River Deep (16 page)

‘I didn’t actually, but it’s Carmen … Carmen Da Vinci of, um, Renaissance Events. I’m overseeing the opening of a major new venue and I’m looking to bring in external caterers …?’

She took Louise’s proffered hand and shook it firmly, wondering if stealing the surname of the artist displayed across the bottom of a framed print on the wall over her left shoulder was a bit obvious, but new as she was to assuming identities and working undercover she had no time to consider the consequences of her snap decision, which was probably fortunate as no doubt it would include derision, humiliation and a short stay in some mental institution. In the event, Louise released her grip first and turned on her high heel without so much as a second glance at the interloper.

‘So have you come for a brochure, or do you actually have a specific event in mind?’ Louise asked her, looking at the boxes of stationery still unopened at her feet.

‘Oh, just a brochure at this stage.’ Maggie replied.

‘Well, then, follow me, Carmen. The office is not quite finished yet, but at least we can talk in there in peace and quiet without a whole load of builders ogling your arse!’

Louise’s laugh was deep and throaty. Deep-throat, Maggie noted. Maybe it was her fellatio skills that had tipped the balance. She shrugged to herself and wondered if it was the hips instead. Louise had proper hips, the kind that curve out from the waist and finished in a rounded bottom. As Maggie frequently noted, her own hips were angular and flat. She had boy’s hips, and very possibly a boy’s bottom, although unlike Sarah she refused to spend hours analysing it over one shoulder in the mirror. Besides, Christian had always told her he liked her bottom. In fact he’d told her he loved it. Come to that, he had told her he loved her, so maybe it wasn’t that at all. Perhaps it was just Louise’s difference, her oppositeness, that drew him to her, because he was running away from the hugeness of their love. After all, he had said as much.

Maggie glanced around as she followed Louise picking through the boxes, cans of paint and ladders that still adorned the corridor, and smiled to herself. The official opening of Fresh Talent 2 had been scheduled for last Friday, but maybe, just maybe, the end of their relationship had created a tiny stir in Christian’s life after all, a slight ripple that had delayed things just a little, and it pleased her to think it. Or then again, maybe the builders were just behind schedule again – they had been for weeks. God knows she’d spent long enough on the phone chasing them. But Maggie tried not to think about rational explanations, because that would lead her down a very tricky route, one which would inevitably culminate in her asking herself exactly why she was in the office of her ex’s new girlfriend pretending she was somebody else. Even as the thought crossed her mind she could hear Sarah’s voice in her head demanding an answer, could see her as she had looked this morning, her arms crossed over her breasts, her lips set into a thin firm line reserved only for her children – and Maggie.

‘I am not taking you back there to have another bloody look at her. Apart from the fact that I have a business to run, you’ve seen her once. We agreed – all tits and legs and no class! What do you need to see her again for? Just let it go, Mags, for God’s sake. For your sake. I know it’s early days, but all this mentalist stuff, this obsessing – it’s not doing you any favours.’

Maggie had shrugged and told her friend that she was right, of course she was right. She had had the obligatory weep on Sarah’s shoulder, wondered to herself how it was possible to be so bored stiff with crying and yet still need to do it all the time, and then had left the salon, turned right up the street and gone to the station to catch the first train to the City, which took twenty minutes to arrive while Maggie stared blankly into space and eavesdropped on the private lives of two old ladies.

‘I said to him, Ron, I said, now stop all this silliness. I’m a married woman, my Bob’s still alive, just. You can’t go asking a married woman to gad about on cruises. Mary, he said, I have to have you, I don’t care what it takes! Silly old fool.’ Mary hadn’t been able to resist a small smile to herself.

‘He’d set his cap at anyone, that Ron,’ her companion had said sourly, and Mary’s smile had faded into the middle distance as she waited; she looked liked she’d been waiting all her life.

Twenty minutes, Maggie mused. Why am I still sitting here after twenty minutes when I could be,
should
be, going home? But her impulse to get on the train had given her the strongest sense of purpose she’d felt since Christian had told her about Louise. It was almost overwhelming, and at least, she noted, since she’d made the decision she’d stopped pretending to
be
Louise. That had to be a step in the right direction.

