Bachelor Boys by Kate Saunders

Author:Kate Saunders
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2011-04-18T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I was struggling in the jaws of a ferocious hangover. I hadn’t felt this dreadful since the aftermath of my finals. Every fiber, every capillary, every tiny muscle I never knew I had sang and vibrated with pain. My blood had turned to iron filings. Opening my swollen, gritty eyes was a tremendous effort, like heaving up two metal shutters.

First, I was aware of a piercing self-pity. Then I registered that I was lying in Phoebe’s spare bedroom. Bright daylight hammered at the Habitat curtains, and lay in hard lozenges on the faded rug.

Now I remembered being hauled up the steps by Fritz. I remembered darling Annabel making me herbal tea and unzipping my jeans. And if I’d had a drop of spare moisture in my desert of a body, I would have wept again. How were the mighty fallen. My best friend was now part of a loving couple (“You go out, Fritz—I’ll take care of her”) and I had been exposed as a beggar for kippers on a vast and unprecedented scale.

I decided sitting up might make me feel better. I was wrong—but once I was upright, I thought I might as well stay like that. The mirror on the dressing table showed me the ruin of my face. Several broad black smudges of eye makeup did not improve its creased puffiness.

Slowly (none of my senses were working properly) I registered the comforting smells of coffee and Phoebe. With a vague idea of casting myself into her arms, I put on a dusty toweling robe which was hanging on the back of the door, and stumbled downstairs.

I found her sitting at the kitchen table. A pot of fresh coffee waited on the counter. She had not felt strong enough to carry it to the table. For once, her physical delicacy didn’t seem to matter. Phoebe was calm, radiating compassion, absolutely there.

She smiled as the wreck of HMS Cassie lurched into the room. “Hello, darling. I thought I heard you. I didn’t trust myself to get up the stairs, but I knew you’d smell the coffee.” (Yes, I’d woken up and smelled the proverbial coffee at last.) “Now, before you say a word, Fritz has already spoken to Betsy.”

I gasped, “Oh God, it’s Friday! Oh God—what’s the time?”

“I hope you don’t mind, but he told her what happened.”

The shock of losing control on such a scale had winded me like a kick in the stomach. Dear lord in heaven, I’d forgotten to go to work. I was the woman who had got herself to work through hell and high water, with raging temperatures and on crutches. And I’d bloody well forgotten. I collapsed into a chair.

“I’ve got to get in,” I moaned. “I can’t leave Betsy all alone—did you say Fritz told her?”

“Not in detail,” Phoebe assured me. “Just that you’d had a bad bust-up with Matthew. He didn’t say anything about you getting drunk,” she added, “but I’m afraid she guessed. She says everything’s fine. She says the man from the printer’s isn’t coming in till Monday now.

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