‘And some bottles of fancy imported lager that are teeny tiny and cost three quid each,’ Jack said sourly. ‘God, he’s such a pretentious wanker.’
‘Really is,’ Hope agreed, pleased that they were finally back in sync, even if it was over the wankerdom of Wilson. ‘And if you’re popping into Waitrose anyway, can you get some clotted-cream vanilla ice-cream in case my mascarpone curdles in the heat?’
Jack grumbled a little more about the dinner party bankrupting them and how they’d have to live on SupaNoodles for the rest of the month, but Hope ignored him as she added a few more items to the shopping list and sent him off to B&Q with a cheery wave.
Their cunning plan to get around the obstacle of not having a dining table was to buy a wallpaper-pasting table, which they’d return tomorrow in pristine condition. Hope had promised Jack faithfully that she’d put down newspaper under the tablecloth, in case of spillages. Of course they needed eight chairs too, but Jack and Hope would sit on their kitchen stools and Gary the estate agent, who lived in spacious splendour in the rest of the house above them, had promised that they could borrow his four expensive Heal’s chairs, though Hope had had to flirt with him for ten very long minutes (‘Really? You’ve doubled your commission in the last six months? Wow! You must be so good at selling houses …’). He even carried the chairs down the crumbling concrete stairs that led to the basement flat and into the re-purposed living room.
Hope was now meant to go next door, according to her checklist, and borrow two chairs from Alice, Lottie and Nancy’s long-suffering mum, but she wasted valuable time following Gary around the flat as he kicked at their skirting boards and advised Hope that she and Jack would ‘easily add another ten thou on your resale value if you ripped out the kitchen and put a new one in’. Jack was much better at dealing with Alice anyway as she always wanted to badger Hope about primary-school league tables and whether Nancy had ADD, dyslexia or was just plain lazy.
She was loath to admit it, but having a list made it easier to finish all the preparations, and less than an hour later Hope had nothing left to do in the kitchen until soon before her guests arrived. She couldn’t lay a table that didn’t exist and so had no choice but to indulge in a long soaky bath, and when Jack still hadn’t come home, she even took the time to blow-dry her hair sort of straight.
By now it was after five, Jack had been gone nearly two hours, and Hope’s Facebook invites stated quite clearly that pre-dinner drinks would be at seven sharp.
Where are you? she texted him, and it wasn’t until she’d finished putting her make-up on that he texted back, On my way. Arsenal r playing @ home. Holloway Rd blocked solid.
‘Why didn’t you take the back roads then?’ Hope muttered to herself, as she applied one last coat of mascara and stepped back to assess her appearance in the mirror glued to the inside of one of the wardrobe doors.
To make up for the rustic, make-do charm of their borrowed table and mismatched chairs, Hope had been going for a look that shrieked effortless glamour, but she wasn’t entirely sure she’d succeeded.
She’d started with the shoes; her beloved Stella McCartney leopard-print satin wedges, which had been an unexpected birthday present from Jack – he usually bought her a dress that was at least a size too small and the biggest box of chocolates he could find. The wedges were higher than Hope was used to and so far she hadn’t dared to wear them outside, but they went beautifully with her black broderie anglaise maxi dress.
Hope was always grateful that she was the sort of redhead that tanned, or rather freckled until all her freckles mostly joined up to create a tan, and the thin straps of the dress showed off her sun-kissed shoulders. The fabric fell in graceful folds over her pot belly. Hope ran a hand over her tummy, which always made its presence felt during the school holidays. When school broke up, she was always full of plans to visit the gym every day and swim and go on long walks, but the plans usually petered out before the end of the first week in favour of meeting friends for coffee and cake, or lunch, or a cinema outing which involved ice-cream and popcorn. In fact, eating vast quantities of food in a social setting won out over the gym every time, leaving Hope ten pounds heavier at the beginning of term. Although she was hating her midriff right now, she knew that spending seven-hour days wrangling a class of six-year-olds, and going to the gym to alleviate the stress of seven hours spent wrangling a class of six-year-olds, would make the belly fat melt away pretty quickly. Until then it was big knickers and maxi dresses all the way, all the time.
