She gives a very small nod of her head. But she doesn’t smile. I wonder if she saw the difficulty I had forcing it down: worse, my grimace of slight disgust at the sight of the bloodied meat. But I think it’s more than that. Emma has never really seemed to like me much. I’ve tried so hard with her – perversely I’ve tried much harder than I might have done if she had seemed to like me. And, it should be the other way around, shouldn’t it? She should make the effort with me. She should be the one looking for some kind of acceptance with Mark’s oldest friends. She’s certainly made the effort with Miranda, despite Miranda being an absolute bitch to her, at times.
I definitely felt a bit sorry for Emma, when she joined our group. There was so much to catch up on, so many in-jokes, so much history. It was different for Bo. His Americanness, somehow, set him apart. He was exotic – a New Yorker – and besides, he studied at Stanford, so there wasn’t exactly going to be an inferiority complex there. Whereas Emma went to Bath, and Miranda has always seemed determined to find little ways to lord Oxford over her, to show her up as not being quite as good as the rest of us. I don’t think she wants Emma to feel bad, per se, she just wants a kind of serf-like acknowledgement of her superiority.
To her credit, Emma barely seems to notice when Miranda has a go at her. She has a robustness about her, a self-containment. I feel like she’s one of those people it’s easy to be friends with, because she has no baggage … but she’s not the kind of person who would be my best friend. She doesn’t seem to have a deeper layer; or if she does, she hides it well. Refreshing, yes, but also perhaps just a tiny bit dull. God, I’m starting to sound like Miranda.
‘You know,’ I’d told Emma, two New Years ago, when she was very new to the group, ‘you really shouldn’t put up with Miranda’s crap.’
‘What do you mean?’ she asked, wide-eyed.
‘The way she talks to you. She’s like it with all of us, to be honest. I sometimes think she has this idea that everyone was put on earth to serve her.’ I knew how that felt, well enough. ‘I love her dearly, because she has her many good qualities too – but it’s definitely one of her less admirable ones. You don’t want to play up to her idea of her own superiority.’
Emma frowned. ‘I really don’t mind, Katie.’ There was a sharpness to her tone that I had never heard before.
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I only thought—’
‘You don’t need to worry about me,’ she repeated, ‘I really don’t mind.’
And she genuinely doesn’t seem to. I watch her now, grinning away at everyone, asking Miranda where she bought her dress. Maybe I’m being oversensitive, but I have sometimes got the impression that she is just barely tolerating me, for the sake of group harmony. That under the surface, there might be real dislike. Or as close as someone like Emma comes to dislike.
It’s quite upsetting, to feel yourself disliked by someone as straightforward and good – ‘good’, yes that’s exactly the word – as Emma. Sometimes, in my more paranoid moods, I have wondered if she recognises that there is something ‘off’ about me. That she saw the destructiveness and the selfishness in me even before I recognised them myself.
Miranda is picking through her meal, carefully separating the fillet from the pastry, and then only eating half of that. She has always been very careful about her weight. Which is ridiculous, because she has pretty much the perfect figure, at least according to the glossies and the Daily Mail. But I remember meals at her house, and her mother taking away her plate before she had finished. ‘A lady,’ she would say, ‘leaves her plate unfinished and keeps her waist under twenty-five inches.’ And I thought I came from a dysfunctional family. For a couple of years Miranda went vegan, then she did the 5:2 for a while. And on top of that every Pilates, ballet barre and soul cycle class offered at her upscale gym. She’s obviously gorgeous, but if you ask me she’d look better with a little more weight, more softness. Already, in her thirties, she’s starting to get that brittle ageing Hollywood starlet look. Oh, and I’m certain she’s had Botox. You would imagine, as her best friend, I might know this for a fact either way. But she’s oddly private about such things. The fact that she gets regular fake tans, for example: she’ll turn up to a wedding looking as though she’s spent three weeks in St Barts. But when I comment on it she’ll say something like, ‘Oh yes, I spent a lot of time in the sun recently – I tan so easily’ and abruptly change the subject.
‘He’s so hot, isn’t he,’ she’s saying now, ‘that gamekeeper? The strong and silent type … Like something from a Mills & Boon novel. So skilled. I didn’t realise stalking a deer was so difficult. And so tall. Couldn’t you just climb that?’
‘God yes,’ Samira says, to a wounded ‘Oi!’ from Giles.
But Miranda hardly seems to notice that she’s spoken. She is looking at Julien. The ‘tall’ part seems a particularly pointed barb. Julien is many things; the one thing he is not, and never will be, is tall. ‘Such a masculine sort of man,’ Miranda adds. ‘There’s something almost dangerous about him … But that makes him all the more attractive. You just know he’d be able to fix anything, or build you a shelter in the middle of a wood. No one has those sorts of skills any more.’
‘You know what you two sound like?’ Giles says. His tone is light, but I think he’s a bit pissed off too.
‘What?’ Miranda says, playfully.
‘A couple of desperate old spinsters.’
I do not miss the glances at me – even Nick, for God’s sake. Because if anyone is a desperate old spinster here then it is, well: yours truly. I concentrate on getting a perfect morsel of venison and pastry onto the end of my fork.
‘I think,’ Miranda says, undeterred, ‘on behalf of women everywhere, that you should try and seduce him, Katie.’ She says it playfully, but there’s an edge to it, and I wonder what it means. She seems slightly too much this evening: the gold dress, her hair piled into a kind of warrior’s headdress, the gleam in her eyes, her laugh just a fraction too loud.
‘And get herself murdered?’ Giles says, laughing. ‘Well, you’ve got to wonder, haven’t you? What’s a chap like that doing all alone somewhere like this? I mean, it’s beautiful and tranquil and everything for a few days, but it would be pretty creepy living here all the time on your own. You’d go mad even if you weren’t already.’
‘He’s not on his own,’ I say. ‘There’s that woman in the office, Heather.’
‘Yes,’ Miranda says, ‘but they’re not together, are they? And she’s probably a bit cuckoo too. If you’ve chosen this life you’re obviously a bit of a weirdo, or you have something to run away from.’
‘I think she seems perfectly normal,’ I say. I don’t know why I’m defending them. It isn’t a good idea to disagree with Miranda when she’s in this sort of mood. ‘And he seemed perfectly harmless. And yes, I suppose he is good-looking.’
‘I see,’ Julien says, in the unconvincing manner of a kindly uncle. ‘That’s your type is it, Katie?’
I can feel them all peering at me, as though I am a specimen at the bottom of a jar. I swallow the morsel of Wellington, take a long draught of my water, though I long for the wine. ‘Maybe it is.’
After we’ve eaten supper it’s still quite early. Emma is doing her best to keep everyone well-lubricated. She keeps insisting on getting up and topping up glasses – which is faintly embarrassing, as though she’s our waitress for the evening. In spite of her efforts, conversation around the table seems to have run dry. There’s a strange pause. What to do, what to fill the time with? With the ease of last night mysteriously vanished, it doesn’t seem enough to sit around and reminisce together. I remind myself it always feels like this on New Year’s Eve, because of all the enforced celebration. Midnight – not particularly late on any given night – suddenly seems like a faraway milestone.
‘I was wondering,’ Samira says, ‘and I know it’s a bit teenage … But we could play Truth or Dare?’
There are mingled groans.
‘We’re in our thirties, Samira,’ Nick says, raising an eyebrow. ‘I think we’re a bit beyond Truth or Dare.’