To My Best Friends

She wasn’t due at Nicci’s house until seven – it would always be Nicci’s house to her – but the way the traffic dragged, one car crawling through the lights at a time, there was barely any point going home at all. Only she’d promised Si she’d put in an appearance because it was Wednesday, his night to have Sam and Tom. Si’s sons from his first marriage stayed every Wednesday night, every other weekend and exactly half of all school holidays. That was the deal.

Supper wasn’t an issue. Wednesday night was pizza night. The same order every week: chicken dippers, followed by medium, stuffed-crust pizzas with some unimaginably disgusting meat combo on top, and brownies and a tub of Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food to finish. Cardiac arrest delivered on the back of a motorbike. Jo had long since stopped trying to force vegetables down the boys, although Si had taught her all his little tricks for concealing them. Domino’s could set their clock by Sam and Tom’s order. It didn’t thrill their mother, but that was Si’s battle. Jo had learnt that over the years. All Jo knew was carbs oiled the wheels of domestic harmony. Plus pizza straight out of the box seriously reduced the washing-up.

At what point did it become better not to show at all than to sprint in, wave to the boys and sprint out again? If she dropped home now, she would be late to Nicci’s, and Jo had been the one who promised David they’d sit Charlie and Harrie, get them to bed, so he could have a night out without worrying.

It was hardly a night off if the sitters turned up half an hour late. Mind you, it was hardly a night off if you suspected one of the sitters had been left joint custody of your children.

Too late Jo noticed the news had finished and been replaced by one of those annoying comedy news programmes. Flicking through the channels, she found something classical she didn’t recognise on Radio Three and something dance-y she didn’t recognise on Radio One. She turned off the radio and groaned into the silence. When had she got so old?

But the silence was worse. It let her thoughts crowd back in.

Capsule Wardrobe was Nicci. That fact had smacked Jo in the face in the few short weeks since Nicci’s death. In every meeting, phone call and email, all Jo could see was Nicci’s absence. It showed in the eyes of the loyal customers; in the pity of the suppliers tiptoeing around her, in their concern.

Oh, the company couldn’t run without Jo, there was no question of that. Jo was the organiser, the administrator, the accountant. She was the person who kept the show on the road, day in, day out. But it was Nicci’s innate sense of style that made Capsule Wardrobe what it was. Jo didn’t begin to know how to keep it going without her. And yet she had to keep telling the others it was going to be all right. The internet business was thriving. The name was strong, their reputation excellent, these things would live on.

Kelly, Nicci’s right-hand woman, was trying – trying really hard – to fill Nicci’s shoes. Sitting up late into the night on her laptop, scouring the ready-to-wear shows look by look, noting the key pieces she thought would work for Capsule Wardrobe’s loyal core of customers. Items that nodded to the new season’s trends but would last far longer than that, making their three- or even four-figure price tag vaguely justifiable, cost per wear. Kelly was there each morning, hovering in Jo’s doorway like a puppy desperate to be stroked. Wanting praise for her list of looks, her trend notes, her buying suggestions. And every morning Jo praised her, and saw relief soften Kelly’s face. But the truth was, Jo wasn’t convinced.

She couldn’t put her finger on the problem. She certainly didn’t know how to solve it. But despite Kelly’s enthusiasm and hard work, she just didn’t have Nicci’s taste; Nicci’s ability to sling on a moth-eaten leopard-print coat, belt it tight, and look like Liz Taylor in her golden years, not Bet Lynch in her Rovers years.

Kelly just didn’t have it. Worse, Jo was pretty sure she couldn’t learn it.

When Nicci was there, Kelly could take her cues from her, but Nicci wasn’t there now, was she?

And then there were Si and the boys, and the attention they deserved, but that she knew they hadn’t been getting from her lately. Not since it became clear how ill Nicci was.

And then there were Charlie and Harrie.

Nicci had meant well, Jo was convinced of that. Until the cancer took hold, Nicci had watched helplessly her friend’s growing anguish as first one, then two, then three attempts at IVF failed. And now . . . what? Who knew? Not Jo, and not Si. They’d both steered well clear of the subject since Nicci’s cancer was declared terminal.

Jo adored her goddaughters, but seriously . . . ?

Behind her some jerk leant on his horn. Lifting her head, she saw the four-by-four in front had rolled forward a few feet, leaving a patch of rain-darkened tarmac. There were still four cars between her and the red lights. Big whoop. What difference did it make if she moved now or in five minutes?

