River Deep (25 page)

Suddenly she heard a muffled thump and possibly a groan behind her. She span round and waited for her eyes to adjust to the half-light. Then she realised what was wrong – the light in the ladies was still on, glowing faintly through a crack in the door. She heard the noise again and then the unmistakable clatter of breaking glass. Someone was in there. Despite her better instincts, Maggie crept towards the door – after all, it might just be her mum or Sheila in there, or maybe one of Jim’s conquests. If she could just push the door open a crack more …

Sarah walked right into her, screamed, and then dissolved into a fit of giggles. She was very, very drunk and in her right hand she was swinging an empty bottle of house red.

‘Sarah!’ Maggie said. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Oops!’ Sarah held out both of her upturned wrists. ‘It’s a fair cop, guvner,’ she slurred. A large shadow loomed behind her and Maggie realised it was Falcon still buttoning the fly of his jeans. To give him credit he looked mortified to be caught red-handed.

‘Oh, er, all right? I’ll give you the cash for the wine. Sarah said you wouldn’t mind?’

Maggie looked from one to the other and then stumbled back two quick steps as her friend flung her arms, with most of her weight behind them, around Maggie’s neck.

‘I love you, Maggie,’ she said blurrily. ‘I mean, you’re flaky most of the time, but I still love you. I want you to know that. You do know that, don’t you?’

She burped loudly and rested her head on Maggie’s neck, seeming to drop off for a second before jerking her head up and staring around her. ‘Whooo! Steady as she goes!’ she giggled as Maggie guided her haphazardly to a chair, with the help of Falcon. She realised that he was relatively sober.

‘Did you get her drunk?’ she challenged him, relieved that he looked stricken at the very idea. They plonked Sarah into a chair, where she promptly leaned her forehead on the table and began to snore.

‘No!’ Falcon insisted. ‘No, honest, it was her idea, the wine and the … ladies. I don’t even drink wine, but she was mad for it! All of it.’ He paused and looked at Maggie. ‘I just went along with her, she’s a pretty hard lady to turn down!’ he said, his expression a mixture of wonderment and alarm. Sarah sat up suddenly as if no time had elapsed since her last garbled comment.

‘OK, so you can be a bit spoilt and don’t know a good thing when it’s staring you in the tits! Ha! Tits, get it? But you’ve always been there for me and you always pay for your mani ––’ The word morphed into a Richter-scale snore, and Sarah’s forehead hit the table again with a not inconsiderable thud. Wincing, Maggie held out her hand to Falcon.

‘Give me twenty pence,’ she demanded, and he coughed up speedily. She stuck it in the payphone on the bar and waited for the owner of the local cab firm to answer.

‘Tariq? Hi there, it’s Maggie from The Fleur. Yeah, I’m at The Fleur now. Yeah. Anyway, listen, I’ve got Sarah here, a bit worse for wear. Are there any of you lot brave enough to take her home?’ Maggie laughed. ‘Excellent, I’ll see you in ten minutes then.’ She hung up and looked at Falcon, who was now crouching down by her friend.

‘There’s no need,’ he said. ‘I can walk her home. I don’t mind, least I can do.’

Maggie shook her head. ‘Mate, does it look like she can walk?’ she said, and Falcon had to agree. ‘Besides, even if you are a nice bloke, what kind of friend would I be if I let her go off into the night with a man she’s just met when she’s in that state?’

Falcon had to agree again. ‘I see your point,’ he conceded, and brushed a strand of hair from Sarah’s sweaty face. ‘Sarah? Sarah?’ he said. Sarah opened one unfocused eye. ‘Cheers then, for … er … everything. You’re a really great bird.’

Sarah furrowed her brows, as if she was giving the matter some serious thought. Then, out of the pit of her stomach, a large growl began steadily to build. Before it could reach its crescendo, however, two large retches forced Sarah to sit upright in her chair, and she vented a stream of dark vomit that filled the room with the stench of acrid house red. Falcon was covered in the splatter. Sarah was snoring peacefully once more, her brow now smooth and carefree.

‘Oh fuck!’ Maggie clapped a hand over her mouth, stifling her laughter. After all, the big pink-haired man with piercings might not think it was so funny. ‘She’ll be mortified when she remembers this,’ she told him, suspecting it was a lie.

‘No worries.’ Falcon said, but his face was wrought with dismay. He headed off to the gents to sponge himself down, and realising that Sarah wasn’t going anywhere yet, Maggie cancelled her cab.

