Muddy Waters (23 page)

‘What are you doing? Are you ready to come down to the bar for a drink?' Abigail came out onto the balcony and watched Stella carefully watering the plants. ‘You're always
tending
to something,' she commented, ‘you're a complete born-again mother hen!'

Stella laughed, ‘Oh, thanks a lot! And what would have happened if I'd refused to tend to
you
when you called up all desperate?'

‘Oh, I don't need
nursing
, just comfort and company,' Abigail said breezily. ‘And I'm getting much better. I can feel my spirits rallying. Chameleon must have done me more good than I ever thought possible.'

‘Ready for anything now, are you?' Stella asked slyly.

‘Suppose I am.
And
you've come out of it pretty well yourself, so don't pretend you were just there as my minder.' She consulted the little gold watch, ‘Anyway, hurry up, it's past drinks time. Now we're actually
allowed
some, there's catching up to do. I'll wait for you in the bar.'

Stella took her red linen dress out of the wardrobe and held it up in front of her. Her hair, due to Charlene and her team who had, thankfully but unbelievably, known exactly what they were doing, looked glossy, shiny and somehow years younger. Her skin, thanks to several sessions on the super-fast Sunliner, had a long-weekend-in-Nice kind of tan, which suited Stella better than the heavier month-in-Marbella type. She put the dress on and applied her make-up (all new, the old stuff – blunt lipsticks, dated eyeshadows, clogged mascara – simply thrown out) with her newly acquired skill, then she stepped back and inspected the very pleasing results.

‘And what are you two ladies doing? Here for the conference, are you?'

Stella, precarious on a bar stool, sure that her bottom drooped over its edges, looked up from her pre-dinner gin and tonic and straight into the slate grey eyes of the kind of excruciatingly correct man she imagined Abigail's Martin to have become since she last saw him. She recognized a type: early forties, smoothly good looking and smartly businesslike, an advert for a classy watch. Too neat to look convincingly comfortable in old jeans, he might collect coordinated designer leisure-wear and be a life-member of an expensive gym. This one had blond and brown discreetly streaked hair, too much of it, as if letting it grow thick and long for one last time before the baldness that ran in the family set in and youthful good looks were over. He wore a grey suit that was neither shined nor crushed, a soft white shirt and a knitted dark grey silk tie that even Adrian, who detested such superfluous and conventional things, would probably grudgingly agree to wear if an occasion demanded one.

Abigail, more accustomed and more bodily suited to perching prettily on bar stools, swung round and inspected him like a lion wondering about possible lunch. She smiled slowly and lazily at him, and then her gaze shifted to his darker haired, darker suited tall slim companion who hovered and glowered rather uncertainly just behind him.

‘
Hello
,' she beamed, just like, Stella thought, an eager air stewardess welcoming first-class passengers aboard and sizing them up for date potential.

‘The stationery fair? Is that what you're here for?' the grey suit asked.

‘Er, no. Actually we're not, we're just . . .' Stella began.

‘Oh no, we're here checking out property,' Abigail interrupted, smiling broadly, waiting for them to acknowledge her
double entendre.
Obediently (or just politely) the two men laughed. ‘I'm Simon,' the grey-suited one introduced himself, ‘and this is Geoff. And we
are
here for the conference. I'm software and he's techno sundries.' Geoff grunted uncertainly but held out a hand to Abigail to be shaken.

‘I'm Anna and this is Samantha,' Abigail smoothly introduced herself and Stella without so much as an acknowledging blink at the lie. Stella choked over her drink and looked hard and long at Abigail. She had a devilish, sexy grin slapped across her face and her slim legs were crossed high and provocatively. She looked as if she was about to wink, though at whom, Stella couldn't have said. Her left shoe swung casually off the end of her foot, which suddenly looked as rudely inviting as if she was dangling her best knickers. She was enjoying herself in a highly practised kind of way, Stella thought, as if at last she was completely and utterly in her natural element. Stella felt thoroughly out of hers, a long way from home comforts.

‘Your table is ready,' a waiter approached and murmured to Stella and she thanked him, thoroughly grateful to be rescued. ‘Come on, er . . .
Anna,
food's ready.' She slid rather inelegantly down to the floor and as she staggered slightly her arm was firmly taken by Simon.

