didn’t try.
“Zuley, short for Zuleika,” she told his impervious back. “I can’t decide whether I like it or not.”
“You can get back to me,” he said.
“I wonder where they got it from…”
“The Bumper Book of Pretentious Names?”
“She must have tagged along with Dash and Arlo. Voted with her feet. It’s not exactly child-friendly round there. You should see the place – weirdos crashed out on every sofa, overflowing ashtrays, empty bottles… God knows what she could have put in her mouth!” Try as she might, she couldn’t quite banish a grudging admiration from her tone.
“Anyway,” she said, her mouth pursed against a smug grin, “upshot is… we’re invited round for dinner later.”
“Can you set the table, please?”
Coitus interruptus seemed to have rendered Neil selectively deaf.
Sara shuffled aside the Sunday paper, clattered plates and cutlery onto the table and called the boys. They hurtled into the room – a tangle of limbs and testosterone, jostling each other for the best chair, the fullest plate, the tallest glass. Dash won on all counts, even snatching the tomato sauce out the hands of his younger brother and splurging a wasteful lake of it onto his own plate, before Arlo had a chance to object.
“Er, we take turns in this house…” Sara said firmly, and was met with Dash’s signature smile – sunny and impervious – more chilling, by far, than defiance. He was a handsome specimen, no doubt about it, and possessed of an easy, insincere charm, but she wondered that she could ever have mistaken him for a girl. Neither his physique nor his behaviour struck her, now, as anything other than self-evidently Alpha-male. Arlo, on the other hand, had the unhappy aura of the whelp about him. Slight of build and weak of chin, he had his mother’s rabbity eyes, without her intelligence, his father’s thin-lipped mouth, without his redeeming humour. He was the kind of kid, who, even as you intervened to stop sand being kicked in his face, somehow inspired the unworthy impulse to kick a little more. She was touched therefore, and not a little humbled that, long after the older boys had left the room, Patrick sat loyally beside this “friend”, whose friendship he had not particularly sought, prattling cheerfully, while Arlo chased the last elusive baked bean around his plate.
“So that’ll be quite nice, don’t you think?” Sara said to Neil when they were alone again and she was stacking the dirty plates in the dishwasher, “dinner tonight. Just the four of us?”
“We were only round there last night,” said Neil.
“Yeah, us and fifty other people.”
“I just don’t get what the hurry is.”
“There isn’t any hurry, but nor is there any reason to say no. Unless we want to say no.”
“And in fact you’ve already said yes.”
“Well, not yes as such. I said I’d ask you.”
“Thanks very much. So now if we don’t go, they’ll think I’m a miserable bastard.”
Sara raised a meaningful eyebrow.
With a sigh, Neil returned to his task of scraping the leathery remnants of fried egg from the base of the pan.
“Neil, they’re nice, interesting people and they want to be our friends. I’m trying, I really am, but I’m struggling to see anything negative in that.”
Neil shrugged resignedly. He was a simple soul really – affable, straightforward, curious. He had constructed a credible carapace of manliness, which, on the whole, he wore pretty lightly. When he picked up a work call at home (which he seldom did), it was impossible to tell whether he was talking to his PA or to the Chairman. This, really, rather than the recent improvement in tenant satisfaction ratings, or the number of newbuilds completed under his jurisdiction, was the reason he was a shoo-in for the big job. The downside of his instinctive and wholly laudable egalitarianism, however, was, in Sara’s view, his reluctance to recognise that some people just were exceptional.
“Eleven o’clock, absolute latest, okay?” he muttered to Sara, as they stood on Lou and Gavin’s doorstep for the second time in twenty-four hours.
“Hell-o-o-o!” Neil said, as Lou opened the door and you would have thought there was nowhere he would rather be. He handed his hostess a bottle of wine and kissed her on both cheeks – a little camply, Sara thought.
“I brought dessert,” Sara told Lou, when it was her turn, “I thought, you know, with all the clearing up you’d had to do… it’s nothing fancy, just some baked figs and mascarpone.”
“Oh thanks.” Her hostess looked surprised and faintly amused. In truth, she didn’t appear to have done much clearing up. The house looked only marginally less derelict than it had when Sara had delivered Zuley back that morning. Empty bottles were stacked in crates beside the front door and a row of black bin-bags bulged beside them. A wet towel and a jumble of Lego lay at the foot of the stairs. The kitchen was chilly and smelled of stale cigarette smoke. No cooking smells, no piles of herbs or open recipe book hinted at treats to come. If it weren’t for the fact that Lou had obviously taken a certain amount of care with her appearance, Sara might almost have thought they had come on the wrong night, but Lou looked gorgeous – like a sexy sea lion, hair slicked back with product, eyes kohl-rimmed, in a tie-necked chiffon blouse and jeans, which could not have contrasted more sharply with the eye-popping maxi dress she had worn the night before. She had the enviable knack, Sara had noticed, of making every outfit she wore utterly her own.
Lou ushered them in and Sara and Neil sat down a little gingerly, on grubby chairs at a kitchen table still littered with half-eaten pizza crusts and spattered with juice.
“Shall I open this?” Lou asked, waving their wine bottle at them. “Or are you in the mood for more fizz?”
She flung open the door of the fridge and pulled out a half-full bottle of Krug.
“A party with booze left over,” Neil said. “Must be getting old.”
“Or more catholic in our tastes,” said Lou with an enigmatic smile. She filled three glasses and handed them round.
Watching her hostess pad around the kitchen, to the strains of John Coltrane, the grimy lino sucking at her bare feet, Sara found herself at once repelled by the squalor and intrigued by Lou’s indifference to it. She wondered what it might be like to live like this – to dress how you pleased and eat when you felt like it, and invite people round on a whim. There was, after all, a certain charm in the larky informality of it all, in stark contrast to Carol’s well-choreographed “pot luck” suppers. Lou cheerfully admitted to being “rubbish” at entertaining. She had once, she said over her shoulder, arms elbow-deep in washing-up water, served undercooked pork to Javier Bardem and given him worms. Once again, Sara found herself at a loss for words.
By the time Gavin bounded into the room, at 8.05, wearing jeans and a creased linen shirt the colour of bluebells, dusk had darkened the windows and Lou had brought about a transformation. She had cleared the table and put a jug of anemones and a squat amber candle on it. Around this centrepiece, she had placed terracotta dishes of olives, anchovies and artichokes, as well as a breadboard with a crusty loaf. All it took was for Gavin to draw
