These Days of Ours (24 page)

It had surprised Kate the last time they met that Kilian was so low-key, so diffident. Her heart had been fluttering so hard she’d wondered if he’d heard it.
Daft, but I expect
actors to be like the parts they play.

They talked about Kilian’s chickens as Angus poured more sherry. The man had never mentioned a significant other; Kate wondered if he was gay. As an actor specialising in romantic leads,
coming out might be tricky.

Maybe that was the reason for his invitation. There was always a reason. Angus flattered people, begging them to come, saying it wouldn’t be the same without them, but the truth was he had
divined they would be alone on the most convivial day of the year and he wanted to right that wrong.

As Kilian detailed his fowls’ various ailments, Kate sneaked a look at Angus, who was laying out tiddly widdly canapés on paper plates from her new range. Illogical to be staring at
Angus when she had the sole attention of a heart throb. Angus had not been meant to happen. He was just the final internet assignation after the orgy, one she’d tried to cancel, but felt
obliged to honour when her date sounded so disappointed.

The mohawk waitress ushered in Charlie. Not at all awed by this guest, she barked, ‘Charlie’s ’ere,’ and abandoned him.

‘Charles!’ Angus was upon him and Charlie quailed as if being greeted by an exuberant dog. Angus’s bulk diminished Charlie’s stature, even though the hours spent at the
gym (another by-product of Charlie’s mourning for Lost Youth that amused Kate) had turned the lanky boy of yore into a well-built, broad shouldered man of substance. Angus was blunt about his
own body: ‘No other word for this but
fat
!
’
he would say, rubbing his tummy, but his rotundity was so obviously due to a surfeit of good food and great wine that he
delighted in it. This delight was infectious; even if Angus had been skinny he would seem large, thanks to his voice and manner, his expansive gestures, the way he remembered and used
everybody’s name. Early on Kate had noticed that children and dogs adored him; they are
never
wrong.

Charlie’s attempt to stay cool when confronted with Kilian was an early Christmas present for Kate, who accepted his tissue-wrapped package and kissed him on his cold cheek.

‘Contessa!’ shouted Angus.

‘Ah, Mum’s here,’ said Kate, breaking away from her clique to welcome her mother, who’d been wafted to the club in a chauffeur driven car, courtesy of Angus.

This gesture, plus her aristocratic nickname, was one of many reasons Mum was pro-Angus, to the point of lobbying Kate to make an honest man of him. Not close to his own family – Kate had
never been introduced to a single relative in their three years together – he delighted in Kate’s Irish clan. ‘My friends are my family,’ he was wont to say. He collected
people the way Jaffa collected fleas: effortlessly.

With the arrival of Aunty Marjorie and Uncle Hugh, overdressed and chattering like parakeets, Angus said, ‘Nearly all assembled!’

London café society would kill to be here
, thought Kate.
And there’s my aunty accepting a Baileys with an ‘Ooh I shouldn’t really!’
Kate sat beside
her mother on a Chesterfield.

‘I don’t like what you’ve done to your hair, Kate.’

‘I haven’t done anything to my hair, Mum.’

‘Well, you should.’

Kate’s hair, longer these days, was casually drawn up into a ponytail. When she let it down, it was just for her and Angus. She caught one of his staccato bursts of laughter from the bar.
Angus could pin down the moment he fell for Kate: eight minutes into their first date.

‘When I knocked over your wine and it went all over your trousers.’ Angus liked to reminisce. ‘You just dabbed at the stain with your napkin and told me to go on with whatever
bloody anecdote I was boring you with.’

He was not to know that Kate hadn’t cared about her patterned harem pants, that she’d cared about very little. Kate had been going through the motions, not just of the date but of
her life. She washed her hair, prepared her food, did thirty lengths of the local pool every morning like an automaton. Everything had had to form an orderly queue because at the forefront of her
mind was Charlie’s letter.

How often she’d wished she could forget the callous wording of the other note, not knowing that the sincere yearning in the original letter would hurt her even more.

Charlie clinked glasses with her. ‘Bottoms up,’ he laughed.

The doorbell rang again, and delivered a bespectacled woman to the gathering.

‘Is that . . .’ Charlie asked.

‘It is.’ Kate nodded. ‘Rosie Smith.’

‘Where have her . . .’

