When Good Friends Go Bad (10 page)

In the king-size cherry sleigh bed, under the thick goose-down duvet with its brilliant vermilion and periwinkle cover patterned in bold designs from Giordani's first-ever bedroom range, Georgina lay waiting for her errant husband. Her forehead and cheeks were damp with cold cream and her swelling body veiled in a lemon brushed-cotton nightgown.

There was an open book in her hand but her eyes weren't taking in a word. All she could visualise was Jennifer's face when Aiden walked through the door and Aiden staring back at her, his expression hungry as a starving Siberian wolf. Why had she ever agreed to meet her old school chums tonight? That life was so far in the past. What had she been thinking? That this little get-together could come and go without Jennifer ever finding out?

Blasted Rowan for arranging this and never turning up.

She returned the book to the nightstand. Where the blazes was Aiden anyway? She didn't dare to imagine, yet she couldn't stop her mind racing. Was he still with Jennifer? Had it been inviting disaster to leave without him?

But what choice had she had, she thought miserably. She couldn't face going back there to break up their tête-à-tête. If Aiden had an ounce of consideration he'd have known what his wife was going through, known that he should have put her first and not left her feeling second-best.

Why, oh why – tears welled in her eyes – had he walked in tonight? Aiden was so perverse, if she'd begged him to come and meet her friends he'd have insisted on staying in the car. What had aroused his curiosity when she'd told him it was just a business meeting? And why, she bit her lip at the injustice, had Jennifer made Georgina feel like she was the baddie? Aiden had ruined that relationship long before Georgina had appeared on the scene. He'd explained how he'd acted like a rat, how unforgivable his behaviour had been. And Georgina had been so hoping that Jen wouldn't despise her, that if by any misfortune she did find out, well, that maybe she'd hate him so much it didn't matter any more or that enough time had passed for her feelings not to be hurt. Yet apparently there was no statute of limitations on boyfriend stealing.

Sleep would be impossible till Aiden got home. Tomorrow she'd search for her tattered old address book and look up Rowan's mother. As long as Rowan wasn't lying in hospital with a couple of broken legs at the very least, Georgina was going to get her number off Mrs Howard and give her a piece of her mind. But even as she thought it she knew her anger was misplaced.

What an awful, awful, night. Once Aiden showed up, the whole evening had fallen apart faster than a piñata at a Mexican birthday party. Jennifer's face had turned white and stricken and she'd refused to speak to her for the rest of the evening.

Nutmeg had acted outrageously, practically jumping Irwin Beidlebaum under Bella Stringent's long regal nose, when it was clear to everyone else that the grand diva and the legendary impresario had more going on than a casual dinner date.

Poor fat Bella. Georgina could identify with the large and not terrifically attractive actress. Overpowering and voluble though she was, however pumped up on artistic acclaim and her own monumental ego, no woman liked to lose a man to a younger woman. No wonder Bella had insisted on driving Georgina home, pretending to be oblivious to her escort's indiscretion. It was a matter of pride, and her insistence had helped restore a few shreds of Georgina's, even if she was paying the price for her cowardly retreat now.

One thing at least was crystal clear. Whatever she'd had in common with Meg Lennox no longer existed. The girl was impossible. She was argumentative, catty, rude and always looking for opportunities to twist the knife. It was hard to imagine how they could ever have been friends.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a loud clunk, thud and a curse from downstairs. Georgina's scalp tingled as she switched off the fringed lamp, pretending to be asleep as her husband stumbled in. Four fifteen a.m. and Aiden had only just returned.

Her heart pounded as he climbed into bed, smelling of whisky, aftershave and his blasted pot. She flinched as his cold feet touched hers and turned her back, eyes wide open in the darkness, body curled around her growing lump.

What could have kept him out so late? And what on earth could he have found to do until this ungodly hour? Beneath the more obvious odours, she thought she caught the subtler smell of perfume.

And – for tonight's jackpot question – who had he done it with?

It wasn't quite morning when Jen fled the now oppressive Marlow Arms. She crunched across the gravel, duffel bag over her shoulder, towards the trusty Mickey Finn.

Like a hell-bound suicide racer she drove through the sleeping countryside, pushing the poor beleaguered 1200 cc engine into a performance rarely seen on even the German autobahns. She made only one five-minute stop as she reached the edge of London. Amazingly no flashing blue lights appeared in the rear-view mirror, but an inadvertent glimpse of her face made her recoil. Talk about
Night of the Living Dead,
she looked like a blotchy-eyed zombie.

