Out of My Depth (15 page)

This was the first time I had heard Izzy acknowledge what she had lost. My heart ached for her.

‘Know what you mean. When I look back at my misspent youth, all I see is hair.’ I sniggered at Patrick. ‘I had too much of the stuff. It touched my shoulders, if you can believe that.’

‘And so I did grow up,’ Izzy continued, ‘and Prince Charming did arrive, and he did sweep me off my feet. And for a couple of years, I had everything I’d ever wanted. Then it starts to go weird, and then he buggers off. What do you do then? What comes after happy ever after?’

I imagined Patrick stroking the top of his head.

‘Buggered if I know. It’s the story of our generation, though. Grow up. Find something to do with your life, whether that means falling into what comes along or achieving an ambition. Get the relationship thing sorted, so you don’t have to worry about that any more. Start a family. Then what?’ he mused. ‘Then, you just carry on doing it until you retire or you die.’

‘Or you divorce.’

Patrick sounded confused. ‘Divorce? Hmm . . .’ He pulled himself together. ‘Well, yes, absolutely, in your case. But in a way, that’s good, isn’t it? I mean, your life is not going to be defined for its duration by the choices you made in your twenties. You get a clean slate. You get to recraft your life now, in your thirties, and I bet it’s going to be a damn sight more interesting as a result.’

Izzy chuckled sceptically. ‘I’ve never thought of it that way. I wish I had time or energy to “recraft my life”. It sounds like something I’ll mean to do for a few years, but I’ll keep putting it off, and then I’ll wake up one morning and I’ll be sixty. You’re sweet, Patrick. I know you’re just being nice. You’ve got everything, haven’t you? Your life has worked out perfectly. You’re just trying to make me feel better.’

Patrick paused for too long before he replied. ‘Something like that,’ he said, dutifully; aware, no doubt, of his listening children. ‘But we all hanker back to our teenage days. Youth is wasted on the young. One of life’s paradoxes. You don’t appreciate it until you haven’t got it any more.’

‘And now we just have to work with what we have got.’

‘Nostalgia, eh?’ Patrick said, with a chuckle. ‘It ain’t what it used to be.’

‘Dad,’ Freya complained. She sounded both annoyed and embarrassed. ‘You always say that.’

I swept in and cleared the table.

Amanda was uncomfortable. Even though it was the evening, it was horribly hot. She had drunk more gin than she needed, because Susie’s unctuous beau picked her glass up whenever she put it down, and smoothly poured a new one and placed it into her hand without her noticing. She had a bugger of a headache. The gin was supposed to make her feel good, but she was stuck with Roman and he was patronising her.

He thinks I’m suburban and boring, she realised. He despises me because I’m not bohemian.

‘What do you do?’ she asked him abruptly, interrupting his monologue on the chicken farm on the hill. She knew he did nothing of any note, and she wondered whether he was going to pretend.

‘Sorry? What do I do?’

‘Mmm-hmm.’

He answered smoothly. ‘I’m Susie’s manager. What do you do?’ He winked.

‘I’m Patrick’s manager.’

Roman laughed. ‘Surely Patrick is his own manager?’

‘Oh, unlike Susie? Anyway, he bloody is not. Let’s see, I manage his home, his children, his travel arrangements, his diet. I keep his fridge and his cupboards stocked and I buy his shirts and ties because he has not got a blinking clue. I arrange holidays. I keep the social diary. I’m sorry, but if you are Susie’s manager, I’m Patrick’s.’ Roman raised his eyebrows at her. He was, Amanda thought, trying to be sexy. It was not working on her, that was for sure. ‘Although,’ she continued, ‘you have to be a man to be a manager, don’t you? I guess that would make me Patrick’s secretary. And yes, before you ask, he has already got one.’ She glared. Even though Roman had barely said anything, she was furious with him. She had been trying to make a joke, about being Patrick’s manager, because she had imagined that she could find some solidarity with Roman in the fact that they were both bankrolled by their partners. It hadn’t worked out like that, because Susie’s hanger-on boyfriend had been sarcastic, and one thing Amanda could not abide was sarcasm. She was terrible at meeting new people. If only she wasn’t so fat, she would be able to wipe the floor with this smarmy Frenchman. ‘When you and Susie have children,’ she added, ‘you’ll see what I’m on about. Someone will have to do the drudgery, and it will probably be you. I know you’re not really her manager. I know you do nothing.’

