Mad About the Boy Read online

  ‘I tried to sweet-talk this rather handsome electrician, who was in the doorway,’ said Percy. ‘Covered in white dust. Quite gorgeous. But I don’t think he quite understood what I wanted. In fact, he said, “Fuck off, you old poonce,” so I couldn’t get my nose in.’

  The night of the opening, Tom went over to his new best friend Vita’s place after school and Percy manned the shop while I went off to get my hair done. I had to feel confident. I was very likely to see David Maier, apart from anything else, and I needed to be strong.

  When I came back, Percy helped me dress and insisted that I hang upside down and muss up my expensive blow-dry a bit, so I didn’t look like I was trying too hard.

  I didn’t have a lot of choice in the clothes area, but even after less than a week on Percy’s regime, I was feeling slightly less like Moby Dick. I wore a cream bias-cut chiffon skirt to just above my ankles – ‘Very fine ankles too,’ said Percy, nodding his approval – with a pale green silk rib-knit cardigan, which seemed to skim over the worst of my fatty pads. The finishing touch was my absolute favourite pair of Manolo Blahnik shoes, which always made me feel like a princess. Hugo had brought them home one day as a surprise. None of my trophy wife wardrobe, as Hugo had called it, fitted me any more – but the shoes did.

  Percy had also taken care with his appearance. He’d put a fresh lavender rinse through his hair, rendering it fully purple, and he’d set it in rollers, to achieve a bouffant effect, very similar to Lady H’s helmet hairdo (which I didn’t point out to him). It smelled of lavender too. He’d had the rollers in all afternoon while he was in the shop, he’d told me proudly, with a scarf tied round them. I hoped Nikki hadn’t been past on another snoop, because it would have ruined the impact of Percy’s arrival at her party.

  But the rest of Percy’s outfit eclipsed even his astonishing hair. ‘She wants a laird,’ he announced. ‘So I’m wearing the plaid.’ And he was too, a splendid kilt in a quite amazing pastel tartan, in shades of mauve, violet, pink and primrose yellow.

  ‘Do you like it?’ he asked, swirling the pleats. ‘I had it woven specially. The smallest length they’d make was two hundred yards, so I gave the rest to my friend Horace who lined the walls of his downstairs loo with it. Looks splendid.’

  On top he was wearing his customary voile poet shirt and, on his feet, traditional lace-up-the-ankle gillie shoes. His highland socks were the same pink as the plaid. They looked strangely familiar.

  ‘These are Hugo’s socks,’ he said, when he saw me looking at them. ‘From that rugger team of his – the Apollos, was it? Liberated them from him years ago.’

  My heart gave a little lurch. Those were the socks Hugo had been wearing the first time we’d had sex (yes, he wore socks in bed, it’s cold in Scotland in February).

  ‘Do you think he’ll be there tonight?’ I asked Percy.

  ‘Almost certainly. That little woofter of his is a great friend of Madame Maier’s, isn’t he? And anyway, Hugo would consider it part of his job to be at any party where cashed-up types like the Maiers and their friends are going to be. He’s a good boy like that. And so am I.’

  He executed a perfect pirouette that revealed in gory detail that he was wearing the kilt in the traditional manner. His mother would have been proud of him.

  Percy’s appearance had exactly the effect I had hoped for when we arrived at Nikki’s party. The room actually fell silent when we made our entrance, followed by a round of applause. Percy bowed deeply like Nureyev, accepting it as his due for his ‘Sydney social debut’, as he called it.

  The expression on Nikki Maier’s face when she realized that this freak was her longed-for English aristo, was worth every second of humiliation I had experienced at her hand.

  Even better, Percy’s charisma – which he had turned up to full volume, a technique he had once explained to me (‘Open your eyes wide, look interested in everything and imagine you have just heard the most wonderful secret. Works like a charm …’) – guaranteed that all the attention of the guests was immediately diverted to him.

  Society snapper Danny Green lost all interest in Nikki, whom he had been photographing holding a crinoline lady loo-roll cover when we arrived, and spent the rest of the evening following Percy around.

  My personal golden moment came when Danny gathered Hugo, Percy and me together for a family group – with me, beaming, in the middle. I could see Nikki and her business partner, poisonous Paul, glaring at us over Danny’s shoulder, as the flash went off.

