Sitting Pretty Read online

  Unwinding my bath towel from round me, I gave my back a final pat down before spritzing myself with the Ted Baker Pink body spray that had been one of the presents in my Christmas pillowcase. Giving it a moment to dry, I gathered my shoes and clutch bag – there’s so much to remember to do, with this dressing up lark – checking that my phone, with the destination of the party in it was in the bag. This was where most women would probably have pulled on some lovely new underwear, something like one of the sets I’d bought for our honeymoon. Only there would be zero point in me bothering with any of that. I could be wearing Bridget Jones’s biggest, ugliest granny-pants, because even if I did find him, Alex wouldn’t be getting close enough for it to matter what I had on under this dress.

  Sliding the garment off its hanger, I stepped into the deliciously silky fabric. I’d never in my life even looked at a dress like this and imagined myself in it. This was the sort of dress worn by go-getting women with high-flying careers and fancy cars. This was a Davina dress – she’d have the lipstick and nail varnish to match. It was hard to imagine it ever being a Beth dress. But the woman in Galeries Lafayette had been so insistent that I try it on and she’d already shown me so many other things that I’d said no thank you to. And I’d fallen in love with it the moment I looked in the mirror.

  It looked like a completely different version of me standing there, a glamorous, confident version and, although I’d never thought of myself in that way, I rather liked it. And I had to admit that with all these beauty treatments I’d been having, my skin really did have a lovely, smooth glow to it that I hadn’t even realised had been missing.

  And now, standing here in it, with the right matching shoes and bag, even my silly hairdo didn’t manage to detract from how good it made me feel.

  Picking up my bag, I took one last look in the mirror. I was dressed to kill and ready to go.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

  A steady stream of butter-coloured taxis was pulling up to the forecourt, but as fast as each one disgorged its dinner jacketed and ball-gowned passengers, a new set of equally fancy pants people would surge forward to be next to go.

  ‘Is this the end of the taxi queue?’ I asked the woman in front of me, who was swaying slightly in scarily high heels and wearing a short, tight, white dress. She looked like the Leaning Tower of Pisa in a frock.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said through a mouthful of chewing gum.

  I stood in line behind her and counted how many people were in front of me. Three guys – they’d probably share one cab. Then there were two middle-aged couples – that could be one cab or two. All in all, I reckoned there would have to be about eleven taxis, before I got to leave here. I really should have thought and come down a lot earlier. What if Alex didn’t stay long at the party and I missed him?

  A quarter of an hour later, I found myself at the front of the queue. My taxi dropped off three handsome-looking older women who seemed to have cornered the world market in sequins and beads, before meandering over to pick me up as if we both had all the time in the world.

  ‘The Marina, please,’ I told the driver as I got in the back. ‘The yacht club.’

  He pulled out of the forecourt and I put my seatbelt on and settled back, trying to relax and doomed to failure. The thought that I was now only about twenty minutes away from where Alex was had turned the fizzing in my stomach up a notch. I was worried that the next time I had to speak, foam would come oozing out of my mouth. My even drier than before mouth.

  I pulled the little pack of mints out of my bag and popped one between my lips, forgetting the lipstick until I saw a smear of it on my finger and thumb. Damn! I didn’t want to get it on my dress. I wiped it off on a tissue, scrunched it up, and put it back in my bag. Instead of refreshing my mouth, the mint just stuck itself to my tongue. I wondered if it would burn a hole in it, and moved my tongue against my teeth to try and dislodge it.

  We’d reached Sheikh Zayed Road, the main artery of Dubai, and the various shapes of the skyscrapers and hotels rose up into the skyline on either side. Almost no two buildings looked alike from this angle – well, except the ones that were obviously meant to be in pairs. I looked up to the left, and watched the metro slide along its track and disappear into a station like a worm into a hole. In the distance, to the right, with a light show playing against it, was the enormous sail shape of the Burj al Arab, the self-titled only seven-star hotel in the world. I wondered if Alex had been there. Alex. Goose pimples started up on my arms as I saw a sign for the marina.

