Married By Christmas Page 22

  ‘I see,’ Charisma said, slicking on sticky red lipstick without bothering to blot, so that it shone on her full lips. Without warning, she stood up and turned around, unpopping the buttons on her shirt, and pulling her camisole over her head to reveal a sensible black soft cotton bra. Knowing what was coming next, Anna turned her back on Charisma as she unhooked the bra and slipped into some lingerie confection that Anna suspected was much less comfortable and much more Charisma.

  ‘So anyway,’ Anna continued to talk to the wall. ‘Tom had actually forgotten you two were married, which was why I only found out a couple of days ago. Now, my wedding, my dream wedding that I have been waiting for all my life is only a few days away. I have everything in place, every single little detail covered, but it can’t go ahead unless you sign these papers. Then a judge will annul your marriage. And that’s why I came to New York, to find you, to ask you to sign the papers and let Tom and me get married on Christmas Eve just like we planned.’

  There was a moment of silence behind Anna’s head in which she imagined Charisma coming at her with something heavy and blunt. But instead of being moved to murder her, Charisma seemed positively blithe.

  ‘Impressive,’ she said, the sound of a zip being sharply pulled up punctuating her comment. ‘It takes some kind of broad to take a plane to another country to make sure she gets her man right where she wants him.’

  ‘Oh, he’s already where I want him,’ Anna said, turning around slowly to find Charisma in all her full-bodied glory, wearing a draped pewter metallic dress with a plunging neckline, teamed with a pair of suede knee-length high-heeled boots. Her mane of chestnut hair was spread luxuriously over her shoulders, and she was standing with her hands on her hips, one of which was cocked in an if-you-want-it-come-and-get-it-bitch stance. Channelling Joan Collins circa 1987 for all she was worth, Anna raised a determinedly unimpressed eyebrow back at her.

  ‘All this,’ she said gesturing at Charisma. ‘This is just admin.’

  Anna braced herself, expecting Charisma to fly at her, grab her hair and pull her to the ground in a frenzy of female violence. And with very little idea about how to catfight, outside of the Regina Clarkson incident, which it was fair to say she didn’t exactly come out on top of, Anna wondered if she would come out of this alive. It wasn’t her life that flashed before her eyes, but images of her never-to-be-worn wedding dress languishing in a charity shop window. Though maybe she could be buried in it. Would there be time to tell someone she wanted to be buried in her wedding dress before Charisma gouged her eyes out with that French manicure? Steeling herself as Charisma took two swaggering steps towards her, Anna prepared to meet her fate. Which was when Charisma dissolved into a fit of girlish giggles, almost doubling up in laughter and leaning one hand on Anna’s shoulder to steady herself.

  ‘Oh my God, that was brilliant,’ she gasped, clutching her jiggling chest, as tears of mirth threatened her immaculately applied mascara. ‘Very Dy-nasty. I can see why Tom has fallen for you, you are an Amazonian, babe!’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Anna asked her, blinking.

  ‘Defending your man, you were magnificent,’ Charisma said, holding out her arms to Anna as if she actually expected some sort of hug. ‘I’m sorry, darling. I couldn’t resist seeing exactly what kind of woman it was that had finally, legitimately got Tom when he was sober and willing. I was messing with you, silly! Come on, come and hug it out and we’ll sign those papers and get you on your way down the aisle!’

  Anna remained where she was. ‘Is this an elaborate ruse in order for you to lull me into a false sense of security and then break my neck when I’m least expecting it?’

  ‘Darling, if I’d wanted to do that you’d be dead by now!’ Charisma exclaimed. ‘Now come here and let me kiss you. Ooh it’s like you’re my sister wife! We’re positively Amish!’

  As it happened Anna didn’t need to move a step to be engulfed in a flurry of perfume and hair as Charisma hugged her, with far more familiarity than Anna was comfortable with. Nevertheless she tried to respond with the same level of generous friendship that her nemesis seemed to be gifting her with, even though she just couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being hugged by a predator, a predator biding her time before striking.

