Chapter Thirty-Five
At home in Sandbanks, sprawled on one of the big sofas in the TV room, Lexy watched the latest episode of Celebrity Island Survivor. Her normally lively, mobile face, so vivacious and responsive that it had been the making of her career, was unusually inscrutable as the bond between Caroline and Santino became increasingly obvious: the two of them clowned around in the sea together, washed each other down, visited the dunny, Santino’s baritone resounding surprisingly well off the wooden structure as he sang snatches of opera.
And Lexy’s expression did not even alter as she viewed Caroline and Santino packing up their belongings and leaving camp. As the other three team members set off, Joe and Debbi helping Veronica up the sloping path, Caroline and Santino turned to look back at the beach where they had spent the last three days.
‘Goodbye, Blue Camp,’ Caroline said, her eyes misty. ‘I’m going to miss you! It’s really weird to think I’ll never come back here again.’
‘You never know,’ Santino said, his head very close to hers. ‘My son Giova watches this show every year and before I left, he said we just can’t tell what’s going to happen. Even when the teams come together—’
‘Merge,’ Caroline said, giggling at the sexual connotations of the phrase he had used. ‘Honestly, Tino, you must have heard that word over and over again! Dan and Pip say it every day when they come to visit!’
‘I have learned enough English,’ Santino said magnificently. ‘I have enough English for everything I need. I do not need this “mairge” word too.’
Caroline giggled again, very girlishly. It was, as Lexy had drily observed earlier, the main thing Caroline did on the show: giggle.
‘So Giova says . . .’ Caroline was prompting Santino.
‘Ah, yes!’ he said. ‘He says that even when the teams mairge, Dan and Pip will play many games with us. They move us – we are separated – we vote for who we want to send away to another camp or to leave. It is not just the public who make all the choices. So maybe we will come back here to Blue Camp, you and I! Chissà?’
He accompanied his last word with the characteristic shrug he always gave with it: Chissà meant, Caroline had learned by now, ‘who knows?’
‘I’m sure Giova knows what he’s talking about,’ Caroline said, smiling. ‘He sounds really clever.’
‘Ugh! That’s how she gets them,’ Lexy observed to Sophie, who was sitting on the other side of the huge L-shaped sofa, at a right angle to Lexy, sipping tea. ‘Bangs on about how great their kids are. Little slut.’
‘People do rather like to hear that, Lexy,’ Sophie pointed out.
‘James and Libby have the best manners,’ Lexy said promptly, winking at Sophie. ‘I just wish some of them would rub off on my terrible twosome.’
‘Your two are getting better,’ Sophie said fairly. ‘I can hear the pleases and thank yous popping out on a more regular basis now.’
‘Thanks,’ Lexy said in a genuinely heartfelt tone. ‘It’s because they’re spending time around you. Even Laylah’s scared of you, and that little madam doesn’t give a shit about anyone! There’s something about your accent. It makes me want to tug my forelock and say sorry automatically, just in case I did something wrong.’
‘You silly girl,’ Sophie said, laughing. ‘Oh, look, you’re going to have to rewind now . . . we missed a bit . . .’
‘Did you ever use to watch this show before you met me, Soph?’ Lexy asked, reaching for the remote.
Sophie turned to look her fully in the face.
‘My dear girl,’ she said. ‘Is that a genuine question? But I must say, it certainly has been an education.’
‘Wait till they start eating all the nasty stuff!’ Lexy said, rewinding. ‘Testicles and eyeballs and all sorts!’
‘Oh,’ Sophie said, with a mischievous smile. ‘That really wouldn’t be a problem for me. My great-grandfather was a Lieutenant Colonel in Ceylon during the Raj, and his son, my grandfather, used to be quite the explorer. He went all over the Middle East – practically an honorary Bedouin. Lived on camel testicles and eyeballs as a matter of course. And we all have terribly strong stomachs. It’s being country folk, you know – big offal eaters. I love sweetbreads and tripe. Very good for you, offal, and very cheap. Such a shame poor people don’t know how to cook it any longer.’
Lexy stared at her new friend, her jaw dropped. No matter how much she hung out with Sophie, she could never anticipate the next thing that might come out of her new friend’s mouth.
‘Um, sweetbreads sound nice?’ she said faintly. ‘But that’s not jam on toast, is it?’
Sophie’s smile deepened.
‘They’re brains,’ she said. ‘Delicious, very lightly fried. And terribly good for you.’
‘I am never, ever coming round to yours for dinner,’ Lexy said devoutly. ‘Not even if you beg me.’
She clicked the remote, and they both settled back against the pillows once more. Lexy knew that this kind of sofa – sectional, sprawling, overstuffed, with plenty of matching pillows – would never, ever have been allowed into Sophie Double-Barrel’s house. She had visited Sophie several times now, and had been fascinated by how different her home was to Lexy’s.
