Chapter 21
The leopard-print minidress doesn’t quite fit, but in a way that Nick finds slutty and sexy and which means it ends up taking Olivia an hour and a half to get ready for Lily’s party, as opposed to the usual rushed twenty minutes.
She’s waited aeons for her husband to give her an orgasm, and now she is averaging one a day – two, if Peter is particularly insistent about doing the washing-up, thus giving her and Nick more time alone – she isn’t going to let anything get in the way of her coming.
‘I think we should have a break, just the two of us.’ Olivia is still sitting on top of Nick, straddling him after a two-orgasm extravaganza. ‘I’ve been looking at places for a cheeky weekend, maybe after I’ve got this bloody centenary celebration out of the way.’
‘I’m very impressed with how you’ve handled this career curveball, I have to say.’
Olivia feels a momentary sinking in her stomach, as she checks her phone and sees that Rose still hasn’t replied to her email.
She throws it back on to the bedside table and looks at Nick, who is gazing adoringly at her with puppy-dog brown eyes in a way she’d almost entirely forgotten about.
She rolls off her husband and falls flat on her back next to him in the bed, noticing that all that takeaway food and all those cinnamon buns are definitely making her boobs bigger.
‘In fact,’ says Nick, also admiring his wife, ‘everything about you right now is impressing me. You’re like Olivia Greenwood, but on steroids.’
‘Maybe that’s what happens when we get older.
’ Olivia shrugs. She gets up and starts re-dressing, completely unbothered by the fact she stinks of sex.
‘We spend the first forty years of our life trying to be someone else, and the next forty trying to be ourselves. And if we’re lucky the people we’ve married still fancy us rotten. ’
‘Well, you can count me in for that weekend away, that’s for sure.’ Nick jumps out of bed, pads to the non-suite and even closes the door.
Olivia stares in the mirror, trying to ignore Saskia’s panicked calls from downstairs that they are going to be late.
‘It’s OK, darling, we’ll be there with plenty of time to spare,’ she shouts out the door, before returning to her reflection.
The invitation said 7.30 p.m. drinks for 8.
30 p.m. dinner, which everyone knows means ‘turn up somewhere around 8’, and as it’s only a half-hour drive away, they’re still on track to be ever-so-slightly early.
Anyway, Olivia is no longer marching to the beat of her mother’s annoyingly insistent drum.
Everything feels a bit quieter in Olivia’s head at the moment.
It’s like someone has turned the volume dial down on the chorus of demands she was constantly alert to – demands she made of herself too.
How many steps she needed to do, how many calories she needed to stick to, how much protein she could eat in a day.
She stands in front of the mirror. Though the anorexia is now in the past, Olivia’s still spent her whole life gripped by its echo, so attuned to the less extreme but nevertheless disordered eating habits that society has somehow passed off as normal.
She’s deprived herself of cream and cheese and carbohydrates and all of the other very best things on the planet, ‘treating’ herself instead to tasteless alternatives with half the calories and not even a quarter of the fun.
It’s like a metaphor for her own character transformation over the last couple of weeks: having spent most of her life carefully extracting all the most delicious bits of herself so she could be a low-calorie version of Olivia Greenwood, she is now existing in all her scrumptious full-fat glory.
The extra pounds she has gained recently have hardly hindered her sex life, more like they’ve done wonders for it.
She feels like some sensual Rubenesque portrait, whereas previously she was simply existing like Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
Then there’s the effect it has had on her complexion.
She leans in closer to the mirror. She’s stopped slavishly lathering extra-strength retinol all over her face each night, and yet she appears ten years younger.
The added weight is plumping out not just her bosoms but the emerging wrinkles on her face that are beginning to sneak in now that her next botox top-up is due.
She glows with the joy of mozzarella sticks, the potential of prawn crackers.
And this feels like one of the greatest revelations of all – realizing that she can take pleasure in food, and herself, all at the same time.
That the two are inseparable, even, one absolutely impossible without the other.
‘Why does nobody tell you that it’s OK to take up space?’ she whispers to her reflection, smoothing down the leopard-print minidress as she speaks. ‘Why do we willingly go out of our way to make ourselves smaller?’