Stumbling through the door of Ollie's rented Bounds Green studio using the key he'd given her for emergencies, she tried not to notice with disappointment the stained carpets and damp-marked ceiling of his rundown student digs. Stepping over mounds of textbooks and half-completed diagrams, she headed for the tiny, mildewed bathroom.

She stared in the mirror and dabbed hopelessly with a sodden tissue at the trails of mascara decorating her cheeks. Splashing water repeatedly on her face, she tried to cool down her telltale red-rimmed eyes. Nothing worked. Giving up, she slipped quietly back into the main room. Slivers of light edged through the ill-fitting curtains. It was, quite frankly, a dump, almost as bad as the dismal hole Jen had rented until Helen stepped in to save her with the offer of a room in her 'kicked-the-cheating-husband-out' bachelorette pad.

Well, at least she knew Helen would stick by her through the hard decisions that lay ahead. Of course Helen would blame Ollie, hating him more than ever, because in her overprotective way she took every slight misunderstanding between him and Jen as a toxic insult meriting the death penalty at least. Helen always meant well, but the thought of her escalating reactions made Jen feel like an underage teen fearful of confronting her mother now that the very worst had happened. What a mess. What a night.

She shivered, easing herself into bed next to Ollie, carefully trying to extricate a corner of the blankets he'd huddled into so as not to wake him. Not carefully enough.

He stirred and yawned. 'What time is it?'

'Late. Or early. Depends on whether you're a morning person or a night owl.' It was feeble but it was the best she could do when her heart was dragging behind her in lead-weighted boots.

'Thought you were spending the weekend with your mates?' He sat up, sexily sleepy-eyed, his hair ruffled and messy as a dozy little boy's. How was she going to break it to him? 'What's with the panda eyes?' His smile was concerned. 'You look like a goth and it's not a look that suits you. Heavy night I take it?' He dropped a kiss on her neck, his voice gentle, as he pulled her down beside him and twined his naked body around hers. The words she needed to say caught in her throat. She blinked her eyes, furiously, willing them not to brim over.

'Hey, are you all right? What happened?'

It was too much. The sympathy totally unravelled her. Jen felt all the tightly coiled emotion rip free from her iron resolve, and tears soaked the pillow in which she'd buried her face.

'I'm sorry.' She mumbled. 'I'm so sorry.'

'Look at me.' He sounded anxious, turning her over to face him. 'What's wrong?'

What's wrong?
Jen shook her head and sniffed.
I'm pregnant, damn you. I stopped at an all-night chemist. I peed on the stick in the car park because I couldn't take another single second of wondering and hoping I was wrong and still the blue line appeared and now I'm up shit creek without a paddle.
But nothing came. She couldn't voice the words. She thought of Starkey, no longer Starkey, her Starkey, but Georgina's Aiden. She thought of the giggling she'd heard from Meg's room and how, heartbroken and anguished in her solitude, all she'd longed for was to be in Ollie's comforting arms. And then had come that knock on the door . . . She swallowed a lump back down in her throat, feeling absolutely wretched. Just when she'd thought the night couldn't possibly get worse.

Pushing all thoughts aside, she sat up, inhaling deeply. 'Did you mean what you said, you know, at Primrose Hill?' She pushed her knuckles into her corner of her eyes, trying to stem the flow, and looked at him.

'About marrying you?' Startled, he sat upright again, the sheet dropping from his muscular young chest. 'Sure I meant it. You know I did. Tomorrow if you want.'

With one hand palm out, like a traffic cop, she held him off, needing to speak without the solace he offered and that her body yearned to lean into.

'And you love me? You really, really love me? You're certain?'

'What is this?' he said with a grin. 'A
Cosmo
quiz?' He gathered her into his arms and kissed the tip of her nose. 'Yes, Jen. I really, really,
really
love you. Now and for ever. Till death us do part.'

She felt the brittle tension inside her relax, for the first time in the nightmare hours since Starkey's surprise appearance.

'All right then, yes,' she said. 'The answer's yes, but only if you still want me after I tell you something . . .'

OCTOBER 2008

'So how was Brownies last night?' Jen held her nine-year-old daughter's hand as they walked the half-mile downhill through the park to Chloe's primary school. 'What did you do?'

'We learned how to do a reef knot. And we played Sheep Sheep Come Home. The leopards chase and have to catch you.' She tucked her little lime-green scarf into her woollen coat.

'Quite fun, eh?'

