Little White Lies Read online

  I look through my CDs and tapes—everything from Stan Getz to the White Stripes. Hmmm. Bjork . . . Haven’t heard that in a while . . . but probably too intense. Air . . . ? No, too mellow. That’s the trouble with albums, I find—you have to commit to one specific mood. I know it’s terribly uncool, but I secretly love compilations. I love the variety, and also it means I don’t have to make up my mind to listen to one artist or another. My fingers hesitate over an old compilation tape I made when I was at school and I pull it out. I spent my life making tapes for my friends when I was at school—it was probably my favorite method of communication. The right mixture of songs can say “You’re better off without him” or “You’re such a great friend, and I’m really sorry I ruined your favorite top” so much better than words can. This tape is a typical compilation of its time—a couple of weepies like “Unbreak My Heart,” some tracks by the Breeders and PJ Harvey that captured my teenage angst perfectly, a few dance tracks, and the odd retro song from an obscure band that I put in to demonstrate how cool I was. CDs may utilize wonderful technology, but the flip side is that no one spends as much time on compilation tapes anymore. Downloading tracks in seconds is just not the same as having to record manually, listening to each song and hitting the stop button just in time at the end of each song. Maybe tapes aren’t so bad after all, even if they do get chewed up on a regular basis.

  Pleased to have made a decision so quickly, I put the tape on and lie back down on the sofa, determined to chill out and make the most of the evening. This is just a short-term blip, I remind myself. How long have I been in London? One month. Just over four weeks. I can’t expect to have a social life already. These things take time to cultivate. I lived in the village for twenty-six years, so no wonder I never had a night in.

  I find myself thinking longingly of the little flat I shared with Pete in Bath, with a roaring fire that kept me warm when he was out doing whatever it was he was doing (or rather, whoever it was he was doing). But, I remind myself, I wasn’t happy really. I was surrounded by friends and family, but I was still lonely. And sure, I got invited to all the parties, but it was always the same people talking about the same old things. Everyone knew everybody—hell, everyone had been out with everybody at some point. There was no excitement, no intrigue, and no one who didn’t know me as “Nat’n’Pete”—I could never be anonymous, never rebuild my identity. Whereas here . . . well, there’s certainly no problem where anonymity is concerned. And if the scales have tipped a little far the other way, I’m sure they’ll balance eventually. I turn up the stereo a bit more. It’s the Indians singing, “Life ain’t no bed of roses.” Don’t remind me, I think ruefully. Still, look on the bright side. I made the move. I am no longer living in Bath, town of Jane Austen, ancient ruins, weird-tasting “spa” water, and endless fields. I am no longer Natalie from Bath—I’m Natalie from Notting Hill.

  The phone rings and I leap off the sofa to get it. There’s only a handful of people it could be. My mother—but I spoke to her last night and she doesn’t tend to ring two nights on the trot; Chloe, my best friend, but that’s unlikely, too—she’ll be out somewhere, I’m sure; or . . . Pete. We’ve spoken probably once a week since I moved here, and our phone calls are generally pretty much identical. We start off telling each other how brilliantly we’re doing and how happy we are; then we talk about work, our families—any neutral ground we can find—and then he always says, “I still don’t get why you moved away. Come back, won’t you? We used to have fun.” And I say something like “No, you used to have fun and most of the time it wasn’t actually with me,” and then he starts telling me I’m paranoid, and I get all defensive and accuse him of sleeping with other people, and before we know it, we’re having the same argument we’ve had for about three years over and over again. After a while, I usually end up in tears. I am over him; I just get upset when I think about the time I wasted with him. Thinking that he felt the same as me.

  “Hello?” I say hopefully. So we argue. Doesn’t mean I don’t want to hear from him.

  “Hello. Is that Cressida Langton?” says a smart-sounding woman.

