A Minor Indiscretion (22 page)

Cozy. The candlelight danced mischievously in her cool gray eyes, which seemed to have gone all soft and misty and warm. Fire and ice.

“I think I'd better pop upstairs for a minute just to check on the children.” Ed twitched his body out of his chair again.

Nicola's lips parted. They were moist with wine. “Should I come with you?”

“No. No,” Ed said. “I'll go by myself. Thanks. Thanks all the same.”

“Did I ever tell you that I absolutely adore children?” Nicola said.

“I think you might have mentioned it,” Ed said, backing out of the door and thinking that “cozy” suddenly sounded very scary indeed.

D
id you know that you can measure the passing of your life by how many
Now That's What I Call Music…
albums there've been? Well, you can. I'll give you a hint. My first ten were bought on shiny black vinyl before CDs were even a twinkle in a record company executive's eye. I think we're up to
Now That's What I Call Music…52.
Except that you can't call any of it music anymore. It's just an incessant thumping noise with no attempt at coherent lyrics. Am I sounding like my mother? I vowed I never would.

Age is such a terribly depressing thing. And so subjective. I don't feel as if I've aged at all. Women of fifty, sixty, ninety, will all tell you the same. Your body may become decrepit, but inside you're convinced you're forever young. And although your brain may suffer from severe memory lapses which we laughingly term “senior pauses,” you put it down to anything other than the fact it's slowly but steadily wearing out—like the rest of you.

I don't feel as if I'm any older than twenty-five, but occasionally I catch glimpses of this woman who looks remarkably like my mother in full-length mirrors in Marks & Spencer, and I know without a shadow of a doubt that I am older.

I want my children to think I'm a very funky and hip mother, but they don't. They think I'm pathetic. And old. Sometimes I get the same feeling with Christian too, and that's very unnerving. Try
as I might, I cannot distinguish between jungle, underground and drum 'n' bass music. Nor do I care to. He says he's never heard of Donny Osmond, but I hope he's just trying to wind me up. I used to do the same to my mother when she mentioned Roy Orbison.

I, on the other hand, clearly remember Brutus jeans, when George Michael wasn't gay even though he sported long blond curly hair and looked it, and when people on council estates didn't call their children Nike. I also remember when being “lush” meant you were an alcoholic and was not a desirable thing. And if you're convinced Limp Bizkit is a chocolate digestive that's been left out on a plate for too long, then you're not as hip as you'd like to think either.

I have time to dwell on these things because I am back at work—if I may use the term loosely. I've been sitting here all morning bashing through invoices that have mounted into a pile as high as during the period of my unauthorized leave. I phoned Kath Brown and groveled before I dared to show my face, and promised her solemnly that I would never, ever go AWOL again. She was very cool and made me beg. A lot. But now I see the size of the backlog I can see why she relented. Despite her unassuming name, she must be raking it in.

However, she hardly greeted me like the Prodigal Son. More like a leper whose thumb had just dropped in her soup. She's keeping up the chilliness theme. There is so much frostiness in the atmosphere that icicles are hanging from the fabric swatches. Really, there are. Frosty the Snowman would feel right at home here. And she keeps looking at me with a snarl about her lips. She's twice made herself a cup of herbal tea and not offered me one. That alone speaks volumes, doesn't it?

My fingers have got keyboard basher's cramp, and I say I'm going into the showroom to check a price when I'm not really. I'm going to look in the mirror to make sure I haven't turned into my mother yet. If Carol Vorderman can reinvent herself from Brain of Britain to vacuous sex kitten, then I'm sure it isn't beyond the realms of possibility for me either. And she's got to be forty if she's a day.

I'm just approaching the £180 rack of soft furnishings and the front door tings itself open exuberantly. Christian pops his head round and my heart sinks. Not because of seeing Christian, but suddenly the opening bars of “There May Be Trouble Ahead”
drift unbidden into my mind. Christian is grinning broadly. He's wearing clothes so baggy that someone else could get inside too—preferably me. He hasn't shaved and is sporting a bristly little smattering of goatee à la Brad Pitt. Kojak, the bald Yorkshire terrier that had been abandoned outside a rescue home and was pictured on page three of the
Daily Mail
this morning, is the only thing I have ever seen look cuter.

“Hi,” he whispers loudly. “Coast clear?”

“No. Get lost,” I say, shushing him out of the shop. “I'm in deep doo-doo already because of you! Go—go on. Shush. I'm going to see you at lunchtime.” I glance nervously back toward the office. “If I can get away.” I feel it may be pushing it.

“I can't wait,” he says. “I have to show you these!” He waves an envelope at me and goes, “Da, da!”