'Nah, it was boring,' she yawned. 'I wanna quit.'

'Oh? Oh dear.'

There was a few seconds' silence.

'I dreamt about aliens last night.' Chloe again.

'What type of aliens?'

She did a quick couple of skips to keep up with her marching mother. 'Purple slimy ones and they were attacking us from all around and we had to get away from their testicles coming through the window.'

'I think you mean tentacles.' Jen suppressed a smile as a rather grotesque vision materialised in her head. 'At least I hope you mean tentacles.'

'And then we ran into the cellar and hid behind a big wooden trunk.'

'Mmm. We don't have a cellar – nor a wooden trunk.'

'I know that, durr,' Chloe scoffed. 'Can we get one, though, Mummy, when we move house?'

'If
we move house,' Jen muttered, thinking back to yesterday evening. The ominous ringing at six o'clock just as she was helping Chloe with her homework. For a moment she feared it was the phone call she'd been dreading ever since Helen passed on her number to Meg, but it was only marginally better – the estate agent finally returning her call.

'Look, Mrs Stoneman.' Mr Hagard's voice oozed practised sincerity. 'We took down their particulars, we made the appointments. We can't physically stick collars round prospective buyers' necks and drag them in.'

'No, but you could at least vet them,' Jen had bristled. 'Our property's been on your books for ages now and I'm sick of people not showing up. I spent the whole day waiting in and half the morning cleaning up.'

Actually not true. As Jen had grown older, she'd also grown neater. Obsessively so. A reaction perhaps to that terrible phase after Chloe was born, when bundles of nappies, bouncing harnesses, drying Babygros and all manner of toys swamped every inch of the Bounds Green studio and cluttered the dinky Islington flat they bought as soon as Ollie graduated and was earning decent wages.

How snowed-under she'd felt. Hopeless against the rising tide of chaos, especially as Chloe cried for the entire first three months. Jen was so lethargic, tearful and exhausted it took a monumental effort to change a nappy or shuffle out of pyjamas before Ollie arrived home from uni. Long crying bouts, irritability, sleepless nights, all classic signs of post-natal depression, and Jen might have been smart enough to self-diagnose, except that her newborn daughter seemed to share the same symptoms.

Chloe came out of the womb protesting and appeared instantly aware of what Jen had feared all through her pregnancy. Nature had made a horrible mistake. She wasn't cut out to be a mother. Even as a child her baby dolls had ended up dismembered or press-ganged as crew for her fantasy pirate ship. Fortunately, Ollie was smitten the first time he laid eyes on Chloe's tiny face and fat little fists. At least one of the pair had innate parenting skills.

But these days 36 Woburn Close was immaculate. Unannounced visitors (Helen/meter readers) could pop in any time to find mirrors and windows polished to a sheen, spiders' webs disintegrated before they could anchor their first threads. Someone could take a good long sniff at the toilet bowls and encounter only a whiff of Ocean Sea Breeze. People could safely eat from her sparkling kitchen floor.

Her mind went back to the argument with the estate agents over the buyers who'd gone AWOL. 'We were supposed to have three appointments,' she'd continued briskly, 'but the only couple who came hadn't put their own place up for sale yet.'

'I'll give Mr and Mrs Burgess a call now, Mrs Stoneman.'

'No.' Jen had mentally counted to ten. 'If they'd any real interest they'd have turned up, wouldn't they?'

She knew she shouldn't be so frustrated with it all. It was nobody's fault that they'd put their own place on the market just as banks were about to collapse around them and shares and property began nosediving. When you compared a few dud potential buyers with redundancies, repossessions and global economic collapse, it should be no big deal.

Nonetheless, the strain was starting to get to her. Since they'd signed on the dotted line, agreeing to Hagard & Whipping's 1.75 per cent sole agency commission, she'd had at least six possible buyers failing to show, two couples putting in offers then withdrawing, others raising their hopes and then it all faded to zilch.

One man drooled over the family room. 'Oh and we can have a pool table over there, right in the centre,' he gleefully told his wife, who was busy measuring the windowsills for curtains. Another woman insisted on swapping mobile numbers with Jen, cooing, 'It's
exactly
what we've been looking for,' before scooting off never to be seen again. Jen felt like ringing her up a fortnight later, saying, 'Well?'

And chains, the dreaded endless anonymous chains, where at any moment, someone's last-minute decision could knock down the whole skittle set. She wanted it to end. She wanted Chloe to know where her dad was going to be living and for her to know where she and Chloe were going to be living. She wanted them to exchange on this house, so they could start looking for places of their own.