Roman narrowed his eyes. ‘Did Susie say we were having children?’

‘I’ve barely spoken to Susie yet. I just assumed.’

He shook his head slowly. ‘Not a good assumption, Amanda. Excuse me.’ And he walked off.

Amanda walked to the edge of the terrace and stepped onto the lawn. The sun was low in the sky now. The grass was yellowish under her feet. There was a soft breeze and, at last, it was almost cool enough for comfort. She inhaled deeply. She smelt figs and herbs and leaves. She made an effort, and unclenched her stomach muscles.

She would never have imagined that Susie was going to end up with all this. In a way she knew she was insane to be jealous. Amanda knew that she and Patrick were rich by anybody’s standards. But Susie could use her money to relax. She and Patrick had to drink to do that. They had a garden, but it was small, compared with Susie’s rolling parkland. They had children, and school fees, and extracurricular activities, and gym memberships, and three cars, and the congestion charge, and they had no time. Patrick’s holiday was limited, so they generally went to a beach resort with guaranteed sunshine, though these days that was harder to find than it used to be. The climate seemed to be going mad. Amanda would only countenance places with kids’ clubs. They rarely spent time together as a family, just hanging out. She suspected they wouldn’t know what to do with themselves if they tried.

Susie didn’t have children yet. That was all it was. Amanda walked across the lawn to the trees beyond it, sipping what she suspected to be the fourth, or perhaps the fifth, gin and tonic of the cocktail hour. She touched the bark of an enormous tree that looked very old. She hadn’t a clue what kind of tree it was. It was nice to touch it. The grass between the trees was interspersed with small stones. The soil looked dusty.

‘Welcome to les Landes, everyone,’ Susie said, beaming. She stood at the head of the table and held up her glass. ‘It’s wonderful to see you all again. Here’s to a fabulous reunion!’

There was a murmur of assent around the table. Amanda lifted her glass and clinked it with everyone else’s, carefully noticing who turned to her first, and who turned last. She was certain that Tamsin wanted to leave her out, because she caught a malicious smile playing around her lips, and Tamsin turned to her last, like an afterthought.

Everyone was smiling big sociable smiles, and Amanda assumed that she wasn’t the only one taking a huge, grateful gulp of wine after the painstaking toasting. This was undoubtedly going to be a remarkable evening; probably not in a good way. She stared hard at Patrick, sending him telepathic orders not to embarrass her. She had told him to keep nice and quiet this evening and to get up and go upstairs or outside when the food was finished, to give the women some time alone.

She avoided even looking at Tamsin. Everything about the woman unnerved her, from her black clothes to her slight Australian accent. Amanda knew that Tamsin was giving her sly looks. She knew that Tamsin had never really liked her, and she thought that now she probably hated her. She recalled Tamsin, years earlier, going on about how she would devote her life to South African orphans, and vowed to ask her, when she got the chance, how that was going. She was trying to relax, but she was getting more and more wound up, and when Izzy started wittering on to her about how bloody wonderful all this luxury was, she suddenly wanted to hurt her.

‘Oh, do you think?’ she said, mockingly. ‘I suppose it’s all relative to where you’re coming from.’

This was supposed to be a scathing put-down, but Izzy just nodded earnestly and agreed that Amanda was right. Amanda noticed Tamsin asking Patrick to pass her the water. She saw Patrick smile as he filled her water glass. She knew that smile. It was Patrick’s ridiculous attempt at flirtation. Abruptly, she leaned forward and held her own glass out.

‘Patrick!’ she said imperiously, and Patrick found himself filling everyone’s water. Susie had to send Roman to the kitchen to fetch a new bottle from the fridge. When Amanda leaned back, she saw that the left breast of her dress had brushed the surface of her gazpacho, and she dabbed it furiously with her napkin, daring anyone to laugh.

‘Lovely gazpacho,’ said Izzy, happily. ‘Did you make it yourself?’

Susie nodded. ‘Of course,’ she said, fiddling with a maroon shoulder strap. ‘We make everything ourselves. The culture’s different here. It’s impossible to get a takeaway — at least, it takes longer to get one than it does to cook, and it’s cold by the time you get it home — and nobody really does ready meals.’

