Perfect Blend: A Novel (28 page)

“You know what, Charlie,” Amy said, “I think it’s time for a bath and bed.”

“Aw.”

“Come on. It’s almost half past eight. Brian and Bel will be here any second.”

Charlie agreed to get in the bath as long as he could stay up to say hello to Brian and Bel.

“Okay. Deal. Now scat. I’ve run your bath and put bubbles in. Don’t forget your ears.”

Amy and Sam sat on the sofa. Sam told her how sexy she looked in the clingy black dress she was wearing and kissed her on the lips.

“Charlie’s a great kid,” he said. “Lively, polite, funny—and very smart.”

“That’s not to say he can’t be a handful sometimes.”

“Aren’t all kids?”

“So, go on,” Amy said. “What’s Charlie’s favorite bit of
Shrek
, the bit you couldn’t tell me?”

“You can’t ask me that,” Sam said in mock horror. “I took a solemn oath. A chap doesn’t give up another chap’s secrets. It’s simply not cricket.”

“Don’t tell her,” Charlie’s little voice cried. “Don’t tell her.”

Amy and Sam swung around.

“I wouldn’t have dreamed of it,” Sam said. “It’s our secret.”

“Good,” Charlie said. He turned to his mother. “No soap.”

Amy told him to get in the bath and she’d come in with a fresh bar.

A minute or two later she was in the bathroom, handing him the soap and reminding him again to do his ears.

“I like Sam,” Charlie declared. “He kept my secret.” He began soaping his face. “Do you think he likes snakes?”

“As it happens, I think he does.”

“If he became your husband, he would make you buy me one.”

“Why?”

“Because when children get new daddies, the daddies want to be their friend.”

“Blimey, there are no flies on you, Charlie Walker.”

“There was one tiny one a second ago, but I drowned it.”

Amy laughed. “No … if somebody tells you there are no flies on you, it means you are very smart.”

Amy watched her son basking in parental approval.

“Now, then, get washed. There are clean PJs on your bed.”

As she left the bathroom, she closed the door behind her. From inside came a muffled, high-pitched imitation of Eddie Murphy, straight from
Shrek:
“And then one time I ate some rotten berries. Man! There were some gases leaking outta my butt that day!”

BRIAN ARRIVED
first, minus Rebecca. She had phoned him to say she had an emergency at work and would be along as soon as she could.

Brian and Sam shook hands, but it was clear that they weren’t entirely comfortable in each other’s company.

When Amy had invited Brian to dinner and told him that Sam would be there, he hadn’t look too pleased. “I just can’t get over the fact that Sam is helping to close down my business.”

“Come on, Brian, we’ve been over this. Sam’s a good guy. He does pro bono work in Africa, but he also has to make a living. He didn’t accept the Bean Machine job to spite you.”

“Duh. I do get that.”

“Well, it doesn’t feel like you get it. Now promise you’ll behave.”

“Hey, I’m a grown-up. Of course I’ll behave. I seem to remember that it was you who lost your temper with Sam the first time you met.”

Amy grunted.

When Bel and Ulf arrived, the tension eased. “Omigod,” Bel cried. “Don’t these floorboards look fab? You know what would look great in here? Some distressed old pine furniture.”

“What, you mean like a panic-stricken sideboard?” Brian piped up.

“Yeah, yeah. Very funny,” Bel came back. “It means you paint it and then treat it with chemicals so that it looks old and beaten up.”

Amy said she wasn’t sure that was the look she was going for, but Bel wasn’t listening because by now she had noticed that her green tunic and leggings were a perfect accessory to Amy’s sofa and cushions.

Amy just about managed to interrupt her to make the relevant introductions. Then she was off again. First she mouthed to Amy that she thought Sam was gorgeous, and then she proceeded to tackle him on the subject of Prince Charles’s influence on British architecture. “I mean, the man is a total dinosaur. All he’s interested in is neo-Georgian suburban eyesores, and people in the architectural establishment kowtow to him. If you ask me, he has set British architecture back twenty years.”

