Virtually Perfect (36 page)

'...Antoine kept up with his work, flying all over the place on assignments.  We worked together a lot.  He never really grew up.  I'm sure you remember what he was like, Roger?  Always ambitious.  Never satisfied.  Always wanted just a
little bit
more
...'

Ben took a big gulp of wine.

'I came home a day early from a shoot...  found him in my flat uninvited,' Ben said quietly.

'You know, over the years, he probably took enough bits and bobs from me to fill a bric-a-brac store,' Ben said thoughtfully.  'I never really got angry, always let it go.  It was just mildly annoying... a bit odd, you know?' 

Roger nodded back.  Ben's eyes hardened in a blink.

'I only caught him red-handed once.  He was taking the one thing I could never forgive.' 

He fixed Roger's gawk, glanced at Eve furtively, then down at the table.  His voice dropped to barely a whisper.

'I caught the woman I loved, the woman I was going to marry, in
my
bed, with my business partner...  my brother-in-law... my best friend, supposedly.' 

Ben's face was burning.  He drained his glass.  You could have heard a pin drop. 
He glanced at Eve, saw the look in her eyes. 

Pity.
  

He shut his for a second, then looked up at the domed ceiling.

'...Must have been awfully crowded.'

She couldn't help it.  It just tripped off the tongue.  Everybody was staring.  Ben's gaze lowered, settling on her again.  He sat there, blinking back.

Don't you dare look at me like that.  It's not my fault.  I'm not your whore of an ex. 
Rolling his eyes - staring at the ceiling. 
What a hypocrite! 
He'd been giving her shit all day over Dan, but she'd seen him putting that pretty little blonde in his car hours before that.  She had an overwhelming urge to blurt it all out, right there and then.  To take that imaginary violin he'd been fiddling away on, and batter him over the head. 

Eve's father never approved of her boyfriends.  Never.  Ben was the only one he'd said more than two words to.  He blatantly thought the sun shone out of Ben's arse, and he was the worst of the lot!  Yes he had talent.  Yes he had money.  He drove an Audi and wore a Piaget.  But at the end of the day, who was he?  Just some council estate kid from Bermondsey.  Her dad would ruin him when he found out.

She didn't speak all the way through the main course, but for the odd word to Roger.  She wouldn't look at Ben, staring down into her plate, pushing the food around it.  She had a face like a smacked arse - cheeks blazing, smile long-gone.  Ben was watching her.  Perhaps it wasn't pity he saw in her eyes after all.  Maybe it was guilt.

The award for most inappropriate dessert at a public function had to go to Curtis.  Jelly.  Not dainty individual servings, but a plethora of bizarre creations, brought out by a procession of waiters.  Pink blancmange mounds topped with plump cherries, wibbling on the plate; tall conical creations flip-flopping with every step.   All very risqué - highly comical to Curtis no doubt - quite in keeping with his boyish sense of humour.  Not quite so funny when you're sitting with your ex-boyfriend, your estranged father, and his tart.  Eve didn't know where to look.  Her face was like thunder.  She wasn't even vaguely amused.

'So what are you driving now?' asked Ben.

Well someone had to talk.

'Just the same.  I've still got the S Type,' replied Roger. 

Ben was surprised.  Roger used to trade his car in regular as clockwork.  He'd once given him an hour long lecture on vehicle depreciation, not that it meant much to Ben at the time.  He only had a beat up Cinquecento.  He used to park it two streets away whenever he met Roger on a job and pretend he arrived there by taxi.

'I'm thinking about trading the TT in for one of those R8s,' Ben confided in him.

Roger raised his eyebrows, peering down, wiping a globule of jelly from his tie with his napkin.

'That's a hell of a jump.'

Ben shrugged.

'I've just finished a job out in Saudi.'

'By royal command, allegedly.' growled Eve.

Ben looked up across the table.  She gave him the strangest look.

'Really?' Roger cooed, his eyes lighting up.  'That sounds very exciting!'

Alex put her hand to her mouth to stifle a yawn.  Eve caught it and smiled to herself.

'It had its moments,' said Ben, smiling wryly. 

What's with her?

Eve was giving him the evils again.

'Have you still got the Silver Ghost?'

Ben remembered the photograph sitting on Roger's desk.  That car was his pride and joy.  Ben had only seen it once, parked in the garage in Esher.  He doubted she ever made it through the front gates.  It was like a two hundred grand Rolex or an Alexander Price suit.  You don't use them in real life, you just own them for posterity, unless you're a rap star, a fool or a mad dictator.

When Ben looked up from the raspberry and Champagne creation, he found them all staring at him.  Eve's face had turned white.  Her black eyes glistened, flickering back.  She looked at him like he'd just kicked her.

'What's the matter?' murmured Ben.

She gasped like a goldfish but no words came out.  He saw her hand shaking; heard the spoon clatter down. 

Ben watched in dismay as she ran out of the room. 

Ben turned to Roger, like a rabbit in the headlights.

'What did I say?' 

Roger's glare was ferocious.

'Shall I go and see if she's alright?' sighed Alex.

'No,' said Roger sharply.  'That won't help at all.' 

He turned back to Ben. 

'You mean to say you didn't know?' he said incredulously.

'Know what?' said Ben, eyes wild with confusion.  'Can somebody please tell me what's going on?'

Roger held his face in his hands, closing his eyes.  Ben saw anger melt into pain.  He felt the claws on his shoulder.

'The car,' Alex whispered in his ear.  'The Silver Ghost.  She got pissed and drove it into the Thames.'

Ben turned to her, his eyes buried in a frown.

'Who?  ...Eve?' he murmured doubtfully.

'No!' scowled Alex.  'Her mum, of course.  That's how she killed herself.'

Eve burst out into the foyer.

