green eyes and dark brown, wavy hair that tumbled around her slender shoulders. He wouldn’t have hesitated when they were younger. He’d have mentioned that strange moment in her kitchen, too, when it looked as if she were about to cry. How fragile she seemed, despite her breezy demeanour. Now, though, with no escape from Ethan and his arse-scratching tendencies, Harvey guards his privacy jealously.
‘She was nice-looking, yeah,’ he mutters with a shrug.
‘Married?’
‘Er, no, I don’t think so.’
‘Oh, so you noticed then.’ A bit of chicken flies out of Ethan’s mouth, which Harvey also chooses not to comment upon. The little shits who pelted him with sweets at the last party he did had better table manners.
‘Only because I was watching her hands while she was playing, okay?’
‘And you just so happened to check out her marital status.’
‘No, I wasn’t really thinking about that.’ Harvey rolls his eyes.
‘Oh, come on. Didn’t you want to make beautiful music with her?’ Ethan guffaws loudly and swigs from a bottle of beer. ‘You did, didn’t you? It’s obvious you fancied her …’
‘What’s obvious? Tell me one thing I’ve said that makes you think I was remotely attracted to her.’
‘That’s why it’s obvious,’ Ethan declares. ‘You’re being all guarded and secretive, going over there to talk about, um, Chopin or whatever. You don’t even like classical music …’
‘Oh, fuck off.’
Ethan smirks and picks up the naan bread, ripping a chunk out of it with his teeth. Harvey was right; the sofa arm now looks as if it’s been licked by a huge, oily tongue.
‘So are you going to ask her out?’ Ethan wants to know.
Harvey glowers at him. ‘How old are you again? She’s going to be teaching me, for Christ’s sake. It’s a professional relationship.’
‘Oh, is that what you call it?’ Ethan calls after him as Harvey escapes to his bedroom. ‘It’s about time you found yourself a decent woman, Harv. I worry about you. There’s got to be some desperate bird out there who’d be willing to do it with a clown.’
Sinking onto the edge of his bed, Harvey takes a moment to compose his thoughts. Lighten up, he tells himself. He doesn’t get out much. Don’t rise to the bait … Plus, Harvey realises, he’s bloody starving, having forgotten to eat in his eagerness to meet Kerry. He gets up and pokes his head around the living room door. ‘Any of that curry left?’
‘Huh?’
‘The curry I made last night. Any left for me?’
‘Aw, no,’ Ethan says, dumping his empty bowl at his feet. ‘Sorry, mate, that was the last of it. But if you’re heading for the kitchen, could you get me another of those cold beers?’
Chapter Thirty
Rob knew he’d been expecting too much for Eddy to keep Nadine’s pregnancy secret. There was no big announcement, no collective gasp: just the office grapevine yacking away, triggering the odd bemused ‘congratulations’, plus a sense, Rob notes, that he has finally been accepted by the new team. As if he’s not the stuffy old duffer after all, and that being a cheat and a liar and making a girl half his age pregnant has somehow made him more … interesting. He’s aware of Ava throwing him a bemused look as she stuffs her ‘Chocotastic’ Pop Tart into the office toaster, and Frank and Eddy halting their murmured discussion as he saunters past. Meanwhile, Nadine has acquired a dreamy demeanour. In fact, she seems to have given up working at all in favour of aligning her pots of pens with their various neon rubbers and fluffy gonks on their ends.
Although he tries not to stare openly, occasionally Rob sees her take a brush from her red patent bag and actually groom a gonk’s hair. I’m going out with a girl who collects novelty pens, he muses, although ‘going out’ doesn’t really describe it. For one thing, on the nights he stays over at her place, they rarely venture out. They still don’t have a great deal to talk about, he realises. But they’ve watched a few movies, and she has taken to cooking strange meals – not triggered by any particular cravings but because, as far as he can gather, she’s never actually cooked much before. Last night she made some kind of Mexican beany starter, leaving an explosion of vegetable choppings and little puddles of bean juice in her wake. ‘I love cooking for you,’ she announced, reaching across the table to squeeze his hand as his eyes watered from all the chilli.
Then they went to bed. Rob has felt so wretched these past two months, it’s been a relief to lose himself with a sweet, young girl with a beautiful, delicate little body who seems, amazingly, to want him. What will happen, though, when the Bethnal Green house sale goes through? Although she seems to expect it, the thought of living at her place full-time makes him uneasy to say the least.
It takes an enormous amount of willpower for Rob to switch his attention back towards the half-written feature on the screen. His intro reads: ‘It’s Spring – get a six-pack in the time it takes to scoff a burger.’ Despite the gaudy Christmas lights winking outside, the issue they’re working on now is all ‘spring clean your body’ and ‘put the spring back into your love life’. (Eddy, ever fond of a cliché, has gone overboard for the ‘reinvent yourself’ angle.) Two issues containing Rob’s sex columns have already been on sale. To Eddy’s delight – ‘see, I said you’d be a natural, Robster!’ – they’ve provoked a flurry of emailed questions from readers, some of such a technical nature that Rob is flummoxed as to how to respond.
By 6 p.m. he’s almost finished the feature. It’s Thursday – late night shopping – and Nadine, who’s looking impatient now, wants to start checking out buggies and cots. It takes another half hour before he makes his way over to her desk.
‘Sorry about that,’ he says.
‘That’s okay.’ She smiles prettily, having reapplied her cherry-red lipstick (how does she always get it so immaculate? he wonders) and customary eyeliner flicks in preparation for the shops. As they head for the lift, Rob can’t resist taking Nadine’s small hand in his. God, this is weird, he thinks, a thought that darts across his brain without warning several times a day. Here we are, virtually a couple now, having a baby. A couple who, less than an hour later, have taken possession not just of a buggy but a car seat, cot, bouncy chair, play mat and wall hanging featuring hand-appliqued gambolling bunnies, all to be delivered within the next five working days.
‘Oh, look at that!’ she cries. He’d been trying to casually manoeuvre her out of the baby department of the store before his credit card melts in the machine.
‘We don’t need that, do we?’ He eyes the cripplingly expensive quilt.
‘Well, I suppose it’s not essential, but we don’t want our baby sleeping under a tatty old blanket, do we?’
‘No, of course not, but I’m sure there are cheaper—’ He stops abruptly as she picks up the quilt. The bags he’s clutching already contain a changing mat, several fleecy rompers in gender-unspecific lemon and mint, plus a knitted toy mouse in a scratchy red coat which doesn’t look terribly baby-friendly to Rob (but hey, what does he know?). And now Nadine
