Wishful Thinking (6 page)

His full name was Francesco Michelangelo Cavari, Conte di Pappageno, though there were at least a dozen more middle names thrown in with which I won't bore you. Italian birth certificates used to get so overcrowded that a few years ago the government decided to slap a tax on excess names, ostensibly for the benefit of harassed form-fillers. The Italian system of taxation is highly creative, and would beggar the entire working populace if anyone ever bothered to pay. Anyhow, Franco was dark and handsome, if not actually tall, with the caramel complexion of the Mediterranean, black hair, and a wicked green glint in his eyes. Georgie met him in Venice, where she had gone for the carnival. The setting was a palazzo, lantern-lit, candle-lit, fairy-lit; reflections shimmered in the canal below; somewhere above the stars were keeping their end up. Music fought a running battle with conversation. Georgie wore gold silk in the style of the seventeenth century; Franco was dressed as a pirate. Through the slits in his mask, she saw that green glint. It was fatal. She had never yet completely lost her head over a man, and somewhere at the back of her mind she felt it was long overdue. He fulfilled all the clichés: the looks of a film star, the credentials of a Latin lover, even the title. ‘It was so Mills and Boon,' Georgie sighs, ‘that was the joke. I never could resist a good joke.' But the joke was on her.

As soon as she returned from Venice, she booked her next ticket out. By the third trip the ticket was one-way. She shacked up with him in an apartment in Rome and in due course they got married.

I've seen the pictures. Georgie's hair looks darker then, a more golden blonde, and long enough to put up, piled on her head and twined with white flowers and bits of silver leaf. She is wearing that reliable marital standby oyster silk, and a train. The pallor of the material sets off a perfect tan, and the sculpted bodice and skirt show her tiny waist and the slender curve of her hips. She looks unbelievably lovely in a totally different way from Lin, all assurance and warmth and sensuality. Beside her, the groom is wickedly handsome, glint and all, his tan deeper and greener than hers, with that olive tint that you get in southern Europe, his pointy smile and loose curls making him look slightly faun-like.

‘Wasn't he a Catholic?' Lin asked.

Georgie made a face. ‘Oh, yes. I was so besotted, I agreed to the whole package. It wasn't as if I had any religion – nor had he. It was just what you did in Italy. He had the guilt, of course. Fornication was a sin and all that. I expect that's what made him so good at it.'

‘Do you regret it?' I inquired.

‘No. I don't . . . really . . . think I regret anything. What's the point? I was madly in love, I got married. Some of the time it was magic. Some of the time it was hell. That was all right with me. Living happily ever after would be very boring.'

Georgie's a lot more down-to-earth than Lin, but in those days she had her romantic streak. She had traded in her glamorous London lifestyle for what she hoped would be the
dolce vita
in Rome, but it took time to make friends and her determination to get a job unnerved her husband. She didn't have the contacts for PR there, so she studied Italian and got work as a translator. She found herself drawn into a small community of ex-pat brides, women from colder climes who'd gone the Mills-and-Boon route, falling for heat, bougainvillaea, dark good looks, seductive accents, out-of-date titles. They would gather together and compare notes on their Italian stallions, on the dominant mothers-in-law, the masculine obsession with machismo and
bella figura
, the best ways of cooking pasta, their frustrated desire to repaint the
salone
blue, or green, or any colour except the standard creamy-white. They had secret feasts involving Marmite, Branston pickle, rice pudding and curry. Georgie, never at her best with too much female company, shocked both foreigners and natives by cultivating menfriends, not clandestine lovers but admirers and companions: a gay fashion designer, an artist who painted her, an American writer encountered in the course of work. When Franco objected she laughed at him. ‘Jealousy is good,' she told him. ‘I'm glad you're jealous. But you must know you have no cause.' When he tried to assert some authority she was not so much intractable as impervious. It amazed her that he – or any man – would even make the attempt to tell her what to do. But when he gave up she eventually realised that this was worse.

