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‘Like kissing their best friend in front of the whole room when the current Romeo is being a slightly harder nut to crack?’
Oh, hell. I’d actually done that too, hadn’t I? Not that I’d planned it, though. I’d just got carried away in the heat of the moment.
Adam hadn’t spoken to me for a month after Sharon’s party, even though I’d wheedled and whined and pulled every trick in the book to get him to forgive me. In the end I’d just turned up on his doorstep one day—no tricks up my sleeve, not even any make-up on—and begged him to give me another chance, to say we could be friends again. There’d been a huge Adam-shaped hole in my life. One I hadn’t cared for very much. One I hadn’t thought I could go on living with. Its presence had nibbled away at my very soul.
Adam had forgiven me. Eventually. But since then we’d both tacitly agreed to ignore the boy-girl element to our relationship, and I must have done a pretty good job of it if I’d managed to forget how atrociously I’d behaved.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said quietly. ‘I’m such a horrible person. No wonder Nicholas Chatterton-Jones wants nothing to do with me.’ And this time I wasn’t even angling for a compliment. I really meant it.
Adam pulled me close again and let out a long breath. ‘Don’t be silly. You’re fabulous. You know you are. It’s just that I realised that you won’t let the men in your life be anything but “puppies”, and I’m the sort that refuses to wear a collar and lead for anyone—not even you. So for that reason, and probably a few more, I decided we work better as friends.’ And then he kissed the top of my head.
One corner of my mouth tried to smile.
Adam carried on talking, and I could feel his warm breath in my hair. ‘I have to warn you…well…I’m sorry to say I don’t think you stand a chance with this one. You’d better find yourself a different puppy to train.’
Sorry? He didn’t sound sorry in the slightest.
I sat up and looked at him sharply. ‘What do you mean?’
He hesitated, and I half hoped he would drop it. Adam and I didn’t have conversations like this. But then, instead of looking down at his battered old trainers, he looked me straight in the eye. I held my breath. Just a little.
‘Guys like Chatterton-Whatsit… Well, sometime less is more. That’s all I’m saying.’
‘You think I’m too…?’ I trailed off, not quite sure how to label myself.
‘Maybe.’
I frowned. ‘But that’s who I am! Nicholas Chatterton-Jones might be a god, but I’m not changing myself for anybody.’
Adam looked rather weary. He shook his head. ‘That’s not what I’m saying. It’s just that there’s a girl underneath all of—’ he waved his hand to encompass the hairspray, the lipstick, the polka dots ‘—this. Just don’t forget that.’
I didn’t know what to say to that. Of course I brushed the hairspray out and took the lipstick off at night. I knew what I looked like without all of it. It was just that all of this, as Adam had so articulately put it, was how I felt on the inside. I only dressed the outside up to match.
I scowled at him. It felt as if he was criticising me, and I didn’t care for it much.
‘What makes you such an expert at relationships?’ I said sulkily, folding my arms and shifting back to rest against the opposite end of the sofa. ‘You haven’t had a serious girlfriend since Hannah, and that was a good couple of years ago.’
Adam matched my position, folding his arms across his shirt. ‘I’ve been working hard on building the business up. I haven’t had time for relationships. Unlike some people I know, I don’t think it’s fair to toy with people and then drop them when it suits me.’
See? This was why we should have never veered into to this territory. It was all getting horribly messy, and the lovely, smiling, joking Adam I knew had totally disappeared. I suspected that I too was being less than my normal charming self, but I wasn’t about to back down, and I wasn’t about to let my Best Bud analyse me further.
‘You never did tell me why it all fizzled out with Hannah. Did she get fed up with you spending all your time mucking about in garden sheds?’
That was below the belt, I knew. But Adam’s role was to make me feel better, not kick me when I was down, so he’d kind of brought it on himself.
He looked away. ‘My heart just wasn’t in it. I wanted it to be, but it wasn’t. And it wasn’t fair to Hannah to keep pretending.’
Blast, Adam! Just when I was all revved up for a cat fight, he had to go and get all honest on me and deflate my nice little bubble of adrenaline.
He looked back at me, an expression in his eyes I hadn’t seen many times before. ‘I hate it when you get like this about my job. I’m proud of what I’ve achieved, and I’ve been nothing but supportive of you.’
Urgh. I felt like an utter heel. He was right. I was taking cheap shots at my best friend just because some guy had had the nerve not to fall instantly at my feet. I was behaving despicably.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I would have gone on, but there was a lump as big as one of my paste brooches in my throat.