Maggie explained to herself once again exactly why it was perfectly rational for her to want to see Louise again and why she knew it would help her. She just
knew
she had to. She had to take her in, this woman, this irresistible force that had disintegrated at a single touch the one thing she thought was immutable. She had to look at her and really
see
her, because she had to know, she
had
to know, where she’d gone wrong, where, at exactly which point, she’d lost him. It was the speculating that was driving her mad. Knowing would keep her sane.

None of it was planned, of course; at least not her new career as a double agent. She’d got off the train and found her way to the new premises. She’d stood across the street with a studied air of nonchalance, going for the persona of a lost tourist or maybe an architecture student – anything that would give her a licence to loiter. As she’d waited she’d wondered again why she had never questioned Christian’s insistence that she didn’t need to visit the new place until it was completely finished. That really she didn’t even need to meet Louise, not until she’d settled in and found her feet. He’d said, ‘You know how fantastic you are, Mags, you’ll intimidate her.’ Maggie sighed and wondered whether if he’d put a huge neon sign up over their bed saying ‘I’M HAVING AN AFFAIR’ she would have ignored that too. But then she’d trusted him, and you don’t question a person you trust, do you? You expect them to tell you straight up how they’re feeling. But as he’d said himself that terrible morning on the sofa, Christian couldn’t bear to hurt her so she’d only got the message when one of the signs had come crashing down on her head.

Maggie had pushed her shades up her nose and watched the Victorian Gothic building, waiting for a glimpse of Louise, just like last time. Exactly as she had with Sarah. Except that Sarah had made the whole exercise vaguely sane. When Sarah had been there she hadn’t felt mad or desperate or idiotic. Ripped into tiny shreds of nothingness, yes, but at least she hadn’t been alone. Maggie had panicked then and nearly bolted, but just at that moment Louise had arrived.

She was dressed in a knee-length beige suede skirt and red silk shirt, her golden legs turned out beautifully in a pair of tan high heels. Maggie had almost missed her, so lost was she in her tumultuous thoughts. Louise had paused only momentarily outside the door, seemed to take a deep breath and then gone in, greeting the workmen with a practised gusto. For the second time Maggie had noted that she had grace and poise. When she and Sarah had noticed it the first time, they had passed it off as sluttish and cheap. They were wrong.

Maggie had stared at the chipped nail polish on her toes for a long moment and wondered. If she had had to sit on the train for ages, bombarded by the incessantly loud ranting of two teenage girls debating whether the best way to get a boy in class to fancy them was to let it be known that they ‘did it’, then the very least she could do was make the journey worthwhile. And anyway, one good look was all she needed – then she’d go back to being herself, but prepared, this time, for battle.

‘Don’t be an idiot, Maggie Johnson,’ Maggie said under her breath, surprising herself in the quiet street. ‘You’re going to get on the bus, go back home, run through your presentation to the bank like you said you would, and try to cost an opening menu that doesn’t involve nuggets, baskets and chips. You are a grown woman,
not
a ranting lunatic.’

But by the end of her muttered speech she had found herself standing outside the doors Louise had walked through moments before.

Cursing herself, she’d walked past the vaulted entrance as many times as she could before one of the decorators in the foyer had winked at her and waved. It was then that something happened to her that had never happened before. For the first time she’d felt light-headed and sort of cut loose, as if the whole morning had been an inexorable journey to the highest peak of a rollercoaster and now the moment had come when gravity was about to send her plummeting down to earth at speed. Before she’d had time to think about it, she’d walked through the engraved glass doors and up to the smiling decorator and tipped what little remained of her balance.

‘Hello,’ she’d said with a grin that was uncharacteristically flirtatious. ‘I’m terribly sorry, I think I’m a bit lost. I’m looking for the Fresh Talent office and the manager, Louise? Louise Bovary, isn’t it?’

At that moment Louise had risen like Venus from behind the high-topped white ash reception desk with a box of stationery in her hands, smiling benevolently.

‘Oh, hi there, I’m Louise,’ she’d said, setting the box down on the desk. ‘Were you looking for me? Please accept my apologies for the state of the place, but it’s just been one thing after another the last couple of weeks, which I probably shouldn’t be telling you if you’re a prospective client. My boss’d kill me!’ She bit her lip on the last word and Maggie saw that she was nervous, maybe a bit harassed and worried about letting Christian down. She felt an unexpected pang of empathy and relief.

