was another matter I would like to discuss with him. He
was fairly unhelpful initially, but I did tell him I was already
hearing talk of Toshigate being bandied about among my
contacts down at Canary Wharf’
‘Toshigate?’
‘Yes. Tosh as in Macintosh, gate as in Watergate.’
‘Oh, I see. Yes, that’s very funny, Tom, I must say.’
‘Yes, I thought so. I made it up,’ said Tom modestly.
‘Anyway, an hour or so later, I got another call; I think
we’ll find that any lobbying we do on Euro regs vis-i-vis the
retail food industry will receive a sympathetic ear, and
there’s a good possibility of a parliamentary question on the
subject, or even an Early Day Motion, particularly if they
are persuaded of a broad span of interest. So I think, under
the circumstances, a quick photo session might be at least
worth considering, don’t you?’
‘Oh, I do,’ said Bob Macintosh. ‘Under the circumstances.
Certainly worth considering.’
Octavia arrived home at nine, after a rather tedious
committee meeting with the regional representatives of a
new client, a sponsor-a-child charity looking to raise their
profile - they all wanted to raise their profiles and they all
didn’t want it to cost anything, she thought despairingly.
She finally managed to persuade them into a series of
‘fasting’ lunches. ‘People pay to come and then eat bread
and cheese and drink water; it raises a lot of money, and at
grass-root level does a very good PR job. It’s what the
charity’s about, earns it respect, and it still gives the ladies
who lunch a reason to dress up and gossip.’
Tom was out at a dinner when she got home; the
children were all asleep. She had been hungry, but it had
worn off by now and that was good. Calories in hand, as
she thought of them. She made herself a large mug of
peppermint tea and went to check the answering machine.
There was only one message, left at ten that morning:
‘Hallo, Boot. Only me. Give me a ring if you have a
minute over the next few days. I’m not doing anything. As
usual. Seems ages since we talked properly. And there’s
something I have to tell you.’
Louise. She’d been thinking about her a lot lately,
missing her. They met far too seldom, separated by their
lifestyles, but they managed to remain close by phone,
picking up a conversation almost where it had been left off,
often after weeks of silence.
She dialled Louise’s Cheltenham number: it rang for a
while, then Louise’s husky, musical voice, breathless,
slightly fraught, said, ‘Hallo?’
‘Louise, it’s me. Octavia.’
‘Oh, Octavia. How lovely. Listen, can I ring you back in
ten minutes? No, make that half an hour. I’m just putting
Dickon to bed, he’s not very well, and there’s also a very
nasty case of outraged hungry male here, demanding its
food. Let me feed the beast and then I’ll get back to you.
Or are you going out?’
‘No,’ said Octavia, ‘no, I’m not going out.’
‘I’ll ring you nine at the latest. ‘Bye, Boot.’
That silly nickname; a diminution of Old Boot, which was
what Louise had called her whenever she was being bossy,
or humourless. Which had been a great deal of the time,
thought Octavia, putting down the phone, staring into
space, seeing Louise suddenly, vividly, as she had been then, this person who had been the most important thing in her
life for all her growing-up years. She remembered watching
her on almost her first day at Wycombe Abbey, running
across the lacrosse pitch at the end of a game, chasing after
two girls, laughing, and then catching them up, walking
between them, talking animatedly, her arms round their
shoulders, tall and graceful and golden haired, wondering
who she was, hearing someone say, ‘Louise Madison gets
prettier every term,’ and envying her, from her lonely,
frightened, friendless state, finding it impossible to imagine
what it must be like to be her.
For the first half term, she watched her from afar,
fascinated by her; they were in different houses, and
different forms, in spite of being in the same year, and their
paths hardly crossed. Louise would smile at her sometimes,
even say ‘hi’, and Octavia would nod at her, and say ‘hallo’
awkwardly back, but that was all. Louise was gloriously
popular, the star of the games circuit and settled comfortably
near the bottom of every academic subject; Octavia
was on a full academic scholarship, got top marks for
everything and couldn’t hold a ball if it was dropped into
her hands. Louise had already been at the school for a year,
having been been kept down because of her poor scholastic
performance; Octavia was still unsettled after two months,
wretchedly homesick, an only child, over-protected, young
for her age, while intellectually precocious and trailing the
glory of her scholarship.
It had been a strange friendship then, formed one
evening after supper as they met in one of the cloakrooms,
each emerging from a lavatory where they had been crying
silently, or as silently as they could manage — Octavia
because nobody liked her and her entire table had gone off
giggling without her, Louise because she had just come
from an interview with the headmistress and been threatened
with unspeakably nameless horrors if her marks didn’t
improve. They had looked at each other shamefaced, both
sniffing, smiling embarrassedly through their tears.
‘You all right?’ Louise had said.
‘No, not really,’ Octavia had said, too wretched to
pretend any longer. ‘What about you?’
‘Not at all,’ said Louise. ‘Should we go and talk about it,
do you think?’ and she pulled a great length of paper towel
from the wall unit, handed Octavia half of it, and then took
her arm, blowing her nose as she did so. And from then on
they had been inseparable. Had actually mingled their
blood, drawn with their compasses, to the accompaniment
of much giggling and squeaks of ‘ouch’ and sworn eternal
friendship, ‘For ever and ever. Amen.’
