‘Oh God, Harris, yuck,’ James said.
‘Sorry, DAD,’ Harris said, yelling, ‘Goooaallllll! Mona, I am king of tiny man football! I am Lord of the Dance, said he!’
Harris did a revolting gyrating dance to this, leaving James feeling sick with dislike.
Ramona turned the music up and Harris started telling his anecdote about drop-kicking a plastic flamingo off Kensington Roof Gardens in front of Nick Grimshaw again, indicating that James’s ordeal was over. For now.
He turned back to his laptop and regrouped. Parker would see Anna again at the exhibition launch party. He had two unappealing options in front of him: wait for a quiet moment with Parker and admit he made up the whole girlfriend thing, begging him not to say anything to Anna. Maybe claim he was on anti-depressants that made him briefly loopy, or something.
Yet Parker was, with all goodwill, something of a toolbox. He’d let it slip, or he’d tell a flesh-eating microbe like Harris in confidence. He could imagine Harris’s vegetable girlfriend jokes would still be going strong in 2020. No, he might as well tell them all as tell Parker.
This put the next option up against some pretty stiff competition in the unappealing stakes. Keep Parker and Anna apart at the exhibition launch and hope to hell she never hears of this.
Yup. James was going to have to go with the high-wire Option Two.
35
It looked as if Laurence was right, never a comfortable thing to admit. James’s own investigations when he got home from the theatre suggested Eva was doing some sort of on-the-spot domestic inspection.
He’d observed the pale circle left by the flower pot on the windowsill, but in order to gnaw the foliage in a death-or-glory shower of terracotta powder, Luther would’ve had to hurl himself at the flowers and drag them onto the floor with his teeth.
Incredible feats of athletic dexterity weren’t your go-to associations with that cat. Luther often seemed surprised by his own tail. James also had a notion that he’d left the bedroom door half open, not closed, as he found it. Although Eva could be going in to pick up more of her things, he supposed.
But then Eva texted the next day to suggest they meet on the Heath for a walk and a talk that evening. It was the first time she’d shown any interest in the process of possibly reconciling with James since she left. So it seemed the ‘putting the house on the market’ threat had begun to work its magic. What an empty victory it felt.
It was a mild evening for the time of year and when he saw Eva waiting for him, hair split in two winsome little buns at the nape of her neck like a college kid, he felt heavy of heart, heavy of limb, and very old. Eva got straight down to business, arms folded tightly against her chest as they tramped through the park, at a speed that suggested they were going somewhere.
‘Don’t you think you should ask me before you put the house up for sale?’
‘I have done. I told you I was getting it valued.’
‘I didn’t think we’d made the decision to sell it.’
‘You’ve left. I don’t need a house that size for myself.’
‘Are you trying to bounce me into a decision?’
James fought to keep his temper under control. ‘Shouty man in park’ wasn’t the role he wanted to play this evening.
‘Bounce you? Is the deal that I sit around like an idiot, waiting for you and Finn to finish The Sofa Series in charcoal? Moving on to a whirlpool bath in watercolours? You’ve left me, Eva. Don’t you know what that means?’
He breathed in air so cold that it hurt his throat and lungs, and waited for Eva to say it was over with Finn, it was all a mistake, she didn’t want to sell the house. Why would she be here, otherwise?
She didn’t say anything.
‘Sara’s must be feeling a little cramped. Doesn’t her bloke mind?’
He looked sideways. Eva stared at the ground.
James lurched, as if he was in an old Mini with bad suspension that had gone over a speed bump.
‘You’re not at Sara’s?’
She pursed her lips and shook her head.
His ribcage was suddenly far too small for all the organs inside it. He wanted to ask whether that was that then in a robust way, but his windpipe felt like it had been flattened.
They walked on.
‘So much for the not sleeping together, eh? What a shocking twist,’ he said eventually, hearing the misery in his voice. There were no points to be scored. He’d lost. ‘Hope you’ll forgive me now for calling bullshit on the stuff you called art and I called foreplay, what with me being right and everything.’