  My heart sinks. Okay, so the other possibility is that the phone call won’t even be for me. Which is pretty depressing, considering that I’m the only one who lives here. I wish now that I’d had the number changed, but it cost £40 and at the time I thought it wouldn’t be a problem keeping the old number when I moved in. And it is. Apart from the irritating fact that bloody Cressida gets more phone calls than I do and she doesn’t even live here anymore. Still, it’s probably a good thing. If it had been Pete, I might have admitted that I’m feeling a bit low. And that would have been disastrous.

  “No,” I say, trying to keep the disappointment out of my voice. “She moved out a month ago.”

  “Oh. Do you have a forwarding number?”

  “No, I’m sorry,” I say for the tenth time this week. Has Cressida not considered telling her friends her new number?

  “Well, that’s a shame,” the woman says, sounding very irritated. “This is Nobu. She booked a table here tonight, and I need to know whether to hold it.”

  “Nobu?” That’s only the most expensive restaurant in the whole of London. Cressida was meant to be there tonight? Wow. She’s suddenly gone right up in my estimations.

  “Yes,” says the woman.

  “Right,” I say after a slight pause. I can’t believe I’m on the phone to Nobu! “Well, I’m sorry I can’t really help.”

  “No, well, there we are.”

  And with that, she hangs up.

  Huh huh, huh huh. Boom, yeah.

  I stare at the phone for a few seconds, trying to imagine going out to dinner at Nobu. Cressida’s probably a super-glamorous urbanite. Glamorous and rich. I wonder who she was meant to be having dinner with.

  My eyes rest on the pile of letters addressed to Cressida. Suddenly they seem rather more interesting. I wonder what sort of mail someone who eats at Nobu gets.

  I wander over and pick them up. Most of them look pretty dull. But there’s a big brown envelope that looks kind of interesting, and a smaller creamy one that’s handwritten. Then there’s a catalog, which I can see through the clear plastic wrapper. I leave the rest of the letters where they are, and take the two interesting-looking ones and the catalog back to the sofa with me.

  I suppose I could open the catalog. I mean that’s just junk mail, isn’t it? It won’t have anything personal in it.

  But as I’m about to rip it open, I stop myself and roll my eyes at my ridiculous behavior. I cannot believe it’s got to the point where I am actually thinking about opening other people’s junk mail for entertainment.

  Although, having stooped this low, I do kind of want to open it. I guess if I’m going to be pathetic, I might as well do it properly.

  Looking around furtively as if worried that someone’s going to see me, I quickly pull open the plastic cover and open the catalog up. I know it’s just a catalog, but it still feels a bit weird opening someone else’s mail.

  But I suppress my doubts and turn my attentions to the catalog. If you can call it a catalog, that is—somehow this seems too beautiful for such a plain description. I’ve never seen mail order like it! For one thing, the paper it’s printed on is luscious, and for another, it’s full of the most amazing things, all of which are incredibly expensive—stone lamps and velvet gowns and other things that no one needs at all but that look so beautiful you’d probably remortgage your house just to have them. If you had a mortgage in the first place, that is. I think I’ll keep this for Mum—it’s the sort of thing she’d love.

  I imagine my sitting room full of beautiful “objets.” Did Cressida order from this catalog? When she lived here, was this room full of opulent throws and cushions? I bet she did. She probably had candles burning, too. I half close my eyes and imagine deep velvet curtains at the window, leather and suede cushions on the floor, and a fake fur throw on the sofa. Okay, as soon as I’ve got some money sa
ved, I’m going shopping.

  I put the catalog down and stare at the other letters. My appetite is whetted now, and I want another little peek into Cressida’s life. It wouldn’t be so bad if I had my own little stack of letters to open, but I don’t have a single one. I got a bank statement this morning (never a nice thing to see at the beginning of the weekend), and I got a postcard from my parents two weeks ago—and that’s it since I’ve been here. Do people not write anymore? Evidently they do; it’s just that they write to Cressida, not me.

  After a few minutes’ hesitation, I pick the big brown letter up, ostensibly to take it back to the main pile of letters, but secretly to look for a sign that it’s also junk mail so that I can justify opening it. Instead, I get a shock. There’s a discreet stamp on the left-hand corner that says “Soho House.” How did I not see that before? Surely it’s not from the Soho House? The private members club that everyone who’s anyone goes to? The one that opened up a New York club and got featured right away in Sex and the City? Don’t tell me Cressida was a member?

