Unlike many of the women who did well in the City, Odette neither ingratiated herself with her male colleagues by excessive drinking and swearing, nor slept and flirted her way to promotion. She simply did everything that was asked of her supremely well. Nor did she work the insane hours that had become accepted as normal in the City. And those who would see her walk from her desk at six-thirty every night would feel not the customary superiority over a ‘lightweight’ who couldn’t hack it, but a cringing knowledge that they were only left still toiling because of their inefficiency.
Odette had only three close friends: Frankie, a psychiatric nurse, Jodie, an all-kinds-of-things, but currently an interior decorator, and Alice, the focus of her current, highly atypical concern.
Alice was the last to join the group. It had begun years before when Jodie, Odette and Frankie, who’d met at college, had taken an early season bargain holiday to Mykonos, unaware that its reputation as a party island was qualified by the fact that most of those partying, back in those days, were gay men. Frankie had spent two fruitless nights attempting to convert the impeccably turned out and exquisitely toned clubbers to the joys of heterosexual love, as Jodie and Odette rolled their eyes and consoled themselves with the lovely view of the harbour, when they spied the darkly attractive young woman evidently on holiday with her mother. They took pity on the girl, and dragged her out with them, despite her protestations that she must look after Mummy. What followed was two weeks of first shy, then warm, and finally hilarious bonding. As so often, the injection of new blood reinvigorated the gang, as the relations between them all shifted subtly. The nights were spent dancing, and perfect days followed, dozing on the beach, lulled by the shushing of the sea. Frankie moved on, with more success, to the locals, but the focus remained themselves. At the end they all agreed it was the best, just utterly and completely the best ever. Even Kitty had enjoyed herself, and was quite content to see Alice disappear with her new friends, leaving her among the polite and handsome young men of Mykonos.
From the beginning Alice had always, of course, been a little odd. It was part of her charm, one of the reasons why they loved her. She was the one who, when their little group of friends would meet for a drink or a meal, would jolt them from their discussion of house prices and handbags with a dreamy soliloquy about beauty or truth or the extinction of a rare species of gaily-coloured mollusc, once indigenous to one of the scattered islands of the Indian Ocean, but now gone forever.
Odd, but not this odd.
It had begun back in the spring, not too long after Alice had joined, to everyone’s amazement, that toffee-nosed auction house. She hardly now ever said anything, just sat and smiled. Or sat and didn’t smile. She’d recently missed two of their regular get-togethers, and when she came to the last meeting, coffee and cakes for lunch at Vals in Soho, she sat throughout the hour-and-a-half of gossip silent but for a blank ‘no, fine’ when Jodie had asked her, without really thinking about it, sometime around the halfway point, if anything was the matter. More significantly, Alice, normally an enthusiastic scoffer of pastries, had left untouched the tarte au citron she had murmuringly ordered.
Among the four of them, Odette was the one who was known for her ability to miss the subtle (or not so subtle) moods of the others, to fail to spot a new hair colour, or romance. But it was she who said to the other two, once Alice slipped away (‘my … I have work … I must go’):
‘There’s something wrong with Alice.’
‘Alice?’ said Frankie. ‘Yes of course there is. She’s fucking mental.’ One of Frankie’s ‘things’ was too throw around unpleasantly derogatory terms for the mentally ill. ‘It’s why we love her.’ She smiled her smile, defiantly showing the gap between her two front teeth. She was dressed in her usual costume of long, flapping skirt and bat-like membranous top; a combination which emphasised her enormous presence. Her nails were painted deep purple, a shade lighter than was normal for her (‘just felt like something sunshiny today’). Frankie had chosen her career largely because it would annoy her parents, Oxford academics who could never see the point of sullying themselves with anything that happened outside college life. Frankie was huge, not at all overweight, but just impressively tall and wide and looming, and her personality succeeded in entirely filling her frame. Her long dark-blonde hair writhed and squirmed over her shoulders, with occasional forays skywards. She’d been amusing them all (but for Alice) with another story about her complex and adventurous love life, and, like all of her stories, it had ended with her face down in a gutter, moaning and railing, legs splayed, knickers nowhere to be found. She’d used the opportunity to say again that if Odette was the brains of their little group, Alice the heart, and Jodie the pretty little sling-back mules, then she, Frankie, was its pelvis.
‘No, not wrong in general,’ said Odette, ‘wrong now. And not just now. For months.’
‘You mean because she’s been quiet?’ said Jodie, delicately wiping the corner of her mouth with a little finger. ‘But you know she just is quiet sometimes.’
Jodie was a chameleon, able to look at home wherever she found herself. She was wearing a simple blue dress that might well look cheap and cheerful to anyone not used to spending a thousand pounds on an outfit. But those who knew, knew.
‘Not quiet like this.’
‘Well, I suppose she was a bit funny, even for her. I know, she’s in love!’ That was Frankie’s explanation for everything, except where people were in love, in which case she would cynically invoke lust or economics.
‘If it’s love it doesn’t seem to be making her very happy.’
‘Does it ever, for anyone?’ said Jodie, wistfully, although it had, in fact, made her perfectly happy, coming as it did in her case with a pretty house in Sevenoaks and an angst-free Platinum Amex.
‘I think she’d have told us about it if there was someone new. I mean someone at all. It’s not as if there’ve been many,’ said Frankie. She immediately regretted saying that as it could apply equally to Odette, and she certainly hadn’t meant to be bitchy.
Odette picked up her bag. ‘I don’t think it’s love. Not the ordinary sort, anyway. I’m going after her.’
‘She’ll be long gone, you’ll never catch her,’ said Jodie or Frankie, or both together; Odette wasn’t listening.
Running from the café, she turned left towards Piccadilly. Luckily, she just caught sight of Alice’s dark hair bobbing down the street.
‘Hi, Alice,’ she said when she reached her, a little out of breath. ‘I thought I’d walk this way with you.’
Alice looked at her with what might have been suspicion in her eyes. It was something that Odette had never seen there before.
‘Well … I was just … yes, walk with me, of course.’
‘Alice, there’s something wrong. You’re behaving so strangely. I’m worried.’
That wasn’t supposed to have happened: she’d so meant to be subtle. But something about Alice made strategies useless.
‘You shouldn’t worry.’
‘Look, Alice, I have to get back to work, but can’t we meet one evening? Just the two of us – not the others. You know, the thing is, I’d like to talk … to get your advice about something. If it’s easier for you I can come to your flat …’
‘No! Not there. Sorry, I didn’t mean to … I don’t mind where we meet.’
Odette named a wine bar in neutral territory, and they arranged to meet in two