She leaned closer to the mirror to peer critically at her face to make sure that her tinted moisturiser was evening out both freckles and the paler skin in between the freckles and yes, she still loved the creamy-rose shade of the Chanel Rouge Coco Mademoiselle lipstick Jack had got her from a Skirt beauty sale. Susie insisted that Hope could get away with a deeper red or even a fuchsia pink on her mouth, which Jack gamely said was a perfect cupid’s bow and her oldest brother Matthew used to describe as a cat’s bum, but Hope refused.
Her mother had drummed into Hope since she was practically embryonic that she should accentuate her widely spaced blue eyes rather than draw attention to her snub nose and her freckles, which had been the bane of her adolescence. She’d tried everything to get rid of them, from rubbing lemon slices on her face (which had stung like a bitch during her spotty teen years) to green-based foundations and concealers, which she’d never been able to blend in properly and had made her look bilious. Now Hope had learned to love her freckles because it was obvious she was stuck with them, like she was stuck with red hair.
Technically it was auburn. A deep, dark red that wasn’t orange and definitely wasn’t ginger. It was the kind of red hair that was more Julianne Moore than Sarah Ferguson, or, God forbid, Miranda in the first season of Sex and the City. Hope’s eyebrows and eyelashes were also the same deep auburn but she’d still been called ‘ginger pubes’ all the way through school. Even now, Hope could be walking down the street, minding her own business, only to hear someone bellow, ‘Oi! Ginger pubes!’ from a passing white van, but such was the redhead’s lot in life. Hope liked to think that having hair this colour had instilled huge amounts of guts and gumption in her from an early age and, when she wasn’t at school, she wore her hair long and loose with pride, even if after half an hour of being long and loose, it was a mass of Medusa-like tangles.
‘You’ll do,’ she told her reflection. ‘As long as you don’t break your neck on the sticky-up bit of lino in the kitchen.’
JACK STILL WASN’T back less than an hour before kick-off. Hope grumbled furiously to herself as she consulted Jamie Oliver’s recipe for the toasted almonds she was making for pre-dinner nibbles.
But by the time she started concocting a punch from a bottle of fake-Pimm’s, a bottle of five-quid vodka from Aldi and two litres of passion fruit juice, Hope was pretending that she was on Come Dine With Me and happily talking to an invisible camera.
‘… and one little tip I have for making a really good punch is to nick a syringe from Janet, the school nurse, so I can inject vodka straight into the strawberries. Gives the punch an added kick,’ she babbled, as she chopped up half an elderly cucumber. ‘It’s also a good way to use up all the fruit that’s about to go mushy. I mean, even if it has gone mushy, the alcohol will just disguise the taste and …’
There was the sound of a key turning in the lock and she hurried into the hall in time to greet Jack as he staggered through the door, dragging the ersatz dining table behind him.
‘There you are!’ Hope exclaimed. ‘I thought you’d gone to Cornwall to get the clotted-cream ice-cream. People will be here in half an hour!’
‘It’s not my fault the traffic was gridlocked,’ Jack replied angrily. His hair was sticking up as if he’d been clutching at it in frustration at the gridlockedness of the traffic. ‘I texted you!’
‘That was an hour ago,’ Hope reminded him. ‘Did you get lost in a time–space continuum that suddenly opened up o
n Tollington Road?’
‘Yeah, and I managed to get everything that you scribbled down on the fourth shopping list for this bloody dinner party, thanks for asking.’
‘You’re so late getting back you might just as well not have bothered,’ Hope said ungraciously. ‘People will be arriving in thirty minutes and you need to get two chairs from Alice next door and have a shower ’cause, quite frankly, you’re smelling pretty ripe, and now I have to lay the table when I should be parboiling potatoes and warming my bruschetta.’
‘Well, if you’d organised things better then …’
‘Now’s really not the time for a lover’s tiff, you two,’ said a warm, amused voice from behind Jack, and Hope saw Susie walk through the door clutching two Waitrose carriers and a huge bunch of what might have been flowers or could have been an avant garde art installation. ‘Jack saw me coming up the road and gave me a lift, didn’t you?’
Jack was still bright-red and furious. ‘Sorry about that, Hope. I’m sure that made me at least a whole minute later than I already was.’
