It Would Be Wrong to Steal My Sister's Boyfriend (26 page)

“I don’t dance,” I said, elbowing him away. “Besides, I’m working.”

The truth was, though, there was very little for me to do. I checked that the cocktail people had everything they needed, made sure the caterers were on track to produce sausages, fried onions and crusty rolls at nine thirty, instructed the DJ that he must wrap up by eleven, without fail, no matter what anyone said, because this was the countryside and we
wouldn’t be forgiven if the neighbouring sheep failed to get their beauty sleep. Then I checked my face and brushed my hair yet again. Thanks to some magic undercoat stuff I’d found in Rose’s makeup drawer, my foundation was still in place and my eyeliner unsmudged. I looked poised and glossy, and even, in my pink dress, a bit glamorous. So I went back into the marquee and found Oliver, who had returned to his table and was drinking champagne, surrounded by his mates. I sort of hovered on the periphery, feeling like the fat girl at a school dance. But as soon as he saw me he stood up.

“Right,” he said, “I’m leaving you lot to it and taking Ellie outside to look at the moon.” And he grabbed a bottle of Black & White sparkling wine and two glasses in one hand and me in the other, and the next thing I knew we were outside the marquee in the warm and silent night.

“So are you still working?” Oliver asked, “Or have you stopped, and can you play?”

“I’m still working,” I said. “Officially I’m on duty until eleven – that’s more than two hours still to go. And when I’ve finished I expect I’ll be too tired for anything except sleep.”

“Pity,” Oliver said, picking up a strand of my hair and twisting it around his fingers. “This is far too lovely a night to work. But I’m your guest, and a very important and demanding one, so I think you’ll have to entertain me for a bit.”

I laughed. “What kind of entertainment would you like? I can’t do magic tricks or stand-up comedy or the dance of the seven veils, I’m afraid. I can recite the whole of Oscar Wilde’s
Ballad of Reading Gaol
, but I think that might get a bit dull after ten stanzas or so.”

“I can do magic tricks,” Oliver said. He took a pound coin out of his pocket. “Here – when I count to three, grab the coin out of my hand.”

He was as eager as a little boy, and I realised he was a bit drunk, so I played along.

“Okay, go on,” I said.

He waved the coin around a bit, going, “One… two… three…” and of course when he got to three and I made a grab for the coin it had vanished.

“Impressive,” I said.

“I’m not done yet,” Oliver said. “Hold out your hand.” I did, and the coin dropped from nowhere into my palm.

“How did you do that?” I asked, laughing.

“I’m a banker,” Oliver said. “Moving money from place to place is what I do best.”

“I know it’s vulgar to ask,” I said, “but are you incredibly rich?”

“Incredibly,” Oliver said. “But not as rich as I’m going to be.”

“Why?” I asked. “Are you plotting some evil scheme involving shattering the economy of third-world countries and sending commodities prices spiralling and making your fortune out of world famine, the way bankers do in books?”

Oliver laughed. “We’re not that cool in real life,” he said. “I’m going to get richer because that’s what I do. I like money. I like manipulating it, and I like how it allows me to manipulate the world.”

“Okay, now you sound like a Bond villain,” I said.

Oliver put on a cod Russian accent and said, “Good evening, Ms Mottram. We’ve been expecting you.”

I was just about to launch into a spiel about how that line doesn’t actually appear in any of the films – a little gem of trivia I learned from Ben, who is a bit of a cinema nerd.
But I didn’t say anything in the end, because that was when Oliver kissed me.

The kiss seemed to go on for a long, long time, and everything about it was perfect: the still, moonlit night, the music drifting out from the marquee, the scent of crushed grass that still lingered around the polo field. Oliver himself was perfect too – his kiss had a breathless urgency that infected me, so I kissed him back just as fiercely, tangling my fingers in his soft black hair as I’d dreamed of doing for so many months, feeling the hard length of his entire body pressed up against mine, smelling the trace of some sort of aftershave or cologne or something on his skin – it smelled a bit of lime and a bit of leather and totally of Oliver, and left me reeling with desire.

Wanting to savour every moment, I opened my eyes, and saw that Oliver’s eyes were open too, and we laughed and moved apart, suddenly awkward. I heard a sort of click in Oliver’s throat as he swallowed, and there was a catch in his voice that I’d never heard before when he said, “Will you come home with me?”