Sam was in the middle of explaining why the Prince of Wales didn’t have quite the influence people thought he did, when Charlie appeared, insisting on performing another magic show. Amy protested and said it was well past his bedtime, but Bel and Brian said they would love to see some of Charlie’s tricks.

After ten minutes of Charlie asking people to “pick a card” or “say the magic word,” Amy put her foot down and insisted it was bedtime. “Okay, but only if Bel and Brian read me stories.”

By nine o’clock, stories duly read and Charlie silent, if not asleep, they were still waiting on Rebecca. The last of the nibbles had been finished ten minutes earlier, and everybody was starving.

“I don’t get it,” Bel said to Brian. “Rebecca teaches night school French. What’s the emergency? Somebody get tangled up in a reflexive verb?”

“Very droll,” Brian came back. “As it happens, she had to teach a later class as well as her own because one of the other tutors is ill.”

Rebecca arrived five minutes later, full of apologies and bearing a bunch of freesias. Rebecca was every bit the doe-eyed beauty Brian had made out. She was tall and willowy, with dark curls that cascaded down her back. She was wearing a short vest top over skinny cropped jeans with turnups. Her belly button contained a pretty sapphire piercing.

Brian stood up as she came into the room and immediately offered her some wine, which she turned down in favor of sparkling water. “You sit down,” he said. “It’s coming right up.” He couldn’t have been more attentive or looked more smitten if he’d tried.

Amy couldn’t help noticing that she wasn’t wearing a bra. Because she had no bust to speak of, this made her look girlish and vulnerable rather than sexy.

It was only when Amy started serving the food that she realized how Rebecca played on this. She couldn’t have the chorizo because the fat upset her lipid balance. Chicken was fine, but rice wasn’t. She didn’t do carbs after six. Amy was about to serve her a chicken breast when Rebecca stopped her. “It is organic, isn’t it?”

Amy said it was free range, which was pretty much the same deal.

“Actually, I won’t have any if you don’t mind.”

Brian didn’t seem remotely irked by her behavior and even offered to make her an egg white omelet. She refused it on account of her egg allergy.

“Oh, dear,” Amy said, “so I guess that means you won’t be wanting any chocolate mousse for dessert.”

Rebecca said she wouldn’t. “And even if I weren’t allergic, I would never eat raw eggs.”

“Of course you wouldn’t,” Bel muttered.

Amy was aware of Brian kicking Bel under the table.

In the end Rebecca accepted some cottage cheese. She ate this with Amy’s salad, using chopsticks, which she produced from her bag.

“And you use chopsticks because …” Bel said, irritation seeping from every pore.

“Oh, they force you to eat smaller amounts, so it’s so much kinder on the digestion.”

“Makes sense,” Brian said. “Maybe we’d all be healthier if we ate with chopsticks.”

At that point Rebecca announced that she just happened to have a spare set. She handed them to Brian. Looking more than a tad awkward, he took them and dutifully attempted to finish his Spanish casserole. Unable to cut into his chicken breast, he stabbed the thing and tried to eat it as it hung off a single chopstick. In the end, his T-shirt covered in gravy, he apologized and went back to his knife and fork.

Toward the end of the meal, Sam finally raised the Bean Machine issue with Brian and said how bad he felt about it. Brian said that these things happen and that he shouldn’t give it a second thought. “Plus, we’ve had a stay of execution because the builders are still trying to get money out of Bean Machine.”

Sam said that he knew about this and that they seemed no closer to resolving it. “The word on the street is that Bean Machine is in financial difficulty, but the company is denying it.”

This cheered Brian up no end. From then on, the two of them started to hit it off. They both got to chatting with Ulf about his job, and Brian said how he’d watched this operation to cure Parkinson’s disease. “Ah, it isn’t actually a cure, but it can really help the symptoms,” Ulf singsonged. Twenty minutes later he was still regaling everybody with the minutiae of the procedure. Once he had finished, there was silence. It seemed that nobody wanted to ask him any questions in case this set him off again.

In the end Bel broke the tension—only to create more.

