These Days of Ours (26 page)

An impatient huff from Becca made Kate bang down the mug. ‘This isn’t the playground, Becca. No more games. I resent being involved with your schemes and I want out. I need clarity.
Not wide eyed hopes.’

‘And me?’ asked Becca, in a fearful voice. ‘Do you need me?’

‘No,’ said Kate. ‘I don’t.’

‘Happy Christmas.’ Kate looked the newcomer up and down. She shouted over her shoulder. ‘Angus! You didn’t tell me you were letting
anybody
in
this year!’

‘Wouldn’t be a party without this lovely lady.’ Angus leaned over Kate and planted a smacker on Becca’s lips.

In she bounded, heavier than ever, like a healthy animal. Leading with her magnificent breasts, her hair extensions curling to the fake fur over her shoulders, Becca embraced Kate, suffocating
her with mingled perfume and conditioner and gel and God knows what else. This was Becca’s fourth automatic invitation to Christmas lunch and she was every bit as star struck as she’d
been at her first visit.

Kate watched her exclaim at the martini she was handed, and yelp her approval of each detail in the room, never relinquishing her host’s arm.

The ostracism hadn’t panned out.

Logic and kindness are a formidable team. Kate, who lacked the stamina necessary for feuds, saw Becca in focus at last. All her flaws and dangerous weaknesses, alongside the neediness, the
wrong-headedness, the insecurity.

God knows she’d tried, but Kate could not hate Becca.

There were rules attached to the amnesty.
Otherwise
, thought Kate
, I’d be a sap.
Honesty at all times, no resentments and no amateurish evil, thank you very much.

The crux of it was Becca’s remorse. It was real. After a week – a very dull week – Kate had called her and they’d negotiated their fresh start. After a long period of
(rather exhausting) Best Behaviour, both women were back to their old selves.

This was Kate’s favourite part of the day.

The remains of lunch on the table. Wine bottles emptied. Chocolate mint wrappers scattered everywhere. The staff on their way home with humungous tips in their pockets. Just the family.

Well, just the family and their pet celebs.

Kilian was asleep on a sofa, looking like a child beneath the blanket Angus laid over him. Over lunch, he’d displayed a bewilderment Kate had seen before in Angus’s circle of
luminaries.

For some, fame was uncomfortable, like a badly cut coat. Struggling to handle this side effect of their career, they retreated emotionally from others, unable to trust. In lieu of friendship
they turned to what they could stick up their nose, in their veins or down their throats.

No such existential nonsense for Rosie, who’d taken to her outlandish life like a natural. Unfettered by self-doubt, confident that her every hackneyed opinion was fascinating, she flirted
with both genders, snapped endless selfies and regaled them all through lunch with the wild flattery of her Instagram followers.

Becca fanned herself with a napkin from Kate’s
Holly and Ivy
line. ‘I couldn’t eat another morsel. My appetite has shrunk since I’ve been on this strict
diet.’

‘But Mummy,’ said Flo, ‘you had thirds.’ At nine, Flo’s one concession to her mother’s love of frippery was a sparkly bow clipped in her hair. Apart from that
she was a mini goth, her dark hair and eyes matching, quite naturally, her dark leggings and tunic. Studious, funny, she was prone to leaning on her godmother like an awkward dog, as she was
now.

‘Hugh!’ snapped Aunty Marjorie, and Uncle Hugh sat upright, shocked out of his sneaky nap.

‘I wassenasleep,’ he said, looking around him, sticky eyed.

‘That man would sleep through World War Three,’ said Aunty Marjorie, as if her husband’s ability to doze was a moral failing. She covertly handed him the last chocolate truffle
and he covertly patted her knee in thanks. Kate saw the undercover affection and wondered what had happened during her mother and her aunt’s upbringing to render them so allergic to open
displays of love.

Beneath the table the real dog, Jaffa, elderly and moth-eaten, stretched out like a well-trodden bath mat. He slept on Flo’s bed, despite his distinctive bouquet. The child’s take on
it was
Jaffa can’t help it if he stinks.

At Becca’s side, a cheerful man with a wide black face and beaded dreadlocks that clinked and chimed as he talked, said, ‘I like a woman with meat on her bones!’ Three years of
being with Becca hadn’t taught Leon what to say and what not to say in her presence.

‘So I’m fat?’ Becca rounded on him. ‘You’re saying I’m fat?’