I thought about my bag back at the hotel, and about all the sorting out and clearing up we’d need to do the next day, and the taxi that was booked to pick Daisy and me up at the end of the night – all the boring, practical reasons why I couldn’t possibly say yes. I carefully didn’t think about any of the other reasons, the real ones. And then I said, “Yes.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Oliver immediately became brisk and matter-of-fact. “Right,” he said. “I’ll ring my driver and tell him I’m ready for him. You collect your things and tell your colleague you’ve made other arrangements – although it looked as if she has, too. Don’t worry about getting back here in the morning, Elliot, my chap, will take you.”

I did as I was told. At that moment Oliver could probably have told me to jump off a cliff, or read a Jeffrey Archer novel, and I would have done it, such was the force of my longing for him. Feeling sick and trembly with nerves and desire, I ran to fetch my bag, checked that nothing disastrous was happening in the Black & White marquee and sent Daisy
a text telling her I was going to spend the night at Dad’s. Oliver was waiting for me outside when I emerged, and he took my hand and said, “Come on.”

He opened the car door for me, and once he’d got in the other side he put his arm around my shoulders. The leather seats were slippery and squashy, and smelled of wealth and newness. I can’t remember much of the journey – the car swished along empty lanes, and I got occasional glimpses of fields and trees and huge, ramparted gates – country stuff. We purred smoothly through the night, and I thought inconsequentially of the classic bit of copywriting from the 1950s, saying that the loudest noise in a Rolls Royce is the ticking of its clock. Oliver’s car didn’t have a ticking clock, but it was silent just the same. I didn’t say anything and nor did Oliver. He held my hand, moving his fingers softly over my skin, stroking my palm and my wrist until I was almost writhing with lust.

“Here we are,” he said at last, as the car’s headlights illuminated the stone facade of the house. I remembered Oliver saying that it had been his grandmother’s and he couldn’t bear to sell it, but he hadn’t mentioned that it was almost a mansion.

Oliver got out, and I waited for him to walk round and open my door for me, because I knew that was what he expected me to do. I thought, I must remember every second of tonight. I’ve longed and longed for this and now it’s going to happen. Then I thought, shit, I’ve been standing all day and it’s hot, I really hope my feet don’t smell. What if he’s a foot man? And what if he’s a leg man? I’ll disappoint him for sure. Then he opened the door, and took my hand again as I stepped out of the car.

“Thanks, Elliot,” Oliver said to the driver. “Have a good night.”

I hoped he wouldn’t say something cringy and cheesy like, “Welcome to my humble abode,” but he simply walked up to the front door and unlocked it, and said, “Come in.”

The house was massive. Properly huge, and there were beautiful pictures on the walls, old ones in gold frames with dark varnish covering the paint and giving it that dark, glowy look, and modern ones in brilliant colours. My heels rang on the stone floor, before being muffled by a thick Oriental rug.

Oliver said, “Are you hungry? I’m sure you’ve barely eaten today, you’ve been working so hard. Or I could open some wine?”

I couldn’t have eaten if you’d paid me, my throat was all closed up with tension, but I’d stuck to fizzy water almost all day, and realised I really, really wanted a drink. So I said that would be lovely, and then, feeling desperately shy, I said, “And where’s the loo?”

Oliver laughed and said, “Come upstairs, I’ll show you where everything is.”

I could believe that the house had been Oliver’s grandmother’s – it clearly hadn’t had anything new added to it for ages. The furniture, wallpaper and curtains were old and all their colours had faded to delicate, dusty shades of rose, jade and gold. On the landing we passed a chaise-longue with a massive tear in the seat, its stuffing oozing out. There were paintings everywhere – hanging on the walls, of course, but also propped up against them, some stacked three or four deep. And there was that smell old houses have, of dusty books and potpourri that dried out years ago, and a hint of damp. It was beautiful but it felt a bit sad, and frankly looked like it needed a good clean, especially the bathroom Oliver showed me to, which had suspicious stains in the bowl of the loo that might have been limescale or might not, peeling paint on the walls and only one scratchy, threadbare towel. I cleaned myself up as best I could, brushed my hair and put on more lip gloss, then went to find Oliver, leaving the plumbing clanking thunderously behind me.

