‘Mrs Staunton loves rugby,’ Tim says. ‘Loves France. Nothing she likes better than sitting in a café on the Champs-élysées sipping absinthe and smoking a cheroot.’
You never know if Tim is joking or not.
‘Okay, maybe not a cheroot,’ he says. ‘Just a cigarette. Or twenty.’
‘Who’s minding your many children?’ Alastair asks.
‘Mrs Staunton’s parents. They command terror.’
If they’re anything like their daughter, I can well believe it. Alastair and I have known Tim for donkey’s years but we’ve never bonded with Mrs Staunton. She’s always really, really busy and arrives late to everything, even the party we threw to launch Hatch. She doesn’t bother with niceties and she tends to the abrupt. When Alastair flirts with her she does perplexed frowns, as if he’s speaking Swahili (I must admit I admire that). And she doesn’t do that thing women usually do, where I show her handbag lots of love, then she does the same to mine, then I tell her she has great hair and she says it’s usually a disaster, but it’s not so bad since she got the sixteen-week blow-dry and so on.
But she and Tim seem to knock along very nicely. Each to their own.
‘Would you get me some stuff in Sephora?’ I ask.
‘No.’
‘You don’t even know what Sephora is.’
‘Do you mind? I’ve a teenage daughter.’
‘I’ll do an email. You’d just have to show your phone to the lady – you wouldn’t even have to speak.’
‘No.’
‘Ah, Tim,’ Alastair says. ‘Have a heart. Poor Amy.’
‘I’m sorry, Amy, but Mrs Staunton has informed me she wants my undivided.’
At three on the dot, Tim switches off his screen. ‘I’m away. Have nice weekends. See you Monday.’
‘Au revoir!’
‘Bonne chance!’
‘It’s the Marc Jacobs primer,’ I call after him. ‘Just in case.’
Tim shakes his head in exasperation, then goes.
‘Lucky Tim,’ Alastair says.
I check he’s properly gone before I say, ‘But he has to go to the rugby. I think I’d actually cry.’
‘And he has to go with Rosanna.’
‘She’s … God, she’s an odd one.’ We have this conversation regularly. ‘Definitely the alpha in that marriage.’ Then I add, ‘Fair play to her.’ Because, yeah, fair play to her. Woman. Surgeon. Five children. Taking her husband away for the weekend.
‘Mind you,’ says Alastair. ‘Tim is so cut-and-dried about everything, not everyone would put up with him.’
‘Ah, no!’ I’m not having it. ‘Tim is great. He’s so reliable, and hard-working, and a good father and kind – he’s kind, Alastair. We’re lucky to have him. Him and Rosanna, okay, she’s not the most likeable, but it works for them.’
‘Is it the rule that the alpha doesn’t have to be nice to the beta’s colleagues?’
‘I wouldn’t know. Neither Hugh nor I is an alpha, neither of us earns enough …’
‘Amy? Hello? Amy?’
Should I still be thinking of Hugh and me in the present tense?
‘Amy? Talk to me. Are you okay?’
‘Sorry.’
‘Seriously, are you okay?’
‘Yep.’
34
Sixteen months ago
‘… which brings us to our next award of the evening …’ Up on the stage the MC droned on. During the prize giving and the humble-brag acceptance speeches, these media award events were so bone-crushingly boring.
If only they’d finish up so I could loiter in the general area of Josh Rowan’s table. But that was still a long way off, and if something nice didn’t happen inside my head soon, there was a real fear I’d go mental – a quick ten minutes in the powder-room on Asos might save me.
‘I’m going to the loo,’ I whispered to Alastair.
My browsing would have been done right at the table if I wasn’t so afraid of giving offence to our hosts, the multi-media group who’d invited me, Tim and Alastair to this, the Press Awards.
Alastair gripped my arm tight. ‘Make bloody sure you come back. Do not abandon me. No man left behind, right?’
‘Grand.’ With my head down, desperate to not make eye-contact and risk being shamed for leaving during someone’s proud moment, I scurried around the circular tables, heading for the Ladies, which was at the back of the ballroom, about half a mile away.
The trick was to move speedily in a running crouch so as not to break people’s view of the stage. I’d just passed the invisible line where the rows of tables ended, feeling like a person who’d escaped from a cruel regime, when my head butted against someone’s chest. ‘Sorry,’ I muttered, already moving away.
‘Hey, Amy.’ My forearm was grabbed and I looked up. Christ alive, it was Josh.
‘Hi!’ I was suddenly breathless.
It was almost four weeks, twenty-five days, to be precise, since the Premilla Routh interview, and in those twenty-five days I’d thought of him. Quite a bit. To be honest, it was bordering on mild obsession.
A few days after I’d last seen him, he’d Instagrammed me a motivational platitude of exquisite awfulness. This had plunged me into a yin-yang state of thrilled shame and, after spending far too long deleting dozens of possible responses, I’d eventually replied with a smiling emoji and a single ‘x’. Immediately I followed him on Instagram and Twitter and, minutes later, he followed me.
Another platitude arrived two days later. Then, after wasting far too long trying to find something special, I sent him one. Things ramped up, when I retweeted a video of a dog dancing to Wham! He retweeted it, then – obviously thinking this was my sort of thing, which it was – he sent me a GIF of cocker spaniels dressed up as penguins. Since then we’d been bouncing funny stuff across the Irish Sea, the jokiness undercut by the number of Xs we signed off with. We were now up to three.
In the meantime we’d become Facebook friends. My digital stalking was under control during daylight hours, but late at night, when I’d had maybe a bit too much to drink, I’d sneak on to Facebook, both his and Marcia’s pages, just to see what was going on.
They’d recently got a new puppy, a Labrador cross, that was proving a nightmare to train, but it was upbeat stuff: chewed shoes – hilaire! The legs of the chairs gnawed to bits – all the lolz!
About two weeks ago, Marcia had installed a black wood-burning stove in their living room and, even though it was beyond me as to why anyone would want something so needy, she was ecstatic about it.
Shortly after that, the whole family went skiing in Utah – I’d have thought Utah would be way too warm for skiing, but clearly I hadn’t a clue. There were tons of photos of the four of them kitted out in reflective sunglasses and padded snowsuits against a background of blinding snow; they’d seemed to be having a great time.
That plunged me into lip-gnawing worry because you could never call me outdoorsy. But maybe Josh could do that with his male friends. Or, indeed, his sons. But, oh, God, I’d have broken up their happy home …
And their home did look happy. Josh’s marriage seemed like a good one, and I’d find myself puzzling over the flirtiness, attraction, whatever it was, that had crackled between us.
In my less insane moments I admitted he was probably just a shagger who was good at compartmentalizing. But thinking that way didn’t generate the sparky feels I’d become too fond of, and it felt far nicer to reconfigure the whole business into a wild, romantic fantasy.
We had been certain to bump into each other tonight – we’d made a studiedly light and casual arrangement to find each other after the speeches. As a consequence, I’d gone to too much trouble with my hair and clothes. Indeed, earlier, before we’d entered the ballroom, Alastair had narrowed his eyes at me and said, ‘What’s with the knockers?’
‘I’m a woman,’ I’d said, a little haughtily. ‘I have breasts.’
‘Yeah, but …’
I also had an arse and a stomach. ‘Let me look.’ I stood in front of the full-length mirror in the lobby and studied myself in the slippery bias-cut sheath. God, I was a bit bursty and not just in the chest region.