‘You’re so going to regret this in the morning,’ she’d told Sarah as Falcon carried her upstairs to the sitting room. Maggie had put a bowl, two panadol and a pint of water within easy reach of the sofa, and set her own alarm clock to make sure that Sarah got home, showered and conscious, possibly in that order, in time to open the salon and greet Becca after her pyjama party. Something she’d eventually achieved by the skin of both of their teeth.

She’d been impressed that, despite the vomit incident, Falcon had stayed to help her clear up not only the mess in the bar but a broken glass in the ladies. As she let him out, he’d stopped and shaken his head.

‘She’ll be all right, will she? Sarah, I mean. About tonight?’ He’d shifted from one foot to the other. ‘I like her and everything, but I don’t really want a girlfriend, you see …’

Maggie’s laughter had shocked Falcon. ‘Don’t worry, mate,’ she’d told him. ‘Sarah’s got the original heart of ice. Better men than you have failed to thaw it.’

Falcon had looked at her for a moment, clearly trying to decide whether or not to be offended. ‘Nice one,’ he’d said eventually, and Maggie had bolted the door behind him.

Maybe in the end, she thought as she sipped the last of her coffee, the whole damn thing was just an endless series of merry-go-rounds.

Her phone jumped into life and began to vibrate across the polished surface, dislodging a pile of papers, including her list, enough so that they scattered on to the floor.

‘Oh fuck!’ Maggie swore earnestly as she tried to grab the papers and answer the phone at the same time.

‘Carmen?’

Maggie froze, her arm outstretched towards the floor as she bent over in her chair. She took a breath and straightened up, unconsciously flicking her hair out of her face as she composed herself.

‘Louise! Hi!’ She tried to sound pleased to hear from the girl as she scrambled to remember exactly what she had told her the last time they’d talked. She closed her eyes. It was only two days ago but it felt like a lifetime.

‘Gosh,’ Louise’s brightness sounded brittle. ‘I didn’t know mobiles could get a signal halfway across the world these days. That’s amazing!’ She laughed a high, hollow laugh. ‘I was just going to leave you a message to call me when you got back. I put together some quotes for your for the opening on the new bar …’

Maggie was confused. ‘Got back?’ she said, just as she remembered her Australia lie.

‘Oh, you mean from Australia!’ Both women spoke at the same time.

‘I didn’t go,’ Maggie said simply. ‘There was, er … a crisis at work, and it all got cancelled at the last minute. It’s been busy, busy, busy or I would have called! But thanks for that, the quotes, I mean.’ Maggie felt guilty. Here was Louise, doing her best to get much needed new business that would never materialise. ‘How are
you
?’ she rushed on, hoping to distract Louise from any more business talk. Fortunately – or maybe not – Louise had something else on her mind.

‘Terrible,’ she said, trying to laugh, but it turned into a sob and a rush of jumbled words instead. ‘Oh God, I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m calling you, I mean, I didn’t even think you’d be here! It’s just that I told everyone at home that things were going so well for me here, bragged a bit about Christian, you know? It’s just that telling them how awful I feel, even Mum, would be so … so … I just can’t, not now. Not until I know there’s no hope. The thought of going back to Cheltenham with my tail between my legs would be awful. I made such a big fuss about going off to London …’

Louise took a much needed breath.

‘… And you just seemed to know exactly how I felt. Do you mind me calling you? I’m so glad you haven’t gone. I know we don’t really know each other that well, but you’re the first woman who’s been kind to me since I got here.’

Maggie waited for any further additions to Louise’s monologue before allowing herself a moment to ingest all that Louise had just said. For the first time since she had engineered her meeting with Louise she was beginning to get the sense that there was more to her than just pretty packaging. She was quite a bit younger than Maggie, and, despite her beauty, vulnerable and easily bruised. She was scared stiff of losing the one thing that Maggie wanted more than anything, and she was panicking. It was the kind of panic that would turn Christian right off her, Maggie knew. She also knew that as much as she wanted Christian, she didn’t want to deliberately hurt Louise any more, not now that she knew she was human, a real person, and not some pneumatic automaton. An idea, straight out of Maggie’s recent school of ideas based on folly and impulse, sprang into her head. Maybe she could persuade her to leave Christian of her own accord. That would be much better. Better for Louise, better for Maggie, and much, much better for Carmen, whose nerves were in serious tatters.

