Every Good Girl (22 page)

‘Hopeless,' Emily agreed, opening the door to their shared room. ‘I wonder how he manages without us?'

‘He isn't without us though is he, we're
here
.'

‘Yes but
he
isn't,' Emily said, throwing her collection of bags onto the blue and white patchwork-covered bed. ‘Which reminds me . . .' She dashed out through the door and leaned on the balcony rail, looking down to where Catherine was now perched on the edge of the sofa, flicking quickly through a magazine and
looking about as relaxed as if she was waiting her turn for some serious root canal work.

‘Catherine? I was just wondering . . .' Emily smiled down at her, her long hair flopping forward and obscuring her expression. She shoved it back impatiently – it was important that Catherine saw her being ‘nice'.

‘Yes?' Catherine said tentatively, looking tense.

Emily continued smiling, enjoying Catherine's upturned face, a picture of nervous anticipation.

‘How is your brother, what was his name? Steven, or Simon, was it?'

Catherine smiled, clearly hugely relieved. Emily wondered what possible terror any request she was likely to make could have held. Perhaps she'd thought Emily was about to demand access to her condom collection, or had chosen this moment to confess that she and Lucy were determined to make her life such hell that she'd take off for ever and leave their dad alone.

‘He's fine. He could come over if you like, he lives very near. I know he's more your age than I am.' She bit her lip, looking worried as if she'd inadvertently confessed to her hopelessness with Young People. As if we can't tell, Emily thought, leaning on the rail and enjoying her superior moment. ‘I don't mind if he comes. Or doesn't,' she shrugged, knowing that by the time she'd gone back through the bedroom door Catherine's perfectly French manicured finger would be halfway through pecking out his number.

‘I've got nothing to talk about. I mean what have I done lately? I've seen a couple of films and chosen a bit of paint colour,' Nina complained as she and Sally sat in the taxi on their way to the restaurant for their
rendezvous with the Knights Out singles dinner parties agency.

Sally had chosen this particular one in great excitement from an ad in the evening paper, aspiring to at least a baronet but dreaming of a duke. When Nina had pointed out that it was obviously the shining armour kind of knights that were on offer rather than the very few available other sort it had been Sally's look of enormous disappointment that had made Nina agree to go along and try her own luck. She was wearing her blue silk suit and the skirt was feeling just slightly uncomfortably tight. It would ride up across her thighs as she sat at the table. She could only hope for a generous amount of tablecloth to avoid giving whichever man she was put next to the wrong idea. Or the right one – perhaps she should be more adventurous. ‘You never know . . .' Sally's favourite going-out-in-hope phrase came to mind.

‘I mean, I've done
nothing
. It's all been taking care of the girls, the gallery, my mother, Henry while he painted and a measly lunch with my ex-husband. Hardly riveting stuff for a potential life partner to get to grips with.' The steamy aftermath of the ‘measly lunch' with Joe came quickly to mind and was banished – she hadn't even told Sally about that one, so she was hardly likely to chat up a strange man with ‘No, I don't do a lot, just sex and Sainsbury's.'

Sally was looking at her in such amazement that Nina almost believed she'd been voicing her thoughts. ‘Good grief, what's the matter with you? Surely you don't intend to go out with a whole bunch of strangers that you'll never clap eyes on ever again and spend the evening telling them about your aged mother? For all they know you could have spent the last week bungee jumping in Nepal or fondling dolphins in the River
Tyne. Make something up! I always do – that's part of the fun. You can bet your uplift bra that they will. It's as much about fantasy as it is about the love-search bit, that's why it's called Knights Out.'

Nina giggled, ‘Terrible name, it made me think about jousting. But then I suppose that's what relationships are. I know, I could pretend to be training to be the new Mother Teresa.'

‘No you couldn't,' Sally countered smartly. ‘Not if you're hoping to pull.'

‘Oh. OK, then I could be a retired ice-dance champion, writing a book on the definitive triple salchow.'

Sally sighed. ‘No idea, have you? Look, last time I did this sort of thing I was a jewellery designer – I know plenty about that because of the gallery. And the time before that I was an erotic novelist; I couldn't resist that one, it went so well with my leopard-print shoes.'

‘You don't know anything about erotic novels,' Nina said. ‘Or maybe you do?'

