Billy came in just as Carol gave Ari the number of a lawyer who specialised in private adoptions and fudging the details.
‘This is the best way to play it,’ he said to Ari, though she still wasn’t convinced.
Sadie looked him up and down and sideways, then sniffed. ‘I suppose you’ve told Ariella that your wife doesn’t understand you.’
Billy steadily met her gaze. ‘Other way round. I don’t understand my wife, I never did.’
Ari’s bump got bigger and bigger so she couldn’t even see her feet any more. Carol came to Camden every week to buy her bags of groceries and bottles of pre-natal vitamins, and to beg Ari to stop wearing stilettos.
Carol also booked doctor’s appointments and scans and pre-natal classes that Ari never attended because she and Billy were in a mad sprint to get the songs finished.
It felt like the songs would never be finished, because there was always another hook in her head, a perfect chorus that wouldn’t leave her alone. Ari had to give birth to the songs before she could give birth to anything else.
Billy worried about her, especially when she could barely squeeze her bulk past the mixing desk and she got thrown out of the Saturday Girls for constantly being late for rehearsals and being hugely pregnant. But worrying didn’t come naturally to Billy. ‘You look like crap,’ he’d say. ‘Go home and go to bed and I’ll be back later.’
The summerhouse in November was Arctic, even with a Calor Gas heater. Ari would get into bed but it was hard to write songs on her guitar when she was buried under a mound of blankets, towels and old coats. Instead, she’d end up stroking her bump and because there weren’t any witnesses, she could finally say her silent sorries to the kid that would never be hers.
Chapter Twenty-one
Ellie was still planning her escape half an hour later.
She’d emailed her old college friends Esme and Sue, who lived in Paris, about the availability of their sofa bed, removed her freshly laundered underwear from the clothes dryer, but had got sidetracked by Deal or No Deal on her way to the kitchen to put the dirty wineglass in the dishwasher.
‘No deal, you utter numpty,’ she railed. ‘Not when you’ve still got the two hundred and fifty thousand and you just found the penny. For fuck’s sake, what is wrong with you?’
‘People ask me that all the time,’ said an amused voice, and David walked through the front door.
Ellie was horrified. ‘You’re not meant to be home for ages,’ she reminded him in an accusatory voice, because for the second day running he’d caught her off guard. She was still parading around in shorts, it was obvious she’d been drinking, and she hadn’t even removed her toe separators. It wasn’t the image she wanted to project, not after last night. Especially when he’d probably had Jessica on the phone spitting fury and demanding he leave work right away to come home and evict her. He looked very chipper for a man on that kind of mission.
‘Sometimes I finish early on a Friday night and no, before you ask, I have a big training run tomorrow morning so I got the tube home.’ He held up an M&S carrier bag. ‘I bought you supplies for the evening.’
‘That’s very kind of you.’ He seemed in such a good mood that Ellie didn’t want to ruin it by continuing last night’s tiff. Instead, she’d have to ruin it when she mentioned Jessica’s visit, because he was going to find out sooner or later. Probably sooner. Still, it was best not to hit him with the highlights as soon as he got home. ‘Supplies just for me?’
‘I’m going out,’ he said, passing the bag to her as he relieved her of the wineglass. ‘You’ll be all right on your own, won’t you?’
Ellie could use his absence to make a speedy getaway.
‘I have a ton of stuff to do,’ Ellie said, and rather than watch him take out everything she’d put in the dishwasher and rearrange it according to his arcane, ergonomic system she gazed out of the window. If he was going out, then she could call Chester so he could give her a lift to somewhere that wasn’t here. ‘Do you think you’ll be gone long?’
‘Depends,’ David said. He looked rather discomfited and Ellie instantly understood why. He was obviously seeing one of his glossy, go-getting women. Which was fine. Good luck to him. And good luck to whichever woman it was tonight, because she was always going to play second string to his career. Unless he was seeing Jessica, in which case, Ellie wished her only bad things.
‘Right. So, you’re seeing a girlfriend, are you? That’s good, because …’ She needed to strike pre-emptively and tell him that Jessica had popped round, in case he had a hot date with her, but the words stuck in Ellie’s throat. How could she even begin to explain what had happened? ‘I’d hate to think that I’m, well, you know, getting in the way.’
