The night Nell met the man with whom she fell in love, she was looking her absolute best-ever all-time peak, which meant that she would either have to face the strain of looking that good whenever he was around, or only ever see him after he’d been drinking.
Nell was attending a gala dinner for the funding of the Columbia Road Art Gallery in an area of such appealing local colour that the rents had been raised and the locals forced out. For this event, she had chosen a tight-fitting Bill Blass black gown that lengthened her legs. She balanced on a pair of ridiculous Manolo Blahnik heels that were instantly priced by every woman in the room. She’d had her hair coloured and cut by Daniel Herschesson (himself, not one of his henchpeople) and her décolletage glowed with a light tan from a business conference in Nice, helped along with a spray of Clarins Post-Sun Body Shimmer. She was on target weight. She had been using Slimfast liquid meal substitutes made with skimmed milk for two weeks now, and was consequently a little shaky and spaced. She was no longer retaining water, and had switched her carbo-conversion-to-muscle-tone regime from weights to pilates because she hated the endless hip-hop tapes they played in the gym, not to mention the weird-smelling men who grunted sexually on the abdominator and never remembered to wipe down the seat.
It had stopped raining by the time Nell climbed from the cab and headed for the gallery, which looked suspiciously like a restaurant converted for the evening and was surrounded by more uplighters than the Nuremberg Rally. The air smelled clean, an event so rare in London that you noticed when it happened. The night was dry, so her antiperspirant was still kicking in and she didn’t look like she had fallen down a well on the way over. Her hair was exactly as Daniel left it, shaped but not unnaturally so. Nell lived in fear of turning into her mother, who had a tightly permed helmet of curls fitted onto her skull every second Tuesday and sported more costume jewellery than Ann Miller did in her eighties. She was wearing understated black-pearl earrings and a minimum amount of expensive wrist-silver, but knew she was still trying too hard to please men.
To be fair, she had been panicked into the temptress look by the fact that she recently passed her thirty-second birthday, an event that felt like it had been carved onto a marble slab instead of written in the greetings cards she received. Her best friend, an animator called Kerry Martinez who was straight but didn’t fancy her, told her that thirty-two was a great age, and that when Seigel and Schuster created Superman they had designed him to look thirty-two, which they considered to be the best year of a man’s life, at which point Nell reminded Kerry that a) Superman was male, and therefore not subject to the problems of accumulating cellulite, b) he had Lois Lane, Lana Lang and some kind of mermaid in love with him, and who did she have? And c) he was a cartoon character who nobody could identify with spectacles on, for Christ’s sake. Nevertheless, when everything was taken into account, she looked damned good. What worried her was that she might never look this good again.
So falling in love with someone right now would not only boost her ego and restore her self-image, but might possibly save her life. And tonight, at precisely 9:10pm she met the man who changed her life and broke her heart. In the course of their time together three hearts were actually broken and mended, but you can’t make an omelette …and so on.
But first came the art and more importantly, the canapés, which comprised transparent slivers of seared tuna and livid, sore-looking carpaccio cut so finely that you had to eat an entire trayful before reaching the calorific equivalent of an egg sandwich. Nell wished she had eaten first, but knew she would not then have been able to fix her dress without help, and until she could train Biffo, her cat, to do up a zip, starving was the safer option.
After two – no, make that three – glasses of a surprisingly acrid urine-coloured champagne, possibly a brand used by an economy airline, the kind that tasted faintly of sick, even the art started to look good. It was the kind of work that needed reams of explanatory text to go with it, otherwise there was no way of knowing that five lengths of rusted iron and a yard of blue nylon rope with a bell attached to one end was meant to empower women in the way they felt about their bodies.
It was not the kind of art Nell liked, the kind that made you feel a growing interest when you looked at it. It wasn’t even the kind of art that shocked the English, who were so easily shocked, but the other kind, the kind that was anxious to change the way you felt by hectoring you. Nell was not in the mood to be lectured. She was here to look at men. Just to look. She expected nothing more, because for many years she expected too much.
She was content to smile and hope for a smile in return, to be noticed, to register in the eyes of others. It wasn’t much to ask, an achievable goal within the realm of her possibilities, and that was fine. But she didn’t think it was going to work out that way tonight. The walls were too white, the lights too bright, the room too hot and crowded. Just getting to the bar required an agility exceeding the stress-level of her dress, which was threatening to open at the back.
It was eight-thirty when she arrived, exactly three-quarters of an hour after the reception started, and forty minutes before she met the man with the emerald eyes. He was already in the vicinity; standing in the Royal Oak pub across the road having a row with a woman who had just accused him of flirting with one of the barmaids while he was meant to be apologising for his non-appearance at her birthday party the previous night. (I know it’s complicated but nothing is clean-cut in life, more’s the pity, otherwise Nell and the man would have met and fallen in love, and have been with each other for the rest of their lives, and there would be no story.)
So Nell looked at her Cartier Panthère, a gift from a grateful client, and sipped her bitter champagne, and pretended to be fascinated by a knotted length of fishing net stabbed into a wall with tin-openers, when a woman tapped her on the shoulder.
