he wearing his Liverpool cufflinks?’
‘Didn’t catch the cufflinks. But he’s just bought a Porsche 911. Lucky sod.’
‘Better dash out and buy one, Sami,’ David says, arriving back at the table with three pints and a whisky chaser. The whisky looks like a double.
‘Might just do that, David, my man. A call here and there. You never know. Are you still driving that tank? Nought to eighty in three minutes?’
Mike watches them quietly. He’s never quite worked it out, their friendship, if that’s what it is. Happy-go-lucky, water-off-a-duck’s-back, is David. Except when it comes to Sami. The barbed comments, the occasional belligerence. He becomes a different person.
Perhaps they’re a little too alike, he thinks. In their late thirties, both from wealthy families, successful in their careers. Married to childhood friends Sophie and Antonia. Both childless. But there the similarities end. David sits back and lets wealth and fortune fall into his lap, whereas Sami’s a hunter, a person who never rests on his laurels; he’s always searching for something bigger, something better.
From the day they first met fifteen years ago, Mike had detected Sami’s restlessness. He changed cars and hairstyles like a chameleon, but then, he could afford to. Yet as Mike gazes at him now, he seems happier, more grounded than ever before. Perhaps he’s reached a plateau in life, a level of contentment which can be sustained for longer than usual. He hopes so; he likes Sami very much. Sami’s one of the good guys.
He shakes himself back to the conversation, picks up his glass of Guinness, murky and dark beneath its creamy facade, and feels the dog’s gentle nudge at his side.
Antonia loves the silence of the countryside, the tranquility of her and David’s large home. It still feels pure and new. Yet she allows the telephone beside the bed to ring, insistent, loud and shrill, without answering. It’s late and she’s sleepy, drifting contentedly in and out of the final chapter of Wuthering Heights, another Brontë novel she should have read as a child.
She knows who’s fruitlessly holding on at the other end of the telephone. Most people call her on her mobile, but years ago she decided to hold back from giving the number to her mother. It made her feel guilty. It still makes her feel mean. But it helps her feel free of the past. Just a little.
‘I think it’s Monday so I’m coming over for a coffee,’ Sophie says, sounding groggy. ‘Put the kettle on.’
It’s what Sophie always says when she phones. Not, ‘Are you in, are you busy, is it all right?’ She expects Antonia to be in whenever she chooses to turn up.
It slightly irritated Antonia at one time, but it doesn’t bother her now. After all, she’s invariably in, alone in her huge home in the Cheshire countryside, going through the motions of being a housewife, whatever that is. Though she supposes cleaning and cooking pretty much cover it now the builders and plumbers and decorators have left. There’s the highlight of the supermarket, of course, but she and David shop for clothes and the house most weekends, so she’s content to stay in and order food online.
‘For God’s sake, what’s David bought you now?’ Sophie often jibes, pulling a face at the latest rug or vase or item of clothing.
‘It’s expensive,’ she replies, feeling the inevitable and disappointing stab of Sophie’s disapproval.
‘That doesn’t make it tasteful, darling.’
‘Well, I think it’s nice of him,’ she says, leaving the sentence hanging. And Antonia does think it’s nice. She thinks her home and its contents are really lovely. It’s just that it’s all a little too much. David’s a little too much.
‘I do love you very much, my beautiful girl,’ he said as he left the house for work this morning, his grey pinstripe suit looking slightly tight.
‘I know,’ she replied, laughing. ‘I think you might have mentioned it once or twice this weekend. Get to work, you big softie.’
Once, long ago, Antonia counted the number of times David declared his love in just one carefree night and she wrote the number in her diary to record it forever. Exhilarating and exciting, she never expected to be loved so much. But now she worries why he repeats the words. She knows he adores the person she’s created, the one she sees in her reflection. But not her mother’s ‘Little Chinue’. He’s never met her.
Making for the stairs, she catches her face in the mirror. ‘Where’s the trophy wife, then?’ They were Olivia Turner’s words, whispered to her husband Mike at the first dinner party she and David hosted. She hadn’t heard the expression before, and as she hung back in the shadows of the hallway, she didn’t twig that Olivia meant her.
‘I’m sorry,’ Olivia said, her pale face colouring when Antonia emerged with a hesitant smile. ‘You must be Antonia. I’ve heard you’re very beautiful and you are.’
But in Antonia’s mind, the word beautiful has never stuck.
She turns away from the mirror, hoping Olivia likes her better now. She seemed tense at the last dinner party. ‘Well, being the bloody office heartthrob …’ she said pointedly to Mike several times. It seemed a strange thing to say. He looked embarrassed and perplexed. But perhaps they were all a little too drunk, Sophie in particular, who turned up with two bottles. Still, the party went well. Of course Helen said the usual, ‘For goodness sake, Antonia, sit here and talk. I won’t bite,’ but lovely Charlie was there with his genial wink, ‘Oh, but she does and it’s ferocious. I wouldn’t risk it.’
She’s still brushing her long hair when Sophie arrives at White Gables, so doesn’t have time to straighten it completely.
‘You look gorgeous, darling,’ Sophie says as she wafts past her and into the large bright kitchen. ‘But then you always do.’
She turns and studies Antonia. ‘Why don’t you do me a favour, just for once, and have a slob-out day? Just one day when you don’t brush your hair or apply any make-up. Don’t even clean your teeth or change your underwear. Twenty-four hours of not being perfect. Would you do that, just for me?’
Sophie’s startling green eyes are on hers just a little too long before she breaks the gaze. ‘But then you’d still look gorgeous and smell of lily of the valley on freshly baked wholegrain, wouldn’t you?’ She picks up a magazine from a low glass table and starts to flick the pages. ‘The curl’s coming back in your hair, Toni. Why don’t you leave it this time? I like it curly.’
Antonia turns away as the telephone starts to ring. They have the hair conversation too often and she isn’t in the mood for Sophie’s amateur psychoanalysis today. Sophie has always been there for her since childhood, good times and bad, but sometimes her familiarity can be claustrophobic. She rubs the back of her neck. Her strained weekend with an unusually quiet David has left her tense.
‘Aren’t you going to answer the telephone?’ Sophie asks. ‘If you won’t, I will.’
‘No, Sophie, leave it. It’ll be a call centre. I don’t want to encourage them.’
‘Then unplug the bloody
