Bookends

Chapter three

‘What shall I wear?’ Si is, as usual, moaning at me down the phone.

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Si. I’m busy. How come you don’t understand the concept of work? Why do you never seem to do anything except phone me a million times a day?’

I can almost see Si stick out his lower lip in a pretend sulk. ‘Fine,’ he says, in exactly the tone I would have expected. ‘I’ll leave you to your work, then, shall I?’

Before I can say anything I hear a click, then the dialling tone. I sigh wearily and punch out his number, knowing that the phone won’t even ring before he picks it up.

‘Have I ever told you how much I hate you?’ he says, picking up the phone.

‘No you don’t. You love me. That’s why I’m allowed to say these things to you.’

‘Oh, okay, then,’ he grumbles. ‘But what are you wearing? No, no! Let me guess. Black trousers perhaps? A large black tent-like jumper to cover your bum? Black boots?’

‘Well, if you know so much, how come you’re asking?’

‘Cath, you’re not a student any more. Why do you dress like one? I keep offering to give you clothing lessons, but you’re still as sartorially challenged as you ever were. What are we going to do with you?’

‘Darling Si. I’m just not interested in clothes, like you. I’m sorry. I wish it were different.’ I throw in a few sobs for good measure and Si laughs. ‘I’m a hopeless case,’ I continue, throwing caution to the winds and crying hysterically. ‘A lost cause.’

‘There, there,’ he soothes. ‘No such thing as a lost cause. We’ll get you to Armani if it kills me.’

‘Can I go now?’ I say, in my usual exasperated tone, wondering whether I should signal my secretary to come in and tell me in a loud voice that my three o’clock appointment is here. ‘Have you finished with me? I am busy, Si. Seriously.’

‘You’re no fun,’ he says. ‘I’ll come over to yours at seven thirty.’

‘Fine, see you la – ’ and I stop with a sigh because he’s already gone.

I smile to myself for a few minutes after I put the phone down, because it is extraordinary that Si manages to do this. He’s supposed to be a film editor, although God knows exactly what that means. All I do know is that he works in Soho, which is, as he readily admits, completely perfect for him, because he can go out cruising every night, if he wants to.

He did throughout his twenties, and when Soho became the new gay village and all the seedy hostess bars were replaced with minimalist gay bars, Si thought he’d died and gone to Heaven (which he did fairly often in those days), but he seems to have settled down now. He used to talk about beautiful boys, and six-pack stomachs, and buns of steel, whereas now he talks about finding someone to cook for, to make a home with, to share everything with. But he’s so desperate for commitment, a relationship, anyone who comes even vaguely close is frightened off within days.

‘It’s my chocolate mousse, isn’t it?’ he says to me, humour doing a pretty bad job of hiding the pain. ‘I knew I’d over-whisked those egg whites.’

‘Either that or the fact that you slid the onion ring on to the third finger of his left hand after half an hour,’ I say, and we both sigh with disappointment, because neither of us can understand why he can’t find someone.

He’s not drop-dead gorgeous, but he’s certainly cute in a Matthew Broderick sort of way. He’s funny, sensitive, kind, thoughtful, has a vicious sense of humour when he feels really comfortable with you, but would never use it against his friends. Or so he tells me.

And his body is – and I’m trying to be as objective as possible – really rather gorgeous. As he says, despite hating ‘the scene’, he appreciates that he’s unlikely to meet Mr Right at the local McDonald’s, and if you have to do the bars and, even more occasionally, the clubs, you have to look the part, and white T-shirts, apparently, require toned, tanned flesh underneath.

Every New Year’s Eve Si and I make a deal. If neither of us is married by the age of thirty-five, we’ll marry each other. Actually, it used to be by the age of twenty-five. Then thirty. And doubtless by the time we hit thirty-five it will move to forty.

I suppose I am slightly in love with him, if only in a platonic way, although there are plenty of times when I wish it could be different. Put it like this. I’m fairly genuine about our New Year’s Eve promises. Si is everything I’ve ever looked for in a man. Apart from the being gay bit, of course. And he’d make a wonderful husband and father. I’d never have to lift a finger at home – he’d do all the cleaning and cook me wonderful gourmet meals every night.

We’d have a hell of a lot of fun, Si and I, if we were married. But I know Si would never marry me. I know he loves me more than anyone else in the world, but I also know that when Si goes to bed at night he closes his eyes and dreams of Brad Pitt, and he could never sacrifice that. Not even for me.

