Chapter 10
The Caitlin of old would have brought wine with her, kicked off her shoes and curled up on the sofa. ‘Okay, tell me everything, all details, leave nothing out,’ that Caitlin would have insisted. She would have listened intently, made all the right noises (even if she thought Marnie had been an arse) and then leapt over to give her a hug. Only then would that Caitlin have kindly and softly offered her true opinion as she had done in the past: Marnie, do you think that maybe you scared him off a little by falling too fast? Marnie, didn’t you think that he might have been lying about driving an Aston Martin when he’d forgotten his wallet three dates on the trot? But that Caitlin wasn’t around any more. She’d got a little colder and more distant with every passing year. That Caitlin didn’t bear much resemblance to this one who had rolled up in a Vivien Westwood suit with expertly microbladed eyebrows and an immobile forehead.
Caitlin perched on the edge of the sofa, hands on her lap as if she was at a job interview. She refused the offer of a coffee or a tea, said she was detoxing and was only drinking water at the moment. Obviously not tap water, only the bottled stuff with a French name, which Marnie didn’t have so she’d do without. Besides, she couldn’t stay long. She and Grigori were going out to dinner with her parents.
‘So, go on then, tell me what’s wrong,’ said Caitlin, with more of a tired air than Marnie wanted to acknowledge. So Marnie told her. The lot. Everything. And then she waited – hoped – for Caitlin to be the Caitlin of old and make her feel better. The way that Marnie had made her feel better when Danny Bradford had bonked her cousin and Will Brown had told her he had gone off her because she was crap at sex. And when Grigori had said that, before he took her to meet his parents, she should work on changing how she laughed because it sounded a bit common. That wonderful, infectious bray of a laugh that Caitlin was known for had to go. And her clothes. And did her accent have to be quite so broad Yorkshire? Marnie had asked her if she was sure she really wanted to be with a man who was so hyper-critical. She said she did and slowly but surely, Grigori had turned her into Margaret Thatcher.
‘So, let me get this straight,’ said Caitlin in that strange slow way she talked now as if each word had to be vetted for accent and pitch before it emerged from her mouth. ‘You didn’t realise that he was still very much married, though he wouldn’t go out in public with you or stay the night?’
‘No. I know it sounds stupid—’ Marnie began, but Caitlin cut her off.
‘How old are you?’
‘You know how old I am, Cait—’
‘Yes, I know I know. You’re thirty-one, days away from being thirty-two and isn’t that just a little too old to be making this sort of mistake? It sounds to me as if you knew exactly what the situation was but chose to ignore it.’ And she laughed, a new Caitlin laugh, a hard, breathy mini-guffaw that carried the words how vey vey vulgar as passengers.
‘I believed him, Cait,’ said Marnie, tears racing up to her eyes. ‘He was so convincing. There’s no love without trust. So I trusted him.’
‘You’ve trusted them all,’ said Caitlin, wearily. ‘Don’t you have any BS detector? Haven’t you learned anything from being dumped on over and over again?’
‘Do any of us?’ Marnie returned, a little annoyed at Caitlin’s judgement. ‘Maybe we only see it for other people, Cait.’ They’d always said to each other that it was the world’s easiest thing to give advice but much harder to take it. In the past they’d accepted they weren’t the wisest girls when it came to men. One of Caitlin’s exes left his own engagement party to nip over for a bonk with her before racing back to it FFS. She hadn’t had a clue that he was even seeing anyone else.
‘But this is stupid,’ Caitlin came back at her. ‘You must have known. The signs were obvious. More than obvious. Even to someone in a coma. Don’t lie to yourself and me. You knew.’
‘He said he and his wife were consciously uncoupling. I might have been frustrated about the lack of speed of that process, but no – I didn’t know.’
‘Did you question him properly? No – you didn’t, because you didn’t want to face up to what you really knew. You never do. You don’t learn. No wonder I—’
She pulled up her sentence short and shook her head, continued down another path. ‘You’ve caused untold damage now, to yourself and others.’