It could be a gas bill for all I know. “What?”

“Da, da!” he says again. Kath Brown will be out any minute. He gives me the envelope. “Tickets!”

“What for?”

Christian is so excited he can barely stand still. “Look.”

I open the envelope, and there are two plane tickets inside and a hefty bill. “Where the hell are the Maldives?”

“In the Indian Ocean,” Christian says triumphantly. “We're going on holiday!”

“I can't go on holiday,” I say. “I've had to grovel to get my job back as it is. Kath Brown will blow a major fuse.”

Christian is unshaken by this revelation. “It's booked.”

“Christian, you should have checked with me.”

Now he folds his arms and tries to look stern. “You would have said you couldn't go.”

“I can't!”

“Of course you can! She won't mind.” He is childlike in his assumption that he will always get his own way. My sister would say immature. “You need to get away.”

With that I would not argue. “But two weeks, Christian?”

“It'll do you good.”

I can't fault that argument either. I look at the final total and gulp. “Where did you get the money to pay for it?”

His face darkens momentarily. “Let me worry about that,” he says.

“Did you borrow it?”

Christian kicks at Kath Brown's designer carpet. “Sort of.” He stuffs his hands in his pockets and, for a moment, he reminds me of Elliott. “I'll pay it back.”

“Oh, Christian.” I sigh and smile.

His face lights up again. “So you'll come.”

“Of course I will. It's booked,” I remind him.

He comes to me and wraps his arms round me. “I love you, Alicia, Ali Kingston,” he murmurs in my ear just as Kath Brown appears at the office door. I knew she would.

Christian lets go of me and I straighten my skirt and fuss with my hair, which never really looks any different whether I've been ravished or not. “I'll see you at lunchtime,” I mutter to Christian, and he disappears out of the door quicker than you can say caught-in-the-act.

I turn back to Kath Brown, who, as designers go, is not looking happy.

I lick my lips and hope I look suitably penitent. “I need to ask you another favor.”

Kath Brown folds her arms and braces her bosom. “Ask away.”

“Christian has booked us a holiday,” I say, realizing that I'm sounding more and more feeble. “Would it be all right if I took another two weeks off?”

“That's fine,” Kath Brown says.

I smile with relief. I wouldn't have blamed her if she'd been a complete cow about it.

“You can have as long as you want, Alicia.” Kath Brown shows me her teeth. They look like little icicles. “You're fired.”

T
he viewing suite in the 1970s concrete block that Wavelength called its offices housed a dozen chairs in varying states of dilapidation, a coffee machine that was usually full of warm black syrup and the biggest television that money could buy. The offices themselves cost a seriously ridiculous amount of money to rent and were sandwiched between a sex shop and an Italian deli. One of which Ed frequented most days. In the summer, unbelievable smells came out of both of them. Wavelength was one of a dozen or more small film companies squashed in between delis and sex shops in the same road and, if you didn't actually see the offices, it gave them a very trendy address on letterheads.

Next to him Orla sat primly in her black leather club chair, legs crossed neatly at the ankles. She was sniffling slightly following her unfortunate interlude in the canal and had a vaguely consumptive cough. She did, however, also have one too many buttons open on her blouse, and beneath it there was a black lacy bra. It could have been because she was feeling feverish, but whichever way, it had been giving Ed dry lips and a certain difficulty in concentrating on the finished promotional video he had previously made for Auto-Choppers, a gadget no overloaded, low-tech kitchen should be without. It had a variety of different interchangeable blades, which could be used for a wide range of
slicing, chopping and general pulverizing of unsuspecting kitchen comestibles into certain oblivion. If he weren't a cynical, hard-bitten video producer, he would have sworn it was a millennium replica of that scourge of the kitchen, the K-Tel Chop-o-matic, an orange plastic device designed to bludgeon vegetables to certain death and your Formica work surface along with it. If you didn't keep a close eye on it, it would have your fingers too. Like the offices, also a product of the 1970s.

The company had poured a suitably large amount of cash into paying for a minor soap star to promote it, and she was doing a grand job for them, perkily dissecting a red pepper with all the skill of a would-be pop star. Orla was making appreciative noises. At least Ed hoped she was—the room was very dark and stuffy, and there was an outside chance she could have been snoring. The closing title music signaled the end of the film, jingling away chirpily until the video clicked and automatically started to rewind itself. Ed got up and turned on the lights. He drew back the curtains, jerked open a reluctant window and let the traffic noise and fumes of London backstreets pour in. Orla stretched, arching her arms above her head and testing the breaking point of her blouse with her breasts. “Great work, Ed,” she said when he sat down again.

