The trouble is, thought Dulcie, I do mind Patrick. I especially mind him being happy with Claire.
Forcing her attention back to Liam, she related the morning’s events to Liza. Dulcie left nothing out because that was the beauty of best friends; you could moan for as long as you wanted, you never felt compelled to rush.
‘All that skulking off to the other side of Bath and secretly getting fit was a waste of time,’ she complained, drawingunsmiley faces in the spilled wine with her finger. ‘He said he knew all along I was a fraud. I bet bloody Imelda told him. Cow.’
Liza watched as Dulcie tried inexpertly to light a sodden cigarette.
‘Let her have him,’ said Liza. ‘You can do better than that. Okay, he looked good, but the charm was all on the surface. Where was the real personality?’
Dulcie gave up on the cigarette. She managed a brief smile. ‘In his jockstrap.’
‘There, you see?’ Heartened by the attempt at humour, Liza sat back in her chair and raised her glass. ‘Feeling better already. You don’t need him.’
Dulcie knew that. She just wished Liam hadn’t laid into her quite so ruthlessly. Those hurtful things he’d come out with ... well, they’d hurt.
‘I told him he was obsessed because all he cared about was boring old sport.’ She kept her eyes fixed on the wet table. ‘And he said at least he was obsessed about something, and didn’t I ever wonder if there was anything missing in my life?’
‘Like what?’ said Pru.
Dulcie shrugged. ‘I don’t know. He just looked at me in this weird way, then he shook his head and said: 'You don’t do anything, Dulcie. That’s your problem. You just don’t do anything.' ‘
‘Well,’ said Liza, breaking the awkward silence that had greeted this last statement – cruel, but true – ‘you’ve got something to do now. Get Liam McPherson right out of your system and find yourself someone a hundred times better.’
‘Oh right, it’s that simple.’ Wearily Dulcie rubbed her face. What with this morning’s encounter with Patrick, followed by the Liam thing, then the fight with Pru, she didn’t know if she had the energy to even think about finding herself another man. ‘Tell you what, you give Brad Pitt a ring, let him know I’m unexpectedly back on the market and ask him if he’ll meet me for dinner on Friday night. I’m free then.’
‘What you need,’ said Pru, ‘is someone kind. Easy-going. Not goody-goody,’ she argued because Dulcie, predictably, was already pulling I’m-going-to-be-sick faces, ‘but ... well, decent.’
‘Decent!’
Pru refused to be put off. Having learned her lesson months ago, she was determined to get the message across.
‘You want someone you can trust,’ she said firmly. ‘The kind of man who turns up when he says he’ll turn up.’
‘The kind who doesn’t come home with lipstick on his tennis shorts,’ put in Liza.
Dulcie groaned and covered her eyes. She knew, she knew what they were saying. It was just those words: decent, dependable, honest, trustworthy ... linked inextricably in her mind with a vision of some bumbling, good- hearted history teacher, always eager to help, in his woolly jumper, baggy corduroys and folkweave sandals.
Men like that, thought Dulcie, decent men, simply didn’t do it for her. They didn’t make her heart beat faster and her stomach contract with longing. Apart from anything else, they were always ugly.
‘There’s nothing wrong with decent,’ Pru insisted, ploughing on, refusing to give up.
Dulcie refilled her glass with Fitou and drank it quickly before it could get spilled. As she did so, it occurred to her that she did know someone decent and not ugly. Someone of whom Pru and Liza both hugely approved. Someone who had in the past been eminently capable of making her heart beat faster and her stomach tie itself in lustful knots.
Curiously, when she had bumped into him this morning, it had happened again.
Decent, mused Dulcie, turning the thought over in her mind. Like Patrick.
‘Like Claire,’ announced Liza, who had also been mulling the word over. Helping herself to a handful of peanuts from the bowl Pru had just placed in the centre of the table, shemissed the startled expression in Dulcie’s eyes. ‘That’s what Claire is. And look how happy she’s made Patrick.’
‘Hang on,’ Dulcie said slowly. ‘How do you know he’s happy?’
Too late, Liza realised she’d said aloud something she should have kept to herself.
‘You said he was,’ she countered with a half-hearted bluff. ‘Anyway, if he’s playing frisbee with her, she must make him happy.’
Dulcie sat up. She might be a bit pissed but she wasn’t a total dimwit. Not completely stupid.
What was going on here that she didn’t know about?
Her green eyes narrowed.
‘You mean you’ve met her?’
Liza gave up. She nodded.
‘Well, only once or twice.’
Pru managed to catch the bottle of Fitou, sent reeling across the table by Dulcie’s twitching elbow.
‘And you didn’t tell me?’ Dulcie gazed at her in bewilderment. ‘I don’t get this at all. How did you meet her?’
It had been one of those silly situations where the longer you put off mentioning something relatively