‘Boobs gone?’ Kate wondered how many more of Charlie’s sentences she would have to finish for him. Rosie had that effect on the opposite sex. ‘She’s taken out her
implants and started wearing glasses because she is now a serious actress.’ Kate tapped him on the nose. ‘Put your tongue back in. Unbridled lust is not a good look on you.’

Disapproval emanated from Mum and Aunty Marjorie, who looked on, lips as tight as a hen’s bottom, as Angus fell upon Rosie, showering her with the compliments she needed and introducing
her to her fellow revellers. They had all seen the topless photo shoots; the bluestocking makeover didn’t fool anybody, especially as the woman persisted with clingy dresses and tottering
heels. Kate noticed how Charlie, the very model of a modern liberal chap who decried women dressing to please men, cleared his throat and passed a hand through his hair. Angus was immune. Women
like Rosie – who Kate secretly thought of as
poor old Rosie
– were the reason he’d turned to internet dating.

His blurred profile pic had given little away. Not that Angus could ever lead with his looks. Emailing Kate out of the blue, he wrote that he’d noticed from her photograph that she had
freckles on her nose: ‘And in my long experience you can rely on nose-freckled folk.’

On meeting him, Kate had recognised him. Back in his decadent advertising days, Charlie had been a member of Astor House; Kate had met him there for drinks and seen Angus roaming the rooms.
Since then, she’d seen him in the gossip columns, always raffish and rowdy looking, with tossed hair and messy clothes.

Towards the end of their obligation date, strolling along the South Bank primly apart (Kate now appreciated how hard that had been for the tactile Angus), Kate had asked why such a famed bon
viveur, surrounded by celebrated sexpots, was on a dating site.

Aware she would never see him again, it was an idle question, a prelude to a farewell as Kate geared up to return to the Kate-shaped niche she’d carved.

Thinking before he spoke, Angus hadn’t responded in kind to the throwaway enquiry. ‘Because,’ he said, pausing by the hulk of the National Theatre, ‘people run through my
fingers like sand. I’m in my world, but not
of
it. Sex is currency. The shallowness dismays me. Women I’ve dated have berated me for not introducing them to movie stars.’
He had, he told her, acquired x-ray vision. ‘I see who’s on the make. I see who’s floundering. It’s easy to lose your footing in Soho. I know who’s desperately hanging
around until the cocaine comes out, and who should be tucked up in bed with a mug of cocoa instead of dancing on the tables. You,’ he’d said, turning to her, ‘interest me.’
He smiled. ‘You really have the most lovely face, Kate Minelli.’

Unaccustomed to compliments – Charlie’s were too antique to carry any weight, Julian had been miserly with them and Warren’s were ones she’d rather forget – it had
taken a while for Kate to realise that Angus meant every word. She came to recognise the difference between the air kissing, the ‘Darling you look
gorgeous
!
’
to the hoi
polloi at Astor House, and the whispered ‘You have such soul’ he dropped in her ear at unexpected moments.

When Angus hailed a taxi for her that first night, he hadn’t lunged. He’d taken her hand and said, ‘I’ll hold you in my heart until I see you again.’ The feeling of
well being, of being thought about, that flooded through careworn Kate was one she hadn’t experienced since the death of her father. A layer of grief had simply peeled off and flown away,
flapping in the air over the South Bank. Without realising it, Kate had settled into a bizarrely premature old age; wincing when she knocked into things and treading carefully as if she might slip.
Angus’s attentions had coaxed her back to her thirties.

‘I’ll get it.’ When the doorbell cut once more through the festive babble, Kate escaped Rosie’s me-me-me small talk (Charlie was helpless in the woman’s tractor
beam) and went to the front door.

‘Happy Christmas!’ said Becca, on the doorstep.

A different doorstep, three years earlier. Kate banged and knocked and rang in the darkness.

A tremulous ‘Who is it?’

Kate answered with a vigorous ‘Me!’

There was no need to name herself. The power of history, blood and love opened the door in a trice, even though enough dark energy coursed through Kate for her to kick it down. Fists balled,
expletives gathering on her lips, she quivered as bolts were drawn.

The door opened, and there was sleep soiled, bedraggled Becca, her greatest friend, her almost-sister, her most barbarous adversary.

All Kate’s ire disappeared. She held out the letter. ‘Why?’ She hadn’t meant to sound so weak; she’d meant to be a fury.