‘This is it, James. All you care about is whether I’ve had sex. You’re not interested in the reasons I left.’
‘All you’ve said is that you were bored. I don’t know what you were expecting marriage to be. We were living together anyway. Marrying is a party, a holiday, then more of the same. Are you going to make a go of the wild life with Finn, then? How’s that going to work when he’s clubbing and you’re knocking forty?’
‘Finn talks to me like an equal. Not some hausfrau whose opinions he finds ridiculous.’
‘Oh God, Eva. As if. Are you Betty Draper with the shotgun all of a sudden?’
‘I’ll tell you when I knew I had to leave, James. That evening when Jack and Caron came round.’
‘What? My tagine wasn’t that bad.’
‘You spent all night talking to Caron.’
‘The civil servant?’
‘And you were fascinated in everything she had to say, laughing away. You couldn’t care less what I have to say. You think I’m trivial.’
‘Of course I was interested in what she had to say, I had to be. It’s polite, with guests.’
‘And then she said private education shouldn’t have charitable status, and you agreed with her!’
‘She made a good case. Also, I thought you felt that way?’
‘I’d be out of a job!’
James had a memory of an early date at a gastro pub in Clapham, and a conversation about how Eva was only doing her job to stockpile money so she could set up as a tutor. Then she’d take on talented cases for free as well as wealthier clients, and make the world fairer. He remembered thinking she was so giving, and the only person he’d ever met who looked wonderful in beige.
‘And then my friends. What did you call them? Captain Cocksman and the low lights with highlights.’
Ach, they were awful, though. Eva’s promiscuous, hairdresser friend Wolfram was the kind who’d bitch about his dying mother’s lack of a cut and blow dry. And the clubbing harpies and self-appointed ‘prominent creatives’ who’d met at his salon were just plain frightening. Velociraptors in Kurt Geiger. James was fairly sure one of them had tried it on with him at her ‘cook out’ in Kew. They’d have been encouraging the Finn thing, without a doubt.
‘Who were you with? At the pub the other night?’ Eva carried on, as if this wasn’t a non sequitur.
‘I was with several people.’
‘The woman with the long hair who stared at me.’
Hope glimmered. Given that couldn’t be true, was Eva projecting rivalry?
‘Anna? She’s someone I’m working with.’
‘Are you seeing her?’
James was unsure how to answer. Was it looking a gift horse in the mouth to admit to Eva she had zero cause to be jealous? He’d try for evasive bluster.
‘Would you care if I was?’
‘You can do what you want, James, you’re a free agent. Are you seeing her?’
‘So that’s a no, you don’t care.’
They passed another young couple on the path. They smiled at them as if they were all in Happily Coupled-Up Club.
James looked at a kid flying a kite in the middle distance, gurgling with excitement as its ribbons rippled.
Eva stopped and turned to him, nose and cheeks chilled to bright pink. Most people would look like a slab of boiled ham, but she looked like a tuck shop sugar mouse.
Time to seize th
e initiative.
‘I’m putting the house on the market. I don’t know what’s happening with you and Finn but I’m going to start moving on,’ James said.
‘Are you seeing that woman?’
James hesitated. It was a good sign she wanted to know. Don’t lie, but don’t extinguish all doubt.
‘We’ve just hit it off as friends.’
When James got home, he steeled himself to look up Finn Hutchinson’s model profile online and found an entire website. He discovered he was an ‘aspiring musician’ – of course you are – who was also ‘a keen surfer who’s always chasing the swell’. Please do, chase it all the way to Beachy Head.
James found himself clicking through the portfolio photos, grimly hitting ‘next’ like a monkey with a toffee hammer.
One showed Finn in a tuxedo, tie undone, legs ‘alpha male’ apart in an armchair, like a 1970s brandy or Dunhill advert. ‘This was a great shoot. Channelling the Rat Pack, classic tux.’
In another one he was doing that awful aw-shucks-me? back of the head rub and smirk, leaning into the lens, spiky hair centre parted, in a V neck Fruit of the Loom t-shirt and silver dog-tags. ‘People use words like sexy hunk but I think I’m more of a goof.’
