Virtue (37 page)

‘Biccie,’ I say, ‘it’s meant to go in your mouth,’ and I move on while she’s still goggling and trying to think of a response.

Ranjiit, tidy little goatee and hard-trimmed hair, hasn’t worked a launch for a while, and is looking harassed. Presses up on the bar to give us kisses and drops back down again. ‘They’re animals,’ he says. ‘It’s a feeding frenzy.’ Waitresses attempt to come out of the kitchen doors with trays of canapés, get four, maybe five steps into the crowd and have to turn back because their trays have been sucked as clean as bleached dinosaur bones on a Montana hillside. He stops for a minute, picks up a cloth and a glass to look like he’s doing something. ‘How are you both? Haven’t seen you since you left the Bean Bag Bar. You’ve been in the papers a lot.’

‘Please don’t start,’ says Harriet.

‘No, it’s cool,’ says Ranjiit. ‘I was really proud. Did you really swear at Leeza Hayman?’

‘Sort of,’ says Harriet. ‘I called her a bibulous old fishwife, if that counts as swearing.’

‘Respect,’ says Ranjiit, and gives her a high five. ‘D’you two want a drink?’

We nod. We need a drink.

‘What do you want? White wine?’

‘Great.’

Ranjiit selects a nice bottle of Aussie Semillion, pops the cork and hands it over with two glasses.

Biccie shoves an elbow under mine, heaves me off the bar. ‘I’ll have one of those as well,’ she says.

Ranjiit shakes his head, smiling nicely like a well-trained little boy. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I’m not allowed to hand out bottles.’

Biccie goggles. ‘But you gave
her
a bottle.’

‘Ah,’ says Ranjiit. ‘She’s special.’

‘Well, I’ll have five glasses of wine, then,’ says Biccie decidedly.

‘Sorry.’ Ranjiit shakes his head again, but nicely. ‘I’m not allowed to do more than three glasses at a time.’

‘Why on earth not?’

‘Well,’ he says slowly, ‘because people often take advantage at things like this and get half a dozen glasses for themselves at a time. Which means that the drink runs out in the first half hour, and then there’s nothing left for the people who come later.’

‘You’re patronising me!’ she says accusingly.

Ranjiit smiles a lovely smile, blinks a couple of times. ‘How clever of you to notice,’ he replies. ‘Three glasses of white, was it?’

We finally track Linds and Mel down to a corner by the window, where they perch on a stack of piled-up tables and share an ashtray made from an empty St Moritz packet. They are deep in conversation with Max Kershaw and Bob Pruitt.

‘… Sort of person you’d have to gob in their food,’ I hear Linds say to Max as we approach.

‘An Amis or a Winslet?’ asks Max.

‘Oh, a DiCaprio at the very least,’ she says. ‘It would definitely have to come from the back of the throat.’

‘Good girl,’ says Max. ‘He can’t cook to save his life, anyway. Did you see the other night? Bloody bacon and tomatoes in the same pan, as though that was some sort of revelation.’

Max and Bob are both food writers. Max works for a glossy freesheet distributed in expensive hotels in the central zone, has a signet ring on his little pinkie and believes vehemently in capital punishment. Bob wears bow ties, and is obscenely, magnificently fat. I’m not talking unfashionably fat, here: Bob is a walking bell jar, a titan of fatness. Bob has to squeeze to get through doors, and that’s when he’s already turned sideways. I once sat in a booth in Livebait backing on to the one Bob was sitting in, and when he laughed, he catapulted me face-first into the person opposite me’s bouillabaisse. Bob writes recipes for a Sunday paper that begin with declarations like ‘There is no chip that compares with one fried in home-made beef dripping.’ I love Bob.

He is also amazingly strong for someone for whom the very effort of standing up produces the sort of panting you usually only see in a Grand National winner. He picks me up in huge arms and squashes me into the folds of his tummy. ‘My dear,’ he declares, ‘it’s always so nice to see the rude girls. Have you insulted anyone yet this evening?’

‘It would be hard not to,’ Harriet splutters after receiving the same affectionate treatment. Bob is a lovely guy, but it’s hard to breathe when your face has been buried in three tons of lard. ‘Anna found someone called Biccie.’

‘Biccie?’ says Max. ‘
Biccie?
What sort of a name is that?’

‘Biccies?’ Bob looks around him wildly, hopefully. ‘Are there? I’m fainting from hunger.’

‘No, no,’ says Max. ‘It’s a
name
. What do you think it’s short for?’

‘Biscuit, obviously,’ says Harriet.

Mel gives me a big cuddle round my well-squashed shoulders. ‘How’s the head?’

‘Better.’ I push my hair back to show her the bruise.

