Left of the Bang. Claire Lowdon

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СКАЧАТЬ Heatherington inserted himself between the girl and Tamsin and deposited a loud kiss on each of Tamsin’s cheeks. He was one of Callum’s closest friends; for three years at Cambridge, they had been on the university water polo team together.

      For once, Tamsin was pleased to see Will. She actually knew him independently of Callum: his family had lived near hers in Holland Park, and Tamsin had encountered Will at intervals throughout her childhood, mostly at their parents’ parties. She remembered him as a boisterous teenager, teasing her unkindly about her skinny legs. Now thirty-two, Will was good-looking in the most obvious way: tall, with naturally olive skin, glossy dark blond hair, Bambi eyes and strong cheekbones. He could have been a mid-nineties boy-band pin-up. Only the full mouth was out of register. There was a hint of the predator about his pout, a complacency that was somehow aggressively expectant.

      ‘Tamsin, you’re dry, we can’t have that.’ Will produced a bottle of champagne and started to fill her glass. These days he was scrupulously polite to Tamsin; but there was always something in his tone that gave her the impression he was secretly laughing at her. ‘Hope you don’t mind, Leo, I invited some reinforcements for later. Including two hot lesbians,’ he went on, turning to the girl in the blood-stained tank top.

      ‘I’m not gay any more,’ she said.

      Will grinned and ruffled her carefully styled hair, which was already sparked with grey at the sides. ‘I’ll believe that when I see it, darling.’

      ‘Reinforcements, yes, that’s fine,’ said Leo, detaching himself from the little group. ‘Sorry – got to go rescue Bex – she’s been cornered by those orthopods she was too nice not to invite—’

      ‘Sooooo,’ said Will, resting one forearm on Tamsin’s shoulder and the other on the un-lesbian lesbian’s, as if they were all jolly chums. ‘Isn’t this nice? Leo and Bex, the beating of two tender hearts as one, the unimpeded marriage of true minds, etcetera, etcetera?’

      ‘Mmmm,’ said Tamsin, who never quite knew how to respond to Will’s florid speaking style.

      ‘Talking of true love,’ he went on, ‘has my secretary managed to keep her paws off your boyfriend?’

      ‘Leah’s not your secretary,’ Tamsin replied evenly. She was remembering why she disliked Will so much.

      ‘Leah?’ asked the un-lesbian, suddenly interested. ‘As in Jonno-and-Baz-in-one-weekend Leah?’

      ‘The same.’ Will bowed his head.

      ‘Has she been trying it on with Callum?’ the girl asked Tamsin. She looked amused.

      ‘No, she’s just his flatmate.’

      ‘What, like they live together?’

      ‘Mm-hmm.’

      The girl raised one dark eyebrow. ‘And how do you feel about that?’

      Leah was a PR officer at Will’s law firm, referred to by Will either as his secretary or ‘our resident serial shagger’. But despite the girl’s reputation, Tamsin didn’t feel threatened. In fact, Tamsin never felt threatened by anyone where Callum was concerned: he adored her, and she knew it. Now, though, under the pressure of scrutiny, Tamsin found herself incapable of communicating this conviction. She took an overlarge gulp of champagne and blinked to clear the tears that the fizz brought to her eyes.

      ‘Leah’s cool, we don’t see that much of her, but she seems cool,’ she heard herself say, lamely. The un-lesbian stared at her for a moment, then turned back to Will.

      ‘I heard she fucked Charlie Huffman.’

      Tamsin held out her empty glass for more champagne. She was, if possible, having even less fun than she’d anticipated.

      Callum, on the other hand, had been having a wonderful evening. He was not generally prone to sentiment, but tonight, fondly, tipsily, surely, he felt everyone he loved in the world was here, in this room. There was little Jake Simonson, excitedly telling everyone about his first architectural commission. There were Victor and Caitlin, a serious, hard-working pair of actuaries, deeply bronzed and full of stories from the year-long trip to India that everyone thought they’d never make; Zander Pownall, messing about in the playpen with his two-year-old son, no trace of the long depression he’d suffered in his mid-twenties; Antoine Namani, another neurosurgeon, making everyone laugh with his medically inflected rap (‘I’m malignant, you’re benign, when I lay down a rhyme, I metastasise straight into yo’ spine’). And, of course, Tamsin, his Tamsin, beautiful tonight in a long wrap skirt tied high at the waist, her sulkiness visible only to him – which in itself felt like something precious. It was, thought Callum fuzzily, a roomful of happy endings.

      Fetching a fresh beer from the drinks table, Callum noticed a tall man he’d never met before, dressed in a vamped-up nurse’s outfit: tiny white skirt, choppy blonde wig, lumpily stuffed fake breasts. Under a grainy layer of foundation, the ghosts of several large freckles were visible. It was easily the most outrageous costume of the evening. When Callum complimented him on it, the man thanked him by lifting up the skirt to display a pair of women’s knickers, his penis squashed obscenely behind the sheer fabric.

      ‘Practically standard issue these days,’ the nurse-man said cheerfully. ‘No self-respecting officer seen dead at a party without see-through panties.’

      ‘You’re in the army?’ Callum was immediately interested.

      ‘Yes, sir. Just finished at Sandhurst,’ said the man with irrepressible pride. He tugged off the wig, revealing a full head of closely-cropped black hair, which he proceeded to scratch with the innocent abandon of a dog shaking itself after a swim.

      ‘And how did you find Sandhurst?’

      ‘Still recovering from the final exercise. It was a total CF.’

      ‘Is that the ten-day one? Diamond Victory?’

      ‘Dynamic Victory. It’s a beast.’ The boy looked impressed. ‘How do you know that?’

      Callum smiled, pleased with the compliment. ‘I’m writing a book, a sort of military history thing … Sorry – what’s a “CF”?’

      ‘CF, charlie foxtrot – means “cluster fuck”, basically a major beasting. Also a verb, as in, I got cluster-fucked. Which you do, at Sandhurst. That’s the whole point.’

      The two men laughed and clinked beer bottles properly this time, acknowledging their approval of one another.

      ‘Is it true that you lot are using “muggle” for “civilian” now?’

      They were fifteen minutes into a discussion on military slang when Callum noticed Tamsin watching them from across the room with an uninterpretable expression on her face. Callum waved her over, eager to show off his new find.

      ‘Here, Tam, come on, I want you to meet—’

      ‘Chris.’ Tamsin said the name at the same time as Callum. ‘It is Chris, isn’t it?’

      ‘Have we…?’ The boy was embarrassed. Then his soft mouth pulled tight in an enormous grin. ‘My god – it’s Tamsin!’

      ‘Do you know each other?’ Callum СКАЧАТЬ