‘I thought it was you,’ said the woman, who was dressed slightly too young for her age in combats, back-pack and round-toe heels, and who Nell vaguely recognised and slotted into the gategory: business dinner at Asia De Cuba, Alice or Amanda, then, ‘do you know anyone here?’
‘Not on the artistic side,’ Nell admitted, ‘I’m working for the vendor of the property.’
‘I can’t believe how expensive this area has become,’ said Alice or Amanda, and a conversation Nell didn’t want to have got underway. Nell didn’t like being an estate agent, the profession had a limitless capacity to embarrass her, yet she was perversely good at it, so good that she should really have set up her own company. But she was a partner in a thriving practice with six branches, and that way she could earn a good wage without the kind of anxiety attacks that left you hopping out of bed in the middle of the night to leave yourself Post-It notes for the morning.
‘Which is a pity, because you never really get the smell of a dead person out of a room,’ Alice or Amanda concluded wistfully, and Nell wondered which part of the conversation she had missed. She surreptitiously consulted her watch again, realising as she did so that this time-checking business had lately become a nervous tic, and accepted a sliver of strawberry glued to what appeared to be a triangular piece of chipboard from a passing waiter.
‘I think the artist has a lot of issues to deal with,’ sniffed Alice or Amanda, studying a protuberance of hexagonal lugnuts covered in pink fur. ‘Not sure I’d want one in my lounge, but there are quite a few orange stickers appearing.’
‘It’s corporate art,’ offered a deep voice behind her. ‘Look at the scale. It’s designed to be seen in an office foyer, big, mildly provocative, non-threatening, intended to be bought by a middleweight advertising agency.’ Nell turned to see who was talking, and became the surprised recipient of the Look.
Not many men could get away with the Look. It was a look that could melt the polar ice caps and raise the level of the sea. It opened cave-anenomes and unfolded the mysteries of women. It involved lowering the head a degree and raising the eyes so that they smile up from beneath the line of the brow in a manner that was both innocent and lascivious. This man had mastered the Look to perfection without looking entirely like a plonker. He knew it was a powerful weapon, and sensibly rationed its use. You should never point a loaded revolver at the same person more than once a night.
Nell’s breath caught in her throat. A tanned hand reached forward, forcing Alice or Amanda to move to one side. He was wearing a fantastically dressy Thierry Muegler jacket over faded black jeans and Adidas Manchesters: a look that acknowledged the evening without obedience to it.
‘Rafael DeNapio,’ said the man, who had short black hair, wide shoulders and eyes the colour of an emptied Gordons gin bottle. Possibly he made his living in razor-blade commercials. In photographs he was a little too sure of himself, squinting into sunlight like a Mediterranean chancer whose desire to appear as a consigliere resulted in him being mistaken for a barista or a male prostitute. He looked Italian but was in fact half-Spanish and half-Luton. His mother never got over the shock of the weather in Britain and made use of the airport as soon as it started cheap fares. She left Rafael and his father to cope alone, and as his father could not cope with anything, Rafael learned to cope with everything.
‘Are you enjoying the art?’ he asked politely.
‘We were just saying how disappointing—’ Nell’s friend started, before Nell cut across her.
‘You’re not the artist, are you?’ asked Nell.
‘No, but I’m a good friend of hers. She’s over there.’ He pointed out an elegant black woman in a leather sheath dress and African beads. ‘She sells very well to banks.’
‘But all that stuff about empowering women.’
‘Well. It gives the buyer a story to tell his clients, paints him in a good light, makes him look philanthropic.’
‘I’m not sure that’s very honest,’ Nell countered.
He raised an eyebrow. ‘Do you think making money is a bad thing?’
‘No, of course not.’
Alice or Amanda tapped the side of her glass with her wedding ring and muttered ‘Refill,’ then slipped away into the crowd, leaving Nell and Rafael to argue about art.
‘Do you think people should have to be dead before they become successful?’ said the man. That’s the second time someone has mentioned death tonight, Nell thought. One more to go. She was irrationally scared of death, but then, wasn’t everyone except Mexicans?
Nell couldn’t catch her breath. ‘Why is it so hot in here?’ she asked. Her hand rose to her throat.
‘Keep that breathless charm,’ he told her.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You know, the old Fred Astaire song, “The Way You Look Tonight”.’ He afforded her a further glimpse of the Look, and led her to the front door for some air. She felt his hand in the small of her back, guiding her, and wondered if he noticed the small but persistant roll of fat that she knew was there. There was something peculiarly old-fashioned and cheesy about his chat-up technique, but not in a comforting way. The conflicting emotions inspired by this tiny gesture made her realise that she should get out more.
Outside, the night was warm and so clear that they could hear a woman screaming outside Hackney Town Hall and fire engines rushing to Tower Hamlets. An old RKO feature could be heard playing on TV in the old people’s flats across the road. It might even have been a Fred Astaire movie. A parked minicab, less a conveyence for transporting passengers than a bass-speaker for old school hip-hop, trembled at the kerb. An eye-watering odour of urine drifted past them. Londoners were forced to find romance in unlikely places.
