all up in his business. But I don’t know how to respect his personal space and do as I’m told by Eleanor.”
“Freddie is a grown man, and he’s going to have to learn to deal with you, seeing as you don’t appear to be going anywhere,” she said.
“That makes me sound so appealing,” I said.
Cilla and Bea exchanged unreadable looks. “You’re not meant to be appealing to him, Bex,” Bea said. “You’re meant to be an unremarkable part of his day. He needs…to grow accustomed to your face.”
“Thanks, Professor Higgins.”
“You actually are my Eliza Doolittle,” Bea said. “But my point is that by keeping yourself scarce, every encounter feels fresh. Remind Freddie of how dull you actually are.”
“I wouldn’t put it that way,” Cilla jumped in, giving Bea a dirty look. “But Bea’s right that avoiding each other hasn’t fixed anything. Compel him to deal with you, like you did with Eleanor.”
“There is nothing less sexy than being tiresome,” Bea said.
“I wouldn’t be too certain,” called Gaz, from inside their sliding door. “Tiresome was my only move, and it got me a goddess.”
“It’s wearing out its welcome,” Cilla said, but as usual, she was smiling. “Either come to tea or don’t, Gaz, but hovering makes you look like a nutter.”
In a flash—I have never seen Gaz move so fast—he came out and plopped into the fourth chair. It didn’t jiggle.
“I thought you said they were all wonky,” I said.
“They are,” Gaz said. “But so is my bum, so it evens things out.” He handed me a petit four with a pink flower on top. “Food for thought.”
I bit it. “Tuna casserole?”
Gaz’s face fell. “Beef Wellington,” he said. “Apparently, we’ve both got some work to do.”
* * *
Cilla’s and Bea’s logic was solid, and the Queen had made it clear that she was sick of the status quo, so during the next few weeks—while Gaz tried to conquer the art of artificial beef Wellington flavoring—I searched for middle ground between “passive” and “aggressive.” I’d run over to Freddie’s apartments to drop off boxes of whatever Gaz had baked, making brief small talk if he answered the door but always leaving before I was shooed away. I saw his new girlfriend coming and going, but never prodded. When Nick and Freddie and I were called up again for two more events, I drew deep on the well of Lady Bollocks’s duchess training about chatting with strangers—Freddie, sadly, increasingly qualified—and began innocuous conversations about subjects I knew they both enjoyed: British craft beers, how Agatha’s ex Awful Julian had opened a hookah bar, the likelihood of Roger Federer avenging his Wimbledon loss. Neither of them told me to cut it out, so this peaceful coexistence started to feel only a few steps away from friendship. As we rolled into Nick’s birthday near the end of August, I was hopeful.
Prince Dick, in a show of the exact sensitive parenting he’d performed their whole lives, marked his son’s birthday with a party for something unrelated. The Royal Geographical Society, to celebrate its twentieth anniversary as the largest group of its kind, had spent all year drumming up cash for a study in Antarctica about the effect of climate change on its ice sheets; with a third of the year to go, the chairman thought a cocktail party with his patron the Prince of Wales would be the best push to loosen some pocketbooks. Nick’s birthday took a back seat—both to global warming, and to The Firm’s ongoing desire to prove to the posh guests that Freddie and I were not secretly banging in the coat closet. The toffs had a formidable grapevine, and I sensed Richard and Eleanor felt their good opinion could spread farther and wider than that of the average Mail reader. One afternoon, she ordered me to bring over pictures of Donna’s pulls for Richard’s party—actual tangible photographs—and studied them with a magnifying glass.
“The purple one,” she said, tapping a sculptural cap-sleeve Roland Mouret. “It’s slim cut enough to prevent anyone deciding you’re pregnant with Frederick’s love child. Which I assume you are not.”
“Not unless it was immaculately conceived,” I said. “But I think the green one gives me more room to eat the passed apps.”
“Which you will not do in any dress,” Eleanor said. “Your public mastication still needs work.” She looked down at the photo again and added, “You will wear my River Bend brooch. It was given to me in the 1970s by the Spanish king, and the diamonds