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  It Would Be Wrong to Steal My Sister’s Boyfriend

  (Wouldn’t It?)

  Sophie Ranald

  It Would Be Wrong to Steal My Sister’s Boyfriend (Wouldn’t It?) © Sophie Ranald 2013

  All rights reserved in all media. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical (including but not limited to: the internet, photocopying, recoding or by any information storage and retrieval system), without prior permission in writing from the author and/or publisher.

  The moral right of Sophie Ranald as the author of the work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  For Hopi, who makes my dreams come true.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  CHAPTER ONE

  I was sitting on the sofa watching Newsnight with Ben when my sister brought home the man I was going to fall in love with. I’d like to say I had a sense of portent or something when I heard two sets of footsteps on the stairs outside. But instead I took another gulp of my tea and carried on half-listening to Jeremy Paxman savaging some Lib Dem MP, and said to Ben, “Sounds like Rose has a bloke in tow.”

  We’d been sharing the flat for four years, and generally we got along pretty well – Rose and I, that is, not me and Ben. Rose has what I suppose you’d call an active social life – she often has crowds of her rah friends over for dinner parties or ‘kitchen sups’ (of course I rip the piss out of her mercilessly for thinking she’s the next Nigella Lawson, to which she responds that Nigella’s so last decade – last century, last millennium even, and it’s all about Lorraine Pascale now. And she’s probably right – what would I know?). Anyway alongside the friends there’s been a pretty steady stream of what Rose calls ‘chaps’.

  When we first moved in here Rose was going out with Danny, who she met in her final year at uni. He was an upper-class twat and I couldn’t stand him. I still don’t know what Rose saw in him, although he did have a fantastic body, apparently from playing polo. Polo! I ask you. Danny was actually the Honourable Daniel Someone – his father was an Earl (our Dad, who’s a real old socialist, bless him, literally choked on a chickpea when Rose told him this and I thought I’d have to perform the Heimlich manoeuvre, but he recovered, which is lucky, because I’ve no idea how to do it). Looking back, it’s possible that the Earl thing is exactly what Rose saw in Danny.

  In due course Rose kicked the Hon Dan to the kerb, or the other way around, I’m not quite sure. He was followed in fairly short order by Neil, who’d been to Harvard Business School and was actually Neil Marshall III and the heir to an enormous oil-based fortune. When Neil pushed off back to America Rose started going out with Aiden, who was something in finance, then there was Mark, who was something else in finance – in fact I think he may have had a hedge fund, but I could be imagining it. You get the picture – there were lots of men in Rose’s life, although to be fair never more than one at a time, that I knew of. After a while they all merged into one, and a river ran through them, so to speak. So I wasn’t at all surprised that Tuesday evening to hear two sets of footsteps on the stairs: the click of Rose’s high heels and the heavier tread belonging to the latest chap.

  I heard the front door open and the rattle of Rose’s keys as she put them in the little dish on the hall table as she always does, which is handy for me when I can’t find mine, and then her voice saying, “Would you like a whisky, Ollie? Or shall I put some coffee on?” and a man’s rather nice, posh-sounding voice saying he’d love a whisky.

  “Ice?” Rose said.

  “No thanks,” said the gentleman caller, and then they both came into the living room.

  Rose and I do look alike, really. If we were in a room full of other people and someone asked you to guess which of the women there were sisters, you’d get that it was us, if the light was dim enough and there weren’t identical twins there too. We’ve got the same bone structure, the high forehead and high cheekbones and slightly beaky nose I see when I look at photos of Mum, and the same rather wispy dark blonde hair and hazel eyes, and we’re both average height, not tall and not short. But that’s where the similarity ends, and why when people who know one of us well are introduced to the other, they invariably say, “This is your sister?” in tones of horrified amazement, or just amazement, if they’re my friends meeting Rose for the first time.

  Because Rose has done what used to be called ‘making the most of oneself’, or what I call scrubbing up well, on the rare occasions when I do it. Rose does it all the time. She has her hair highlighted at some swanky salon in Chelsea, so instead of being mousy like mine, it’s pale gold, but looks really natural, and she straightens it every day, so what’s limp and shapeless on me is a smooth, shining curtain on her. She never, ever leaves the flat without having a shower, curling her eyelashes and putting makeup on – not even to go down to the corner shop for bread and Marmite on a Saturday morning with a hangover, which of course means I get sick of waiting for her to get ready and go myself. She always wears high heels, so instead of being an average five foot five, she’s an elegant, slender five foot nine. And she wears really expensive, designer clothes. And did I mention the slender thing? I don’t want to give you the idea that I’m some kind of lumpen heifer – I’m a perfectly ordinary, healthy size fourteen – but Rose is a size eight and puts herself through hell to stay that way.

