No One Could Have Guessed the Weather (4 page)

“She had to buy two new suitcases to bring all the stuff home, I remember that,” he muttered grumpily, but she trotted over and kissed the top of his head.

“We went to the outlet malls. It was incredible. I bought a Max Mara coat and suit I still wear.”

“She's still the same size, Lucy. Never gained a pound. Gorgeous as ever.”

And he patted Paula on her bottom. She giggled flirtatiously, and Lucy remembered that Paula, in her skintight Levi's and red leather blouson jacket, had been an object of much desire among her brothers' classmates.

“How's Louis doing?”

“Much better. He's got over his ups and downs.” (Louis had been a full-fledged heroin addict for ten years, but the month in an open prison after he was caught dealing seemed to have sorted him out.) “And he's just had a lovely little boy with that new girlfriend of his. They've become Quakers.”

“Oh.” Lucy was genuinely interested in this. She often toyed with the idea of becoming a Quaker. “Have you been to a meeting, Paula?”

“Yes, I went last month to look after the baby. Very interesting. I sort of agree with all the pacifist stuff after Iraq and all that. But I couldn't do it myself. You can't have jewelry.”

Her father burst out laughing at this. It took a moment before Lucy realized his laughter was indulgent, a sort of “ooh, you are awful” laugh. Paula and her father were soul mates, it was true. No wonder her mother had turned to the bottle.

“D'you want more tea?” Paula said, and her father grunted “yes.” He pointed at the row of videotapes of George playing soccer on a shelf by the telly and asked Lucy to put one on. She walked over. He had recorded them religiously every Saturday of George's thirteenth year.

“Any game in particular?” she asked.

“No.”

She selected the under-fourteen's Buckinghamshire five-a-side and stuck it in the antiquated VCR. She handed her father the remote, and he reclined his chair a little, raising the footstool so he could watch in the greatest comfort. He switched up the volume so he could hear the running commentary he had done himself in the style of John Motson while he was filming.

When Lucy went into the kitchen, Paula was sobbing.

“It's so sad. It's so sad,” she kept saying, over and over again. “We should have been friends. Once you get older you realize you should just forget everything and be friends, but your mother wouldn't have any of it. Even after twenty-three years she still referred to me as
‘that cow Paula Arnold.'
She always made out that I stole him away. But, Lucy, you know he walked out that door himself.”

He bloody ran,
thought Lucy.

“Your dad begged her for a few of those wretched tapes. He just wanted to see them. But she refused, said she'd burn them if he asked her again.”

Lucy hugged her. She smelled of face powder and Anaïs Anaïs.

“She wasted her life. That's why I say to Lawrence it's good that you had a bit of a career. And it's why I've always helped out at the golf club. You have to have something for yourself, Lucy. Otherwise what happens if they leave you?”

Lucy wanted to say that her father, with his stroke, and his lame left leg and his bottom firmly planted in the Parker Knoll, was not going anywhere. But she knew that to Paula, who loved him, he was still Lawrence Cunningham, age thirty-five, heartbreakingly handsome in his cream polo-neck, the object of much desire among the Mothers at the School, as he climbed out of the racing-green Jaguar and opened the doors to take schoolbags and children out.

Paula pulled herself together. “Now, I've brought something for you; I hope you don't mind.” She shuffled over to her bag and pulled out a sheet of stickers.

“You and George have to decide what you're going to do about the house, but before he gets here, have a little mosey round, and anything you want, stick one of these on it.”

Lucy burst out laughing. The stickers had smiley faces on them.

Paula looked offended. “I know you might think I'm being”—she paused, searching for what would almost certainly be the wrong word—“indelicate—”

Lucy, relieved, immediately said, “Of course not—”

“But that Cordelia was talking about your mother's royal wedding commemorative plate last Christmas, and I'm just saying you might regret it if George packs everything up and ships it to Auckland and you don't even have a photo.”

Lucy took the stickers.

“Thank you, Paula. That is thoughtful of you.”

