Telling Lies to Alice Read Online Free

him and stuffed it in my pocket. I said good-bye and headed off—every time I looked back he was still sitting there in his car, looking after me, and all the time I had my hand in my pocket, clutching his little piece of paper. . . .
    I’ve still got it. In a shoebox under my bed, where I keep special things. I don’t look in there—not often—but it’s nice to have them. Just stuff like birthday cards from my granddad . . . my wedding ring, from when I was married to Jeff . . . and Lenny’s last note to me. The one he wrote before he killed himself.

 
Four
    I was excited about the dinner. It was at Mirabelle, which I’m pretty sure was Lenny thinking, let’s impress her, but I’d been there before with James Clarke-Dibley, so I wasn’t totally bowled over. I didn’t expect to see Jack, though. Well, I didn’t know I was going to see Jack until the maître d’ met us at the foot of the stairs, all smiles—Lenny’d picked me up from my flat so we arrived together—and said, “This way, sir. Mr. Flowers is already here.” So we went over to the table, and there was Jack with his feet well underneath—he obviously wasn’t going anywhere, and Lenny was clearly expecting him, because he said, “You beat me to it,” and Jack said, “Only to the table,” and they both laughed. Well, I thought, so much for Mr. Injured Innocence, but I didn’t say anything, just sat down. In fact, I don’t think I said more than about ten words the whole time we were there, because the minute we’d ordered, Lenny and Jack went into their double act and I was sitting between them with my head going back and forth as if I was watching a tennis match, and half the restaurant watching, too, but pretending they weren’t because Mirabelle isn’t the sort of place where you go up to someone and ask for their autograph.
    Lenny had introduced me—“Meet Jack, I know you’ll get on like a house on fire, you’re just his type,” but it sort of felt like . . . I don’t know, as if I could have been a new car he’d just bought and not a person at all. I wasn’t thrilled about that, but it was exciting sitting there with them in this luxurious restaurant, and I was enjoying myself because they were very, very funny and I was getting my own personal show. I can’t remember much of what they said. A lot of it went straight over my head because they were talking about people I didn’t know—not then, anyway—and it was hard to concentrate because they were both playing footsie with me. I kept wondering how the evening was going to end, especially when Jack started going on about this Polaroid camera he’d just bought and saying how it was good for taking sexy pictures, and I wasn’t sure about that, so in the end I tucked my feet under my chair and let them do it with each other . . . it took about ten minutes before they noticed but they both wound up looking under the tablecloth. . . . Jack said, “I thought your legs were a bit hairy,” and I said, “Well, what do you expect? I’m a bunny.” Which made them laugh, and that made me feel a bit more confident, so I said, “How did you two meet, anyway?”
    They both started laughing again. “National Service,” Lenny said. “We were in some godforsaken dump in the West Country on a training course. Men from all different regiments, and there was this Regimental Sergeant Major who’d been through the war, and he thought we were a bunch of no-hopers. We’d had it up to here with being shouted at and all the rest of it so we were pretty fed up, and the RSM kept ordering these bloody fire drills. . . . He used to sound the siren and you had to drop whatever you were doing and charge over and parade outside the guardroom. We were meant to assemble in three minutes but nobody could be bothered, so we’d come ambling up five, ten minutes late and he’d start shouting—
    “You’re a cretin! What are you?” Jack bellowed in a strangled voice. I went bright red