Ed shrugged. “The client will be pleased.”

“So should you be,” she said. “It's neat, tidy, professional.”

“Yes,” he said with a nod. “But not pushing the boundaries of creativity.”

“Er…no,” Orla conceded. “I guess not.”

Ed huffed.

“Don't brood on it, Ed,” she advised, touching his arm with a deft, light stroke. “Things are happening. This isn't how it will always be. There's a way out.”

“I know,” Ed replied. Orla and he had chatted more about her schemes and plans when she'd been over to his house for dinner, but, as yet, she hadn't pushed him for a decision. Nor had she opened her checkbook to him and told him how much the deal would be worth. No doubt, crunch time would be coming for both.

“How are things at home?” Orla hadn't moved her hand.

Ed's lips tightened. “Not great,” he said. It wasn't simply the fact that the Auto-Chopper promo was never going to be the advertising world's equivalent of a Guy Ritchie movie that was
making him brood, it was more the fact that Ali had announced she was going on two weeks' holiday. Ed picked his fingernail and looked up at his colleague. “Alicia is going to the Maldives—”

“It's a great place,” Orla gushed.

Ed's face clouded over “—with love's young dream.”

“Great if you like sand,” she said hurriedly. “And sea. And fish…” Her voice trailed off weakly.

Ed puffed meaningfully.

“I thought he was supposed to be a starving artist?”

“So did I. Or perhaps I just hoped he was.”

“That's understandable,” Orla said sympathetically. “Maybe he'll dash off a few more masterpieces.”

“He's not bloody David Hockney. He does drawings of middle-aged women with nothing better to do than hang around in Covent Garden. Passably good drawings. It's hardly art.”

“Saatchi paid thousands of pounds for a run-down beach hut because Tracey Emin had stuck a note to the door. The same woman wheels a disgusting unmade bed into your Tate Gallery and it's hailed as a triumph. So what's the definition of art?”

“If you can masturbate to it, it's pornography. If you can't, it's art.”

Orla gave him a patronizing smile. “You have a lot of bitterness inside you, Ed.”

“You know what I'd like to do?” he replied with a world-weary sigh. “I'd like to take one of those little plastic Auto-Choppers and grate Lover Boy's dick off for him.”

Orla looked at him, brow furrowed with concern. “You must move on, Ed,” she told him earnestly.

Yes, I must, thought Ed. I must move on to inserting a strange and interesting range of Performing Power Tools into a selection of his bodily orifices.

“This could hold you back in life. Living with anger stifles the creative process,” she lectured.

“Yes,” Ed said wearily. As if he hadn't got enough to worry about.

“She's showing no sign of wanting to return?”

“No.” But then, as Neil had pointed out, he hadn't exactly asked her to. He had, however, made several visits to lurk outside Christian's house. And he wasn't sure whom he wanted to
catch a glimpse of more—Ali or Christian. Thankfully, he had seen neither.

Ed had noted the address and telephone number down when he had found the card in Ali's handbag. It was a stupid thing to do and he wasn't proud of it, and he'd tortured himself with it ever since. He'd phoned Christian's mobile a dozen times, maybe more. And he'd always remembered to dial 141 beforehand so his call couldn't be traced. Sometimes he'd listened to Christian's irritatingly chirpy and hip message: “Hey, man! Whassup? Leave a message!” and wanted to punch him on the nose even more. Sometimes Christian had answered the phone himself, and he sounded so young, so sure and so lacking in responsibilities that it made Ed's tired, burdened, middle-aged heart want to bleed.

“You know what you should do?” Orla broke into his thoughts.

“No.”

“Give her a taste of her own medicine.”

“Great idea.” Ed brightened. “I just don't know any obliging twenty-three-year-olds.”

“How about an obliging thirty-something?”

If it was a honey trap Orla had set, he had a feeling he'd just walked straight into it.

“Where would we go?”

“Budleigh Salterton,” she joked.

“What about the kids?”

“Let Ali look after them for the weekend.” It seemed a reasonable suggestion, but then that would mean Christian Trendy Bastard having them for the weekend too.

“If we're going to be partners, it would help to get to know each other better. Away from the work environment.”

Partners? This hadn't cropped up before. Ed had assumed that Orla would be the boss and that he'd be the hired help. This put a whole new slant on things.

“Yes,” he said hesitantly.

Orla leaned on the back of her chair, her hand cupping her face. One black eyebrow arched imperceptibly. “After all, what's good for the goose is surely good enough for the gander….”

And in the absence of a better suggestion, Ed decided it probably was.