A Minor Indiscretion

  My sister enjoyed the high life as a British Airways purser for several years and lived off several married pilots while she saved all her hard-earned cash to open an antique-clothing emporium. She sells 1920s dresses to television actresses for awards ceremonies and stuff like that, and is an endless source of celebrity gossip. Personally, I think she reads most of it in Hello! magazine, but she won’t have it.

  I smile and open something decent. Not that either of us will be able to tell the difference after a few glasses. I start to stack the dishwasher and wonder if it’s not harder than just washing up in the first place.

  Jemma sips her wine, sighing with pleasure. “What’s this?”

  She has pulled the loosely rolled-up paper from the corner of my workbag and waves my portrait at me. “A drawing,” I reply helpfully.

  “I can see that! Who is it?”

  “Cow.”

  “You look utterly, utterly gorgeous. When did you have this done?”

  “Today. This morning.”

  “God, it’s good. Isn’t it?” I turn my back to her, intent on my stacking. I can’t bear it when you don’t stack the things properly and you get all dried-on stuff left inside or scummy water in the cups. It’s a nightmare, isn’t it?

  “So?”

  “So.”

  “So, it’s not like you to splash out on something like this. This is the sort of thing I do. You spend your money on washing powder and school fees and the world microwavable meal mountain.” My family take the piss out of my inability to produce good wholesome meals on weekdays. A lot.

  “The guy did it for free.”

  “No!” My sister is examining the drawing from every angle, and I want to grab it from her and hide it. “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I was sitting having a coffee and he drew me. I think he was bored,” I add hastily, seeing her skeptical look.

  “He singles you out of a crowd to come and draw you because he’s bored?”

  “There wasn’t a crowd. There was no one else around.”

  “Ohmigod, this gets more romantic by the minute!”

  “It does not. He was only a boy.”

  “Was he?” Jemma grimaces. “How disappointing.” She turns the drawing back to the right way up. “Well, he must have fancied you to make you look like this. God, Ali, you’re fourteen film stars rolled into one….” Jemma catches my eye, and I put the oven chips dish down. “You’re blushing,” she says, looking horrified.

  “I’m not.”

  “You are.”

  “I’m having a hot flush.”

  “Bollocks.”

  I pick the oven chips dish up again and try to swish my unruly hair forward to hide my face. Jemma and I look a lot alike. Except she has a slinkier figure, a great nose and more sensible hair. Her hair is burnished chestnut rather than two-day-old carrot and it’s long rather than wide, fashionably crinkly and curly instead of making her look like the Wild Man of Borneo.

  “You’ve gone all girly.” She’s also like my mother, who doesn’t miss a trick.

  “Now it’s my turn to say bollocks.”

  “What was his name, this handsome young man?”

  “Who said he was handsome?”

  “I bet he was.”

  “He was called…Christian,” I blurt out. My legs have gone all weird and wobbly. “And you’re right—he was gorgeous.”

  “You old tart!” My sister howls with laughter, and I sit down with her and gulp my glass of wine because I’m blushing and having a hot flush all at once.

  CHAPTER 4

  “That Jemma is one hell of a woman,” Neil said appreciatively as he lifted his pint.

  “She’s a man-eater and a commitment-phobe,” Ed said, examining a cheese-and-onion crisp before eating it. There were loads of trendy bars in Richmond, but they always went to the Queen’s Head. It was a proper man’s pub that sold draft ale even though the brothers never drank it, and it didn’t play music at a million decibels, so that you could actually have a conversation. Neil did, however, rue the lack of scantily clad women, not counting the barmaid whose breasts always looked like two ferrets having a fight down her crop-top. “Jem’s always whining on about not being able to get a man, and yet she’s got a queue of them battering down her door. Then she always manages to pick the ones who are totally unsuitable.”

  “That’s women for you,” Neil agreed.

  “She’d be far too much effort for you.”

  “Rubbish.”

  “Does she look like the sort of woman who’d let you wash your socks by putting them down the toilet and flushing it?”

  Neil looked hurt. “I don’t do that anymore! Never ever! Well, hardly ever.”