‘You OK?' he asked quietly.

‘Fine, absolutely fine, thanks, just tripped,' she said, smoothing down her scarlet dress and recovering her dignity. He did have awfully nice eyes.

Abigail unfolded herself like a cat stretching and smiled at the two men. ‘See you later,' she said, her voice full of Mae West promise. Stella was quite surprised she hadn't addressed the pair of them as ‘boys'.

‘Abi, how
could
you?' Stella giggled when they reached the out-of-earshot safety of their table. ‘I've never, not even in my wildest moments, seen myself as a
Samantha
.'

‘Why not? It's a dead sexy name. Suits you, now you've had a make-over,' Abigail said, brutally ripping a bread roll in half.

‘It's only sexy because it rhymes with “panther”. Not a name I can even begin to do justice to. You could at least have let me be “Anna”, you're much more of a “Samantha” than I could ever be. God, that man must think I'm well and truly pissed, sliding off the bar stool so clumsily. It's only because I'm too small to do it with grace.'

‘No, it's because you haven't had enough practice,' Abigail said, laughing. ‘There's a lot of things you haven't had enough practice at.' She waved the bread accusingly at Stella. ‘What have you ordered to eat? The sea bass? Let's have champagne, that will go nicely. I'm having the
mélange de fruits de mer
as they so pompously call it – fish stew that isn't quite up to being called
bouillabaisse
probably.'

‘OK. But
please
promise me we don't have to spend the rest of the evening with Messrs Software and Sundries,' Stella bargained as the wine waiter approached.

Abigail grinned slyly. ‘I can promise not to
try
to spend the rest of the evening with them. But I can't promise they won't try to spend it with us. And of course, they might not be using their real names either, so it's like fancy dress all round, everyone pretending to be someone else. That way you get to
behave
like someone else too.'

‘Are you nuts?' Stella said. ‘Who in their right mind would
pretend
to be called
Geoff
?'

‘Someone called Archibald?' Abigail suggested, laughing.

Stella glanced back towards the bar, which was now filling with conference delegates, some still wearing their plastic identity tags, as if so proud to have their status spelled out beneath their names that they couldn't bring themselves to remove them from their lapels. Perhaps they didn't have much status outside the boundaries of work – perhaps they spent so much time doing these trips away from home that they were treated like slightly inconvenient visitors when they got back home with their freebie offerings of multi-coloured notebooks, supply of fine-line pens and superfluous rolls of state-of-the-art parcel tape. There might be small children who'd grown out of the books Daddy attempted to read to them at bedtime, wives who spent treacherous giggle-and-tell time with girlfriends he'd never even met. She had an odd sneaky feeling inside, surprising herself, a stirring attraction to the man called Simon, although, or maybe because, he was everything that Adrian wasn't. Adrian would dismiss him as ‘straight', assuming corporate dullness and a despicable in-car selection of easy-listening pop classics.

She'd liked his voice, his optimistic readiness to make an approach and enliven a tedious, away-from-home evening. Perhaps he got lonely, out there being successful at sales, she thought, trying to stay sensibly aware that she was quite ridiculously inventing an entire life for him and his colleagues. He was, far more likely, just trying for an easy pick-up and some fast, anonymous sex.

‘Not that it would matter if we
did
have a bit of fun with them . . .' Abigail was musing on, almost to herself. ‘I mean, it's not as if anyone would ever know what we did. No one would probably care. Not in my case anyway. And where,' she suddenly demanded, ‘was Adrian when you called him earlier?
He
could be out somewhere, up to any old thing, for all you know. He could be in a bar just like this one, making a new friend that he isn't going to tell you about.'

Stella took a mouthful of her tomato and avocado salad and thought about Adrian's idea of fun. It usually involved football, films, family. The other obvious ‘f' wasn't, as far as she knew, an extra-mural hobby. ‘I don't think so,' she laughed, ‘Adrian couldn't be bothered. He's terribly lazy. Right now he's probably lying on the sofa with a Sainsbury's chicken tikka, Becks bottles all over the floor and a video of something with spies and Sharon Stone. That's usually his idea of a good night.'

‘Don't you be so sure,' Abigail said, looking straight at her with unnerving seriousness. ‘Wouldn't you advise your problem people never to be too complacent?'