‘How’s your breathing now?’ he asked solicitously.
My breathing’s fine, she thought, but my pulse rate seems to indicate that I just fell out of a plane. ‘Better,’ she told him, gazing away at what she tried to pretend was an attractive scene. But the dustbins of Columbia Road were not the palm trees of Tobago, and she found the pretence an effort.
‘Is it possible for canapés to leave you hungrier after you’ve eaten them?’ he asked. ‘Don’t you feel hungrier now than when you arrived?’
‘You know, I do?’ She looked at him and felt a light stab in the heart, as though someone just prodded her with an unbent paperclip. He returned her look with surprise growing in his eyes, but then she realised he was looking past her.
‘Now there’s a sight you don’t see every day. Isn’t it some kind of omen?’
She followed his gaze to find herself staring at an adult male tiger padding softly down the middle of Columbia Road, stopping to sniff around the drains where the market traders empty their flower vases. It had a long, rib-sticker frame and patchy orange hair, like a childhood teddy bear.
Nell and Rafael watched in apprehensive disbelief as it placed its paws with great deliberation on the littered tarmac before stopping and coiling down into a crescent like any sleep-ridden housecat. It yawned immensely, its great pink tongue flexing and distending, and a deep purr rolled out like the ratchet of a turnstile. Above the creature’s closing eyes, the bright neat windows in council flat canyons stood in for the star-swamped skies of India.
‘Remember when we saw the tiger?’ asked Nell a year and two months later, as they were lying in bed watching a terrible old horror film starring Joan Crawford as the world’s oldest circus ringmistress.
‘God, she looks like a drag queen,’ Rafael murmured, barely hearing her. ‘Good legs though. I’ve seen this one before. Diana Dors gets sawn in half.’
‘Its eyes were so yellow.’ Nell pulled the edge of the duvet over her nipples. She was still conscious of the age-gap between them, and rarely let him see her naked with the overhead lights on. She was a bit of a magician when it came to getting from the bed to the bathroom without letting him see her midriff from the side. She knew she shouldn’t be like this, but he was so perfect that he made her feel too human. For a year and two months she had watched him sleep in her bed, his profile halfburied in the pillow, his mouth slightly open, a scruffy angel with shiny eyelids and thick, unruly hair the colour of a twilight wood. It seemed impossible for anyone to sleep so beautifully without knowing it, but Rafael managed to be unaware of her eyes following him as he awoke. He slept more than anyone she had ever met, and would have missed Sundays completely if she didn’t wake him.
Nell’s flat was situated in Primrose Hill, where the sun crossed the road from the park. The rooms were small, plain, mostly cream paint and reclaimed oak. She had paid too much but got a good deal because, after all, she was an estate agent, and how would it have looked if she hadn’t? Rafael was a chef but had given up his job to become an artist. His work was intriguing, his drawings and sculptures winding strange narratives across half-hidden landscapes that only offered clues to his intentions.
Sex with Rafael was muscular, athletic, emblazoned with energy. He had this way of flexing himself inside her that sent her wild. He was young, of course, just twenty-three, and she was now thirty-three, which should not have mattered but somehow did. He made her feel younger and rather brave, and she needed to feel that way because her parents had made her sister their favourite – Karen was married and had two children – and nothing Nell said or did encouraged them to view her as an adult. Nell thought of herself as mature, cynical, dry-witted, but when her parents visited they treated her like a silly child who had let them down in a matter of responsibility. They made her feel that she had failed, although they would have denied this if confronted. They were unable to respond at all to Rafael, and talked to Nell as if he was not in the room with them.
Rafael had a small, gloomy flat in the Caledonian Road above a locksmiths. The only time she visited him at home, a headline in the shop window underneath his bedroom window proclaimed ‘Cally Road Slasher Strikes Again’. She never went back, and he didn’t move in with her because she didn’t ask him. She was scared he would make an excuse to spare her feelings. Nell financed his career. She rented him a workshop, furniture, canvases and sculpting materials. She bought his clothes and – since she couldn’t cook and he no longer had time – bought him many meals in pleasant mid-priced restaurants, for which he regularly expressed his gratitude. Sometimes he danced around the lounge with her, his tanned broad hand in the small of her back, guiding her steps into the line of his strong, supportive body.
Would you call this love? It worked for her. She didn’t want the state to evolve, but worried that it would end, so she worked harder and started taking more classes at the gym, and Rafael ran her hot baths and gave her aromatic foot massages, and explained the effects of light on wood. Sometimes he spent the evening at his studio, and then, as he approached his twenty-fourth birthday, he spent the night there. Nell was not suspicious of him because Rafael did not appear to notice other women. They always noticed him.