‘I say,’ says Max, ‘been tangling with that chef of yours again?’

‘Oh no, far more dramatic,’ says Harriet, ‘she got kidnapped. Had to be saved by a very cute policeman.’

‘How cute?’ asks Linds.

‘Very cute,’ we chorus together, and I look at her in mild surprise.

‘Kidnapped?’ asks Bob, to whom the idea of someone picking you up and carrying you away seems an entirely alien concept.

‘Don’t worry,’ says Harriet. ‘She got a police escort home.’

‘Hang on,’ says Mel, ‘last I heard you had that nice Australian boy in tow.’

‘Well, yes, but he’s in Barcelona until Sunday. And then he’s off back down under.’

‘Still keeping them lined up like chocolates, then,’ teases Mel.

‘Chocolates?’ Says Bob. ‘Where?’

‘It’s a crime against humanity,’ Max fulminates.

‘What?’ asks Linds.

‘You can’t call a woman
Biccie
. It’s like calling your dog Cressida.’

This goes over everyone’s head. Especially Bob’s. ‘I wish you wouldn’t keep mentioning biccies,’ he says. ‘I might have to slip through the crowd and see if I can’t get a bit closer to the kitchen.’

We all turn to watch Bob slip through the crowd. It’s one of those unmissable phenomena, like the parting of the Red Sea. He lumbers away from us, going, amiably, ‘Excuse me, excuse me,’ and ploughing forward without waiting for a response. People topple like ninepins before a bowling ball. A swathe of clear floor opens up behind him.

‘I’m going to see if I can’t get into his slipstream,’ says Mel, ‘see if Ranjiit can do us another bottle.’ And she slips through the crowd in his wake.

‘Which one’s Biccie, anyway?’ asks Max.

I point across the floor. ‘The brunette with the brown velvet skin.’

‘Well,
that
narrows it down a bit.’ He laughs. And then he does something very odd. He cups his hands about his mouth and shouts a single word:

‘Caroline!’

For a moment, the room falls quiet. It’s as though a mobile phone has gone off in a bar full of bankers. Everyone looks around to see who’s calling them, then, like a herd of startled sheep, they begin to talk again, odd bleats joining up to become cacophony once more.

‘That’s brilliant.’ Lindsey giggles. ‘Can I try?’

‘Be my guest.’ He gestures expansively towards the room.

Linds cups her mouth, yells, ‘Chaaaarlie!’ out over the throng. The hoots and brays die away once more, heads crane like compys in
Jurassic Park
. ‘What a lovely game,’ she says. ‘Lovely.’

‘The trick,’ he explains, ‘is to not do it too often. Every ten minutes or so is about right, or they begin to learn, like Pavlov’s dogs.’

‘A little-known fact about Pavlov’s dogs,’ Harriet butts in, ‘is that, about twenty times after they’d rung the bell and salivated, they realised that there wasn’t going to be any more food and started attacking their trainers.’

Everyone falls silent to contemplate this for a moment. Then the Jurassic crowd parts once more and Bob Pruitt bears down upon us with a tray of canapés held high above his head. ‘No biccies, I’m afraid,’ he announces. ‘But I managed to get these.’

We all fall upon them as though we haven’t eaten in weeks. ‘You saviour,’ cries Harriet, ‘you little star!’

Bob beams round a handful of bruschetta.

Mel pops out from behind him. She has a bottle of red in one hand and a bottle of white in the other. ‘I’m getting quite good at this for a librarian,’ she says. ‘Ranjiit’s a sweetie, isn’t he?’

‘Where do I recognise him from?’ asks Max.

‘He used to work at the Bean Bag Bar with us,’ I tell him. ‘And before that he was the barman at Polka!’

‘Polka! Of course!’ cries Max. ‘He used to make a blinding schnapps martini! With little sausages on the side!’

‘They were Kabanos, I think,’ Bob corrects him.

‘No, no they were definitely sausages,’ says Mel. ‘By the way, I just played a blinder.’

‘Oh, yeah, what was that?’ asks Linds.

‘Some toad with bloody wraparound sunspecs on was leaning over me telling her stories about his bloody skiing holiday. Adam something-or-other. Never been so bored. You know me. I wouldn’t know a schuss from a scheiss. And he’s leaning further and further forward to look down my dress and it’s getting more and more obvious. So I said, “Oooh, look, there are my food-critic friends over there. I must go and talk to them.” And he said, “Ooh, must you go so soon? I was just getting to know you. I’m going to an orgy in Fulham later. Want to come?”’

Harriet opens her mouth and mimes putting her finger down her throat.