In her rear-view mirror, the middle-aged guy in his BMW made a show of drumming his hands impatiently on the steering wheel. It was too dark to see clearly, but she just knew that his expression screamed ‘women drivers’.

Tosser, she thought as she eased her foot off the brake to allow her Golf to close the gap between it and the car in front.

Charlie and Harrie . . . Three weeks had passed and still Jo hadn’t said a word to Si, let alone David. She didn’t know where to start, with either of them.

Si was a good guy. A keeper, Nicci called him. The kind of guy who knew what to do on a long, empty Sunday. Hardworking, reliable and unfailingly kind. Still sexy at forty-five, twice-weekly swimming sessions ensuring his body was firm. Plus, he still had his own hair, and lots of it. She loved him, baggage and all.

He knew there was something going on. ‘What’s wrong?’ he’d asked, a couple of nights ago after they’d made exhausted love, when the lights were out and she hoped he’d fallen asleep. She let him think it was work; that she was worried about what would happen to Capsule Wardrobe. That was true, as far as it went. All their savings were in the company: big money, by their standards. And no pension. Capsule Wardrobe was her pension. But that wasn’t all. Far from it. The IVF had gone on a backburner when Nicci became sick, but now she was dead there was no excuse not to get back on the wagon. Or not. Three strikes, they’d promised themselves. Three strikes and then they’d stop. But neither of them had expected it to come to that. Not really.

And then there was the other madness. The Mona and David thing.

What the hell had Nicci been thinking?

In her darker moments, when Jo woke at three or four or five and couldn’t get back to sleep, she wondered whether Nicci had been thinking at all; whether the cancer and chemo . . . but no, that was too hideous to consider. And yet, even for Nicci – and Jo had a high tolerance for Nicci’s plots, seeing them as endearingly hare-brained rather than Machiavellian – this whole letter thing was extreme.

The traffic lights changed and the Golf rolled forward. Beyond the lights a comparatively empty road beckoned. One more car and she was on her way.

If she were honest, Jo was dreading this evening. Not just because she hadn’t seen David to talk to since the funeral, but also because the idea of sorting through Nicci’s clothes felt wrong. The mere thought of it made Jo feel like an intruder. It was so . . . final. If Nicci was letting them touch her clothes there was no escaping it. She was gone.

The first time she’d read Nicci’s letter Jo hadn’t noticed the P.S. tacked on the end. The enormity of the rest of the letter had overshadowed it. But then David called and asked her when she wanted to start dealing with Nicci’s clothes, and it dawned on her – not that if he knew about the clothes, he might know about everything else too – but that every item, and there were thousands, had to be sorted into one of three lots.

CHUCK: Far from being junk, these were the valuable but dispensable pieces – and there were plenty – that should be sold to raise money for the girls’ futures.

CHERISH: The pieces with sentimental value to be kept for the girls as a kind of wearable memory box.

CHARITY: Where the rest went. Nicci, being Nicci, had specified charities: Oxfam, the NSPCC, Macmillan Cancer Support, Refuge, Safe Shelter; those specialising in children and cancer, mainly. Although Jo had been surprised by the inclusion of Refuge, and had never even heard of the last.

Well, now that task was upon her and there was nothing for it but to gather her strength and face it.

Chapter Six

‘Not early, am I?’ Lizzie asked. The confusion on David’s face when he opened the front door made her wonder if she had the wrong time, or even the wrong day. Instinctively, she glanced at her watch: ten past seven. That was Lizzie, always early or late. Try as she might, she could never just be on time.

Usually she would have thrown her arms around him, hugged him hello. But since letter-gate it felt wrong. Instead, she stood on tiptoe to peck his cheek and stepped back when he took a second too long to respond.

‘No,’ David said, eventually. ‘You’re not.’

He looked, if anything, worse than the last time she had seen him. His usually pink skin was sallow, the bags under his eyes tinged with grey. ‘It’s just . . . I was expecting Jo first.’

‘She isn’t here yet?’

Before he could answer, a shriek came from the far end of the house, followed by a crash and a wail.

David glanced over his shoulder. ‘I better go and see . . . Come in.’

Before Lizzie had a chance to ask how he was coping, David had vanished into the kitchen. Not that she needed to ask. One look told her he wasn’t.