The champagne arrived and Stella quickly gulped down half a glass. ‘Yes I would, you're right,' she agreed. ‘But they're not me . . .'

‘And you're not Adrian either. Think about it.'

Stella didn't think about it. She didn't want to. She'd always assumed it was a comfortable, easy thing, living with someone you could trust. You needed to be able to picture what they were doing in your absence with some degree of accuracy, otherwise all was emotional anarchy. She didn't want to have to torture herself with mental pictures of Adrian and Willow rolling passionately in wet clay on Willow's studio table, or imagine him and Ellen MacIver thrashing in her rockery by the hygienically fumeless glow of her built-in all-gas barbecue. Abigail was telling her there was no such thing as trust and she didn't want the discomfort of even suspecting.

Around them, the dining room was filling with hotel guests. There was the usual out-of-season collection of elderly couples and threesomes of widows treating themselves to a break before the school holidays. Stella imagined them in minibus groups, touring gardens by day, snipping craftily at shrubs, taking illicit cuttings of species that caught their fancy and about which they would later brag coyly to their friends (‘That choisya's from
Sissinghurst,
wasn't I naughty?'). Perhaps she and Adrian would end up like that, sitting opposite each other at tables heavy with damask layers and cumbersome cutlery, nothing to talk about but the day that had just passed, and hoping they'd still be alive for the next one. What use would secret fantasies be then?

‘They might ask us to go to a club,' Abigail was suggesting as their fish arrived.

‘And they might already have found someone a whole lot younger to ask,' Stella said glumly, pouring more champagne.

‘Do you know, you sound as if you'd actually mind that,' Abigail commented with surprise. ‘And there I was thinking you were just about to tell me you needed an early night and had a riveting novel to finish.'

Stella laughed. ‘It's this place. It's so
staid
and
proper
.' She looked around at the eau-de-nil carpet, the muted rose wallpaper with cream and moss green flowers. ‘The furnishings are so discreet, so utterly, offensively
inoffensive.
It's driving me mad. When we're older this is the sort of thing we're supposed to find tasteful. Where do people like us go?'

‘Hell, eventually, if we're lucky. The Other Place will probably be just like this. Bland and boring and tinkling with shopping-mall music.' Abigail giggled, ‘I think you're getting drunk. Here, have some more.' She leaned over and topped up Stella's glass. The waiter brought another bottle, shoving it quietly into the silver ice bucket and deftly whisking away the empty one, though Stella couldn't recall either of them ordering it. She ate her sea bass and ordered a chocolate truffle torte, recklessly obliterating the careful calorie counting at Chameleon. What difference could one little sin make?

Ruth was glad she hadn't, after all, rushed to phone Melissa and tell her about Bernard. Suddenly it was all deeply private, as secret as her first five-year diary, all locked up. She'd done her reporting duty by telling Melissa when she'd first had all-the-way sex, a rather rushed encounter in the far corner of the college car park, in the back of a Ford Mondeo with a blond dread-locked boy from B.Tech Performing Arts. His frantic breath had sounded like Niagara Falls in her ear. She'd laughed when he'd told her she was beautiful, laughed because it had sounded as if that's what he, and his mates fresh from their terribly remote and famous boarding school, had decided was a sure way to get a girl to part with her underwear. His hurt, puzzled face had then told her that she'd been wrong, he really
did
think her beautiful and it was from that moment she'd stopped defining herself as fat, big, overweight, bulky, lumpy, all the words that could put her down. She was determined it would take more than Abigail's casually bad-mannered up-and-down appraisal and judgement to send her back to that kind of insecurity. She sat in the garden on the swing-seat, rocking gently and remembering Bernard's breath on her neck, calmer than the dread-lock boy's, perhaps, she thought, in fear of heart attacks. He must be that old, and her father was always saying he looked just like a battered apple, the perfect shape for a heart-failure man. His hands had left smudges of pinkish oil paint on her breasts, which, like a teenage pop fan who'd got close enough to touch her idol, she had been reluctant to wash. Eventually she'd scrubbed off the marks in the shower, determined that if she didn't, it would be like assuming that she'd never get the chance to lie naked on the velvet sofa with him and get smudge-marked all over again. She had to think onwards, not backwards. That was the kind of thing her mother was always advising.