And he’d hung up; in a fit of pique, so had I.
Of all people, it was Freddie who came the closest to getting through to me. Lacey and I often ran into him at various clubs of Tony’s, where it was too loud to discuss anything but our drink orders, and I knew the two of them had stayed in more constant contact. But I was still surprised when, one Monday in August about two hours after I’d called in sick with another abysmal hangover, he showed up at my flat with a restorative bag of Cornish pasties.
“This is obviously a total nonsense suggestion,” he’d said, handing me a warm puff-pastry pocket. “But what if you tried not getting pissed off your tree all the time?”
I flopped back onto my sofa and took a bite. “This country’s best quality is its belief in butter,” I said, pastry debris shooting into the air like greasy snowflakes.
“And its worst quality is that its third in line to the throne will not be diverted from the topic at hand,” he said, pulling a newspaper from his bag and unfurling it with a flourish. The front page read IVY LEAGUE VALEDICTORIAN?, with five images—styled to look like they’d been torn from an album—of me dashing in or out of clubs, shaky and smeared.
“Hang on,” I said, sitting up and grabbing it from him. “Some of those are from the same night, and one is like two years old. They’re making it sound like I did all of this last week.”
“Clever, I know,” Freddie said, nonchalantly propping his feet up on my coffee table. “But you are going rather hard.”
“This from a guy who goes rather hard with a new girl every week, just to piss off his father,” I said. “At least I’m not dragging anyone else into this.”
“Touché,” Freddie said. “But all my relationships are mutually beneficial. Trust me, I haven’t broken a single heart in England.”
“If you say so. But you’ve never had yours broken, either, so you don’t get to tell me how to deal with it,” I said, heating up. “You and Nick have whatever fun you want. You don’t judge your own girlfriends for it. So you damn well don’t get to judge me.”
Freddie let that settle for a second. “I didn’t say I’ve never had my heart broken,” he said calmly. “And I didn’t tell you not to have fun. You’ve always been fun. Just not reckless.”
We chewed quietly until I couldn’t stand it anymore. “How is he?”
“Rather well,” Freddie said. “He’s started training as a warfare officer down near Portsmouth. It’s all weapons and navigation and whatnot. He’s chuffed.”
I’d seen pictures of the parade when Nick finally finished at the Naval College and became an officer. He’d been so hot in his gold-and-red-trimmed black uniform and white hat that I’d fallen into a box of wine and watched Bridget Jones’s Diary three times in a row.
“He’d want to know you’re getting on all right,” Freddie added gingerly.
I bristled. “If you’re just here to absolve his conscience or something—”
“Don’t be so testy, Killer,” he said, holding up a hand. “I’m here on my own behalf.”
“Good. Because I would love to tell you that I’m doing great,” I said. “I would love to tell you that I’m seeing someone awesome, and we’re allowed to touch in public, and I’ve never been happier. But it would be lies, and the only thing that helps is getting far away from Nick and pretending I’m Leona Da Vinci, who wears huge hats and doesn’t have any problems. And I’m going to keep doing it until I don’t have any problems.”
Freddie looked at me intently. Then he smiled. “I was Jock Weapon once at a hotel.”
“In more ways than one, I bet.”
He chuckled. “Well, Killer, this was a terrible talk,” he said, clapping his hands together and then standing up. “Just promise you won’t go completely ’round the bend. No face tattoos, no running off with a pool boy to Belize.”
“I’ll try, but Leona Da Vinci wants what she wants.”
He chewed on his lip, then added, “Maybe you and Knickers should just have tea and get it over with. Wouldn’t it be worse if you just bumped into him?”
“Probably,” I said. “But I’m not ready to see him, Freddie. Not yet.”
Turns out we were both right: It was way worse, and I wasn’t ready.
That particular drizzly, doomed Friday in mid-October was the red carpet opening of Joss’s new store on Kensington High Street. I’d worn a series of outrageous Soj bikinis in Cannes that had stirred up even more interest in her as a designer, so she and her walking midlife crisis of a business partner decided they should strike while the proverbial iron was still…if not hot, then at least plugged in, and so they rushed the shop and her clothing line to market. She’d invited socialites, pop stars, party reporters, and any of Tom Huntington-Jones’s crew who were still speaking to him—which, for the moment anyway, included his daughter Philippa, who’d recently begun seeing Gaz.
“This is nuts. Cilla is single. I would’ve thought you’d pounce,” I had said.
“Naw, after that smarmy tosser Tony, any old git looks good. I don’t want to be Cilla’s any-old-git,” Gaz said firmly. “She needs to realize I’m her destiny.”
“Or, you need to man up and show her,” I said. “She basically once told me to stop wasting time and lock down Nick before somebody else did. She was right. You should try it.”
I’d been anxious about the first real prospect of seeing Nick since the breakup, but Joss texted to say Nick had RSVP’d no. And so, emboldened, I dutifully opened the box containing the other source of my dread: the complimentary clothes Joss wanted her higher-profile guests to wear on the red carpet. Mine were a silky top that read blouse around the neck in silver-sequined letters, and white skinny jeans with a foot airbrushed on the ass like graffiti.
“It’s symbolic,” Joss had explained. “You’ve been kicked around, but you’re still standing.”
“It’s heinous,” Lacey had yelped when I walked out of my bedroom modeling the ensemble. “I assumed you were joking about wearing that. You just can’t. You cannot.”
“Joss is counting on me,” I said. “Think of it this way. She gets my loyalty, and you get to look a hundred times better than I do. I’m helping two people.”
Lacey downgraded her yelp to a whimper and fiddled with the sequins on my top, as if hoping to make them look less like letters. I did envy her chevron minidress, which she claimed was a sample she’d gotten from work, but which looked more like it came from Harvey Nichols. I suspected a lecture from Dad was coming about abusing her so-called emergency Amex.
“These past few months have been entertaining, and all, but real talk: At some point you need to dress like a rational adult who wants to attract a rational boyfriend,” Lacey finally said.