Cause Celeb by Helen Fielding Read Free Book Online Page B

about their sleep, but still I risked a little kiss on the cheek and snuggled up to him affectionately.
    â€œOh, for God’s sake, you’re behaving like a five-year-old,” he said, and turned his back on me.

    The lure of the bastard—I was a sucker for it. “Changeable women are more endurable than monotonous ones,” I read somewhere. “They are sometimes murdered but seldom deserted”—exactly the appeal of the male bastard. You know they’ll never tie you down or silt you up. It’s the excitement and absorption of pursuit: pitting yourself against their harsh nature, trying to turn it around. Even when I discovered what his nature really was I still thought I could transform Oliver. I thought he just needed a bit of love and care and he’d soon get the hang of things. I thought I could love him out of his character.
    My friend Rhoda, who was older than me and American, said that I was suffering from a dangerous addiction and shouldn’t touch someone like Oliver with a barge pole.
    â€œOK, so long as he can touch me with his barge pole,” I said giddily.
    Later she said that Africa was just another version of my masochistic bastard complex and I should stay in England, learn to love myself and go out with bores. But I said she’d been reading too many American self-help books, and should get a few drinks down her and lighten up.

CHAPTER
Five
    T he start of an affair can be a dodgy time for everyone: it’s like learning to water-ski—once you get up it’s fine but there’s far more chance of falling over and getting wet and cross than getting up. Picture the scene, three days after that night with Oliver. No phone call. Zilch. But being young and in awe of him, I failed to think the sensible thing, which was “What a rude man.” I wasn’t quite stupid enough to sit at home in the evenings and do psychopath eyes at the phone. But it would have been acting equally neurotically to leave the answerphone off. So I had the crisis of coming back to no message when I got home at the end of the evening. Or coming back to three messages, and finding two of them were from Rhoda, and the other was from Hermione, asking why, in heaven’s name, I hadn’t told her that Cassandra had left a message that afternoon saying Perpetua wasn’t coming to dinner.
    Finally on day four in the office, his call came, in a manner of speaking.
    It was an irritatingly kindly female voice.
    â€œHel lo, is that Rosie Richardson?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œHel- lo, Rosie. This is Oliver Marchant’s assistant, Gwen.”
    His assistant ? Why his assistant? Within seconds I was into an Oliver-in-hospital fantasy.
    â€œOliver was wondering if you were free tonight.”
    â€œYes.” There was a delicious, tempting rush in my stomach.
    â€œGood. He was wondering if you would like to come to the Broadcasting Society Awards at the Grosvenor House tonight.”
    â€œYes, that would be—”
    â€œSuper. Black tie six-thirty for seven. Oliver will pick you up at six-thirty. Could you let me have your address, Rosie?”
    This style of romantic follow-up to a sexual encounter is the kind of thing crushes allow you to put up with, which is why they are monstrous afflictions to be fled from like vengeful beasts.
    We were seated at a round table in a vast hotel ballroom. Above us, four gigantic chandeliers twinkled down on the mass of bare shoulders, sequins and cummerbunds, the TV lights, the giant screens, and the production staff scurrying round holding yellow scripts, looking self-important, verging on hysterical. The proceedings had not yet begun. Everything was already running late. Onstage a troupe of sparkling dancers were practicing, rushing at the audience doing starburst jumps, then turning and high-kicking off in the opposite direction, heads still turned towards us over their shoulders with air-hostess smiles.
    On my right