Amanda glared at her soup. It was impossible to take anything Susie said or did as anything other than a personal affront. It felt to her as though Susie could see all her failings, and was pointing them up by ostentatiously not having them. Amanda rarely cooked, and when she did she didn’t use vegetables.

Tamsin jumped in. ‘Susie, do you love cooking? Only I thought that with this lifestyle you’ve got going on, you’d have someone to cook for you.’

Susie looked displeased for a moment. She sighed. ‘I chose to cook for you all this weekend. I wanted to make it perfect. You’re right, I could have got someone in to do it. We could easily have gone out. But yes, I do love it, and I love creating meals for my friends.’ She didn’t sound as if she loved it.

‘Well, it’s absolutely wonderful,’ Tamsin said. ‘Well done. We’re very impressed.’

The bitch! thought Amanda, and she threw her a dirty look. Tamsin seemed incapable of speaking to Susie without being sarcastic. Amanda wondered why she felt protective of Susie. She supposed she knew. It was all to do with Tamsin.

‘Yes, Susie, we are,’ Amanda said, belatedly and far more sincerely than Tamsin had managed. ‘It’s stunning soup. I’d love to take the recipe.’

Susie was gracious. ‘I’ll write it out for you. Now, girls. Girls and boys, but girls mainly. This is a reunion. So we need to catch up. Let’s go round the table and each spill some details. What we did when we left school, to start with.’ She looked around. Amanda!’ Susie said, waving her spoon at her. ‘Why don’t you start?’

They all turned to Amanda and looked at her expectantly.

Bloody hell, Amanda thought. Why do I have to go first? If Susie had gone first, she would have an idea of what was expected. She drained her glass, and waited for the unctuous Roman to refill it.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘Me. Right.’ She breathed a couple of controlled breaths, and started. ‘Well, I left school after A levels,’ she began. ‘I got the grades I needed for Bristol and I went there and studied history.’ She nodded, nervous. It felt strange to be leaving Tamsin and her mother out of the story but she could hardly do anything else. Tamsin had been gone by the time she got to uni, anyway. ‘Bristol was brilliant. I had the time of my life, I really did. I lived in halls for the first year, and to be honest I can hardly remember most of it because I was pretty much drunk all year.’ She caught Patrick’s eye and smiled. ‘In my second year, I met a very dashing young economics student in the union bar. His name was Patrick. He invited me to dinner at Brown’s, which was quite the most upmarket date I’d been asked on in my life. I couldn’t normally afford Brown’s, but this economics student had an impressive share portfolio on the side and he didn’t live like all us normal students did. We started going out and he hasn’t managed to shake me off since!’ She looked around and everyone smiled dutifully.

As she filled them in on moving to London with Patrick, renting a flat in Clapham, buying a house, and being the first of all their friends to get married, Amanda listened to herself. She was stilted and nervous, and although the skeleton of her facts was correct, she was not telling them the truth.

She remembered her first meeting with Patrick. She had, indeed, been in the union bar, the Epi, and it had been her second year. That much was true.

She was skinny, then, and she was unspeakably miserable. Amanda had always pretended to be happy. She carefully made sure there was a spring in her step when she walked around Bristol. She smiled constantly. She invited people, casually, to come to the bar with her, pretending to be impulsive. Despite her efforts to be pleasant and fun and indispensable, she had not met anyone on her course who was anything other than a casual acquaintance.

She missed Suzii desperately. Suzii was the only one who understood the guilt. Suzii was the only one who would ever understand. Izzy might understand a little. Tamsin, Amanda was certain, she was never going to see again. But Susie had gone to London, without a plan, and she hardly ever answered her letters. When she did, it was obvious that she was busy having a life. She was getting over what they had done. It was only now that their foursome had been torn apart that Amanda realised how dependent she had been on it.

She even missed Dai. In fact, she missed him as much as Suzii. Sometimes she caught a train to Cardiff without telling anyone, to see him. She felt better for a few hours, but she knew he could not be a part of her future, and so, soon after she met Patrick, she wrote Dai a tear-stained letter. Dai was her passion, but Patrick was suitable, and stable, and Amanda knew that without stability, she would collapse.