'Is there a vending machine anywhere around here?' she blurted at the receptionist.

The twenty something just gawped at her.

'...There's a tampon machine in the ladies.'

'No, no!  Cigarettes!'

Eve was like a crackhead sniffing out her next fix.

The girl behind the counter shook her black shiny bob. 

'I'm sorry,' she said.  'We don't sell them anymore.'

Eve huffed.  Of course they didn't.  Socially, smokers in 21st Century England were just a shade above petty criminals and politicians.

That's it.  Fuck this.  I'm off.

Eve felt around in her handbag and pulled out the ticket.

'Could I have my coat please?'

'Of course,' the girl nodded at her, plucking the ticket from Eve's trembling hand and wandering to the rail.  'They took the machine out ages ago.  I'd offer you one of mine, but I had my last one at breaktime...  There's a newsagents over on Castle Square though,' she said, carefully passing Eve's coat over the counter.  'It's just down the bottom, over the street.'

Eve's eyes widened.  Of course there was.  She was right.

To stay, or to go? 
Stay?... Or go?
  Eve sat puffing her second cigarette, pondering the question.  The stone bench was cold.  Her bum had gone numb.  The sky was filling with cloud, it looked like it might rain.  The speeches would be over by now - they'd probably had the first dance.  That was the acceptable time to leave, wasn't it?

She didn't want to go back to the flat though.  There were two ghosts rattling around in there now: first Dan, and now Ben.  She was already outnumbered.  Eve shuddered, drawing the collar of her coat tighter around her neck.  She couldn't go back inside either.  She didn't know what to do. 

'...Eve?'

It had taken half an hour to find her.  Ben was going spare.  There had been a rather embarrassing episode in the ladies' where he'd been calling under the cubicle door, to what turned out to be a rather agitated Hilary Clinton.  He'd been wandering all over the Pavilions in places he shouldn't have been.  He'd even driven over to her flat. 

'Can I pinch one of those,' he asked, hesitantly sitting down beside her.  Eve pushed the gold box and the lighter into his hands.  She wouldn't look at him.  She hadn't looked at him once.  She just sat shivering, staring into space. 

There was a robin not far away.  He'd been there ever since she first got there.  Gradually edging closer.  He was an inquisitive soul, hopping around on those spindly legs, watching her with his beady black eyes.

Ben wanted to put his arms around her.  He wanted to make it all better.  He didn't care about anything else anymore.  He just wanted to make it all right. 

'You know, on paper, you were virtually perfect,' she told him ruefully.  She took the last puff of her cigarette, stubbing it out beneath her black Malono Blahnik, exhaling a plume of smoke to the dulling sky.

'Nobody's perfect, Eve,' said Ben, taking a cigarette from the box, tapping it on the top, lighting it up.  'There are no angels walking the earth.  Or demons, come to that.  I never claimed to be anything other than human.'

He didn't notice her glaring at him.

'But what I said in there,' Ben mumbled awkwardly.  'I hope you know I...  I had no idea...  I... I...'

'It's OK,' she said, the frown dissipating a little.  'I know.'

The robin was still watching her, edging ever closer, his red breast feathers ruffling in the light breeze.

'When I was little,' she said wistfully.  'if I expressed the faintest interest in something, Dad used to go out and buy the biggest and best he could find.  I started playing the keyboard at school - just a cheap little synthesiser.  He went out and bought a Steinway for me!'

She laughed.

'What was I meant to do with that?  My fingers were too small.  I couldn't play it, so I gave up...  I liked My Little Pony.  So he bought three Connemaras.  They were all over 14 hands!  I had to wait three years till my feet could reach the stirrups!'

She smiled to herself.

'I'm not knocking him, I know the thought was there, but I didn't want all of this...
stuff. 
I just wanted him to be around a little bit more.  Be a normal family...'

Ben smirked and shrugged.

'What's one of those?'

She met his gaze, fleetingly.

'Mum drank for as long as I can remember,' she said quietly.  'I'm sure it was only because she felt lonely.  We used to hear her crying at night, while he was off schmoozing his authors at fancy dinner parties...  With fancy women, probably.'

Ben toked his cigarette.  He shook his head.

'No,' he said.  'It wasn't like that.' 

'They'd have some terrible fights when he got back.  She'd be screaming at him half of the night.  Eventually, he stopped bothering to come back at all...  That's when she really went downhill. 

'She'd ring me sometimes in the early hours - I couldn't get any sense out of her.  Amy had Simon so I moved back from Clapham.  Mum didn't have anyone...  

'She'd have drunk herself sober by morning, then just start all over again.  Her car smelt like a brewery.  She used to stash half litre bottles of Smirnoff down the back of the seats.  I couldn't stop her.  I mean, I'd bin what I found, but as soon I went to work she'd be off buying more.  What was I meant to do?  Tie her to the bed?  Lock her in the garage? 

'She was meant to be the parent - so was he.  It was me who was supposed to be the child.' 

She turned to Ben, black eyes gleaming, skin deathly white.

'When she died, when she... do you know what Dad did to make it alright?'

Ben stared back at her.  He just shook his head.

'He came home with a kitten.' 

Eve smiled bitterly. 

'I could barely look at Bo when we first got him.  Every time I did, it just made me mad.  My dad honestly thought he could fill the space my mother left behind by buying a fucking cat.'

Ben flicked the cigarette into the grass.  Eve stared at the nub, glowing in the fading light.  She felt his arms wrap around her, rubbing her arms.  She felt the warmth of him.  She closed her eyes for a moment, breathing in his scent. 

Her gaze wandered back to the path.  Her eyes widened, darting up and down furiously. 

She couldn't find him.  The little robin had gone.

'Your dad used to have a picture on his desk,' she heard Ben say.  'Two little girls with big dark eyes.'