When Good Friends Go Bad (13 page)

'Far out, Georgie. Thought you said a good-size country residence? This is like a goddam stately home!' Meg viewed the expanse of sweeping lawn from the patio doors. 'Where's the lake? No, wait, don't tell me. Behind the gazebo, turn right at the summer house?'

The words were light but the tone subdued as she played with the curtain cord. Only someone who knew her could tell she was still shaken by Georgina's initially frosty reception.

'Fine view from the west wing, eh Carruthers?' Jen joined in. 'Are you taking in lodgers? Because once my pile of old bricks finally sells, Chloe and I would be happy with a room over the stables, honest.'

'Don't be silly,' Georgina laughed, showing an array of perfectly straight, dazzling white teeth. 'It's not nearly that grand. There's no lake or summer house. And the previous owner had the stables converted to garages. It's merely a house, that's all, and rather oversized for the two of us. Although it
is
a Grade II listed building.'

'That's a load off. We'd hate to think you were slumming it, eh, Meg?' Jen prompted. At least complimenting Georgina lavishly on her opulent surroundings provided some distraction from the awkward atmosphere that had marched in with them, somewhat like the stray mutt that had once decided to join Jen and the others carol singing. The black mongrel had run into people's houses just as the quartet struggled through the first bars of 'Good King Wenceslas', causing such havoc and giggling fits that instead of filling their decorated pails with scads of loot, most householders had ejected the tuneless four (plus dog) before they could get out a single note.

Barely half an hour ago she'd almost wondered if Meg would suffer the same fate.

She and Meg had pulled up in their cars at exactly the same time, Jen in her BMW, Meg in a dark blue Punto. They swapped curt embarrassed hellos without the hugs or enthusiasm of a decade earlier and side by side, like adversarial lawyers heading to a mitigation meeting, climbed the flight of stone steps between miniature poplars in gigantic carved marble urns.

'Some place, eh?' Meg was the first to break the excruciating silence, hands shoved into her pockets, shivering a little. She looked a shadow of her former self, her face thin with little lines around her eyes, a downturned droop to that sassy mouth. She was drowning in an oversized old parka and even her red hair seemed to lack its usual verve and vitality. It wasn't hard to believe that she could be seriously ill after all.

'I've never seen anything like it,' Jen said truthfully. 'Lucky Georgina.'

The Jacobean red-brick exterior with rows of windows reflected the light of a late autumn day, the bright russet of the Japanese acacia contrasting with golden-leaved beech trees, laurel hedges, blue pine and magnificent horse chestnuts.

'Should we knock or ring the bell?' Meg indicated a heavy brass knocker on the stout wooden door.

'Ring, I think.' Stepping forward, Jen pressed the button.

Immediately the chimes sounded, Georgina whipped the door open so fast she might have been lurking behind it. She fixed Meg with a basilisk stare, arm out as if barring a vacuum-cleaner salesman from entering, scattering dirt all over her carpet and sucking it up for a cheesy demonstration.

'Before you take one more step, Nutmeg Lennox,' she glowered, 'I think you have incredible gall showing up like this. You've hurt a lot of people with your outrageous behaviour.'

Of course she'd been pregnant last time they saw her, but once again Georgina won the award for most changed. She'd lost so much weight that her face looked almost too gaunt, and those perfect shiny white teeth must have sent at least one dentist's child through university. Her stylish apricot pussy-bow blouse and shimmering brown wide-leg trousers hung loosely on her with barely a suggestion of her former curves, so that, Jen thought wickedly, with that mass of upswept hair adding volume to her head, she was in danger of looking like the stop sign on a lollipop man's pole.

Hearing Georgina's attack, she pretended to stare at the entry to conceal her emotions. Meg's outrageous behaviour? What about Georgina's deception?

Lost for words, Meg's pale sharp face had seemed even whiter. She started to stammer something but Georgina railed on.

'Were you or were you not completely out of order? Stealing Irwin Beidlebaum from under poor Bella's nose, just as they were tweaking the final details on Bella's contract. Not to mention being blotto, incredibly lewd
and
offensive to Jennifer and me.'

Meg looked astounded. 'That was ten years ago! Old Bella's had two sell-out Broadway shows and like twenty lovers since then.'

'True enough,' Georgina continued to bar her entrance, 'but Bella has become a very dear friend. I design all her frocks, we email each other weekly and she most certainly hasn't forgiven you. I mentioned I was seeing you today and she said to be sure I give you a piece of her mind.'

