Free Never Mind Miss Fox by Olivia Glazebrook Page B

reflection in the kitchen mirror. “Eliot said there were all sorts of different people going,” he said.
    Other grown-ups, was what she had laughed down the telephone. There might even be some as old as you. Hey—and listen: have you got a number for Danny? The words had struck and winded him.
    â€œYou’ll probably chat up her mum or something,” continued Tom. “You’re all right when you’re with Martha, but on your own you can be a bit…” The sentence did not seem to have an end.
    Â Â 
    Martha had gone to visit her father. “He sounded awful on the phone,” she had confessed to Clive that morning. “He sounded wasted.” She had filled Viv’s car with provisions—“I bet he hasn’t eaten proper food in weeks”—and pressed away through the Saturday traffic.
    She would have been baffled by Clive’s change of plan. “Eliot’s birthday party? But why?”
    I don’t have to tell her everything, Clive reasoned with his conscience.
    Â Â 
    The two brothers shouted “’Bye, Mum,” over their shoulders as they went out of the front door and Clive heard, “Send her our love—” before the door slammed.
    They cycled to the station, tied up their bikes and caught the Tube.
    â€œIt’s nice up here,” said Tom as they walked towards Primrose Hill. “I’m going to live in Camden when I’m older.”
    Tom was in love with everything about Eliot, thought Clive, and that included her family home and her postcode.
    Martha had been right when she had said that Kilburn and Primrose Hill were separated by more than geography. Eliot’s was a sturdy, square white cake of a house that stood, quite certain of itself and its position, in a proper garden of its own. From a glossy front door, stone steps led to a gate at the pavement.
    Inside, Clive was given champagne and Tom a glass of punch. “Punch for the young,” trilled Sabrina, Eliot’s mother. “Darling Tom,” she added, kissing him. “How’s my rotten daughter treating you? I wish you were in love with me. ” She sighed and shimmered away in her silk drapery.
    â€œNightmare woman,” said Tom, shaking his head. “She showed me her bush, once. It was unbelievably massive.” Then he sidled off to have his drink topped up by a friend.
    When Eliot saw Clive she said, “Clive!” as if he were the only person she had wanted to come to the party. She was glassy-eyed and dazed; starstruck with herself.
    A couple of hard-faced girlfriends had taken charge of her, holding her by the elbows and steering her round the house. The two friends stared and giggled at Clive, flirted with Eliot’s father and gazed with unblinking insolence at Sabrina before spotting Tom and separating him from the crowd, like mute, efficient sheepdogs. They herded him up the stairs in front of them and away to Eliot’s room.
    Tom did not try to win people over but with an unconscious, careless, laughing kindness he attracted them. His mother had called it his “magnet.”
    â€œIt’s because he’s free,” Martha had said, watching Tom on the beach. “You can tell a mile off.”
    Now, as Tom was carried off upstairs by the sheepdogs, Clive felt conflicting thoughts strike him within like bits of flint: Those girls look mean—I wish they liked me—But they like Tom—I don’t care anyway. In the days before Martha that sensation—rummaging; cutting—had come often.
    Â Â 
    As Tom had suspected, Clive did not know anyone here. He became aware that he was caught in a hopeless position: he did not wish to be dismissed by the teenagers as a boring grown-up but nor did he wish to be seen by the adults as an ignorant schoolboy. He wanted his own category: Oxford finalist.
    He discovered that if he walked into a room where adults stood in discussion he was regarded