  The funny thing was that, despite the circumstances, Hugo and I were still delighted to see each other. We stood in a corner for most of the night, chatting and watching Percy wow the crowd. This may seem hard to understand, considering how he had shattered my life, but when you’ve been best friends since you were nineteen and shared everything from university finals to parenthood, you can’t just turn it off. Well, we couldn’t. We still loved each other’s company. Greg was glowering as darkly as Nikki, but Hugo didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘Isn’t Percy looking well?’ he said. ‘It’s great to see the old duffer and I know Tom loves having him here. By the way, what’s this grapevine thing he keeps going on about? Driving me mad. Bloody hell – Percy’s wearing my old Apollos socks. I wondered where they’d gone. They’re bloody good socks.’

  He looked at me quickly – and I knew he was remembering that night back in St Andrews too.

  ‘It’s awfully nice to see you, Ant,’ he said gently. ‘Are you sure you’re OK? I know I gave you the shock of your life and everything, but I just couldn’t carry on lying to you.’

  ‘I’m getting better, Hugo,’ I said. ‘Having Percy here really helps because he’s so distracting and so helpful. It’s like having a nanny and a housekeeper and a personal trainer …’

  ‘And a friend?’ said Hugo, with his laser-beam perceptiveness.

  ‘Yes,’ I nodded. ‘A very good friend.’

  He paused for a moment and seemed to come to a decision.

  ‘You know, Ant, I don’t want to overstep the mark or anything, because I know I’m the one who caused all the trouble, but I do so miss your company. Now that some time has passed, do you think we could start seeing each other again, sort of socially, as friends?’

  I thought about it. I still missed him horribly – and it would be nice for Tom.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, trying to believe what I was saying. ‘It’s a good idea, especially with Percy here. That way we’ll both get to see more of him. Perhaps we could have the odd family dinner together. It would be lovely for Tom.’

  ‘That’s a wonderful idea,’ said Hugo, with his adorable dog-like enthusiasm, spilling half his champagne in his excitement. ‘I’m so sick of going out for dinner all the time to pretentious restaurants. All the food comes in piles and you have to go outside to smoke. It’s ghastly. I’d love family supper with just a chop and a crumble …’

  He looked so happy at the prospect, I wanted to feel excited too, but I wasn’t really sure I was ready.

  At that moment Greg came over and slipped his arm through Hugo’s. My stomach dropped like a stone. Would he have to be at the family dinners too, I wondered. At least my English cooking would put him off. I’d make steak and kidney pudding – heavy on the suet – with mushy peas, followed by spotted dick, with extra skin on the custard. I’d make him drink Vimto. Flat Vimto.

  ‘Hugo, darling,’ said Greg, ignoring me. ‘Nikki and David are taking us for dinner at Catalina after this. Just the inner circle. Be ready to leave in half an hour.’

  He sniffed at me and walked off.

  ‘Does he have to be quite so unpleasant?’ I asked Hugo. ‘I mean, what exactly have I ever done wrong to him?’

  Hugo looked extremely uncomfortable.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Ant, he was bloody rude then, just as he was that night at your shop and I will say something to him, but I think he just feels intimidated and insecure around you.’

  I snorted with indignation.

&nb
sp; ‘And I suppose my feelings never occur to him? Well, I’m not having him to the family suppers until he gets over it,’ I said firmly. ‘The onus is on him, to get on with me. And now I’m going to mingle.’

  I kissed him on the cheek and before I could object he put his arms around me and gave me a full-on Hugo hug-o, resting his head into the side of my neck and nuzzling it. My body went limp. That embrace was so familiar, I just wanted to slide back into it and die. At that moment Percy appeared.

  ‘Come on, Antonia,’ he said. ‘We’re going out for dinner. Really fun people. Let go of your future ex-wife, Hugo, we’re off.’

  And with that he took me by the hand and led me away. The man was a saint.

  Percy was right about the fun dinner. He’d found a little group of hilarious people at the party, some of whom I had met before, but hadn’t got to know properly. Antony Maybury was there and several of the journalists who had done pieces on Anteeks. There was a big crowd of us – about twelve – men and women, gay and straight, and the best thing of all, they were all screaming with laughter about Nikki’s shop.