Nell tried not to wonder how long this could last, but told herself that she lived for the moment. She was besotted, hopelessly, pathetically in love, despite his recent aloofness toward her. She abandoned her plans to set up her own property company, and instead accepted a partnership in the firm, which was run by a man who thought of himself as liberal but who was in fact as sexist as a seventies nightclub comic. She had done this because she wanted to make Rafael’s dream come true.
The next day was Rafael’s birthday, and Nell had planned a special surprise. She found a gallery that would exhibit his art. It was the room where they met in Columbia Road, and for two weeks in July it was to be his. She knew he had enough work stored up, and had already arranged for the invitations to be printed. She needed the addresses of his friends, and one evening, when he went to the studio without taking his mobile phone, she unlocked it and found the postcodes she needed. She also came across the text message that read without your love i am only a shadow xxx rafael. She sat on the corner of the bed, the moment she dreaded now made flesh, and the sun faded from her life. First she became ashamed of herself, for not being strong, but then she grew angry. She called the number. A girl with a babyish voice answered.
‘Is Rafael there?’ asked Nell.
‘No, he doesn’t live here,’ said the girl tentatively. ‘Who is this?’
‘His wife,’ said Nell. ‘Who are you?’
‘Oh my God,’ said the girl, and hung up.
Nell just wanted to know one thing; how long had it been going on? She rang the number again, and again, until she got an answer.
The flat was in the basement of an Edwardian house in a corner of Crouch End where the drives had been gravelled and filled with dustbins, and there were never less than four doorbells. Hope was no more than twenty-one, and answered the door in the kind of clothes Nell had never worn, pulling the unravelling brown cardigan tighter across her breasts as if to protect herself from the harm this older woman could do with her lies. Hope invited her in, clearing a cat from an armchair to offer her a seat.
‘I’ve only got instant,’ she apologised, eyeing her opponent’s too-elegant clothes.
‘That’s fine.’ Nell gingerly seated herself on cat hairs and watched Hope duck behind the badly-repainted kitchen bar to emerge with unmatched mugs. Hope needed a good conditioner; she had what the commercials used to describe as ‘flyaway hair’, but underneath the baggy waistless clothes, beneath the unruly fringe, was an appallingly attractive girl. Hope earned a pittance as a television researcher for a company that was surviving on verbal promises and gently failing. She and Rafael had been dating – her choice of verb – for nearly a year. He had promised to move in with her very soon. So fervent was Hope’s belief in her boyfriend, so transparently innocent was she, that Nell found it hard to believe they were talking about the same man.
Hope reminded her of a beautiful actress playing a role in which she was required to spend the first part of the film as an ugly duckling. Her awkward shyness prevented her from raising her head to face Nell. She had obviously never confronted anyone in her life.
‘Actually I’m not his wife,’ Nell felt compelled to tell her. ‘Where did you meet him?’ She watched the cat cleaning itself while she waited for Hope to frame an answer.
‘We were filming in a small art gallery in Hoxton, and he started talking to me about his work,’ Hope explained meekly. ‘Believe me, I had no idea he was seeing someone else.’
‘Seeing is an understatement,’ Nell felt compelled to point out, bearing in mind that she was financing his career.
Hope shook her head at her feet, mortally embarrassed to be forced into this conversation with a stranger. ‘I help Rafael with his art. I gave him the theme that will provide the centrepiece of his show. It’s a piece constructed of found items that represent the love we have for each other.’
‘This just keeps getting better, doesn’t it?’ Nell found a space to set down her undrinkable coffee.
‘To be honest, I wondered if he was seeing someone else because he’s always working late, but then artists keep unusual hours, don’t they?’
‘If you suspected something, why didn’t you ask him?’
‘I’m not good at confrontations,’ Hope admitted. ‘I have no confidence in myself. Perhaps we should talk to him together.’
‘I don’t think that’s such a good idea. We should talk to him separately. Whatever you do, don’t tell him we’ve met. You should never reveal all your cards to a man.’
‘I’d feel terrible if he had to choose between us,’ said Hope, as faint as a winter shadow.
‘Then let’s hear him out without prejudice,’ Nell suggested. ‘The son of a bitch.’
Confronting Rafael on consecutive nights, Nell and Hope blamed his mobile phone for the discovery of infidelity, and insisted on an honest response, at which point he casually agreed to leave them both. He told them – with some relief, they noted – that he felt no real love for either of them, and furthermore that he believed a man was born to have as many partners as he could manage, and while Nell and Hope had been good for him, the time was right to part. In fact, he was glad this had happened because they were holding him back from achieving his full potential. His work, he explained, was already being tipped as the next big thing in the art world. He was unrepentant and cheery as he left, pecking each on the cheek as he went.
As well as trusting Rafael, Nell had given up her savings and her dreams for her lover, just as Hope had surrendered her belongings and her faith in men. The trouble, as Nell saw it, was that men didn’t suffer in love as women did.
As Rafael advanced towards his first gallery show, the two women arranged to meet again. Eating ice cream on Hope’s sofa, they watched as Rafael was interviewed on TV, hoping to see at least some sign of attrition. But the young artist was more appealing than ever, and to their dismay told the interviewer that his art was driven by his emotional honesty, and that without love he was nothing. He unveiled his masterwork, entitled ‘Breathless Heart’, and gave no credit to the women who helped him achieve success.
