When all Hope had left were a few hiccups, Susie had held out her hand. ‘I’m Susie and I can tell this is going to be the start of a beautiful friendship,’ she’d said as if she really and absolutely meant it.
And it had turned out to be true. Susie was five years older than Hope, and had all the trimmings and baubles of a sophisticated thirty-something: a high-paid job in PR, a beautifully furnished flat in Highgate, over a hundred pairs of designer shoes, and an actual walk-in wardrobe where she stored all her other designer fripperies. But Hope had quickly discovered that Susie’s outside didn’t match her inside. Once you got past the sleek glossy exterior, Susie was good people.
She was just as happy downing pints in an old man’s boozer on the Holloway Road and finishing up with some spicy hot wings from Chicken Cottage as she was sipping mojitos in Shoreditch House. She’d gone through five iPhones in the eighteen months that Hope had known her; dropping them down toilets, losing them on drunken nights-out and leaving one in a service station on the M60. Susie was also unstintingly generous and had been genuinely devastated when she’d realised that Hope’s size-six feet wouldn’t fit into any of her size-three statement heels. She even tried to supplement Hope’s teacher’s salary with free dinners at expensive restaurants on her company credit card.
Hope suspected, and all the evidence indicated, that Susie didn’t have a lot of female friends. Not when she looked the way she did and gave off waves and waves of serious attitude. She was rude and crude and used words that would have had Hope’s mother itching to wash her mouth out with Fairy Liquid. At times she could even be downright insufferable but blamed it on being raised by a philandering father and an alcoholic mother who’d both had serious boundary issues. Even now, Hope didn’t know if that was a joke, but she herself had grown up with three elder brothers who’d loved nothing more than to tease, terrorise and torment her, and she could quell a class of unruly six-year-olds without even raising her voice, so putting Susie in her place when she being obnoxious was hardly a stretch.
Susie was being particularly obnoxious as she watched Hope assemble her brioche bread-and-butter pudding. ‘For fuck’s sake, why did you invite two teachers?’ she whined.
‘Piss off! I’m a teacher,’ Hope said without rancour.
‘Whatever.’ Susie pouted. ‘If you start sharing wacky anecdotes about your days at teacher-training college, I’m going to kick you under the table.’
‘Like you could even reach with your tiny little legs.’
‘Why do you think I’m wearing five-inch heels?’
They grinned at each other just as Jack walked back into the kitchen, squeaky-clean, fragrant-fresh, and with a put-upon look on his face. ‘OK, what do you want me to do next?’
There actually wasn’t anything left to do until the guests arrived, when Hope could whip herself into a state of near hysteria as she tried to simultaneously sear twenty scallops in one pan while frying rounds of black pudding in another.
‘Everything’s under control,’ Hope said proudly.
‘It is?’ Jack sounded sceptical. ‘Are you sure about that?’
‘I’m quite sure,’ Hope said firmly and a little huffily. ‘But if you want to be useful then you could lug that bucket full of ice out of the back door ’cause it’s in the way. Oh, and should we put some more wine and beer in there too, do you think?’
Jack smirked like he’d known all along that not everything was under control. Hope wriggled her shoulders in irritation.
‘You’re doing fine,’ Susie said soothingly. ‘Everything’s going to be perfect and even if it isn’t, just get everyone really pissed up and they won’t notice if you overcook that lamb thing.’
‘It’s a roulade,’ Hope said, abandoning her pudding to hunt for her list so she could check how long the lamb needed to cook. Should she heat the oven up now? But what if everyone was late and then the oven was too hot and the lamb dried out? Then she’d be stuck with a too-hot oven, which would lead to burnt brioche bread-and-butter pudding and … ‘Oh, God …’
‘You need a drink,’ Susie and Jack, who’d finished his lugging duties, said in unison.
‘I can’t,’ Hope whimpered. ‘I don’t dare sear my scallops while I’m under the influence.’
‘Hopita, you could sear those scallops blindfolded,’ Jack said, snuggling up behind her. ‘By Wednesday night your scallops were good enough for MasterChef. And who doesn’t like black pudding?’
‘Well, I don’t, because I’m not a dirty Northerner,’ Susie hissed, pulling a face at the two people who’d been born and bred just outside Rochdale. ‘I’m not eating anything whose main ingredient is blood.’