  Don’t get me wrong, it’s her body and her life, but it makes me sad sometimes that Rose is willing to make so many sacrifices for her looks. Part of it’s principle – I genuinely believe it’s wrong that women are judged so harshly on their appearance, and that there’s such a very narrow definition of beauty in Western culture, and so much pressure to conform to it. Part of it’s seeing my sister dragging herself off to the gym every day without fail, even if she’s got a horrible cold or has only had three hours’ sleep because she was out at a party the night before, and entering every single thing she eats or drinks into the calorie counting app on her iPhone, and literally stopping half-way through a plate of food when she reaches her twelve hundred calorie quota, no matter how hungry she still is. And of course I’d quite like it if I could borrow her designer clothes sometimes, on the rare occasions when I have to go somewhere smart, but none of them would ever fit me, not in a million years. But she’s really nice and lets me borrow her shoes whenever I want, so it’s not all bad. Except they kill my feet and I usually end up having to take them off and walk home barefoot, and once I left her silver snakeskin Jimmy Choos on the number 19 bus. She wasn’t so nice about that.

  Anyway, the long and the short of all this is that Rose is groomed and glossy and I’m not, and although she’s eighteen months younger than me, twenty six to my twenty eight, she looks older, all sort of put-together and grown up, whereas I still look like a student, and people assume I’m the younger sister. Which I gue
ss is why when Rose and Oliver came into the living room that night, Rose said, “This is my big sister, Elodie, and her boyfriend Benedict.”

  Of course, as Rose knew perfectly well, Ben is not my boyfriend. Really, not at all. He’s my good mate, and he has been ever since I spilled a pint of beer down the back of his shirt in the student union bar in my final year at uni (well, since about ten minutes after, strictly speaking, once he’d finished being annoyed and I’d finished apologising). Not that he isn’t the sort of bloke anyone with any sense would want to have for a boyfriend – he’s super clever but never arrogant, he listens to what everyone says and treats everyone the same, and although he’s so brilliant and everyone’s always saying what an amazing career he has ahead of him, he never talks down to anyone, even when they’re clearly wrong. And he’s properly fanciable too, not in an obvious way, just really lovely, with warm smiley greyish blue eyes and a strong, open face. So understandably that first night I met him, once he had dried off a bit, I wanted to go to bed with him, and we did, and it was amazing.

  For a few months we were what I suppose you’d call Friends With Benefits, and then something happened – okay, someone happened – that meant there stopped being benefits, but we carried on being friends. And we still saw each other a few times a month, sometimes alone to see a movie or go to a gig or whatever, and sometimes with a group of mates, like for the Tuesday pub quiz at The Duchess, where we’d been that night. I suppose one day we’ll sign the register at each other’s weddings and be godparents to each other’s children, and all that stuff. Anyway, quite often I have to remind people that Ben. Is. Not. My. Boyfriend, and I felt a bit annoyed when Rose introduced him to Oliver that way.

  But I didn’t say that to Oliver, because I was too busy looking at him. I don’t want to exaggerate but he took my breath away. Literally. I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach and I could feel a flush of heat spreading over my entire body. Which was weird, because of course I think love at first sight is a load of old pony, and anyway Oliver wasn’t even my type, although his looks were, as I’ve said, breathtaking. He’s like all the cliches: tall, dark, handsome. If he was an actor he’d have a shout at playing James Bond, he’s got the right sort of steely blue eyes and beautiful, deep voice with the kind of accent you get from public school then Oxbridge, the kind of accent Rose has carefully acquired and I haven’t. And, like Rose, he had that look of polish about him: his hair was beautifully cut and had just the right amount of wax or something in it, so it was in a proper style without making him look like the spiky-haired member of a boy band. His suit was beautifully cut too, even I could see that, and it emphasised his broad shoulders and long legs. His tie and his shoes and his cufflinks all looked expensive, and although it was eleven o’clock at night he looked like he’d just shaved. So, seriously, not my type. He couldn’t have been more different from Ben, who was wearing a shabby grey hoodie and jeans with frayed hems and a hole on one knee, and socks but no shoes.

  Anyway, once I’d caught my breath, I smiled and managed to say, “Everyone calls me Ellie,” and Ben got up off the sofa and shook Oliver’s hand and said everyone called him Ben.

  “Have you been anywhere nice?” I asked.

  Oliver said, “Nowhere special,” at exactly the same moment as Rose said, “The Brompton Club,” with the sort of excited smugness in her voice that made me think that it probably was somewhere very special. I caught Oliver’s eye and he gave me the ghost of a wink.

  For the first time in ages, I wished I’d bothered to put on a bit of make-up and do something with my hair – I was so conscious of the contrast I must present with Rose, she in her elegant little black dress and high heels and tights with seams down the back – seams! – or I suppose they might even have been proper stockings or those hold-up things that bring me out in a rash whenever I try to wear them. I was wearing a Race For Life T-shirt, old jeggings with a hole in the seam that showed a chunk of my inner thigh, and no bra, which if I’m honest is more or less what I wore most nights, so it’s not like I can even say Oliver caught me at a particularly bad moment, or anything.

