“What’s that for?”
“I read your manuscript last night.”
“Oh God.”
“Clever girl.”
“You liked it?”
“I loved it.”
Sara felt she might melt with happiness.
“It’s great, Sara. Original, heartfelt, quirky.”
“Hey, steady-on.”
“No, honestly. I was so excited I had to wake Gavin up and read bits to him.”
“Oh my God!” Sara crushed her cheeks with mortification and pleasure.
“I want to go over it with you in detail. I’ve got some suggestions. Can we get together at the weekend?”
***
At the school gate, the Deputy Head was greeting the children as they arrived. Sonia Dudek was a favourite of Sara’s. She had cut her teeth in Caleb’s Reception class, and had progressed from Tiggerish ingénue to senior manager in four short years. Now she was smiling, greeting the children by name, attempting to bolster the morale of doubting parents.
“Hi there,” Sara said, flashing her a sympathetic smile. Sonia smiled back, then, seeing Lou, caught her by the elbow.
“Oh, Ms Cunningham. Can I have a word about Dash?”
The bell was ringing, so Sara hurried on with the other children, struggling to master her curiosity. Doubtless, Dash was being selected for the new “Gifted and Talented” programme and good luck to him, she told herself firmly.
Once she had seen the boys into class, Sara waited outside the school gate for Lou, but after ten minutes there was no sign of her, so she walked home alone. As she turned into her street, she saw Carol getting out of her car. Mindful that a rift was growing between herself and Carol that could all too easily become an unbreachable chasm, Sara had issued a vague invitation for the weekend. She could tell from the way Carol now stood, four-square, in the middle of the pavement, with a slightly forced smile on her face, that she was going to be pressed for a day and time.
“Hi Sara, how’s the novel?”
Sara sighed. You couldn’t keep anything to yourself on this street.
“Early days,” she said.
“What’s it about?”
“About?” Sara wrinkled her nose disdainfully.
“You know, what genre? Thriller? Chick-lit? What?”
“Oh God, well… I suppose, inasmuch as it’s about anything, it’s a sort of... coming-of-age novel.”
Carol made a “get you” face and Sara felt a pang of irritation.
“So, were you thinking Friday or Saturday?” Carol asked. “Because Saturday would work better for us. Less chance of Simon nodding off.”
“Could I get back to you? Only Saturday’s ringing bells…”
“Friday then. I’ll just have to prod him awake. Only I need to know, for the babysitter…”
God, she was like a fucking terrier.
“No, let’s go with Saturday,” Sara said, thinking to herself that if the worst came to the worst she could always come down with a mystery virus.
By the end of the week, Gavin had returned to the school run.
“Oh hi,” Sara said, more pleased than she cared to admit to find him on the front step. “How was Berlin?” She pulled the door shut behind her and had got as far as the garden gate before Gavin laughed and said:
“Aren’t you forgetting something?”
“Oh God, what an idiot!” She turned away briskly so he couldn’t see her flaming face, put her key in the latch and called, “Boys, come on, it’s ten to...”
It was fascinating hearing Gavin talk about his trip. The gallery was a former warehouse in the east of the city, he said, “very cool”.
Sara admitted that she had never been to Berlin.
“Oh you’ve got to go,” he said. “We should go next year, the four of us. Stay in this boutique hotel that Lou loves in Friedrichshain. The clubs are fantastic.”
Sara glazed over for a moment, imagining herself gyrating to techno in a Berlin night club, under the influence of who-knew-what stimulants, with an important contemporary artist and his film-maker wife.
“… So, what do you reckon?” Gavin was saying.
“Oh gosh, well, I suppose we could try for February half-term…” said Sara, flattered by his tenacity.
“No…” Gavin frowned in affectionate bemusement, “I meant about Greenwich Park, tomorrow, if the weather holds?”
She must stop zoning out like this, it was embarrassing.
“Oh, right.”
“Us boys can kick a ball about and you and Lou can talk about your book, which sounds fantastic, by the way.”
“Oh God, it’s only a first draft. There’s, like, a million things I need to change…” Her voice trailed off as she noticed his reproachfully raised eyebrow. She smiled and blushed, “but yeah, the park sounds great.”