Adam put his hand on top of mine and squeezed. ‘Apology accepted. You’ve really got it bad for this Nicholas guy, haven’t you?’
He looked slightly pained, as if he was sharing my misery. I nodded, and my whole insides started to ache. I don’t normally do the crying thing. Who has the time when liquid liner and three coats of mascara are involved? But I’d got this stinging sensation right up at the top of my nose and I knew I was perilously close.
I didn’t know why I liked Nicholas so much. Apart from the obvious looks-like-a-Greek-god, has-piles-of-cash thing. It was more than that. I never usually let guys get to me this way. Adam was right. Normally I was the one pulling all the strings. But there was something about Nicholas that had called out to me right from the start. I had a feeling he might be the elusive cupcake that would assuage my nagging hunger and satisfy all my sweet-toothed desires.
The stinging got worse. I looked at my shoes. Beautiful red peep-toe creations. But even they made me sad, and I didn’t even really know why.
Maybe Nan was right. Maybe something was ticking inside me. I was almost thirty, after all. But, seeing as I was…well, me, I was obviously going for the full-fledged meltdown rather than the polite tick-tock in the background of my life. Nan always says I can’t do anything unless I make a production out of it.
Adam shuffled closer on the sofa, so his arm was touching mine. He leaned down to try and see into my eyes, and nudged me. ‘Coreen…?’
My bottom lip slid forward. ‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe I am too much for Nicholas Chatterton-Jones.’ I shrugged and tipped my head slightly to look at him. ‘It’s a moot point now, anyway. I found out a couple of days ago that Nicholas might be off the market soon. There are rumours about a possible new girlfriend.’
Adam gave me a lopsided smile. ‘That’s never stopped you before.’
I punched him on the arm. ‘That makes me sound awful! I’ve never actually stolen a man away from anyone. I can’t help it if they take one look at me and realise I’m the one they can’t live without.’
Adam pressed his lips together and nodded sagely. ‘That’s what I love about you—your matchless modesty.’
I punched him again. And then I smiled. How did he do that?
He put up his fists and nudged me on the shoulder with one of them. ‘So? Who’s this girlfriend? Do you think you can take her?’
I swatted his hand away, but he kept jabbing me gently on the upper arm, the way boxers did when they warmed up with one of those swinging punch bags.
‘I’m going to take you down in a minute, if you don’t cut that out!’ I said, laughing.
The devilish twinkle was back. ‘Promises, promises,’ he said.
‘It’s that awful Louisa Fanshawe,’ I said, not rising to the bait. And if we were talking fisticuffs, I probably could take her. She was another one of those willowy sorts who’d blow away in a stiff breeze. I wouldn’t risk breaking a nail on her, though, so she was safe on that count.
‘Oh, yes. I’ve heard how awful she is,’ Adam replied. ‘All that charity work…visiting sick children in hospital and campaigning for the homeless. It’s positively disgusting.’
I jabbed him in the ribs with my elbow. He was supposed to be on my side, so why was he practically bouncing up and down? What had he to be so happy about? I decided to direct my ire at the absent Louisa.
‘When she’s not swanning up and down a catwalk for some pretentious designer,’ I pointed out.
I thought about Louisa Fanshawe and her stick-like limbs and big doleful eyes. She wasn’t exactly pretty, but I’d allow for the fact she was striking—in that understated, slightly duck-faced way some high fashion models were. The women on Nicholas’s arm always looked frighteningly similar. Duck-faced and stick-thin was obviously his type.
I sighed again. Louisa was the less Adam had been talking about. I looked down at my chest. Less wasn’t something I had a lot of. I was doomed.
I was about to point this out to Adam, but when I looked up at him he was paying an inordinate amount of attention to the last of the prawn toasts. I think he felt me looking at him, because he offered me the foil tray. I shook my head. ‘You have it.’
He demolished it in one bite, and then turned to look me straight in the eyes. ‘Like I said…’ The seriousness there made my pulse kick. ‘The guy’s an idiot.’
I felt a smile start somewhere deep in my chest and work its way up to my mouth. ‘I love you, Best Bud,’ I said, and wrapped my arms around his neck and pulled him close.
For a long time he was silent and he just held me, soothing me with the rhythmic warmth of his breath on my neck. Then the inhaling and exhaling stopped. Seconds and seconds seemed to drag past before it started again, and when the next breath came there were words floating on it.
‘It’s hard not to,’ he whispered into my neck.
And then I hit him again.