‘If it were up to me,’ says Max, ‘I’d horsewhip the lot of ’em. If ever there was a justification for bringing back hanging …’

‘So,’ finishes Mel, ‘I said, “Ooh, but I wouldn’t want to monopolise you. There must be other breasts you want to talk to.”’

Max sighs. ‘Ghastly, these things. Ghastly. Don’t know why I bother coming. Hate every minute of them.’

‘Me, too,’ says Harriet in her most blasé voice, though I know for a fact that she’s spent the entire day getting excited about getting to go for a night out without having to serve anyone. She had three baths. Count ’em. Three.

‘I swear, this is it,’ says Max. ‘Complete waste of time.’

‘Dreadful,’ agrees Harriet. ‘Absolutely pointless.’

‘Sick of bloody canapés,’ he says.

‘I know,’ she says, ducking under Bob’s arm to help herself to a miniature duck pancake with hoisin sauce dripping from the ends. ‘Never want to see another one.’ She pops it in her mouth, chews, closes her eyes slowly in ecstasy.

Max pauses, lights a Dunhill in a small bone cigarette holder. ‘Going to the launch of that new gastropub on the river next week? The Cox’s Head. Down by Putney, good views of the boat race.’

‘Probably,’ says Harriet. ‘Haven’t decided yet.’

‘Good,’ agrees Max. ‘Me, too.’

Grace has won a Brit Award. No, really. We’re watching the highlights in stunned silence when the buzzer goes at half past five on Sunday, and, while I’m still going, ‘Good god. What if she’d turned up and collected it?’ I think: blimey, he’s keen. He’s not due till six thirty. I’ve not even had a chance to have a shave yet. I’m still drinking sugary tea, and Harriet, who has promised to go out, is still elbow-deep in the glue and cat litter from which she is constructing a
faux
-gravel path in a 3-D representation of Highgate Cemetery after, as far as I can see, a nuclear holocaust. Blasted trees of coathanger wire and unthinned oil paint hang over leery gravestones and scattered chicken bones. We’ve been arguing desultorily about whether she is ever going to clear up the popcorn on the stairs, which must be riddled with beetles by now.

We’re both so gobsmacked by the sight of the bald little man in a suit who has been sent by her record label to collect Grace’s Brit that neither of us hurries to answer the door. He only comes up to the shoulder of the fashion-model-in-platforms who announced the We’re Not Complete Philistines, You Know Award, and she is standing behind him as he mutters acknowledgement of the entire orchestra that were hired to back up my mother’s xylophone-playing. It’s lucky that she’s black, really, as otherwise, what with her décolletage and push-up bra and the fact that he is dipping his head towards the microphone in the manner of people unused to public speaking, one would think that she’d suddenly sprouted three tits.

Halfway through his speech, a gigantic photograph of Grace, looking particularly grim, is projected onto the backs-creen, and the assembled crowd of musos drop their don’t-care act to emit a unified gasp of fear. I know how they feel. The last time I saw my mother, I had my hands clamped over my mouth to stop myself from screaming.

The buzzer goes again as an Indie artist in a dress that looks like a pine cone comes forward to announce the Hammiest Overacting in a Promotional Video Award. Still reeling, I wander over and press the speak button on the intercom, go, ‘Hello?’

‘Hi, it’s Mike Gillespie,’ comes an unexpected voice.

Harriet looks up, raises an eyebrow. ‘Oh, hi.’ I press the buzzer. ‘Come up.’

Harriet goes over to the sink and begins to swarfega her hands. ‘Well. What does he want?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Hmm,’ says Harriet. Then she says, ‘You’re not going to sleep with him, are you?’

This gives me pause. ‘Gosh. I hadn’t thought about it,’ I half-lie. ‘D’you think I should?’

She rolls her eyes. ‘I wasn’t giving out orders, Anna. Keep control. Just because someone asks you a question doesn’t mean that the answer is yes.’

‘D’you think that’s why he’s here?’

‘Well, I don’t think he’s planning to walk in here and rip your gear off, no. Anyway, for heaven’s sake, you’ve got Niggle turning up in an hour. What’s wrong with him, all of a sudden?’

‘He’s going back down under after the weekend.’

‘I think,’ says Harriet, ‘he’ll be going down under before then.’

‘Eugh,’ I say. ‘Lurid and unnecessary detail.’

Harriet squirts a couple of pints of cream onto her hands, rubs it up to the elbows, puts her rings back on.

‘So, what? Our PC Gillespie is to be the next victim?’

‘Christ, you make me sound like a black widow spider,’ I say.

‘Well …’ she says doubtfully.

‘What?’ I’m used to Harriet calling me a slag, but this is slightly unusual.

‘He’s a nice guy, that’s all,’ she says. ‘I’m not sure if he’s the quick-fling type.’