It Would Be Wrong to Steal My Sister's Boyfriend Read online

  I showered and cleaned my teeth and swallowed two paracetamol with water from the bathroom tap, and got dressed in skinny jeans and ballet pumps and a rather pretty camisole top and waterfall cardigan (from Primark – don’t get me started on the ethics of that) and poured loads of eyedrops into my eyes before I went downstairs. Not that I was expecting Oliver to be there, or anything. But he was. He was alone in the kitchen, standing at the stove poking with a spatula at a pan full of bacon.

  “Morning,” I said, feeling desperately shy all of a sudden.

  “Morning,” Oliver said. He was wearing the smart white shirt he’d had on the previous night, with the cufflinks and everything, and I presume boxer shorts, although I couldn’t see because the shirt tail hung down to the tops of his thighs, which I couldn’t help staring at. His legs and his feet were bare and he’d obviously just had a shower (Rose has her own en-suite shower room; in the course of negotiations about that, I got sole use of the main bathroom and the bigger bedroom that faces the garden, so I’m not complaining), because his hair was damp, although it had been carefully combed. His top half looked like a banker and his bottom half like a teenage boy – it was odd and quite touching. I noticed that he had lovely legs, lean and muscular with a dusting of dark hair, which was worn away at the tops of his legs where his jeans would rub. I realised he’d noticed me staring, and also that a rather awkward sort of silence had fallen.

  “Did you sleep…” I said, at the same moment as Oliver said, “I hope you don’t mind…”

  “After you,” he said.

  “No, no,” I said. “Guests speak first in this house. Anyway I was only going to ask you if you’d slept okay, which is pretty dull as conversation-starters go.”

  Oliver laughed. “And I was going to apologise for taking over your kitchen. I promised Madam breakfast in bed – it seems she’s feeling a little fragile this morning. So am I, in fact. I think bringing out the Calvados was probably a strategic error. You’d very sensibly called it a night by then.”

  I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but finding out that someone else has a hangover worse than your own has almost supernatural restorative powers. Perhaps it’s realising that they will be too occupied dealing with their own crawling sense of shame to worry about anything stupid you might have said or done the night before, or it’s a simple question of realising there are others worse off than yourself, but trust me, it works every time. I certainly felt heaps better knowing Rose and Oliver were suffering too, anyway.

  “Coffee?” Oliver asked, pushing the cafetière across the table.

  “Lovely.” I located my favourite Marmite mug in the cupboard, sloshed in coffee and milk, and sat down at the kitchen table, sipping gratefully. “Do you have anything exciting planned for the day?” I asked, realising as soon as I said it that it sounded like a none-too-subtle way of asking when I could expect him to clear off out of our kitchen.

  Oliver lifted the slices of bacon out of the pan and arranged them on a plate lined with kitchen paper to drain. Impressive – I’m more of a slap straight on to bread and eat leaning over the sink girl myself. “Work, unfortunately,” he said. “We have our year-end in December and it means that the run-up to Christmas is ridiculously busy and January doubly depressing because there are no looming deadlines to distract one.”

  I suppose that may have been my cue to ask Oliver what he did for a living, but I had a hazy recollection of it having been discussed at some length the night before, so I just made sympathetic noises. Oliver opened the breadbin and took out a loaf of wholemeal sourdough – Rose refuses to have white bread in the house, she says she can’t resist eating it and it plays havoc with her weight and her IBS – and started to slice it.

  “I always feel plastic white is the best medium for a bacon sarnie,” Oliver said, “but I’m sure there are benefits to this, too.”

  I said I totally agreed with him, and placed the blame for the organic stone-ground stuff on Rose. I didn’t mention her IBS though – that would just have been low.

  “But where do you stand on the red sauce versus brown sauce debate?” I asked.