CHAPTER THREE
The Very Thought of You
Coreen’s Confessions
No. 3—You’d think that someone as vain as I am would enjoy looking in the mirror, but sometimes I just can’t face it.
I CONTINUED to mope around for the next few days, and the more I thought about it, the more I thought that maybe Nan was right about something ticking inside me.
Of course I didn’t tell Nan that I might be on the verge of getting serious with someone when I visited her the following Sunday. She’d have had me up at the church to book a date so fast my head would’ve spun. Baby steps. Just thinking about being with one man for a considerable chunk of time was about as far as I wanted to go at present.
No, when I visited Nan we did what we always did—ate roast dinner, drank tea, and planed to watch an old black-and-white movie on the telly. After lunch I observed a further ritual. I went into the spare bedroom, opened the rickety wardrobe, and looked at all the dresses hanging there in their clear plastic covers.
They had been my mother’s. She’d died about ten years earlier, in a shabby little bed and breakfast in Blackpool, killed silently, invisibly and senselessly by a faulty boiler spurting carbon monoxide. And when she hadn’t turned up to go on stage that night at the club they’d just slotted another singer into the bill and carried on. It shouldn’t be that easy to replace someone, should it? People ought be remembered for their unique qualities, even if the choices they made in life weren’t ones you respected, or even understood.
As I did most weeks, I pulled out just one of Mum’s stage dresses and studied it more closely. This one was all shoulder pads and sequins, probably from around the time she’d met my dad. I could imagine Mum, her big Joan Collins-style hair stiff with half a can of hairspray, singing a soft rock ballad into a microphone, her eyes closed and her heart on her sleeve. She’d had a lovely voice. I had a few cassette tapes at home, but I didn’t play them much—too scared they’d warp or wear out.
Her voice had been rich and husky, able to catch every nuance of emotion in a song, whether she was belting it out or making the audience hang on every note. By rights she should have had more success than she did. And maybe she would have done if she’d put all the energy she’d wasted trailing round the country after my father into her career instead.
Despite my love of vintage, I never tried on these clothes. The eighties weren’t my thing, for a start. I knew the dresses would probably fit, but I didn’t want to look in the mirror and see my mother staring back at me. I didn’t want to see that same broken hopelessness in my eyes.
‘Go on—take them down to that shop of yours and get a few quid for them,’ Nan said from behind me.
I hadn’t heard her come in the room. I shook my head, carefully put the dress in its place on the rail and shut the wardrobe door. Nan gave me a sympathetic smile.
‘Cuppa? And that Dirk Bogarde film starts in a few minutes.’
I shook off the sadness that had collected like dust on my mother’s abandoned clothes and smiled back. ‘That would be perfect.’
I loved my Nan. I’d never seen her feathers ruffled, and for someone who’d produced two generations of drama queens she was as sensible and grounded as they came. I hadn’t minded living with her when I was a kid. There had always been cake and cuddles at Nan’s little terraced house. And Nan made everything seem warm and cosy. She never got that far-off look in her eyes that made you feel as if she was thinking of someone else, wanting to be somewhere else, while you tried to tell her about the gold star you’d got for your school project.
It had been easy to fall into the trap of believing I lived with Nan because Mum was always up and down the country, singing in clubs and pubs, or off on cruise ships. While there was a certain amount of truth in that, after her death I’d started to see another reason for her not giving up the club circuit and settling down. Leaving that life behind would have meant giving up hope—hope that she’d bump into Dad, hope that he’d fall in love with her all over again and come home. While she sat in a never-ending succession of grubby backstage changing rooms, putting her false eyelashes and sequins on, she could still deny the truth, pretend that day still might come, when really the dream had expired many years before.
But I didn’t like to think of Mum like that, sad and alone, pining for a man who would never love her the way she had loved him. I liked to remember the happy times. Like when she came home and stayed in the spare room at Nan’s. When I was really small I used to come over all shy at first. I’d be awed by the glamorous lady sitting on Nan’s old-fashioned brown sofa. But it hadn’t taken me long to get all loud and demanding, to be clambering all over her and tugging her to my bedroom to see my toys. I even used to make her hold my hand while I went to sleep.
My favourite memories of her were the times she’d let me dress up in her clothes. She’d even backcomb my hair and put silvery eyeshadow on me. And then I’d clump around the spare bedroom in her shoes, singing one of her songs, doing all the actions, and she’d fall back on the bed and laugh until she cried. My mum had a lovely laugh.
‘Custard Cream?’