Determined to cheer themselves up, Nell and Hope went out on the town, and in the course of a night spent downing sweet overpriced cocktails in West End bars, came to realise just how cruelly they had been used.
‘We’ve no legal comeback against him, you realise,’ said Nell, ordering another round. ‘We have to face the fact that we’ve been taken for a ride. We’re older – in my case, much older – but no wiser.’ Nell felt stigmatised by her age, just as Hope did by her shyness. ‘I’m not going to let him get away with it. Our only advantage lies in the fact that Rafael has no idea we know each other.’
‘At least we have our friendship,’ Hope pointed out, a little drunk. ‘Maybe something good will come of this.’
‘You’re damned right it will,’ promised Nell as she bit the cherry from her stick. ‘You and I are going to take him down.’
It took Nell a week to come up with a way of taking revenge on Rafael. She emailed Hope and informed her that they would place an advertisement on the internet for a young girl. Not just any young girl, but someone so young, thin and dazzlingly sexy that Rafael would not be able to resist. She would make him fall desperately in love with her, leading him on until he acknowledged that he couldn’t live without her. Then she would publicly dump him and shatter his stupid breathless heart.
What they needed was a girl who hated men with a terrifying passion. They agonised over the wording of the ad, but finally agreed on a few carefully loaded sentences and placed them on a dozen websites. Then they waited to start interviewing.
It seemed to take forever. The emails and photos flew back and forth, but no one was exactly right until Miranda came along. She had a rough-edged London accent, but apart from that she fitted the job description perfectly. She was just twenty-one, at college and driving a minicab around Middlesex in her spare time to make ends meet. She explained that she had been incredibly hurt by lying, cheating rat-bastard men in the past, and now hated and distrusted the entire male species. She felt such deep emotional scars that she had given up her lucrative career as a model, because she no longer wished to pander to male fantasies.
For a handsome fee that would see her through college, Miranda agreed to take Rafael, emotionally speaking, to the cleaners. She readily agreed to abide by the women’s rules, and felt revulsion when taken shopping for the kind of tarty killer outfits that Nell knew Rafael liked. She was briefed in fine detail about what the artist wanted and didn’t want in a woman. The question of sleeping with him was broached; Miranda was ready to do whatever it took to enslave Rafael, in order to truly show him what a broken heart meant. Soon she was fully trained for her task, and set out on her mission to make a man suffer in love.
It was Rafael’s big opening night. A large sign in the window read: ‘The DeNapio Project – Emotional Response’. Apart from that, Columbia Road Art Gallery seemed to be decorated much as it had been the last time they had attended an opening; the guests and even the canapés were the same. But this time, Nell watched Rafael from a distance. She had forbidden Hope to speak to her. It was essential that no one knew they were friends. Miranda arrived in a separate cab, wearing a pair of diamond-chiffon triangles held together with silver chains. The room’s conversation level momentarily dropped when she entered. Nell had warned her against making the first move. She glanced across the crowded room at Hope and gave her a reassuring smile. Rafael had noticed their protegée and was already moving in beside her. He and Miranda stood admiring the gigantic purple phallus of junk that dominated the centre of the room. When Nell looked back, they were no longer standing together.
‘What happened?’ Nell hissed at Miranda after signalling her to meet in the ladies’ room.
‘He’s totally disgusting,’ Miranda replied. ‘Hit me with some crappy old lyric from a Fred Astaire song.’
Nell coloured with embarrassment as she remembered how she felt.
‘I’ve never met such a total, utter creep.’ Miranda fluffed her hair in the mirror as if trying to rid herself of his aura.
‘So what did you say to him?’
‘I told him his work was a load of cock, figuratively and literally, that he was using his ego to dupe people into thinking he had talent. He walked off.’
‘You were supposed to make him fall in love with you, not alienate him.’
‘This is too much of a challenge, Nell. He made my flesh crawl. Christ, he’s so smarmy. What did you two ever see in him?’
‘But you have to do it, Miranda. There’s no one else who can help us. Please, you have to get back out there and seduce him. If not for the money, then do it for womankind. Think of all the others he’ll get away with hurting if you don’t pull him up short.’
That got her. Miranda touched up her warpaint and went back to the battlefield as Hope and Nell watched from the bar. This time she opened the conversation, and whatever she said appeared to do the trick. Rafael asked her to meet him in a few days’ time, then took her to dinner, and Miranda reported everything back in detail. It was clearly a strain on her; of all the things she hated about him, the worst features were his insincerity, and the fact that he was only interested in her body. Miranda found herself dropping stupid statements into her conversation, just to see if he was listening, but it was obvious that her physical beauty had turned him deaf. On the third date he begged her to sleep with him. The more she refused, the more he fell in love with her. Nell was delighted by each report; Hope less so, because revenge gave her no pleasure.