7
It was a perfect autumn day and Greenwich Park had never looked lovelier. As she strolled hand in hand with Neil down Blackheath Avenue, Caleb and Patrick chicaning in and out of the bollards on their skateboards, Sara felt imbued with a sense of wellbeing. She couldn’t actually be happy, she knew, for happiness was unselfconscious, and this wasn’t, but she was as near as dammit. She enjoyed thinking of her life as a novel in progress and, since Lou had told her she mustn’t shilly-shally when people asked her what she did, but must say loud and proud, “I’m a writer,” it seemed legitimate. As she half-listened to Neil explaining what he had found unsatisfactory about the latest Sebastian Faulks novel, she scrolled through a mental playlist of appropriate soundtracks for the day. The Kinks? Too obvious. The Smiths? Too ironic. As they reached the end of the avenue they paused to take in the cityscape, unfurled along the river like a theatrical backdrop, St Paul’s to the West, Canary Wharf ahead, the Dome to the east, the greensward of the park falling away gently beneath them, and it came to her: Saint Etienne’s “London Belongs to Me”. Neil stood behind her, encircling her waist, his stubbly chin pressing against her cold cheek, and she turned to him and buried her face in his warmth, filling her nostrils with his peppery Neil-ish scent. She was weighing up whether to turn the embrace into a snog, when a familiar voice said:
“Hey, you two, get a room!”
She sprang guiltily away.
“Hello, mate,” said Neil, turning warmly to greet Gavin.
“Hi Gav,” Sara said, giving him a feeble wave.
“What have you done with the ball and chain?” asked Neil.
“She took the kids to the swings,” Gav replied. “I’m supposed to liaise with you.”
“Liaise?” Sara said, grinning.
“That’s what she said, ‘Liaise with them and bring them down here, Gav.’”
“I don’t believe you,” laughed Sara. “Lou doesn’t ‘liaise’. She wouldn’t know how.”
“What does she do, then?” Gavin tilted his chin at her, smiling.
“She ‘hooks up’,” Sara said, “she ‘scouts out’.”
“Nope,” Gavin said, shaking his head, “you’ve got her all wrong. She’s a big liaiser, is Lou. She’s forever fucking liaising. I say to the kids, ‘Where’s Mum?’ And they go, ‘She’s liaising, Dad.’”
Sara shook her head, laughing.
“You kill me,” she said.
Neil grinned politely.
“Anyway,” said Gavin, “Patrick and Caleb have got the right idea.” He nodded towards two dots careering down the hill towards the playground.
“Hey, wait for us!” bellowed Neil, galumphing after them, leaving Gavin and Sara to bring up the rear.
The fine autumn weather had brought out the whole of Greenwich, and the playground was packed. Young mums in angora beanies and Ugg boots were psyching teenage hoodies into giving up their swings for little Olivia or Ethan. Grannies in quilted jackets fretted alongside hijabed Somali women at the bottom of the slide. Six-figure dads guarded all-terrain buggies while their wives debated Montessori versus Steiner over the sandpit.
“Jesus!” said G
avin. “Needle in a haystack.”
But Caleb and Patrick homed in on their friends like a couple of heat-seeking missiles and Sara found Lou nearby, chatting to Neil as she rocked Zuleika back and forth on a springy horse.
“Hi,” she said, her heart lifting as Lou enfolded her in a perfumed embrace.
“I have to get out of here,” Lou said, laughing cheerfully, “it’s too much.”
“Oh sorry,” said Sara, “have you been here ages?”
“No, just feels like it,” she said, plucking Zuley off the horse and delivering her into Gavin’s arms, before either of them had time to protest. The next thing Sara knew, Lou was steering her out of the mayhem towards the tearooms.
They carried their cappuccinos over to a quiet table in the corner, next to a bad painting of the Cutty Sark. The windows were steamed up and a trellis intertwined with plastic ivy screened them from the bustle of the room. Lou burrowed in her bag and brought out a moleskin notebook.
“So…” she said, “your book.”
Sara snorted with laughter.
“What?” said Lou.
“Just, you know, ‘my book’!”