Hope wanted to throw herself at Susie with pained little cries but she was too mad with Jack to do anything but say, ‘You’re early,’ in a tight voice.
‘Oh dear,’ Susie cooed. ‘Thought you might need a hand but I can always decamp to the pub across the square if I’ll be in the way.’
‘God, don’t do that,’ Hope cried, pushing past Jack to grab Susie by the arm. ‘I need you.’
‘Well, you’ve got me,’ Susie said, dropping the Waitrose bags with a dull thud that made Hope wince because she didn’t want olive oil over everything, but then Susie was hugging her hard, the spiky fronds from the bouquet tickling Hope’s shoulder blades. ‘As it’s you, I’ll even volunteer my services as your kitchen bitch.’
Hope hugged Susie hard back, until Susie made a small distinct sound of protest. Hope let her go and watched her friend smooth down her peach silk, ruffle-sleeved Catherine Malandrino top, which she was wearing with teeny-tiny cut-off denim shorts and a pair of very strappy, very high gold sandals.
‘You look gorgeous,’ Hope said, and it wasn’t even a compliment but the absolute truth. Susie was small, slim and sleek, from the top of her shiny dark-brown hair, which looked as if she soaked it in keratin every morning, to her perfectly pedicured size-three feet. The bit in between hair and feet was pretty stunning too. Susie was, there was no doubt about this, sultry-looking. Deep brown, sloe-shaped eyes peeped out from behind her fringe, she had a tiny smudge of a nose and full, plush lips that were either pouting or smiling like she’d just heard a really filthy joke.
She also had an olive complexion, a generous helping in the breast department and what her legs lacked in length they made up for in their toned perfection, even though Susie could eat obscene amounts of food and not go near a gym in weeks.
It was hard not to feel less-than when you were in the same room with Susie. And it was also hard not to feel more-than. Hope always felt that she wasn’t pretty enough or slim enough or just plain enough. When she was with Susie, being five foot, six inches was too tall and being a size twelve was too fat. Right now Hope felt like a gangling Goth in her shapeless black dress. And all that chuff about her redhead pride? Pffft! She was a freckly ginger who …
‘You’re the one who looks gorgeous, Hopey,’ Susie interrupted her pity-party. ‘How come you always manage to look dreamy and ethereal when I’m sweating like a stuck pig?’
‘You need to get your eyes tested,’ Hope snorted, as she tried to hide her pleased smile. ‘And you couldn’t look like a stuck pig if you tried.’
‘Well, stuck piglet,’ Susie conceded, as Jack brought in two dining-room chairs from next door. ‘What needs doing first?’
‘The table,’ Hope decided. Her voice was getting very squeaky. By her own estimation she was five minutes away from a pre-dinner party meltdown. ‘Oh shit, I don’t think there’s even time to lay the table.’
‘Yes, there is,’ Susie said firmly, pushing past Hope so she could start grabbing handfuls of cutlery out of the drawer. ‘Hopey, find a vase for those weird flowers I got you. I thought they’d be a really cool centrepiece.’
‘God, I haven’t even thanked you for them!’
‘Yeah, well, why don’t we leave the grovelling for later and Jack, sweetie, hate to be the one to tell you this, but you stink,’ Susie added, as he came into the kitchen and reached up to get glasses down from the cupboard above her head. ‘Can you go and have a shower before you asphyxiate us and kill my flowers?’
Jack advanced on Susie with both his arms raised above his head while she giggled and held him back with the bread knife. ‘Nothing wrong with a healthy bit of man sweat,’ he declared, brandishing his armpits at Susie one final time, then sidestepping past Hope as he stripped off his sweat-soaked T-shirt. ‘You look like a Modigliani,’ he whispered in Hope’s ear, as Susie chattered cheerfully away about how none of their cutlery matched, and it was exactly what she needed to hear.
Not that she did look like a Modigliani – his models were pale and thin and drippy-looking – but it was Jack taking the time to see she was freaking out and calming her down with one of his rare compliments. He wasn’t a gushy kind of boyfriend who constantly told Hope that she was awesome so when a compliment did come her way it meant a lot.
‘Sorry I’m being such a witch,’ she muttered and Jack grinned, and as Susie and Hope finally began to lay the table, Hope could hear him singing ‘I Put a Spell on You’ in the shower.