He was in his bedroom, the one room in the house that appeared to have had anything done to it during the past hundred years or so. It was an island of bright newness in
the shabby, neglected house. The floorboards had been polished, the wallpaper stripped away and the walls painted white. The bed was white too, covered in a think duvet like a cloud, and there was a huge painting hanging above it of a naked couple. It was quite modernist, all in shades of blue, and the proportions of the man and the woman were distorted, with her eyes located somewhere under her armpit and his feet for some reason enlarged to massive proportions, but I could still tell that they were enjoying sexual intercourse in the position which I believe is known as the reverse cowgirl. In front of the bed was a white sheepskin rug, and Oliver was sitting on it, drinking champagne, his legs stretched out in front of him. I joined him.

“What do you think of my Cunningham?” he asked.

“What?” I asked, wondering if this was some obscure reference to seventeenth-century erotic literature. “Your cunning what?”

“Jamie Cunningham.” Oliver gestured to the painting above the bed. “Rose found that for me. Cunningham’s not well known but he’s going to be the next Marcus Brand. That painting was only finished two years ago, when he was experimenting with cubism, but it’s already quadrupled in value. Although mostly I just like the subject matter.” He handed me a glass of champagne.

I don’t know if it was the mention of Rose, the stark, almost obscene eroticism of the painting, or Oliver himself, but the desire I’d felt for him was dwindling and I was uncomfortable and even a bit scared.

“What’s wrong with his foot?” I asked.

Oliver laughed. “He must go through a hell of a lot of socks,” he said. We were silent for a little while. I could hear the champagne fizzing in my glass and the sounds of a country night that are so soft they’re almost silence: the hoot of an owl, the swish of a car
passing on a distant road somewhere. “So, Elodie, here we are.”

“Here we are,” I said. I turned to look at him again, waiting for the familiar surge of desire his perfect profile and silky hair could ignite in me.

He pulled me towards him and kissed me, his lips pressing mine against my teeth with an intensity that was almost savage. His hands were moving over my body, eager and demanding, one squeezing my breast, pinching my nipple through my dress and bra so I gasped with pain and pleasure, the other snaking up my thigh. I heard the rasp of the zip of my dress being pulled down, and felt the sudden coolness of the air on my back, then Oliver’s warm, dry hand moving over my skin. He pushed me gently back on to the rug and my head sank into the soft fleece. I felt a forest of goosebumps sprouting on my arms and legs. Oliver knelt between my legs, exploring my body, smiling down at me. I closed my eyes, and wished I could close my mind too, to the little voice that was getting louder all the time, demanding to know what the very fuck I thought I was doing.

“Look at you. You’re lovely,” he said.

I heard the rattle of buttons as he threw his shirt on to the wooden floor, and the metallic sound of his trouser zip, and my eyes snapped open again. Oliver was beautiful, as beautiful as I’d imagined him, his skin pale and smooth and flawless, stretched over a body so lean it was almost gaunt. He was staring at me so intently, his gaze felt as hot and demanding as hands. “Gorgeous girl,” he said.

“I’ve wanted you for so long. I want to give you so much pleasure. You’re the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen.” He leaned over to kiss me again.

The voice was clamouring now, almost screaming in my head, “Does he say that to Rose? Surely there can only be one sexiest thing?” And that was it, like pulling the plug out of a sinkful of soapy water, my desire drained away, and I could see the detritus it had
been hiding: that Oliver was cheating on Rose; that I was betraying my own sister; how horribly I’d used poor Peter and most of all, how disgusted Ben would be if he knew what I was doing.

“Oliver,” I gasped, “Stop.”

His face above me was flushed and bewildered. “What?” he said.

“Please, stop,” I said. “I’m really sorry. But I can’t do this.”

“What’s wrong?” he said, “Are you on your period? I don’t mind, we can still…”

In spite of myself, I burst out laughing. “No. I’m not. I just don’t want to carry on. It’s not right.”

“Jesus.” He rolled over and found his jacket, where he’d thrown it on the floor, took a pack of fags out of the pocket, lit one and offered it to me. I shook my head.

“Jesus,” he said again. “You might have said so earlier. This is going to bloody hurt.” He gestured towards his still impressive erection.

“Sorry,” I said, humbly.

“Do you mind staying here?” he asked. “Elliot’s gone off for the night and I’m in no state to drive. I could ring for a cab for you but I doubt we’d get one to come out here at this time of night.”