  “Sauce? What kind of philistine would adulterate a bacon sandwich with sauce?” Oliver said. “Lots of butter,” he spread a thick layer on the bread, “Bacon, a generous dusting of white pepper, and there you have it – perfection. Would you like one the same? Oh, no, sorry, of course – you don’t…”

  I looked at Oliver and I looked the slices of bacon, the fat golden and crisp at the edges, and thought about my principles and the poor pigs, and how shallow and wrong it would be to do something I disapproved of in order to please him, and I said, “Oh, go on then.”

  And he was right – it was delicious. We ate and he asked me about my plans for the weekend and I said I was going to visit my best mate Claire, who lives a couple of miles away in Brixton, in a very tiny, very dodgy studio flat with her gorgeous baby girl Persephone, who’s my god-daughter. I told him all about how Claire’s boyfriend Ty had succumbed to a fit of commitment-phobia towards the end of Claire’s pregnancy and ditched her, leaving her and Persephone to make do on almost no money whilst Claire’s on maternity leave from her job as a drama teacher in a youth outreach programme, which pays next to nothing at the best of times. I told him how Claire had asked me to be her birth partner after Ty buggered off – although I suspect he would have been about as much use as a chocolate teapot anyway; I saw him almost faint once watching Claire trimming chicken livers for a paté.

  “It was the most amazing experience,” I said to Oliver. “So, like, elemental. And Claire was… Just, wow. Even though she was screaming and mooing like a cow, bless her, she was just so strong. She did a hypnobirthing course and I think the techniques helped her deal with the pain, because she just zoned out – it was like she’d entered another plane. And seeing how proud she was when she held Pers for the first time was incredible. It’s really going to be tough for her being a single mum but I know she’ll make a go of it.”

  And Oliver talked a bit about a friend of his who’s a barrister specialising in family law, and how hard it can sometimes be to get absent fathers to do their duty by their kids, and what a disgrace it is that so many men seem to want to abdicate responsibility rather than embracing fatherhood, and how things really have improved over the past few decades in terms of the way the courts can appropriate income for child support. I was really surprised by how sound his views were actually – I suspect most of Rose’s friends would come over all chuntery about how women shouldn’t go having babies they can’t afford, which is nonsense of course because as we all know, it takes two to tango. Anyway we had more coffee and I found a carton of grapefruit juice in the fridge, and by the time Rose came downstairs showered, dressed, fully made up and looking rather crossly for her breakfast, Oliver and I were chatting away like old friends and we’d finished all the bacon.

  “So Rose has a new boyfriend?” asked Claire, once we’d got the formalities out of the way. The formalities consisted of me presenting Claire with a bottle of wine and a box of brownies I’d bought at Waitrose on the way, and Pers with a fluffy pink pig, and then spending about half an hour kissing her adorable squashy tummy and telling Claire how much she’d grown since I last saw her two weeks before.

  Poor Claire, since Ty dumped her and she had Pers her social life has been a bit limited, so she’s developed a slightly obsessive interest in other people’s, and of course Rose’s is a pretty good one to pick if you’re in the market for living vicariously. Although Pers was totally gorgeous and brilliant company, and was terribly advanced for eight months, she didn’t have an awful lot to say for herself yet, and Claire missed human interaction, even though she and Pers try to go out at least once every day.

  Their flat is truly, truly horrible. I die a little bit inside every time I go there and am struck afresh by how awful it is, and by the fact that it’s home for my best friend and her baby daughter. Claire’s done her best to make it nice, bu
t ultimately with a kitchen that hasn’t been updated since the 1970s, a wonky floor covered in manky, ancient carpet tiles that lets the downstairs neighbour’s skunk smoke seep through, and a huge patch of mould on the bathroom wall that comes creeping back within days of Claire spending an afternoon scrubbing it off, the amount of difference flourishing plants and cheerful framed posters on the walls can make is limited. And yet Claire and Pers emerge from this hovel every day to go to their baby massage class or their mums and tots yoga or storytime at the library or whatever, Claire in her charity-shop clothes and Pers in the little outfits Claire puts together from hand-me-downs and eBay purchases, and they look like they’ve stepped out of the Boden catalogue.