Beaming, rubbing his hands, Leon giggled, ‘I’m in for it now!’ in imitation of his own mother’s Ghanaian accent. He liked nothing better than being scolded in front of
company.

‘Becca, my love,’ said Angus, his jacket missing, his shirt as tossed as an unmade bed. ‘Go easy on Leon.’

Tartly, Becca said, ‘I don’t mind. It’s good for a woman to know her husband thinks she’s obese.’

Having gritted his teeth and hung on in there, Leon had been promoted from internet date to husband.

‘She’s off!’ chuckled Leon. Having snaffled Becca he existed in a personal weather system of blue skies and sunshine. Her harsh words were balm, her incessant criticism
muzak.

‘Of course you’re not fat, Becca, pet.’ Mum prowled the room, opening up Christmas cards, hoping to find more autographs for the collection she browbeat her book group
with.

‘You’re a
bit
fat, Mummy.’ Flo’s honesty earned herself a quelling
Flo-rence!
from Charlie, who made an
Oh my God
face at Kate above his
daughter’s head.

‘It’s my metabolism.’ Becca’s metabolism was often named and shamed: she refused to believe her extra poundage was anything to do with her constant eating. As she grew
larger, so did her appeal. Becca was ripe, round, juicy: an eloquent retort to the fat-phobics who would round up all of womankind and herd them to the gym. Much of their income from Leon’s
career as a current affairs camera operator went on glossing, veneering and waxing Becca, as if she was a municipal building that required constant upkeep. ‘If I even
look
at a cream
cake I put on weight.’

‘Then don’t look at them.’ Flo couldn’t grasp the problem.

‘Ooh.’ Mum murmured happily to herself as she slipped an arty card into her bag. ‘Michael Fassbender.’

The length of the table sat between Kate and Angus, but she still felt his paw prints on her body from their lazy morning in his disordered four poster up on the top floor.

Fancying Angus had stolen up on Kate. Just as falling in love was a journey, so was working through lust to find true lovemaking. Kate had always gone for sleeker models, but Angus excited
her.

Always on the edge of his seat, primed to dash off, he never dashed too far from Kate. She was, he told her, a long drink of cool refreshing water after his long route march across his very own
Sahara. ‘My thirst for you,’ he would say, kissing the top of her head, ‘can never be slaked.’

His recognition of her had been instant; Kate took longer, but tumbling into bed with him had been inevitable after a few dates in low-lit rooms, with claret on tap and the air of debauchery
that Angus disseminated even when in a greengrocer’s. Nothing like Warren’s stage-managed squalor, sex with Angus made a wench of her.

Lying together, his big hand on her hip, his hair on end like a dandelion, Angus would talk freely. Not the evasive gushing of his public persona, the way Angus spoke to Kate in bed was a
compliment he bestowed on nobody else.

Mum waved a glittery card. ‘Who’s this Esther woman, Angus?’ She was coquettish and it was not nice to look upon.

Kate couldn’t be sure if her mother caught the discreet, distressed shake of her head. Mum was capable of ignoring such a warning. Of
enjoying
ignoring such a warning.

‘All these kisses!’ Mum pulled in her chin to underline the innuendo. ‘She’s certainly keen on you!’ She peered through her glasses to read. ‘Happy Christmas
Big A kiss kiss kiss kiss.’

Not built for speed, Angus was at her side in a moment. Laughing, as ever, he spirited the card into his pocket as Kate felt Becca’s quizzical look boring into the side of her face.
Mum’s thoughtlessness had set the ley lines of the table buzzing. She nodded;
Yes, that’s her
; Becca’s face softened in sympathy.

‘Wish Lucy was here,’ said Flo.

Another glance from Becca to Kate, this time checking that Kate had clocked her noble refusal to comment.

Leon, it would seem, couldn’t resist cliff edges. ‘Lovely girl, that Lucy,’ he sighed.

‘I wish she was here too, Flo,’ said Charlie.

‘To absent friends!’ Angus held up his glass, winking at Kate as the others all found a vessel to raise. The toast wasn’t just for Charlie, it was for Kate’s dad, and for
his own spectres.

It had taken a long while to open up to Angus but he’d sniffed out Kate’s truths like a truffle hound. Kate felt older, larger, as if she added up to more than she did before. She
felt like a woman. ‘To Angus!’ It was her turn to wink. He was the best, most un-looked for present she’d ever received.

‘Party games!’ shouted Angus.

Flo had begged. ‘Charades! Please!’