I looked up to see Nan offering me a battered tartan tin that, back in 1973, had once contained Christmas shortbread. I’d been so lost in my memories that I’d followed her into the living room and sat down in an armchair on automatic. The titles of the film were staring to roll, so I nabbed a couple of biscuits, balanced them on the arm of the chair, and prepared myself to slip into a world where men were noble, women had impossible eyebrows, and violins expressed every emotion while the actors stayed stiff-lipped, clenching their fists. I quite liked the idea of standing motionless at a moment of crisis, all elegant and dramatic, while an orchestra swelled around me.
I looked down at my floral Capri pants and red suede ballet pumps. Not sure I’d like to live in black and white, though. I’m a Technicolor kind of gal, I suppose.
We were ten minutes into the film when my mobile rang. Nan tutted, but didn’t swerve her gaze from Dirk, looking all square-jawed and beautiful on the screen, so I picked up my cup of tea and walked into the kitchen to answer it. ‘Oh, God, sweetie! I’m so relieved it didn’t go to voicemail!’
I’d recognise those upper-class tones anywhere. Unlike her brother, whose rich voice was even and restrained, Izzi Chatterton-Jones had a dramatic delivery that made booking a table at her favourite restaurant sound as if it was a life-and-death event. If Izzi had been a character in a novel, her dialogue would have been riddled with italics.
‘Hi, Izzi. What can—?’
‘I’ve had the most fabulous idea, darling, and you’ve simply got to help me with it.’
Knowing Izzi, whatever she was planning would be probably be last minute and extremely stressful to say yes to. On the other hand she was bags of fun, and I might even get to see Nicholas again.
‘I’m going to host a country house party!’ Izzi squealed. ‘Mummy and Daddy are going to the South of France for the whole of July, and they’ve said I can borrow the house for an entire weekend. Isn’t that the most super idea ever?’
She paused, probably waiting for me to recover from swooning with excitement. Only I wasn’t. I couldn’t think of anything worse—mud, rain, horsey laughs, everyone dressed in drab tweeds and shooting anything that twitched? Count me out. I was eternally grateful that Nicholas seemed to spend most of his time in London, in his tall white house with black railings in Belgravia. Now, I wouldn’t object to spending a weekend there, given half the chance.
‘Well, what do you think?’ Izzi asked, a hint of impatience in her tone.
‘Super,’ I said, borrowing her vocabulary. None of the words I had in mind would have gone down well. ‘But what’s this got to do with me?’
‘It’s a murder-mystery weekend!’
Okay. I know that compared to the Chatterton-Joneses I’m merely a commoner, but did I really look like the kind of girl who knew how to do someone in? It must be the accent. Although mine was a lot softer than true Cockney, Izzi and her sort probably thought I knew the East End like the back of my hand and was distantly related to the Krays or descended from Jack the Ripper.
‘I…er…don’t think I’ve ever been on one of those,’ I said. ‘What’s involved?’
‘I want to do the whole caboodle—costumes and everything—and that’s where you come in!’
Oh, goody.
‘I can’t abide those fancy dress shop monstrosities,’ she added airily.
I stifled a giggle. The thought of Izzi in a padded Superman outfit, complete with six-pack and biceps, had sprung to my mind, and it made it very hard to listen properly.
‘…so if you can sort all of that out it would be fabulous.’
Huh? Oh, dear. I’d wandered off again. Thankfully I have a full range of phrases tucked away at the back of my head for such eventualities. Sounding very serious, I said, ‘Could you be more specific?’
Izzi launched into a long spiel about wanting authentic thirties clothes for her Agatha Christie-type murder-mystery weekend, and I swear if I had been a cartoon my eyeballs would have been spinning round in my head and dinging like cash registers. Daywear, eveningwear and accessories for eight people! And Izzi only likes the very best stuff. I didn’t care that I was missing Dirk smouldering on Nan’s ancient telly for this. If things went well in the next year or two I was thinking of opening another branch of Coreen’s Closet, somewhere closer to the West End, and Izzi’s connections would really speed things along.
‘It’s going to be such a hoot!’ Izzi said. ‘We’ve all got characters to play. I’ll e-mail you details of every part so you can start hunting for suitable clothes.’
‘What’s your budget?’
Izzi made a dismissive noise, as I’d suspected she would. ‘I care more about it being right than I do about the cost,’ she said, and then she giggled. ‘I have the most fabulous part for you!’
I raised my eyebrows. I’d been hoping she’d say I was on the guest list, but hadn’t wanted to assume. This could have just been a business transaction, after all. I grinned to myself.
