“I have something to confess,” he says through the gap in the en suite door as I towel off from showering afterward, the peppery scent of his posh body wash infusing the steam.
“What’s that?” I say lightly, though—irrationally—my mind is barking,Girlfriend? Wife? Kids?
“The party we’re going to. It’s at Olly and Joanna’s.”
I put my head around the door. Max is in front of the mirror, freshly dressed in dark blue jeans and a black long-sleeved sweater.
“You don’t mind, do you?” He apologizes with his eyes. “Thought you might not agree to come if I told you.”
The idea of it does feel slightly awkward: we were at uni with Olly and Joanna, childhood sweethearts from the same town in the Midlands, who were both studying chemistry. They were part of our wider circle, but we all thought they were slightly co-dependent, and already I’m struggling to remember a single thing about who they reallywere—like what music they were into, or which films they enjoyed, or what drinks they would order at the bar.
“Are you... friends, now?”
Max nods. “Bumped into Olly in Balham one night a couple of years back. He was hammered, so I walked him home. He sent me a crate of wine the next day to say thanks.”
“A crate?” I say, thinking,What’s wrong with a bottle?
“They’re nice, I promise.”
“Is that because they’ve got more exciting, or you’ve got more—”
He cuts me off with a laugh. “I’ll let you be the judge of that.”
—
Olly and Joanna’s house is halfway down one of those long, tree-lined streets where every second property is home to a young family, all with identical side-return extensions, bi-fold doors off their kitchen-diners and a particular style of Berber rug in the living room. Max tells me Olly is an analytical chemist now, and that Joanna works as a scientific writer for—get this—thesamepharmaceutical company.
“They work together now, too? That can’t be healthy,” I say, as we climb out of the cab.
“Don’t drop that,” Max says, smiling down at the bottle of champagne I am gripping by the neck. “This isn’t a broken-glass kind of street.”
“Do you think they know they’re two separate people?”
Max laughs and takes my hand, and we walk up to the front door together and ring the bell like we’ve been a couple attending house parties for years.
I feel mean, of course, as soon as Joanna answers. She’s exactly as I remember—pin-thin in a slightly pinched way, with strawberry-blondhair and unnervingly pale skin, made even paler by the darkness of her navy silk dress. “Hello, you,” she says to Max, leaning forward to kiss him, before standing back and taking me in, shaking her head proudly like I’m her firstborn child on day one of primary school. “Lucy! Haven’t seen you since your famous disappearing act.” And before I can wonder if she’s being deliberately snarky, she’s pulling me into a kind of long-lost-friends hug, all musky perfume and strands of wayward hair.
Inside, Olly is similarly effusive—Took you guys long enough!—and soon we find ourselves with drinks in hand, drifting between groups of Olly and Joanna’s neighbors, colleagues, and friends, many of whom Max seems to know.
Every flawless room of this house is aglow with lamplight, platters of M&S nibbles on surfaces where we once might have balanced ashtrays and plastic pint glasses. It’s all very middle-class and urbane, with most of the conversation seeming to revolve around the much-admired renovation of Olly and Joanna’s house, and swapping contact details for builders, plumbers, and electricians, as well as the usual debates on the council’s approach to policing, schooling, parking. There’s a lot of underplayed wealth going on here—the kind nobody admits to but that slips out in offhand references to second homes, nannies, postcodes. I start to feel conscious of my cheap sundress, green-and-white cotton in a bold print—perfect for the weather, I’d thought. I hadn’t even worried too much about the creases, thinking,How posh can a house party be?But I know a pair of Louboutins and a hundred-quid manicure when I see them.
“Sure you don’t want one of these cocktails?” Max asks me, after we’ve been here an hour or so. “They’re insanely good.”
I smile. “I don’t think drinking in public after ten years dry is a very good idea.”
“Tenyears?” Max says, but fortunately as he does, he’s clapped onthe back by a tall, sandy-haired guy with high cheekbones and glinting blue eyes, who turns almost straightaway to me.
“Lucy Lambert. Well, well.”
Beneath the chatter of the room, a Mumford & Sons bass line is galloping away. It strikes me that the frantic beat seems to suit this guy’s entrance, somehow.
I know those eyes, I think, my mind scrambling to place them. But in the end, it takes me too long. “Sorry, I—”
“It’s Dean,” Max says, at the same time as his friend says, “Dean Farraday.”
“Oh,”I say, my eyes readjusting to the slimmer, sharper, more self-possessed version of Max’s friend from his law course. One of the guys he went to live with, after he graduated. I always used to wonder if Dean—or Rob—had persuaded Max to finish with me, in order that they could be three single lawyers in London together. But I eventually concluded that had to be rubbish, because Max was always someone who knew his own mind. “Sorry—I didn’t recognize you.”
“Imagine me several stone heavier.” Dean winks. “Max finally talked me into the gym.”
