Entertainer’. After some scrutiny, he reckoned the name was Merry Martha. The phone number remained legible. But he didn’t make a note of it and he put the card in his kitchen bin without another thought.
FOUR
Pip McCabe’s flat, like Zac’s, gives away little about the career of its owner. There’s nothing remotely zany or even vaguely theatrical about the interior. It’s neither colourful nor quirky. Though the basement flat is a small space, it doesn’t seem cramped on account of Pip’s aversion to clutter. No ornaments. The pictures on the walls are non-representational, frameless and subdued in colour. Photos held in stylish thick glass sandwiches are of her family, though Pip herself features in few. Pip’s home is an essay on calm; gradations of neutral hues for walls, floors and soft furnishings. The stripes and spots and frills and flounces and plastic and kitsch of her clowning – her clothes, her props, her funky chunky shoes – are immediately and neatly stored as soon as she returns from work. There’s never any leftover washing-up to be done. There’s never a damp towel left scrunched on the bathroom floor. The bed is made as soon as she’s left it. Not that it even looks that crumpled when she rises each morning.
Pip’s favourite drink is red wine. She doesn’t care for white, for champagne or for spirits. She likes a good Rioja best of all. And she has the utter confidence to happily drink it – and sometimes quite a lot of it – in her spic-and-spandom, with not one spillage to date. Maybe her training as an acrobat has something to do with it. At work, she flops and flaps and fools around but such japery is attributable to consummate physical control; at the centre of her slapstick and tumbling are balletic grace, athletic stability and acrobatic control.
When Pip McCabe is out and about, at work or at play, she is the life and soul, she’s the girl who gets things going, she tells the first joke, she’s the last to leave. When Pip McCabe is at home, however, she wafts around quietly with music playing softly. She’s happy with the solitude, confident with quiet, content in her own company. Alone in her flat, she provides the best audience in front of which she can truly be herself. She’s entertaining; she’s a children’s entertainer. But she’d really rather not entertain at home. Which was why Mike, her last steady boyfriend, left her. She never let him in. The door to her flat and entry to her heart remained closed.
She’s a great illusionist, is Pip McCabe. Her home isn’t Conran, none of her stuff is from stockists recommended by Elle Decoration. Rather, she has a cunning way with calico bought cheaply from Berwick Street and furniture bid for at Tring Auction Rooms. If she wasn’t a clown by trade, Pip could well earn her living as an invisible mender. However, that’s not to say there aren’t a couple of flaws, a little fraying, in her own fabric. But she’d rather keep them invisible and try to fix them in her own way and in her own time.
There are two nights a week when Pip would rather not be at home, absolutely never alone if she is. Tuesdays and Thursdays are exhausting for her though she works a maximum of four hours in the afternoons on these days and never as Merry Martha. Pip won’t ask for support, for help, for company, but she tries to ensure that her evenings on these days are occupied. Pizzas are good, movies are better, a fair few drinks in a raucous bar is the ultimate, watching Friends at a friend’s home will do and she has even been known on one or two occasions to have people round to hers, Rioja at the ready and comfort food aplenty. This Thursday she quite fancied seeing her sisters but Cat is in bed with flu and doesn’t want a visit, much less to provide company, and Fen is suddenly up in Derbyshire again, assessing sculpture in a private collection. Pip turned to her honorary sister instead.
‘Megan?’ she phoned.
‘Philippa McCabe,’ Megan responded, thinking to herself But of course, it’s Thursday. ‘I was going to call you. Do you want to do something?’
‘Sure,’ Pip said casually, as if she had only been phoning for a chat but Megan’s suggestion of meeting up was most appealing and how convenient that she herself happened to be free. ‘What do you fancy?’
‘To be honest,’ Megan said in a lascivious whisper, ‘I fancy a bit of Dominic. He’s the brother of Polly’s boyf, Max – you’ve met them. But I don’t think he’s on the menu tonight – so I’ll settle for pizza.’
‘Sounds good to me,’ Pip laughed.
‘Or alcohol,’ Megan interjected excitedly, as if she’d overlooked its existence.
‘Either,’ said Pip.
‘Both!’ Megan declared and they arranged to meet at Smorfia in West Hampstead.
Pip settled down to a bath, dipping her body deep into the water, right up to her lower lip.
Wash the day away. Soothe. Cleanse. Breathe.
She closed her eyes on the day just been and what she had seen. She opened her eyes and stared at the taps. She could be in West Hampstead in less than half an hour.
The waiters flirted extravagantly with the two women. Megan was a regular and Pip had been often. The restaurant was small – friendly, noisy and smelt heavenly. Megan and Pip filched food from each other’s plates and chatted nineteen to the dozen, though on occasion this meant talking with their mouths full.
‘Was it tough today?’ Megan asked, tearing a much larger slice of Pip’s pizza than she’d intended.
‘It was,’ Pip confirmed, helping herself to Megan’s pappardelle, ‘particularly.’ Megan didn’t ask more and Pip didn’t elaborate. Pip enquired about this Dominic chap and Megan swooned off on elaborate tangents, describing potential wedding cake design and fantasy honeymoon destinations.
‘Has he asked you?’ Pip enquired.
‘Asked me what?’ Megan responded.
Pip thought about it. ‘Anything? Your favourite colour? If you snore? If you’ll marry him?’
Megan laughed heartily. ‘He hasn’t even asked me out yet,’ she admitted, raising her eyebrows at herself, ‘let alone kissed me, never mind asking me to marry him. But hey, I’ll live in hope. Or in day-dreamland at the very least.’
‘Well,’ said Pip, slightly histrionically due to a fast-flowing Chianti and a lot of garlic in the food, ‘if you ask me, day-dreams endanger reality.’
‘You’re too bloody cynical for your own good,’ Megan pouted, ‘and for mine.’
‘No, I’m not,’ Pip protested, ‘I’m just sensibly circumspect.’
‘Bollocks!’ Megan retorted, because Pip was her best friend so she was allowed to. ‘Your mum ran off with a cowboy when you were a kid and bang! you don’t believe in true love!’
Pip chewed thoughtfully. ‘I’m fine about love. I just don’t trust men with a penchant for rhinestones and rodeos!’
They chinked glasses and laughed.
Megan picked a large glistening black olive from her friend’s pizza, scrutinizing it admiringly before popping it into her mouth. Pip mopped at Megan’s sauce with some leftover bruschetta. ‘The thing about love,’ she said with her mouth full, ‘is that it requires one to get naked.’
Megan looked a little blank. ‘Well, if you leave your clothes on, you tend to get a little messy.’
‘But