  “You couldn’t stack take-away cartons in your kitchen until they walk out all by themselves in disgust. You’re not the type to be able to handle a high-maintenance babe. You’re one of life’s laid-back bodies. Enjoy it. Find a slovenly woman who will love you for what you are.”

  “A slob?”

  “If the cap fits…”

  Neil glared at his brother over his beer.

  “Remember what happened with Penny?”

  Neil shuddered.

  “You had three years of hell with her. She stopped you playing football, and watching it. She stopped you smoking. She stopped you getting pissed at parties. She made you sell the Alfa Romeo and get a Citroën and complained constantly that you didn’t have a proper job.”

  “I thought that’s what people in love did.”

  “And then, when she’d done all that, she dumped you for a physiotherapist with no hair who smoked and played football.”

  “Bet he doesn’t now.” Neil grinned.

  “I love Jemma…like a sister,” Ed claimed. “But she’d try to change you too.”

  “Jemma could change instead. She could lower her standards.”

  “Never. Women don’t change. Until you marry them.”

  “I saw Penny the other day. She was in Tesco with two kids, one still in a pushchair. She’d got fat.” Neil smiled and helped himself to Ed’s crisps. “But at least she’d moved on. Here I am, three years later, same job, same flat, same life.”

  “How is the glamorous, drug-fueled world of school photography?”

  “Same as ever. I spent the day trying to herd tribes of unruly five-year-olds into some semblance of order. How would you like to spend your entire waking moments saying ‘Smelly Sausages’ in order to get some toothless, hyperactive urchin to grin?”

  “I spent my day trying to get a blonde in a bikini to drill a hole with a broken drill. Tomorrow, I will no doubt spend an equally futile day trying to get her to saw with a broken saw. Don’t ever buy any Performing Power Tools, by the way.”

  “At least you get to look at a bird in a bikini. What do I get? Horrible little tykes who could learn some sartorial elegance from Just William.” Neil leaned back. “Oh, when is Vogue finally going to get on the phone and insist that I fly to Ecuador at a moment’s notice to photograph Elle or Helena or Liz for the front cover?”

  “Maybe when you get off your lazy backside and compile a decent portfolio.”

  “I shall treat that with the contempt it deserves. Still, the wedding season will soon be upon us,” Neil said, cheering up. “The brides may be lost causes, but I’ve pulled some very nice bridesmaids with my sparkling repartee.”

  “Be grateful that life is so simple, my brother.”

  Neil paused over his pint. “Not trouble at home?”

  “No. No. Not at home. Everything’s fine. Well, nothing that winning the lottery and giving three children to a passing circus couldn’t fix.”

  “Work?”

  “Same as ever. You’re not the only one who hankers after bigger and better things.”

  “Oh, not the Harrison Ford stories, bro.”

  “I haven’t told them for ages.”

  “Christmas. One glass of port too many.”

  “That was months ago!”

  “If I
wasn’t so certain of our mother’s cast-iron morals, I’d swear he was our third long-lost brother.”

  “Three weeks ago, I spent ten days filming a man dressed as a tin of tuna flakes. That was a major contract for Wavelength. Don’t you think I miss the good times?”

  “Everything’s relative, Ed. How do you think the man inside the tin of tuna felt?” Neil nodded sagely.

  “True.”

  “Hindsight always gives things a rosy glow, mate. You know that.”

  Ed sighed. “Sometimes it’s very easy to forget it. And sometimes I just wonder where I might be now, if I’d stayed the distance.”

  “Probably filming The Mummy Returns in a sandpit in the Home Counties purporting to be the far-flung desert sands of Egypt.”

  “Probably.”

  “It wasn’t all sun, sand, sea and sex. You said so yourself. Did you ever spend the night in Sharon Stone’s trailer?”

  “No.”

  “What was the point in it all then? A few beers with Harrison Ford doesn’t amount to much. It can’t have been the great job you make it out to be.”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  “There must be something that’s brought on this little black cloud. Have you still got the brisk and terrifyingly efficient Orla with you? Perhaps she’s getting you down.”