'It's a buyer's market right now,' Mr Hagard pulled Excuse Number Two Hundred and One out of his big fat excuse bag, 'with the housing collapse and no one wanting to move around Christmas.'

'But it's only October.' On a scale of stress factors, selling your house had to rank right up there with divorce and death, especially when your fate was in the hands of a total nitwit.

'It'll take two months minimum to go through,' he countered gloomily.

They'd lowered the price fifteen thousand, then another fifteen and they were considering another fifteen, but not with these agents, not if they were sending any old punters.

'You're not listening to me, Mummy.' Chloe pulled her attention back to the present.

'What . . . pardon? Sorry, what were you saying?' Caught out again.

'You never listen to me.' Since they'd told her Mummy and Daddy would soon be living apart – but we love you, darling, and it's nobody's fault – Chloe had become twice as diligent in cataloguing all Jen's failings. As if she wasn't already keenly aware of most of them.

'No, no, go on. I did hear the last bit, something about . . . wanting something.' It was a good guess. Wasn't Chloe always wanting something?

'Yes.' Chloe eyed her suspiciously. 'I was saying that I need velvet material.'

'Yes, that was right, velvet. Er, what for again?'

'Tudor costumes,' Chloe sighed. 'For school. Do you have any in your shop?'

'I don't know, probably. I'll look, but I . . .' Jen stopped as a loud honking noise resounded from over their heads. They both looked up to see a gaggle of black-headed, white-throated birds soaring downwards in a V formation, resembling a Second World War invasion force as they turned in perfect synchronisation and landed feet first into the nearby lake.

'Are they swans?' Chloe put her hand to her eyes and squinted.

'No, they're geese. Canadian. They're like Tesco – taking over the world.'

Jen dropped her daughter off in the school playground, and watched her run happily over to her squealing friends, before heading to work along the high street. She walked past the old timber-beamed buildings, reflecting on the town she'd chosen for her family.

Huntsleigh, Berkshire. On the exterior everything was lovely. Convenient location close to both M25 and M4 motorways, detached houses with spotless double-glazed windows, sweeping driveways, magnificent hills looming above extensive parks and forests, cute little surrounding villages, olde worlde pubs, but – behind those spotless double-glazed windows – there was something missing.

The people here weren't like Londoners. They didn't laugh at the same things; they were snobby and well spoken, not funny and street-smart. The mothers she'd met through Chloe only seemed to care about things like status and shoes, while the fathers were similarly preoccupied with golf and gin. They drove too fast in their flashy petrol-guzzling four-by-fours. She could go on and on but it would only make her seem whiny and ungrateful.

She was the one who'd decided on this move. She'd had such idealistic visions about living in the countryside, buying a big farmhouse with a paddock, a pony and perhaps even goats. They'd have fresh milk in the mornings, bright sunshine every day. She and Ollie could have revived their relationship and run through buttercup-filled meadows hand in hand.

Nothing had turned out as she'd planned: not the big farmhouse (after searching for months, they decided that Chloe, being an only child, shouldn't be too isolated); not the pony and goats (they needed the paddock for that); not even the bright sunshine (this was England after all) – and especially not the relationship-revival fantasy.

If anything the move had killed outright their already flagging marriage, lacking friends and social activity to disguise the fact they'd grown apart.

In fact nothing about leaving Islington had turned out how she'd hoped. It was as if she'd forked greedily into a lovely scrunchy roast potato only to find it was a parsnip – and a rotten one to boot.

Ollie liked the buzz of the city, loved it, truth be told. He had mates scattered all over London, some of whom he'd known nearly all his life. Jen was the one who told him he was being selfish, insisted Chloe couldn't possibly go to the local underachieving secondary school, where the Ofsted report was so scathing they were thinking of replacing all the staff. Helen was living in Huntsleigh by then and raved about it. The fresh air would be so much better for Chloe, Helen said, and honestly should Ollie have the final vote, considering he spent more time working abroad than he did at home?

Besides – Jen had hammered in more points every time her husband returned from Tanzania – it wasn't as if they ever went to art galleries or the theatre, well, hardly ever and there were trains, weren't there?

The sad truth, Jen had to admit as she came to a halt outside the charity-shop door and pulled out a shiny pair of brass keys, was that the disastrous move was
her
fault. She'd dug the grave and when Ollie reluctantly gave the nod, she'd rapidly flung all their beds into it, before he could change his mind.