  Claire, you see, is seriously beautiful. Not like me and Rose. Claire’s a ten without doing anything. She’s got clear, glowing olive skin that doesn’t need makeup and smooth, shiny hair the colour of bitter chocolate that doesn’t need straighteners, and a slim, lithe figure that doesn’t appear to need diet or exercise to stay that way, and a perfect oval face with high cheekbones and full lips that always seem to be smiling. I suppose it’s partly her looks that got her into the mess she’s in now. In the same way as people with vast amounts of money tend to go out with and marry other people with vast amounts of money, I’ve noticed that utterly gorgeous people end up sleeping with other utterly gorgeous people. You’d think there’d be some disadvantage to it in terms of the diversity of the gene pool or whatever, but apparently there isn’t, and that’s how it was with Claire and Ty. He’s as beautiful as she is, all long limbs and honey-coloured skin, and the most amazing green eyes I’ve ever seen. For almost a year the two of them were inseparable, constantly intertwining their lissome bodies and exchanging dazzling smiles and gazing into each other’s exquisite faces. You could see that, however much they pretended they were glad to see you, they really couldn’t wait for you to go so they could be alone again. It was at once deeply annoying and really, really lovely and sweet, because they were both so happy, but anyone with more than about five minutes’ experience of life could tell it was going to end badly, and so it did.

  When Claire found out she was pregnant, it was like nature cranked up the dial a bit and allowed her special dispensation to go from being a ten out of ten to being an unprecedented eleven. Joy shone out of her. She was never sick, she barely put on weight, she didn’t seem to get swollen ankles or stretch marks or varicose veins or any of the other disfiguring horrors that plague pregnant women. She just glowed with a kind of serene excitement, thrilled by what was happening in her body. And therein lay the problem. For the first time in their relationship, Claire’s attention was focussed inwards, at the tiny new life inside her, rather than outwards at Ty. Initially he made an effort and shared Claire’s excitement about the baby – I really believe he did. But as month followed month and he carried on being not-quite-as-important, he started to withdraw. When Claire wanted to stay in and drink tea and have a warm bath and go to bed with another Georgette Heyer novel (she became obsessed with them whilst up the duff), Ty wanted to go out. At first Claire reluctantly went with him; then Ty reluctantly stayed in; later still he took to going out alone, and one night he didn’t come back.

  Claire rang me, frantic with worry, and I went round and stayed overnight in the slightly less grotty one-bedroom flat she and Ty shared, while she paced and fretted, sure he had been stabbed to death on the mean streets of Brixton. I pointed out to her that the streets of Brixton are hardly mean any more, property prices there have rocketed in recent years and there’s even a farmers’ market, for heaven’s sake, but she was too anxious to listen. I was right, of course, and the next morning Ty sloped in, sullen and belligerent and clearly feeling guilty as hell. I made myself scarce, but Claire told me later that after spending the day crying (her) and shouting and punching the walls (him), Ty had admitted that he’d spent the night with a girl called Olya who worked on the Chanel counter at Harrods, and he couldn’t help it but he was in love with her and was taking himself off to Bayswater to twine his limbs with hers and gaze into her eyes, and Claire could forget it if she thought she’d be getting child support because Ty, being an out-of-work musician, hadn’t got two quid to rub together.

  So in spite of having a genetic inheritance that will probably make her a supermodel, poor darling Pers has had a hard start in life from the point of view of material things. But Claire adores her and I adore her and Ty and Olya adore her (Claire’s been incredibly grown up and allows them to see her every other weekend, although they can’t take her out on their own for very long because Claire’s still breastfeeding on demand and Pers does demand rather a lot). This also curtails Claire’s social life, and although I know she wouldn’t swap places with anyone, she does get a rather wistful look about her when she remembers the days – just a couple of years ago – when she was out every night at various gigs drinking and smoking and dancing and being admired and pulling. It will get easier for her, of course, once Pers is a bit older and she has a bit more freedom and a bit more money, but for now I think she does feel a bit trapped sometimes, and so she loves hearing about Rose’s active social life and my less active one.