Rather than devastated, Jen thought Meg actually looked relieved. Had she expected worse than this?

So Meg's flirting with the impresario hadn't ended that night. Now she vaguely recalled spotting a photo somewhere of Irwin Beidlebaum at a royal film premiere, and Meg had been with him. At the time Jen was throwing up daily and still adjusting to the notion of bringing new life into the world, so she hadn't given it much thought.

'OK,' Meg said sheepishly, 'you can tell Bella you've said her piece. I admit it – my bad. I was a selfish out-of-control bitch. If it's any consolation, I still feel like a louse about that night. I got so totally hammered.' She twirled a strand of red hair around her finger as her green eyes pleaded like a little girl's, looking so diminished and helpless that Jen suddenly felt sorry for her.

'That's hardly an excuse,' Georgina said sternly.

'What can I say, guys?' A premature firework exploded in the sky as Meg hugged her arms to her body, shivering against the cold wind blowing at her back and through the still open front door. 'That hoity-toity restaurant. Hundreds of dollars for a bottle of plonk. And me flat broke, drama-school reject, even waiters looking down at me – I felt like the hillbilly cousin.' Her ungloved fingers fumbled at her bag zipper, dug in and extracted a lipstick.

'While you, Georgie,' she went on applying a fresh layer without the benefit of a mirror, 'were on top of the world, Bella Stringent grovelling at your feet, the next Vera Wang to be, and like, so obviously rolling in it. It made me feel like such a big fat failure.' She capped the lipstick with a snap.

'Yes, well,' Jen tried to interrupt, realising she needed a wee. 'It's all ancient history now . . .'

'Rolling in it?' Georgina looked offended. 'I was in hock up to my eyebrows, Bella Stringent's Tony awards dress only just saved us. If you imagine I've had it easy . . .'

'Course I don't, Georgie,' Meg cut in, hands spread wide, with a lower voltage version of her old grin. 'Just had a few hang-ups back then. You're looking at the new "evolved",' she waggled two fingers, imitating quotation marks, 'Nutmeg Sunflower Lennox. Nothing like ten years of hard knocks and having your mortality tested to make you see the light.' She included Jen in her smile. 'Hell, I'm thrilled for your success. I'd be wearing Giordani myself if I had the bucks.'

'Good,' Georgina scowled, 'because I've paid for everything in this house with sweat, tears and bloody hard work. The last thing I need is someone coming in, sneering about silver spoons.'

'For Chrissake, Georgie.' By now Jen was hopping from foot to foot, ready to burst. 'Why don't you take her out the back and shoot her? I'm meeting Ollie and Chloe at a fireworks do later and if I have to wait here another five seconds I promise I'm going to wee on your doorstep.'

'Oh sorry. Come in then,' Georgina said ungraciously, shutting the front door finally and leading the way. 'The powder room's the first door to the right.' A woman appeared from a doorway. 'We'll have tea in the drawing room, if you don't mind, Miss Dandridge.'

Meg caught Jen's eye shooting get-a-load-of-old-Georgie glances behind her back. Despite herself, Jen nearly laughed out loud. Powder room. That's what Georgina's mother had called their toilet and probably her mother before that, and it had never failed to get a laugh from her three friends when Georgina had slipped up and said the words too. All of a sudden the knot that had formed in her stomach when she set out this morning eased a little, as she slipped into the downstairs loo that showed no sign of powder whatsoever.

'For pity's sake, Nutmeg,' Georgina said as her housekeeper put the tray on the coffee table and left. 'Stop fidgeting about and sit down. Tell us why you wanted to see us so urgently. What was this matter of life and death? Jennifer said . . .' she hesitated then forged on, 'something about a lump?'

Jen bit her lip. Pea, plum or grapefruit? She felt horribly guilty remembering her ridiculous conversation with Georgina. If Meg were really seriously ill . . .

'I came over here for tests,' Meg tossed her hair as she flopped like a rag doll on to an enormous overstuffed armchair, 'but do you mind if we talk about something else? It makes me too nervous. Until I get the results, I don't think I'm quite ready to share.'

'O . . . K,' Georgina said slowly, and exchanged a bemused glance with Jen. 'What else do you want to talk about?'

Jen was equally taken aback. All this urgency and insistence on meeting up and now Meg said she wasn't 'quite ready to share'?