The next, he was sporting a ten-gallon hat and chambray shirt, chewing on a toothpick. It was captioned: ‘This look is the real me, outdoorsy.’ Yes. Because obviously you do a lot of cattle ranching in Dalston.
What did it all remind him of? It reminded him of Eva. Once when James had said something uxorious about how she was always dressed so well for every occasion, she said she was like an actress. She loved playing roles. James wondered if he’d missed an awful lot of warning signs.
How had this happened? He knew he’d have to fend off rivals with Eva, but he didn’t think he’d lose her while they were still shaking confetti out of their hair.
He suspected the answer lay in the same qualities he’d found so irresistible to begin with, that old cliché about growing to hate what you initially loved. She was like a shark, she could only swim forward. Or the bus in Speed that’d blow up if it dropped below fifty mph. He’d found Eva scarily exhilarating. He’d made the mistake of trying to settle down with scary and exhilarating.
Now he was just scared. In a crisis, there didn’t seem to be enough in common between them to find the language to discuss a way out of it.
Was it possible …? Don’t think it, James. Try not to think it.
He gazed at a photo of Finn leaning topless against a motorbike with a greasy rag thrown over his shoulder, fake oil smear on cheek, in baggy denim. ‘My philosophy of life? I like to be the one to create the “hell yeah!” moments.’
Contemplating these beautiful people, James couldn’t stop the ugly question forming.
Was it possible he was in love with someone he didn’t like?
36
‘Knock knock! Are you decent, Dr Alessi?’
‘Nearly there, Patrick!’ Anna called, thinking, please don’t picture me in the scud.
Anna nervously did a last check of hair and make-up in her smeary mirror and adjusted the blue wool dress over her stomach.
She’d try to keep her coat on for as long as possible until she had a drink inside her. It wasn’t low cut, but it was clingier than she was used to.
Not being a shopper, she’d left it until the last minute in Hobbs to throw 200 quid at the ‘what to wear to Theodora launch’ problem.
‘Victoria’s going to head over with us,’ Patrick said, with that strained we’re live on air don’t say fuck or bugger tone people use when alerting a colleague that a boss was within hearing range.
‘Lovely. Ready!’ Anna said, opening the door. Patrick’s raptures about how nice she looked were curtailed by Victoria glowering behind him.
Victoria Challis wasn’t just a formidable head of department, she was also formidable-looking. She was about five foot nothing, with grey pudding basin hair that somewhat curiously had squared-off sideburns cut in. In case you didn’t get the hint that she wasn’t going for ‘fluffy’, she also wore suit trousers with a man’s shirt and tie. Anna would have admired her flamboyant snook-cocking at society’s sartorial rules, yet she was always too busy being scared of her.
You might stereotypically assume Victoria was same-sex orientated, yet her husband of thirty years, Frank, worked in the maths department.
‘She looks more like her husband than he does,’ as an ungentlemanly colleague put it.
It wasn’t a long walk to the museum from UCL but it was made to feel significantly longer by Victoria firing questions at Anna about the exhibition. The tone was intimidating, even if there was nothing in them that Anna couldn’t handle.
In the style of one of her heroine’s contortionist sex shows, Anna knew Theodora back to front, standing on her head, with barley sprinkled in surprising places. Yet Patrick was clearly worried in case there was something she couldn’t answer, and kept buffeting Victoria with statements like: ‘You said John Herbert was delighted with your work, Anna?’ in an unsubtle manner.
Poison Challis looked increasingly irritated and eventually barked: ‘The woman has vocal cords of her own, Dr Price!’ Talking to Victoria was like opening the door to a blast furnace. This was at the moment they were handing their coats to the coat check staff at the British Museum, making Anna forget to say she’d keep hold of hers.
Patrick openly boggled as Anna’s coat came off. She started regretting her choice of dress. She cherished her platonic rapport with Patrick, and had no wish to disrupt it by parading tightly clad evidence of the fact she was female.