‘Why don’t I take over?’ she offered when she reached the kitchen, and the full chaos Harrie and Charlie had wrought on their bedtime milk and cookies became clear. Crumbs and puddles splattered the oak table. The solid wood worktops were thick with dirty dishes, open cereal packets and the debris of an earlier meal – or two. And the toddlers were hardly to blame for that.

Lizzie headed purposefully towards the sink. ‘I’ll start on this while I wait for Jo,’ she said. Anything was better than this awkward hovering.

David made to protest but Lizzie waved him away. ‘I thought you were going out,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you get off and let me sort this?’

David hesitated. ‘I was . . . am . . . it’s just . . .’

Still he loitered. Surely he wasn’t planning to stay home after all?

‘Off you go then,’ Lizzie said, channelling her mother in the days when her mother could still strike the fear of God into cold callers, and hoping he couldn’t hear the panic in her voice. This evening was going to be hard enough without David here. ‘The reinforcements have arrived.’

At least one-third of the reinforcements was lurking around the corner, sheltering from the rain.

‘Hurry up,’ Mona muttered, adjusting her inadequate umbrella so the drips stopped soaking her back and spattered her boots and jeans instead. It was only five minutes since she’d seen Lizzie park and go inside. But, thanks to the cold and the wet, it felt far longer.

Through the downpour she stared at the solid Victorian end terrace and felt a familiar sense of isolation. Nicci and David had bought the house as part of a probate deal eight years earlier, soon after Mona returned from Australia. ‘In need of modernisation,’ the estate agent had said. Understatement of the year. ‘Buy it while it’s still standing,’ Mona had muttered the first time the proud new owners showed their friends around. That was before the builders and plumbers and electricians had transformed it into the twenty-first-century family home of Nicci’s dreams.

Mona had spent endless Sundays and bank holidays there in the intervening years, but still she felt like an outsider. It was entirely her own fault, she knew. Nicci, Lizzie and Jo had been such a tight-knit group when she’d answered their ad for a fourth person to share their student house that she’d never felt totally part of it. She hadn’t helped herself, of course, by heading off to satisfy her wanderlust as soon as graduation forced everyone to decide how they were going to live their lives. It was in Australia, as far away from home as possible, she hoped to find the person she wanted to be.

Instead she found heartbreak. Although it hadn’t looked that way at first.

Temping by day, Mona learnt yoga by night, which was where she met Callie, the instructor. And through Callie, her brother, Greg. Tall, blond, oozing confidence. As unreconstructed as it was possible to be. One look and, for the first time, Mona fell in love and lust so hard she barely caught her breath. Pregnancy and marriage, in that order, took her by surprise, followed, almost as rapidly, by rumours of Greg’s ‘hook-ups’. At first, she refused to believe the man she loved would do that to her; at second, she turned a blind eye for the sake of their baby boy.

Until he left her.

He. Left. Her. For a blonde waitress called Justine. Just one of many things she omitted to tell Nicci and Jo and Lizzie. Instead, she returned to London, aged twenty-eight, and with nothing to show for her travels but a newfound passion for yoga and a wide-eyed five-year-old boy with a Star Wars rucksack, who looked nothing like her and everything like the man the memory of whom she was running away from.

Glancing irritably at her watch, Mona stamped her feet against the damp, spraying water on to her jeans. Seven twenty – what the hell were they doing in there? And, come to that, where was Jo?

The rain had slowed, but by now the bottom half of her jeans were soaked. Mona knew she should just go in, face David, get it over with. But she couldn’t make herself. Just as she hadn’t been able to make herself tell Nicci about Neil. Though there were many times she’d wanted to.

Neil Osborne. If she’d felt distanced from her friends before, it was Neil who sealed her alienation.

‘Because Sunday afternoons were family time, which, for Mona and Dan, meant long lazy roast lunches around Nicci’s big oak table. And for Mona Thomas’s lover meant roasts at home. With his wife, Tracy (although Mona did her best not to give the woman a name, just as she didn’t want to see her face). Tracy, she forced herself to think, and his three teenage daughters.

So it was always just Mona and Dan. Mona’s lover was never there to top up her glass or squeeze her knee under the table at some private joke; never there to kick a ball around David’s back garden or talk sport in the kitchen.

But then, to be fair, Neil had never been invited.

It wasn’t that Nicci and David excluded him, more that they didn’t know he existed. None of them did.

