When Good Friends Go Bad (19 page)

'Thank you.'

'Any time.'

Jen blushed, realising she was still clutching his waist, feeling the ridge of his leather belt under her fingers.

'Oh God,' she groaned, dropping her arm hastily and stepping away. 'Please save me from people like that.'

'Bill hit on you?' He squinted down at her, eyes crinkling with amusement.

'It wasn't just my soffits he was after. I can't bear it. Is this what it's going to be like, being single again?'

He nodded gravely. 'Brace yourself. The word's out. Jennifer Bedlow free again. All kinds of Bills and Bens are on the move, heading in this direction.' He mimed a zombie walk.

'Idiot. Come in, why don't you? Only you'll have to put that out. Can't have my house smelling of dope. I have a daughter, you know.' She gave a false titter to counter her boring rectitude, but Aiden stamped the joint underfoot and followed her inside.

'What are you doing in Huntsleigh, anyhow?' she asked.

'You left your mobile.' He pulled it out of his pocket and handed it over. 'I had an appointment nearby. Said I'd drop it off as it's on the way. How's the injury? Finger OK? No fatal infections?'

She waggled it in the air. 'Right as rain. Fancy a cup of tea or do you have to dash?'

After all, it was only polite to be hospitable, especially after his timely intervention with Barnacle Bill, Mr Rising Damp himself. But the truth was she didn't want to see Aiden go right away. He felt like the only bright spot in an otherwise miserable day, even if the pleasure was borrowed and temporary.

'I can stay for a while. My appointment's not till two.'

He wandered past her into the lounge. 'So tidy! And all these gold sockets – so very kitsch.'

'I'm considering melting them down, I need as much cash as I can muster.' She chuckled to drive away the suggestion of concern that rippled across his face, making sure he knew it was a joke. 'Want me to show you around?'

'Sure.'

She'd done the tour with prospective buyers so many times it had become a habit. You answered the front door and immediately started describing the virtues of the underfloor central-heating system, how the sun always blazed through the French windows, the south-facing garden, how the Neighbourhood Watch was very vigilant, the road extremely quiet but not too quiet to be creepy. 'Move in here, Mr and Mrs Jones,' she'd want to say. 'It's so damn perfect, it's like living in Stepford – only I'm sure your husband would never want to remove your brain, Mrs Jones.'

'What's this in here?' Aiden opened the door to the airing cupboard and peered inside. They'd inspected the downstairs – cloakroom, toilet, lounge, family room, kitchen and now they were on the first-floor landing. It was only when she saw him nodding solemnly at the neatly folded sheets and towels that she gave herself a metaphorical slap on the forehead. Why on earth had she been boring the pants off him this last quarter of an hour? What a fruitcake he must think her. Not only that, but she'd just realised that ever since they'd walked upstairs she'd been humming, 'But When You Get Behind Closed Doors'. Oh God, she thought, save me from myself.

'Hey, enough of all this. Besides you're too late, it's under offer,' she added smartly, 'and I'm not partial to gazumpers.'

'Actually it's interesting. Gives me new insight.'

Now there was a provocative statement. Suddenly she wished she'd left him outside, snatched back her mobile, forbidden him entrance. Insight into
what?
she wanted to demand. 'So they didn't call you Snoopy Starkson for nothing,' she improvised.

He grinned down at her. 'No, I had to pay big money for the rights to that particular nickname.'

How much happier he seemed today, away from his gothic mansion where he always seemed suitably moody and introspective. But then Aiden always had showed her a side he shared with few people, funny, loving and romantic instead of the cynical bad boy that others saw.

She wondered if he and Georgina laughed and joked the way he used to with her. And how gorgeous he looked, so mature and masculine in his oatmeal cashmere sweater, charcoal jeans, that luscious dark wavy hair.

It wasn't fair. She almost wanted to get up close, peer up that straight nose for stray hairs or search for blackheads on that manly jaw. But she was afraid she wouldn't find anything to repulse. He was nearly perfect apart from one thing – Georgina. Her So-flawless Starkey had become All-too-married Aiden.

The tour continued. She stood in the doorway of the master bedroom while he strolled past their king-size bed and checked out the shower in the en suite. Surely he had no interest in any of it. He was only doing it . . . why? . . . to wind her up?

She couldn't bring herself to follow him in. There was an invisible barrier that she couldn't cross and the photograph of Ollie in cap and gown on the wall, the day he received his degree, stared accusingly across the room.