The dates shifted from evening dinners to daytime outings. Gradually Rafael found himself forced to change his behaviour as he learned how to deal with this extraordinary young woman. After six weeks had passed, Nell had become anxious for Miranda to dump him, and the strain was showing on Hope. Miranda explained that she needed to string Raphael along a little longer; the deeper he was in love, the further he had to fall. She assured Nell that her resolve was as firm as ever, that Rafael had only strengthened her belief in the duplicity of men, and that the three of them would share in the pleasure of his downfall. He had entered the gift-buying stage, and was planning to introduce her to his parents. She was still refusing to sleep with him.
But too much time passed. Summer turned to autumn, and Nell grew impatient. The time had come to dump Rafael. Nell called a meeting with Miranda in her local Primrose Hill pub. The moment she saw Miranda, she knew that something had happened. They sat outside where the dying sun slung shadows across the cold grass. The girl looked sheepish and uncomfortable as she sipped a beer.
‘I might as well tell you,’ she said, unable to meet Nell’s eyes. ‘I’ve fallen in love with him.’
‘How could you have?’ asked Nell, aghast. ‘You hated his guts.’
‘He says he’s going to marry me, Nell. Look, I’ll find a way to refund the money you’ve spent on me—’
‘This isn’t about money, you know that.’
‘He’s changed. I’ve changed him. He’s learned humility – even kindness. He’s learned how to love, Nell. He admits he’s been lousy to women all his life, especially to you and Hope. He’s acknowledged his past mistakes. He’s promised me that this time things will really be different.’
‘But that’s what he does, Miranda, he’s just doing it a different way with you. Can’t you see? You’re falling for the oldest line in the book. He’s covering himself from every angle so that he can get you into bed.’
‘We’re sleeping together,’ Miranda admitted. ‘Even a man like him lets out his true feelings when he makes love.’
Miranda was disgusted. ‘Jesus, when did you get so naive?’ she asked.
‘Look at yourself, Nell. When did you get so cynical? If you want the truth, Rafael found you too old and Hope too nervous, but he was too much of a gentleman to refuse either of you. Maybe the problem has been yours all along.’
Nell watched Miranda walk away across the darkening parkland.
The next day, Rafael called both Nell and Hope to tell them about his wedding plans. Both women were in shock.
‘I warned you that this could happen,’ said Hope. ‘I wish I’d never listened to you. No matter how much somebody hurts you, taking revenge on them is wrong.’
‘I’ll call her, get her to hold him off,’ said Nell. ‘I’ll prove to her that he can’t be trusted around any woman.’
‘Just give it up, Nell,’ said Hope. ‘Haven’t we done enough?’
‘You wait and see,’ warned Nell. ‘He’ll fail her, just as he did before. He doesn’t care for her any more than he cared for us. Men like that don’t change.’
‘Maybe you’re wrong. Maybe they do.’
Nell refused to believe it. She watched and waited for proof of Rafael’s duplicity. His first show had been a smashing success. Thanks to the piece he had created with Hope’s memories and Nell’s money, he found himself becoming a media darling. Charles Saatchi bought his art. The papers loved to carry his photograph. It didn’t hurt that he was dating the most glamorous girl in town.
When Rafael announced his wedding date, Nell decided that what they needed to do was find a way of bringing out Rafael’s worst side in front of his intended bride so that she could see the mistake she was making. An awful possibility had begun to dawn on them both: that Rafael really had changed his ways, and they had introduced him to the love of his life, when they could have remained blissfully ignorant and relatively happy sharing him.
As the wedding day approached, Nell played her trump card.
‘I’ve convinced Miranda to tell him the truth about how we recruited her,’ Nell explained. ‘You watch, he’ll reveal his true nature now. No man wants to admit he’s been played for a fool.’ She was drinking too much, and in all honesty, was starting to sound like a broken record. Hope no longer enjoyed the evenings they spent plotting in bars. Nell’s bitterness increased according to the amount she drank. Hope was still angry and upset, but there was a limit to how long she could nurse a grudge.
‘The Ride Of The Valkyrie’ sounded from Nell’s purse. ‘That’ll be her now,’ she said, digging deep to extract her mobile. ‘She said she’d tell him at nine, and it’s nearly half past.’
Nell listened, and as she did, her face fell. She’s looking tired, thought Hope. This business is eating her up, the sooner it’s over, the sooner we can get on with our lives. She waited until Nell snapped the mobile shut and threw it into her bag.
‘Miranda told him.’
‘What did he say?’
Nell pulled an ugly face. ‘She says he was hurt at first, told her he felt betrayed, but then he forgave her.’ She threw back her drink and gestured to the barman for another. ‘He even professed his undying love for her, says he’s going to contact both of us to formally apologise for his past behaviour.’
‘Oh.’
‘That means more phonecalls from him. He’s taken to calling me on a regular basis, as if he expects we can all magically be friends now. All this sweetness and light is killing me.’
‘Maybe we can be friends, Nell. You know, eventually. Maybe he just wants to bury the hatchet.’