They knew he had existed. To begin with, they’d even managed sisterly empathy. ‘He wants to have his cake and eat you,’ Jo said, thrilled at her own witticism. Mona had just confessed she’d fallen for a married man, with all the usual qualifications: I didn’t know to begin with . . . She doesn’t understand him . . . He’s not happy . . . They’re only together for the sake of the children . . .

‘Mona,’ Nicci said, as Jo and Lizzie rolled their eyes.

And they all chorused their favourite line from their all-time favourite movie, ‘He’s never going to leave her.’

Mona’s mouth had twisted as it always did when she was a little bit hurt, a little bit guilty, but didn’t want to show it.

‘You’re right,’ she said, forcing a smile and channelling Carrie Fisher as she knew she was required to do. ‘You’re right. You’re right. I know you’re right.’

But that was three years ago. More. What they didn’t know was that he was still around. They thought Mona had dumped him because that was what she’d told them. It wasn’t a lie, exactly; more a lie of omission. She’d intended to end it, putting it off each time she saw him, but then, out of the blue, he dumped her, and to her surprise and horror she’d thought her heart was going to shatter all over again.

In the end, it was easier to let the others think she’d been the one to do the dumping. And when they’d been so pleased they cracked open a bottle of Nicci’s favourite pink Laurent Perrier to celebrate, Mona knew she’d been right. Better by far than telling the truth, which was that she’d do anything – anything at all – to have him back.

Despite the fact she’d been on the receiving end of a cheating husband herself, and knew precisely how it felt to be left.

So when Neil turned up at the fashionable organic restaurant where she was manager, claiming he couldn’t live without her – literally, that was what he’d said: ‘Mona, I can’t live without you’ – well, Mona just ‘forgot’ to mention it the next time she saw her friends. And the next time, and the next. And because there’d always been a part of herself she’d kept private, the deception hadn’t even felt that unnatural. And then it felt too late, like she’d missed her chance to tell them the truth. And now . . . well, now she had.

The sound of an engine igniting brought Mona to, just in time to step back into the shadow of a six-foot garden wall as David’s people carrier appeared, indicated and turned in the opposite direction. Nearly seven thirty. And still no Jo. Lizzie was going to be livid.

Chapter Seven

‘Where the hell have you been?’ Lizzie had barely opened the front door before she started in on Mona. ‘It’s nearly half-past!’

‘You want the honest answer?’ Shaking the rain from her umbrella, Mona leant it against the wall of the porch.

‘Would I like it?’

‘Doubt it,’ Mona said.

‘Then forget it.’ Turning her back on her friend, Lizzie marched back to the kitchen. Charlie and Harrie were charging around in increasingly small circles, but they were now washed and wearing pyjamas. The kitchen table still looked like a battle in a biscuit factory, but the washing-up was done and the wood worktops were, at least, visible.

‘I was hiding round the corner like the pathetic coward I am,’ Mona said, pointing to the drenched lower half of her jeans, ‘waiting for David to leave. I just didn’t bank on a monsoon.’

‘Shhhh.’ Lizzie’s gaze flicked towards two pairs of small but flapping ears. ‘You could have texted me; at least waited somewhere dry. I’d have let you know when the coast was clear.’

‘Where’s Jo?’ asked Mona, hanging her damp jacket over the back of one of the mismatched kitchen chairs.

‘Stuck in traffic, she said. And she had to nip home. Should be here any minute.’

‘Probably avoiding you know who too,’ Mona concluded, turning her attention to the tiny hands now clinging to her wet legs. ‘Hello, my lovelies.’ Sweeping Charlie and Harrie up, one under each arm, she spun them around until their squeals pierced Lizzie’s ears.

‘When did you get so big?’ Mona groaned, setting them down with a kiss each.

‘Again!’ Harrie insisted.

‘Don’t. You’ll make them si—’

‘Just one,’ said Mona, spinning on the spot.

‘Mo . . .’ Lizzie protested.

‘Shouldn’t you two monsters be in bed?’ Mona asked when she’d stopped.

‘Nooo!’ Harrie shrieked.

‘No bed!’ That was Charlie. ‘Auntie Lizzie say no bed.’

‘That doesn’t sound like Auntie Lizzie to me.’ Mona raised an eyebrow.

‘Did!’

‘It’s true.’ Lizzie waved an open bottle of Sauvignon Blanc at Mona.

‘Just a small one.’

Lizzie raised her eyebrows. ‘No small glasses in this house.’

‘As it comes then.’

‘We agreed, remember? It’s for them, after all. They should be there for the ceremonial opening of the wardrobe.’