  “Orla’s all right. She’s just doing a job.”

  “I’ll give it another month. She’ll be turning you inside out by then, psychoanalyzing you, questioning every decision you’ve ever made.”

  “If it wasn’t her, it would be someone else. And they might be short, fat and bald and have body odor. At least while Orla’s picking my life over, she’s pretty stunning to look at.”

  “Is she?” Neil perked up. “I thought you only had eyes for Ali?”

  “Everyone’s entitled to look every now and again,” Ed said and gulped his beer, chasing it with the last cheese-and-onion crisp and wondering why his cheeks and his ears felt as if they were glowing.

  CHAPTER 5

  I really can’t believe I’m doing this. Really, I can’t. I have taken an early lunch from work and am sitting—yes, you guessed it—at the Covent Garden Café eating a baguette which might be a lump of cardboard for all I know. And that’s not a criticism of the food here, it’s more to do with the state of my mind. I lasted a week before I did this though. Which, I think, all things considered, wasn’t bad going. And until I got here, I’d almost managed to convince myself that all I wanted was a cold coffee and a cardboard sandwich at a convivial hostelry and wasn’t the slightest bit interested in seeing if Christian was still around and how many other older women with dubious hair he might be drawing as an act of kindness.

  I don’t know if you can understand how I feel. It’s like when you used to leave a disgusting, fallen-out tooth under your pillow at night and, miraculously, in the morning the tooth would have vanished and in its place would be a shiny fifty-pence piece. (Although the going rate in our house now ranges from a pound to a fiver depending on the level of pain endured in pulling out the offending tooth. Tanya lost one of her front teeth going over the handlebars of her bike, which is worth five pounds of anyone’s money.) But, in my heart of hearts, I always knew that it was too good to be true. Why would anyone, let alone a fairy, want a manky, bloody tooth in return for money? The tooth fairy always seemed to get a raw deal, and it left me with a nagging sense of doubt. Why would anyone do that? And that’s what this feels like, in a peculiar sort of way. Although I’m not sure I can really compare Christian to the tooth fairy, I think I can empathize wholeheartedly with the manky tooth.

  Life was very quiet at the Kath Brown Design Studio this morning. See, I told you she had a boring name. Not that there’s anything wrong with being called Kath Brown, per se. It’s just not a sexy designer-type name, is it? Perhaps if she changed it to Kathy or Katy Brown or even Kat Browne, it might perk it up a bit. Anyway, whatever. Things are quiet and I’m going to take a whole hour for lunch. So I might just eat this baguette quickly and nip off into Neal’s Yard to see if I can find something quirky or pretentiously New Agey that I don’t need so that I can justify my being here.

  The square is busy. Maybe that’s because the sun has deigned to come out. By the café there is a man painted from head to foot in gold with a squeaker in his mouth; not unexpectedly, he is squeaking at passersby, who in turn throw him money. There is a puppet theater called The Amazing International Theatre of Dolls, which consists of row upon row of wrecked-looking Barbie and Ken dolls and the odd Action Man thrown in who are dressed in bizarre clothes and are being made to mime along to popular hit tunes by an equally bizarrely dressed man who is desperately trying to make it look like there is some sort of skill involved. Across the street, a beautiful bohemian brunette is playing Vivaldi like an angel on a battered violin and making it look like there’s no skill involved at all. It’s a strange world, isn’t it? But, try as I do not to look, there is no sign of Christian anywhere.

  I pay my bill and wander into the market. I could take the direct route up James Street and past the Tube station, but you never know, I might find something in the market that I can’t live without. Well, I might. As I pass through the rows of painted glass and silk T-shirts, it seems unlikely, and then, as I get to the other end near the back of the Opera House, he’s there.

  He has his back to me and he is drawing a middle-aged woman and she is laughing and flirting with him. I don’t know why, but I feel sick. Maybe there was something dodgy in that damned baguette. I had my suspicions all along. I thought the lettuce looked way too limp to be fresh. I edge closer and see that the drawing is good. Excellent. But not as good as my drawing, and she laughs again and swishes her hair about. Christian puts his charcoal down, and she rummages in her handbag and pays him. Oh yes, she pays him! And then she “ooo’s!” at the drawing. It is a good likeness, but he hasn’t given her tempestuous hair or eyes that wouldn’t look out of place in Wuthering Heights.