‘Yeah, I know where I’d like to bury it.’
But this time, Hope decided to speak up. ‘You know, perhaps the time has come to give in gracefully,’ she suggested gently.
‘You still don’t get it, do you?’ snapped Nell. ‘He’s lying. You can see the lies in his eyes, in the way he gives women that patented sexy look. Trust me, he’s still using that look to get himself laid behind Miranda’s back, I can feel it.’
‘You have no shred of proof, Nell. Neither of us do.’
‘I feel terrible,’ Nell told her. ‘After all, it was me who got her into this situation. He’s broken through that tough shell of hers and fooled her.’
‘It sounds to me like you’re jealous,’ said Hope, rising from her seat. ‘You don’t want Miranda to be happy. She’s young and beautiful and finally in love. No one could have predicted it, it’s just the way things turned out.’
‘Maybe I am a little jealous, but I’m more concerned for her. You remember how Miranda was when we first met her. He’s going to take away the trust she’s rebuilt in men. She won’t survive a second time. He’ll ruin her life.’
‘I’m going,’ said Hope. ‘You should too. It’s late, and we’re both a little drunk.’
‘Wait,’ called Nell. ‘I’ve another idea. We could smuggle ourselves into his stag-night and catch him doing something inappropriate, wanking over a waitress in a broom cupboard – it happens.’
‘Will you listen to yourself?’ said Hope angrily. ‘I can’t take it any more, Nell. You have to let it go at some point. Goodnight.’
After that night, Hope stopped taking her calls. Worse, she called Nell just once to announce that she had been invited to the wedding as a friend of the groom. Unusually, the ceremony was to be held at midnight. British services usually took place before dusk, due to ancient laws aimed at preventing the substitution of brides under cover of darkness. For Rafael the midnight setting was an artistic statement, one which had already intrigued the press and encouraged them to run pages on the couple’s lifestyle. The happy couple smiled out from the pages of colour supplements and glossy magazines. They appeared together on talk shows, hand in hand. Rafael and Miranda had joined that elite group of crossover stars whose opinions were canvassed on every topic of passing interest.
Nell made an effort to move on with her life, but everything seemed stalled. Her work had became more demanding as house prices slumped. She found herself trapped in a job she hated. She had missed her chance to get out, and blamed herself for compounding the idiocy of trusting a man like Rafael by trusting a girl as beautiful as Miranda. She should have seen that they were made for each other. Rafael, on the other hand, had learned from Damien Hirst’s famous comment about it being easy to be a British artist, and was quickly becoming rich.
It rained hard on the night of the wedding. Nell drank alone, disgusted with Hope and the thought that she could happily celebrate with the man who had so cruelly deceived her. She left the bar at ten without any formal plan in her head, but found herself driving to Rafael’s studio. The lights were off, and although the rear of the building was protected with bars, Miranda still had a set of keys. As she walked unsteadily through the darkened studio, she could smell Rafael’s aftershave mixed in with the scents of plaster and paint. She searched for evidence, but after finding nothing, sat on the floor and cried. Her head was throbbing. In the slim streetlight she saw a new version of his most famous statue, another monument to his sexual ego. Frustration welled up as she lifted the fire extinguisher from its clip on the wall and smashed at the purple mosaic. Splinters of mirror sprinkled around it in a crystalline rainbow. She had broken the top clean off.
The dark hollow centre of the statue beckoned. She peered inside, then felt around with her hand. What had he put in here? Carefully she pulled at the square of cardboard with her fingertips, but couldn’t imagine what it was. She could not risk putting on the lights, but found a torch in one of the cupboards. Carefully focussing the beam, Nell found herself looking at a Polaroid photograph pasted to the inside of the statue. The lurid picture, conveniently dated in felt-tip pen, showed Rafael kissing a naked girl with body makeup and cropped golden hair in his bed just two weeks earlier, at a time when he was supposed to be working late in the studio. He had even graced the photo with his signature.
It was shameless. It was obscene. More importantly, it was evidence. She called Miranda and told her what she’d found.
‘You’re drunk,’ Miranda countered. ‘I’m being dressed. Where are you?’
‘I’m in his studio. Just come down here,’ whispered Nell. ‘He’s been screwing around behind your back, and I’ve got concrete proof.’
‘How can I come down there? I’m getting married in less than an hour! People can hear me. Listen, you’re not supposed to be in there, you have to get out before anyone sees you.’ She didn’t know Nell had smashed Rafael’s latest artwork nearly in half. ‘What kind of concrete proof are you talking about?’
The literal kind, thought Nell, tugging hopelessly at the photo, which was firmly set in the huge concrete base of the statue. ‘Fine,’ she snapped, ‘Go ahead and marry him. I hope you’ll be very happy together.’ She hung up, appalled. This, truly, was the death of love. Miranda knew her future husband couldn’t be trusted, but was still going ahead with this sham of a marriage because she wanted him. The thought disgusted her. So much for sisterhood. So much for equality. If only she had some way of getting the evidence to the wedding ceremony. She looked at the statue. Then she peered out of the window at her car parked outside.