‘I don’t know why you’re suddenly so fixated on my love life,’ David said, looking at her curiously. ‘I’m going out for dinner.’
Ellie nodded. ‘That’s nice. Where are you going? Somewhere romantic?’
‘I’m going round to my parents’ for dinner, on my own. I’m not sure that counts as romantic. In fact, it would be quite disturbing if it did,’ he drawled. Ellie no longer had to torment herself with thoughts of Jessica and David together. Now she could imagine David being fussed and clucked over by his mother as she nagged him about his unmarried, childless state.
She even grinned. ‘Will there be chicken soup, even though the temperature is in the low nineties, and will you not be allowed to move on to the main course until you’ve finished every last drop in your bowl?’
David grinned back at her, entirely without guile. ‘You’ve met my mother, then?’
‘I haven’t, but I have a grandmother who always makes a major thing about Friday night dinner.’ Ellie let out a breath big enough to ruffle her hair. ‘I have to spend the week leading up to it on a juice detox so I’ll have room for the huge amount of food she shovels down me.’
Now, instead of doing a runner to someplace as yet unknown, Ellie wished she were on her way to Belsize Park. It was far, far too hot for chicken soup and it wasn’t even her night, but she wanted to sit around Sadie and Morry’s big table with her family, the people who loved her and accepted her. Well, apart from Aunt Carol, but Ari always said that that was nothing to do with Ellie and everything to do with Aunt Carol being a sour-faced cow since birth.
If David went soon, instead of calling Chester Ellie would call Morry. He’d come and pick her up and she could speed-eat her way through four courses, and if there really weren’t any photographers around, then she might just as well stay with her grandparents. So, really, she had to tell him that she was going and just … go.
‘You don’t look very happy. Is a pizza and a bottle of wine not going to cut it?’ David asked, and for a man who’d spent the day being dynamic and thrusting and doing shady things on behalf of his celebrity clients, and had a sweaty commute home, he seemed very smiley and relaxed. Like he’d put all the horrors of the week behind him and was ready to have some fun, in which case her vacating the premises would improve his mood even more.
‘It’s not that,’ she began. ‘It’s just … I have to … I’ve decided I can’t stay here any more. In fact, I’ve already started packing.’
His smile disappeared and he stilled, which made Ellie tense up, because it was the stillness of a big animal just before it pounced. ‘Oh,’ he said, eyebrows raised. ‘I thought we talked about this last night and we agreed—’
‘We did,’ she interrupted. ‘But now I feel that it’s … it’s inappropriate for me to continue staying here.’
‘Inappropriate?’ David carefully enunciated each syllable as if the word was unfamiliar. ‘Have you just stumbled out of the pages of a Jane Austen novel?’
‘No! And yes, it is inappropriate me staying here with you. People will talk. They’ll speculate, and I’m fed up with people speculating about me.’ She was getting a little strident as she worked up to her confession.
‘If no one knows you’re here, then how can the
y speculate about you being here?’ He was always able to cut though Ellie’s bluff with an incisive question that showed it up for the bullshit it was.
‘Well, I go swimming every day. I see your neighbours, and then—’
‘We had an agreement, Ellie, that you’d stay here until Sunday. I don’t see what’s changed since we discussed it last night.’
A lot had happened. Billy Kay had phoned. They’d fought. Jessica had popped in on a mission that redefined the words ‘flimsy excuse’ and Ellie had fought with her too. And even fighting with David and knowing that he preferred women like Jessica hadn’t stopped that physical pull towards him. That was another reason why she had to go, but none of that was easy to explain when he was standing in front of her.
‘It’s not just that. I’m going crazy being stuck indoors for days on end,’ Ellie improvised, though every word was true. ‘Sitting out on the balcony isn’t doing it for me, and the hum of your air conditioning system is driving me bonkers and did you know that your fridge makes this weird noise like there’s an angry cow trapped inside it?’