‘I’m going to spit on your scallops,’ Hope told her dryly, nestling back against Jack who obligingly tightened his arms. ‘And no minted pea purée for you either.’
‘Christ, Jack, give the girl a drink,’ Susie drawled. She was leaning back against the kitchen counter, legs tensed, chest stuck out as she gave Hope and Jack a wicked smile. ‘In fact, I think we should all have some vodka. Just to get us in the mood.’
‘Oh, yeah, and what mood would that be?’ Jack drawled back, and Hope realised it was her turn to drawl something vaguely flirtatious but it almost felt as if she was surplus to requirements.
And while she was trying to process that thought, or even decide if the thought needed processing, the doorbell rang. Hope tugged herself free of Jack’s arms so she could pat her hair and smooth down her dress and do a complete lap of the kitchen, pausing only to take the scallops out of the fridge.
‘Easy, tiger,’ Jack said, shaking his head as the doorbell rang again. ‘I’ll get that, shall I, while you do another circuit?’
Hope took a deep breath. ‘I don’t know why I’m so nervous,’ she said to Susie. ‘I mean, I know everyone who’s coming and I like them or I wouldn’t have invited them, so why am I freaking out?’
‘I have no idea,’ Susie said, shrugging. ‘But you need to stop freaking out because you’re getting that blotchy stress rash all over your chest. Not a good look, Hopey.’
There was a distinct possibility that her legs might give way and she’d crumple to the floor, Hope thought, but then the door opened and she could hear Allison and Lauren mocking Jack and the ancient Death to the Pixies T-shirt he was wearing, which Hope had neatly mended with red thread because she couldn’t find her spool of black cotton.
‘Hopey!’ Lauren called out, waving to her from the hall. ‘Where did you suddenly get a dining room from?’
‘Looks fantastic,’ Allison added, pushing Jack out of the way so she could bustle towards the kitchen and throw herself at Hope. ‘The offy was having a special on Prosecco so we bought four bottles. Let’s get one of them opened. I’m gasping for a drink.’
Susie was already getting glasses, Lauren was presenting Hope with a huge bunch of tulips, and Jack had his hands in his jeans pockets and was looking proudly at Hope as if she might just be a domestic goddess after all.
Everything was going to be all right.
IN ALL THE planning and making of endless lists and scallop dry-runs, Hope had forgotten that a dinner party was still a party and parties were meant to be fun.
Flushed with the success of her perfectly seared scallops and tender lamb roulade (the ends had been a bit dry but she and Jack had had those), Hope sat at one end of the table and allowed herself a small triumphant smile.
For the last two hours she’d been either chained to a hot stove and ministering to pans spitting sizzling olive oil at her, or tending to her guests’ every need. She’d made sure their glasses were never less than half full, that Susie had lardons instead of black pudding, and that Otto had a bottle of Heinz ketchup to smother his roulade in, even though she’d wanted to bash him over the head with it.
Hope had barely eaten anything and finally understood why her mother always assumed a martyred air every year at the family Christmas dinner and sat at the table complaining every five minutes, ‘On
ce you’ve spent hours cooking a meal, you really don’t feel like eating it.’ Oh yes, Hope now knew that it wasn’t just a cunning ruse so Caroline Delafield could spend the rest of the day reclining on the settee watching The Sound Of Music and working her way through a box of liqueur chocolates.
It wasn’t until Hope had jumped up to stick the pudding in the oven that Lauren had intervened. ‘If you make us eat anything else, there will be vomiting,’ she’d threatened. ‘Sit down, have a glass of wine, ’cause you’re lagging seriously behind, and just, y’know, chill.’
So, Hope was chilling. Or, rather, she was able to chill once Jack had put the bread-and-butter pudding in the oven on a very low heat and set the timer. She took a generous gulp of Sauvignon Blanc and surveyed her table, which was attractively lit by just a fraction of the tealights she’d bought in IKEA after Elaine, who taught the Yellow Class, had sworn blind that there were going to be power cuts last winter because the Germans were bogarting all the electricity. Turned out they hadn’t and Hope was left with five hundred candles.
