I always loved going home to Rivendell and just enjoying myself without any reminders that I wasn’t ticking off the boxes for husband, children, super job: all these markers people are supposed to have achieved by the time they get to my age. Is that what life’s supposed to be about? Ticking off the boxes?
I wasn’t ticking off any boxes, but I’d never hurt my beloved Stefan or Giselle by saying such a thing. But now ... maybe things were changing. I wouldn’t say anything, though. I held the thoughts of Finn close to my heart. I liked him – I could admit that – but it didn’t mean he’d love me. I came with so much baggage I could fill a 747’s baggage hold. Who’d take that on?
Vilma arrives in a flurry of hugs for everyone and a bottle of wine she’s picked up somewhere that was cheap, but ‘it’s supposed to be really, really good’.
Stefan hugs her. ‘Cheap and really, really good, my favourite words,’ he says, ‘apart from Giselle, Sidonie and Vilma.’
‘You forgot the cats and the dogs and the goose,’ says Vilma.
‘The goose met with an untimely death,’ my mother says gravely.
‘Not another one.’
We could never keep geese very long; they were always escaping and getting out onto the road and terrorisingpassers-by. Geese were the untrained attack dogs of the animal world, ferocious fowl with teeth.
Dinner is lovely. We talk and laugh, though the wine is sadly tragic. And Vilma insists we don’t drink it, and says she’ll bring it back to the shop and make the man in the shop drink a bit of it until he sees that cheap and nice are not the same things.
‘No, no, darling,’ says Giselle, ‘there is no point. But you shouldn’t be spending your money on wine for us anyway, you should be spending it on you.’
‘I know but I brought home most of my washing,’ says Vilma.
‘And you can do it yourself,’ Giselle laughs.
My phone pings with a text and I see, with a dart of excitement, that it’s from Finn. He’s asking me to dinner at his friend Marin’s. She’s the one married to his pal, Nate.
‘I’d love you to come,’ the text finishes and I feel myself fill with excitement. You didn’t invite people you didn’t like to dinner with your friends, I think. Then my crazy mind gets involved and reminds me that we said we’d be friends. Just friends.
‘Must go to the loo,’ I say idly, and rush off to sit alone and examine each word of the text. It’s all straightforward except for the last line.
I’d love you to come.
You don’t say that to someone who’s a friend, do you?
I beam at myself in the foxed old mirror that’s been in Rivendell forever.
‘Finn,’ I whisper into it. ‘Finn and Sid. Sid and Finn. Imagine if that came true...?’
I’d love that too, I text back and feel a quiver of excitement run through my whole body. I’ve met Finn for coffee twice since our meal in the wine bar and we’ve gone for another two walks, which weren’t quite as much fun because we weren’t alone. His fellow hikers are nice but they’re not his real pals.
I feel schoolgirlish at how anxious it makes me that his friends will like me.
Me:biker-boot chick, wanting a guy’s friends to like me. I must be going a little nuts.
As I come down from my girlish fantasies about Finn, I tell myself that it’s simply nice having a male friend. It doesn’t have to go anywhere. We talk about work and sometimes he talks about sport, and I tell him sport is really boring, which makes him laugh. We talk about all sorts of things. Sometimes Finn tries to subtly meander the conversation around to Marc. And I just as subtly shove him off.
I can’t go there with him.
He thinks I had a normal relationship with Marc. I can’t tell him the truth.
I flush the loo for the sake of noise and return to the kitchen, my phone hidden in my pocket, like something precious.
After dinner we sit in the big old sitting room with the funny purple velvet couch we have had for years, and the old brightly coloured carpets that feel like they have been in Rivendell as long as I have. We love cards and we play all sorts of games and when there are the four of us together, it’s so much fun. Vilma’s the most competitive, with Stefan being the gentleman banker of all the pennies we keep in a jar so we can place bets. Blue curls up behind me on the couch and it’s lovely to feel his gentle feline heat in the small of my back. Soot, who has mixed parentage but is certainly over half dachshund, sits on my mother’s lap, eyes closed in blissful contentment because he’s with his dearest person in the whole world. There is the faintest hint of fox poo off him and Giselle says she’s going to have to wash him properly tomorrow.
With the fire roaring in the grate and the house cosy and happy, outside lit up with its twinkling of fairy lights, I think that Rivendell must be one of the happiest, most magical places in the world, and I’m so lucky to have it, to dip in and out of. If I am really lucky, I think dreamily, slipping into fantasy land, I might even have someone to bring here one day.
17
Marin
