June immediately downed the Jack and held the glass back out. ‘Might as well fill that up, save me the trouble of walking to the bar again.’
When I didn’t move right away she rolled her eyes. ‘Ellie, don’t get angry; it’s such a bore. I’m a lousy cook. If you knew what you’re not missing in my noodle surprise you’d thank me.’
‘It’s not the cooking,’ I said, and tumbled into it. ‘It’s the way you leave my house a mess, and smoke in it, and never help out with anything, or even tell me why you’re here or how long you’re staying, and then you promise to do something and take off the minute a man crooks his little finger. Can’t you ever grow up?’
My voice, loud and shrill in the pub, suddenly didn’t sound like my own. It sounded like an echo of my mother’s, through all those floorboards and walls and years.
I stopped.
So it wasn’t enough that I’d discovered through my fiction that my secret fantasy was to be more like June. I had to find out that really, I was much more like my mother.
June smiled. It made me clench my fists.
‘Eleanor, chill out and have a sense of humour, won’t you?’
‘I have a sense of humour,’ I shrilled.
My sister put her hand on mine. Her fingers were covered with silver rings and she had perfect nails. ‘I know you do, honey. That’s why I wanted to come and stay with you.’ She squeezed my hand. ‘And you’re right, I haven’t been helping, and I haven’t talked to you about why I came to visit you. I’ll be better, I promise.’
She said it with her eyes steady on mine, and my anger, though it didn’t disappear, wavered. She looked so sincere.
‘You won’t. You never have.’ I hated how petulant I sounded.
‘I will. Listen, tomorrow we’ll have a proper girly chat and I’ll tell you everything. Okay?’
I nodded and tried to salvage what was left of my sense of humour by smiling at her. She beamed back and held out her empty glass for me to fill again.
I watched her go back to Hugh; she put his pint down in front of him and slipped under his arm to nestle close and look up into his face with her big green eyes.
No difficulty guessing who was going to be Hugh’s latest bedmate, then.
I swallowed a gulp of ginger ale that did nothing to make my stomach feel better and busied myself emptying the glass washer.
My eyes were continually drawn to Hugh’s corner, though. I thought he wasn’t into brunettes. And I would have thought he’d have the good taste not to get off with his best friend’s sister. But apparently Hugh’s sexual appetite knew no boundaries of hair colour or loyalty.
June’s giggle pierced over the ill-balanced music and I saw her cuddle closer to Hugh. His long limbs and broad shoulders made her seem even more tiny and elfin. Something about the way he was sitting with her made him look protective. As if he were trying to be some knight in shining armour as well as the Don Juan of Reading.
I grunted and poured Maud and Martha their gins. When I turned around from the cash register Hugh was at the bar.
‘Hey,’ he greeted me with a smile - wide, sparkle-eyed, guileless, with that one crooked tooth on the bottom left-hand side that only made all the rest of his teeth look straighter.
Well could he smile. For the price of a few pounds he was wining and Jack Danielsing himself into a wild night of sex with June Connor, who no doubt knew a shocking trick or two.
‘Nice of you to come and say hello,’ I said, grabbing two pint glasses from the shelf and beginning to fill them with cider and Stella.
He raised an eyebrow. ‘I waved.’
‘Oh, gosh, I do apologise. I should be honoured.’
‘Tetchy, are you?’
‘Enjoying my sister, are you?’
‘Yes, as a matter of fact.’ He scratched the back of his head and I noticed that his thick dark hair looked particularly as if someone had been running their hands through it. ‘She has some interesting opinions, especially after she’s been drinking.’
I nodded. ‘I’m sure that opinions aren’t the only interesting things she can share when she’s been drinking.’
‘I concur with your judgement, Ms Connor,’ Hugh-as-Sean-Connery replied.
I glared at him. He was trying to jolly me along, make light of the fact that he was going to shag my sister senseless without even asking my permission first.
‘Here,’ I said, pouring more Jack Daniel’s from the optic into a glass, ‘this should help you move things along more quickly. Just do me a favour.’ I put the glass down in front of him, and folded my arms. ‘Try to keep the noise down tonight, will you? I need some sleep.’
Hugh’s expressions could change with the swiftness of a bolt of lighting. His eyes narrowed, his brow contracted, and his smile melted half away. ‘El, I wouldn’t sleep with your sister.’
I laughed, though I wasn’t finding this funny at all. ‘Uh huh. Don’t try to kid me, Hugh, we both know you’ll stick your dick in anybody who smiles at you twice.’
His face transformed again, this time into a wide-eyed, open-mouthed expression of what I’d think was outrage on anybody else, but couldn’t be with Hugh, because what I’d said was one hundred per cent true and he knew it. I turned away from him and went into the kitchen to deal with a nonexistent food order.
When I returned to the bar Hugh was back with June in their corner, and they were canoodling or whatever it was you called it when two people couldn’t keep their hands off each other. I didn’t look too closely.
Instead, I involved myself in a conversation with Paul and Philip where they tried once again to explain to me why footballers deserved to make so much more money than teachers and nurses, and in the midst of our argument I looked up and Hugh and June were gone.
10
Lucy Sharpe licked the end of her pencil and tried her best to concentrate on her shorthand and not to listen to what was going on in the next room.
