‘I know it’s daunting, when you first start,’ he said casually – but it felt like he’d read my mind.
‘It kind of is,’ I admitted. ‘I know I’m meant to be learning, but it feels like there’s just so much to learn – not just the work, but how everything in the firm fits together, if you see what I mean.’
He nodded. ‘All the moving parts. All the unfamiliar faces, and the hierarchies, and not wanting to put a foot wrong.’
‘Yes, exactly.’
‘When I joined the firm, open-plan offices were only just starting to be introduced. Most of us had rooms still, either alone or shared. And the first thing my senior partner said to me was, “Young man, we have an open-door policy here.”’
‘That sounds nice.’
‘That’s what I thought. Except he didn’t mean that his door was always open – he meant ours were to be, all the time. He didn’t want us skiving off – napping under our desks, looking at Page Three, that kind of thing.’
I laughed.
‘We used to get to wine and dine clients much more, back then. Now, it’s all breakfast meetings and filtered tap water, and salads at one’s desk. The work’s no easier but things have changed on the hospitality side. I used to get tickets to the cricket at Lord’s every year from one client, invited to Royal Ascot by another – now, Compliance would have a fit if we tried to get away with that.’
I laughed again, and said that I supposed it was a good thing we worked a bit more transparently now, then instantly worried that it made me sound judgy and uptight. I was feeling distinctly tipsy after my two cocktails, but I was determined to be on my best behaviour, to make a good impression, to be the girl who could hold her own in a social situation as well as at work.
‘But speaking of hospitality,’ Gordon said, ‘you must be famished, you poor thing. Come on, let’s grab a bite to eat.’
He stood and so did I, taking a second to steady my swimming head. Another of Gordon’s gestures must have summoned another suited staff member, who was hovering by our side.
‘A table for two for dinner, Mr Poulton?’
‘That would be wonderful, Danilo.’
‘This way then, sir, madam.’
I was fairly sure no one had ever called me madam in my life before. It felt excitingly grown-up, but also slightly absurd. I resisted the urge to giggle and walked obediently through another doorway into the next room. It was more brightly lit than the bar, a huge chandelier suspended from the ceiling illuminating tables with cloths draped in snowy folds like icing on a Christmas cake, and twinkling off crystal glasses and silver cutlery.
Danilo pulled out a chair for me, and when I lowered my bottom down to it he pushed it expertly back in again before draping a napkin over my lap. If I hadn’t seen it on Downton Abbey, I’d have had no clue what he was doing, and maybe pushed his hand away or something.
‘We’ll have a bottle of the Taittinger for now, I think,’ Gordon said, and I thought, Oh my God, so that’s how you pronounce it! ‘And then seek Gustav’s advice on the wine once we’ve decided what to eat.’
A menu had been placed in front of me, I noticed, and I inspected it blearily. I seemed to have got a bit of mascara on one of my contact lenses, and it was threatening to pop out of my eye. I blinked and tried to focus. All I could see was a list of expensive-sounding ingredients, and no prices anywhere at all.
‘You’re not a vegetarian, are you?’ Gordon asked. ‘No allergies, or anything like that?’
‘Oh, no. Nothing like that. I eat anything.’
A piping-hot bread roll had been placed on my side plate, and there was a dish of butter in between us, which smelled like some sort of herb had been added to it before it had been whipped into a soft peak like buttercream on a cupcake. I wasn’t sure if there was a special way you were supposed to eat bread rolls, but it smelled too good for me to wait and see what Gordon did with his. I cut the roll in half and smeared butter on it before taking a massive bite.
‘Oh my God. That’s so good.’
‘Everything here is. Shall I order for us both?’
I was totally focused on containing the river of butter that threatened to run down my chin, so I could only nod. There was icy cold champagne in my glass, which when I took a gulp I discovered was as toasty and buttery as the bread.
‘We’ll both start with the scallops,’ Gordon told a waiter, who had materialised as if by magic. ‘And then the grouse for me and the lamb for the lady.’
