an elongated toot and a flash of people sleeping or raising plastic coffee cups to their mouths.
‘That I’m boring?’ asked Rose. ‘Probably.’ Jason, she was sure, saw her as part of the furniture too. Not a lover, just that terrible and damning ‘mate’. When had he started calling her that? Five years ago, ten years ago? After Katie was born? When he’d been down the ‘business end’ three times in total, for the birth of his daughters, and had seen quite enough? When he’d witnessed her mooching round in her dressing gown of a morning cooking sausages one too many times? Or because he was away for more than half the year, leaving her and the girls to it, and ‘mate’ was the best she could get, in the current circumstances? She daren’t admit it could be way more than that, not yet.
‘Where’s he been?’ asked Wendy. ‘Hong Kong again?’
‘Always Hong Kong.’
‘He’s a man in demand.’
‘He is. Shame me and the girls are at the back of the queue for supply.’ Rose sighed a big, huffy sigh, and not for the first time. She was sure a lot of people thought she was a single mum, and she wouldn’t blame them. That’s what she was, in effect. ‘Ugh. Enough about me and Jason,’ Rose said, wriggling in her seat and slipping a foot in and out of one shoe, under the table. ‘It’s dull. What’s going on with you, Sal? Are you still dating and dumping?’
‘I like to call it being discerning.’ Sal smiled, as the train clattered heavily down a portion of track and their near-empty rosé miniatures jiggled on the table, threatening to topple over.
Rose smiled. Sal was always meeting people then discarding them. Several men in the last three years had been kicked to the kerb. There was Mr Lovely, who Sal was over the moon to discover had a tragically misspelled tattoo, a tiny etching of ‘They think its all over’, with a devastating missing apostrophe; there was Mr Right with the Wrong Attitude, who made the catastrophic error of opening a door for her and steering her through it as ‘one of the fairer sex’; and other men and other non-negotiable traits – an overly dirty laugh, an inability to pluck nostril hairs, a penchant for Travel Scrabble or owning one horrid jumper too many. Sal looked for faults like a bloodhound and was thrilled to uncover them so she could dispatch the man off into the horizon.
‘The Guy Effect,’ said JoJo sagely. ‘Still rumbling on.’
They all nodded. Sal had been in a ten-year relationship with Guy. On a good day he had been charismatic and charming, on a bad, downright awful. He had a lot wrong with him but Sal loved the man and could never see it. She defended him, she made excuses for him. She said he was a ‘poet and a tortured soul’ (he really wasn’t; he was a merely a frustrated copy editor on a lawnmower magazine); Rose and the others just thought he was a grumpy, argumentative loser.
During one of their epic fights four years ago, Guy had died. There had been a petty argument in the car involving Sal’s map reading and Guy’s refusal to stop and ask a passer-by for directions. The argument had escalated; the car had accelerated, driven by an increasingly angry Guy. He’d failed to see a Give Way sign and had ploughed them into the base of an electricity pylon. Guy had died instantly; Sal miraculously emerged unscathed, physically, at least, and, although grief-stricken over his death, Sal suddenly saw the relationship and its terrible end for what it was. She had been blind to Guy’s faults and that blindness had caused years of pain and, ultimately, tragedy, which was why she looked for them relentlessly in men now. It was a protection: simply, she only dated people she could never fall in love with.
‘Actually,’ said Sal, hesitantly, ‘I’ve slept with someone.’ Her face broke into a broad grin. ‘Someone I really shouldn’t have slept with.’
‘Who?’ asked Rose.
‘When?’ asked JoJo.
‘Why shouldn’t you have slept with him?’ asked Wendy. ‘Did he have the Wrong Shoes or call you a “lady” to your face?’
‘Er, no,’ said Sal, looking quite sheepish, for her. ‘He’s my chef, at the pub.’
‘Your chef!’ exclaimed Rose, delighted. ‘Oh, naughty, naughty.’
‘What’s he like?’ queried JoJo.
‘Have you got a photo of him?’ enquired Wendy.
‘No, of course not!’
‘A one-night stand?’ asked Rose.
‘Yes, of course a one-night stand.’ Sal jumped; a high-speed train coming in the opposite direction shot past them in dramatic fashion, making the windows rattle. Rose automatically breathed in. ‘You don’t think I’d make a habit of it, do you?’
‘Depends how good he was!’ laughed Wendy. Sal laughed too, but Rose knew she would do everything in her power not to make a habit of anyone. She was OK now, after what had happened to Guy, but she wasn’t ready to let anyone into her heart. Not again. Sal had said more than once that the pain simply wasn’t worth it.
The conductor came, punched their tickets; made unnecessary small talk. Rose willed him to hurry up and move on – they were trying to have an in-depth catch-up here! Finally, he shuffled down to the next seats.
‘Wow!’ said Wendy. ‘Your chef. Now that is gossip!’
‘Yup,’ said Sal. ‘And rather unsavoury, if you excuse the pun. I shouldn’t have gone there. Now,’ she said briskly, ‘let’s move on from my love life. JoJo, any men on the horizon for you?’
‘Nope.’ JoJo shrugged happily. ‘No men. Not interested, don’t have the time. I’m married to my work, as you know.’ A very apt choice of phrase, decided Rose, and so ironic: JoJo was so busy helping other women have perfect weddings she could never meet someone to provide her with her own. ‘I’ll keep my life plain and simple, thank you.’ She smiled serenely and picked her BlackBerry off the table to give it a composed glance.
Yes, that was JoJo, thought Rose. Married to her work and so eternally unruffled. She always had been. Even in university halls, where they first met, JoJo’s bed was always immaculately made, her room spic and span, her shoes – always heels; she wore them at university, when no one else did – lined up neatly against the wall. It would be nice if a man could come along and unruffle JoJo, Rose thought, but she couldn’t see it happening.
‘Speaking of which,’ said Wendy, draining the very last of her miniature. ‘How are my last-minute alterations coming along?’
JoJo had made Wendy’s wedding dress, to Wendy’s very precise specifications: a simple, silk, empire line dress with lace, capped sleeves. No loud, blingy embellishments, none of what Wendy called ‘unnecessary frou-frou’.
‘I know you only do class and sophistication, but nothing too over-the-top please,’ she had reportedly said to JoJo, when it was first mooted. ‘I don’t want to look like a toilet roll holder or a fairy on top of a Christmas tree.’ Wendy had also said she wanted to look like ‘herself’ on her wedding day and that she would do her own hair and make-up as ‘nobody wants a one-off orange fright with ringlets for the day’. But, the dress had to be white; that was a given. Frederick’s family were very conservative and very, very traditional; it was a huge white wedding and it was going to be very, very posh.
It was a shame Wendy couldn’t have what she really wanted, thought Rose – a good splash of colour,
