The Perfect Happiness(125)
“Let’s all go to tea at your house, the children can play downstairs and we can give Angelica a stiff drink in your sitting room,” Candace suggested. Angelica nodded gratefully, feeling the warmth of friendship envelop her like a beloved old rug.
Candace gave Angelica, Joe, and Isabel a lift in her car, calling her housekeeper on her mobile to change the arrangements she had made for her own children’s tea. When they arrived at Letizia’s terraced house, Joe and Isabel were delighted to find themselves in the company of all their friends and rushed off in a rowdy gang to the playroom downstairs. Angelica flopped onto the sofa in the first-floor sitting room, curling her feet under her and hugging the mug of tea Letizia had laced with whiskey. Scarlet joined her on the sofa. Letizia was on the point of sitting down, having brought up tea and biscuits on a tray, when the doorbell rang. “That’ll be Kate,” she said, hurrying downstairs to open it. The girls glanced at one another in silence, listening to the slamming of the door and Kate and Letizia talking in low voices in the hall.
“Not me!” said Candace, raising her hands.
“Letizia, of course,” said Scarlet with a chuckle. “She was texting in the car.”
“If I’m going to pour out my soul, it might as well be to all of you,” said Angelica, smiling feebly. “Save you from gossiping about it later.”
“Don’t bet on it, honey! What you’re about to divulge will give us all months of gossip!”
“I’m so sorry about Jack!” Kate exclaimed as she rushed in on a wind of perfume, her pregnant belly stretching the fabric of her vintage Mary Quant minidress. Since her love affair with the count, her dress had got more lavish, her jewelry more brash, and her scent overpowering. She sat down and crossed her long legs so that the gold buckles on her Roger Vivier shoes glinted in the sunlight streaming through the tall sash windows. “So who is he?”
Angelica smiled through her tears. “He was my lover,” she said simply, and for once there was nothing Kate could say to bring the conversation around to herself.
The girls listened, spellbound, as Angelica confessed to loving Jack. She told them the story from the very beginning. From the moment she had felt the frisson of attraction at Scarlet’s dinner party to the telephone call that morning, ending it all. They asked questions, probed into her feelings and her thoughts, and the strange thing was that the more Angelica talked about him, the less she hurt. Sharing her pain reduced the inflammation. Sharing the memories filled her heart with joy, for the love they had forged and the fun they had had. She trusted them to keep her secret: after all, they only gossiped to one another.
“The irony is that my affair with Jack has made me appreciate Olivier more. Our marriage has been strengthened because of it, and I salute Jack for that. He taught me to live in the present, and that is what I’m trying to do. None of us knows what’s around the corner.” She looked at her closest friends sitting around her, listening without judgment, understanding with compassion, supporting with humor, and realized that there was nothing in the world more healing than friendship.
“Oh my God!” Kate cried, holding out her teacup and staring down at her lap. “My waters have broken.”
“Really? Are you sure?” Letizia asked, horrified.
“I don’t know why else a torrent of water would gush out of me!”
“I hope they haven’t discontinued that fabric,” said Candace, glancing at the William Yeoward armchair that was now drenched with Kate’s fluids.
Angelica laughed at Kate’s immaculate sense of timing. “I didn’t think anything could upstage my story.”
“Foolish woman, you should know better,” said Candace. “The time of reckoning is now upon us.”
“Darling, do you want me to call Pete?” Letizia asked.
“Do you have to?”
“I think I should. It’s his baby, isn’t it?”
Kate pulled an anxious face. “I’m still not sure.”
Letizia shrugged helplessly. “Do you want me to call the other father?”
“No,” Kate snapped. “I’ll call Edmondo.”
“You can’t have Pete and Edmondo at the birth!” Candace exclaimed. “There’ll be a god-awful fight.”
“What shall I do?” Kate wailed, suddenly ashen with panic. She grabbed Letizia’s arm. “You have to come with me. I’m not giving birth on my own. You must all come with me!” Kate demanded. Letizia pulled her up to stand shakily, holding on to Letizia’s arm as if it were her lifeline.