  ‘You know what this calls for,’ Charisma said, picking up what looked like a real fur coat from the back of a chair, and a handbag that, if it was real, would cost about eight hundred pounds. ‘This calls for you and me to get ourselves a drink, baby!’ Anna opened her mouth to decline, but was promptly shouted down. ‘No, I won’t take no for an answer. Manhattan brace yourself, Tom’s wives are out on the town.’

  With Charisma’s arm hooked determinedly through hers as they headed out of a fire exit at the back of the theatre and into the freezing night, Anna felt a little bit like she was being kidnapped and wondered about the possibility of ending up sleeping with some fishes at the bottom of the Hudson wearing a pair of concrete slingbacks.

  Since announcing her plans for Anna, Charisma had not stopped talking about where she was going to take her new best friend and how they were going to celebrate this particular momentous event in both of their lives, and where they could go for breakfast at dawn, sweeping Anna along like some piece of flotsam doomed to trail in her wake.

  Just in time Anna remembered Miles. ‘Miles!’ she said, stopping dead, so that Charisma stumbled a little over her heels in the snow.

  ‘Miles?’ Charisma fluttered her lashes at her. ‘Your feet hurt already?’

  ‘No, my friend Miles. He’s waiting for me in the lobby. He came with me tonight. For moral support.’

  ‘You have a friend with you, a man friend?’ Charisma asked her, intrigued. ‘Does Tom know?’

  It seemed counterproductive to say no, so Anna just laughed by way of explanation and let Charisma lead her around to the front of the venue, which was now locked up, its metal shutters firmly drawn down. Miles was sitting on the one dry step under the porch, his head bowed, clutching his phone in his hand, staring at the space between his boots. Every angle of his body told Anna that something had happened.

  ‘Hi?’ she said, uncertainly, as she approached him, prising Charisma’s fingers from her arm, grateful that Charisma seemed to understand the need to hang back for a moment. ‘Miles? Hi? Are you OK?’

  Miles looked up at her and Anna gasped to see that his eyes were brightened by tears. Without a moment’s thought she knelt in front of him, barely aware of the wet snow steadily melting through the material of her skirt.

  ‘Oh God, what happened?’ she asked, putting her hands on his knees as she looked up into his face.

  ‘They called, Anna,’ Miles told her, his voice thick with emotion. ‘The management company called about the audition.’ He covered her hands with his own, which Anna noticed were trembling and freezing cold.

  ‘Look, it’s OK,’ she said, sliding her hands out from under his, and putting her palms on his rough cheeks. ‘It’s fine, because, remember, you said it wasn’t about success or money or fame, it was having the chance to do something that made you so happy, and that won’t change, even if they did turn you down.’

  ‘But they didn’t,’ Miles said, so quietly that Anna didn’t hear him at first.

  ‘And anyway,’ she continued, ‘at least this way you won’t be travelling around the world for ever and ever, living a soulless life on the road, populated with endless hotel rooms and women throwing themselves at you and maybe we can even hang out again and—’

  ‘Anna!’ Miles grabbed her hands once again with his freezing fingers, and kissed them in turn. ‘You are not listening to me! I got the job. I got the job, Anna! I’m the new lead singer and guitarist for the NYRDs!’

  Before Anna had a chance to speak, Miles had swept her up in his arms, staggered down the steps with her and was spinning her around and around, the pair of them laughing until they were giddy, a world of Christmas lights flashing by in a neon swirl. ‘This is going to change every
thing,’ Miles told as her as they spun. ‘This is where it all begins.’

  Finally, he set her down unsteadily on her feet, the street still lurching around her, and hugged her so tightly to his chest that Anna could feel his heart thundering through her coat.

  ‘I’m so glad you were here for this moment,’ Miles said into her hair. ‘I can’t imagine wanting to share it with anyone else.’

  But before Anna could think about what he’d said or what it might mean or how she might feel about it, Charisma made her presence felt, letting her coat fall open as she smiled at Miles.

  ‘The lead singer of the NYRDs, huh?’ she said, looking him up and down with naked admiration as he and Anna finally disengaged from their embrace. ‘Well, if that’s not a reason to rock this town tonight, then I don’t know what is.’

