Sophie Weston - The Bedroom Assignment

‘Sure, you get by. You earn your bread and you have a great life.’ Suze struck the ladder with her fist to emphasise her point. ‘But what about the future?’

Zoe looked down again at her, mildly surprised.

‘Don’t forget, I’m the one who still has a life,’ she teased gently. ‘When did you start to sound like your father?’

Suze gave a sharp sigh. ‘I know. I know,’ she said ruefully. ‘Being a financial success is not all joy. Have you finished?’

‘Yup. Now, if you can just stop shaking that ladder…’

‘Sorry,’ said Suze with a grin. ‘Concentrate, Manoir. Concentrate.’

Zoe secured the last light and climbed rapidly, hand over hand, down through the branches. Clutching the trunk, she felt around for the top of the ladder with her foot. Suze reached up and directed it onto the top step.

‘Thank you,’ said Zoe. She slid to the ground and unhooked the wheel, with its residual cable. ‘There we are. One tree dressed to welcome summer.’

‘You’re the business,’ said Suze, admiring.

Zoe retrieved the ladder from her and retracted the extension. She clicked it back into place and hiked the ladder under her arm, turning back to the house.

‘Who needs a man?’ she said lightly.

Suze padded after her. ‘Okay. Okay. You don’t need a man to hang your party lights. What about the other stuff?’

And suddenly there it was again. Another ideal opening. Go for it Zoe. Tell your best friend the truth.

But she found herself prevaricating. ‘What other stuff?’

Suze made a wide gesture, embracing the whole world of romance. ‘Hanging together. Holidays. Giving each other breakfast in bed with the newspapers on Sunday morning.’

Zoe changed the ladder to her other side. It was quite unnecessary. The thing was not heavy. But it meant she didn’t have to answer.

Not that it mattered. When Suze was into one of her ‘Why You Ought to Live Like I Say’ homilies, she was impossible to deflect anyway.

‘I mean, with Simon you knew where you were. He’s practical, too.’ A thought struck her. ‘And we were relying on him to pick up the booze, weren’t we?’

‘It’s being delivered,’ said Zoe hastily.

‘I should have known you’d get it sorted.’ Suze shook her head. ‘What did he do, poor guy? Ask you to marry him?’

‘Marry him? Of course not. I’ve only known him a couple of months.’

‘Quite,’ said Suze dryly. ‘But men do seem to see you as settling down material. God knows why, with your record.’

The budding garden smelt of honey in the still afternoon sun. Zoe could not face spoiling it, after all. She would just have to wait for another opportunity.

She felt her coping mask twitch into place. The Zoe who could handle anything and make a joke of it, too. Privately she called it Performance Zoe.

‘It’s my cooking,’ she said lightly. ‘Ever since Gran taught me how to make bread and butter pudding I haven’t been able to get men out of my hair.’ She manoeuvred the ladder down a flight of four stone steps without difficulty and went to the battered garden shed. ‘Can you open the door, please?’

Suze did. But, ‘It’s more than bread and butter pudding,’ she said darkly.

Zoe disappeared inside. Various planks of the shed were rotting, and the tools were ancient, but it was painfully tidy. She hung the ladder on its allotted hook.

‘I doubt it,’ she said from the depths.

The house had been built on the side of a hill. As a result the garden was arranged into three wide terraces. The orchard was at the top, but this middle terrace was the largest, with a lawn and flowerbeds full of old cottage flowers. Bees buzzed among headily scented low-growing pinks. Suze flung herself down on the grass and stuffed her nose into a small grey plant with white flowers.

‘Heaven,’ she said dreamily. ‘I suppose you do all the garden as well? No, don’t answer that.’

Zoe emerged from the shed. ‘What?’

Suze rolled over on her back, heedless of grass stains and creases on her expensive navy skirt. She looked up at her friend lazily. ‘Come on, Zo. You know what a hot babe you are. Bread and butter pudding is just a bonus.’

Zoe sank down beside her and started plucking at the grass. ‘Thank you.’

‘It’s true,’ said Suze dispassionately. ‘Men drool and women weep. If you weren’t my best friend I’d have put out a contract on you by now.’

Zoe picked a daisy out of the lawn and threw it at her. ‘No, you wouldn’t.’

‘I might. If you got your claws into one of my men.’

There was something in Suze’s voice that startled Zoe. She stopped pulling at grass stalks and looked at her friend, shocked. ‘I would never do that.’

‘You wouldn’t have to,’ said Suze dispassionately. ‘It must be pheromones or something. All you have to do is turn up somewhere on your own and—wham!’

‘Wham?’ Even Performance Zoe blinked at that. ‘Get real, Suze.’

Suze sat up and linked her arms round her knees. ‘It’s real enough. Men—some men, anyway—take one look at you and go weak at the knees.’

‘Hey, I’m not that special. I’m not even beautiful.’

‘I know you’re not,’ her friend said candidly. ‘But there’s something about you.’

‘Pu-lease—’ said Zoe. She tried to joke but she was unnerved all the same.

‘There is,’ Suze insisted. ‘I’ve seen it, again and again.’ She rested her chin on her clasped knees, thoughtful. ‘At first I thought it was because you didn’t try as hard as the rest of us. I mean, your clothes were okay, but you always looked as if you’d scrambled into them at the last moment before going out. I said that to David once.’

David was Suze’s boyfriend before last. Zoe had wondered several times whether Suze was as completely over him as she claimed to be. Now her voice changed and Zoe was certain.

‘And David said, “Yes, exactly.” That soft, rumpled look gave a man the feeling that you’d only got out of bed a few minutes ago. And that it wouldn’t take too much persuasion to get you back in again.’

Zoe sat bolt upright, forgetting all about Suze’s possible broken heart. ‘He didn’t,’ she said, True Zoe taking over momentarily and genuinely appalled.

‘Yup.’

‘But that’s—so untrue.’

‘But effective,’ said Suze dryly.

Zoe’s nails gouged into the grass. ‘It’s crazy. I—’

Suze stopped hugging her knees.

‘Why did you really heave Simon?’ she said quietly. ‘The truth, now.’

And that was the trouble, thought Zoe, scrabbling at a dandelion with real venom. Oh, she could tell Suze the truth, all right. It would only take one sentence. He wanted to go to bed with me and I bottled out. Only Suze would not believe her. And Zoe had no one to blame for that but herself.

There was this big fable among their friends: Zoe Brown the femme fatale, and the men who never lasted. Only no one knew it was a fable. Not even Suze. And Suze thought she knew everything there was to know about Zoe Brown. She very nearly did, too. Just not—

They had always told each other their secrets, from the time their mothers had walked them to kindergarten together. Suze was still telling. It was only Zoe who held back. And Suze had no idea.

Of course Zoe did not lie. Well, not exactly. She had never stood up and actually told a falsehood about any of the men she had been out with. Only people made assumptions—the men themselves did nothing to deny them—and before she knew where she was the myth of Zoe the Butterfly Lover was born. Even her brother and sister thought she changed boyfriends so often because she got bored.

Whereas the truth—

Well, it could not go on. She had sworn it at New Year, looking in the mirror in Suze’s bedroom, the only stone cold sober person in the house. She had laughed and kissed poor, bewildered Alastair at miserable midnight. The smile had been plastered on her face so hard that she’d felt it would crack.