‘Wardrobe!’ Harrie and Charlie shrieked, running around the kitchen again. ‘Wardrobe!’

‘Do you feel weird?’ Mona asked half an hour later when they had transferred to the large bedroom that took up the entire front half of the first floor, where Nicci had spent most of the last six months of her life, when she hadn’t been in hospital.

‘Not weird, exactly,’ Lizzie lowered her voice. ‘Just, you know, empty. Like a piece is missing.’

‘I do, really weird.’

‘Well, you would, wouldn’t you?’ Jo said, walking in with a bottle of pink Laurent Perrier and three fresh glasses. She set the glasses on the bedside table, slit the foil and began unfurling the wire.

‘Why me more than anyone else?’

Jo smiled grimly, although she didn’t feel much like laughing. If a year ago someone had told her they’d be standing here, the three of them . . . Three . . . She shook herself.

‘Pot-kettle,’ Mona said. ‘And anyway, isn’t it about time you mentioned your little bequest?’

‘Stop it, you two,’ Lizzie said. ‘Little ears.’

But the little ears were shut. Their owners fast asleep, curled up, their dark blond heads like inverted commas on the pillows of David’s bed. Thumbs firmly in place.

‘Anyway, I didn’t mean that,’ Mona replied, prowling the room, unable to settle. ‘I meant this whole scenario. Last time we were here . . .’

Nobody needed to say it. The last time was the night before Nicci was moved to the hospice. The night she said her real goodbyes.

Easing the cork from the champagne as silently as possible, Jo poured three glasses and handed one each to Mona and Lizzie. ‘I thought we should do this properly . . . for Nicci and for the girls,’ she said. ‘But I think we’ve already lost our audience. I’m sorry I missed them awake. How did they seem?’

‘OK. A bit hyper. But I guess that’s better than the alternative. Better than David, anyway.’ Lizzie stared pointedly at Mona, but her friend was making a show of rearranging the large cardboard boxes lined up along the bedroom wall. Each had a scribbled yellow Post-it note attached: the first ‘Chuck’, the second ‘Cherish’, the third ‘Charity’.

‘Do you want to do the honours?’ Lizzie pointed to the mirrored double doors that led to the walk-in wardrobe.

‘No, it’s OK,’ Jo said.

‘I’m not doing it,’ Mona put in, too hastily. ‘It’s all yours.’

Anyone would have thought they were opening a long-sealed family crypt, not the spot-lit inner sanctum that housed Nicci’s fashion collection, Lizzie thought.

She sighed, but she didn’t move. She didn’t want to do it. Didn’t see why she should. It wasn’t as if she was Number One Friend, anyway. That was Jo’s domain. But Lizzie had always been the tidier-upper, the smoother-over, the peace-maker. Where Nicci had been the leader, forging ahead with plans and ideas, Lizzie had always trailed at the back, shutting doors behind them, unable to come up with a good reason not to be the one to clean up after the others. She even helped mop up the trail of emotional devastation a much younger Nicci had left in her wake.

‘Looks like it’s down to me then,’ Jo said. Positioning herself by the double doors, her right hand on the handle, she lifted her glass stiffly. ‘To Nicci,’ she said, raising it higher and pulling the door open.

‘To Nicci,’ Lizzie and Mona echoed.

Ceiling-set spots had come on automatically as the doors opened, lighting the eight-by-twelve room lined with rails, one row of full height on the right, two of half height on the left. A wall of drawers faced them, and a double row of shoe shelves skirted the room from floor level. More shelves piled high with bags and hatboxes lined the top. There, any suggestion of order stopped. The room was stuffed.

‘I had no idea it was such a mess!’ Lizzie gasped. ‘I was expecting, you know, neat colour-coded piles. The law of the wardrobe, copyright Nicci Morrison.’

‘Are you telling me,’ said Mona slowly, ‘that when it came to her own clothes the queen of clean was the world’s biggest hoarder?’

Jo shrugged. ‘Looks that way.’

‘How the hell did she collect so many?’

‘It was her life’s work,’ Jo said, ‘her passion. You know that. Her job and her hobby. Some people collect books or works of art, Nicci collected clothes. This isn’t even the whole lot. David says there are about eight suitcases in the attic, maybe more. He reckons there’s nothing of value in them; Nicci was too worried about moths and damp for that. We should have a quick sort through just to be sure. But I reckon those can go straight to the charity shop.’