'Anything! Did you watch the election results on the news? Yay for Obama! We finally elected a black President.' Meg's fingers played with a mammoth crystal dangling from a gold chain around her neck, the mother rock among several chains of crystal beads. 'By the way Georgie, if it makes your friend Bella feel better, tell her Irwin Beidlebaum was a shit to me too. Threw me over after he had his wicked way and not even a sniff at an audition. Instant karma, I guess.'

Add a turban, Jen thought, and she could be a sexy fortuneteller, reading palms on Ashport pier. Her blouse was lilac, long and floaty with transparent batwing sleeves, her wrists and fingers weighted down with bracelets and rings. Lace-up pointy-toe boots and grey tights peeked out from under her ankle-length purple batik skirt. Not a bit like the old flaunt-every-inch-of-flesh Meg.

Nevertheless, in comparison, Jen felt a boring dowdy frump in her kilt-length pleated skirt, court shoes and sage-coloured thin-knit sweater with matching cardigan and a string of pearls inherited from her mother that she'd hardly ever worn. This morning, inserting the matching pearl studs in her ears, she'd thought the sum total was, if not her usual style, at least charmingly retro – the perfect outfit for a sedate afternoon tea with the classy Georgina Giordani. But not now – unless your idea of retro chic was Velma from Scooby-Doo.

'So, Jennifer.' Georgina turned away from Meg, visibly disapproving, and dropped two cubes of sugar into her bone-china tea cup. 'You're getting divorced, you said? What happened? Did he have an affair?'

Jen flinched. Georgie really wasn't interested in small talk with either of them. But resting her saucer back on the table she realised, for the first time in ages, she actually wanted to confide in someone. Neither of them knew Ollie. They had no alliance to him or reason to judge like most of their friends. And, most significantly, they weren't Helen. They would listen unbiased. That was one of the worst things about divorce, she'd discovered. The way people felt they had to take sides.

'No,' Jen said. '
I
did.' For a second she allowed herself to enjoy their looks of shock, and then relented. 'Only joking. But I have admitted adultery, even though it's a lie. We decided to file for the divorce ourselves, without solicitors or anything, save the hassle.' And really why should the lawyers pocket the money when she and Ollie were intelligent, reasonable people and had agreed everything?

'What hassle?' Meg said bluntly, looking dwarfed by the massive armchair as she pulled her feet up under her. 'My Nevada divorce took two weeks and cost us less than six hundred dollars.' She settled herself more comfortably, looking like Alice in Wonderland as she sipped her no-milk, no-sugar tea and balanced the saucer on her knee.

All the furniture seemed to be designed for giants. The big squashy sofa that Jen and Georgina were on would easily seat another three, the yawning gap between them like that separating two warring lovers clinging to opposite sides of their king-size bed. But then again, anything smaller in this room would seem puny, and from the crackling fire to the well-stocked bookshelves the atmosphere was one of pleasure and comfort first, with elegance and function galloping up in a neck-and-neck finish.

'Yes, well, it's not like that here.' Jen shifted her weight against a peach cushion with white stencilled leaves. 'We had five choices.' She used her fingers to count them off. 'One, we cite two years' desertion – doesn't work because he's still in the house. Two, we cite irreconcilable differences and wait for two years' agreed separation and consent, but we didn't want to wait two years.' Nor two seconds, even. Not once Ollie had brought up the subject. 'Three, worse, wait for five years' separation – clearly impossible. Four, we cite unreasonable behaviour and then it will be forever cast in stone that we've been horrid to each other. And five, we opt for adultery and it's all rather quick after that. So we chose five.'

Not that anyone would know. Or at least they wouldn't have if she hadn't unthinkingly told big-mouth Helen, Huntsleigh's unofficial town crier.

'But why should you be the one who's cheated?' Georgina asked, outraged. 'Why not him?' Helen's reaction exactly.

'We tossed a coin. Besides, I don't want everyone wandering around feeling sorry for me.'

'No, instead they're going to assume you're—' Georgina stopped abruptly and got busy stirring her tea.

'A no-good dirty tramp,' Meg finished for her, with a grin.

'I wasn't going to say that,' Georgina said indignantly. 'But, really, wouldn't unreasonable behaviour have been the better option?'

'I know, I know.' Jen rubbed her eyes. 'Bizarre, isn't it? Somehow I don't mind it going down on the court records that I've been shagging someone senseless behind my husband's back, but God forbid people might think I've been the inciest bit unreasonable.'