and now I am going to be Lairdess Amanda Phillips-McConnald!’ finished Amanda, all in one breath.
There was a silence.
‘Hey, his name’s Phillips too?’ said Fran.
‘No, no! You see, I’m keeping my name and taking his name. It’s a feminist statement really. Didn’t you see me in Tatler?’
Fran said later my eyes were like saucers. So she asked, ‘Is he rich?’
‘Don’t be silly, darling. What’s in Scotland?’
‘History? Great natural beauty? Mel Gibson?’
‘Sheep and alcoholics, darling. No, he hasn’t a bean … and there’s a “castle” to do up – he couldn’t pay for that looking at bridges all day long.’
Then Amanda went completely off on one about her interior design plans for the castle. I’d been there. (Fraser had asked a bunch of us along, but I’d tried to pretend it was a private outing for me alone.) It was really just an impressive exterior, two habitable rooms, and a Calor Gas heater, but she clearly didn’t know that yet, given the lengths she was prepared to go to to put metal walls in it.
‘I thought we’d go for a cutting-edge, post-industrialist look,’ she was saying.
I knew I had to say something – anything – at this point. So I followed my time-honoured rule of saying the first thing that comes into my head:
‘Wow, so really it’s like a class-weds-money type of thing! That’s practically …’
I was going to say Hogarthian, but too late. I got a look that could peel an apple whole, and a very long pause. Eventually:
‘Well, of course, us Phillips can trace our ancestry back pretty far.’
‘What, to Woking?’ said Fran.
‘Ha ha, very funny.’ She turned. ‘Are you getting married, Fran? Oh no, I forgot, you’re not seeing anyone, are you? Because maybe, if you ever do, we could make fun of you for a change.’
Fran raised her eyes to heaven and headed back to the bar for more drinks.
Tantrum over, Amanda leaned in chummily. ‘So, you and Fraser were quite close, weren’t you?’ She smiled, as if to show that this didn’t mean ENVY ME! ENVY ME!
‘Not really,’ I said, meaning: Well, I fancied him and he completely ignored me.
‘Oh, you must come to the wedding. It’s going to be absolutely wonderful. Daddy simply insists on making a fuss.’
Amanda’s dad had been married about four times since we were sixteen. He got a discount.
‘I’d love to.’ I would be generous. She was the first of my friends to get married, and to a lovely bloke. Why shouldn’t I be happy? Without warning, a thought of Alex popped into my head, and I winced.
‘Great! Oh, I’m sorry I can’t make you a bridesmaid, but Larissa and Portia are such good friends from varsity, I just had to ask them.’
‘Oh, right …’
‘You will meet someone, Melanie, you know. Someone nice. Such a shame about Alex dashing off like that. He was a bit of a one, wasn’t he? And of course so terribly well connected.’
Meaning what exactly? I put my drink down, rather too emphatically.
‘Well, I don’t care about that, and I don’t care about Alex.’
‘No, of course you don’t,’ she said, patting me on the hand in an infuriating manner.
I was constantly forgetting Amanda’s true potential for sheer malice. Revising my earlier estimate, I hoped she’d have a poxy marriage and get divorced before we’d finished the cake.
Fran came back with the drinks, but Amanda immediately hopped up and said she had to be elsewhere. She shook back her blonde sheet of hair – rootless – and sashayed her pert little leather-trousered arse out the door to her latest-model convertible, mobile phone already clamped to her ear, waving merrily behind her, off to somewhere infinitely more glamorous and exciting than the pub on a Friday night.
Fran and I sat in silence for a bit, till Fran said, ‘Sod that, then!’ and we drank her white wine as well as ours. Then we had another one to cheer ourselves up, and then a couple more, and before long we didn’t care that Amanda Phillips had found her handsome – if scruffy – prince and was going off to live in a castle. Much.
Much, much later we were yabbering nonsensically about the last bloke Fran metaphorically kicked in the bollocks and threw out the house – actually, when I came to think of it, she had literally kicked him in the bollocks, and he had limped out of the house of his own accord – when across the crowded pub I spied what looked like a familiar pair of knees. Following upwards, I deduced that it was in fact Nicholas, tallest accountant in the world. (How did I know him again?) Gosh, he was tall. I liked tall.
I tugged on Fran’s sleeve. ‘Look –’s Nicholas.’
Fran looked roughly over. ‘Wanker,’ she said.
Had Fran not said wanker about every bloke we’d mentioned for the last hour and a half I might have listened to her and saved myself some trauma. Instead, I waved at him in huge circular motions. ‘Knickerless!’ And I dissolved in giggles. He flew over and gave me a big kiss. Oh, we must have been old friends, then.
‘Melanie, fantastic to see you. I’ve just been having another crazy night out with the accountants.’
I squinted to make out anyone else who’d been at the other end of the bar, but they all seemed to have mysteriously disappeared.
‘God, we’re mad. Can’t see us getting home tonight without a police caution! Chaw chaw chaw!’
‘Buy’s a drink, Nicklas! You’re loaded!’
‘Sure, babe.’ And he did so with the fervour of a man who knew only too well just how much alcohol he usually had to get down a woman to get her to sleep with him.
In normal circumstances I would have run six miles from Nicholas, whom I had accidentally slept with at a party once because he was, er, very tall. He’d phoned me up constantly since and I’d realized that, tall though he might be, he was also the most boring bastard who’d ever lived. In fact, he was the most boring accountant who’d ever lived. After the inevitable grilling I’d caught from Fran when he turned up to pick me up in stonewashed jeans and pink cowboy boots, I’d made Linda answer the phone for a month. Now here he was again, and he was desperate, and I was desperate for attention – a deadly combination.
Ensconced in a corner next to Fran – who looked half-asleep, but with a drowsy look that said she could still bite you on the face if you thought about trying anything – Nicholas started telling me all the latest pranks him and his fantastic accounting mates had been up to. By the time they’d finally got on the coach they’d hired to go see Bryan Adams, I was about to gnaw off my own
