Lizzie refused to be goaded into a confession. All in good time. She swapped her now damp towel for her bathrobe, and as she opened the door Clare practically fell into the room. She must have been leaning right up against it.
‘Well, I spoke to all the bosses without saying anything incriminating, boogied the night away with Ben and the team, drank lots of alcohol and then got stuck in the corner with Danny Vincent—possibly the most self-centred, boring, slimy drive-time DJ in the history of broadcasting. It was terrible. To make matters worse my head feels too heavy for my body, and right now I’m not sure whether I’m going to make it through the next few hours without being sick…’ Lizzie didn’t remember being exceptionally drunk at any stage of the evening, but her body was telling a different story. ‘Maybe I’m coming down with something…’
‘Poor you…’ Clare empathised fervently.
This was why, Lizzie mused, she was her best friend.
‘…but I think you’ll find it’s just a good old-fashioned hangover. So, did he make a move?’
Lizzie shuddered at the thought of those whiter than white teeth and tighter than tight trousers.
‘No. Thankfully, just when I thought there was no way out, I was rescued by a different bloke who had spotted my predicament from the bar.’
‘I see.’
Lizzie was being so pseudo-offhand that Clare now knew there was a whole lot more to this than she was being told at the moment. This was typical Ford behaviour. Whenever Lizzie had anything interesting to divulge she just tossed it in ever so casually at the point in the conversation where you had as good as stopped listening. Clare decided to play it cool for now. She knew from experience that this coy moment couldn’t last long. Lizzie meanwhile, freshly energised by her shower, was just burbling on.
‘Anyway, just the usual, really. Lots of drinking, chatting and dancing, and then I got a taxi home. It must have been nearly 2:00 a.m. when we finally found one.’
‘We!’ Clare picked up on the discrepancy at once. Ha! Lizzie had let her guard down. Such a careless mistake. Amateurish, in fact.
Lizzie could have kicked herself. It had all been going so well. But Clare was her best friend. She was entitled to the full story—and besides, it wouldn’t feel real if Clare didn’t know. Yet now she felt sheepish. Since her divorce Clare had been so generally anti-men that Lizzie felt somehow she had let the side down.
‘OK. So I shared a cab with him.’ Lizzie looked at her feet awkwardly.
‘With…’
The intensity of Clare’s stare was currently boring a hole in the side of her head. Lizzie felt sure that Clare would be able to bend spoons if she put her mind to it.
‘With Matt.’ Lizzie looked up. She was going to take this on the chin. She had nothing to be ashamed of. It wasn’t as if she met people every weekend. In fact she couldn’t remember the last time…
‘The guy who rescued you from the clutches of the delightful Danny?’ Clare grinned at her use of alliteration, just in case Lizzie had missed it.
‘Yeah.’
‘You shared a cab all the way to Putney? Does he live round here, then?’
Lizzie hesitated as she realised that she had no idea where he lived. She vaguely remembered Matt telling the driver where to go next, and she even remembered listening, but she had no recollection of what he’d said. Her mind had quite clearly been on other things.
‘I’m not sure…I got out of the cab first.’
‘So the taxi didn’t terminate here, then?’
Clare was now striding back and forth across the landing, casting a cursory glance at Lizzie from time to time. Lizzie attributed this increasingly irritating habit to the surfeit of dog-eared John Grisham novels on their bookshelves and one viewing too many of A Few Good Men, which seemed to be playing on a loop on one of their digital channels.
Clare adopted her best quasi legal tone.
‘Miss Ford, in the early hours of Saturday December twentieth did you, or did you not, bring a Mr Matt to 56 Oxford Road for a night of wild abandon?’
Lizzie was stalling. Nothing like building nothing into something. One kiss had become headline news in south-west London. They really had to get out more.
‘It’s a simple enough question. Did you bring a man back to our apartment last night? Yes? Or no?’
Apartment. She’d definitely been reading another American legal thriller.
‘No.’ All of a sudden Lizzie was feeling very self-conscious and very naked underneath her bathrobe.
‘But at any point on the night in question did you engage in the activity of kissing? Were salivary juices exchanged?’
Clare certainly knew how to make an ostensibly romantic moment seem very clinical. But the I-know-I’m-onto-something look now plastered all over on Clare’s face was making Lizzie laugh. She stopped fudging her answers and, between giggles, confessed.
‘Yes. Guilty as charged. We kissed in the cab. He left. Happy?’
Lizzie didn’t want to get on to the fact that she hadn’t got his number and didn’t know when, or even if, she would be seeing him again or, more interestingly, the fact that she knew she’d quite like to. Clare was bound to say something disparaging, plus it always seemed like tempting fate. It was time to move this conversation on. Lizzie was determined to develop her enigmatic side, and now was as good a time as any—plus, once she admitted that she liked someone things always seemed to go awry. However humorous Clare thought she was being, this was Lizzie’s life they were mocking, even if right now there was more material than normal.
‘I suppose I’d better get on with my day…’
Clare looked at her watch. ‘Your afternoon…’
‘Afternoon, then… God, you can be pedantic.’
‘Takes one to know one. You’ve taught me everything I know. Anyway, now you’re up I must just pop to the shops. Do you need anything? I shouldn’t be long but I don’t have to be at the restaurant until five…’ Clare waited for Lizzie to process the information. If she knew Lizzie as well as she thought she did, she’d offer to cook them some lunch. She could almost hear the cogs grinding into action.
‘Right… Why don’t I cook us some lunch? Take advantage of the fact that we’re both in the flat at the same time. Novel, I know. Spaghetti Bolognese OK for you?’
Bingo. Clare loved the way that Lizzie’s mind always worked the same way. It was one of the most male things about her personality.
‘Great. Is two o’clock too late for you?’
‘Perfect. I’m sure I can manage on tea and toast until then.’
‘Bit peckish, are you? Was your tongue sarnie not very filling?’
Lizzie was already on her way to