  My heart starts beating a bit faster. If you want to talk “high society,” this must be as close as it gets these days. Suddenly London doesn’t feel quite so impenetrable, after all. I actually have a letter from Soho House. Correction—Cressida has a letter from Soho House. But she’s not here, is she? And I have no idea where she is, either. For all I know she could have moved to Australia and she’s hardly going to care about a few letters back here, is she?

  I give the envelope a good feel—there isn’t much in there. A few sheets of paper at most. Then I put it down again. This is unbearable. I can’t go looking at someone else’s mail. But come on, this is Soho House! When else am I going to have this kind of opportunity again?

  I turn to the other letter, which looks equally enticing. The envelope is thick and creamy, and the handwriting is elegant, written with a proper fountain pen.

  Cressida Langton, Flat 3, 127 Ladbroke Grove, Notting Hill, London W11.

  It just sounds so smart, doesn’t it? And it’s my address now. I live here. Suddenly I get a rush of excitement. Screw Pete, and screw the party upstairs—I don’t need either of them.

  I wonder what Cressida looks like. Beautiful, probably. I can’t imagine anyone unattractive going to Soho House. I stand up to look in the mirror, hold my head up and straighten my posture, imagining that I’m her. “Dahling, you look divine,” I say to my reflection, pretending it’s Catherine Zeta-Jones or someone. Okay, so maybe the accent’s a bit much—I’m sounding more like the Queen than Liz Hurley—but I can work on that. “Just dashing out for drinks at Soho House?” I tell an imaginary Pete. “Oh, Alistair, I’m sorry; I can’t stay long—I’ve got dinner at Nobu in an hour . . .”

  As I speak, my hands are irresistibly drawn toward the letters again and I pick them up, fanning myself with them, completing the picture. It wouldn’t hurt to just have a little sneaky peek, would it? I mean, no one will ever know, will they? I’m sure Cressida’s never going to come back and claim them, so having a little look won’t make any difference at all. Except that she might come back, mightn’t she . . . and then what would I do? It wouldn’t exactly look good to hand them over already opened, would it? Damn, and they look so irresistible, too.

  Almost reflexively, I pull my hand away as if the tips of my fingers have been singed.

  “Natalie Raglan, what on earth do you think you’re doing?” I say to myself under my breath, pulling myself out of this “Cressida Langton” reverie.

  That was close. I smile at my reflection as I hear “Tempted by the fruit of another” coming out of my stereo. I’m not sure this is what Squeeze meant when they wrote the song, but the words are pretty apt. I will resist my temptation. These letters are someone else’s private correspondence, and I am not the sort of person to open them. Period.

  I flick on the television, but before I can start seriously channel-hopping, the phone rings again.

  “Rescued!” I cry, reaching for the phone.

  “Natalie?” asks a familiar voice. “You sound a bit out of breath.”

  “Chloe! Yeah, well, I just ran across the flat. Or, rather, dived across the sofa.”

  Chloe and I have lived next door to each other since we were about five, and until I came to London, we did pretty much everything together. My brother, James, died when I was six, and my parents took a long while to get over it, so I used to be round at Chloe’s house more than I was at mine for a couple of years. We were inseparable—we went everywhere together, read the same books, saw the same films . . . God, we even had our first kiss on the same night. Not kissing each other, obviously, but kissing boys. It was with John and Steve from school and we were both fourteen. We even insisted on standing about ten feet from each other in case anything went wrong, and then we ended up giggling so much John and Steve got completely paranoid and walked off as if we were a pair of demented morons. I was quite relieved actually—John was a really crap kisser and even back then I was worried Pete would find out. Not that it would have mattered in any significant way—it’s not like Pete ever asked me out at that stage, but at the time I had this idea I was saving myself for him.