To her left Allison was deep in conversation with Marvin, who worked with Jack on the art desk at Skirt. The ends of her razor-cut, platinum-blonde bob swung gently as she recalled the infamous X-Acto-knife incident at the secondary school where she taught English. She even pulled back her dress to show Marvin her lilac bra strap and the miniscule mark she should have claimed workers’ comp for.
‘Was that from the X-Acto knife?’ Marvin asked, peering forward to examine it more closely, though his eyes seemed to be firmly fixed on Allison’s breasts, which had probably been her intention all along.
‘Nah. One of the little bastards threw a chair at me,’ Allison recalled with a sniff, as she adjusted her dress and put away her goodies.
Marvin usually looked inscrutable, especially when impressionable young women were throwing themselves at him, which they did frequently because he was absolutely beautiful. Even though Hope was a one-artboy kind of girl, she did have a little crush on Marvin, who was tall and muscular with burnished skin the colour of a bar of chocolate with 70 per cent cocoa solids or Pantone shade 1608C, as he was fond of telling people, which was the kind of lame joke that artboys loved to make. He also had a dirty, flirty way of smiling at you with his tongue curled behind his front teeth, which he was doing now. ‘Do you teach in one of those hideous sink schools the Daily Fail is always banging on about?’
‘Not even!’ Allison shook her head vigorously. ‘It’s one of those swanky-pants Academies, policed by the yummy mummies on the PTA and stuffed full of Xanthes and Saffrons and Orlandos, entitlement oozing from every pore. Vile little sods.’
Hope grinned and looked to her right where Otto, who probably had been a vile little sod when he was at Harrow but had had it kicked out of him at art school, was talking with Lauren about Mad Men, the death of the American Dream and post-Capitalist dystopias. Lauren’s jaw was set as if she was stifling a thousand yawns, and although Otto was very attractive in an effete, languid way, Hope wasn’t surprised when her iPhone beeped. Lauren was a demon touch-texter. Hope surreptitiously looked down at her phone to read: Christ, rescue me!
When Hope raised her head, Lauren threw in an imploring look, her pixie-like face scrunched up, lower lip jutting out. She looked alarmingly similar to when they’d first met, on their first day of nursery school, when Lauren was experiencing severe separation anxiety and Hope had just pushed her off the much-coveted red tricycle.
‘Great name for a band,’ Hope said brightly. ‘The Post-Capitalist Dystopias. In fact, I’m pretty sure I saw them playing the second stage at Latitude.’
‘You spent the whole weekend trolleyed so I don’t think you saw much of anything,’ Lauren reminded her wryly, as she ran a hand through her close-cropped brown hair – ever since she and Hope had seen A Bout de Souffle at the impressionable age of sixteen, Lauren had decided that gamine would be her USP. ‘And you still owe me for my tent, which you wrecked.’
‘How on earth did Hope manage to wreck your tent?’ Otto sounded incredulous.
‘You really don’t want to know,’ Lauren said, grinning as Hope made zipping motions.
‘Oh I do, I really do.’
‘Hopey will kill me!’
Lauren and Otto were back on track and Hope could revert to chilling mode and catch up on the drinking; there were at least nine finished bottles waiting to go in the recycling bin. Her eyes skittered down the length of the table, counting the empty plates as she went, until she reached the other end, where Susie and Jack were sitting opposite each other and generally looking like they were having a good time. And at the foot of the table was Wilson, not talking to anyone and generally looking like a man who was scheduled for major surgery the next day.
Hope knew that she should be a good hostess and try to engage Wilson in conversation, but there was a huge expanse of table between them and engaging Wilson in conversation was usually a painful and ultimately futile experience.
He’d only been seeing Susie for the last six months, and Hope wasn’t even sure that they were that serious about each other, but she knew that Susie could do so much better. Wilson was entirely lacking in any kind of charisma and he always made Hope feel as if she was an empty-headed, superficial, shallow girl who had nothing to say that he would want to hear. He wasn’t rude, but Hope always wanted to shiver when he gave her one of those wintry smiles that never reached his steely-grey eyes and, try as she might, she and Wilson had never progressed much further than, ‘It’s my round, what are you having?’ and ‘Yeah, it’s a bit nippy for this time of year, isn’t it?’
