envy you that.”

Liv looked back in the mirror. Give or take the odd flower on her bodice, maybe she could be the fancy dress version of a bride at least. The bodice looked passable with her pale skin. A bit of lipstick, and all would be well on the big day. And Tim? Well, he was completely great, really; she’d never thought otherwise or she wouldn’t have been with him for all this time. She just had to learn to appreciate him a bit more. Remember how much she loved his fluffy boyish looks and how cute he was when he fell asleep on the sofa during
Friends.
And try to imagine how devastated she’d be if he was hit by a bus tomorrow. Anyway, who wanted a man who bought you dagger-heel shoes and asked you to wear them in the bedroom? How awful would it be to have a husband whom women at cocktail parties flirted with as they elbowed you out of the way to try to wrest his mobile number from him? And just what was it with these aftershave-commercial-type men who kissed your neck passionately in front of the mirror as you cleaned your teeth? At least Liv knew Tim loved her for herself. He wouldn’t be stupid enough to stand for her tantrums. To buy her jewels “just because.” He knew his own mind and they laughed together. Curled up deliciously in bed. Knew their respective chopping and stirring roles in the carbonara recipe by heart. That, as a poet must have said, was love. She’d make a beautiful bride, she thought as she eased the zip down on her corset, with maybe a whisper of a diet before the big day.

“You see, darling, I’ve sampled the soup. Licked the cones. I have lived life. And now I will give myself: my extended, travelled, fulfilled self, to my husband.” Beauty was twirling around the shop like a remake for the twenty-first century of a Doris Day movie.

“C’est parfait. Parfait.” Delilah was practically panting with the ecstasy of it all. “Roger ees lucky man,
non?”

“It’s been a thrilling affair and it will be a thrilling marriage.” Beauty was the kind of girl who took her luck and flawless looks for granted. Presented with one smidgen of her charms on a silver platter by the tooth fairy, Liv would have evaporated in a puff of I-am-not-worthies. Beauty just frowned at an imaginary dark root on her head. “I love love love him. I swear the second he puts that ring on my finger I’ll just growl with pleasure.”

“And you just know that Roger will be precisely three-foot-six of mangy, bearded, impotent, but oh, so wealthy arms dealer,” Alex whispered into Liv’s ear as she looked at Beauty with her golden ponytail and Bulgari engagement ring. Liv giggled; Alex was right. So what if Beauty had sampled the soup and licked the cones? She wasn’t likely to be truly in love with the old dog she was marrying. Just bluff. Passionate marriages with wonderful, kind men who were also handsome were just a myth devised by advertising agencies to sell more chocolate.

Liv pushed all thoughts of breathtaking one-night stands and having Eric Clapton write songs about how wonderful she was looking tonight to one side and concentrated on how she was going to make Tim the happiest husband in the world. And there was always Tantric Sex Counselling and stuff if they ever got really desperate. For heaven’s sake, she hadn’t even resorted to buying exotic undies yet. Much less had one of those conversations that magazines always advised: talk through your fantasies and if you’re comfortable with them feel free to chuck an old scarf over the lampshade and act them out. The only hitch was that Liv’s fantasies usually involved other men: Naked Brad, the in-house photographer at work, various newsreaders.

“Oh, my god. Look away; look away.” Alex closed the curtain on Liv and began to whistle loudly.

“What? Why?” asked a muffled Liv, thinking that maybe the arms dealer was just too hideous a sight to behold. Perhaps he’d been maimed by one of his own weapons. Perhaps they’d had to stitch his face on inside out after a mishap with a Kalashnikov. “You know I’m much better at stomaching the gory scenes in
ER
than you. I can take it.” Liv groped her way round the curtain and stuck her head out. “Fuck me.” She whistled slowly. Before them stood a clearly smitten Beauty but not a beast in sight, only the most divine leather-clad Frenchman that money could never buy. His hair was cropped, black, and ruffled and his criminally blue eyes creased with joy as he watched Beauty emerge in her very small smalls.

“Darling, you’re not allowed to see me in the dress. Now go away or I won’t marry you at all.” Beauty shooed him away like a gnat; he tossed his head back and laughed.

“Me, please. Me, please. Next in line if she doesn’t want you.” Alex panted quietly. “There is a God, isn’t there?”

“Yeah, and he’s wearing a seventies biker outfit and smells of petrol.” Liv’s bodice was too tight now. She hacked the zip down a few notches and continued staring. “Why is life so unfair?” she moaned. Alex suddenly swivelled round and pulled the curtain over her.

“Okay, hang on a minute. Let’s just say that even if that fiancée of his was hit by a bus, or even just an old green BMW in the street outside,
you
are getting married. He’d be mine. You can’t have your cake and eat it.”

Liv didn’t care. She just wanted another look. She ripped the curtain from Alex and stuck her head out. The girls panted and gawped until the trinity of beautiful people in the corner turned and stared at them in horror. Did such unfortunate people really exist? they wondered as Alex wiped her sweating palms down her thighs, her tongue lolling bovinely next to Liv, whose boobs spilled out of her bodice onto the Fulham Road. The beautiful ones quickly looked away, terrified that such dreadfulness was contagious and having no intention of being afflicted.

“Cherie,
my bike ’e is throbbing in the street outside. I wait there for you. Comme toujours.” Roger pulled on his helmet and creaked through the door.

“But you just know he’s impotent, don’t you?” Liv ventured hopefully. “I mean all that throbbing between his thighs. It can’t be good for it. Can it?”

Chapter Two

Where Was I When
Everyone Was Sampling the Soup
and Licking the Cones?

L
iv rang her parents six times before she finally gave up and decided to cut her losses and walk the two miles from the train station to their house. It would give her time to think and work out just what she was going to say to them. To ask them whether they really thought she was doing the right thing in getting married. Shouldn’t it be undying passion or not at all? Liv had convinced herself that her mother would know what was best for her. But her faith in her mother’s ability to help her out suffered a minor setback ten minutes later when she was accosted by last year’s rotting Christmas tree and three empty boxes of Waitrose’s own brand wine in the driveway of their house. Ordinarily Liv would have cleared them discreetly away into the wheelie bin, but she was dying for the loo.

Seeing the curtains still drawn despite the bright autumn sunlight outside, she pelted round the back of the house in the hope that someone had left a door open for the cats to get in. Liv’s mother and stepfather had no concept of security—Lenny, her stepfather, had worked with reforming criminals for many years and had it on good authority from several burglars that the more signs of life in a house the less likely you were to be broken into. Hence all the neighbours with bolted garages and crooklocked cars were forever having their homes stripped of video cameras and computers. Meanwhile Lenny and Elizabeth, with their open doors and garage spewing lawn mowers and trampolines and unlocked cars with tantalising stereos, had never been relieved of so much as a garden hose. They just knocked on wood occasionally and wondered who’d want their LP collection anyway, much to their smart neighbours’ crooklocked dismay.

But today the door was firmly locked.

“Lemme in, quick.” Liv hammered on the French windows and crossed her legs. Still no sign of life. The cats were scattered on assorted surfaces, Oedipus on the kitchen windowsill, Tom on the mouldering patio table, and Blair, the youngest, on the mat. Blair had been named in the heady preelection frenzy of April 1997 when Labour seemed like a good idea and before Tony had become Tory. Lenny had subsequently wanted to change her name to Karl, but Elizabeth deemed it cruel to confuse her, so he’d only call her Karl under his breath while breaking open a can of Sheba.