shit. It was – lovely.’ Her voice cracked.
‘Oh my god.’ Charly never talked like this. Like a person with emotions. Kate watched her friend, she patted her arm. ‘You’ve fallen for him, haven’t you?’
‘No,’ said Charly furiously. ‘He’s a dick, OK? We were supposed to be meeting up last week and he called and said Claire was getting suspicious! He said it had been fun but we should call it a day, he couldn’t have two secret office affairs going on! What a –’
Her hand clenched into a fist and her lovely face crumpled. ‘Oh, Charly,’ said Kate, unhappily. She didn’t know what to say. She liked Phil, but she couldn’t understand why he was so secretive about his relationship with Claire, either. Was it that big a deal? Was it naïve of her not to understand why he was so weird about it? She put her arm around Charly’s bony shoulders, clad in slithery oyster silk. Charly sniffed loudly and caught Kate’s hand.
‘That’s why I don’t want to go to The Crown tonight. OK?’
‘Yes, that’s OK,’ said Kate, kissing her hair. ‘It’s always OK. Now, we need to plan our next move. Tell him he can’t get away with it.’
Charly looked at her in surprise. ‘Are you serious?’
‘Yes,’ said Kate, feeling incredibly protective of Charly, who was so screwed up in her own, weird way. ‘It’s Claire I worry about now, don’t you? He’s just going to mess her around like he has you.’ She got out her new mobile phone, her pride and joy.
‘What are you doing?’ said Charly.
‘I,’ said Kate proudly, ‘am now going to send my first text message.’ She keyed laboriously, for a minute. ‘God, this is annoying, scrolling through. There!’ she said, eventually. Charly peered over her shoulder.
I know what you did to Charlx. If you mess Claire arovnd we will tell her. Have a god eveming. K x
‘Hm,’ said Charly. ‘The typing’s a bit crap.’
‘So?’ said Kate, pressing ‘Send’.
‘Well, Kate Miller,’ said Charly, admiringly. She cleared her throat, and sat up straight. ‘You are turning into a bad girl, you know that?’
‘Hardly,’ said Kate.
‘Slept with your hottie flatmate yet?’
Everyone always thought she was having a torrid affair with Sean. ‘No!’ Kate said, and she blushed. ‘It’s not – there’s nothing going on. Shut up!’
‘Yeah right,’ said Charly, draining the last of her drink.
‘In your head there is. I don’t blame you, he’s gorgeous. Dull as fuck though.’
‘No he’s not,’ said Kate defensively, though Sean had in fact, this morning in the kitchen, droned on for five minutes about the new Microsoft enabling functions, while Kate held her hungover head in her hands and prayed for death. ‘He’s just passionate about his job, that’s all.’
‘Bor-ing.’
Kate thought back to the weekend before, how Sean had showed her how to use his new laptop, set her up with her own hotmail account and everything. They had sat side by side at the computer for hours, she listening, he explaining, their legs touching, neither of them acknowledging it. ‘No,’ she said, quietly. ‘Not all the time.’
‘He’s so not the one for you,’ said Charly. ‘Don’t shag the flatmate just because he’s there and you’re busy playing husband and wife. Textbook. I mean it.’
Kate was silent, uneasy all of a sudden. She looked at her watch. ‘Let’s get another drink, and then I’d better be off,’ she said, after a pause.
Charly sprang up, suddenly alive again. ‘These are on me, doll,’ she said. ‘Thanks. Thanks a lot.’ She sashayed to the bar, and every man in the vicinity glanced in her direction.
It was after eight when Kate got back, and she was two-white-wine-spritzers-drunk, which is to say not sober but not disastrous. Sean was watching TV as she barrelled into the sitting room.
‘I’m late!’ she cried loudly, hoping that by making a drama of it she’d get the guilt over quickly. Sean hated being late, it was the one area of flatmate life where they diverged wildly. If Kate said Sunday lunch at one p. m., she expected people to pitch up by two and to serve food by three. Sean meant lunch on the table at one p.m.
Sean didn’t look up from the TV. For some inexplicable reason (Kate said it was because she was being all grown-up), Zoe had decreed that tonight was to be evening dress, and Sean was immaculately dressed in black tie. He was that kind of boy, the sort who always had nicely shined shoes and owned his own dinner jacket.
‘Are you furious?’ Kate said, unwrapping her scarf and throwing her coat on the ground. ‘Sean, it’ll take me two minutes to change, I’m sorry –’
He looked up and she saw his face.
‘What’s wrong?’ she said.
His big blue eyes were curiously expressionless; but Kate knew him by now, knew him well enough to know something was up. ‘Jenna’s engaged,’ he said.
‘Oh.’ Kate sat down next to him, and took the remote out of his great big hand. She turned the TV off. ‘Oh, Sean, that’s – that’s crap.’
Jenna had been Sean’s girlfriend all through high school in Texas, and most of university, till they’d broken up before he came back to England for his third and final year. She was, as far as Kate knew, the only woman he’d ever loved, and the circumstances of their breakup were mysterious. Sean had been really unhappy. Kate had only met her once, in their second year, when she’d come to visit. She reminded her of a girl from a Seventies perfume ad: long, wavy brown hair, flicking out at the sides, endless long legs, the shortest skirts, the widest smile. And she was nice, which was the killer. Kate and Francesca had hated her.
She patted her unresponsive flatmate’s leg, feeling the hard muscle beneath the black cloth. ‘How did you hear?’
Sean cleared his throat, and flicked his eyes wide open, then shut them rapidly. He did this several times. ‘She called me. I was just leaving work, and she called me.’
‘Are you really upset?’ said Kate gingerly.
‘No,’ Sean said, sitting up and shaking his head. ‘Hell no!’
Rubbish, Kate thought. He reminded her, fleetingly, of Charly and her earlier bravado.
‘It’s just – hey, Jenna was my first proper girlfriend, and I was really into her, you know. She’s marrying some farmer guy called Todd. Ugh.’ He shook his head again. ‘He grows maize, has like thousands of acres. It’s such a fucking cliché, man!’
Kate looked round their warm, small flat, crammed full of mementoes of their happy flatmate life together.