Nick returns from the non-suite, pats her on the bum, and dresses quickly in an old suit from his PR days, which is slightly too roomy from all the CrossFit.
She watches him as he loops his tie, puts on cufflinks, thinks how proud she is that he had the guts to leave that world and do something meaningful, something worthwhile.
She wonders what she would have done with her life, if she hadn’t been chasing a career she thought would impress everyone else.
Sure, she had enjoyed those days of university journalism, but real-world journalism had quickly proved to be completely different, and yet she’d still stuck it out this long, waiting for someone to let her know she was really good at it.
She wonders, now, why she’d allowed other people’s validation to mean so much more than her own.
How much further she might have gone if she’d actually allowed herself to believe that she was really good at journalism, and refused to take all the bollocks that had been handed to her by tossers like Stephen.
Maybe, by now, she’d be one of those tossers like Stephen.
Her mind wanders to all the alternative worlds out there, where she didn’t study herself into sickness so she could get to a top university and then on to the graduate scheme of a newspaper where she now works as a glorified party planner.
Might she have run away and joined the circus?
Travelled the world like a bum, finding herself, in the style of Lily?
She’s never had the time to stop and think about this, never really considered the possibility that she could also make a change and spend her life doing something she wanted to do.
What a danger women would be, if they were all given the time and the space to learn about themselves.
If they were left to do as they pleased, and allowed to make mistakes with the same wild abandon as their male counterparts.
Some of them would undoubtedly take over the world, though there would be plenty of others who might simply decide to lie down and wank all day, just as men did.
Olivia is beginning to suspect she might fall into the latter category, although that could just be the years and years of sexual suppression rising up and spilling out into the world.
Maybe it would eventually calm down, and then she could go on to run the United Nations.
Or maybe she’d realize she wasn’t built of super-ambition, resilience and steel, and be OK with that, choosing instead to do something that mattered to her.
Whatever the case, it would be nice to find out, wouldn’t it?
She snaps out of her reverie, runs her fingers through her hair in lieu of properly brushing it, and then makes her way downstairs, where Nick greets her with a whistle.
Everyone is assembled in the hall in their smartest clothing – everyone except Jack, who is in a Man City kit, teamed not-so-neatly with his Crocs.
‘Won’t you be cold in that?’ asks Nick, staring at his son’s sandals.
‘Oh for god’s sake,’ Olivia laughs, chucking on some eyeliner in the hallway mirror, admiring the post-sex glow that is infusing her cheeks in lieu of blusher. ‘If you’re worried about anyone being cold it should be me, in this incredibly slutty dress.’
‘You shouldn’t use the word “slutty”, Mum, it’s not exactly empowering, even if you are being sarcastic.’ Saskia is in head-to-toe black, doing a good impression of Wednesday Addams.
‘I’m not in my sarcastic era any more, Saskia.
I’m in my “say the first thing that comes into my head” era.
Anyway, do you like it?’ She does a twirl.
‘The leopard-print minidress, that is? You know, I’ve realized that it’s not older women in miniskirts that anybody needs to worry about.
It’s us standing here, owning our own majesty! ’
‘Oh my god, Mum, are you having a hot flush or something?’ Saskia cringes into her sleeve.
‘I’m just doing my job and embarrassing you, sweetheart. Promise I’ll try and snap out of it when we finally meet Lady Muck’s new boyfriend.’
Jack scrunches his nose up. ‘Who?’
‘Clive, your grandmother’s new fancy man, who we are all going to bitch about afterwards to make Grandad feel better.’
Peter doffs an imaginary cap at his daughter, a far-off look in his eyes. They pile out of the door and into the car, where Olivia tries to ignore the smell of booze emanating from her father in the back.
He’s his own person. She isn’t responsible for him.
And as she prepares to see her mother for the first time in months, she wishes that she, too, had downed some vodka.
To extinguish the nerves that sit somewhere deep beneath her leopard-print minidress.
To get rid of the ominous feeling that weighs so heavily on her.
To dilute the worry chewing away at her.
To feel certain that she won’t return to her old, people-pleasing ways.