Aiden stopped to scrutinise it.

'The young stud, eh? Looks like he can handle himself.'

'He can. He's tough. Not that he gets into fights.'

All of a sudden she wanted Aiden to get out of there, to get out of the house. It felt all wrong him being in a place where she and Ollie had once been so intimate, especially given some of the thoughts she was having about Aiden these days. It was like some sordid liaison, even if the truth were much more innocent and unplanned.

Aiden gazed out the window for a few seconds then sauntered back across the room. Casually he leaned his shoulder on the door frame and hooked his thumbs in his waistband.

'OK kid,' he affected a Humphrey Bogart drawl. 'Time to come clean. I've a confession,' she could see the laughter lines crease round his eyes, 'I told a lie. I didn't have an appointment.'

Jen was freezing as she jogged across the heath after dropping Chloe off the next morning, her hands slowly turning to blocks of ice, blades of frosted grass sticking up like shards of crystal, making a crunching sound underfoot as she ran.

One thing she liked about Huntsleigh was the variety of landscapes, the remoteness of the heath which in the summer was ablaze with purple heather and wild gorse, the magnificent views of the windy ridge and the peacefulness of the bluebell woods.

She wrapped her scarf tighter round her neck and slowed her pace, worrying about Chloe again. Last night when they were snuggling together watching a Disney rental, Chloe in pyjamas, damp and warm from her bath, Jen had felt her throat constrict at the thought of how she might be affected.

She'd known for some months that Mummy and Daddy were divorcing but up to now it had been purely talk, nothing had changed in her life. Selling the house would make it real. Life was difficult enough for her with Ollie gone for six weeks at a time. Chloe was always so excited to see him when he came home. He always arrived with tanned arms full of presents, like Santa Claus at Christmas ready to devote his entire leave to making them both happy.

But like Christmas, it could never live up to Jen's fantasies of how perfect everything would be as soon as he got home. All that missing him and breathless anticipation, only to be smacked back to earth by reality.

After the initial gluttony came hard readjustment. Having a man about, interfering, questioning decisions she usually made on her own, creating huge messes with Chloe in some silly game that involved throwing Cheerios around the kitchen, disrupting carefully laid plans with agendas of his own. And then just as she relaxed into the relationship again, started appreciating having him there to share the load, enjoying his energetic vibrant presence, it was time for him to leave and for her and Chloe to begin anew the painful adjustment to his absence.

Eventually she started to resent him being home
and
resent him for going away, silly because he was doing it for the family, building up a nest egg to make up for the years they'd sacrificed while he was studying.

They tried to keep in touch. The business of oil exploration often took him into remote areas, far from civilisation, but there were satellite phones, Skype and email these days. Ollie checked in as often as he could, she and Chloe emailed him, scanned Chloe's paintings to send to Tanzania. But his world was so dissimilar to theirs. It involved work they knew little about, people they'd never met, triumphs and disasters they were at a loss to understand.

And it started to seem too much trouble to fill him in on all he'd missed. It was one thing to excitedly recount an ongoing drama, but too tedious to laboriously type the trivial details of Chloe's homework, or who'd come into the shop that day, in an email that only seemed further evidence of how monotonous and identical her days had become. Or to resurrect some dull little anecdote on his return when the whole episode was cold and buried.

Well, in less than a month it'd be the real Christmas, she thought as she puffed along the footpath, noticing her breath cloud the freezing air. Their last Christmas in the Huntsleigh house, the last time they'd go as a family to the garden centre, bring a tree home on the roof of Ollie's beloved old VW Camper, the last time he'd lift up Chloe so she could put the star on top. The last time they'd exchange smiles as Chloe ripped the paper off the presents they'd bought her.

For so long she'd loathed December, dreaded the memories it brought up, but seeing it through Chloe's joyful eyes had made it tolerable, helped to soften the terrible associations of that awful time.

And then in January a whole new set of problems would emerge. How would they manage custody with Ollie's schedule? How would Chloe adjust? Next year she'd be working towards her SATs, the year following she'd be the same age as Jen had been when she met Meg and the others. Soon there'd be boyfriends, exams, possibly even university and then she'd be gone for good. And what would Jen be left with? Bill, the surveyor, seemed to have revealed to her a whole new void, the life of a divorcee, and she could see it yawning before her feet, dark and bottomless.