  I tried to make conversation for a bit, letting Rose tell us who she’d seen at the Brompton place (Kate Moss and Harry Styles, since you ask), and Oliver and Ben made a few incomprehensible remarks to each other once the end bit of Newsnight came on, where they show you which markets are up and which are down, and how the pound is doing against the yen, and all that. But after Oliver’s wink – if it had even been a wink – I found it really hard to know where to look, and started to feel terribly uncomfortable in my comfortable clothes with my comfortable not-boyfriend, so I finished my tea and Ben said goodnight and went home, and I went to bed, and after a while I heard Rose and Oliver do the same.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A few days after that, I arrived home from work to find that the flat had been transformed. I’d left it in the morning in its normal state – not exactly a tip, but with unwashed teacups on the kitchen counter and a bit of a film of dust everywhere, and a load of washing in the washing machine that I hadn’t got around to hanging up to dry. Which is probably just as well really, as Rose wouldn’t have been happy if she’d brought her new man home to find a forest of my tights and knickers hanging on the airer in the living room.

  Anyway, I’d had a really rubbish day and I was knackered by six o’clock, so I declined an invitation to join some of my colleagues in the pub and set off home. I work for a charity and we rely quite heavily on volunteers to meet our staffing needs, and whilst I really admire their passion and commitment and we couldn’t possibly manage without them, when they are flaky or incompetent or just plain don’t turn up, it makes my job harder than it would have been if they’d never been there in the first place.

  My job title is Director of Communications, which sounds dead important, but actually means I spend most of my time scouring the newspapers for stories that are relevant to us and then frantically bashing out press releases to get our response to the story out there before it gets old and everyone loses interest. Occasionally a journalist will ring me up in advance of the story being printed and we get a quote in first time round – that’s a good day. That Friday hadn’t been a good day – there’d been some ridiculous scaremongering thing in the Daily Mail and one of my more hapless volunteers and I had spent the day calling and emailing all our media contacts with our response to it, except towards mid-afternoon, just as I was thinking the day was almost over, I realised that she’d emailed out my response to a story from the previous week, ‘Archie, 12, is Britain’s youngest Dad’, rather than that day’s story about the link between binge drinking and genital warts. So I’d had to call all the journalists and apologise and resend the press release, except by then most of them had decamped to the pub, and by the time I’d finished I was too tired and hacked off to do the same.

  As I was saying, I knew something was up the second I walked in the door. The flat smelled of polish and lilies and something delicious cooking, and the front room had been all winter wonderlanded up with a Christmas tree loaded with gold and silver baubles and white fairy lights strung everywhere. Personally I like tinsel and multi-coloured lights but Rose says they’re tacky and won’t have them in the flat, and I just have to suck it up because she, as everyone knows, is the one with the taste in our household. No, really, she is, and I don’t mind leaving the majority of the decorating decisions to her.

  I suppose I should say at this point how extraordinarily, amazingly lucky Rose and I are to have the flat in the first place. Our dad could afford to give us a generous wedge of cash for a deposit and so, unlike so many people our age, we are happily installed on the bottom rung of the housing ladder rather than floundering around in rented accommodation, and I am really, truly grateful for our good fortune. The flat’s nothing special, just a small two-bed with a decent kitchen and a lovely smart new bathroom that Dad had done for us when we moved in, and it’s in a part of Battersea that used to be quite
grotty but is becoming more and more chichi and gentrified – in fact one of Prince Harry’s pals was mugged at the end of our road the other day, and if that’s not the sign of an up-and-coming area I don’t know what is.

  Anyway when we moved in I gave Rose carte blanche to get on with the decorating. Actually the truth is I really can’t be arsed with that sort of thing and I’d quite happily have furnished the entire place in one trip to Ikea, but Rose doesn’t work that way. She went to markets and antique shops and cutesy little boutiques and found loads of lovely ‘pieces’ that together make the flat look lived-in and homely but at the same time really elegant. Even the things that we ended up having to buy from Ikea because Rose had blown our budget on ‘pieces’ look somehow chic and classic, like even if we’d had unlimited funds, we’d have chosen that particular squashy cream sofa anyway, because it’s just so right. Add a few really quite good original drawings and oil paintings – Rose works for Quinn’s, the auction house, so she gets to charm all the Young British Artists and snap up bits of their work that will be worth squillions of pounds one day, for next to nothing – and the flat looks like something out of Living Etc, it really does.

  But the addition of the Christmas decorations, unnatural cleanliness and delicious smells emanating from the kitchen reminded me that Rose had told me – I’m pretty certain she had anyway – that she was going to be hosting one of her dinner parties, or possibly a kitchen supper, that night, and I’d intended to make myself scarce as I usually did on these occasions. But it was too late – I had entered the dragon’s den.

  “Ellie?” Rose called from the kitchen. I sidled reluctantly through and leaned in the doorway.

  “Hi, Rose. The decorations look amazing, and something smells nice,” I said. Rose is, in addition to all her other talents, a fantastic cook. In my gap year I went backpacking around South-East Asia; Rose worked as a chalet girl before embarking on an art-themed grand tour of Europe, and during the course of it she learned how to make mayonnaise and decant claret and all that gubbins. Personally I’m quite happy with a jacket potato in front of the telly, and anyway I’m a vegetarian so most of Rose’s cordon bleu masterpieces are wasted on me, but her friends always bang on about how wonderful her food is, and whenever she has one of her dinner parties she spends a fortune at Waitrose and Borough Market on ingredients and hours in the kitchen.