Untold damage? Since when did Caitlin Tyler say untold damage? But Marnie was more concerned with what Caitlin had been about to say after the ‘no wonder’ line.
‘No wonder I what?’ she looped the conversation back to it. ‘What were you going to say?’
Caitlin shrugged. Then she looked at her watch. Then she stood up from the sofa, carefully, like a model afraid that a paparazzo would shoot his camera up her skirt. ‘Doesn’t matter. I’m going to have to go . . .’
‘No wonder I what?’ Marnie was insistent. ‘Just tell me.’
Caitlin sighed, then looked Marnie straight in the eye and quirked a perfect left brow, as far as the Botox would allow her to.
‘Okay then, I was going to say . . . no wonder I didn’t bring Grigori with me.’
What did that even mean, thought Marnie.
‘Grigori? What’s he got to do with any of this?’
Caitlin’s hands fell onto her hips in a stance of meaning business.
‘Marnie, you aren’t interested in men unless they have some complication, some baggage. Think about it – every one of them,’ Caitlin picked up her handbag, a very nice Lulu Guinness with a pair of red lips as a clasp, not unlike the lips on Caitlin’s face, which were plumper than Marnie remembered them ever being before.
‘And what the hell has that to do with Grig—’ Then the icky penny dropped. ‘Oh please, tell me that you’re not suggesting I’d be after Grigori. Please don’t tell me you keep us apart because you’re afraid I’d try and steal him from under your nose.’ Marnie let loose a shriek of disbelieving laughter, expecting Caitlin’s to join it. Expecting Caitlin to tell her not to be so bloody daft.
‘Yes, if you must know, that’s exactly what I think.’ Caitlin’s expression remained stony.
‘Really?’ Marnie’s jaw dropped so low, she could have fitted a football between her teeth.
‘Yes, I’m afraid so. That’s what I think.’
Marnie stared at the woman in front of her and knew that there was nothing of her old friend left in that Caitlin casing. She was an alien, a stranger. That her best buddy could think so badly of her flooded her body with a horrible cocktail of upset and anger which spilled over into words.
‘I wouldn’t touch that chinless wonder if he peeled his skin off and he was Ryan Reynolds underneath.’
‘But you did, didn’t you?’ Caitlin threw back at her. ‘He told me what you did on the staircase at Lucy’s wedding.’
‘What I did? You mean when he stuck his disgusting tongue in my mouth and I shoved him off and he fell down the stairs and called me a—’
‘Oh, listen to yourself, Marnie,’ spat Caitlin. ‘He couldn’t stick his tongue in your mouth from a distance, could he? He’s not a fucking lizard,’ – Marnie huffed loudly at that –‘you’d have had to get up close and personal first. Don’t you think I’ve thought it through?’
Marnie threw up her hands. ‘You’d believe him over me? He was plastered, I was sober for a start and I would have never, never have done that to you. What a prick. He’s had you changing the way you dress, how you speak, how you laugh and now you tell me he thinks he’s so drop-dead gorgeous your best friend would come on to him?’
‘And that is precisely why you are not invited to our wedding,’ said Caitlin, taking her car keys out of her bag.
Marnie blinked in shock. She wasn’t sure if she was most stunned by the fact that her so-called best friend – her oldest friend – was getting married and hadn’t told her, or that she was marrying one of the biggest turnips on the planet. Or that Caitlin had believed her capable of such deception. They were all vying for top position. And all of them were winning.
‘Happy fucking birthday. Don’t bother buying me anything for mine. Let’s end it there,’ said Caitlin, dropping both the gift bag she brought in with her onto the sofa and her posh accent too. She sounded like the Caitlin of old for those few seconds before she speed-walked on her red-soled shoes towards the front door, slamming it hard behind her.
The bag fell off the sofa and the box inside slid out. It was an M&S toiletries gift set.