No wonder she'd been up at four, hadn't been able to sleep. Aiden kept coming into her dreams, the way he had for all those years until she fully fell in love with Ollie – for good, she'd thought. Even this running couldn't clear her mind. The endorphins were taking far too long to kick in.

So many nights Jen had agonised over Aiden, wondering what she'd done, said or hadn't said, to drive him away, how she could have acted to make it different. If she'd been funnier or less flippant. Was he looking for the silent melancholy type, someone to match his own unspoken agonies of the soul? Or someone more sophisticated, sporting dark lipstick, a cigarette holder? Either way she knew she hadn't been enough. She hadn't measured up. She'd been ready to unravel herself like a pair of old knitted socks, pick up the needles and reinvent herself as a scarf or a bobble hat if that was what he wanted. But she never got the chance to ask.

Now as her legs pumped like pistons in a methodical rhythm, her mind was free to wander territory she'd just as soon not be treading, those barbed-wire fences she'd spent years erecting showing signs of sagging under the recent strain.

She hadn't gone all the way with Starkey until her dad decided to move to West Croydon. Funny how all his attempts to protect her innocence had backfired so radically. When they started going out, after that fateful party, (21st September 1985 at Clover and Herb's, it was etched in her soul and in her diary), Jen had been fifteen and underage. And even when she turned sixteen in January, though she loved Starkey with a passion, the thought of her dad's disappointment had stopped her from crossing that final frontier. She hadn't been a very mature sixteen, hadn't felt quite ready. Some days she thought Chloe at nine had more savvy than Jen did back then.

She'd bolted to Starkey's place in tears the day her dad announced she'd be taking her A levels at a sixth-form college in Croydon. He'd found a factory that was hiring and they'd be out of Ashport as soon as he could rent a house. Turned out he'd been wondering how to break the news for some time, and the fire at the stables not only hurried things along but also justified his decision.

Starkey and a couple of friends were living in a squat, a vacant three-bedroom house with a run-down abandoned feel and a garden full of weeds. They had a squatters' notice stuck to the window, their own lock on the door and the gas and electric switched to their name. But it could barely be called home. There were no curtains, naked light bulbs hung from the ceiling, and the sole furnishings in Starkey's room consisted of a grubby mattress, giant bean bag, portable boombox, 19-inch TV and VCR and a huge poster of Che Guevara.

Starkey answered her frantic knocking at the door. From his room upstairs, she could hear Springsteen huskily groaning that he was on fire.

'Hey, Titch. What gives?' He'd stared at her with astonishment and concern as she stood in front of him, too tearful to speak. And then he'd led her upstairs, kissed her damp cheeks and red-rimmed eyes, his lips burning wherever they touched flesh. Somehow he seemed to know without her saying a word that the rules had changed. Feverishly they'd undressed each other before tumbling together on his single bed, all caution abandoned as they went all the way for the very first time. Even today she couldn't hear Springsteen sing that song without getting goosebumps.

She'd wept buckets as she lay in his arms after the rapture of their lovemaking had worn off and reality returned. She told him she wasn't going to move, told him she'd get a job and stay in Ashport to be with him. He'd insisted that was a bad idea.

'You don't want to end up like me,' he said, 'qualified for nothing. We've got all our lives to be together.'

After that she was openly rebellious of curfews or restraints. She hated to hurt her dad but she was in the grip of a passion too powerful to withstand, even when she'd been dragged, kicking and screaming, to the grimy brick terraced house he'd rented in Croydon. Her father insisted she got a summer job and contributed to the household. (They'd registered her for college even though her O level results had been disappointing, given the disruptive last year.)

She used her new income to take a train to Ashport every weekend and didn't come back till late Sunday night. She spent whole days with Starkey, lazing in bed till two or three p.m., going out for junk food and cigarettes and coming back to bed again. She didn't look nearly old enough to be able to drink in a pub and none of her friends were around, but she never tired of sitting on his bed that doubled as their sofa, listening to Starkey play the guitar or slow dancing with him around the zebra-striped bean bag.

By the time she started college her father had unbent enough to suggest that the young man might visit her for a change. Starkey roared up one October Sunday in his Triumph Stag but the visit was not a success. Not with her dad popping his head into her bedroom every five minutes to ask if they'd like a cup of tea, the sound of the opening door making them break apart (once with her bra undone and shoved up under her sweater). Starkey had wanted to drive to the park, but it was pouring with rain and Jen didn't want to get caught in his car with fogged-up windows and some bored policeman peering in to see what they were up to.