Everything at Lexy and Frank’s was either new, or maintained in mint condition. If something got scratched, it was replaced immediately. Sophie’s home, however, had been furnished entirely with items that had been in her family since at least the grandfather who ate camel eyes with the Bedouins: not only was nothing pristine, it was positively scuffed, knocked about, the kind of ‘brown furniture’ that auction houses were refusing to take nowadays, as the modern taste was for light pine, white-painted wood, or mirrored furniture, all of which were anathema to posh people.
Sophie was undoubtedly a fish out of water in nouveauriche Sandbanks. But though she was living here for her husband’s job – selling luxury yachts to the millionaires, who were deeply impressed by his upper-class drawl – she and her Freddie had refused to adopt the Sandbanks style. Sophie was much too polite to criticize Lexy’s decor, and from the way she settled into Lexy’s ridiculously comfortable, oversized sofas with an involuntary sigh of pleasure, Lexy suspected that Sophie secretly preferred them to her own ancient, faded Chesterfields.
But ever since Lexy had caught Sophie wincing at one of Lexy’s big ‘inspiration’ posters – Sophie would never have done that if she had realized that Lexy could see her reflection in one of the many corridor mirrors, of course – Lexy had quietly taken them all down. Gone were Bitch is the New Black, I Need More Shoes and More Issues Than Vogue, all of which Lexy had thought were genuinely witty. Gone also were the gigantic decorative, free-standing, light-up letters spelling out LOVE and HOME which had welcomed visitors on specially built shelves in the entrance foyer. Sophie hadn’t given them the side-eye, but she pointedly avoided looking at them directly, which Lexy had taken as a sign that they were not in the best of taste either.
And they had come from the same boutique on Canford Cliffs as the inspiration posters! How was Lexy to know what was right or not? She wasn’t going to make over her whole house to meet Sophie’s tastes – that would be impossible – but she certainly didn’t want to keep anything that made a Double-Barrel cringe. The gigantic letters had been replaced with some very unobjectionable silver vases from the White Company, and Sophie, seeing them for the first time, had promptly commented on what lovely peonies they contained, so Lexy had relaxed with relief in the assumption that the vases had also gained Sophie’s approval.
Onscreen – almost lifesize on Lexy’s gigantic TV with its surround sound from built-in speakers, so different from Sophie and Freddie’s eight-year-old television in the scruffy back living room – Caroline and Santino walked slowly along the island path, brushing palm fronds aside, the chain at their waists clinking between them. Veronica stopped, wheezing, and Santino whisked Caroline into the jungle, behind a tree, giving the viewers the sensation of spying on a thrillingly private encounter, even though the outline of Caroline’s mike pack could clearly be seen under her Team Blue T-shirt.
‘Here we go,’ Lexy said beneath her breath.
Santino kissed Caroline’s fingertips. Caroline caressed his cheek. Santino lowered his head, slowly, slowly . . .
‘Yesssss!’
Sophie, in a very unusual display of emotion, sat up bolt-straight and punched the air as Santino and Caroline started to kiss.
‘I don’t bloody believe it!’ she exclaimed. ‘After only three bloody days! My God, this is wonderful! That’s it, my dear. You have your husband back!’
She turned to Lexy, her eyes bright with satisfaction.
‘Little minx,’ she said. ‘Though I could think of many worse words! Jumping from one man to another like – like a frog on lily pads!’
Lexy, who had paused Celebrity Island Survivor on the kiss, the kiss that was clearly an open-mouthed one with full tongue involved, burst out laughing at the expression Sophie had used. You truly never did know what Sophie would come out with next.
Lexy felt ridiculously lucky to have been taken under Sophie’s wing, especially as it was obvious that Sophie had zero interest in profiting from Lexy’s fame. She had genuinely never watched Lexy’s show or followed her career in any way. Her husband, Freddie, apparently sometimes watched Frank on his Sunday football roundup show and thought he was ‘sound’, but that was as far as the Double-Barrel family’s acquaintance with Lexy and Frank went.
The friendship, therefore, was entirely genuine. Famous since eighteen, sharp as a tack – apart, obviously, from where Caroline had been concerned – Lexy was acutely aware of when people wanted something from her, because they almost always did. Sophie, however, didn’t want to take anything. She wanted to give, to organize, to bring order to chaos. In other lives, she would have been a school matron, the head of the Red Cross, an army quartermaster. As it was, she did fundraising for local charities and ran the local cricket club with an iron hand in a fairly iron glove.
‘Look, Lexy, I know how good you’re being about cutting down on drinking, but shall we have a small liqueur to celebrate?’ Sophie suggested, a flush of colour on her cheeks now. ‘I couldn’t be happier for you if it were the little bitch who tried to steal Freddie getting caught out like this on camera!’
Lexy’s jaw dropped. Sophie and Freddie’s marriage, in the glimpses Lexy had had of it, seemed enviably happy, running on very smooth wheels. Lexy had had no inkling that it might not be everything it appeared to be.
Sophie waved a hand quickly, indicating she didn’t need any sympathy, as Lexy started to respond.
