Freya was sure that she sounded perfectly normal, but Pel’s eyes had immediately brightened with speculative interest. ‘Oh?’ he said, in the way only Pel could, with at least sixteen syllables and due warning that he would insist on knowing every last tiny detail, no matter how trivial, before he would let the matter drop.
‘He’s a civil engineer.’ Freya picked up her drink, would-be casual. ‘He runs some kind of aid organisation and is always running off to Africa and places like that, building roads and irrigation systems. You know the kind of thing.’
Pel gave a kind of shrug to indicate that he didn’t really, but didn’t particularly want to know any more.
‘He’s in Africa now, as a matter of fact,’ she went on. ‘Lucy heard that he was going away just when they put up the rent on my old flat and I couldn’t find anywhere else to live. She suggested to Max that I look after the apartment for him while he was overseas.’
It sounded reasonable enough, Freya thought. It was reasonable, come to that. There was no reason for her to feel defensive and vaguely self-conscious whenever Max’s name came up.
‘How long is he away for?’ asked Pel.
‘At least four months. It’s worked out really well,’ she hurried on before Pel could start tutting about short-term solutions. ‘It’s saved Max having to find a short-term tenant or leave the place empty, and it’s given me time to look around for somewhere else. The apartment’s perfect for me, too. It couldn’t be more convenient for work. I can cycle there in five minutes. So you see, the party isn’t really an extravagance,’ she said, hoping to divert Pel from the subject of Max. ‘I’ll only be spending the money I would otherwise have had to fork out on travel costs.’
Her ploy didn’t work. For once Pel failed to rise to the bait of correcting her ropey economics. ‘I’d forgotten Lucy had another brother,’ he was saying. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever met Max. Was he at her wedding?’
‘I think so,’ said Freya, who had spent the entire wedding trying to avoid him, not an easy task when he was the bride’s brother and she was chief bridesmaid.
‘Hmm…’ Pel searched his memory. ‘What does he look like?’
Picking up her glass, Freya pretended to sip her gin as an uncomfortably vivid image of Max settled in her mind. Max, with his quiet face and his cool mouth and the sardonic amusement glimmering in his unnervingly pale grey eyes.
‘Oh, you know…’
‘No,’ said Pel pointedly.
‘He’s very ordinary,’ she said, proud of her careless shrug. ‘A bit dull, really. Not the kind of man you’d notice at a party. He’s one of those save-the-world-before-breakfast types who thinks building a few roads in a developing country gives him the moral high ground on every other issue.’
Pel sat back in his chair and smiled knowingly. ‘Ah, it’s like that, is it?’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Freya stiffly.
‘You and Max had a thing together, didn’t you?’
‘What on earth makes you think that?’ she asked with an unsuccessful laugh.
‘Intuition,’ said Pel smugly. ‘Plus the fact that your face goes all funny when you talk about him.’
Involuntarily, Freya’s hands went to her cheeks. ‘It does not!’
‘Yes, it does.’ Narrowing his eyes, Pel pretended to peer mystically into the bottom of his glass. ‘I’m getting the sense that you made a bit of a fool of yourself over this Max,’ he said portentously.
Freya eyed him sourly. Pel was just a little too clever for his own good, sometimes. ‘Very funny,’ she said, un-amused.
‘I’m right, aren’t I?’ He leant conspiratorially towards her. ‘Come on, Freya, ’fess up!’
She hesitated, moving her glass around on the bar until she had a pattern of interlocking rings. Pel would never let it go now that he had the whiff of a secret. ‘You must promise not to tell anyone else,’ she said at last.
‘Cross my heart and hope to die!’
‘It was at Lucy’s twenty-first,’ she began reluctantly. ‘It was a great party, but I’d had a terrible row with my first real boyfriend that afternoon, and I was in a bad way. I didn’t want to spoil Lucy’s day, though, so I pretended that Alan was on emergency call and couldn’t make it. It was awful.’
Freya shuddered at the memory and took a slug of gin. ‘I had to pretend to be having a fantastic time when all I wanted to do was go home and cry. I really thought Alan was the love of my life, and I couldn’t think about life without him.’
‘Let me guess,’ said Pel. ‘You had too much to drink?’
She sighed. ‘If you know so much, why am I telling you this?’
‘Because I want to know where the mysterious Max fits in. Go on!’
‘Well, Max was there, of course. I hadn’t seen him for a couple of years. He’d just come back from Africa, and he looked really different.’
Freya paused, her mind going back six years. Max had looked taller and more solid than she’d remembered, and older than his twenty-seven years. After a couple of years in the African sun, his grey eyes had been startlingly, even shockingly light in his brown face. Freya could still remember the tiny jerk of her heart when she had recognised him across the room.
‘He wasn’t enjoying himself either, but then he was never a party animal,’ she remembered. ‘I could see him watching me occasionally with that disapproving expression of his—that was exactly the same as I remembered—but he didn’t say a word to me until I got to the point when I didn’t think I could bear it for a second more. He came over and just said that I’d had enough to drink, and that he was taking me home.’
‘Mmm…the masterful type?’
‘That’s one way of putting it,’ said Freya, grimacing into her glass at the memory. ‘I tried to tell him I didn’t want to go, but he just ignored me, and the next thing I knew I was being frog-marched out to his car.’
Pel was leaning forward, agog. ‘Did he make a pass at you?’
‘Worse,’ said Freya tersely.
‘Worse?’ Pel’s eyes were out on stalks. ‘My God, what did he do?’
‘It wasn’t what he did. It was what I did.’ Her cheeks were burning and she pressed her hands to her face. ‘I tried to flirt with him.’
‘And?’
‘And nothing. Max is completely unflirtable.’
It was obvious that Pel was disappointed. He had been expecting something more dramatic. ‘Was that it?’
‘No, then I started to cry.’ Freya took a long pull of gin, trying not to cringe at the memory. ‘I told him all about Alan and how much I