But she had a big surprise planned for his second visit.

Her next-door neighbour was holidaying in Majorca, leaving Jen a key to water her plants and feed her cat. An empty house with proper beds, even a multi-jetted jacuzzi – and Starkey coming over for the whole weekend – it was like getting all her birthdays at once. But it hadn't happened that way. Oh no, it hadn't happened that way at all.

She pulled up panting, feeling slightly sick, rested one of her legs on a wooden railing and began to stretch, thinking back to yesterday.

The minute Aiden told Jen he hadn't got an appointment, she became all jumpy and unusually coquettish.

'Then why did you say you had?' She led the way back to the living room, careful not to sashay her hips in Anamaria fashion.

'So I could stop by with your phone. Georgie was working at home today, getting herself in a right old frenzy and it's best to clear out when she gets like that.' He pulled a face as he sat down on the sofa, Jen placing herself in an armchair, a good two feet away. 'Besides, we haven't had a chance to talk, you and I, not really.' His eyes were like melted chocolate, the dark bitter kind, almond-shaped and delicious. Already Jen could feel her pulse race, as if she were on the brink of doing something incredibly dangerous. He was leaning his elbow on the sofa's arm, his hand curling over the edge. All she'd have to do was stretch out her own hand to touch his fingers, or extend her crossed leg to caress his ankle with her foot.

But his next sentence slowed her right down again. 'Listen, Titch, I owe you one for being so nice to Georgie. She's going through a tough time and she really needs a friend right now.' He pinched his lower lip, seemed to hesitate then plunged on. 'If you didn't know her so well I wouldn't tell you this, but she's had some real emotional problems.'

Haven't we all,
Jen thought. But still the fact that Aiden had chosen to confide in her, of all people, surprised her.

'She has?' she said, baffled as how to react. Should she ask what kind? Or was that too nosy?

Aiden gave an odd laugh, perhaps misreading her confused expression. 'Not what you imagine,' he said, immediately causing Jen to wonder what he imagined she imagined. 'But she's overworked, overstressed and some of her strategies for coping can get a little self-destructive. Under that big front she puts up, she's scarily fragile.'

Jen felt a rush of sympathy for Georgina, mingled with shame at herself. How silly to be concerned, even for a flicker, that Aiden had a less than honourable reason for dropping by. He was a nice guy worried about his wife.

'She was always more vulnerable than she let on,' she acknowledged, wondering what he meant by his reference to Georgina's self-destructive ways of coping. She couldn't ask him, though. It felt too surreal to be having this conversation about her former best friend with her former lover.

'No kidding. Sometimes I think she's driving herself to a nervous breakdown. But she's bloody impossible to argue with. She gets so hysterical.' He broke off, his handsome face clouded. 'Sorry. I won't bore you with my problems.'

'I don't mind,' she said automatically. It was silly. One part of her agreed, thought it was pure nerve for him to discuss his marital woes with her. The wickedest part wanted to laugh in his face, cackle
serves you right, you shit, you'd have been better off with me.
But the part that won felt genuinely sorry that he looked so wretched, that he and Georgie were clearly unhappy.

'It's just, well, a lot of our friends are connected to Georgie through business. And I still feel . . .' He sighed, rubbed his weary face. 'I saw a photo of your daughter upstairs. She looks like you. Very sweet. You know, I envy you.'

'Me?' Jen was staggered. 'Why? I'm a complete failure. Divorced. No job. No life. No money worth speaking of and I'm about to be homeless. I'm not even that good a mother. I forget to bring velvet home.'

Aiden's expression told her she'd baffled him with the velvet comment. But still he said, 'I don't believe that. You were always such a good sport. I'll bet – it's Chloe, right? – I'll bet Chloe has a blast with you. And money never mattered that much to us, did it?' He crossed his ankles and leaned back, shadows under his eyes.

'Yes, well, things do slightly alter when you're approaching forty. We're not kids any more.'

'That's one of my big regrets,' Aiden said slowly. He fiddled with his fingers a bit, stretching them back, examining his nails, avoiding her questioning stare. 'One of many. That we don't have children. Georgina says that Giordani's her baby, but time goes on and that joke starts to wear a little thin. Especially when she's thirty-eight already and we're no closer to starting that family.'