‘Are you ready, darling?’ Ethan asks as he swings into the dressing room. He glances impatiently at his watch and does that tapping thing with his foot. ‘We’re going to be late.’
He’s still handsome, my husband. There’s a smattering of grey in his hair, but it only makes him look more distinguished over the years. It’s so terribly unfair that men grow more beautiful with age whereas women, inevitably, do not. He looks so smart in his hand-tailored charcoal grey suit and crisp white shirt.
‘Is that a new tie?’ I usually bought all his clothes and I didn’t recognise it.
He looks down. It’s grey silk with a faint black line through it. Very stylish. ‘Yes.’
‘You bought it yourself?’
Ethan rolls his eyes. ‘I am perfectly capable of buying my own ties, Lydia. I don’t see why you should be so surprised.’
But I am surprised. That was my role: I looked after the house, I looked after Ethan, I shopped for him.
‘It’s nice,’ I offer.
Even after all this time, I still love him. We’ recently celebrated our fifteenth wedding anniversary. Well, when I say ‘celebrated’ I mean that Ethan was away on business somewhere –Denmark, I think –and I opened a bottle of fizz on my own and watched re-runs of Wallander. When he was less busy we were hoping to hop off for a week somewhere warm.
It’s a party tonight. Another one. This one at The Dorchester. A thank you for five hundred of Ethan’s staff for hitting their targets in these terrible times of recession. Some of them will be made redundant next week, but they don’t know that yet. Tonight, they’ll still be blissfully unaware of their fate and on a high.
I take one last look in the mirror. The last time I appeared in the Daily Mail it was a shot from our beach holiday in Barbados pointing out the cellulite on the back of my thighs. I was mortified. That was the day that my unswerving attachment to the sarong started. Of course, that was years ago. I’ll be forty-five next birthday. Not a milestone birthday, as such, but one that takes me another step further away from my prime. None of the newspapers care what I look like now. But I do. My skin used to be like porcelain, white and flawless. There are wrinkles now –fine ones, thanks to Crème de la Mer and some well-aimed Botox. But they’re undeniably there. Perhaps I’ll have some of the lights taken away from around this mirror. It’s too bright, unforgiving. I might like myself better if I were perpetually in soft focus. I ease back my cheeks with my fingertips and watch my jawline tighten. That’s how I used to look. Once when I was young and desirable.
‘How much longer, Lydia?’ Ethan presses. ‘The car is waiting.’
‘I just want to make sure that I look my best.’ I clip on my diamond studs, then stand up and check myself in the full-length mirror. This dress is cut on the bias and flatters my figure, which is fuller than it used to be despite the hours I spend in the gym and the hours that I spend looking at food rather than eating it. It’s sapphire blue and emphasises the colour of my eyes.
‘No one will be looking at you,’ my husband says. ‘I’ll see you downstairs.’
It’s not just the newspapers who don’t care what I look like anymore, it seems.
It wasn’t always like that. Obviously. Ethan used to love having me on his arm at his corporate functions. Mouths used to gape when he introduced me. I knew what they were thinking. That Ethan had punched above his weight. That he had married well. My husband might not have wanted me to carry on with my career, but he liked men to look at me. He liked their mouths to water when they saw me with him. He encouraged me to dress in the skimpiest of clothes. And I was happy to oblige. He couldn’t keep his hands off me then. At the most inappropriate moments, I’d feel his thumb graze my nipples, his fingers inching up my thighs. I’ve lost count of the corporate dinners where his hand would be between my legs under the table before we’d even reached dessert.
There was a photograph of me in the tabloids. We’re on a yacht in the Med –I can’t remember whose now –and I’m standing at the bow alone in impossibly high heels, the tiniest of gold bikinis that barely contains my breasts, a gold chain accentuating my slender waist, the scant thong exposing my tanned buttocks. My long blonde hair streamed behind me. It was my natural colour then. I look like the cat who’s got the cream. It made page four of the Sun. I remember exactly the day it was. We were with a party of businessmen who we were entertaining for lunch. I was the only woman on board and yet Ethan insisted that I wore the bikini and nothing else. He even picked it out for me. Even after we’d spotted the paparazzi on another boat, he’d come behind me and slipped a finger under the thin fabric of my swimsuit and inside me. The other men were all lounging on the deck with champagne just behind us, but he didn’t care. Then Ethan took me down below, lifted me straight onto the counter in the galley, pulled down my bikini bottoms and made love to me right there. At any moment, any one of the men, or all of them, could have walked in. I thought he’d done it because he was overwhelmed by passion, because he loved me so much.
I’m older and wiser now.
I slick on my lipstick, smooth down my dress and plump my cleavage. It’s all still my own but it needs help now from well-cut and ferociously expensive underwear. Picking up my diamanté purse, I make my way down the stairs.
The Dorchester is one of my favourite venues and this is from someone who has been to the Burj al Arab on a regular basis. But that is tacky in its opulence whereas The Dorchester is all about understated elegance. Mind you, every five star hotel thinks that they’re far better than they are. We like the Terrace Suite here, which has the most marvellous view over London, and we were booked in overnight. I’m hoping to do some shopping in town tomorrow and perhaps have some lunch at Harvey Nics. Ethan, of course, is going into the office even though it’s Sunday.
The Ballroom Suite is already thronging with Ethan’s colleagues. They’re all bright young things, university educated with degrees in such things as philosophy and politics. They have conversations where they all shout over each other about the FTSE and the Dow Jones and I have no idea what they’re talking about and have no desire to. I stand and sip my champagne and try to look interested.
The room is beautiful, stylish, all cream and gold. We stand at the top of the sweeping staircase so that Ethan can greet his staff. We shake hands endlessly with the damp, the sweaty, the cool, the dry, the over eager, the bone-crushingly aggressive and the limp-wristed. No wonder the Queen always wears gloves. How could she bear to have all those strangers touch her?
‘Hello, Lydia.’ I look up to see one of Ethan’s managers, Colette, standing in front of me, smiling widely. I think she’s one of his favourites as she always seems to accompany him to his business meetings. ‘Beautiful dress. You look lovely.’
‘Thank you.’ She’s visited the house several times too, so we are familiar enough with each other to air kiss cheeks. ‘You look simply divine too.’
She’s slender, Colette. Sickeningly so. Self-consciously, I pull in my tummy. Tonight she’s dressed in a black, clinging number with a perilously plunging neckline that leaves little to the imagination. It must be held on with tit-tape and I’d bet a pound to a penny that she’s not wearing any underwear. It makes the brightness of my blue look garish in comparison. Like I’m trying too hard. She’s young. Twenty-six at most and has a boyish figure with a washboard stomach and no hips. For work she power dresses in crisp white shirts and pencil skirts with vertiginous black patent heels. She looks like a woman who wears stockings to the office. Her skin is soft and coffee-coloured. Her corkscrew curls –the height of fashion –bounce onto her bare shoulders.
I feel