The phone rings again. My private line. Which means it’s one of three people. My mother. Si. Or Josh. I’m always amazed that Josh manages to call me quite so regularly, but then again I’m not entirely sure I know exactly what he does, money and finance having always been something of an anathema to me.

I do know that he works for one of the big banks in the City. That he is in charge of a team of ten people, and that the only reason he manages to get home every night by seven o’clock is because he’s in the office by six a.m. every day.

Other than that, I think he has something to do with Mergers and Acquisitions, or M & A, as I believe you’re meant to call it in the trade. I know he’s doing well enough not to have to worry about money, and I know that his public school background, minor though it was, has almost certainly helped him reach the position he now occupies.

‘You must work to live, not live to work,’ Josh always laughs, when Si and I tease him about having such an easy life at the age of thirty-two when he should, by rights, be working like a madman. But, although I am constantly surprised by his lack of ties to the office, I am also impressed, and I know that his family is so important to him that he would never sacrifice his life purely for money.

My line is still ringing, and it could very well be Josh on the phone now, so I pick up, taking my chances.

‘Now what do you want, Si?’

‘Just to tell you that’ – he pauses dramatically – ‘Mr Gorgeous has phoned!’

‘Fantastic! So when’s he coming over to break your heart? Oops, I mean, coming over for dinner?’

‘And how do you know this one isn’t The One?’

‘I’m sorry, my darling. You’re quite right. He might be. So you haven’t invited him over, then? Let me guess, he’s taking you to some fantabulously swanky restaurant for dinner tomorrow night.’

‘Nearly,’ he says brightly. ‘I’m cooking him a fantabulously swanky meal at my place tomorrow night.’

‘You’re hopeless,’ I say.

‘I know,’ he replies, but his voice is bubbling over with excitement.

‘No chocolate mousse, now,’ I warn sternly.

‘I know, I know. And I’ve buried the onion rings in the back garden.’

I get home at seven, cursing the fact that I haven’t got a parking space at work, and fantasizing about going freelance and never having to take the damn tube again. There are times when I really don’t mind it, when I actually quite enjoy it, but then there are times, like tonight, when there are no seats, and you’re all crushed together, and everyone is wet from the pouring rain so the carriage is filled with that awful damp smell.

I grab a towel from the bathroom and pull the elastic band out of my hair, rubbing the towel vigorously over my head, rolling my eyes as I catch sight of myself in the mirror. I should not have been born with this hair. It is just not fair, because my hair is barely human. It is a frizzy mess that used to circle my head rather like a fuzzy halo, and, now that I have tried to grow it, looks increasingly like Marsha Hunt’s on a very bad day. It would have looked fantastic in the early seventies, but it looks ridiculous now.

I have a bathroom cabinet stacked with various defrizzing, smoothing products that Si keeps accidentally-on-purpose leaving at my house, saying that he didn’t really need them and I should keep them, but I just can’t be bothered. Occasionally I read the labels, but invariably I forget to use them, and run out of the house with wet hair scraped back into a ponytail, which is the only way I can look halfway decent for work.

I used to make an effort. I used to wear make-up and have highlights and flirt with strange men in bars, but the older I get the less interested I am. I used to believe in love, in passion, but now I believe that the two cannot go hand in hand, because passion is not love, can never be love, and the one great passion of my life was someone I didn’t even like, although naturally I didn’t realize it at the time.

I was twenty-four when I met Martin. He really wasn’t anything special, not that first time I met him, at a marketing course in Luton. We were there for four days, executives from all over the country, and Martin was leading the course.

I remember he took the stage, bounding up to one of those flip charts, holding an electric-blue marker pen in his hand, and I mentally wrote him off as a boring marketing man. He was ordinary looking. Medium height. Nondescript clothes. Nothing, in short, to write home about.

But by the end of the day I thought he was, quite simply, the most incredible man I had ever met. We all did. Even though none of us had actually met him at that stage. That came later. Afterwards. At the drinks party where he singled me out, came over to talk to me. Looked deep into my eyes and told me I had interesting ideas. And all of a sudden the colours in the room became far brighter, the lines sharper, and I remember thinking that perhaps this was what it was like to fall in love.

Eventually we sat at a table in the corner, with other people who had paid fortunes to come on this course, and Martin fascinated all of us with his stories, his confidence, his charm. But I knew I was special. I knew that there was some sort of link between the two of us, something magical, something that would lead to more.

Our table-fellows gradually started to leave. ‘Got an early start tomorrow,’ they’d say with a wink at Martin, who would laugh politely. Each time he heard it. And eventually it was just the two of us, and Martin turned to me and tugged the elastic band out of my hair, which actually hurt terribly, but I winced in silence because I was aware it was supposed to be a romantic gesture.