I drank more champagne and sipped some water, but only a little – not enough to be sensible, but too much to stop me needing to wee. I was going to have to get up, find the toilet, maybe retrieve my bag and check my face and hair. Did I do it now, or wait until after our starter? Was it rude to go to the bathroom between courses in a place like this? I had no idea, but go I must.
‘Excuse me a second,’ I said, standing up.
The lights had been dimmed a bit without me noticing, but they still glinted off every surface. The deep carpet under my feet made me feel as if I was wading through water. I made my way back to the door, carefully navigating between tables, but still bumping into the door frame as I passed through.
‘I’m sorry, where’s the…’ I asked yet another suited young man.
‘Just through there, madam.’
He leaned forward in a little half-bow and I wondered whether I was meant to do a curtsey in return, but stopped myself just in time.
I found myself in a brilliantly lit, marble room with a vase of fresh flowers on a little table, a squashy pink brocade armchair, vials of expensive liquid soap and hand cream, and a pile of rolled-up fluffy towels. I stared at my reflection in the mirror – my cheeks were flushed and my eyes slightly bloodshot, but my make-up was still mostly in place. I gripped the edge of the washbasin and my reflection swam in and out of focus.
‘Alice,’ I told myself. ‘Please, don’t be fucking stupid.’
But I suspect that, at that point in the evening, it was already too late.
Ten
I didn’t have much of a chance to think about seeing Joe and Zoë in the restaurant that lunchtime, because afternoon trade at the Nag’s Head was brisk to the point of insanity. I served and cleared and wiped and served again all afternoon, and it was a massive relief when Shirley turned up after spending the afternoon having tea with her elderly aunt and I was able to head home.
I was expecting the flat to be in darkness – it was a weeknight, after all, and Joe was rarely home before eight. But I was wrong. The lights were on, and I could hear music pumping from the flat from a couple of doors away– not unsociably noisy, but loud enough to be heard from the street. It was some kind of nineties grunge – Pearl Jam or Soundgarden or something – one of the bands that Joe liked and I didn’t.
Still, if he’d got in early and decided to relax with some tunes, who was I to grumble? He was home, and we could enjoy a rare evening together.
I fitted my key in the lock and opened the door, calling a greeting. But the music was too loud for me to be heard, and I didn’t repeat myself. I just stood there in the hallway, looking through to the kitchen. Joe was there, dancing. There was a wooden spoon in his hand and he was holding it like a mic, singing along to the music. And there with him, her wild curls flying, was Zoë. She was wearing a frayed denim mini skirt and a strappy violet top, and I could see the muscles in her arms and shoulders. Her legs were toned and slim, her feet bare. She moved with the same easy grace I’d noticed when she was assembling meals in her food cart: like the whole room – our whole flat – had been especially designed around her.
The track ended, and the two of them whooped and laughed.
I stepped forward, putting down my bag, and said, ‘Hello.’
‘Alice!’ Joe said. ‘I didn’t hear you come in. Zoë’s here.’
I resisted the temptation to say waspishly that I’d noticed.
‘Hi, Zoë.’
‘Hey, Alice! I’m sorry about the short n
otice. The friend I’ve been sofa-surfing with had her new flatmate move in, and he needed the room I was using. So here I am. Thanks so much for letting me stay. We’re cooking chilli. It’s vegan – I hope that’s okay.’
Along with the music, I’d noticed the smell as soon as I opened the door: a rich, spicy aroma. I hadn’t eaten since my lunchtime sandwich, but I suddenly didn’t feel hungry any more.
I glanced around the flat. The door to what had been our spare bedroom stood open. The desk where Joe and I sometimes worked in the evenings had an unfamiliar laptop on it, surrounded by a tangle of wires and chargers. The bed had been made – badly, presumably by Joe, who, while perfectly house-trained in most ways, was incapable of putting a duvet into a duvet cover without the result looking like a pack of sausages – and was piled with clothes. A half-empty backpack blocked the doorway.
On the kitchen worktop, I could see a set of silver steel knives that definitely weren’t ours, several cast-iron pans and a food processor – also not ours. There was a vat of brick-red sauce simmering on the hob, filling the room with its steam.