Franco had always been fond of women, gambling and drink, not necessarily in that order. He gave up other women when he married Georgie – she knew he was occasionally unfaithful but always maintains it was ‘nothing serious' – but turned increasingly to gambling and drink to reassert his emasculated ego and deaden the smart to his self-esteem. He could not rule his wife; had she chosen to rule him, within the domestic domain, taking over from his mamma whose iron dominion had been curtailed rather than softened by chronic illness, he would have adjusted. But Georgie did not want to rule. It was her independence which defeated him, and when he protested, ranted, fumed, all he saw was that she didn't take him seriously. His male bravado and lust for mastery was a game to her, a game she won effortlessly, without even noticing the contest. He drank to give himself the courage to challenge her, to numb himself to her laughter and her charm. By the time she had begun to understand, it was too late.

They wanted children but, despite constant groundwork, nothing happened. Georgie went for tests, Franco wouldn't even consider it. Doctors attributed the problem to ‘psychological barriers'. When she finally learned she was pregnant, after her mother-in-law's last stroke, she didn't tell him straight away, in case anything went wrong and the failure of his hopes proved too much for him. He was drinking now to blot out the dread of his mamma's approaching death, or for any reason, or just for the sake of drinking. He came back late one night barely able to stand; she was trying to help him up the stairs to their flat when he fell against her and sent her sprawling. She tumbled down the rest of the flight and lay still, bleeding copiously. Neighbours called an ambulance; Franco was too drunk to help. The next day, doctors told him she had lost the baby he hadn't known she was carrying; subsequent tests confirmed damage to the womb which meant she was unlikely to conceive again. He sobbed out his guilt on her hospital bed, promising to give up the drink and saying having children didn't matter. A week later, he was blaming her for not telling him, and drinking again to drown both his shame and his bitterness that he would never be a father.

And so it went on. Drink → penitence → abstention → awareness → guilt → drink. Garry Grimes had gone on benders lasting two or three days but in between he had periods of relative sobriety. It was depression he needed to fight, not alcoholism. But Franco was now a full-blown alcoholic. Ultimately, he drank because he drank. After his mother's death they moved into the family mansion, a decrepit villa full of nooks and crannies where bottles could be hidden. Georgie tried getting rid of them, but he only bought more. She sought medical advice, only to be told there was nothing to be done until he decided to do it himself. She took control of their finances, only to find they hadn't any: what remained of the Cavaris' ancestral wealth had mostly been gambled or drunk away. Franco borrowed money from her, and never repaid it. When she refused to lend, he stole. The tenor of their rows had changed: she no longer laughed or teased him. One day, he hit her.

That was when she knew she would have to leave. Not tomorrow, or the next day, but sometime, someday. She stood at the window looking out over the Eternal City and thinking that its roots were deeper than love and its towers higher, because a city was a strong thing, a work of skill and stone, and the edifices of the heart were as towers of mist, and like mist they blew away. She told herself she wasn't bitter – she swore she would never be bitter, because bitterness eats the soul – but cynicism had entered into her, hardening her mind if not her heart. She would have to leave, and return to London, and the
dolce vita
was gone for good. In fact, it had been gone for quite a while.

‘Of course you had to leave,' said Lin. ‘He might have hurt you.'

‘Oh, I wasn't worried about that,' Georgie responded. ‘He couldn't hurt me. Even when he hit me, I didn't feel it. What worried me was that
I
would hurt
him
. If he hit me again I might hit him back, or pick up a kitchen knife – and that would be that. I never wanted to hurt him, so I had to go. There was nothing I could do for him any more.'

It was a battle she couldn't win, and Georgie had always been used to winning. She could have stayed in Rome – she had been there nearly ten years, and had many friends – but she felt it was better to make a complete break. She sold her jewellery and put the money in a trust with anything else she could scrape together, and arranged for regular payment of basic bills and a small allowance for Franco. The American writer and a Cavari cousin were trustees. Then she packed her clothes and a few personal items and flew back to England. Everything she had in the world fitted into three suitcases and a flight bag.

In London, she moved in with the elderly aunt who would subsequently bequeath to Georgie both her house and her mortgage. She knew she wouldn't be able to pick up where she had left off and she was right: she was pushing forty and had been out of the game too long. But there was an opening at Ransome Harber and an old friend put in a word. The salary was mediocre, the social scene far from glittering, but it was a job. Georgie took it.