“Sara! You have to stop putting yourself down. You’re not doing yourself any favours. It’s really competitive out there. Nobody wants to hear from an author who’s not got the courage of her convictions. Do you respect my opinion?”
Sara wiped the smile off her face and met Lou’s eye. “Yes.”
“Well, I’m telling you that this is a really remarkable piece of writing.”
“Thanks.”
Lou went on to give Sara a detailed critique of her work: her characters were compelling; her style lyrical; her flashbacks well-timed. Lou thought the childhood Nora might have a different voice to the adult one – her vocabulary would be limited, she pointed out. A child of seven would probably not use the word “egotistical”.
“Good point,” said Sara.
“But the only significant flaw, as I see it…” said Lou and Sara braced herself, “… is that you bottle out of the rape scene.”
“Well, I wanted it to be ambiguous…”
“I think you didn’t want to write it.”
“Um… maybe.”
“The thing is, Sara, writing’s scary. You have to be prepared to go deep.”
Sara nodded.
“And when your brain’s shouting, ‘No, no, I’m not going to think that thought; it’s too dirty, it’s too scary, it’s too painful, that’s when you must make yourself think it and make yourself write it.”
“Well, I was sort of going on the basis that the best horror movies leave something to the imagination.”
She might as well have said “The dog ate my homework.”
“Have you seen Antichrist?”
Sara shook her head.
“You should.”
By the time they had finished, the chill cabinet was down to its last sad egg sandwich and was being refilled with clingfilmed cream teas.
“So,” said Lou, shovelling clutter back into her leather duffel bag, “do you know where you’re going with it now?”
“Yes,” said Sara, “absolutely.”
Lou picked up her phone, dialled and held it to her ear. Sara laid a hand on her forearm.
“Thank you,” she murmured, her eyes pricking a bit.
Lou patted her hand magnanimously as she started to speak into the phone:
“Hi, we’re done,” she said. “Where are you?”
She rolled her eyes and hung up.
“I might have known.”
They were sitting at a trestle table overlooking the river. Gavin and Neil were each nursing a pint, and if the empty crisp packets and cola bottles all around them were anything to go by, the children had been well-catered for. The boys had long since got bored with throwing stones in the water and waving at the passengers on passing tourist boats and had contrived a homemade skate park on the pavement from a couple of stray traffic cones and a beer crate. Zuley had fallen asleep on Gavin’s lap, her sweetly pouting mouth connected by a gossamer strand of drool to the lapel of her father’s coat. Seeing the women approaching, Neil scrambled eagerly to his feet.
“What’ll it be, guys? Name your poison.”
The low sun was hot, and against a mother-of-pearl sky, even the Isle of Dogs looked picturesque. There seemed little to take issue with, and the women installed themselves happily at the table and awaited their drinks. They had another round and then another, their tolerance of the shriek and rattle of the boys’ hijinks increasing in inverse proportion to that of their fellow drinkers, most of whom were driven away within the hour. The conversation moved from small talk, via highfalutin’ debate to ribald anecdote. Gavin, it turned out, was privy to some hair-raising art-world gossip. Of course, it had all quietened down now, he said, but the things that used to go on in the old days at the Colony Room Club, you would not believe. Sara wasn’t sure she did believe them. She thought herself reasonably broad-minded but, for the life of her, she couldn’t see how some of the sexual practices Gavin described would be physically possible, let alone pleasurable. Still, she laughed along, not wanting to seem like a prude and hoping he wasn’t sending her up. She was relieved when the conversation evolved into a more serious debate on whether fetishism could also be art, although after three glasses of Sauvignon Blanc, her opinions, which she was surprised to find quite decisive on the matter, proved harder to articulate than she would have liked.
At last, the sun dipped behind the tower blocks and cranes, casting fingers of gold across the roiling black water and turning the sky briefly fluorescent. Sara hunched her shoulders against the cold. Her teeth had started to chatter, but she wasn’t going to be the first to call time on what had been a magical day. She stole a glance at Gavin, wondering, as she found herself doing often, what he was thinking. The expression on his face was contemplative, but changed, as she watched, to one of disbelief, and then dismay.
