Honeycote Read Free Page A

skin-tight shorts that gave the creep even more idea of what he was missing but nothing to hide his hairy hand under.
    ‘That’s awful. Aren’t you upset?’ Sophie, who always found it very hard to hide what she was feeling, was intrigued by Mandy’s matter-of-fact manner. If Miss Cowper had just told her that her parents had split up, she’d be hysterical, she knew she would. She could feel tears welling up just imagining it. But Mandy merely shrugged and bit a Malteser in half neatly, surveying its honeycomb interior. She looked up at Sophie gravely with her baby-blue eyes. Sophie wondered if she dyed her eyelashes – they couldn’t be natural, surely.
    ‘With any luck she’ll bring me back some shoes. They’ve got great shoe shops over there.’
    Sophie thought, with a seventeen-year-old’s grasp of psychology, that Mandy was studying the Malteser too intently to be convincing and was probably devastated deep down. She decided not to probe too deeply. After all, she didn’t really know her well enough to go delving into her innermost feelings: Mandy had only joined Redfields in the sixth form and even after eighteen months this was probably the first time they’d had a one-to-one conversation, privacy being a rare commodity at Redfields. If she wanted to pretend everything was fine, then Sophie wasn’t going to push it: she’d just make sure Mandy knew there was a sympathetic ear if she needed one.
    Mandy, however, wasn’t pretending. She’d let a few tears trickle out in front of Miss Cowper, primarily because she knew it was expected and it didn’t do to let your headmistress think you were in any way odd. Also, something deep down inside told her that it was a tiny bit sad that she wasn’t able to care, and the crocodile tears had relieved that feeling. At least the emotional display would make Miss Cowper feel she’d done her job properly. She’d shown such genuine concern that Mandy had been touched. If it had been her own mother making a perfunctory attempt to comfort her, Mandy knew she’d have been suffocated by the fumes of Poison dabbed on her perpetually racing pulse points.
    She and her parents lived what Miss Cowper, being a historian, would have dubbed a laissez–faire existence. Mandy knew she got in the way of her mother’s pursuit of sport (both vertical and horizontal) and her father’s moneymaking, but didn’t want to spend time with them any more than they wanted to spend time with her. She threw herself into the whirlwind regime that her mother organized to keep her out of the way during the weekends and holidays – tennis, ballet, riding, photography, gymnastics, even, one half-term when her mother was particularly desperate to dispose of her, dried flower arranging – thus becoming an accomplished and self-sufficient child. She was as overjoyed as her parents were when they hit upon the idea of sending her away to board for her A levels. As her father had driven out of the school drive, waving his hand with its bejewelled pinkie out of the car window, she had felt an overwhelming sense of relief. Perhaps now she’d have the chance to settle down and make some friends. Her peripatetic lifestyle had made her adept at making acquaintances but not at forging deep friendships.
    She’d been an object of envy amongst the other girls when they’d learned of her curiously independent and sophisticated lifestyle. They’d all have died for their own self-contained suite with satellite TV, charge cards for Kookai and Warehouse, and an account with a cab firm that would take her anywhere she wanted. But they didn’t understand it was all a meaningless pay-off, or why she was almost deliriously happy at Redfields. At least here she was somebody. The recognition she’d received after winning the inter-house tennis match still made Mandy glow with warmth inside. No hollow parental praise, no empty reward in the form of a crisp twenty-pound note from her father, but genuine