It must sound as if everyone in publishing gets their job through the machinations of a friend. Basically, this is true. But just for the record, I got in through an employment agency – which makes me almost as rare as an author who's been pulled out of the slush pile.

Georgie had been with the company about eight months when Lin joined, over a year when I came. She and Lin, though unlikely friends in terms of character and outlook, had enough similarities in their life histories to form an instant rapport; Georgie rapidly became Lin's chief confidante, mentor, and substitute elder sister (though a far more sympathetic and understanding version than the real thing). Since I was working in Editorial, not Publicity, it took me a little longer to form part of our trio. I was attracted to Georgie – everyone is, of both sexes – but it was only after a particularly disastrous launch at L'Escargot that we became close. The book in question was a classy legal thriller by a blonde barrister called Courtney Pryce (real name Davina). Her literary agent, a battleaxe of uncertain age and even more uncertain temperament, got extremely drunk at the party even by publishing standards and Courtney politely suggested it was time for her to go home. The agent, whom I won't name for reasons of tact, discretion, and libel laws, went berserk, attempted to sock her client, and had to be forcibly restrained. She was eventually sent home in a taxi, was subsequently dumped by Courtney, and a year or so later produced an inferior novel plagiarising much of her ex-client's plot which became a brief bestseller at the Walthamstow branch of Safeway. Meanwhile, back at L'Escargot, a furious Georgie repaired her smudged mascara – ‘Thank God my blusher's okay: I haven't got it with me' – and thanked me warmly for leaping into the fray to assist her. We retired to the restaurant for dinner, lingering – with Lin – long after the author had fled, and bonded.

Most friendships formed at work happen because people are stuck in the same environment and getting along together is both pleasant and convenient. But I really hope the friendship between Lin and Georgie and me is the deep kind, the kind that lasts. We certainly worry about each other enough. But then, women always worry about their friends: it's so much more comfortable than worrying about yourself. For instance, Lin and I indulged in some serious worrying over Georgie after the office party two Christmases ago.

Office parties, as everyone knows, are an essential item in contemporary romance. What Almack's was to Georgette Heyer, what Cinderella's ball was to the fairytale, what the movie premiere is to the B-list celebrity, the office party is to chick fic. In the City, secretaries tart up to seduce their dishiest bosses while excluded wives rant down their mobiles, and So-and-So from Foreign Investments makes an exhibition of himself with That Blonde from Money-Laundering.

In publishing, contrary to Bridget Jones et al, there are very few dishy bosses: Peter Mayer at Penguin in the good old days of fun and
fatwas
was, I am told, the exception to all rules. But since it is perfectly true that us girls tart up more for ourselves than the opposite sex – if Nigel is anything to go by, men don't notice anyway – we duly tarted. That is, Lin wore something with ethnic embroidery and tatty hemlines, mascara too dark for her colouring and a smudge of lipstick; I did my best to cover the bulges in a loose silk shirt, daringly pink, which made me look like an oversized Christmas parcel; and Georgie wore an Armani suit, all slimline trousers and stylish tailoring, which must have made a major contribution to her mounting credit-card debt. She looked sensational, with her tits looming from a wispy little top under the collarless jacket, her hair an exquisite blonde disorder, and a couple of face jewels (they were all the rage that year) on her cheekbones. And all for the massed might of Ransome Harber, including not only the resident imprints but also the Design Department, which, like Publicity, dealt with everyone, Contracts, who had turned procrastination into an art form, and the power-mad control-freaks from Sales, who, in the teeth of the evidence, still believed they knew How the Market Works.

From five-thirty, every ladies' loo was choc-a-block, while the men wandered around complaining because there was no one else to answer the phones, opening bottles, sampling their contents, pulling the odd premature cracker and, in extreme cases, wearing paper hats. Georgie, Lin and I finished our titivation in Georgie's office, where she had thoughtfully provided us with a portable mirror and desk lamp for makeup purposes. Then we emerged, headed for the drinks as usual, and several glasses later, when Lin had peeled off to discuss folklore with Graham from Phoenix, Georgie and I found ourselves talking to Calum McGregor, the Art Director.