  I stand behind him for a second, unsure whether to stay or whether this is the moment I should walk away and get on with my life. You know that feeling when your gut tells you something, and another part of your anatomy, your brain or your heart or your feet, tells you to ignore it. And before I can decide whether to follow my gut instinct and leave, he turns round.

  His eyes light up. They do. I have never seen anyone’s eyes light up for me before. I’m sure I haven’t—not even Ed’s eyes. And, my God, is it a heady feeling. “Ali,” he says. “What are you doing here?”

  “Watching a master at work,” I say with a laugh. How can I tell him what I’m really doing, when I’m not even sure myself? There’s an awkward moment where we both fidget and then we should both start to speak at the same time, but we don’t. I do. “I came to say thank you for the drawing. I was in such a foul mood on Monday, I wanted to thank you for brightening my day.”

  “You brightened mine,” he says, and if it’s a line, it works.

  “Well, thanks.” Fidget, fidget. “I wish you’d let me pay you.”

  “It was a gift.”

  “Well, thanks.” Fidget, fidget. “I’d better be off.”

  He stands hurriedly and nearly knocks his easel over. “Have you had lunch? I could have a break now. There’s no one waiting.”

  And he’s right. There’s just the two of us in all this crowd.

  “I’ve had lunch.”

  “Coffee,” he says. “Have you got time for coffee?”

  I look at my watch as if I’m undecided.

  “There’s a nice little place down here.” Those eyes are so hard to refuse. “They do great cakes.”

  “I’m on a diet.” I’m not, but I probably should be.

  “I’ll eat one for you.”

  I laugh. He is so eager to please. Eager to please me. Me, so used to pleasing everyone else but myself.

  “Or we could go for a walk. There’s no calories in that.”

  Or harm? I ask myself. “The sun’
s out.”

  “Walk it is, then.” Christian smiles and packs up his little box with bits of charcoal in it and tucks it into a Nike rucksack and slings it on his back. He’s wearing a huge white T-shirt smudged with the fruits of his labors and beige combat trousers that hang loosely on a frame that has not yet developed its full quota of muscles. The sort of clothes that Tanya’s friends wear. We smile uneasily and set off toward Neal’s Yard, not touching but not far away. And this just feels wrong, so wrong.

  It’s impossible to talk as we try to stroll casually along. We keep having to part to let crowds of chattering French teenagers barge through. Why do they all dress in navy blue and behave badly? And why do they never have a schoolteacher with them? We cross over by Marks & Spencer. I head automatically for the Zebra crossing while Christian prefers to dodge the traffic, and I avoid thinking about tonight’s supper while I have this beautiful, beseeching boy by my side. This side of the road is more interesting, in my opinion, and quieter. We drift together again, still attempting to act like comfortable old friends.

  “Have you been busy this morning?” I ask, and sound as if I’m talking to my children.

  “Steady,” Christian replies with a shrug. “I hoped you’d come back. I’ve been hoping all week.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” He laughs. “Do you believe in fate, Ali?”

  “Not really,” I say. I actually believe in paying your credit-card bills on time, washing strawberries before you eat them and always wearing clean underwear in case you’re involved in an accident that requires hospital treatment and showing a young, attractive doctor your pants. See my earlier discourse on the tooth fairy, if you want to be assured of my essentially skeptical and unromantic nature. “Do you?”

  “Of course.”

  I want to say, “But that’s because you’re a child and you haven’t been worn away by the daily grind of just getting through life and your head is still filled with ideas and hopes and fanciful notions.” I don’t, because behind that boyish facade there is a developing man and I don’t want to crush his unfettered spirit. Not on a bright, sunny day like this. I turn and smile at him. “Let’s go for the cake option instead,” I suggest, and he grins back and we head for the nearest place, which looks tatty, but at least has tables outside.