As Mum toiled her way through a complicated mime of
When Harry Met Sally
, Kate crept out to join Charlie in the courtyard, home to a tiled fresco and some bins, and therefore as
schizophrenic as the rest of Soho, blending high culture and sleaze.

‘Had to get out,’ said Charlie. ‘To breathe.’

‘I understand.’
Who better to understand?
thought Kate. When you’re nursing a bruised heart, Christmas Day is long.

‘Thanks for having me, Kate. It’s not my year to have Flo, so I’d have been on my own.’

‘You’re not a charity case, idiot. You have a mandatory invitation to my life, you know that. Have you written anything today?’ Kate knew all about Charlie’s
diligence.

‘Nothing else to do.’

This despondency began when Lucy exited, stage right, three months earlier. Flo’s inability to get her head around why one of her favourite people disappeared tore at the scab each time it
formed.

Only some of Charlie’s beans had been spilled; Kate wasn’t sure why he and Lucy had broken up. She knew about a series of rows and stormings out. A tearful reconciliation. A final
goodbye. Your average heartbreak.

Lucy had stonewalled his endless phone messages.
Charlie’s modus operandi has evidently changed since he split up with me:
Kate did her best to keep that bitter thought at bay but
sometimes it sneaked in by the back door.

She and Angus invited him to the club for long gossipy dinners: always room for one more at Angus’s table and he knew what Charlie meant to her.

Kate wondered if Angus knew more than that. The buffoonery was a front; Angus could sum folk up in a flash. When the right moment presented itself, Kate would fill him in on her backstory with
Charlie. It would resign KateandCharlie to antiquity where they rightfully belonged.

A one man woman, Kate had found somebody else – somebody available, who loved her back – to be that one man.

‘Did Lucy send you a Christmas card?’

‘Nope. Too busy with her new bloke.’

‘You don’t know that.’

‘She should be here. I feel all wrong.’ Charlie grasped at his arm as if it was a phantom limb.

Lucy’s defection had put a firework in Becca’s Spanx. ‘Now’s your chance! Charlie’s vulnerable,’ she’d coached. ‘Pounce.’

‘Charlie is not a wounded gnu and I am not a lion.’ Kate didn’t see herself as a pouncer.

‘He’s lonely. He needs you. That silly girl was just a passing fancy. He was blinded by her thigh gap.’

‘You never took the time to get to know Lucy. They were in love. He still is.’

‘Bollocks.’ Becca had been intransigent. ‘You’re the love of Charlie’s life. Go get him.’

Again, the chess board. If Kate and Charlie were to reunite, it would exonerate Becca, put right the wrong she’d done them both. Playing devil’s advocate, Kate had posited,
‘So, I pounce. Charlie isn’t appalled by my lack of sensitivity. No. Charlie takes me in his arms and it’s happy ever after. What about Angus?’ When Becca had made no
answer, Kate had carried on. ‘No more parties at the club. No more Christmas lunches.’

That had silenced Becca on the subject. A future where she couldn’t casually name drop Ewan McGregor wasn’t a future she relished.

Like a well-groomed Satan, Becca had tempted the poor sinner, Kate, with a vision of an alternative reality, where Kate and Charlie lived in harmony, together at last. When Charlie’s
masterpiece was published to great acclaim, he’d tell interviewers he couldn’t have done it without Kate.

There were other alternative realities, however. Ones where, as in the current reality, Charlie was dropped by his agent and suffered a crisis of confidence. Alternative Charlie would lash out
at alternative Kate, and she would snap back.

And somewhere out there, laughing and singing and lonely as hell, would be Angus.

Mature Kate wasn’t convinced she could cohabit with the mature Charlie. He complained. A
lot
. He’d turned into a fussy eater. They argued about politics with genuine
vehemence.

Whatever happened with Charlie, Kate believed she would have found her way to Angus.

‘Becca’s right,’ said Charlie, in the here and now. ‘Lucy’s too young for me.’

‘Becca’s never right. Love just happens, Charlie.’

‘Was it love?’

‘It looked like it from where I stood.’

‘What now?’ Charlie looked hungrily at Kate, as if she might have the answer to it all.

Kate, who couldn’t even remember the password to her own laptop, was glad to be Charlie’s confessor and confidante, but lately she’d felt stretched. There were only so many
times she could say
It’s going to be all right.
He needed honesty from her.
I’ll be there for you
: she could promise that. Dad’s favourite Shakespearean nugget came
to mind.
Thank you, Dad
, she thought. ‘To thine own self be true, Charlie,’ she said.