“So, Rebecca, Brian tells me you’re a born-again virgin.”

Brian glared at her. For a second time Amy was aware of his foot lashing out in Bel’s direction.

“Ouch!”

Ulf asked her if she was all right.

“Fine,” she said, looking daggers at Brian.

If Rebecca was angry with Brian for revealing that she had reclaimed her virginity, she wasn’t about to show it, at least not in public.

“Yes,” she said, “that’s true. Last year I took a vow of chastity.”

Bel asked her why.

“Don’t you find that you’ve indulged in far too many meaningless sex acts in your life?”

Bel grimaced, clearly assuming this was a barb aimed at her, but she let it go.

“Yeah, but as meaningless sex acts go, some of them were pretty amazing.”

“Well, when I find the man I want to marry, I want the love-making to be really special. I decided the only way to make that happen was to give up on sex until I get married.”

“So you’ve had the hymenoplasty operation, then?” Ulf inquired.

“Excuse me?” Sam said, eyes wide.

“Yes, I’ve had my hymen restored,” she said as if she were discussing her new highlights.

“I’ve read about the procedure,” Ulf said. “The surgeon takes the residual tissues of the hymen and stitches them back together. It’s very successful, apparently.”

“That’s right,” Rebecca said. “In fact, some wives do it every year as a present to their husbands. That really appeals to me. It’s sort of an annual cleansing and rededication, if you will.”

“Actually, I won’t if you don’t mind,” Bel said, reaching for the wine bottle.

They were having mint tea or coffee—or in Rebecca’s case, white tea that she carried with her in a tiny Chinese enamel tin—when Bel’s mobile went. After a couple of seconds, the color drained from her face. “Okay, I’ll be there in a few minutes.” She flipped the lid on her phone. “I gotta go. That was my next-door neighbor. She found my back door swinging open. I’ve been burgled.”

It turned out that Ulf couldn’t take Bel home because he was getting the sleeper to Edinburgh, where he was speaking at a conference the next day. They’d already planned for her to take a cab home.

“I’ve got my car,” Brian said to Bel. “I’ll take you. No arguments.”

“But what about Rebecca?”

Rebecca said she could call a cab, but Sam said he would drop her home. He and Amy had agreed earlier on that Charlie-wise it was far too soon for him to spend the night.

Thank yous and goodbyes were hurried, and in less than five minutes everybody was gone. Afterward Amy did the dishes and tidied up. It was funny that since Victoria’s marathon clean she was experiencing a newly acquired urge to keep the place tidy. She fell into bed around midnight, wondering if she ought to phone Bel. She imagined she would still be up waiting for the police. She dialed her number. It rang out for a few seconds and then went to voice mail. Amy decided that the police—with uncustomary efficiency—had come and gone and that Bel had hit the sack.

Just after nine the next morning, the phone rang.

“Hi, its me.”

It was Bel.

“Hon, is everything okay?” Amy said. “Was much taken?”

“Oh, you know, the usual: laptop, the Nikon Jurassic Mark bought me. Of course the police weren’t remotely interested. Oh, and by the way, I slept with Brian.”

“What?”

“I know. I can still hardly believe it. He insisted on staying over because the burglars had broken the lock on the back door and the place wasn’t secure. Anyway, then we had this huge fight.”

“What about?”

“He had a go at me for bringing up the chastity thing at dinner and said I only did it because I wanted to get him in trouble with Rebecca and split them up. I said if I wanted to split them up it was only because I thought Rebecca was a self-obsessed princess and totally wrong for him. He said that was none of my business and I had no right sticking my nose into his relationships, which I guess is true. Anyway, then he accused Ulf of being a bore and said he’d had more interesting conversations with his coffee blender. I started shouting, defending Ulf. He shouted back, swearing and calling me names, and before we knew what was happening, we were tearing each other’s clothes off.”

“About blinkin’ time! How long have I been saying that the two of you were meant for each other? So have you finished it with Ulf?”

“Whoa. Hang on. Brian and I slept together. That does not make us an item.”