  The driver turned right, off Sheikh Zayed Road and took a parallel road. We passed a metro station, then Dubai Marina Mall, which looked tiny compared to Dubai Mall and Mall of the Emirates. While we were waiting at a red light, a tram crawled towards us, on its track between SZR and the road we were on. It looked empty.

  We were turning right again, down a little road, then left, and I could see it ahead of us. The yacht club. Somewhere in that building was a party and one of the guests was Alex. There was a queue of taxis ahead of us dropping people off, and I was itching to get out. Everyone else seemed to be waiting until their taxis were right in front though, so I thought I’d better do the same.

  I looked up the steps at the front of the building. And that was when I saw him.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

  Everything went into freefall as I stared out of the taxi window at my husband. He was stood by one of the glass doors, talking to a couple of other men and laughing. His hair was shorter, he was wearing chinos and a T-shirt I hadn’t seen before, and he looked happy and carefree. And oh, so very handsome. I’d somehow managed to forget that about him.

  A sudden jolt of doubt sparked through me. What was I doing here? What on earth had I thought this would accomplish? Even with all my efforts to show him how fabulously I was doing without him, what was I really expecting to happen? This was stupid, even by my standards.

  My cab edged forward as I was trying to think what to tell the driver. I should just turn round and go straight back to my hotel, this was a terrible mistake. But he was pulling up in front of the club now and a group of waiting lads, already anxious to be on their way to wherever they were going next, were opening the doors, one of them sliding into the front passenger seat before I could even open my mouth.

  I had no choice but to get out. Opening my bag quickly, I fumbled for my purse, pulled out a hundred dirham note, and handed it to the driver. He gave me five dirhams change which I handed back to him and started to climb out. My seatbelt was still done up though, and it yanked me back, causing me to yelp and one of the lads to laugh and offer me a helping hand, just as Alex happened to look in our direction.

  Unbuckling the belt, I tried again to get out of the car gracefully. As I stuck my head out, however, unused to even such a tiny bit of extra height on top of it, my topknot collided with the top of the door frame, dislodging it and sending it skew-whiff.

  My heart pounding in my ears, I prayed Alex hadn’t recognised me, that he’d gone inside, that I could just wait here for another taxi to take me back to my hotel. My reflection in the taxi window before it drove away showed I looked an absolute mess. After all my efforts. I thought of those hairgrips I hadn’t used. They might have kept it in place. Or one of them might have dug into my head and reminded me that I’d got the stupid thing on top of it and then I wouldn’t have bashed it getting out. How long would I have to wait for another taxi to get away? I stood behind a man with a broad back and looked out into the road.

  ‘Beth?’ His voice from behind me sent the goose pimples racing to the surface again. Oh God! Why did you have to let him see me? ‘Beth? Is that you?’

  CHAPTER SEVENTY

  I took a deep breath to give the ground time to swallow me but it didn’t, so I had to turn round and face him. ‘Hi, Alex.’ How I managed to get the words out I didn’t know.

  The broad-backed man, clearly not realising the importance of his role, had wandered off and there, in
his place stood my husband. He looked as stunned as I felt.

  ‘Beth. It’s really you.’ He bent forward as if to kiss me, so I offered him my cheek, but his head tilted the same way as mine and we ended up banging noses. His second attempt landed on my cheek while my lips ended up hitting his ear. So much for the cool, calm, independent new Beth I’d been determined to show him before turning on my heel – me walking away from him without a backward glance. ‘You look amazing!’

  So did he, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. ‘You don’t look so bad yourself,’ I heard myself paraphrase. ‘Your hair’s shorter.’

  ‘I couldn’t handle it trailing round my neck in the humidity here,’ he replied. ‘Me trelathike – it was driving me nuts. It’s not like Greece. The heat here is wet. You should feel how sticky it can get, even at this time of the year …’ He trailed off as he seemed to realise the inappropriateness of his words.

  ‘Yes,’ I said with a calmness that belied the churning in my stomach. ‘I should, shouldn’t I?’

