Zoe's Lesson. Кейт Хьюит
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poisonously saccharin smile. He turned away, not wanting to invite another conversation.
Alone, he tossed back the last of his champagne and debated leaving. It wasn’t even nine o’clock, and the organiser of tonight’s party, a glamorous socialite named Karen Buongornimo—all he’d seen was a flash of dark hair and the gleam of an artificially whitened smile—had yet to speak. He would be publicly thanked; he needed to stay. This would, he determined, be the last such event he attended. It wasn’t simply difficult to navigate the sea of blurred faces and bodies; it was dangerous and humiliating. He did not intend to endure it another time. Grimacing, he held out his glass for a refill.
Zoe skirted the edge of the crowd, clutching her champagne, avoiding conversations. She watched as Karen called for everyone’s attention, and half listened as she gave a flowery speech about the importance of supporting emerging artists and how Monroe Consulting had been so fabulously generous. Monroe Consulting…that must be Max Monroe’s firm. The man with the thundercloud. Zoe felt another little dart of curiosity. She tossed back the rest of her champagne. Tonight was not a night for thinking. Or remembering.
Tonight she was going to have fun. She was good at that; she’d always been good at that. And now it helped her to forget.
‘And I’m sure Max Monroe would like to say a few words…’ Zoe didn’t so much as hear Karen’s introduction as the deafeningly awkward silence after it. Heads turned, bodies swivelling, waiting for the man in question to speak.
He didn’t.
Zoe craned her neck, standing on tiptoes in her already stiletto heels, but there were too many people—not to mention a large concrete pillar—for her to see the dreaded Max.
Finally, when the silence had gone on long enough for Karen to look both annoyed and embarrassed, and several people had cleared their throats in a telling manner, he spoke.
‘I have one word.’ His voice was low, his tone dry, almost, Zoe thought with a pang of recognition, bitter. ‘Cheers.’
Another silence, and then someone called out, ‘Hear, hear!’ and a peal of laughter like staccato gunfire burst out, the tension easing. No one wanted the party to be ruined, it seemed.
‘Cheers,’ Zoe said aloud, and reached for another glass of champagne.
She might not be a Balfour any more, but she could still act like one.
She surveyed the crowd; she recognised most people, knew only a few. Good. It was better that way. Tonight she wanted to laugh and forget the burden of her birth. She wanted to have fun.
‘Drowning your sorrows, darling?’
Zoe froze. She knew that voice, hated that voice. She turned slowly, hardly able to believe who she was seeing…Holly Mabberly, her nemesis from boarding school and the it-crowd in London. They weren’t enemies, precisely. Nothing so uncivilised. In fact, most people probably thought they were friends. They airkissed and chatted in public, laughed in perfect trills and fetched each other drinks. During one winter evening Holly had even borrowed her new pashmina when they’d decided to walk to another party. Zoe wasn’t sure she’d ever returned it.
Yet she would never call Holly her friend. She remembered in year four at Westfields, when a scholarship girl had been caught filching lipsticks from the chemist’s in the village, and had been expelled. Holly had smiled a terribly cold smile and said, ‘Well, that’s a relief.’
Zoe didn’t know why that seemingly insignificant moment had stuck with her, why that smile had chilled her to the bone, the offhand, callous remark cutting deep. Yet it had. For in Holly’s arctic gaze she sensed a predatory anticipation, an eagerness to see the high brought low.
And this was surely the moment she’d been waiting for, for Zoe had been brought very low indeed.
Zoe hesitated a split second before taking a final sip of her drink, draining its dregs. Then she lifted her head, tilting her chin as she deposited her glass on a nearby tray. ‘What sorrows, Holly?’ she asked sweetly. ‘I’m having the time of my life.’
Holly’s mouth turned delicately down at the corners in a perfected expression of false compassion. She reached out to clasp Zoe’s bare arm with her hand, her fingernails digging into the tender skin. ‘You don’t need to pretend with me, Zoe. I know—well, actually I can’t know, as I’m not…you know—but I can only imagine how you feel absolutely—’ she paused, searching for the word before latching onto it with relish ‘—destroyed.’ She squeezed her fingers again as she added sadly, ‘Completely lost.’
Zoe blinked, surprised by Holly’s inadvertent perception, for that was exactly how she felt. Lost, spinning in a great void of unknowing, the ground she’d thought so solid under her feet not simply shifted but gone. She blinked again, refocusing on Holly, her blue eyes narrowed to assessing slits, her mouth still curved in a smile that didn’t even bother masquerading as anything but malice.
‘Lost?’ she repeated with a little laugh. She choked on the sound; it wasn’t her perfect trill. More like a wobble. ‘Good gracious, Holly, you’re sounding awfully melodramatic. Why should I feel lost? I think the only time I felt that way was when we tried to walk back from the Oxford-Cambridge boat race—do you remember?’ She laughed again, and this time the sound rang true—or rather false—a perfect crystalline peal. ‘It took us four hours to make it from Putney Bridge to Mayfair. Too many drinks, I suppose.’
‘Darling.’ Holly squeezed her arm, her nails digging in deeper. Zoe bit the inside of her cheek to keep from wincing. ‘I told you, you don’t need to pretend with me.’ She dropped her voice to a whisper that still managed to carry to seemingly every corner of the room. ‘Is it just too, too awful? Is that why you came to New York? To get away from all the gossip, the whispers and stares?’ Holly made a moue, the expression of sympathy so patently false it made Zoe’s skin crawl.
‘I’m fine, Holly,’ she managed to say, but her voice sounded wooden. It had been three weeks since the Charity Ball, but this was the first person who had dared to openly confront her about the tabloid’s story in all that time, the first person whose scorn and relish she had to face, and of course it had to be Holly Mabberly. Yet it hardly mattered; there were dozens of Holly Mabberlys in the world, in her life, people who would act just the same as she was, disguising scorn with sympathy. She shook Holly’s arm off, giving her an icy smile. ‘So sorry to disappoint you, as I’m sure you’d prefer me in floods of tears, but really, I’m fine.’
Holly just shook her head. ‘Oh, darling, you don’t need to take it out on me.’ This was said with the perfect combination of reproach and pity that had Zoe swallowing a molten lump of fury. Holly patted her cheek. ‘I can only imagine how utterly difficult it must be. You can hardly hold your head up in England any more, can you? Not amongst anyone who matters anyway.’ Holly clucked her tongue, and this time her voice carried all too well. ‘It’s too, too sad. I suppose blood will out, though, won’t it?’
To her horror Zoe found her eyes suddenly filling with tears. Stupid. Holly’s remarks were childish and aimed to wound; how could she let them? And how could she cry here? She wanted to hold her head high and proud, as Oscar had said. She did. She just wasn’t sure she could. She wasn’t strong, no matter what he thought.
She could not, would not, cry now, not in front of Holly Mabberly, who would gloat and tell every soul and socialite from here to Paris, not in a room full of strangers who suddenly seemed no more than a gang of nosy eavesdroppers. Not here. Please, not here. She hadn’t cried since she’d learned the news; she’d kept it together, her composure all too fragile but still intact. Why on earth would she break down in the middle of a party?
She’d been having fun, for heaven’s sake.
‘Oh, Zoe…’ Holly murmured, reaching out again, but Zoe avoided her grasping claw and took a stumbling step backwards.
‘Leave me alone, Holly. Just leave me alone.’