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same
exquisite torture!
    By now Carla almost
admired Serena’s dogged persistence in believing that the seasonal
changes of the natural world held any interest for her, just
because she happened to run a florist’s shop. That said, the way in
which Serena used the same weary stock phrases, delivered in a
creaky pitch of delight (one which hadn’t altered a jot over the
past decade) suggested that Serena’s interest in the blossom was
even feebler than her own.
    Unlike the blossom,
Serena’s true enthusiasms surrounded her at all times of the year –
outrageously expensive clothes.
    Carla was very, very
careful to avoid the whole subject of clothing. She refrained from
openly noticing that Serena never seemed to wear the same garment
twice, and that what she did wear wasn’t on sale in any of the
shops she went to. But to give Serena her due, she didn’t need to
be told that fashion was a complete nonstarter for Carla, and she
was considerate enough to return the favour of not openly noticing
what her favourite florist wore.
    It was supremely ironic
therefore, considering how much more she had to lose by breaking
their tacit agreement not to learn anything personal about each
other, that it was Carla and not Serena who went and spoiled it all
by opening her big fat mouth.
    Thus one unforgettable
day, in a fit of temporary insanity, Carla had once casually
mentioned that she was going to the hair dressers.
    Straight away this
throwaway little remark blew up in her face when Serena said she
wished she could go to a hair dressers just like that, but her hair
was so difficult that she was obliged to visit a special woman. In
fact, she had seen her just last week.
    This information came
as a huge surprise to Carla, not least because Serena’s hair hadn’t
changed one iota in the last ten years – fringe at front, shoulder
length everywhere else.
    In fact, she had always
assumed it was a wig.
    ‘Well, I never.’
    Carla was confident
that this note of mild wonder would be enough to draw a line under
the whole topic. But wait! Serena hadn’t finished the story of her
hair. Having agreed with whatever it was Carla was talking about,
she went on to add how lucky she was to have her special woman,
because not only did her special woman understand her hair as no
one else ever would, but she also did it on the cheap. To wit –
fifty quid per trim.
    Fifty quid!
    Carla reeled. She
always felt ripped off paying a tenner. And that was for a perm
that took ages and really hurt. Carla’s hairdresser didn’t ponce
about like Serena’s. She made damn sure that Carla, and everybody
else too, knew that her hair had been done, and done proper
too.
    The blossom, the
clothes, and now the hair, the more Carla knew about Serena the
more she ached afterwards.
    Not that Serena stopped
at making Carla ache at what she knew. She also made her ache at
what she didn’t. For there was a niggling riddle about Serena. An
enigma born of a contradiction. First up, the facts were these:
    One , Serena was
a freelance designer.
    Two , her clothes
were from Paris.
    Three , she spent
fifty nicker on her hair.
    Now, could they come
more rarefied than that? No, of course not. Everything about Serena
screamed posy.
    So then, the big
question was, Why the hell didn’t she buy more flowers?
    By rights she should
have been ordering them in by the cartload. Well okay . . . it was
just possible she was too rarefied even for flowers. However, Carla
could not bring herself to believe such a level of snobbery was
possible, not even in Kew. And in any case, this mystery ran far
deeper than a poseur not buying flowers. Oh no, there was so much
more to Serena than a designer lifestyle, clothes from Paris and an
eternal fringe. Even if between them they did absorb more money
than Carla saw in a month of Sundays.
    Oh no, above and beyond
all these ingredients there was . . . the nose.
    Serena had this giant
hooter. A whopping monster of gristle and bone with well