Post-It notes. Every single one. They fluttered in the stiff breeze from the open window, like tiny Tibetan prayer flags, except that they tended to be deprecatory, rather than imprecatory, in tone. ‘Snores!’ said one, and then, in brackets, ‘very loudly’. ‘Could NEVER see my point of view’, declared the next. ‘Very poor judgement’, accused its neighbour. ‘Beginning to lose his hair’, alleged a fourth. ‘Just won’t LISTEN!’ snapped a fifth. ‘Putting on weight’, pointed out a sixth. ‘“Selfish”’, announced the note on the freezer. ‘Forgot my birthday’, spat the one on the spice rack. ‘Lousy taste in ties’, trumpeted the one on the tumble dryer. ‘Could be short-tempered’, sneaked the one on the fridge. Everywhere I looked, every vertical surface, bore some unpleasant legend about Charlie. Amber must have used at least five packs.
‘I say,’ squawked Pedro. He emitted a long, low whistle. ‘I say,’ he said again. Then he clawed at the yellow Post-It on his cage (‘Failed Ancient Greek O-level’), before shredding it with his razor-edged beak.
Poor Charlie, I thought as I peeled the one off the toaster (‘Stubborn’), he didn’t deserve all this. I put in two slices of wholemeal bread and turned it up to ‘high’. There was a creak on the stairs, then Amber appeared, framed in the doorway in her velvet dressing gown, like some portrait by John Singer Sargent. What a pity, I thought. All that beauty, marred by bitterness.
‘You’ve got to accentuate the negative,’ she said, slightly sheepishly, as she removed a Post-It from the kettle (‘Complete wimp’) and filled it.
‘You should do it too, you know, Minty,’ she added as she unscrewed the jar of coffee (‘Pathetic’). ‘You’ll find it really helps.’
‘No, thanks,’ I said wearily. ‘It’s just not my style.’
And then, out of curiosity, I tried to imagine what my yellow stickies might say. ‘Jilted me, during my wedding, in front of every single person I know’; ‘Extremely domineering’; ‘Had a violent temper if crossed’; ‘Constantly tried to sell insurance policies to my friends’; ‘Very rude about my mother’; ‘Dictated what I wore’; ‘Criticised what I said’; ‘Undermined me at every turn’. Oh, they would be far, far worse than anything Amber could come up with about Charlie. ‘Shallow’ was another obvious one for Dom, while ‘Deeply neurotic’ also sprang to mind.
Whereas Charlie’s very stable. He really is. He’s also honourable. In every way. He’s the Honourable Charles Edworthy, you see, because his father’s a life peer. And Amber told me that Charlie had been a bit surprised when Dominic had asked him to be his best man, because they hadn’t known each other long, having only met through me. But I knew Dominic well enough to guess the reason at once – he’d thought it would look good in the ‘Weddings’ column of The Times. ‘Best man was the Hon. Charles Edworthy,’ it would say. But that announcement, like my marriage, had been unexpectedly cancelled.
In any case, I knew all the bad news about Dominic. I didn’t need to write it down. It had been tucked into the back of my mind for the best part of two years. But the funny thing is that I’d accepted all those negative factors. It’s not as though I wasn’t aware of them – I was. They troubled me. And though, on the surface, I made out everything was fine, inside I was filled with dismay. So I did what I did at work. I edited the bad things out. I excised them, just as I remove the rubbish from my radio interviews. At work, I review all my recorded material, and then skilfully cut out the crap – all the bits that jar, or don’t fit; the inarticulate, or plain boring parts, the hesitations and the repetitions – I remove them all, so that the end result is smooth and easy on the ear. And that’s what I’d done with Dominic. But why? Why did I? People have begun to ask me that. Well, there’s a complicated answer.
First of all, because I suppose I try to accentuate the positive. See the good things. And there were good things, too, about Dom. He was attractive, and generous, and successful. He was also very ambitious for me, which I liked. And of course he seemed to be very fond of me – though not, as it turned out, quite fond enough. But that’s why I decided that I could live with all his faults. Because I thought he loved me. Because, out of all the women he could have had, he’d chosen me. And that was flattering. Then I’m not the sort of person to make a fuss, however unhappy I feel. As I say, I always like to keep things smooth and ‘nice’. And that’s the main reason why I kept quiet – because I hate confrontations of any kind and I really don’t handle them well. Particularly when it comes to personal relationships. I’m terrified of giving offence. Because if I give offence, then I might be rejected. So I avoid giving offence, like the plague.
That’s why I’m not going to say anything to Amber about the fact that she’s making no attempt to find her own place. Nor am I going to complain about the way she leaves her washing up, despite being here all day. Nor do I intend to bring up the subject of the phone. She spends at least two hours every evening on it, droning away to anyone who’ll listen about how ‘bloody appallingly’ she’s been treated by Charlie. And I do wish she wouldn’t do this, not least because I’d like to use the phone myself.
Amber, meanwhile, had opened Pedro’s cage, and he was now perched on her shoulder, affectionately nibbling her hair. They’re very alike, I suddenly thought. Birds of a feather, in fact. They’re strikingly good-looking, attention-grabbing, profoundly irritating and time-warped.
‘Super, darling!’ screeched Pedro, as she handed him a sunflower seed.
‘I wish you’d learn how to say, “Charlie’s a bastard,”’ she said to him with a regretful air. This is extremely unlikely. a) Pedro was very fond of Charlie, and b) he hasn’t added a single word to his vocabulary since 1962. He’s like an old record in that way, and the needle is well and truly stuck.
‘He’s going in the next novel,’ Amber said, with a smile.
‘Who, Pedro?’
‘No, Charlie, of course.’
‘Oh dear. As what?’
‘As an effete toff called Carl Elworthy who turns out to be a serial killer!’
‘Poor chap,’ I said.
‘What do you mean, “Poor chap”?’ she retorted, as she applied bitter orange marmalade to my toast. ‘Poor me, you mean.’ She bit into it with a loud ‘crunch’, then tore off a tiny piece for Pedro. He took it daintily, then his bulbous, black tongue ground it around his beak, like a pestle in a mortar.
‘What a bastard,’ she said again.
I wanted to tell Amber the truth – that I didn’t blame Charlie at all. That I thought she was over the top. But I didn’t because I’m a bit frightened of Amber, just like Charlie was.
‘Scary, isn’t she?’ he’d once whispered to me, slightly tipsily, at a drinks party.
‘Oh yes!’ I said, surprised at his candour. ‘I mean, well, you know, a bit!’ And then we’d both blushed guiltily, like conspirators, and gone, ‘Ha ha ha!’
‘We’re going to get over this, Minty,’ Amber added, as Pedro waddled down her arm. ‘We’re going to forget men,’ she said. ‘We’re not going to bother with the bastards at all. In fact, we’re going to enjoy ourselves without them, we’re going to …’
‘Celibate?’ I said wryly.
‘No, cerebrate,’ she announced happily. ‘We’re going to cultivate the life of the mind!’ She stirred her coffee excitedly then buttered my second piece of toast. ‘The key words for us, Mint, are Protect, Pamper and Improve – with the emphasis firmly on “Improve”. And we’re going to spend time with women, too, Minty. Clever women. I know,’ she went on enthusiastically, ‘let’s start an all-women’s book club! They’re extremely fashionable – Ruby Wax is in one, and so are French and Saunders. We could call ours the BBBC.’
‘What’s that?’
‘The Brilliant