“We're nice people, Lucy; we think people don't do things like that. But you ought to have seen how my brother's kids behaved when my mum died. It was carnage. They went through the house like a
tsunami.
”

Paula shook her head at the memory. Then she had an idea.

“While you're over, why don't you see a few friends? You can't sit here on your own for a week. Life goes on. You should call someone.”

That's right,
thought Lucy.
Life goes on.

•   •   •

C
AMILLA WAS WAITING,
as arranged, behind the taxi stand outside Victoria Station, but Lucy didn't see her at first because she was hidden behind the enormous steering wheel of what appeared to be a farm vehicle. Camilla caught her expression.

“Don't say anything,” she said. “In the settlement the Bastard was meant to buy me a four-by-four, but he kept arguing on and on, said a Fiat Punto would do for the school run, but my lawyer wouldn't let it go and this arrived. I think he shipped it over from Eastern Europe full of refugees. He's so cheap, that's what Americans say, isn't it? He was always cheap.”

“Yes,” agreed Lucy, safe in the knowledge that the chances of Camilla and the cheap Bastard reuniting were nil. “He never ever bought a drink, did he? The first time Rich and I met him and he should have been trying to impress us, he made us gin-and-tonics from those small plastic bottles he got free on the plane.”

“Want to know something worse than that?” said Camilla,
“He reused
lemon slices.”

Lucy looked at her in disbelief.

“Oh, yes,” she continued. “After anyone left, he would fish the lemon slice out of the bottom of their glass, wipe it with kitchen roll, and leave it sitting in the side of the fridge till the next time.”

“Did you ask him why?”

“He said he didn't want people to be interested in him for his money. I said there's no danger of that, love.”

Lucy and Camilla had once been best friends but had not seen each other since Camilla's wedding four years previously. Since then, Camilla had had a child and got divorced. It seemed to suit her, though. Her long legs, encased in lacy tights under a tight gray pencil skirt—a look Lucy had never liked, but on Camilla it worked—were slender and muscular, and there was no sign of the creeping roll of midriff fat that Lucy felt gathering above her own low-rise jeans.

“You look good,” Lucy said.

“I know,” replied Camilla. “I caught this vile bug that was going round the Montessori. Threw up and out of both ends for a week. Fantastic. I'm back in all my old clothes. It's
totally
recession.” She giggled momentarily. Then her face became serious again.

“You should have said something to me, Lucy. If you thought he wasn't right, you should have said it. It's not like I was desperate to get married.”

If Camilla had been Pinocchio, her nose would have hit the windscreen at this point. Camilla had been thirty-five, tired of drifting from one low-profile job in the art world to another, fed up of renting a studio flat in Portobello, and had tried and failed to land the kind of chap her father craved, so when the cheap Bastard appeared from nowhere, with his offshore companies and his overuse of aftershave, she asked no questions, brought him home to the family pile in Scotland, and the deal was done at the Soho House six months later.

It was the only wedding Lucy had ever been to where the marriage felt doomed from the very beginning. She tried to explain it to Richard at home the next day—he had remembered an urgent trip to his dentist at the last minute—but it was impossible to describe the sense of foreboding in the room. It hummed over the canapés and the seating plan like petrol fumes rising from the Hammersmith flyover. It was not until a thank-you note for the two brass candlesticks arrived that Richard understood.

“Talk about the
unhappy
couple,” he chortled, and though Lucy pooh-poohed it she knew he was right. She peered at the black-and-white photo inside and knew that Camilla and her new husband didn't love each other. Camilla had gone through with it because she had read too many articles in the
Mail
on Sunday
about desperate childless women in their forties, and, although she was genuinely delighted with her son—“At least I got Tristan,” she repeated—the marriage was over before she could provide a spare for the heir.

The Bastard's motives turned out to be something to do with tax and residency, although he had some sort of penchant for marriage, as he was now on his third girlfriend since Camilla and they had just got engaged.

“She's a nice girl, actually, but when I congratulated her I said just don't get older, because then he'll be off.”