A strange alliance it had been, between the awkwardly
difficult little girl nobody liked, and the charmingly easy
one everyone did, but for some reason it had worked;
Octavia had dinned her Latin verbs and her mathematical
tables into Louise, Louise had insisted that Octavia be
allowed to join the large gang of giggling, gossiping insiders
that she led, and mutual gratitude and need had grown
quite quickly into a lot of other things, not least affection
and a very real respect. They stayed with one another in the
holidays, at the lovely sprawling manor house in Gloucestershire
where Louise lived with her doting parents and her
two younger brothers, and the darker splendour of Felix
Miller’s Victorian Gothic mansion in Hampstead. From
those weeks came Octavia’s first experience of the happy,
easy, noisy family life that Louise so carelessly enjoyed,
Louise’s of the tension and discipline and fierce possessiveness
that drove Octavia; their very differences drew them
closer, taught them tolerance and respect for one another.
When they had left Wycombe Abbey — Louise to do a
secretarial training amidst the most dire prognostications of
a life wasted and ruined, Octavia to Cambridge to study law
- they drifted apart for a while; back in London at law
school, studying for her final exams, Octavia had seen
Louise’s lovely face in the Daily Mail one morning (not
greatly changed, even if the golden hair had been bleached
and teased into a shape that defied gravity and the brown
eyes had apparently doubled in size, with the addition of
several layers of dark brown eye shadow and three pairs of false eyelashes). She was tipped as the hottest thing on the
catwalk since Twiggy, the Mail informed its readers.
Octavia had contacted Louise through her agency and
they became close again, Louise taking Octavia shopping
(‘You look awful, you’ll never get a job wearing clothes
like that’), and Octavia dragging Louise to theatres and art
galleries (‘No need to be pig ignorant and empty headed
just because you’re a model’). Octavia went to supper
parties in Louise’s big sunny studio flat near Primrose Hill,
and met her friends — other models, photographers, dress
designers, fashion editors, rather alarming they seemed to
her, with their wild clothes and outrageous gossip. Louise
was invited to slightly intense evenings in the rather grand
flat Octavia’s father had bought her in the Old Brompton
Road, formal three-course dinner parties with Octavia’s
fellow lawyers and old friends from Cambridge.
Louise, by then, had a string of lovers, Octavia one fairly
serious one; they shared appallingly intimate details of their
sex lives, saw one another through pregnancy scares,
heartbreak, career crises — Louise was fired by her agency
for turning up late once too often; Octavia decided, just
into her first big case, that she hated law, could stay in it no
longer — and then Louise took off for America for five years
to work and Octavia met and became engaged to Tom.
Louise had approved of Tom: ecstatically. ‘Heaven!’ she had
said happily, over supper with Octavia the night after the
engagement party Felix had insisted on giving, and which
she had flown over for. ‘Too good looking and charming
for words, of course, but you can handle that, can’t you, my
darling?’
Octavia had said she was sure she could, but quite what
had Louise meant? Louise had got a bit flustered and said
nothing, nothing at all, it was just that terribly good looking
and charming men did tend to be a bit of handful, she
should know, and Octavia had said if Louise meant she
thought Tom was going to play around, then she was wrong, they had both agreed that fidelity was of paramount importance, or perhaps she’d meant that she, Octavia, was
less good looking and charming than Tom, in which case
she would rather Louise came out and said so.
Louise had become very upset and said she hadn’t meant
anything at all, and anyway it had been the champagne
talking and Octavia had obviously forgotten what a lot of
nonsense she did talk, champagne or no. Octavia had
forgiven her, of course, but it had cast a shadow over the
evening.
Louise had come over again, for the wedding, had been
chief bridesmaid, and in his speech thanking her, Tom had
said he half expected her to join them on honeymoon, so
integral a part of his bride’s life did she seem; Louise had
Stood up laughing and said was it an invitation because she’d
adore to accept; Octavia and Tom went to Barbados
without Louise, and when they got back td London she had
gone.
For a while they had lost contact; then the phone rang
one morning in Octavia’s office and the lovely voice said,
‘Boot? I’m getting married. He’s called Sandy and he’s
divine, and utterly right for me. Come and meet him and
approve — and keep quiet if you don’t.’
She hadn’t approved and she didn’t keep quiet: she felt she
couldn’t, felt it was her duty as Louise’s friend to be
truthful.
‘He is — marvellous of course,’ she had said carefully, ‘but
I don’t think quite right for you.’
‘But he is,’ said Louise, her blue eyes shining with
earnestness. ‘Almost everyone says he’s not right, even
Mummy says it, just because he’s in the army, and not a
photographer or something, but he’s what I want, he’s so
stable and utterly reliable and - and English.’
‘But your lives are so different, Louise. You’ll have so
little in common and—’
‘They are, but I’ve had enough of that life, Boot. It’s so
ridiculous, so excessive, and everyone treats you like shit in
the end. Sandy is so wonderfully old-fashioned. And romantic. He’s like — well, he’s like Daddy. Daddy’s the
one person who’s very happy about it. Now do stop
fussing, I know we’re going to be utterly, perfectly happy.’
And she had married him in a cloud of euphoria and wild
silk on a glorious spring day in the village church in
Gloucestershire, emerging to a guard of honour formed by
Sandy’s fellow officers, a cloud that broke up fairly soon
into a series of storms before changing heavily and
permanently into a grey mass, overhanging what clearly
was, to Louise, an endlessly disappointing landscape.
Octavia, saddened by the disappointment (unacknowledged
by Louise), had formed her own theory about the alliance.
Despite (or perhaps because of) more than half a decade in
the fashion industry, with its careless morality, its shifting
emotional sands, its frenetic concern with style and
appearance, Louise was extremely romantic. It was a joke
about her that her sexual fantasies were not of multiple
lovers, of night-long orgasms, of outrageous practices, but
were set in a time warp, Hollywood style; Louise dreamed
of eyes locking across a crowded room, meetings in slow