Back at school, the teachers ratcheted up the pressure another notch. But that was cool because with all the GSCE coursework I didn’t even have the time to monitor my lack of text messages. My parents relied on e-mails to communicate, and the rest of my friends were here with me at school, so apart from Billy and Freddie there was no one left to text me. Still, it was dispiriting especially when Portia’s message alert was going off incessantly.
The longer I left it to patch things up with her the worse it became. I knew that, but I avoided the issue by hanging out in Star, Georgina and Indie’s room.
I didn’t want to make an enemy out of Portia, I really didn’t. I’d never had an enemy like Portia before. Honey, now she was my idea of an enemy. Lady Portia Herrington Briggs, though, was far too magisterial to express her feelings about someone as lowly as me.
The most powerful weapon Portia had in her arsenal was my own guilt, and that guilt included the photo of her family by her bed which included her dead mother. Every time I looked at that photograph I wanted to make up. Even without the reminder of her loss, I actually liked Portia and I desperately wanted to sort things out with her. Before finding out that she was going to the ball with Freddie, we’d become close friends. But like I said, that was then.
Her wariness hovered over me like a cloud, darkening my every waking hour. The worst thing about it was that she wasn’t even a bitch towards me. She remained civil and decent to a fault, which was much harder to bear than Honey’s open nastiness. I’d never done anything mean to Honey, but I was totally responsible for Portia’s wariness of me. I could have sorted it all out with a simple apology, but I was too jealous and bent out of shape over Freddie to do even that. Especially as day after day, my mobile remained silent and hers merrily rang and beeped with messages.
Indie and Portia barely mentioned the ball again — only insomuch as it meant they couldn’t attend Star’s house party and what a bore it all was, but how at least they’d have each other. But as far as I was concerned, the Annual Royal-Euro-Bash Thingamee was still there, just like Portia’s title, just like her dislike of me, a constant niggling reminder that I would and could never be like her or part of her world, which, when it came down to it, was Freddie’s world too.
Freddie might like me, and I really think he did, but he was a prince and I was an American nobody. Unlike Indie, I was as close to being a nobody as he was ever likely to meet. I was in his world but not of it. I was like a random stranger trying on the glass slipper. ‘Close, but not close enough,’ the Prince’s equerries would say. As I lay in my bed, night after night with Honey smoking herself stupid with the fake weed on one side of me, and Portia serenely reading on the other, I waited for my text alert to sound. Checking I had a signal every few minutes, I finally convinced myself that Freddie probably only liked me for my wild-child Hollywood credentials – and even they were fake. I was about as wild as my pet rabbit Dorothy whose most reckless act to date was dropping her lettuce in her water.
‘Many texts from Freddie and Billy today, darling?’ Honey kept asking, sometimes even adding, ‘It must be hard for Billy.’
‘What?’
‘Well, I expect you are going to the Royal Bore with Freddie, darling,’ she said breezily even though she knew as well as anyone else that I wasn’t.
‘Oh that’s right, I keep forgetting, he’s going with Portia, isn’t he,’ she’d add. ‘Silly Honey.’
Then one evening when Honey and I were alone and I was reading the school magazine I’d helped to set up, Honey remarked, ‘Portia and Freddie seem pretty tight now.’
I flicked a page of Nun of Your Business as if I was actually reading it, and replied nonchalantly, ‘Really? Why do you say that?’ Then I flicked another page just to punctuate the point that I wasn’t in the least bit interested in Freddie and Portia. The magazine, now run by the Year Tens, had gone downhill and I was considering speaking to Sister Constance about it. It was meant to be a satirical look at Saint Augustine’s school life but had become a boring gossip rag. Oh my god, was I turning into Ms Topler, our English teacher, complaining about the state of modern-day writing?
Honey turned to face me, blew a billowing stream of smoke rings and smiled. ‘Well, they’re texting one another like mad. I imagined you would have noticed?’
Then, as if set off by satanic forces, Portia’s text message alert went off. She was still in the en suite, and Honey wasted no time in grabbing the mobile. I didn’t even bother to stop her. For one, Honey isn’t the sort of girl you rein in, and secondly, I was madly curious as she opened the message and shrieked, ‘Oh look, Calypso, it’s from Freddie.’
She passed it over to me to read for myself in case I didn’t believe her. I didn’t want to believe her, and there were a thousand reasons why I shouldn’t. It’s not as if Honey has a close relationship with the truth, after all. So I ignored her offer and turned another page of the Nun. I began scanning an article I had written about fencing in a transparent attempt to suck up to Bell End, forcing myself to ignore the prickling sensation in my hand, which was itching to grab the phone and read the text for myself.
‘Oh my god, darling, you have to read it now, it mentions you!’ she urged.
I looked her in the eye as she sucked hard on the last of her faux weed fag. She must have sensed my weakening conscience because the next thing I knew, the phone was thrust in my hand and my magazine was cast to the floor. Honey was right, if it was about me. I had every right to read it!
CAN YOU TELL CALYPSO . . .
But before I could scroll down further to read the rest of it, the phone was snatched from my hand.
I looked up and saw the look of hatred on Portia’s face.
She didn’t say anything. She wouldn’t. She merely placed her mobile on her bedside table beside the photograph of her family, plugged in her hairdryer and started drying the wet tentacles of her long black hair.
My face was burning. No, not with shame, not with guilt at reading another girl’s text message, but with fury, because all the half-formed suspicions I’d been harbouring about Portia and Freddie now seemed fully warranted.
‘I believe you have a message for me from Freddie,’ I told her, raising my voice above her turbo dryer.
Portia carried on drying her hair in front of the mirror as she replied quietly, ‘As you appeared to have read it yourself, I’ve deleted it.’
Honey was lying on the bed flicking through the social pages of the latest Tatler, looking for photographs of herself.
I winced. ‘I didn’t actually get a chance to read the whole thing,’ I admitted, as I began to acknowledge how wrong my behaviour actually was. Say sorry, say sorry, say sorry, my better self pleaded with wicked self. But I didn’t apologise. I folded my arms and gave her a filthy look.
Portia eventually turned to me and smiling serenely, told me, ‘Perhaps it would be better if you spoke to Freddie yourself, Calypso?’
I flopped on my bed. That was the whole point, though. I couldn’t call Freddie to whine about only half reading a text he had decided not to even send to me. Portia knew that. I guess it was the toff equivalent to telling me to lock myself up in the tower of London and throw away the key.