  “He’s called Oliver,” I said. “He’s some sort of City trader, and he collects art.”

  “Really?” Claire shrieked with laughter and rolled her eyes. “That is just, like, so Rose. Is he as vile as he sounds? Does he wear peach-coloured cashmere jumpers and have floppy Tory-boy hair? Does he pop his collar and have a box at Twickenham? Would I find his picture on lookatmyfuckingredtrousers.com? Does he belong to a swanky golf club that won’t let women be members? Or is he the wide boy type, whose idea of a fun night out is snorting coke off strippers’ bums?”

  I said, feeling a bit defensive for some reason, I hadn’t seen Oliver in a cashmere jumper or red trousers and he hadn’t mentioned golf or strippers, and his hair was actually quite sensible and ordinary. Claire looked a bit disappointed and switched Pers over to her other side to finish her lunch.

  “Actually, Claire,” I said, “he’s really nice. Like, as in nice. I like him.” I felt myself blushing furiously but she didn’t see because she was gazing down at Pers’s fluffy little head.

  “You like him? Great,” she said. Claire’s heard all the horror stories over the years about Danny, Neil, Aiden and all the rest of them, and has had to listen to me wailing about the prospect of Rose one day marrying one of them, and my poor future nieces and nephews being saddled with Danny, Neil or Aiden for a father.

  “Mmmm,” I said, helping myself to another brownie. “The thing is, I think maybe I like him a bit too much.”

  This got Claire’s attention. She looked up at me. “You fancy Rose’s new boyfriend? Really? You’re not just making it up because my life is bereft of excitement and romance and I have to live vicariously?”

  I laughed. “I wish I was. He’s sweet, he really is. He seems really interested in what I have to say. And, Claire, he’s so fucking drop-dead gorgeous I could just sit and stare at him for ever. He’s as lovely looking as you and you know what a compliment that is.”

  “Shut up!” Claire said. “But… you won’t do anything about it, will you? You wouldn’t try and steal Rose’s boyfriend off her? Because that would be so totally evil I don’t think I could be your friend anymore.” But she was smiling and I could tell part of her was thinking that it would be really, really interesting if I tried to steal Rose’s boyfriend, and would provide her with enough gossip to keep her going until Pers was practically old enough to leave home. You see, Claire, while a kind person and a true friend, loves nothing more than a juicy bit of scandal.

  “Of course not. That would be wrong. I suppose I should find someone new really. I need to get out more,” I said gloomily.

  “I still wish you and Ben…” Claire began, but I silenced her with a hard stare.

  “Ben. Is. Not. My. Boyfriend,” I said. “And he won’t be, not ever.” I didn’t need to tell Claire why – she
knew all about Nina. “So I need someone new. I need to check my phone every five minutes to make sure it’s working, and feel my head spin when I’m kissed, and experience the horrible disappointment of realising he doesn’t really understand American Psycho, and all that stuff.”

  “Yes, I vaguely remember all that,” Claire smiled ruefully. “Anyway, even if you had set your sights on Rose’s chap, it wouldn’t work, because if Rose is his type, you aren’t, right? Not that you aren’t wonderful and beautiful and everything,” she added hastily, “but Rose is just… different. High maintenance. Knows important people. Goes to flash parties. You know.”

  I did know, and after the little smart of hurt I felt whenever I suspected anyone of drawing comparisons between me and Rose had faded, I realised she had a point. Why on earth would Oliver want me, or even think about wanting me, when he had Rose? But why not, if all or at least some of the things he liked about Rose were there to like about me too, mightn’t he – totally of his own volition, without me needing to do any stealing at all – just sort of... notice me? Look at me and think about me in a bit the same way as I couldn’t help looking at and thinking about him? Because when I talked to Claire about all the knee-trembling intensity of the beginning of a new relationship – the breathless anticipation, the round-the-clock sex, the tenderness everything about Him (even unto dirty socks) can inspire, I wasn’t imagining experiencing those feelings for just any random new man. I was imagining experiencing them for Oliver. With Oliver.