‘Well of course I do, everyone who's ever had sex does. And besides they had a publisher on Richard and Judy so I'd picked up a bit of the vocab. Use your imagination, choose your profession! It's so easy!'

The cab turned into a narrow street off the Fulham Road and slowed down. ‘We'd better get out round the corner, we're not supposed to know each other. No-one is,' Sally said, leaning forward to talk to the driver. Nina ran her tongue over her nervous, dry lips and prayed for the evening to pass swiftly. Sally looked at her as the cab stopped. ‘If you're hoping for anything to come from this evening, pray not to be put next to a BBD.'

‘What's a BBD?' Nina asked suspiciously.

‘Some poor sod who's had a bloodbath divorce. One
they just can't stop telling you about. That way lies pure and utter boredom. OK, into the fray, may yours be a rich pussycat and may mine be a stallion.'

Recording studio staff seemed to be getting younger, Joe thought as he took a mug of tea from the tray that the tape operator had brought in. He looked like a fifth-former on a fortnight's work experience – skinny, large-footed and mottled with rampant acne. Joe didn't want the tea, he wanted to be home with his girls, all three of them, taking them out to eat at the Café Rouge round the corner and coming home to watch a video and sprawl on the sofa scattering popcorn. He looked at his watch and found the time had moved on only ten minutes in what he'd assumed to be the past hour. The studio was in a gloomy basement and like all such places had no windows and no feeling of fresh air and reality. The frankly sordid control room, with its musky smell of stale cannabis and cold coffee and long past their best ginger suede-and-steel chairs, could only truly appeal to young and impressionable rock musicians who'd assume this was Doing Success. To jaded Joe it felt just claustrophobic and he was pacing the floor with the urge to escape.

‘Run it once more, Kev,' the girl from the agency requested. She looked at Joe and smiled, a slow and confidential just-between-us smile. He grinned back at her then sipped at his fourth mug of tepid tea. She didn't interest him, not even slightly. With detached speculation, just to see what was stopping him, he inspected her, the slim and shiny suit with its aren't-I-
gorgeous
short skirt, the sassy blond hair with its carefully asymmetrical parting and expensively cut untidiness. A year or two ago he'd be asking her if she fancied a drink after, just so he could watch those long
legs curling themselves round each other on a bar stool. Now he didn't care. As the track ran and the singer tried once more to fit the lyrics to the melody, he tested himself, trying to work out whether he was feeling just too old, asking himself how he felt about that.

‘Drink after this? I think we deserve one,' the girl was saying, her smile confidently expecting a ‘yes'.

‘Sorry, I'd love to but I've got to get back. I'm late for the family,' Joe heard himself saying. She pouted and turned away, blushing rather appealingly. The detached part of his head, where he kept the old juvenile Joe, jeered at him but there was no wavering, no contest.

As he left the studio, going down to the car park in the lift, he wondered about Nina alone that evening in their – no,
her
– house. He thought of her curled up in the soft lamplight on the sitting room sofa with the TV on and Genghis snoring softly on the rug. When she kicked her shoes off they always landed upside down. Or she might be upstairs wallowing in a scented bath, indulging in some serious body-pampering. He tried not to think of her giggling over a bottle of wine with Henry in the kitchen or brutally discussing All Men are Bastards with the flimsy new woman from across the road. Not once did it cross his mind that she might not be home at all.

Nina sat at the large round table and pinned her name tag to the lapel of her jacket. She felt as if she was at a primary school social where people she had been seeing at the gate for the past few years would come up and say ‘Hi . . . er . . .' swift-look-at-label, ‘
Nina
' and they'd both pretend the label wasn't necessary, not at all.

For a Friday night the restaurant didn't seem to be particularly busy, and their table, away in an alcove slightly apart from the main room, reminded Nina of taking the girls for a birthday treat at a burger bar where large parties were safely roped off out of range of trouble. She shifted uncomfortably on the cane chair: she'd been right about the skirt, which was already riding up and would only stay put if she kept her knees virtuously still and together, defeating, she thought with a smile, the unspoken object of a Knights Out evening.