‘You have beautiful hair,’ he said to me, while I blushed furiously and tried to think of something to say.

‘It’s a frizzy mess,’ I ended up muttering, instantly regretting spoiling the mood.

‘No, no,’ Martin murmured, ‘it’s quite lovely. Would you like to come up for a drink? It’s rather noisy down here, don’t you think? And I have a wonderful Scotch upstairs.’

Of course I knew that whisky meant sex, but I was somehow mesmerized by him, by the fact that the man to whom everyone in the room wanted to talk was giving me his undivided attention, and I meekly followed him upstairs.

We spent the next three nights together. I would sit in the front row during his lectures and feel a glow of warmth each time he looked at me, aware that the rumours had already started to circulate, but not caring. Only caring that Martin would look at me again by the time I counted to twelve, because that would mean he was going to fall in love with me. Even I wasn’t naïve enough to believe he might love me already.

I like to think that if I had met Martin with the wisdom and cynicism of my current thirty-one years, instead of the romanticism and dreams of twenty-four, there are two things that would have been different.

The first is that I would never have slept with him in the first place, because now I know that these course lecturers regularly look for someone as I was then: a young shy girl, preferably rather plain, who would be flattered and impressed with their false charm and attention.

The second certainty is that when the relationship continued after the four-day course, I would have known that those times when he said he couldn’t see me because he was working, those nights when he’d rush out of bed after sex and leave, the fact that he never gave me his telephone number, only a pager, meant only one thing.

Of course I should have known he was married. But you see what you want to see, and you hear what you want to hear. I didn’t know better. I was so flattered, so swept up by someone, anyone, telling me I was beautiful, I didn’t stop to think about anything else.

Si knew. Although he didn’t say anything at the time. He once tentatively asked me if I thought he might be married, and I was so furious with him he never brought it up again. Until I knew for certain. At which point Si sniffed and said, ‘I told you so.’

‘I hate it when people say I told you so,’ I said.

‘I know. I’m sorry. But I told you so.’

And so it went on.

The whole Martin Malarkey (Si’s expression, not mine) lasted two years. Two years that gradually wore me down until there was almost nothing left. Two years that shattered my dreams of romance and everlasting love. Two years that taught me never to open myself up again for fear of getting hurt.

In fact the only good thing to come out of it was the weight loss. Even after he confessed he was married, I continued to believe that he loved her but wasn’t in love with her. I believed that she had happily consented to his wishes to sleep in the spare room and that they hadn’t had sex for two years. I believed that the only reason he was staying was because of the children, but as soon as they started school he would leave.

I believed this until I found out she was pregnant again. Don’t ask me how I found out – a long and complicated story – but I did, and Martin denied it until he could see I wasn’t buying the lies any more, and then it was over.

So, as I was saying, the weight loss. I couldn’t eat. Quite literally. Could. Not. Eat. For weeks.

‘You know you’re becoming a lollipop,’ Si would say. ‘You have this huge hair and a little sticky body. Please eat this,’ he’d beg, proffering home-made coconut pie with chocolate sauce, or treacle tart, or salmon fishcakes. ‘We’re worried about you.’

Josh and Lucy would invite me over for dinner and exchange concerned glances when they thought I wasn’t looking, too busy sighing and poking at pastry with my fork.

Finally Si dragged me up to Bond Street. ‘We might as well take advantage of the fact that you now have hipbones,’ he sighed, pulling me into Ralph Lauren.

‘But I’ll never wear this,’ I kept hissing at him, although I had to admit, if I were into clothes and had unlimited finances, I probably would have bought them.

Eventually we settled on Fenwick, much to Si’s horror, and I bought a couple of size 10 trousers and a tight sweater, just to keep him happy, although I was slightly smug about not having to buy a size 14 for the first time in years.

‘You’re a woman,’ Si said in disgust, shaking his head in amazement. ‘You must understand the concept of retail therapy.’

I wore the trousers for a while, until I started becoming happy again, and soon I was back to my normal size and the trousers were given to my secretary. And since then I haven’t really been involved with anyone.

There have been a few, but they’ve always been too short. Or too tall. Too handsome. Not handsome enough. Too young. Too old. Too rich. Too poor. Quite frankly these days I prefer a good book.

‘What about Brad?’ Si asked me one day.