‘Oh God! Don’t worry. I’m sort of new to this too,’ Maggie had replied as she’d returned Louise’s anxious smile. She’s just a person, Maggie had realised with a shock, just a rather gorgeous normal person with the same insecurities as anyone else. For a moment Maggie had felt a strange mix of guilt and joy, as she realised that it might be possible to win Christian back from her after all.

‘I’m sorry,’ Louise had said. ‘What did you say your name was?’

‘Carmen?’

Maggie stared at the brochure copy which she herself had written only weeks before, somehow unable to get the printed words to make sense on the page.

‘Carmen! Are you OK?

Maggie blinked and looked up at Louise, who was now leaning across the beech radial desk that Maggie had budgeted for, her face a picture of concern.

‘I’m sorry!’ Maggie leaned back in the chair and fanned herself with the brochure. ‘I think it’s this heat. It’s sent me a bit ga-ga. So, um, what were you saying?’

Louise’s face relaxed and she smiled. ‘Actually I was saying do you fancy getting out of this office? There’s a nice place round the corner where we could have coffee. I’d offer you one here, but I haven’t unpacked the machine yet.’

Maggie masked her surprise at the offer, but conceded that it was probably a good move on Louise’s part. The chaotic surroundings could put a prospective client off.

‘Um, why not?’ she said. ‘It would be nice to get some fresh air anyway.’

Louise smiled confidently at her and strode to the closed office door. ‘Right, this way, madam,’ she said, gripping the door handle and turning it. It came off in her hand.

‘Oh shit! Oops, sorry, I mean …’ Louise regarded the redundant piece of metal in her hand and smiled wanly at Maggie. ‘I mean, oh shit!’

This is my punishment, Maggie thought. This is divine retribution for coming here in the first place. I’m going to be locked for all eternity in an airless office with a woman whose breasts take up most of the room. But then, on the upside, at least she won’t be with Christian either.

Maggie looked at Louise’s crestfallen face. ‘Don’t panic!’ she said brightly. ‘This sort of thing always happens at exactly the wrong moment.’ She crossed the cluttered office in two steps and took the handle out of Louise’s hand. ‘Here, let me try.’ Maggie tried to reinsert the handle on to its shaft, tentatively turned it and for one moment thought she had been reprieved from her eternal doom. Then she heard the handle on the other side of the door clatter to the floor. Followed by the connecting shaft.

‘Oh shit.’ Maggie said, looking into the wide eyes of her boyfriend’s mistress. ‘Now we really are fucked.’

The two women looked at each other for a second, and then, as one, beat their palms against the door and shouted for help. After a few seconds they stopped, and Maggie felt her reddened palms tingle. Faintly, from down the corridor, they could hear the buzz of a drill.

‘They can’t hear us,’ Louise said. She laughed unconvincingly. ‘Oh God, Carmen. I’m so sorry. You’re never going to use us now, are you?’

Maggie tried a consoling grin, but she was sure her newly acquired but mounting claustrophobia must be reflected in her face.

‘Never mind,’ she said stiffly, and then glanced at the phone on the desk. ‘I know, ring them. Ring the builders and tell them to let us out!’

Louise looked apologetic. ‘We’re getting connected this afternoon,’ she said. ‘Oh, but my mobile, my mobile is … on the front desk. Oh fuck.’ She sat back down and, pulling open the desk drawer, produced a warm can of coke. ‘Look, at least we won’t dehydrate,’ she said bravely.

Maggie slumped back into her chair and blinked. What was she supposed to do now? Carry on being Carmen, she guessed. At least this way, in a sort of crisis, Louise might open up a little, give away a few vital clues.

‘Anyway,’ Louise continued, ‘there’s always a bright side. It’ll be a nice treat for me to spend a bit of time with a girl, what with all the builders around. I’ve only been living in London for a few months and I haven’t had a chance to meet anyone much. The only friend I’ve got is my boyfriend!’

Maggie forced a reciprocal laugh. ‘Oh no, we can’t have that!’ she replied heartily, hoping her brain would click into automatic pilot and do all the talking for her. Every now and then a small voice inside was screaming soundlessly ‘what the hell do you think you’re doing here?’ but for the most part it was like some dream, some movie trailer that Maggie just happened to be floating through, and even though she knew at the back of her mind that what she was doing was ridiculous – not to mention strange – she just couldn’t muster up the energy to care very much.