  Oh the shop … Remember that crinoline lady she was holding? That was pretty much the standard of everything in there. It was all hideous and her mark-up made mine look tame. There was a ghastly standard lamp I’d rejected myself at Wally’s for $10 and she was selling it for $940. Painted lime green. Gloss.

  ‘It’s amazing really, isn’t it?’ said a small woman with a Louise Brooks bob, who was a stylist on a glossy magazine. She’d been into my shop a few times, I remembered, to borrow props. ‘It’s amazing how completely someone can miss the point. The whole shabby chic thing, which you do so brilliantly, Antonia, is based on knowing which shabby object has fundamental charm – and therefore potential chic – and which one is just simply shabby.’

  I beamed at her. She totally got it.

  ‘My favourite thing,’ said Antony, ‘was the IKEA chest of drawers – one hundred per cent MDF – painted Gustavian grey and finished off with those cut-glass knobs that Antonia sells.’

  ‘She bought them in my shop,’ I told them, which caused great hilarity.

  ‘And what about that bubblegum-pink sideboard?’ said a man with a beard and close-cropped hair, who Percy told me later was a leading interior designer, in the minimalist style. ‘It’s quite a nice little mid-century piece, but the colour is so wrong. Diabolical. So what I don’t understand is – how did she manage to get that grey on the exterior so right?’

  ‘I used it on quite a few pieces when I decorated her house,’ I told him. ‘She insisted on having the mix details, in case it ever got chipped. I didn’t want to give them to her, but she can be a very persistent lady.’

  ‘A pushy bitch, as we say in Sydney,’ said a rather beautiful woman, who was the editor of a famous food magazine.

  I couldn’t believe it, I felt like I’d taken a reality pill. There was another world in Sydney after all, of real people, nice people, funny people, people who could talk about something else apart from money and diamonds and their husband’s latest deal. We had such a laugh.

  By the end of the dinner Percy had all their numbers and was setting a date for them to come to dinner at our place. For the first time for many weeks, that night I actually went to sleep quite quickly – and without crying.

  8

  I wish I could say the same about Christmas – that there had been no crying. But that first one without Hugo was the hardest thing I had endured since Suzy’s party. It was so difficult to go through the motions of buying the tree and decorating the house and all the things I had to do to keep it special for Tom, when I had only ever done them with Hugo before.

  One very hot and sunny December afternoon, about a week before the big day, I was standing on Queen Street outside my favourite deli, staring vacantly into space as I tried to remember what on earth I’d been going in there for, when I saw Hugo and Greg go past in Hugo’s car. The top was down and there was a Christmas tree sticking out of the back seat. A huge Christmas tree. I felt like I had been punched in the stomach.

  The rational side of my brain told me that Hugo was really getting the tree for Tom – who I had already heard boasting to Vita that he was having two Christmas trees and two Christmas stockings this year – but seeing them doing what Hugo and I had done together for so long, was nigh on unbearable. If Percy hadn’t been back at the house, to distract and entertain me, I honestly don’t know what I would have done. I think I might have harmed myself. I was that low.

  Percy made Christmas bearable by taking it over and making it different. With his usual sensitivity he figured out that the morning would be the hardest part for me – no sitting in bed with Hugo, drinking champagne and watching Tom open his presents – so he arranged that Tom would go straight over to Hugo’s for breakfast, while we had a celebratory brekkie of our own. It involved a lot of Krug and a lot of smoked salmon.

  When Tom came back at lunchtime, dragging a pillowcase of swag behind him, Hugo came too and joined us to exchange presents and make things seem a little normal for Tom. I survived it by a whisker and the minute he left I prepared to take to my bed in a darkened room for the rest of the day. But Percy had other ideas.

  ‘That’s good,’ he said as he saw me heading upstairs. ‘Go up and get your bathing suit on. The limo will be here in a minute.’

  I looked at him, bewildered.

  ‘What limo?’ I said.

  ‘The one that’s taking us to Camp Cove,’ said Percy, happily. ‘Can’t be worrying about tedious things like parking on Christmas Day.’