“Bloody hell, she’s pissing on me,” he said.
As Zuley woke up and realised what she had done, she cried and struggled. Gavin tried to stand up, a cola bottle got knocked over and deposited its dregs on Lou’s Orla Keily scarf. The boys became rebellious when instructed to quit what had become a fiercely competitive game that had been nearing its climax. For a moment, things looked like they would turn ugly. And then a strange thing happened, Gavin whipped out his iPhone and called a taxi; he distracted Zuley with a stale potato crisp out of the ashtray and made a joke about having been pissed on by women all his life; Lou corralled the boys and persuaded them that the big and clever thing would be for them to travel home on the top deck of the bus with her and Sara. There would be a short intermission, and then the party would reconvene at Gavin and Lou’s place, complete with roaring fires and takeaway food. What was not to like? In its wit and resourcefulness, the plan felt like a rabbit out of a hat, a triumph of the creative over the banal, and proof, if proof were needed, that Gavin and Lou were a class act.
It was in this spirit of hard-won camaraderie that Sara and Lou, Caleb, Patrick, Arlo and Dash all trudged the last half-mile from the bus stop to their road, the older boys keeping their spirits up by composing a rap whose sexual precocity and casual misogyny would have made their mothers’ blood run cold had they not been deep in discussion about the challenges of raising sons. But as she neared her own front gate, Sara’s blood ran cold anyway for standing on the path, dressed smart casual, and carrying, respectively, a box of Belgian chocolates and a bottle of Montepulciano, were Carol and Simon.
“Shit!” she said under her breath. “Shit! Shit! Shit!”
“What?” Lou asked.
But by now they had drawn level.
“You did say seven…?” Carol said.
“I did. But you know what? No point me pretending – I’d completely forgotten. I’m really sorry.”
Carol’s face fell.
“Well I’d better go and tell the babysitter we won’t be needing her...�
�
“Come to ours!” said Lou.
“What?” Carol looked at her wildly.
“Why not? This is our fault, really. We hijacked them, didn’t we, Sara?”
Sara tried for a smile.
“Only, it was such a gorgeous day and we ended up staying out much longer than we meant to. We were going to get a takeaway from that new place. You really would be very welcome to join us.”
Sara watched Carol wrestle with the choice. Would she opt for the moral high ground or go for the riskier pleasures of an evening off-piste? The latter, it turned out – they’d have to pay the babysitter, anyway, and it was ages since she and Simon had had an Indian, so, why not? Sara glanced at Simon, whose rictus of barely disguised horror must have mirrored her own.
8
“Oh,” said Gav, opening the door, “hello.”
“Have you ordered the food yet?”
Lou hurried past him to the kitchen, leaving Sara to signal with a comic widening of her eyes that this turn of events was not of her choosing. The boys stampeded upstairs. Carol, following Sara’s lead, hung her coat on the newel post and they trooped through to the kitchen, where they found Neil on the phone to the Moti Mahal. Everyone crowded in the doorway and watched him change the order with patient good humour, once, twice, three times, under Lou’s overexcited supervision.
“Forty-five minutes,” he said, hanging up. “Hope you’re hungry.”
“That’s very kind,” Simon said to the room at large. “We’d have been happy just to stay for a drink.”
He sat down unhappily at the kitchen table and shrugged his waxed jacket onto the back of his chair.
“No problem,” said Gavin, “the more the merrier. We’ve been meaning to get you round for ages, haven’t we, Lou?”
Lou nodded eagerly and Sara could only wonder at her disingenuousness in making such a claim. It had, after all, been months since the housewarming and Carol was no fool. She sat, now, fingers laced on the laminated tabletop, glancing around the kitchen with the conspicuous curiosity of a robin after a snowfall. What must she make of the kitsch coloured cocktail glasses, the Mexican death mask, the bobbly, hand-knitted tea cosy? Sara smiled to herself. That had been her, in the beginning – she recognised the air of bewilderment, of dismay, actually, that the rules of good taste should be so wantonly flouted. She got it now, though. She stood up, abruptly, and walked over to Lou and Gavin’s fridge, flung it open with a proprietorial air.
The People at Number 9 Page 7