  ‘How are you holding up?’ Tom asked Liv when she returned from the ladies’ room after freshening up as best she could. After a day of jet lag and emotionally confusing sightseeing, she’d been determined to change for dinner, and to feel at least halfway human again, retiring to the restroom to slip into a teal-green sweater dress she’d picked up in Banana Republic, and applying some of the make-up the nice lady in Macy’s had sold her, even though she didn’t know she needed any. Just a little dark grey glitter gel on her lids and a sweep of lash-lengthening mascara, complemented with a dash of gloss that brought out what the nice lady had said was the natural cherry red of her full lips. At least now they got to sit down for a few hours, and, if not relax, exactly, as they waited for Anna to make an appearance, at least rebuild their reserves of energy with some good food and alcohol.

  Tom had bargained his way into the Round Table restaurant at the Algonquin, which was supposedly fully booked, by unleashing the full extent of his charm on the flustered and easily impressed young lady at the front desk. She had taken pity on them and squeezed them on to a tiny two-seater table right at the back of the room, where Tom was constantly in danger of having his nose broken by the swing of the kitchen door as it bounded open every few seconds. Liv didn’t mind where they were sitting though, it was exciting enough to be here in the very place where Dorothy Parker and her cohorts had once sat around being funny and wry and cynical about life. As a teenager Liv had always liked to think of herself as a sort of Dorothy Parker of the Home Counties. She was convinced she had been the nearest thing their school had had to a rapier wit and bold literary talent. At least in her head anyway. Her literary ambition hadn’t got much further than Tom’s quest to be the first Englishman to write a great American novel; much less further in fact, when she discovered that what she was really good at was creating sauces and jus and not rewriting Pride and Prejudice for the umpteenth time, only minus the sexual tension and wit.

  Still, now she was seated here, in this historic place where so many conversations had gone before, crackling with life and laughter, and the smell of really good food, Liv was quite content to slip into that fantasy again, casting Tom as her F. Scott Fitzgerald. In her head they were a pair of doomed lovers finding solace in each other’s arms as their worlds fell apart around them. Except, of course, Tom’s life was only just getting going and Liv’s was the same as it ever was. It came to something, she thought wryly as she weaved her way through the tables to the back of the room where Tom was waiting, when the most exciting and impulsive thing that’s happened to you all year is rescuing someone else’s relationship.

  ‘I’m fine, actually,’ Liv told him as she squeezed into her seat, very grateful for the large gin and tonic that Tom had ordered her and which was waiting, quietly fizzing away, when she returned. ‘A little knackered and I sort of wish I had a bed to sleep in tonight, I really thought there’d be at least one room free.’

  ‘There is,’ Tom said confidently. ‘There’s Anna’s room. She’ll be back sooner or later and it might be a bit of a squash, but you girls can share the bed and I’ll sleep on the floor. There will be room at the inn tonight!’

  ‘Yes, but not exactly the romantic reunion you were hoping for?’ Liv asked, watching him across the rim of her glass, as she felt the gin fizz through her veins to her exhausted fingertips and then straight to her head. It was going to be very easy to get drunk tonight, in fact this one drink might do the trick. ‘Obligatory best friend playing gooseberry just when you two should be engaged in a passionate clinch!’

  ‘The thing with me and Anna though,’ Tom said unconcerned, as he perused the menu looking for the closest thing to his usual steak and chips, ‘is that we’ve never really done all that romantic stuff, which isn’t to say I don’t feel that way, it’s just you know. Long looks, hand-holding, big gestures, grand speeches, that’s not really us.’

  Liv and Tom watched each other across the table for quite some moments before they each recognised the irony of the situation and Liv buried her face in her gin once more.

  ‘What I’m trying to say,’ Tom blundered on, his cheeks suddenly flushed, ‘is that we don’t need all that “tinsel” to make our relationship seem real. And that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? When you are about to marry someone, spend the rest of your life with them, it’s not supposed to be about the thrill, or the romance or even the sex, is it? It’s supposed to be about whether you can know for sure in your heart that you will still feel the same way about another person in ten, twenty, thirty years’ time. It’s about whether you’ll make a good team, with the right skill sets for a nice life. And me and Anna, we make a good team. We have the right skill sets.’