  It was a stretch limo, which meant it had to drop us quite a way from the beach in the narrow streets of Watsons Bay, but apart from that Percy had thought of everything. As well as a huge picnic, we had three umbrellas for shade, two beach towels each – lie and dry, as he called them – and special blow-up backrests to lean against.

  We ate buckets of prawns and oysters with our fingers, with plenty more Krug to wash it down, and he’d bought a whole tray of perfectly ripe mangoes. I ate three in a row, standing in the water, with the juices running all down my front.

  Percy strolled up and down the shoreline, checking out the ‘local fauna’, as he called it, wearing a white sarong and a huge cartwheel sunhat, while Tom and I had great fun splashing in the water, playing with his new boogie board. It wasn’t Christmas as I knew it, but it was highly diverting.

  And it went on like that throughout Tom’s summer holidays, with Percy providing constant distractions, to entertain him and to take my mind off all the things that Hugo and I weren’t doing with him as a family.

  I closed the shop for two weeks in January and devoted myself to having fun with Tom and Percy. We went to see Jungle Book outdoors in the Botanical Gardens, went kayaking in Middle Harbour and out to Cabramatta on the train to have Vietnamese noodles and marvel at all the exotic fruit in the market there. We hired a boat on the Hawkesbury River, had picnics at obscure Harbour beaches I didn’t know existed, and all kinds of other jollies. Tom adored it all.

  One of the greatest successes was a night-time ghost tour of the old King George army hospital and barracks, which covered a large piece of land over on the north shore of the harbour. I’d never even heard of it, but in his inimitable fashion Percy had researched every possible outing and place of interest within a fifty-mile radius of our house. I thought it sounded a bit yucky – visiting an old disused hospital – and I was worried Tom would be terrified of the ghost aspect, but Percy was adamant.

  ‘No, Antonia, it will be marvellous,’ insisted Percy. ‘That delightful young Keith down at Cadman’s Cottage, where I got the tickets – very attractive teeth – assures me it’s absolutely fascinating. It’s where they used to put all the mangy new arrivals when they arrived off ships riddled with disease and corruption. Also any of them who had gone tonto on the voyage. It’s a miracle I escaped a stay there when I arrived myself, what?’

  Percy was right – it was marvellous. I
was such an Eastern Suburbs Princess, I’d never even been over to North Head before and it was spectacular. There were amazing views of the Harbour and out to the ocean – and no ugly buildings to get in the way, except for the old sheds and structures of the King George Hospital itself, which were incredibly atmospheric.

  Even without the gripping ghost stories that the guide worked up for maximum spook effect, the whole place had a poignant romantic air about it that I loved. Some of the buildings were old stone, others were Victorian brick and there were some in Federation style, but all of them had the same integrity of being worn from use as the things I bought for my shop. There was a real sense of history up there.

  The part of it that touched me most was the infectious diseases ward, a single storey weatherboard building surrounded by verandas, right down by the shore, with waves crashing into a little rocky cove and the lights of the City shining across the dark water. It was really sad – so many soldiers had died of flu there, after coming home safely from the First World War – but there was a special beauty in the faded paint and it had an intrinsic elegance.

  I was amazed how moved I was by the place, but apart from that the outing followed our usual pattern. Percy fell immediately in love with the guide – ‘Oh I do adore a man in khaki, Ant,’ he had hissed the minute he saw him in his ranger’s uniform – and flirted with him outrageously the whole way round.

  Tom started out showing off madly, running ahead and jumping out at me, making ghoulish faces, becoming quieter as the darkness drew in around us, until he was clutching my hand very tightly and saying nothing. By the time we reached the morgue – the scariest part, by far – he had both arms wrapped around my waist, his head buried in my hip, just one wide eye peeping out. All the way home we listened to him telling us how scared he hadn’t been, but in the middle of the night he climbed into bed beside me, clutching his special teddy.

  As well as the outings there was my fitness regime to keep me occupied – or at least that was the idea. I was fed up with it after three days and started begging for mercy, but Percy would not let up. I went off to the shop each morning – after my mandatory one-hour trudge around the park – with a packed lunch of cottage cheese, two Ryvita crispbreads and a bundle of crudités. My afternoon treat was some thrilling melon cubes. I came home each night to a delicious low-fat, no carbohydrate meal – well, as delicious as food without butter, cheese, cream, pasta and potatoes can be.