‘It’s all over now,’ she said briskly. ‘Let’s just say, there’ll be no more female doubles partners at tennis for Freddie apart from me, and he knows better now than to complain about my wonky backhand! So, what do you say? Shall we have a toast to Caroline’s downfall, or am I being very naughty to suggest it?’
‘No, it’s a great idea,’ Lexy said, standing up and crossing over to the onyx-clad, chrome-backed wet bar built into the corner of the room, a feature that would never appear in any house owned by a Double-Barrel. ‘What would you like?’
Clinking their glasses, looking at the freeze-framed screen, Lexy said to her new friend:
‘Okay, here’s the toast. To Santino!’
‘Oh, very good,’ Sophie said. ‘It would be wonderful if he turned out to be the fickle type and went after one of those women with the gigantic knockers to make the slut look like a complete and utter idiot! But the damage is done now as far as Frank’s concerned, which is the important thing.’
Lexy nodded.
‘Still,’ she said soberly, ‘it only gets things halfway. Just because Frank’s seen what an opportunist she is, that doesn’t mean he’ll come back to me.’
Sophie frowned deeply, her sensible features contorting into a positive grimace.
‘Nonsense!’ she said very firmly. ‘You’re his wife and the mother of his children! You’ve apologized for behaving like a silly fool with a younger man, and you’re making amends now by looking after the brats all by yourself. You’ve stopped smoking, you’re barely drinking, you’ve taken a good hard pull at yourself. And frankly, he didn’t marry an angel, did he?’
Lexy couldn’t help a smile.
‘No,’ she admitted. ‘He definitely didn’t.’
‘So now you sit and wait,’ Sophie instructed. ‘And when he comes back to you, you never ever mention the slut again.’
‘Is that how you handled it with Freddie’s tennis doubles partner?’ Lexy couldn’t help asking.
‘Ah,’ Sophie said, settling herself comfortably on the arm of the sofa. ‘That’s a nice little story. It turned out that she had quite a restrictive prenuptial agreement with her husband. Usual drill – second wife, much younger, very decorative. Air stewardess who picked him up in business class. She got bored and started working her way through the men at the tennis club. Little idiot – everyone knows you stick to the tennis pros in this kind of situation! But she was stupid enough to target our husbands. One of the other wives is a partner at the solicitors’ office which drew up the prenup, and she checked the terms. Of course, these things are never cast-iron, but judges do take them into consideration, and there was a clause about her not getting a penny if she committed adultery . . .’
Sophie gave a little V-shaped smile and sipped at her brandy.
‘I suggested we get up a collection,’ she said, ‘and I found us a very innocuous-looking middle-aged lady with a very high-quality camera and a very respectable and boring estate car. She followed the trolley dolly around for a week or so. And then the trolley dolly got some incriminating photographs of herself in the post, together with a polite suggestion that she resign from the tennis club immediately.’
She took another sip of brandy.
‘Now the dolly is the golf club wives’ problem. I’ve warned a couple of the ladies there I know, of course. And offered them the contact number of the innocuous-looking woman, should they find they need it.’
Lexy chinked her glass with Sophie’s.
‘I wouldn’t like to get on the wrong side of you,’ she said frankly.
‘Oh, I’m not naturally vindictive,’ Sophie said cheerfully. ‘You have to do something really quite terrible for me to go to the trouble of applying my special powers.’
‘So that’s why you befriended me,’ Lexy said, the penny slowly dropping. ‘You’d been through it, and you wanted to help someone in the same situation.’
Sophie nodded.
‘It was certainly a factor,’ she said. ‘And I truly think this will end as well for you as it did for me.’
‘You’ll still be my friend if – when – when everything’s okay again, won’t you?’ Lexy blurted out.
Sophie looked taken aback.
‘Of course I will! Where did that come from?’ she asked.
Lexy felt like a kid back in school again, asking someone if they were still best friends. It was a sensation she had not had for thirty years, and she didn’t enjoy it one bit. She was remembering a girl at primary school who only stayed friends with someone if they were having problems: divorcing parents, a bullying older sibling, health issues. As soon as the issue was resolved to some extent, the girl would be off to find another tortured soul who she could try to succour. It made her feel superior in some way, gave her a sense of power.
Sophie didn’t remind Lexy of that girl, and yet . . .
‘Oh no, don’t worry!’ Sophie said, catching on. ‘I don’t go around rescuing lame ducks, fixing their wings and then dumping them back in the pond again while I go on my merry way! I very much enjoy your company. It’s . . . refreshing.’
‘I’ll take that as a compliment,’ Lexy said wryly.
‘Oh!’ Sophie looked at the glass in her hand. ‘Naughty me, I started drinking and forgot to toast! To Santino!’
Lexy looked once more at the image frozen on the huge screen, Santino’s handsome head bending over Caroline’s, his lips on hers.
‘Oh, definitely! To Santino!’ she echoed, raising her glass to him.