Zoe gritted her teeth and knocked back a mouthful of lukewarm Chablis as the conversation about house prices, catchment areas and Tuscany rattled around the little group she’d been dragged into.
How she could ever have imagined her contemporaries would have changed was beyond her. Back in their boarding-school days, despite the best private girls’ education the country had to offer and despite a handful of intellects far more formidable than her own, all most of them had ever wanted to achieve in life was marriage to an aristocrat, an estate and a socking great bank balance, and judging by the number of double-barrelled surnames, titles and diamonds being shown off tonight that had been accomplished with dazzling success.
Zoe sighed in despair. All that money spent. All that potential untapped. All that dedication and ambition so badly mis-channelled. What a waste.
As this evening was turning out to be.
She’d been here for fifteen minutes, but it had taken her only five to realise that there was little to no chance of achieving any of the things she’d hoped to achieve by coming.
When the email inviting her to the reunion had popped up in her in-box a month ago her first instinct had been to ignore it. While she appreciated the fantastic academic education she’d had and the sacrifices her parents had made for her to have it, she’d never got on all that well with these girls. She hadn’t had anything in common with most of them, and some of them—one in particular—had made her life pretty miserable for the best part of seven years. So without a moment’s hesitation she’d replied that she was busy, deleted the email and firmly put it from her mind.
She’d gone back to doing what she did best—work—and buried herself in a whole load of statistical analysis for one of her and her sister’s biggest clients, and had been so absorbed by the numbers and the implications they might have that that should have been that.
But to her intense frustration that hadn’t been that because despite its consignment to the bin the invitation seemed to have opened up a Pandora’s box of adolescent angst, hormonal chaos, and brutal and painfully clear memories, and, as a result, over the past couple of weeks she’d found herself dwelling on her school days with annoying regularity.
It didn’t matter how hard she tried to shore up her defences and push it all back, or how much she tried to concentrate on something else. Her memory hammered away, and beneath such relentless pressure the sky-high barriers she’d erected to protect her from those hideous years crumbled, leaving it to trip down lanes she’d blocked off long ago, picking at emotional scabs and prodding at the wounds beneath as it did so.
And once that had happened no amount of statistical analysis could stop her remembering the pain and suffering she’d endured.
The bullying had started off trivially enough. Books she’d needed for lessons had strangely disappeared, phone messages and letters hadn’t been passed on and there’d been rumours that hinted at lesbian tendencies and had all twelve girls in her dormitory huddling into a group at the far end of the room, eyeing her with suspicion and whispering.
Then there’d been the snide remarks to her face, the ones that targeted her family, mocking her and her sister’s need for scholarships and lamenting the fact that they didn’t live in a draughty old pile in the middle of nowhere, didn’t holiday in Barbados and Verbier, and had never been anywhere near Ascot, Glyndebourne or Henley.
At first Zoe had gritted her teeth and tried to ignore it, telling herself it would stop soon enough if she just knuckled down and got on with things. That they’d soon get bored and move on to easier prey.
But they hadn’t got bored and it hadn’t stopped, and her indifference had actually made things worse, escalating what had up to that point been bullying of the mental and emotional kind to the physical.
Sitting in front of her computer, her spreadsheet blurring in front of her eyes as the memories kept coming, Zoe had sworn she could still feel the tiny bruises from the sneaky pinches and the sharp pain from the surreptitious kicks she’d received on an almost daily basis. She’d thought she could still hear the snip of the scissors as one afternoon, while she’d been working head down at her desk concentrating so hard she’d been oblivious to anything else, they’d cut through the long shiny ponytail she’d had since she was six.
Mostly, though, she kept reliving the awful night following the one and only time she’d dared to retaliate, when she’d been pinned down and had had ouzo poured down her throat. She’d been found by the caretaker stumbling around the grounds at midnight, singing—badly—at the top of her voice, and taken straight to the headmistress, and as a result had been suspended a month before her A levels.
It had not been a good time, and even though she’d got over it all years ago the last thing she needed was an evening spent with fifty-odd reminders of what had definitely not been the happiest days of her life.
But then at some point during the last week or so, her previously rock-solid conviction that she was right not to attend the reunion had begun to wobble. The more she’d dwelled on what had happened, the more she’d begun to regret the fact that she’d done so little to stop it. OK, so it wasn’t as if she were going home to her parents every evening and had been able to confide in them, but with hindsight she could have told someone.
Why she hadn’t had started to bother her. What it said about her she wasn’t sure she wanted to know. And as if the tendrils of doubt, self-recrimination and denial that were winding through her weren’t enough, she’d begun to be hassled by an image of her sixteen-year-old self, standing there with her hands on her hips and pointing out that now would be the perfect opportunity to redress a balance that should have never been allowed to become so skewed in the first place.
Go and show them, the little voice inside her head had demanded with increasing insistence. Go and show them how well you’ve done, that despite their best efforts to batter your confidence and destroy your self-belief they couldn’t. Go and show them they didn’t win.
She’d tried to resist because she’d risen above what had happened long ago, she really had, and besides, she loathed conflict, hated having to make conversation and avoided social occasions like the plague and the combination of all three might well finish her off. But that little voice wouldn’t shut up, and in the end she’d come to the conclusion that she owed it to her teenage self at the very least to try and make amends because, quite apart from anything else, if she didn’t she wouldn’t have a moment’s peace.
So she’d emailed the girl organising the reunion to tell her she’d changed her mind, and that was why, fizzing with adrenalin, buzzing with fighting spirit and brimming with a confidence she rarely felt when confronted with the idea of people, she’d wriggled into a little black dress and heels and then trekked across the city to the gastro-pub in Chelsea on this late September Thursday night instead of spending the evening at home snuggling up to her laptop in her pyjamas as usual.
But if she’d known things weren’t going to work out as she’d anticipated, if she’d known she was going to wind up drinking disgustingly warm wine while having to endure a whole load of ‘do you remember when’s and being made to feel inadequate, as if somehow she’d failed simply because she hadn’t procreated, then she wouldn’t have bothered.
Zoe drained what was left of the wine in her glass and set her jaw. She knew she hadn’t failed. She’d achieved way more than many other women of her age and she was proud of the success she’d made of her life.
And so what if she wasn’t married and didn’t have children? And who cared if she had abysmal luck on the boyfriend front? She had a career she adored, supportive and loving parents and a great sister. While she wasn’t averse to the odd date or two and possibly a relationship at some stage, she didn’t need a man to complete her life, and she certainly wasn’t sure she wanted the chaos and mess and general disruption that children caused.
No, she was perfectly content with the way things were and therefore she had no need to feel insignificant. No need to feel inferior or inadequate. No need to let herself be affected by the opinions