To fill the tense silence that fell, Lucy tried to cheer Camilla up by telling her about the dramatic change in her own circumstances and her new life in New York. She illustrated this by the fact that they had only one bathroom in their apartment. Camilla was appalled.

“You mean there's only one toilet? How could Richard do that to you?” she exclaimed, in the same tones she had used to describe her ex having sex with an air stewardess at a hotel in Disneyland when they brought Tristan to see It's a Small World. Lucy started saying that the collapse of the international banking sector wasn't Richard's fault, but she knew that Camilla would take Lucy's defense of any male member of the species personally, so she shut up. Anyway, Camilla and Richard had a difficult relationship. Camilla was suspicious of Richard because, despite his father being a diplomat, he had chained himself to the railings in front of the South African embassy the summer before Mandela was released. (
“Couldn't he just have bought the song?”
she said.) Their tongues had also once tangled rapturously on the floor of the drinks tent during a College Ball, but Richard had subsequently pretended it had never happened.

Camilla now pondered the doomsday scenario facing Lucy.

“Are you going to have to get a job?” she intoned, in a voice like Vincent Price at the beginning of “Thriller.”

“I don't have a proper visa yet,” replied Lucy.

“Thank goodness,” muttered Camilla.

“And I'm not sure what I would do.”

“Oh, Lucy, you could do anything. You had a bit of a career, after all. Not like me. At least when the cheap Bastard tried to make me earn some money the lawyer was able to confirm that I was qualified for nothing. All those years on the front desk at Christie's doesn't really get you anywhere, except a chance to marry some duke who's flogging off a Canaletto.”

Lucy couldn't help laughing. She was beginning to remember why she and Camilla had been such close friends, despite the enormous differences of background, politics, and aspiration between them. They had met their very first day at university, as their rooms were side by side. It transpired they were also tutorial partners, and Lucy watched in awe as Camilla, with her confidence born of entitlement and her resilience born of boarding school, ran rings round the various professors. Posh, slightly potty, and very clever, Camilla was what Lucy had always imagined a true bluestocking to be, and she felt it was a shame that Camilla had not been nineteen in the 1930s, when she could have danced to Cole Porter, hiked her skirt up to slide down banisters, or been a pioneering Girl Guide. There was something lost about her; she had been born at the wrong time, into a class that was dying, to parents who had no way of providing the life they themselves had enjoyed for their children.

“You know what my mother said to me the other day? ‘Camilla, darling, Cambridge wasn't meant to be finishing school. Daddy and I thought you'd be a lawyer.'” She paused. “Coming from her, can you imagine? A woman who did nothing in her life except read Mills and Boon and occasionally change some curtains in the north wing.”

Remembering her only night in the north wing, shuddering in mildewed sheets as she clutched two foul-breathed terriers to her to try and keep herself warm and Camilla's lecherous brother Benedict out, Lucy thought of her dinner of half-thawed shepherd's pie with Lady Fiona, who assured her that all the secrets of a
heppy
marriage could be learned from the animal kingdom, specifically the big cats.

But Lucy had learned a lot from Camilla. She had arrived at Cambridge silent and cowed; Camilla taught her not to be afraid, not to smoke, and that the quickest way to get a buzz on was a cocktail of champagne and cough mixture. In turn, when Camilla went to parties dressed as a spider and drank distilled alcohol from great punch bowls, Lucy kept a wary distance, ready to rescue her when she couldn't put her key in her door, and even stayed at the police station with her the night she was arrested for being drunk and disorderly while riding a bicycle.

“Why did you stop work, anyway?” asked Camilla out of nowhere.

Lucy was a little startled. No one had ever asked her this outright before. No one, that is, except herself. Unfortunately, she and her self had failed to come up with a satisfactory answer.

“I was so sick when I got pregnant with Max that I left straightaway, and I thought I would just take a few months off afterward, but . . . then I felt so tired. That was it, really. And I can't decide if I was tired because of the baby, or tired because I'd worked so hard for so long with so little to show for it. Then Richard started doing really well and he was traveling all the time and suddenly we had this house and this life and another baby, and soon . . . None of the women I met worked—”