to his ego, make him look good or could do something for him.’
‘And Gregory Wallace is different?’ Sophie asked, bitterly aware that the criticism, uncannily accurate, still managed to reflect badly on her.
‘You could come and find out. Besides…’ Katherine afforded her friend a long, speculative look ‘…he might just get the wrong impression, you know.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Well, you know the saying that the lady doth protest too much. He might just think that he has the opposite effect on you if you’re anything but indifferent.’
Which, Sophie thought later as she got ready for bed, had been below the belt. How could she argue when Kat might have a point? The last thing she needed to complicate her life was to have Gregory Wallace thinking that he had any effect on her, and he was too good-looking to think otherwise.
Which was why, on the evening of the thirtieth of November, she found herself in her bedroom, staring disconsolately at the few dresses in her possession which she had kept from Alan’s days. Most she had got rid of soon after they’d parted company when she’d still been fired with bitterness and rage. Then motherhood had taken over and what remained she had simply stuck in a box in the attic, meaning to send them to a similar fate, only to forget them over the course of the years.
Jade was lying on her bed, fetchingly dressed in a long, cream antique nightie which Sophie had rescued from one of her charity sales months previously, and eyeing each creation her mother tried on with a jaundiced eye.
She pointed to a black affair with a plunging neckline, which was small enough to fit into a powder compact, and Sophie shook her head and mouthed, ‘Too tiny.’ She made a face and laughed with her daughter.
‘What about this one?’ she said slowly and clearly, holding up a long, green dress which she remembered as being one of the least provocative ones she had been coerced into buying years ago.
‘Yuck. Dull,’ Jade wrote on a piece of paper. ‘Put on the green one,’ she wrote, signing the message, ‘I love you, Mummy.’ This was followed by a series of kisses and hearts, at which point she appeared to get carried away with the symbols and began to draw lots of smiley hearts floating across the A4 paper.
If Jade thinks it’s dull, Sophie decided, that’s good enough to me. At least, she thought, it doesn’t smell of hibernation in a box. She had had the lot dry-cleaned. Annabel and the rest of her cronies thought she was weird as it was, without adding an odour problem to the list.
She slipped on the dress, without looking at herself in the full-length mirror, and sat at the dressing-table, wondering what to do with her hair. Jade sidled up to her and Sophie recognised that glint in her eye. It was called Operation Hairdresser, one of her least favourite games, but she obediently sat still while her daughter combed her hair with a wide-toothed comb and tried not to grimace too much when tiny fingers intervened to get rid of knots. She should have had the lot chopped off a long time ago, but somehow she had never been able to bring herself to do it.
After fifteen minutes she gave her daughter the thumbs-up sign, even though there was virtually no difference between how her hair looked now and how it had looked previously—still a mass of unruly, undisciplined curls.
Then she applied make-up, something she wore so rarely that she was amazed that her small collection had not gone past its sell-by date.
She brushed on a little powder, dusted with blusher, reluctantly applied mascara and then lipstick. When she sat back and inspected herself she had to admit that she looked good, even though she felt like the Mrs Sophie Breakwell of a few years ago, hanging on the arm of the man who had been the catch of his social circle—someone whose looks had been prized far more highly than her intelligence had been.
The babysitter and Katherine arrived on the doorstep at precisely the same time.
‘Wow,’ Katherine said in an awe-struck voice, and Sophie sighed in an elaborate way.
‘Blame Jade,’ she said, letting them in and fetching her ridiculously small clutch bag from the sofa. ‘She chose the dress and did the hair. And…’ Sophie turned to Ann Warner, who lived a few houses down, ‘…she shows no signs of being sleepy.’ Jade, standing next to her, grinned obligingly even though she hadn’t heard the remark.
She knelt, kissed her daughter, informed her that she had better be on best behaviour what with you-know-who arriving down certain chimneys in the not too distant future and then she straightened.
‘I’ll be back by eleven-thirty,’ she said.
‘Take your time. I shall enjoy myself with Jade.’
‘Yes,’ Katherine said, as they walked towards the car, wrapping their coats tightly around them because the cold was numbing, ‘you will take your time and you will enjoy yourself because you will be the knock-out of the entire party.’
‘And that’s an order, is it?’ Sophie laughed as she slipped into the passenger seat.
‘Absolutely.’
‘In which case, I may just as well tell you that I hate taking orders.’
CHAPTER THREE
SOPHIE saw the long line of cars and knew that she wasn’t going to enjoy herself.
‘I really don’t want to be here, Kat,’ she said, nurturing the flimsy hope that her friend might suddenly become sympathetic and offer to drive her back home. She felt awkward and uncomfortable in her dress, her shoes were already beginning to make themselves felt and, whatever Kat had said about her appearance, she couldn’t help feeling like a clown with all this make-up on.
‘Don’t be silly,’ Kat said briskly, stretching into the back seat of her car and locating her bag. ‘I’ve told you a million times you can’t bury yourself in your cottage and pretend that the rest of the world doesn’t exist.’
She was right, of course. Sophie knew that, but it didn’t help. She could see a group of people entering the stately house, their figures silhouetted against the outside lights—black coats, lots of jewellery, upswept hair. Lots of kisses as they entered, laughing and talking among themselves. More were bringing up the rear, similarly clad, and, from the looks of it, in similar high humour. There was the distant sound of music, a live band, drifting out on the cold air. The trees were all bedecked with hundreds of white lights.
It was all very festive, but Sophie didn’t feel festive. She wished that she was back in her own home, curled up on the sofa with Jade half-asleep next to her, reading a book, listening to her daughter and vaguely watching television all at the same time.
‘Well?’ Kat asked, with her hand on the doorknob. ‘Ready?’
‘I suppose so,’ Sophie said glumly, getting out of the car and dragging her feet as they approached the house.
Annabel’s mother was waiting by the door, a short, plump woman who was incongruously and expensively attired in a long, sequinned, vivid blue evening dress. She hugged Katherine, whom she had known since the year dot, and then turned to Sophie with a smile.
‘I’m so glad you could come, Sophie,’ she said warmly. ‘We don’t see enough of you.’
Actually,