Ellie hadn’t realised her cabin fever was so far advanced. ‘I always wondered where that noise was coming from,’ David murmured. He looked at Ellie. Then down at her feet, which were still sporting toe separators, because she was an idiot. Ridiculous. Making a mess of his ordered life.
‘Well, I suppose you can come with me if you want. My mother always makes enough food to feed the entire street.’ He stared at her with narrowed eyes.
‘That wasn’t what I meant,’ Ellie protested. ‘I wasn’t angling for an invite. I’m going. I’m really going.’
‘You can just as easily go after dinner,’ David pointed out. ‘I was planning to walk across the Heath to their place. If you wore shades and, I don’t know, a hat, I doubt anyone would give you a second look.’
That was enough to dent Ellie’s ego and force her to get a bloody grip. ‘I couldn’t,’ she said automatically, because she wanted to be gone before he spoke to Jessica, and after what Jessica had told her, Ellie trusted him even less. What kind of man dragged his parents into his ruthless power-plays? Though a walk on the Heath and chicken soup did sound like her dream Friday night.
‘I’m going to have a shower,’ David said casually. ‘If you do change your mind, I’m leaving in half an hour.’
Forty-five minutes later, Ellie was on the Heath and clutching a huge bunch of gerbera daisies she’d insisted on buying from the flower stall on the corner of David’s road, because you didn’t turn up for dinner at someone’s house empty-handed, especially when they hadn’t even invited you.
Ellie had forgotten how dry and stiff the heat was. Now it wrapped around her, brushed against her bare legs and pricked her arms as they walked the gravel path that led past Kenwood House, came out briefly onto Spaniards Road, then walked across Sandy Heath to the Heath Extension. The rich green space she’d seen from her fifteenth-floor eyrie wasn’t rich or green. The grass had been bleached and withered by the sun and the footpaths that stayed muddy for weeks during rain-sodden winters were now scorched earth. Ellie wobbled over huge cracks in her Swedish Hasbeens sandals, the most suitable, meet-the-parents footwear she’d packed. When the paths became even more roughly hewn and featured hillocks and sudden drops, David took her hand to guide her to more level ground.
It wasn’t proper handholding; it was medicinal handholding so Ellie didn’t go arse over tit, but it still made her heart beat a little bit faster. She wouldn’t have needed to hold his hand at all but Ellie had forgotten that it was that strange hinterland between Friday afternoon and Friday evening that she called the Friday dump. Everyone realised they had an hour to clear their desks and their in-trays and cross all those items off the to-do lists that they’d written on Monday morning, and her phone wouldn’t stop ringing.
So instead of telling David about Jessica’s visit – she’d even rehearsed her first line: ‘Your friend Jessica popped round, I’m afraid we kind of got off on the wrong foot’ – she gave Vaughn an update on exporting Emerging Scandinavian Artists to New York. Then Piers called because he’d lost an invoice. Then her opposite number in New York phoned to bitch about one of the Scandinavian artists who was now pretending that he hadn’t told everyone that he’d make them a floating Perspex bicycle to order in any size or colour. Finally, as they were leaving the Heath for tarmac so hot and sticky that Ellie had to prise the sole of her sandal off it every time she took a step, she had Lola moaning about Tess.
Without Ellie there as a buffer between Lola’s brattiness and Tess’s bossiness, they were currently engaged in psychological warfare over Come Dine With Me.
‘… there’s only two per cent of space left on the TiVo because she records episodes she’s already seen. I deleted four repeats so there was room for a BBC4 documentary about outsider art and she went mad and then she had a go at me for buying non-quilted loo roll,’ Lola ranted.
They were walking along the road that skirted the Heath, passing huge double-fronted Arts and Crafts houses. Then David stopped at a pretty white house with leaded windows, a creeper plant trailing lazily around the front door, and a huge oak tree in the front garden. He gestured at her phone.
‘I’m sorry,’ Ellie mouthed and turned her attention back to Lola, who was now venting about Tess’s heinous crime of asking her to listen to her music on headphones after eleven.
‘She has the radio on so loud in the morning that it wakes me up. Why can’t she listen to that on fucking headphones?’
‘Sweetie, we’ve all had a stressful week – I read that more murders are committed at ninety-two degrees than any other temperature,’ Ellie said soothingly.