And on the dining table, on top of a pile of clean washing, was a large, fluffy ginger cat that was definitely, categorically not ours.
When it saw me, it opened its amber eyes, yawned hugely, then twisted around and started to wash its arse.
‘This is Frazzle,’ Zoë said. ‘He’s a rescue cat, and an ace mouser. You’re not allergic, are you?’
I wasn’t – not to cats, anyway. But I couldn’t shake the suspicion that Zoë herself might make me come out in an unsightly rash and start wheezing.
Still, she was here now – her and her furry feline friend. I’d agreed to her staying and I had no option but to make the best of it. And, after all, the poor girl had recently split up with her boyfriend. She was probably nursing a broken heart. Although, dancing in my kitchen with my boyfriend with her perfect hair and perfect body, she hadn’t looked broken-hearted in the slightest.
I stepped into the kitchen and gave Joe a brief kiss. I wasn’t sure whether I should shake Zoë’s hand, or kiss her too, or what – but she made the decision for me, folding me into a hug.
‘Thank you so much for letting me move in, Alice,’ she said. ‘You’re incredibly kind. Frazzle and I will try not to be any trouble.’
‘You’re welcome.’ I moved out of the embrace of her surprisingly strong arms and tried to smile.
‘I hope we won’t get in the way,’ Zoë burbled on, seemingly oblivious to my discomfort. ‘I’ve got a job in a café in Covent Garden for the next two weeks, so I’ll be out all day. And I can make myself useful here. I’m not great at cleaning but I can cook and stuff. And Frazz just sleeps all day. Once he’s settled in we can leave a window open for him and he’ll come and go as he pleases.’
I didn’t say that, although our area was a lot less rough than it used to be, leaving a window open while the flat was empty was just asking for some opportunistic thief to break in and nick everything of value, starting with Zoë’s fancy chef’s knives, which would probably turn up a couple of weeks later at a murder scene. And I also didn’t say that if anyone seemed in the way right then, it was me.
Instead, I asked about Zoë’s job, and she chattered away about the ultra-hip vegan place where she was working, and how more and more people were coming around to the idea of a plant-based diet.
‘Of course, I eat meat sometimes, when I have to for work,’ she said. ‘But veganism isn’t seen as this rigid thing any more, you know. It’s more about treading lightly on the planet.’
Joe screwed the top off a bottle of wine and poured us all a glass.
‘Welcome, I guess. Officially.’ I touched my glass to Zoë’s.
‘I shouldn’t really,’ she said. ‘It’s Chilean, and the food miles… But hey, we’re celebrating, aren’t we?’
‘Of course we are,’ Joe replied. ‘How long until this is ready, do you reckon? And shall I cook some rice? Make a salad? Set the table?’
‘We’ll need to get Frazz to move,’ Zoë said. ‘Poor boy, you’re so comfy there, aren’t you? Are you settling into your new home? I put his litter tray in the bathroom, by the way. I hope that’s okay.’
She scooped the cat up, and he draped over her arm like a large, stripy fur coat and began to purr. I put my glass down and picked up the pile of washing, now liberally coated with orange fluff. Oh well – Joe’s jeans were on the top of the pile and had borne the brunt of it. Frazzle was Zoë’s cat and Zoë was Joe’s ex and so, really, he deserved it.
Putting our clothes hastily away in the bedroom, I tried to stifle the feeling of resentment that had crept – or rather rushed – up on me. It wasn’t like Zoë had just turned up out of nowhere. Joe and I had discussed her coming to stay. It was the only way we could make up the shortfall caused by me not bringing in a proper wage any more and spaffing money I didn’t have on shoes I’d probably never wear. And she’d cooked dinner for us, and that was nice, wasn’t it?
But still. She’d been dancing round the kitchen with my boyfriend. In her bloody mini skirt with her auburn hair and her toned shoulders. And Joe, in those few moments before the song ended and he noticed me, had looked so different – so carefree and uninhibited and happy.
And I was going to trip over a cat’s toilet whenever I went for a wee myself.