  ‘Except you weren’t thinking about the next thirty years when you married Charisma,’ Liv couldn’t help pointing out. ‘Although to be fair she might have quite different skill sets,’ she added a tad cattily.

  ‘That’s my point exactly,’ Tom said, not rising to the bait. ‘I wasn’t thinking about anything when I married Charisma, except where my next shot was coming from and how to keep her interested and entertained, so I could hang on to her a little longer. She was already slipping away from me, the fantasy was almost over, I knew it and I wasn’t ready to live life in the real world again, so I married her in a topless bar. I know it seems silly now but I was … young.’ Tom looked up, catching Liv’s expression as he realised exactly what he’d said. Before, in the café with Martha the slutty lawyer, he made it seem as if it had been Charisma that had more or less coerced him into going through with what he’d thought was a joke ceremony. He hadn’t said anything at all about just wanting to keep hold of her for as long as he could. This time it was Liv’s cheeks that flared with colour as she felt a surge of irrational jealousy over Tom’s willingness to make grand romantic gestures for this strange woman and not her best friend.

  ‘Look,’ Tom stumbled on, ‘what happened between me and Charisma, it’s not the same at all as what I have with Anna. My relationship with Charisma was an infatuation, it was a crush, my brain had nothing to do with anything I said or did, I was crazy about her. And when she left … well, I was heartbroken, sure. But it didn’t take long for me to see that being with her had been like drinking a bottle of tequila every day, I had no idea what I was doing until she was gone and I had a chance to sober up.’ On impulse, Tom reached across the table and covered Liv’s hand with his own. ‘It’s not like that with Anna. She’s beautiful and smart and sensible and she knows what she wants from life, and it’s the same things I want too. And so what if she doesn’t make me feel drunk or out of control, that’s not what matters in the long run, is it?’

  Very slowly Liv withdrew her fingers from underc Tom’s.

  ‘You know what,’ she said, slowly and carefully. ‘I think we should stop talking about Anna now. She’s not here, and it’s not fair. And we’re both tired and a little drunk and very far away from home and I … I’m worried that everything that seems so sane back in London seems insane here in New York and everything that seems so foolish back at home, seems like a good idea here. So let’s stop talking about Anna, and let’s get another drink and some food, OK?�
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  Tom nodded, gesturing for the waiter to come and take their order.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Tom said, after the waiter had gone with instructions to bring them steak and more gin. ‘I don’t mean to put you in an awkward position, it’s just … Well, the thing is, Liv, there isn’t anyone in the world who I can seem to talk to the way I talk to you.’

  ‘Podium!’ Charisma shouted, after their fifth shot of tequila, doing her best to pull Anna up, against her will, onto what was in fact a bar and not a podium, in some neon-lit club that hummed with bass and seethed with writhing clubbers. Not usually one for nightclubs or dancing of any sort, Anna remained with her feet firmly on the slightly sticky ground, feeling impossibly prim and overdressed in her red pencil dress, surrounded as she was by scantily clad young people.

  ‘Come on, doll!’ Charisma urged, shouting to make herself heard over the pounding beats. ‘Let’s dance for the rock star!’

  Anna decided it was probably best to ignore her and, glancing over her shoulder, saw Miles, more than a little high on life and the alcoholic by-product of cactus, dancing with a passing redhead whose eye he’d caught. He had that ability to make women stop and look at him and, if it was bad now, it would be worse when he was officially a rock star. Anna tried and failed not to imagine the hundreds of sexually adventurous women that would be throwing themselves at him morning, noon and night when he was famous, and how much he’d love it. It was hard to feel that Miles had sort of been hers for a little while, and now he would belong to everyone.

  ‘Get up here and grind!’ Charisma hollered again, making Anna look back up at her. ‘You need to move it if you want to keep him interested!’

  ‘Are you kidding, in this skirt?’ Anna said, still not drunk enough not to think about her seams splitting. ‘And I don’t want to keep him interested, he can “grind” with whomever he likes.’