She looked over to where Sally was sitting on the opposite side of the table, already with a large drink to hand, her eyes swivelling round to check out the other, what were they, customers? punters? Sally's lower half, which no-one could see, was wearing a pair of sensibly comfortable stretchy trousers but her top half was a stall laid out: a low-cut blouse of something semitransparent, blotched with scarlet roses which reminded Nina of her mother's bedroom wallpaper. Big tumbling frills of the same fabric fell across her bolster of a bosom and a necklace of silver leaves (from gallery stock, Nina noticed) nestled in the folds of her cleavage. Her thick, streaky blond hair was fluffed out like the fur of a cat that's spoiling for a fight. Nina hoped that among the six men on offer, who so far all looked discouragingly like corporate lawyers on their way home from the office, Sally would truffle out a true Knight for herself. To Nina, so far, they were simply a collection of dull grey suits and safe ties. There were four other women: two in safe black but sporting something bold in terms of jewellery, and one with jet-black long hair who wore a scarlet high-necked Chinese-style dress that clung to her slim body and what she and Joe used to call shag-me shoes, high, gold and
open-toed with double ankle-straps. Nina sipped her spritzer and imagined Joe muttering comments in a restaurant along the lines of, ‘Pity she can't just put them on the table and let them do the talking', as he'd be sure to do if he was with her. She wished she was at home, suddenly, with him and the girls and a Friday night video, Genghis and the cat scavenging on the carpet for spilled popcorn . . .

Welcome to Knights Out,' Scarlet Dress suddenly announced. ‘I'm Belinda, I'll leave it to you to make your own introductions as the evening progresses. For those of you who haven't joined us before, this is simply dinner with friends. The only difference is that you'll be friends by the end of the evening, rather than at the beginning.' Her audience tittered softly and some of the braver sets of eyes started to seek out someone round the table to be sharing the joke with. Sally grinned across at Nina and winked, raising her glass. Her eyes and head slid sideways to indicate the man sitting on her right and Nina forced back a giggle as Sally made a being-sick face across the table, hiding behind her menu.

‘Hi, I'm Lawrence,' the Grey Suit on Nina's left spoke. ‘Have you been to one of these things before?' It sounded like an echo, because, Nina quickly realized, this seemed to be everyone's opening line.

‘I'm Nina. And no I haven't actually. And you?' He looked all right on close inspection, she thought, tall, athletic and with very clean hands. Add a Good Sense of Humour and he might be anyone's Lonely Hearts column dream man. Surely, by definition, the sort of man who shouldn't need to be doing this.

‘Yes, once or twice. I prefer it to one-to-one dating and for very good reasons. Can I just ask, are you divorced or widowed or what?'

‘Divorced, actually,' Nina lied, feeling that if she said ‘Separated' she might be outed as a Fake Single and marched from the premises. She wondered which profession to select when he inevitably asked. Lion-tamer came to mind.

He smiled, rather sadly. ‘Ah, then you'll understand. You see with my wife, well I had a terrible time. The wrangling in the courts, you wouldn't believe it, absolute bloodbath . . .'

‘I am
not
watching bloody
Watership Down
. Not on a Friday night and that's final.' Emily faced Lucy in Blockbusters and wondered how disgracefully sad she looked, arguing with her sister about the best way to spend a night
in
.

‘OK, what about
Clueless
.'

‘Seen it twice. Look Luce, it's
The Saint
or
Evita
. I don't feel in the mood for anything with heavy sex or violence.'

‘Had too much of both this week?' Simon's voice behind her, too close to her ear, flippant and careless, made Emily jump with nerves and she swung round angrily.

‘You
fuckwit
, what would
you
know?' she hissed rudely in his face. Simon's smile still beamed, but his eyes looked as if he'd been smacked. He backed away a few steps, alarmed.

‘Hey, sorry. Whatever I said wrong, I didn't mean it.'

Emily tried to collect her wits, tried to smile back at him but her treacherous lip trembled. She felt a complete fool for over-reacting, but men really shouldn't creep about startling girls like that. Lucy crept up next to her and took her hand, patting at it with soft fingers, doing her best to soothe. Simon was
looking perplexed. He had his hands shoved far down in the pockets of his jeans just like boys at school when they were embarrassed by a teacher's thoughtless sarcasm. He tried again. ‘Er, look – Catherine rang and told me you were in here choosing something to watch. I just thought you two might be wanting a bit of company, that's all. I'll go home again if you like.' He grinned: ‘Actually I think she's a bit scared of being on her own with the two of you.'