I glanced at my reflection in the mirror over the dressing table. I didn’t have time to do anything about my limp hair or lack of make-up or the spot that had erupted out of nowhere on my chin. But I could, at least, do something about the fact that my face looked like the bit of Frazzle’s anatomy that he’d just been washing so thoroughly. Having a cat’s bum on my clean washing was one thing; having a mouth that looked like one really wasn’t on.
‘Smile, Alice,’ I commanded silently, and my reflection reluctantly obeyed.
‘Now go out there and be nice.’ In the mirror, my head nodded slowly.
I turned and left the bedroom, closing the door behind me even though we usually left it open. Usually, there was no need to worry about our privacy, but now it felt like there was.
Joe and Zoë were in the kitchen. The table had been set with three places, and Frazzle had settled himself down in the centre of them, looking disapprovingly at the open bottle of wine – a fresh one, I noticed; Joe and Zoë must have torn through the first. I felt a brief flash of empathy for the cat – like me, he’d had his life turned upside down and, like me, he was going to have to make the best of it.
‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was playing on the speaker (that one, even I recognised), but more quietly now. And Zoë and Joe weren’t dancing – or not as such. In our tiny kitchen, Zoë was tipping the chilli out of its pan into a serving bowl while Joe placed a sieve full of rice over hot water to steam. Yet the two of them seemed to move around each other easily, naturally, as if there was enough room in there for a whole brigade of chefs.
‘So Amanda and Carl got married,’ Zoë was saying. ‘He proposed to her in New York, in Central Park. There’s this thing you can do where you get a company to organise a picnic with fresh oysters and champagne and a violinist serenading you, and you get taken there in a carriage pulled by one of those poor horses. They did that. It cost a fortune. And, like, six months later – over.’
‘Carl was always a strange one,’ Joe replied. ‘Hey, Alice, would you mind popping the salad on the table?’
‘Tell Frazzle to get off,’ Zoë said. ‘He might listen to you – he never does to me.’
‘And Ben Denver’s in San Francisco,’ Joe carried on, as I took the salad bowl to the table and gently nudged Frazzle, who looked at me like I’d just committed a war crime before jumping to the floor with an affronted meow. ‘He went out there with some bonkers start-up idea, but as far as I know he’s working in a juice bar now.’
Great, I thought. First of many evenings I’m going to have to spend listening to my boyfriend and his ex rehashing their shared history I wasn’t part of, their
shared friends I’ve never heard of.
‘Loads of people are rejecting conventional employment models now, though.’ Zoë whisked past me with the bowl of chilli. ‘No one wants a job for life any more. Why would you?’
‘Like Alice,’ Joe said. They both looked at me, their heads tilted to one side. ‘Come on,’ their faces said. ‘We don’t want you to feel left out.’
So, while Zoë spooned chilli into bowls and Joe passed around a bowl of grated cheese (not vegan, but that was apparently okay because it had been in our fridge anyway, and beginning to dry out, and evidently it was more problematic for cows to be exploited if the product of their labour went to waste than if it didn’t), I explained about the Nag’s Head.
‘That’s so totally amazing,’ Zoë said. ‘It sounds so, like, authentic. Do they serve food? I bet they do. I’m thinking cockles and whelks and pie and liquor and stuff.’
I managed to laugh. ‘It’s not that authentic. Think more oven chips and microwave lasagne.’
‘And pickled eggs and pork scratchings,’ Joe remembered, and we shared a smile, remembering the evening we’d spent there together.
It wasn’t even that long ago, I thought, with a jolt of sadness. So why did it feel like another world?
But Zoë was oblivious to my sudden surge of emotion. ‘What’s it called?’
‘The Nag’s Head.’
Zoë shook her head. ‘It shouldn’t be called that any more. Nag is a pejorative term for a horse that’s considered to be of low breeding. It’s like being racist, or classist, only about an animal. Totally not okay. Never mind the misogynist connotations of nag when used as a verb.’
Just Saying: An absolutely perfect and feel-good romantic comedy Page 8