Susie was one of her three best friends and Hope wished Wilson was more user-friendly because then they could go out as a foursome a lot more than they did and Jack would have someone to talk boy stuff with while she and Susie debated everything from politics to nail varnishes, but it hadn’t worked out like that.
Wilson was a photographer who lived in a converted loft in Kentish Town and used the downstairs space as his studio, where he got paid huge sums of money to shoot advertising campaigns and moody black-and-white shots of the great and good for the Sunday supplements. He drove a vintage Saab and collected vintage cameras and saw the world through a pair of vintage horn-rimmed glasses. He wore his black hair short at the back and swept up into a quiff at the front and was never seen in anything but Dark Wash 501s, snowy-white T-shirts and black V-necks; he and Jack had nothing in common, apart from the fact that their respective girlfriends liked spending serious quality time together.
‘But what do you see in Wilson?’ Hope had once asked Susie during one of their regular let’s-bitch-about-our-boyfriends sessions.
Susie had given the matter some serious thought. ‘Well, he does have good cheekbones,’ she said finally. ‘But mostly what I see in him is that he’s got a big dick and he knows what to do with it.’
It didn’t sound like a compelling enough reason to see Wilson on a regular basis, but it did mean that it was Susie’s responsibility to entertain him. Usually she didn’t seem to have any problem engaging with Wilson, though most of their conversation consisted of gently taking the piss out of each other, but this evening she’d all but ignored him in favour of talking to Lauren or Jack, and now she was standing up. ‘I’m going to have a post-prandial fag in the garden,’ she announced. ‘Anyone care to join me?’
There was a regretful murmur of dissent. The table was evenly split between those who didn’t and those who were currently trying to quit.
‘You’re all a bunch of lightweights.’ Susie sighed, shaking her head. ‘After I’ve topped up my nicotine levels, I’ll make a start on the dishes.’ ‘You don’t have to do that,’ Hope said half-heartedly. She made a lacklustre attempt at standing up herself, but Susie tutted and flapped her hands at Hope, then at Lauren and Allison who were also making unenthusiastic noises about slapping on the Marigolds.
‘You all just sit tight,’ Susie insisted firmly. ‘It will only take ten minut
es and the kitchen is really too small to have four people in there all arguing about who’s going to dry.’
It was very sweet of Susie and also very uncharacteristic. She’d already tried to avoid doing anything that might jeopardise her manicure. Wilson certainly seemed to think so. ‘Just yell if you run into trouble,’ he advised Susie, as she slowly began to squeeze her way out of the room, which involved Marvin and Allison tucking their chairs as close to the table as they possibly could. ‘And the green stuff in the bottle by the sink is Fairy Liquid; you’ll need some of that.’ Hope thought it might have been the first thing he’d said since he’d sat down.
‘Very funny,’ Susie snapped, as she finally reached the doorway. ‘Didn’t know you’d invited Oscar Wilde, Hope.’
She left the room grumbling about how smokers were a dying breed, as Jack got to his feet and started gathering up the empty bottles. ‘We need more booze,’ he said. ‘Two bottles of white, one of red. Wilson? I think I’ve got some more of that Belgian microbrew.’
‘Just water. I’m driving. San Pellegrino, if you’ve got it, thanks,’ Wilson said.
Hope realised that as Jack and Susie had left the table, Wilson had no one sitting next to him and she’d have to get up and take Jack’s seat so Wilson wouldn’t be a total Billy no-mates. She was just glancing down the table to ascertain that yes, Wilson still looked as if he was suffering from a particularly painful bout of lockjaw, when he lifted his eyes from silent contemplation of his pudding spoon and caught her eye.
After a few seconds Hope wished that he’d stop looking at her because his gaze seemed rather resentful, like he begrudged having to spend the evening eating all the lovely things she’d cooked when he could be polishing his collection of horn-rimmed spectacles or alphabetising his scratchy vinyl records. Both her grandmothers and her mother were insistent that a good hostess made her guests feel welcome and included, no matter what, but it had been a really long day and she had a bread-and-butter pudding in the oven, and Hope’s grandmothers and mother would never know that Hope’s way of dealing with a difficult dinner guest was by removing herself from the room.