  Anyway, since then Chloe and I have done pretty much everything together—college, university, even work; we joined Shannon’s agency in Bath on the same day. I took a scattergun approach to getting a job after university—I didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I applied for pretty much everything, while Chloe was quite prepared to slum it for a while and try to figure out what she wanted to do with her life. But I persuaded her to send in a CV with mine to a few companies, and we both got a job at Shannon’s, an adverising agency. In the event, Chloe turned out to be a natural, whereas I never really felt in my heart of hearts that it was what I wanted to do. But if I hadn’t decided to quit and move down to London, we’d still be working side by side.

  To be honest, though, since I’ve been in London I’ve actually been avoiding Chloe’s calls. It’s not that I don’t want to talk to her—of course I do—it’s just that I wanted to leave it until I had more to tell her. She’s my best friend, after all. The last thing I want is for her to think I’m sitting on my ass every night. I want to impress her with fantastic stories of my wonderful social whirl—my glamour-filled days and hedonistic nights. And also, I can’t tell her the truth because she’d end up telling my mum. And I can’t bear the idea of Mum’s dreams of moving to London going pear-shaped for the second time in her life.

  “I’m so pleased you’re finally in!” says Chloe in her familiar cheerful tones. “So tell me, how’s it all going? Are you happy in London?”

  I pause. I want to tell Chloe about being a bit lonely, a bit scared that I’ve jumped in at the deep end and can’t quite remember how to swim. Chloe’s always been the one I tell my problems to (believe me, there have been a lot of them). We always used to love spending Saturday night watching old movies and discussing our (usually disastrous) love lives, and I know she’ll be expecting me to confide in her as usual.

  But somehow I can’t do it, so I mumble something and ask her how she is instead.

  As Chloe tells me about her week, I think about how surprised she was when I actually went through with my promise to move to London. Actually, I surprised myself, too. I only said it for effect one night when Pete got back at midnight with no explanation as to where he’d been. So I told him I was sick and tired of it, and that I was leaving him and moving to London. And when he told me to stop being ridiculous, I dug my heels in and refused to admit that I hadn’t really been planning to move—not in any serious way. And then when my mother heard . . . well, she was so excited, I couldn’t tell her that I wasn’t sure I’d really meant it. Still, it’s done now—I just wish I had a few good stories to tell Chloe.

  My eyes are drawn to the letters again. I suppose I could always tell a few white lies, couldn’t I? You know, just spice things up a bit. I mean it’s not like Chloe’s here or anything. She’ll never know.
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  I look away. God, Natalie, I chastise myself. You’re actually thinking about hiding the truth from your best friend? Just because you don’t want everyone to think you’re a failure?

  “Natalie? Are you okay?” Chloe whispers into the phone. I haven’t said anything for several minutes, which is not like me at all—we usually both talk so much that it can be a struggle to get a word in. “Look, if things aren’t working out, you can tell me, you know. There’s no shame in admitting you were wrong . . .”

  I feel myself redden. Admit I was wrong? I don’t think so. It would mean disappointing Mum and having Pete crow over me, and frankly there’s no way I can admit I’m alone for the fourth Saturday in a row. And anyway, doesn’t Chloe realize where I am? I’m in Notting Hill. I live at 127 Ladbroke Grove. Of course things are working out.

  My eyes rest back on the letters.

  “Am I okay?” I hear myself say in a slightly strangled voice. “God, I couldn’t be better!”

  Squirming at what I’ve just said, I feel myself getting hot.

  “Really? It’s just that your mum said you sounded a bit down when she called—that maybe you were finding it harder than you expected. I mean it’s a huge place, London . . .”

  Mum? Oh, God, was it that obvious? I thought I’d done a great job of telling her it was just like she thought it would be when she called the other night. Evidently I need to work on sounding more convincing. And what better time to practice than the present?

  I take a deep breath. “Huge and fabulous!” I say to Chloe, trying to smile as I talk. “Actually, you’re lucky to catch me in at this time. I was just heading out for the evening.”

  I cringe as I talk, but try to convince myself everything’s okay. I feel kind of empty inside as I talk, but I guess that doesn’t really matter.