‘Do I have your permission to kill her, then?’
‘No! No killing. Can’t you please try to get on? Go to Saino’s, get some wine and Kettle Chips, then tell her that everyone in Britain has seen that episode of Come Dine With Me where the woman falls asleep and her guests have to cook the dinner themselves, like, five times.’
Lola gurgled. ‘That was a classic!’
‘See, there you go. You can bond over that.’ Ellie glanced at David who made a winding it up motion with his hand. ‘You catch way more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.’
‘If you’re not off the phone in ten seconds, I’m leaving you out here,’ David said, as he unlatched the garden gate. ‘I’ll tell my mother that you’d rather spend the evening playing Pollyanna than eating her chicken soup.’
Ellie scowled at David’s back as he strode up the path.
‘… only reason I agreed to move in was because you were living there and you’re cool and Tess isn’t. She’s so vanilla.’
‘Don’t you think I’ve got enough to deal with right now without you giving me crap about Tess?’ Ellie suddenly snapped. ‘I don’t fucking need it. OK?’
Lola didn’t say anything. Ellie suspected she might have shocked her into silence for the first time in her life. She hurried over to David, who was waiting for her on the doorstep.
Not that Lola could stay speechless for long. ‘Christ, what crawled up your arse?’
‘Got to go now,’ Ellie chirped. ‘Love you, mean it!’
It was the mock-ironic way they always said goodbye, but it earned Ellie another pointed look from David as he rang the doorbell at the precise second it swung open to reveal a plump, smiling woman with silvered dark brown hair swept up in a messy bun, and eyes the exact same shade of blue as his.
‘I thought I heard your voice,’ she said. Then she saw Ellie standing on the doorstep. The smile was gone in an instant. ‘Or voices. You didn’t say you were bringing someone for dinner. I hope there’ll be enough to go round.’
‘You know there’ll be plenty to go round, even if I brought twenty people with me,’ David said mildly. Ellie was all set to retreat, to step back onto the path, but his hand was suddenly at the small of her back to push her steadily and inexorably towards the woman who’d given birth to him and wh
o was staring at her in horror like she’d just taken a dump on her hollyhocks.
‘It’s very nice to meet you,’ Ellie said as she proffered the gerbera daisies at the older woman, and for someone who was all about crisis management and clinical assessments of other people’s characters, David had really underestimated his mother’s reaction to having an extra mouth to feed. ‘Sorry to turn up unannounced.’
His hand was still on her. Long fingers splayed against the base of her spine, she could feel the heat of his skin through the cotton of the blue and white striped wrap dress she’d changed into. It didn’t feel at all comforting, quite the opposite, especially when he gave her a none too gentle prod and she had no choice but to walk through the front door, and his mother had no choice but to stand back so Ellie could enter.
‘It’s Velvet, isn’t it?’ she asked in a tight voice, reluctantly taking the flowers from Ellie. ‘Welcome to our home.’
Chapter Twenty-two
Ellie bit the inner skin of her bottom lip hard so she could focus on that familiar pain as David steered her through the wood-panelled hall with its beautiful black-and-white tiled floor into a huge living room-cum-dining room that stretched from the front of the house to the open French windows at the back. The walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling shelves full of books, framed prints and photos, little ornaments, tchotchkes and objets d’art: a tiny painted elephant, a vase made from a buckled, twisted piece of green glass, a set of netsukes. Ordinarily, Ellie would have liked to linger by the shelves and explore their contents, get to know about the people who lived here as she asked about the provenance of each treasure, but tonight she just wanted to choke down one bowl of soup and get the hell out.
At the French windows, the room extended into an L-shape and round the corner was an open-plan farmhouse-style kitchen with a scrubbed pine dresser full of mismatched plates and cups: blue and white Delftware, vintage gold-rimmed china be-sprigged with flowers, and a scrubbed pine table, one end obscured by piles of newspapers and magazines. There was even a scrubbed pine worktop, and copper-bottomed pans hanging from a rack above the range. The smell of a fragrant, aromatic, roasting chicken was the smell Ellie always associated with Friday night dinner, with coming home, but not this Friday night.