The Best of Friends Alex Day (best short novels .TXT) 📖

the first time, I truly envy Charlotte being able to escape to Corsica on holiday, to get away from it all. Of course, the reality is that I know this is not what happens. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.

On top of everything else, memories of Charlie continue to assail me, beckoned by Naomi bringing to the cafe fragrant bundles of herbs reminiscent of the fateful trip I took to visit him during his year abroad, the first time I ever encountered fresh coriander, basil, and thyme. The pungent smells of those plants will forever evoke recollections of the Mediterranean and Marseille, of meals cooked by Charlie in the apartment he shared with four ultra-glamorous French girls who took it upon themselves to teach him as much about French cooking as they could. Any man’s dream, right? But I was so naïve and trusting that it never crossed my mind that Charlie would stray.

Even when I went over to visit him, I didn’t realise straight away. It was only when I saw that those vixens rarely left his side, that they constantly surrounded him with their Ah, oui’s and their Je ne sais pas’s that it dawned on me. One, in particular, was leech-like in her dependency on Charlie, always needing him to help her to translate something for her English degree or to show her how to make tea ‘ze Engleesh way’.

Her name was Josephine.

Charlie’s increasingly complex experimentation with haute cuisine needed a sous chef and I, evidently, was not up to the job. Josephine, of course, was. She was his ever-present acolyte, delivering his elaborate, herb-adorned dishes to the table with all the devotion of a religious ceremony. He pretended not to notice her adoration and when I brought it to his attention, he dismissed out of hand the very notion that she was making a play for him.

I abhorred her sexy accent, sexy pout, and sexy apparel. In the rising warmth of late April, she wore boob tubes and micro-mini skirts and ostentatiously washed her tiny, translucent underwear by hand in the kitchen sink, draping it alluringly over the Juliet balcony to dry where it was on full view to anyone in the sitting room. At a time when the only smalls England had to offer were of the sensible and practical Marks & Sparks variety, or polyester fripperies from a sex shop, the expensive but flimsy fabrics of her barely-there knickers and plunging bras were something truly exotic. And threatening. Those frith-froths of embroidery and lace were like bunting proudly proclaiming a celebration.

Or a victory.

I wanted to get away, to get out of the huge but claustrophobic apartment, far from all the fawning minions. I’d checked out a small hotel on the waterfront in Cassis; in the photos it looked charming, a whitewashed bedroom with muslin curtains that fluttered in the breeze, the window overlooking the picturesque cluster of pastel-hued buildings nestled around the harbour. A small beach nestled at the foot of high cliffs and, though the water would be too cold for swimming, sunbathing under a milky spring sun would be perfect for my English skin that hadn’t seen a ray since the previous August.

But Charlie vetoed the expedition on the grounds of expense, our lack of any mode of independent transport, and the fact that the weather forecast was bad.

‘What’s the point of spending all that money just to sit in the hotel room and watch the rain pour down?’ he asked plaintively, like a small child wondering why he has to go to school.

The three weeks of my stay seemed to pass so slowly. Charlie was out of sorts throughout, as if his displacement to another part of Europe made him mildly allergic to the presence of anything British. Namely, me.

But as soon as I left, I easily persuaded myself that it had all been nothing, just Charlie’s stress at having to integrate someone from one part of his life with people from another. He found transitions difficult, was always grumpy when going to sleep or waking up, just like babies often are. I clung to the fact that, once he came home, everything would be OK, everything would return to normal.

The Finchley Road flat was no more; I’d moved back into halls, not wanting to be there unless Charlie was and anyway, without us as a couple living in one room, I couldn’t really afford the rent. My heart was set on getting a flat together for our final year, just the two of us, where we could do what we liked when we liked. Walk around naked. Make love on the sofa or the kitchen table. Have a coffee table strewn with important and erudite books that we would actually read rather than just watch Ptolemy roll joints on. Hope for the future kept me going through that lonely year.

Those hopes were dashed in the cruellest, most heartless way.

I watch Naomi now, as she chops and dices and tastes, and wonder whether she really has designs on Dan. It’s more and more apparent to me that, even if she does, Naomi is not Charlotte’s main problem and neither, I don’t think, is Dan. She wants to hang onto him, of course she does. Women generally do, from habit if nothing else – though in Charlotte’s case, I imagine that it’s the lifestyle he offers her that plays the biggest part in her tenacity. What can she possibly see in handsome, charming, multi-millionaire Dan, I ask myself ironically.

That being said, the truth is that if Dan is going to walk off into the sunset with a trollop from his sports club, Charlotte might learn the hard way that there’s not much she’s going to be able to do to stop it. You can’t make someone love you; you can’t make them stay if they are determined to go. That’s just the way it is sometimes.

I picture Charlotte in Corsica now, imagine those long, dreamy, sun-filled days, the photos from