This was the only way. If she confronted him at the service or the reception, she would have to accuse him of lying without being able to offer up proof. He would accuse her of being bitter and jealous, and would have her thrown out of his gallery. She would be made a laughing stock. But she could haul the statue across town to the Charlotte Street Hotel, where the wedding was taking place, and show Miranda the truth before it was too late.
It was lighter than she’d expected, but was still a bugger to manoeuvre out of the back door and into the alleyway. It helped that the top two-foot section of the statue was missing. By the time she had managed to tie the damned thing to her roof rack, she was covered in concrete and plaster dust, her soaked clothes were torn, and she had managed to misplace her shoes somewhere.
The ride across the city proved hair-raising, as she was forced to hang onto the nylon ropes threaded over the statue and through the windows. She reached Tottenham Court Road and became snared in a traffic-choked diversion around a flooded slip-road. There was nowhere to park in Charlotte Street, so she paralleled the car beside the wedding limo, and dashed into the hotel. The desk clerk warned her that the service was already taking place in a function room, and that she could not be admitted, but the corridor outside the room was deserted; everyone was inside.
As Nell opened the door, a collective sigh went up from the congregation. Miranda and Rafael, dressed in matching midnight blue outfits that would have looked twee in the suburbs, were about to exchange vows in what appeared to be a souped-up version of a traditional non-religious ceremony, complete with African singers and an elaborate audio-visual screen presentation. Nell watched miserably as the lovers stepped onto a white dais and stared into each other’s eyes. Hope stood on the groom’s side, barely visible in a wispy beige suit. She appeared to be crying.
Nell could hardly bear to look. In front of Rafael’s family, his friends, his peers, the film crews and the congregation, the groom said ‘I do’, and pledged his eternal love for Miranda.
Miranda turned him down.
Nell couldn’t believe her ears. The girl actually said no. A murmur of disturbance rose from the gathering. Rafael was looking at his bride in disbelief.
‘I don’t love you,’ said Miranda firmly, ‘in fact, I hate everything about you,’ and everyone started talking at once. Rafael appeared to be about to fall to his knees. He didn’t get angry. He didn’t scream and shout. He looked destroyed, defeated, humiliated. He still had the same look on his face as Miranda climbed down from the dais and walked from the room.
‘I don’t know why you’re acting so surprised,’ said Miranda. ‘You always knew my intention. We went over it often enough.’ She had pulled Nell and Hope into the bar across the road from the hotel, away from the questions of the press. ‘We all agreed my actions at the outset. I never deviated from the plan. I broke his heart, just as I said I would, and you’re paying my college fees.’
‘But you told us – you told us—’ Hope abandoned the sentence and drank her gin.
‘I had to convince you because Rafael would have discovered the truth from Hope. No offence, Hope. I mean, he was ringing you day and night.’
Nell and Hope were silent.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Miranda, puzzled. ‘You don’t look very happy, either of you. You got exactly what you wanted.’
‘I don’t know.’ Hope looked uncomfortable. ‘Don’t you think this whole thing might have – well, damaged you?’
‘I’ll admit it’s done something,’ said Miranda. ‘It’s got the anger out of my system. I have a feeling I don’t hate men anymore. After all, we’re equal now.’
A noise in the street drove Nell to the window. ‘Oh God,’ she cried, ‘the statue.’ The downpour had unsettled the chemical compound of the mosaic phallus, and it was crumbling into pieces. One half slid onto the bonnet in a pool of plaster. Nell ran through the flood and fished out the Polaroid as it came loose. The rain had blurred the felt-tip date and signature into illegibility. She brought the picture back into the bar.
‘Oh, that’s me,’ Miranda told them as she studied the photograph. ‘We were fooling around one evening. I tried on a wig. It brought my scalp out in a rash.’
‘You mean—’ Nell was suddenly overwhelmed by her own meanness of spirit. ‘We’ve wronged a reformed man after all. Together we’ve ruined the life of a born-again innocent.’
‘I wouldn’t lose any sleep about it,’ Miranda told her. ‘He’s really not so innocent. I knew from the moment I met him that he’d eventually cheat on me. It was a race to see if I could get him to the altar first. The way he gives gullible women that look is such a total tip-off.’ She ordered another round of drinks. ‘Damn, I feel good. There’s something very enjoyable about being able to beat the odds just once.’
Back at the ceremony, the photographers and friends dispersed as Rafael picked himself up, dusted himself down and shot the maid of honour his patented look. She glanced around first, but smiled back.
As Nell surveyed the evaporating mess on her car, Hope and Miranda gave her a hug. ‘You realise that if anyone of us ever decides to marry, the other two will be watching her partner’s behaviour very carefully,’ Hope warned. ‘If I was a man, I really would not want to mess with us.’ The others were forced to agree.
They’ve started dating again, the three of them, Nell, Hope and Miranda, and they’re all out there, somewhere in the city.