‘There! That doesn’t look too shabby,’ Susie said ten minutes later. ‘Well, maybe shabby-chic, but you do that whole vintage thing so well. When I try, it just looks like a load of tatty old junk from Oxfam.’
Hope folded her arms and surveyed her temporary dining room and her temporary dining-room table. On top of her red and white polka-dot tablecloth (and it was impossible to tell that last Saturday’s Guardian was laid out beneath it) were her rose-sprigged placemats, and on top of them were assorted bowls on top of assorted plates, plus cutlery that Hope had found in charity shops and at car-boot sales. At least each setting had a wine glass that was just like the other seven wine glasses but that was only because they’d been in a sale at Habitat.
‘It’s not sophisticated,’ Hope lamented, as she tweaked the strange lemon-like protuberance that was the focal point of Susie’s bouquet, ‘but it is quirky. And now I know that I can improvise a dining room, I can sign up for Come Dine With Me.’
‘I’d come dine with you any time,’ Susie sniffed the air appreciatively. ‘Your whole flat smells of Cointreau and garlic. Right, so what’s next?’
Nothing was too much trouble for Susie. She finished making the punch and even though she was wearing a £400 silk top, she was happy to fill a huge B&Q bucket with ice and stick the white wine and beer in it because Hope had run out of fridge space. Susie did draw the line at peeling the potatoes because she’d had her nails done that morning but, still, it was hard for Hope to remember that the first time she‘d seen Susie had been at the gym, in full make-up, pedalling sedately on an exercise bike in Stella McCartney for Adidas workout gear and reading Vogue, and she’d been intimidated beyond all measure. When Hope went to the gym, she wore saggy leggings, holey T-shirts and scraped her hair back because even the slightest exertion made her drip sweat all over the floor.
Hope would occasionally see Susie in the changing rooms doing her make-up in nothing but an Agent Provocateur thong, so all the other women could admire her lithe body and truly spectacular breasts and make a solemn vow to themselves that they’d either work out harder or stop going to the gym on the same days as Susie. Well, that was how Hope had felt so when she’d signed up for a yoga class and found herself next to Susie it hadn’t filled her heart with joy. Especially as Susie could contort herself into the most awkward poses while Hope couldn’t even master the basic breathing techniques.
Hope had eventually decided that Susie was a stuck-up cow when she caught her smir
king after Hope had fallen out of her Half Moon pose and landed on the floor with a shriek. That was it! No more sneaking admiring glances at Susie as she spent ten minutes blending her eyeshadow in the changing room mirror, no more trying to share a conspiratorial smile with her when Mr Short-Shorts was doing lunges. Even though Susie barely knew that Hope existed, as far as Hope was concerned, Susie was dead to her.
Then came that fateful yoga class when Hope had set her sights on mastering a shoulder stand if it killed her. She’d just been about to straighten out her legs, when the woman behind her had let out a volley of farts that ricocheted around the studio and Hope had gone crashing to the floor, almost dislocating her collar bone in the process. She’d sprawled on her mat for a second, trying to catch her breath, as the poor woman continued to chuff away. All around her, people were falling out of their poses, all except Susie, whose body, apart from her shaking shoulders, was in a perfect perpendicular line.
Susie had then gracefully righted herself, caught Hope’s eye and wafted her hand in front of her nose. ‘Someone shouldn’t have had chilli last night,’ she’d whispered. Then she’d tentatively sniffed the air. ‘My mistake. It was obviously curry.’
After this comment, there had been a deathly silence until the woman finally stopped farting, picked up her yoga mat and practically ran out of the studio. Hope had pursed her lips tight, then risked looking over at Susie again who was now pretending that she’d been suffocated by the fumes and it was … GAME OVER. Hope had collapsed back on her mat and put her hand over her mouth but the giggles had leaked out between the cracks of her fingers. Then she’d heard Susie snort and Hope had started to laugh so hard that tears streamed down her cheeks. When Georgie, the yoga instructor, had tried to calm Hope down with a mellifluous but detailed explanation of why yoga made some people fart, Hope had curled up in a crying, shaking, cackling ball of mirth until Susie had yanked her up and hustled her out of the room.