the next day.
2. The friend with a more modest budget than yours, who couldn’t dream of buying the same kind of clothes as you (the truth is that she dreams of nothing else). Perhaps you think it is a real treat for her to go shopping with you. Personally, I call it mental cruelty, and I am always painfully embarrassed by the role of second fiddle that certain women reserve for their best friend. Besides, her presence is of absolutely no use to you at all, because this kind of friend always approves of everything you select, and will agree with even greater enthusiasm if it happens to be something that isn’t very becoming.
3. Finally, the friend who lives for clothes and whose advice you seek. This spoilt and self-confident woman will monopolize the attention of the shop assistants, who are quick to scent a good customer. You find yourself forgotten by everybody, trying to decide what looks best not on you, but on your friend.
Moral: Always shop alone. Women who shop with their friends may be popular, but elegant they are NOT.
I’m on my way to Notting Hill to see a friend I write with, Nicki Sands. We began working on a screenplay together about a year ago. Neither of us is really a writer, which is probably why we aren’t making a lot of progress on the project. We meet up religiously twice a week, loitering around in a kind of career cul-de-sac. However, writing does provide us with a useful alibi, instantly deflecting any embarrassing questions such as, ‘So, what do you do?’
Nicki used to be a model in the late seventies and early eighties and now she lives with a record producer in an enormous double-fronted house in Notting Hill. They openly despise one another. Neither one of them is obliged to work, so they while away the hours wandering from room to room, looking for new ways to torture each other.
I arrive around 10:30 to find Nicki and Dan milling about in their Santa Fe style kitchen. They own a cappuccino machine that neither of them can work and are standing in front of the faux adobe woodburning hearth and indoor barbecue unit holding their empty cups.
Every once in a while, one of them will have a go and the other will provide a running commentary.
‘That’s right, put the coffee in and turn the knob … No! No, no, no, no, no!’
‘Shut up!’
‘Jesus, you’re doing it wrong again!’
‘No, I’m not!’
‘Steam, there’s meant to be steam!’
‘Shut up! What is it with you?’
‘What is it with me? What is it? I’ve been up since six and I still haven’t had a fucking cup of coffee!’
Reading the instructions is considered cheating.
After a while, Dan gives up and makes a Nescafé. The three-hundred-pound triumph of Italian engineering has won again. Nicki and I decide to go out for coffee and discuss plot development. But what we really do is sit in Tom’s, a café and organic food shop around the corner, and hash over Nicki’s failing relationship in detail.
‘He thinks he looks young!’ she hisses at me, leaning dramatically across the table, as if discretion were a consideration. ‘I mean, he said to me the other day, “I don’t think I look a day past thirty-five.” I nearly choked on my cappuccino!’ (They must have been out.)
She’s speaking to me but her eyes never leave the door, just in case someone thinner, prettier, or more chic walks in. This almost never happens. I’m just beginning to confide in her that I think maybe my husband and I might have a serious problem too, when suddenly she screams, grabs my arm violently and yanks me across the table. ‘My God! Louise!’ she gasps. ‘That’s the handbag I was telling you about! There!’
I smile and nod.
I’m used to Nicki by now. And I’m used to her ignoring me.
Nicki is one of those women who only has one girl-friend at a time. She wears friends out with her constant demands for attention but is too competitive to tolerate more than one extra female in her life. I’ve known this for a while. However, cultivating friends has never been my forte. Although I’m perfectly sociable – happy to spend an hour or so in idle chit-chat with any number of people, the thing I’m not terribly good at is the kind of honest self-revelation and shared intimacies that are the backbone of a lasting female friendship. I long to be open and informal, if only my life weren’t such a mess. But now is not the time. After all, if I started confiding my innermost problems to someone, I’d have to do something about them. And I’m not ready for that yet. Someday, when I’ve pulled myself together, maybe I’ll have a real chum of the heart.
In the meantime, I’m not expected to share any deep personal confidences with Nicki; I’m only required to show up and tag along. And tagging along will do me just fine. It’s easy, undemanding – we talk about nothing more taxing than new lipstick formulations and, even though I could never afford it, the benefits of Pilates versus Hatha yoga techniques. And there’s a certain amount of glamour involved in these weekly escapes. I enjoy basking in the chaotic splendour and excess of Nicki World, complete with multi-million pound homes, £100 face crèmes, and £4 organic lattes, while clinging perversely to the reassuring knowledge that, for all their money, Nicki and Dan are still incredibly unhappy. When your own life remains a baffling, unresolved puzzle, there are few things more comforting than to be surrounded by fellow struggling souls.
When we’ve downed enough caffeine to bring us to tears, we walk back to Nicki’s and dump our bags in the Moroccan style living room. Almost everything that Nicki and Dan lose is eventually discovered lying camouflaged against the overwhelming profusion of kilim cushions that populate this room. They’ve even managed to create curtains out of old Oriental carpets, so that sitting in it is like being swallowed by a giant carpet bag.
Then we climb up to Nicki’s Victorian study and she sits in front of her computer, which folds out from a unit made to look like an antique dressing table, and I sit on the daybed. The daybed is an original, painfully uncomfortable and obviously designed to keep Victorian ladies very much awake.
‘OK. Right.’ Nicki turns on the computer, clicks into our file and pages down to where we left off.
‘Here we are, page fifteen,’ she announces triumphantly.
No matter how much work we do or how often we meet, we’re always on page fifteen.
‘OK, so how did we leave it then?’ I try to gather my enthusiasm.
‘Jan was just about to reveal to Aaron why she’d left home.’
‘Oh, yeah. Good. And what did we decide about that?’
Nicki checks through the notes we made at coffee.
‘You know, I don’t think we came to any firm conclusions about that one.’
‘Did we have any ideas?’
She flicks through again. ‘I’m not really seeing anything that can be called a solid idea.’
‘Oh. OK. Never mind.’ I haul myself out of the sagging centre of the daybed. ‘Right. Let’s get brainstorming!’
The room goes dead. A dog barks somewhere in the distance. Nicki gnaws at a hangnail.
Suddenly,