‘Anna, may I say, you look sensational,’ Patrick exclaimed, and Victoria rolled her eyes.
Anna was glad the room offered other, far more sensational things for them to look at. The British Museum’s Great Court looked wonderfully dramatic by night. The centrepiece was the cylindrical reading room, its perimeter lit by a ring of bright white lights, and hung with vertical banners advertising the Theodora show. The evening sky above was carved into diamonds by the vaulted roof. Anna felt her heart lift, and a stab of excitement.
There was the echoing hubbub of guests’ conversations in the stone space and waiters carrying trays of champagne flutes and breaded things on cocktail sticks, stands with the exhibition book and places to download the official app, as well as tours running in and out of the exhibition itself … well. As Aggy would say: er mer gerd. They were all here for Theodora. If Anna never had any children then she guessed this was the closest she’d come to the sensation of watching them collect their degree or get married.
She took a deep breath and tried what her dad had told her to do, years ago: find a way to hold on to and enjoy a quiet moment, in the middle of a melee. Quite a valuable skill when you lived with Judy and Aggy.
As she breathed deeply, for the second time in recent memory in a busy room she felt eyes on her, and saw that they belonged to James Fraser. He was looking at her with an expression of amused curiosity. Anna thought: I bet he’s thinking a glamorous dress on me is a humorous juxtaposition, like paintings of dogs playing poker. She tilted her head in acknowledgement and James raised his champagne glass.
‘Dr Alessi, welcome welcome! We did the old girl proud, I’d say?’
Anna turned to see the kindly John Herbert twinkling away at her.
‘Oh John, I think this is the best day of my life,’ Anna couldn’t help but gush.
‘Shall we press the flesh and tell everyone about the wonderful work you did?’ he said.
After circulating, chatting, making sure the corporate sponsors’ egos were suitably fluffed, the arts journalists duly briefed, and listening to a speech by the museum director, Anna felt half-cut and wildly proud.
A tap on the shoulder and Parker was stood behind her. Interesting shirt … did the tie dye actually have bells hanging off it?
‘What did you think to the app?’
‘It’s wonderful,’ Anna said. ‘Thank you.’
>
Having been the scourge of Parlez at that meeting, Anna bet she was the only person who had a small weep at her desk when she watched the clip of the actors.
She’d been frightened of seeing Theodora done badly, but the woman with the aquiline nose, serene bearing and eyes the colour of coffee grounds bore a spooky resemblance.
‘You know the bit on the fashions, called Dressed To Empress? That was mine.’
Anna smiled. ‘Excellent punning.’
‘So you guys can date openly, now the work’s done?’ Parker said.
‘Sorry?’
‘It’s OK,’ Parker said, quietly. ‘I saw you. I know.’
‘Saw me?’
‘You and James. At the theatre. I know about you two … y’know …’
Parker grinned and made the world’s least dignified mime of a curled fist and inserting and reinserting finger.
A deeply agitated-looking James appeared between them, looking down at Parker’s hands and back at Anna’s puzzled face.
‘Oh no, Parker. What have you done?’
‘I was saying you and Anna don’t need to keep your thing on the downlow anymore! James said you were keeping business and pleasure separate and now you can be all pleasure. Wocka wocka wah wah …’ Parker did a little side-to-side groin shimmy.
James rubbed his eye and looked like he wanted to evaporate.
‘You think we’re dating?’ Anna said to Parker, and James.
‘He said you were?’ Parker said, looking at James.
‘Uh … I. He saw us, and …’ James was visibly sweating and grimacing and Anna found she loved it. Truth be told, she was amazed James hadn’t bellowed: Her? Ugh! No! James Fraser, feeling ridiculous in front of her. Sweet dreams are made of this.
‘You weren’t supposed to tell anyone,’ she said.
James’s eyes widened. Long pause. ‘Yeah, sorry.’
‘Honestly. You try to have a highly secret fling. With literally no one knowing about it …’ she added, holding James’s gaze.
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