  ‘Alex!’ Before he could dig himself out of that, one of the men he’d been talking to called him. ‘Who’s this?’ The friend came sauntering down towards us, smiling. He was wearing a pink shirt and little frameless glasses and looked kind. Before Alex could say a word, his friend put out his hand for me to shake. ‘Hi, I’m Steve.’ He looked at me far more approvingly than I was used to. ‘And you are?’

  ‘This is Beth,’ Alex jumped in. ‘My wife,’ he added, as if that fact had only just occurred to him.

  ‘Oh my God! Hi, Beth,’ Steve, now kissed me on both cheeks – a lot less clumsily than my husband had, I noticed. But then Steve had never married me and then dumped me by phone from a departing aeroplane. He had no reason at all to be nervous about what I was suddenly doing here. ‘We’ve all been wondering when you were going to show up. Come on up and meet everyone.’ And he put his hand on the small of my back to lead me up the steps.

  I caught a glimpse of Alex’s face as I turned to go in the direction I was being led. What did his expression say? Surprised? Scared? Confused? Was it very mean-spirited of me that his discomfort gave me a warm Ready Brek glow?

  This had already gone so far off my imagined scenario I mentally tore up the script and let Steve steer me through the lobby and on towards what looked like a bar straight ahead. I could feel Alex keeping up close behind. Was he worried I was going to embarrass him? We passed the doorman, who wished us a good evening, and on in to what was indeed a huge bar, its long wall of windows overlooking the marina. We veered right, past a DJ desk with a tiny, Asian female DJ in headphones, nodding along to the music. There was a bar counter ahead, but we turned left and went through a door and outside, onto the terrace.

  I wasn’t overdressed and I wasn’t underdressed. There were so many different styles – and a lot more flesh on display than I would have expected in a Muslim country. This was obviously the place to party.

  We were swallowed up into a large, colourful, noisy gathering at the far end of the terrace. Everyone was talking, drinking, and laughing. Some of them were moving in time with the music in a ‘sort of liking the rhythm but it being too early to actually start dancing’ way, and there were ice buckets with bottles of white wine and fizz dotted around the tall tables.

  ‘Hey! Everybody!’ Steve shouted over the music. Those closest to him turned and waved their glasses at him. ‘This is Alex’s wife,’ he shouted a bit louder. ‘This is Beth, Alex’s wife.’

  The notion that in any normal circumstances it should have been Alex introducing me to his work colleagues flashed through my mind, but normal this was not. I’d landed both Alex and myself in some surreal kind of improvisation with a large cast of extras and this Steve was doing a great job. Maybe he was just that kind of guy. He could be Alex’s boss, and therefore felt it was his duty to introduce me. And introduce me he did. In the space of what was probably a couple of minutes I must have met and been given the names of about twenty or thirty people, of whom there was definitely a Sarah and a Zara, because they each made a point of telling me that they weren’t the other one. I was pretty sure that there’d been a Mark and a Mike, too, but apart from them, all the names had fallen into that big lucky dip barrel where names always ended up when you were introduced to too many new people at once. Then whenever you had to speak to one of them again you’d dip your hand in, pull one out, and hope it turned out to be the right one.

  My only intention in coming here tonight had been to have a dignified skirmish with my husband before flouncing away with both the utmost dignity and the last word. Pushing him into the water had been floating around as an optional extra. This, however, I hadn’t envisioned, and I decided I knew just how Alice must have felt after falling down the rabbit hole. And judging by the look on Alex’s face he was feeling pretty much the same. I could almost feel sorry for him. Almost.

  A few minutes later, I was talking to Sarah and Zara – who had both complimented my dress – sipping the glass of Prosecco which Steve had put in my hand, when Alex came up behind me and slipped an arm round my shoulder. My traitorous stomach did a flip. I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck standing to attention and my concentration on Zara’s description of the fabulous dress she was having made for some ball she was going to completely disintegrated.

