style="font-size:15px;"> ‘Darren, my friend,’ slurred Lars. Damian couldn’t be bothered to correct him. ‘Am I glad to have met you, man.’ And without further ado, he slung Damian over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift and carried him to the bar.
Through tears of laughter, Damian started to sing ‘New York, New York’ again, the words muffled against Lars’s huge back.
Lars joined in from somewhere around Damian’s knees, and the rest of the room happily shouted out the chorus. Then there was much shushing as the next singers had mounted the stage, about to give their performance of a lifetime.
‘What you drinkin thish time, man?’ Lars asked Damian, putting him back to his feet like a dishevelled half-Indian rag doll in designer jeans.
‘No no no, it’s my round,’ said Damian, reaching into the wrong pocket for his wallet, and pulling out his phone instead. ‘Ooooh, look, messssage … oh, fuck! Shit, Lars, what’s the time?’
‘Wasssshamatter, old buddy?’ Lars furrowed his blond brow, putting a heavy hand on Damian’s shoulder.
‘Lars, mate, what’s the time?’ Damian had forgotten he could check the time perfectly well himself on his phone. Not to mention his watch.
Lars looked at his enormous Rolex.
‘It’sh twenty hundred hoursh. But why, my friend?’
‘Because I’ve just been reminded where I’m supposed to be, right now. D’you know a place called L’Ambassadeur?’
‘Do I know L’Ambasshadeur?’ Lars smiled broadly. ‘Man, I have sharesh in that place.’
‘Is it far from here?’
‘I’ll take you there, my friend. Who ya meeting there?’
‘Oh, only my wife. And her boss. And his wife.’
Both men stared at each other for a second, then started roaring with laughter again, slapping backs and thighs in total male harmony.
‘So you see, Poppy, it is vitally important that we don’t feed our kids dairy. Cows’ milk is for kiddy cows. We don’t express our milk and feed it to those kiddy cows, now do we?’ Eleanor, Marty’s wife, gave a nervous laugh and Poppy tried to make her own laughter sound sincere. She had to admit Eleanor had a point (if not a vocabulary that included the word calves), which might, at a pinch, be interesting, but all she had talked about since they’d arrived at L’Ambassadeur had been child-rearing. And not the fun stuff that Poppy’s few friends with children back in the UK talked about – the very sweet things they sometimes said or did, or the anecdotes of embarrassing swearwords coming from little mouths in public. Oh, no.
Eleanor’s party chitchat ran the gamut from children’s nutrition to pre-school education to ‘downtime’. Her only son, Hammond (Why did so many Americans have names that should be surnames?) was 18 months old. Poor little bugger. Poppy didn’t think Eleanor was a bad woman, but she was just so bloody earnest, so desperate not to get things wrong. She had a face that hovered between plain and pretty. Her smile was sweet, her jawline delicate and her pale skin flawless, but her forehead was just too narrow, her eyes just too small, her lips just too thin for her to be a proper beauty. Her light brown shoulder-length hair was side parted, very straight and very shiny. A beautifully cut Narciso Rodriguez beige silk shift dress, a few shades lighter than her hair, skimmed a slender body that bore no visible signs of childbirth. Apparently, she’d been a trader on Wall Street, pre-Hammond. Poppy found this very hard to believe.
Marco, the assistant director, who was short, swarthy and good-looking, with several piercings, was wearing skinny black jeans with a corduroy biker’s jacket and a vintage Alexander McQueen skull-printed scarf around his stubbly throat. His partner, Chase, a model for Ralph Lauren, was dressed entirely in Ralph Lauren and as ludicrously handsome as you’d expect a Ralph Lauren model to be, with a broad jaw, high cheekbones and golden-blond hair swept back from a magnificent brow. He appeared to have about as much personality as the shop dummy he resembled.
The conversation had not, so far, been what you’d call sparkling. For the first time since she’d been in NY, Poppy was missing grey old London enormously.
A waiter came to the table.
‘Can I take your order?’
‘We’re still waiting for one of our guests,’ said Marty, who was wearing a black T-shirt under a black Armani jacket and heavy-rimmed glasses that he thought made him look intellectual.
‘It’s OK, Marty, order without him,’ said Poppy. ‘I’m so sorry Damian’s so late. It’s very unlike him.’ Inside, she was seething. Where the fuck was he?
‘No, we’ll wait for your husband,’ said Marty, smiling at his latest protégée, who was looking gorgeous in a sage-green suede sleeveless minidress that matched her eyes and showed off her coltish brown limbs. With her streaky blonde hair loose around her shoulders, he thought she was just delicious. ‘In the meantime, why don’t we get some wine?’
‘Sounds great. A white and a red as some of us are having meat, and some having fish?’ Poppy looked around the table.
‘Two bottles?’ Eleanor looked horrified.
‘Hey, it’s only a couple glasses each,’ said Marco, kicking Poppy under the table. Poppy remembered Fabrice’s tales of Martinis, crystal meth and amyl nitrate with Marco the night before and hid a smile.
‘My nutritionist says there’s so much sugar in wine. And sugar is poison.’
Marty laughed heartily and patted his wife’s hand.
‘Eleanor’s been a lot more aware of her mortality since we had Hammond. Kids do need their moms to be alive, after all.’
Everyone laughed weakly.
‘What about their dads, Marty?’ Poppy couldn’t help it, even though he was her boss.
Marty looked taken aback.
‘Sheesh, well, of course they need their dads too! But their dads can handle their poison as they bring home the bacon –’ he did an excruciating Cockney accent – ‘while their mommies stay home and look after them. And you don’t want a poisoned mommie in charge of the kiddies now, do ya?’
He actually wished Eleanor would lighten up a bit. He was glad his wife was such a great mom, but after two miscarriages that had nearly destroyed their marriage, Ellie’s overwhelming joy when Hammy had been born perfect was rendered almost maniacal by the relief. Her subsequent quest for perfect motherhood was both laudable and intensely wearing.
Poppy looked at Marty askance. She had thought that only the Americans in the middle of the States thought that way. The ones on the East and West coasts were meant to be a tad more liberal.
‘I’ve never been more fulfilled than I am now, staying home and looking after Hammy.’ Poppy couldn’t tell whether Eleanor sounded smug or pleading, as she turned to her with that earnest, slightly scared expression in her pale blue eyes.
‘It must be wonderful,’ she started, trying to be nice, but her words were drowned out by two very drunken male voices. One was singing
