Natalie and Kit were so arty and bohemian. They’d started the dancing, and it was definitely bordering on the dirty kind. You felt almost like you shouldn’t watch. Natalie had the kind of untamed curly hair that made women like Georgie try perms, the sexy kind.
Annie and Rupert – the Hawtreys – so posh they were almost aliens. Easily the grandest people she’d ever known. This house, this effortlessly glorious coastal home they were all in now, had been in Annie’s family for generations. She’d spent summers here all her life. This weekend – this extraordinary, pinch-yourself weekend – was just normal for her.
Flick was wild and funny. Her husband Andrew was the only one who’d seemed distracted today – his mobile kept ringing and she’d seen him several times circling by the groyne, speaking on it. Flick just teased him, and he didn’t seem to mind at all. They’d been married less than a year. You could see the newlywed sparkle between them – the tenderness. His proud eyes followed her everywhere she walked.
Vanessa and Ross seemed intellectual. They’d met at Cambridge, she knew. She imagined all their other friends were professors and junior government ministers and book editors. Georgie was pretty sure she wasn’t smart enough to get into a serious conversation with them. She wasn’t quite as sure who made her feel that way – was it them, or did she do it to herself?
But here she was. Here they were, the three of them. Her, Phil, and Liam, curled up now under a crochet blanket on an ancient green velvet chaise at the foot of the bed in the room they’d been given. Liam, her beautiful and precious little boy, with his ginger curls and his dusting of pale freckles, was, it seemed, her golden ticket into this particular club.
They wouldn’t have been her friends at school or university, these women – she was sure of it. She’d have envied them, imitated them, admired them, maybe even despised them.
It was different for the guys. Guys didn’t evaluate. Men didn’t keep score. Not in the same way, she didn’t think. They might have all been on the same football team, or propping up the same bar, and it would have been easier for them to be friends. They’d fallen, it seemed, into a quick and easy, matey friendship. If they had less in common than their wives – maybe if they only had in common those wives and their children and their postcodes – it didn’t seem so obvious.
It was always more complicated for the women. Over a few months, via dozens of playdates, a hundred cups of tea, and a Christmas fair committee all this had happened, and now they were a gang. She’d even used the word, talking on the phone to her mother, turning down an invitation to stay for the Bank Holiday. ‘We’d have loved to, but we’re away with the gang.’
And there were years to come. Years and years. These children would grow up together. And these people were going to be her friends. Hers and Phil’s. She wanted to savour every moment, but at the same time, she couldn’t wait. And it could only get better, right?
THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING
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First published 2020
Copyright © Elizabeth Noble, 2020
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Cover illustrations by Zoe More O’Ferrall
Extract from To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
Published by William Heinemann.
Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited. © 2018
ISBN: 978-1-405-93455-8
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
The Family Holiday Page 33