It was common knowledge in Whitehall that the Chancellor was conducting a liaison with the Minister for Internal Affairs. Lucy just wished they wouldn’t perform their internal affairs in the Minister’s office, in full earshot of Lucy, her new secretary.
‘Harder! Faster!’ The words were incongruous enough in the context of a blandly decorated government office; when cried out in the Minister’s plummy accent they became, frankly, surreal. ‘Oh yes, who’s my rearing polo pony of love?’
Polo pony of love? Lucy screwed up two bits of paper and put them in her ears. She felt sick.
If she could work in another office, it would be easier, but the Minister insisted that Lucy work right there with only a thin wooden door separating her from the politicians’ sexual shenanigans. She must know that Lucy could hear every thrust, every slap, and every metaphor. It was as if the Minister enjoyed knowing Lucy could hear.
With a great effort of concentration, she managed to finish typing up the minutes of the morning’s meeting and was sending the document to the printer when the door opened and the Minister and the Chancellor entered the room, adjusting their clothing.
I paused with my fingers on the keyboard and sighed. The idea had come at about three o’clock in the morning, as I lay in my bed trying to sleep. If reality was missing from my novel, maybe I should, after all, rewrite
The Throbbing Member of Parliament
with the heroine, Lucy Sharpe, being more like myself.
I’d come into my study, filled with June’s things, and had started typing.
However, there was a new problem with that solution: as an erotic heroine, I was awful.
For one thing, an erotic heroine would get turned on by hearing other people having sex - even if she didn’t want to be - otherwise, there was no point in writing about it. Whereas I had spent the entire night feeling sick at the mere possibility that I might hear Hugh and June having sex with each other. I’d tried sleeping on the couch, out of hearing range, but had had no luck, and when I’d gone to bed out of desperation for some sleep I couldn’t stop my ears pricking up at the slightest noise.
Those noises were the wind, or the house settling, or my other neighbour Alice’s noisy water heater. There’d been no peep from Hugh’s house.
But that didn’t mean anything. They could be getting it on hanging from the bathroom ceiling. They could have gagged each other with rubber balls. They could have spent the night having sex in a succession of taxis for the benefit of a succession of voyeuristic taxi drivers.
I should have felt grateful that I couldn’t hear them, but instead I was much, much more of a wreck and a prude than Lucy Sharpe.
Downstairs, the front door opened. My heart leapt and my hands clenched on the keyboard. June was home.
Having her home was even worse than having her out, because I was probably going to have to hear about her exploits. I bent my attention back to my lame novel and my lame heroine, who, I was beginning to realise, would be awful in whatever novel she happened to be in.
‘Lucy,’ said the Minister as she came into the room reknotting her Hermès scarf, ‘do you think you could let the Chancellor have the dossier we prepared this morning? He’s eager to get the full picture.’
Lucy bit back a sarcastic reply and said, ‘Yes, Minister,’ instead. Jobs like this one didn’t come along every day, and if she had to put up with hearing about amorous polo ponies and the unsavoury images they evoked, it was a small price to pay. She lifted the dossier from the desk and held it out towards the Chancellor.
His fingers brushed hers when he took it, and Lucy looked up at him in surprise. Her embarrassment had been such that whenever he came into the office she’d avoided his eye, but now something compelled her to examine his features.
He was a tall man, surprisingly young-looking for someone in such an important office, and his rangy body filled out the broad shoulders of his tailored suit. From this angle, from below, he had high cheekbones and a strong chin, and a straight patrician nose with a slight bend on the end of it, like a hawk’s.
‘Ellie, doll? I’m home.’
The words only just filtered through because what I was writing had suddenly become interesting.
Lucy, beyond all probability, had started to do unexpected things on her own in the way that fictional characters did when they were becoming realistic, and she had decided to be attracted to the Chancellor, up to that point a minor supporting character, who had, with the words appearing under my typing fingers, abruptly gained a description.
A description that echoed precisely the way I’d described Hugh to myself a couple of weeks before, on our way back from the STD clinic.
‘Ellie?’ June’s voice was closer, at the bottom of the stairs.
What did what I’d just written mean? If Lucy was me, and she was suddenly attracted to the Chancellor, and the Chancellor looked like Hugh, did this mean that
I
was attracted to Hugh?
‘Hey, sweetie.’ June stepped into the spare room. She was wearing the same slip dress as last night and her long hair had that just-got-out-of-bed tousle. She dived immediately for the desk beside me and retrieved a packet of tobacco.
I couldn’t be attracted to Hugh. He was my best friend. I’d known him for years and never once been attracted to him. It was one of the enduring mysteries of my life why all these other women constantly fell at his feet.
But that would explain why I’m so upset about him sleeping with June,
I thought.
‘Ellie?’ June waved her hand in front of my face. ‘Are you hypnotised or something?’
I blinked and focused and noticed grey circles under her eyes and a distinctly greenish tint to her skin.
‘Hung over?’ I said.
‘Death warmed up.’ She slumped on to the pull-out couch and began rolling a cigarette. ‘Make me a cup of tea, will you, doll?’
I saved the document, closed my word processing application, and shut down the computer. ‘Make yourself one,’ I said, ‘I’m going out.’