‘Brad who?’ We were sitting at a café in West Hampstead, with Josh and Lucy, and a pile of the Sunday papers. It’s become a bit of a tradition with us now. One o’clock at Dominique’s, every Sunday, for coffee, croissants, scrambled eggs and papers.

We were all engrossed. I was stuck into the Sunday Times News Review, Josh had the Business section, and Lucy was reading Style. Si had the magazine.

‘Brad who? Brad who?’ he said indignantly. ‘There is only one Brad,’ he finally exclaimed, adding, ‘Brad Pitt. That’s who.’ Si held up a picture of said man caught in a paparazzi snap coming out of a restaurant.

‘What about him?’ Lucy asked.

‘What about him for Cath?’

‘Yes,’ I said slowly, as if talking to a child. ‘Because Brad Pitt would dump Jennifer Aniston for a short, plain, mousy…’

‘You’re almost blonde,’ Si interrupted. ‘And he loves blondes! Remember Gwynnie.’

Josh put down his paper and looked at Si, shaking his head. ‘Si, what on earth are we talking about? What is this conversation? Have you gone mad?’

‘No. I just meant that Cath finds fault with every man who even goes near her, and he’s completely perfect, but she’d probably find something wrong with him too. Wouldn’t you?’ He looked at me.

‘’Course,’ I said, examining the picture before exclaiming very seriously, ‘His hair’s too greasy.’

Josh and Lucy gave up introducing me to their friends a long time ago, but men never seemed to be much of a priority after Martin.

Not that I relished spending the rest of my life by myself, but I wasn’t, not with Si, not with Josh and Lucy.

Damn. Si will be here in fifteen minutes and the place looks like a tip. As you would expect, Si’s flat, despite being in the less than salubrious area of Kilburn, is immaculate. Not particularly smart, I grant you, but only because Si’s work is so irregular he can’t afford to re-create the room sets he drools over in Wallpaper magazine.

Mine, on the other hand, is a mess. The flat itself is in a mansion block, and therefore lovely and large, but interiors have never been quite my thing, and the fact that most of the furniture was passed on by elderly relatives or well-meaning friends has never particularly bothered me.

It bothers Si, though. Every time he comes over he sits on the sofa, growing more and more fidgety, before getting up and re-arranging. He pulls books off the bookshelf and arranges them in neat little piles on the coffee table, together with whatever bowls he can find.

He plumps up cushions and rummages around in my wardrobe for old scarves, which he drapes over furniture. Si’s a big believer in draping, although he claims he hates it and is resorting to desperate measures to hide the ‘hideous pieces of crap’. He collects mugs that are gathering mould, and, shooting me filthy looks, takes them into the kitchen, stands them in the sink and covers them in hot, soapy water.

He has been known to get the vacuum out of the cupboard and do the entire flat, but, as he says, hoovering has never been his favourite job. Give him a pair of rubber gloves and a can of Pledge, however, and he is as happy as anything.

I run around the living room, gathering papers, videos, books, and stack them in a precarious pile next to the sofa, well out of Si’s view. The mugs are literally thrown into the sink, and then I remember the bed and rush in to shake out the duvet.

‘Only real sluts don’t make their bed,’ Si said one day, after which point I have tried to remember to make it. At least when he’s coming over.

At seven thirty on the dot the doorbell rings. I haven’t had time for a bath, and I run to the door tugging a cream cardigan over my head because I can’t be bothered to undo the buttons.

‘Are my eyes deceiving me? Could that be… cream?’ says Si. ‘That’s adventurous. What happened to basic black? I don’t think I’ve seen you in a colour for years.’

‘It’s not a colour,’ I say grumpily. ‘It’s cream. Anyway, would you like to come in for two seconds to see how tidy I am?’

Si pops his head round the living room door and marches straight over to the side of the sofa. The bit that’s supposed to be hidden from view. One tap of his toe and the pile is once again all over the floor.

‘Cath, my love, did you think my instincts would have failed me? Did you think, perhaps, that they had gone absent without leave? Or perhaps you think I’m rather stupid…’

‘All right, all right. Sorry. But you have to admit it looks okay.’

‘No,’ Si says slowly. ‘Although relatively speaking I suppose I’ll have to concede it does.’ He checks his watch. ‘Josh said quarter to. Shall we wander over?’

I nod and grab my coat, turning to see Si watching me.

‘Sweets,’ he says. ‘You really should make more of an effort. Put on just a tiny bit of make-up on this gorgeous spring evening. What if Mr Perfect turns up?’

‘I don’t need Mr Perfect,’ I say, closing the door behind us and tucking my arm cosily into Si’s. ‘I already have you.’