‘I still can’t see why it would’ve been some moral failure.’
‘None of my business,’ I said, haughtily, heart suddenly banging against my ribs as if it wanted to make a break for it and scuttle off to the Victorian Essayists ahead of me. My behaviour suggested I’d be a good fit for the era.
‘I’d have had a better time if you’d stayed,’ Ben said, nailing the source of my anxiety more accurately than I wanted.
‘Why do you say it like that? Like it’s the lowest standard – “I’d have had a better time even if Ron had stayed.”’
‘That wasn’t what I said.’
No, and that wasn’t what I meant. I don’t want you to want to do that, with her. When she’s nothing like me. What was I on?
Ben looked out of the window, back at me, opened his mouth to say something, hesitated.
‘I can cook,’ he said, flatly.
‘What? You conned me so I’d do your shopping?’
He glared at me. I glared back.
‘Pleased to see you two were paying such rapt attention and that the academic debate now rages,’ our tutor cut between us. ‘And I’m certain those notes you were passing were on the rise of the middle classes in the fourteenth century in relation to The Canterbury Tales.’
‘Most definitely,’ Ben said, nodding.
‘Sod off to your eleven o’clocks,’ the tutor said, and we did.
26
In all those fashion features about ‘What To Wear To Meet Your In-Laws’ or ‘What To Wear On A Country Weekend Away’ I’d like them to toughen up and tackle the genuinely thorny issues, such as ‘What To Wear To Meet Your Lost Love’s Wife’.
I know I can’t attempt this dinner party with anything in my current wardrobe. So slim are the pickings – and not in the sense that anything is small – I decide on a scorched earth policy, bundle most of it up and take it to the nearest charity shop.
The altruistic glow dims in minutes as I stand holding recyclable bin bags in the middle of Age UK. The woman at the counter has grey hair in a bun and glasses round her neck on a string, like a wonderful granny from a Roald Dahl story who’d adopt you if your parents were wiped out in the first chapter in some blackly comic manner.
‘Just here?’ I say brightly, hoping for a drop-and-skedaddle.
She makes the internationally recognised – and not entirely gracious – outstretched finger wiggle that means ‘Give That Here’.
I hand it over, thinking, I didn’t know giving things away for free has an audition process. She starts pulling the contents of my bags out in front of me, sniffing a cardigan disdainfully and asking: ‘Are you a smoker?’
Before I can answer in the negative, she yelps in distress as if she’s found a nobbly dildo the size of a Saharan cactus and says ‘We can do without these …’ holding a rogue pair of socks at arm’s length, between finger and thumb. Hmm, my slipper-socks with paw-like rubber grips on the soles. I’m sure someone would be grateful for them. Admittedly, with second-hand socks, you’d have to be not so much in reduced circumstances as bin rifling. But talk about no good turn going unpunished. I want to say: ‘Who are you, the Duchess of Dry Clean Only?’
Instead I mumble ‘howdidtheygetinthere’ and continue my shopping with the socks bulging in my coat pockets, vowing that the aged and their forked-tongued representatives can bloody well help themselves in future.
I need an outfit that says ‘Grown up and yet still youthful’ ‘Dressy but laidback’ and ‘Not slaggy but not retired from active duty either’.
Unsurprisingly, looking for something in my budget that both a) fits and b) conveys six contradictory statements turns out to be difficult. I thought I was a size 12 and I still cling to this belief despite all evidence pointing north. Or in the case of nipples in very tight material, north-west and south-east.
A trek up and down King Street’s fashion stores on a busy Saturday afternoon leaves me frazzled and near-tearful. There’s only one thing for it, I decide, and call Mindy. She listens to the problem and writes a brisk prescription.
‘You’ve lost perspective and are no longer in the good decision zone. Go somewhere upmarket, like Reiss, find a simple black cocktail dress. Buy one size up if that looks better, shelve your pride. Pay whatever it costs. Wear with any heels you know you can walk in. Boom, done.’
‘But I wore black last time I met Ben? And his friend?’ I add, hastily.
‘He won’t remember what you wore unless it was Bernie Clifton’s ostrich costume. Trust me.’
I find her instructions simple and effective. I arrive back home on a short-lived high, until I discover that, while the pop-video lighting in the changing rooms made me look like an ‘Addicted To Love’ girl, in the fading daylight it’s a bit more ‘Mafia widow who’s been hitting the tortellini in her grief’. I could try to improve on this, or I could have a nerve-steadying vodka and Diet Coke while waiting for the taxi. It has a much stronger lure than a frenzy of turd polishing. I recall a Tao of Mindy phrase: ‘You can’t polish a turd, but you can roll it in glitter.’
I settle for vodka, and more make-up.
I obsess over what Olivia’s going to be like. I know she’s blonde, or what I glimpsed of Ben’s phone wallpaper suggested so. Ben always went for conspicuous ‘knock outs’; no reason to think the woman he settled down with will be any different. I imagine her as a sort of Eighth Wonder era Patsy Kensit, dressed like Betty Draper in Mad Men. With the conversational skills of Dorothy Parker and the … oh sod it.
The worst has happened already. She’s not me. On the menu tonight: Rachel’s heart is turned into steak haché, served with an egg on top.
27
Ben and Olivia’s house is a Victorian semi with white gables and a glossy royal blue front door, a lollipop bay tree in a square black planter standing sentry. I ring the stiff brass doorbell and wait, listening to the hubbub of lively voices beyond. I get a ripple of anxiety. No Rhys by my side any more. I hadn’t appreciated how solitary being single would feel. I wish I’d had two vodkas.
Ben answers, carrying a bottle with a corkscrew wedged in it, cream shirt, slightly mussed hair, looking like something from a Lands’ End catalogue. He and Olivia probably go for hearty walks in Aran sweaters and his‘n’hers chocolate moleskin trousers on Sundays, throwing sticks to their rescue puppy, laughing with their heads thrown back.
‘Rachel, hi!’ He leans in for a chaste peck on the cheek, and I go rigid. ‘Can I take your coat?’
I do an awkward dance, handing him the wine I’ve brought, unwrapping myself, swapping the coat for the return of the bottle.
Over his shoulder, as he’s hanging my coat up, Ben says: ‘This is Liv. Liv, Rachel.’ Blood pounds
