Читать книгу Nothing to Wear and Nowhere to Hide: A Collection of Short Stories - Fay Weldon - Страница 10

I’m a summer person, and she’s a winter person. Her name is Jennifer, mine is Kate. She’s twenty-five and I’m twenty-four. She used to be my best friend. Now she’s my father’s girlfriend, and soon he’ll marry her, once he’s divorced my mother. Then she’ll be my stepmother. We’re all good friends. These things have to be done amicably, for the sake of the children: that is to say me. My mother and I are in therapy, and dealing with our negative emotions very well, but the other two don’t seem to need it.

Jennifer and I were at college together. We’ve known each other since we were fifteen. Now we both work at the same travel magazine, going all over the world trying out holiday destinations for our readers, which is a pretty terrific kind of job. We earn well and travel well, and we’re both ambitious: I even got promotion to deputy editor recently, and Jennifer was happy for me, or seemed to be. She is, was, my best friend.

When I say she’s a winter person I mean she’s very fair and delicate-skinned, and burns easily, and likes to stay out of the sun. If she’s in it too much she goes red in the face and sweats. She’s the Iceland expert at the magazine. She goes for the cold destinations whenever she can: mountains and glaciers: I go for the hot places, lying around on beaches. If a mosquito bites her neck her whole face swells up, and her eyes go tiny, red and puffy so she can hardly see out of them. She gets hay fever and sneezes a lot in the pollen season, and has to dose herself with so much histamine she hardly makes sense when she talks.

But she looks fantastic at a Christmas party, her skin pale and almost translucent, her eyes big and haunted, and the blonde bob fragrant and silky, and wearing cashmere so pale pink it’s almost white. Wrap her in a winter coat and she looks sexy and vulnerable.

Me, I bloom in the summer. I have an olive skin and tan easily and love lying in the sun. I am at home on a beach and have a bikini figure—long-waisted and athletic. My hair is very thick and curly, and at its best looking as if it’s just been dunked in the washbasin and left to dry in a hot wind, as befits Nature Girl. I shiver all winter and get goose-pimply, eat too much chocolate and get spots, and put me in a winter coat and I look like a sausage wrapped round the middle with a piece of string. I like high heels, but they’re not good on ice.