‘It’s OK,’ Maggie said, cautiously optimistic about Plan B. ‘Of course we’re friends. Calm down and tell me what’s happened.’ Maggie made an attempt at nonchalance. ‘Has Christian said something?’ She heard Louise blow her nose on the other end of the phone.

‘Not exactly,’ she began. ‘You know he was due to go out on this business meeting last night? Well, he told me he’d come back to my place in Southwark, you know, near the office. We never go back to “their” flat in St Albans, I’ve never even seen it. I told him he didn’t have to, I knew he was going back to St Albans for the meeting and he might as well stay as his place, but no, he said he’d come back to mine, said he’d be here before midnight and that I should “wait up” for him, if you know what I mean? I was so pleased, I felt that if he wanted to see me that badly he must really like me, you know?’

Maggie chewed her lip anxiously.

‘And?’ she prompted.

‘And midnight came and went and then one and two and three, and at four I gave up ringing his mobile and just fell asleep on the sofa. The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes this morning was him sitting in the armchair opposite me, still in the same clothes, a five o’clock shadow on his face.’

Maggie gripped her chair, feeling an uneasy, tilting sense of déjà vu. Apart from anything else she had parted from Christian at no later than nine o’clock. Where
had
he been all night?

‘Inconsiderate bastard. What did he say?’ Maggie asked, appalled for more than one reason.

‘He said he’d been for a walk and a think.’

Maggie’s heart skipped a beat. A walk? And a think? A walk and a think where? Had he seen her and Pete lying in the grass holding hands? She didn’t know how to feel about the prospect, because although she wanted Christian to think she might have someone, she didn’t want him to give up on her.

‘A walk where!’ she found herself demanding petulantly, in exactly the kind of tone that would drive Christian bonkers. She couldn’t help it.

‘He didn’t say. Just a walk. To think. I asked what about, but he said that he couldn’t talk about it with me yet because he hadn’t finished thinking. And of course, Carmen, well, I thought he was with her, with Maggie. I mean, what do you think? He had to be, didn’t he? I played it really cool, though, because he totally went off on one before when I tried to get him to talk. So I didn’t say anything. I just said, “OK, if you want to talk about it I’m here.” I thought, well, even if he was with her, he came back to me, right? That has to mean something, right? I’m not giving him up with out a fight. Right?’

For a briefly liberating and instantly forgotten moment, Maggie wondered what two fantastic young women like Louise and herself were doing fussing over a man like Christian who didn’t know a good thing when he’d got it, and had to go on “walks” to “think” when it should have been patently obvious to him what he needed? And then she remembered that she loved him and that she didn’t have a choice in the matter. Neither, by the sound of it, did Louise.

‘Um, right,’ Maggie said, her brain on serious overload.

‘Oh Carmen,’ Louise’s sigh was heartbreaking. ‘Are you around tonight, this afternoon? Christian’s gone out – more thinking, I gather – but he said he’d take me out later to talk. I’d love to see you, you know. You can help me form a strategy. Which part of London do you live in? Perhaps I can come to you? Carmen?’

Maggie realised she’d not been listening.

‘Oh. Er, no, I live miles away from you. How about I meet you in Soho for a coffee?’

She quickly rearranged her day. She’d have to put back her planning work until tomorrow, and call Pete and tell him she’d meet him at the café she’d arranged to meet Louise at instead of at the station. She was careful to give herself at least half an hour’s clear space between Louise departing and Pete arriving – she’d need time to adjust her persona – it was hard being a double-double agent, if that’s what you called it.

‘Oh, I’d love that, thank you! Thank you!’

Maggie glossed over how grateful Louise seemed and arranged to meet her at a café she knew and hung up the call. She had a feeling she would never need to fly to Australia, as pretty soon she would have dug herself a hole big enough to get there by foot. That would cheer Pete up, at least.

What was she up to? she asked herself silently.

‘What you up to, then?’

Maggie jumped out of her skin, knocking her cup on to the floor. She looked on in dismay as the dregs of her coffee were soaked up by her list of suppliers. Sheila stood over her as she retrieved the soggy bits of paper, her arms crossed beneath her breasts and her mouth set in a thin, lipsticked line. Maggie began to clear her work away, avoiding Sheila’s eye.

‘I’m just trying to get started on sorting this place out, She! But if it’s not one thing it’s … another.’ She looked meaningfully at her phone and then hopefully at Sheila. She had not fooled her.