Becca’s face folded in on itself. No fight in her either; she recognised the piece of paper.

‘How could you?’ Kate was high pitched. ‘How could you do this to us?’ She had meant to say ‘to me’.

‘I’ve been waiting for this to happen,’ said Becca.

Inside the house, they sat in the pool of light thrown by the low-hanging shade above the circular kitchen table. Kate eschewed the soft chairs; she wanted hard seats and hard facts. They came
out slowly, in a non-linear fashion.

‘It’s almost a relief,’ said Becca.

Jaffa snored at Kate’s feet. The kettle, the fridge, the cherry-patterned blind were all the same. She was changed, however. She no longer felt at home here.

Before they got to the ‘how’ Becca had a lot to say about the ‘why’.

‘I’ve always been jealous of you.’ Planted when they were both children, Becca’s resentments had been watered until they grew vigorous. And dangerous.

It was all news to Kate.

‘You and your dad got on so well. When I went round your house it was alive and warm, with the fire going, and your books all over the rug.’ Her own parents, said Becca, were
‘joiners’, always out and about, playing golf, sailing their boat, dragging her to grown-up parties where she’d get overtired and vomit down her new dress.

Sensing Becca was working herself up, Kate got in early with her rebuttals. ‘Hang on a minute. We had a fire because our house was unmodernised and freezing cold.’ She remembered her
mother comparing their house to her sister’s ‘palace’. ‘We’d have killed for a boat!’ From Kate’s point of view, Becca’s childhood had been
glamorous.

‘But,’ said Becca, ‘did you ever envy me?’

‘Never. But that’s about my temperament, not whether or not your life was enviable.’

‘I was spoiled,’ said Becca, pulling her dressing gown tighter, ‘but I was ignored.’ She was more familiar with the back pages of her father’s newspapers than with
his face. ‘And, Christ, the pressure from Mum. She’s always expected so much from me. You’re lucky. You could withstand your mum.’

‘Lucky?’ Kate drummed her fingers on the pine. ‘Everybody’s lucky in your version of events. Except, crucially,
you
.’

‘Exactly!’ Becca, never expert at spotting irony, seemed glad of the empathy. ‘You had your dad. He was always
there
, always ready with a cuddle if your mum was on the
warpath.’ Becca had nobody. ‘My mum and dad threw all your exam results in my face. I grew up knowing they thought I was stupid. I couldn’t be successful on my own terms. I had to
nab a husband, and a house, and have babies.’ All liberally sprinkled with sanitising money. ‘Otherwise I’d be a failure.’

‘So far, so self-pitying.’

‘Then I bagged Julian. Mum was pleased at last. He wasn’t like the other boys. I was dazzled.’ Her initial I-can’t-believe-my-luck reaction never had the chance to settle
down into anything approaching love. ‘I guessed early on that he had a soft spot for you.’

‘I don’t believe you.’ Kate sat back. ‘I would’ve noticed.’

‘Why would a man that sophisticated and worldly be interested in me?’

Kate had never heard Becca disparage herself. ‘Because . . . because of a million reasons. All the guys were after you.’ She remembered it well; wallflowers have long memories.
‘You were catnip.’

‘I was candy floss. You were clever and funny and had all these opinions on things I hadn’t even heard of. Looks fade, Kate. Brains don’t.’

Becca wiped at her wet cheeks with a savage hand. Kate didn’t leap up and hold her, coo it all better as she’d always done in the past. Their friendship had finally come of age,
fifteen minutes – or thereabouts, Kate wasn’t certain when she would stand up and leave – before it ended. Becca said, ‘We were given our roles. Pretty One. Clever One. We
swallowed it whole without question.’

Their family were neither psychologists nor evil geniuses. None of the parents could have foreseen what would happen. Carefully, the girls had taken pains never to overlap. The Pretty One could
never be interested in topics other than herself; the Clever One believed herself unattractive.

It struck Kate forcefully that she loathed confronting her appearance in the slab of mirror at the hairdresser’s, or happening upon her reflection in a shop window. She looked down at her
hands, at the unvarnished nails kept short; even though she’d dressed up for the country house party she hadn’t contemplated painting them a showy red. The Clever One, Kate had no
confidence in her own femininity.

The roles assigned to Kate and Becca in childhood had fused to their skin.

Becca said, ‘It wasn’t fair that Julian liked you. You already had the perfect boyfriend.’