  ‘Ella na horepsoume – come and dance with me,’ he said in my ear. I didn’t know the song, but it sounded suitable for slow dancing, and my outrageously disloyal heart did a little flutter at the thought that he wanted to hold me. My head, on the other hand, warned me that he just wanted to get me away from his friends in case I said or did something to embarrass him.

  ‘Ahh, that’s so sweet,’ Sarah and Zara chorused as Alex took me in his arms, a few steps away from them, and we swayed together to the music.

  ‘Mou elipse toso poli, Beth – I’ve missed you so much,’ he said, his lips even closer to my ear this time.

  ‘That’ll explain all the phone calls, texts, and emails you kept bombarding me with,’ I whispered ever so sweetly. ‘I thought I was going to have to take out a restraining order.’

  ‘Oh, Beth. I was so stupid. As soon as I arrived here I knew I’d made a mistake. But I knew how angry you would be so I thought I’d wait and give you time to calm down …’

  ‘What, with that explosive temper of mine!’ I stopped pretending to move to the music and looked him in the face. ‘And how many months were you thinking of giving me to “calm down”?’

  ‘I kept thinking, tomorrow I’ll call Beth, tomorrow I’ll send an email. Then tomorrow came and I didn’t know if you would want to speak to me.’ He looked soulfully at me with those big, dark chocolate eyes, reminding me of Rex, which was dangerous territory. ‘The more time went by, the more I thought I must have left it too late …’

  ‘But you didn’t think it was worth giving it a go?’ I clamped down on my softening heart. ‘One phone call?’

  ‘I should have called you, I know I should, but I thought you’d still be angry and you’d tell me to get lost. I’m so glad you came, Beth.’ His eyes met mine again and my heart cranked up the flutter to a skippety-skip beat of its own, while my head told it to stop being so stupid. Did it need reminding of what he’d done to me? The position he’d carelessly left me in? So am I, my stupid heart wanted to say, but my head wouldn’t let it. All the times I’d played this scene in my head – what I’d say, what he’d say, whether he’d slink away from me, or yell and shout, whether I’d give him hell, or crumple in tears, I’d never imagined this. Here we were, what felt like only minutes from the moment I clapped eyes on him, more or less dancing in each other’s arms, surrounded by his new friends, as if the last few months were nothing.

  ‘I can’t believe you came all this way to find me,’ he murmured. ‘Come home with me, Beth, you don’t need to go back to London.’

  ‘I haven’t been in London.’ He wanted me to stay? What? He thought it was all going to be tha
t easy? He made the mess, I cleaned it up and now everything was all right again?

  ‘Pou piges? Where did you go?’

  ‘I stayed in Wintertown.’

  ‘But we let go of our apartment there.’ He looked puzzled. ‘You gave up your job there. I thought you would go back to London and stay with your mother while you looked for a new job.’

  ‘I got my job back at Sitting Pretty.’ Ha! He hadn’t been expecting that!

  ‘Where did you stay? How did you afford the rent?’

  ‘Oh, I took up squatting in empty houses, it’s remarkably easy if you know when people are going to be away!’ He hadn’t been expecting that, either.

  ‘Oh, I’ve missed that English sense of humour of yours.’ He pulled me to him and wrapped his arms around me.

  Just wait until I told him about my new job. Would he think that was another example of my English sense of humour? Alex had made no secret of the fact that he saw my time at Sitting Pretty as just a little job to keep me out of mischief and in pin money while he went out and earned the real stuff. I couldn’t wait to tell him all about my new career with Halliday’s Vacation Club.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

  It was too noisy to talk properly at the yacht club and so, after we’d welcomed in the New Year with the flashiest firework display I’d ever seen we ended up sharing a taxi back to his apartment with Mike. Or it could have been Mark. Whichever one it was, he had an eastern European girl draped all over him wearing the shortest skirt and skimpiest top I’d ever seen and a very hard expression on her face. Alex had said she was his girlfriend but she didn’t look very friendly. She looked like she could be Katya’s or Natalia’s cousin.