In Bed With Lord Byron

like an unwashed tramp. And yet for all my embarrassment, it was wonderful to see him. Liquid sunshine poured through
my body, sparkling in my cells. I noticed that he was wearing my cravat; it was tucked almost surreptitiously under his collar, but a little bit peeked out.
    ‘I just thought it would be nice to invite Lucy over for a girlie evening,’ said Kerry.
    ‘Oh, wow, this is perfect timing,’ Anthony cried. ‘Have you given her the tickets?’
    ‘No, not yet – I mean, I kind of forgot,’ said Kerry, looking shifty again.
    What on earth were they talking about? Anthony looked at me, and then at her.
    ‘You haven’t told her yet, have you?’
    ‘What?’ I cried. ‘What’s up?’ I laughed in bewilderment.
    Anthony removed an envelope from the mantelpiece. A funny look came over his face.
    ‘First of all, we’ve got a present for you,’ he began, but Kerry cut in, taking the envelope from him.
    ‘Lucy, we’d like you to have this.’
    She passed it over. Frowning, I opened it up. It was an airline ticket. Heathrow to JFK. I looked up in a daze.
    ‘We thought it would be a nice treat for you,’ said Anthony.
    ‘I mean, we know you need cheering up after what happened with Brian,’ Kerry added.
    ‘Thanks.’ I was stunned. My confusion thickened to a fog. I had clearly missed a crucial element in the script here, turned over two pages without realising. Why on earth were they
paying for me to go and gatecrash their lovers’ trip in the US? Why? Did they want to generate some sort of love triangle?
    Then I looked up. Kerry was standing beside Anthony and they were clutching hands tightly, exchanging nervous smiles.
    ‘There’s a reason why we’d like you to come to the States,’ said Kerry.
    Surely not?
    I stared at the silent TV, unable to cope with reality, with the present. I watched Byron waltzing Germaine across a sofa.
    ‘Lucy . . .’
    I raised my eyes unwillingly.
    ‘We’re engaged!’
    ‘The wedding’s in the US next month . . .’
    ‘So we’d love you to come!’
    ‘In fact,’ said Kerry, coming over and putting her arm around me, ‘I want you to be my maid of honour!’

Chapter Eight
    Kerry
    I am to be married, and am of course in all the misery of a man in pursuit of happiness.
    L ORD B YRON

i) To America

    The invitation sat on the mantelpiece, beneath the curling petals of a vase of roses. I did my best to ignore it, but its cordial italics seemed to keep leaping out and crying
    ‘Look, look!’ every time I strolled past it, or sat down to watch TV, or read, or lifted my purring cat on to my lap, until it felt as though the card was no longer nine inches but
    thirty feet, crowding out everything else in the room, impossible to evade.
    Two weeks later, I found myself on a plane to New York, my head still spinning in shock.
    Engaged, I kept thinking.
Engaged.
En-gaged.
    To be honest, if I really pushed aside my jealousy, if I really stepped back in detachment, I didn’t know what to make of Kerry. My mind wanted to be black and white, to decide either way,
to throw her into a box marked ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or ‘nice girl’ or ‘bitch’. But in truth she was an odd mix. One minute she’d seemed so
wonderfully warm, the next incredibly manipulative.
    That night, the night Kerry and Anthony had announced their engagement, kept spinning round and round in a repetitive loop. The more I analysed it, the more I felt confused. If Anthony
hadn’t come back, would Kerry ever have told me about those tickets? Or would she have lied to him, claimed I’d rejected them, or refused to come round? Would I still be sitting here
now, trying to scrape the fare together? There was no doubt in my mind that Kerry might be nice, but honesty wasn’t her strong point. She was manipulative and she had a tendency to play
games; it made me wonder what other webs she might spinning, what else she had told Anthony about me.
    And then there had been our conversation about what Kerry liked in bed. The animalistic variety. She ached for Casanova. So was she really happy to be engaged to Anthony? Still, the whole
going-to-bed game was fantastical rather than revelatory, I thought glumly. Maybe Kerry was way ahead of me: wise enough to know that in reality you couldn’t marry perfection, or all of your
fantasises rolled into one ball; that you had to settle for sensible second-best.
    And what about Anthony? Did he really like her? I couldn’t help wondering if he really