Jill Mansell - Mixed doubles

Dulcie looked indignant. ‘It was an emergency, I couldn’t find a duster. I had to look authentic, didn’t I?’

‘They’re my seducing knickers,’ Pru said sadly, trying to imagine a time in the dim and distant future when she might feel up to a spot of seduction. Maybe in fifty or sixty years ...

‘Take it from me, said Dulcie, ‘if you want to seduce a man, the best way is no knickers at all.’

Chapter 35

One way and another, it had been an eventful day. By the time Liza arrived at Dulcie’s house, Dulcie was getting stuck into her second bottle of wine. Half-smoked, irritably stubbed-out cigarettes were piling up in the ashtray, which was only brought out in moments of great crisis.

The more cigarettes she smoked and the more wine she put away, the more sorry for herself Dulcie became.

‘... and not just any old frisbee,’ as she thumped the kitchen table, ash cascaded down the front of her black T-shirt, ‘a pink frisbee with go-faster stripes round the side! I mean, can you picture it?

Patrick, playing with a pink frisbee on a beach .. . on a Tuesday? Has Saint-sodding-Claire been slipping happy pills into his cocoa or what?’

To divert her, Liza said, ‘Never mind Patrick. Tell me what happened with Liam. Careful—’

Dulcie’s co-ordination had gone AWOL. Red wine splashed across the table as she tried to pour and missed. The bottle clunked against her glass, which in turn toppled over, drenching an almost full packet of Silk Cut.

The trouble is, thought Dulcie, I do mind Patrick. I especially mind him being happy with Claire.

Forcing her attention back to Liam, she related the morning’s events to Liza. Dulcie left nothing out because that was the beauty of best friends; you could moan for as long as you wanted, you never felt compelled to rush.

‘All that skulking off to the other side of Bath and secretly getting fit was a waste of time,’ she complained, drawingunsmiley faces in the spilled wine with her finger. ‘He said he knew all along I was a fraud. I bet bloody Imelda told him. Cow.’

Liza watched as Dulcie tried inexpertly to light a sodden cigarette.

‘Let her have him,’ said Liza. ‘You can do better than that. Okay, he looked good, but the charm was all on the surface. Where was the real personality?’

Dulcie gave up on the cigarette. She managed a brief smile. ‘In his jockstrap.’

‘There, you see?’ Heartened by the attempt at humour, Liza sat back in her chair and raised her glass. ‘Feeling better already. You don’t need him.’

Dulcie knew that. She just wished Liam hadn’t laid into her quite so ruthlessly. Those hurtful things he’d come out with ... well, they’d hurt.

‘I told him he was obsessed because all he cared about was boring old sport.’ She kept her eyes fixed on the wet table. ‘And he said at least he was obsessed about something, and didn’t I ever wonder if there was anything missing in my life?’

‘Like what?’ said Pru.

Dulcie shrugged. ‘I don’t know. He just looked at me in this weird way, then he shook his head and said: "You don’t do anything, Dulcie. That’s your problem. You just don’t do anything." ‘

‘Well,’ said Liza, breaking the awkward silence that had greeted this last statement – cruel, but true – ‘you’ve got something to do now. Get Liam McPherson right out of your system and find yourself someone a hundred times better.’

‘Oh right, it’s that simple.’ Wearily Dulcie rubbed her face. What with this morning’s encounter with Patrick, followed by the Liam thing, then the fight with Pru, she didn’t know if she had the energy to even think about finding herself another man. ‘Tell you what, you give Brad Pitt a ring, let him know I’m unexpectedly back on the market and ask him if he’ll meet me for dinner on Friday night. I’m free then.’

‘What you need,’ said Pru, ‘is someone kind. Easy-going. Not goody-goody,’ she argued because Dulcie, predictably, was already pulling I’m-going-to-be-sick faces, ‘but ... well, decent.’

‘Decent!’

Pru refused to be put off. Having learned her lesson months ago, she was determined to get the message across.

‘You want someone you can trust,’ she said firmly. ‘The kind of man who turns up when he says he’ll turn up.’

‘The kind who doesn’t come home with lipstick on his tennis shorts,’ put in Liza.

Dulcie groaned and covered her eyes. She knew, she knew what they were saying. It was just those words: decent, dependable, honest, trustworthy ... linked inextricably in her mind with a vision of some bumbling, good-hearted history teacher, always eager to help, in his woolly jumper, baggy corduroys and folkweave sandals.

Men like that, thought Dulcie, decent men, simply didn’t do it for her. They didn’t make her heart beat faster and her stomach contract with longing. Apart from anything else, they were always ugly.

‘There’s nothing wrong with decent,’ Pru insisted, ploughing on, refusing to give up.

Dulcie refilled her glass with Fitou and drank it quickly before it could get spilled. As she did so, it occurred to her that she did know someone decent and not ugly. Someone of whom Pru and Liza both hugely approved. Someone who had in the past been eminently capable of making her heart beat faster and her stomach tie itself in lustful knots.

Curiously, when she had bumped into him this morning, it had happened again.

Decent, mused Dulcie, turning the thought over in her mind. Like Patrick.

‘Like Claire,’ announced Liza, who had also been mulling the word over. Helping herself to a handful of peanuts from the bowl Pru had just placed in the centre of the table, shemissed the startled expression in Dulcie’s eyes. ‘That’s what Claire is. And look how happy she’s made Patrick.’

‘Hang on,’ Dulcie said slowly. ‘How do you know he’s happy?’

Too late, Liza realised she’d said aloud something she should have kept to herself.

‘You said he was,’ she countered with a half-hearted bluff. ‘Anyway, if he’s playing frisbee with her, she must make him happy.’

Dulcie sat up. She might be a bit pissed but she wasn’t a total dimwit. Not completely stupid.

What was going on here that she didn’t know about?

Her green eyes narrowed.

‘You mean you’ve met her?’

Liza gave up. She nodded.

‘Well, only once or twice.’

Pru managed to catch the bottle of Fitou, sent reeling across the table by Dulcie’s twitching elbow.

‘And you didn’t tell me?’ Dulcie gazed at her in bewilderment. ‘I don’t get this at all. How did you meet her?’

It had been one of those silly situations where the longer you put off mentioning something relatively insignificant, the more significant it became. Liza wished now she’d told Dulcie straight away.

‘Okay.’ She hesitated. ‘But the only reason I didn’t say it before was because I didn’t think it would last.’

Trembling, Dulcie lit a cigarette.

‘Go on.’

‘Her name’s Claire Berenger. She’s Kit’s sister,’ said Liza. Dulcie screamed. The foul-smelling cigarette landed in her glass of wine.

‘You lit the wrong end,’ said Pru as the filter sizzled and went out.

‘How could you know that and not tell me?’ Dulcie shouted. Pru jumped – she hadn’t had time to tell her – but Dulcie wasn’t yelling at her, thankfully. She was yelling at Liza.

‘I’ve just said, I thought it wouldn’t last. There didn’t seem much point.’

Liza was on the defensive. Dulcie could imagine why. She had never felt so betrayed.

‘But now you know it will last, because she makes him so fantastically happy.’ Dulcie spoke through gritted teeth. Hot on the heels of betrayal came a great surge of jealousy. She imagined the cosy dinner parties for four, Liza and Kit sitting around a candlelit table with Patrick and Claire, gossiping together, about her.