‘Don’t look at me that way,’ Gabi added, frowning. ‘After Joel, I’m done with men, remember?’
Anna nodded slightly. ‘I do remember youtellingme that.’ Whether it lasted remained to be seen. Right at that second, Anna would have bet twenty quid on her friend’s lips being locked onto someone else’s come midnight.
But Anna couldn’t begrudge her that. The break-up with Joel had been almost five years ago.To be honest, Anna hadn’t been sad to see the back of him – he hadn’t appreciated Gabi nearly enough – but Gabi hadn’t seen it that way and she’d been broken-hearted. Since then, there had been a handful of short-lived relationships. Gabi liked guys who were confident, but more often than not, ‘confident’ turned out to be ‘cocky and self-absorbed’. Not qualities that lent themselves to a mature, long-lasting partnership.
‘It’s true,’ Gabi added, looking so convincing Anna almost believed her. ‘Are you ready?’
Anna glanced up at the staircase, beyond which her duvet cocoon lay waiting, and sighed. At least one of them should have something to hope for this evening as they crossed the threshold from this old, tired year into the fresh blankness of the next.
She forced the corners of her mouth to turn up. ‘Of course. Give me two seconds. I’ll just grab my coat and put on my shoes.’
Chapter Two
IN AN IDEAL world, Anna thought,I would arrive at every party an hour and a half late.That way she could skip the beginning, when everyone was buzzing with optimism about the night ahead, full of loud hellos and instantly forgotten introductions.
Gabi worked as a food stylist, in charge of making the pictures of dishes in cookbooks and magazines appear mouth-watering. Over the years, she’d encountered an eclectic mixture of people, from photographers and art directors, to magazine editors, stylists and TV presenters. The party that evening was being hosted by an ex-pat Californian who owned a chain of south London beauty salons. Vanessa lived in Chislehurst, and as Anna drove to their destination, the houses became progressively grander, the streets leafier. It was only a couple of miles away from Anna’s semi-detached in Sundridge Park, but it seemed like a different world.
She trailed around the ground floor of the stylish house behind Gabi, a glass of untouched fizz in her hand. Every time Gabi managed to extricate herself from one group of excitable extroverts, she was instantly dragged into another, most of whom Anna didn’t know. Anna just hovered around the edges,keeping her expression friendly but neutral, and avoiding eye contact as much as possible.
The advantage of having a more outgoing friend who seemed to know ninety per cent of the other guests was that the conversation eddied around Anna, much the same way a stream flowed around a rock in its path, and that was fine by her. Because with small talk came questions, and she wasn’t particularly keen on questions, not the personal kind, anyway, and the one question she really didn’t want to hear was—
‘Hey, Anna! Howareyou?’
She fixed a smile in place and turned to find another of Gabi’s creative, interesting friends smiling at her. ‘Oh, er, hi…’ Anna trailed off, partly because she couldn’t remember the woman’s name, but mostly because this one simple question always left her in a quandary. She was basically an honest sort of person, so when somebody asked her how she was, her automatic response was to tell the truth.
Big mistake.
Back in the early days, she’d done just that, launching into a description of how each second of the day was a painful knife-stab in her heart, how she dreaded opening her eyelids each morning. It had been so wonderful to let it all out.
But she’d soon discovered it was a great way to make her friends’ faces fall, to cause them to stammer awkwardly. More often than not, they’d invented someone on the other side of the room they urgently needed to talk to and had scurried away.
No onereallywanted to hear how she was. Not after two years, nine months and eight days. Not even Gabi. Instead, they wanted to hear she was putting herself back together,that it was possible to heal from something that tragic and move on. It was selfish, really, because they were asking her to give them hope. They were asking her to reassure them that if something that awful happened to them, they’d eventually be okay too. But Anna wasn’t okay. She wasn’t even close.
Gabi’s friend was looking at her, eyebrows raised, waiting for an answer.
‘Doing good,’ Anna replied, nodding, and noticed, once again, how grief had turned her into a big fat liar. ‘How about you?’
The woman – Keisha! Her name wasKeisha– nodded philosophically. ‘Oh, you know. Same old, same old…’ And then her brows drew together. ‘I heard about… you know… I’m so sorry.’ And then she did the worst possible thing: she placed a sympathetic hand on Anna’s arm. It burned.
Anna wanted to shrug it off, to glare at Keisha for stepping over an unmarked boundary, but she didn’t. ‘Oh, look!’ she said, staring at the air past the other woman’s head to the opposite side of the large and glossy open-plan kitchen. ‘I think Vanessa is looking for you.’
Their hostess was actually nowhere to be seen, but two could play at the ‘invisible friend’ game. Keisha looked torn for a brief second, then gave Anna a swift one-armed hug and hurried off. Anna breathed out and escaped in the other direction.
She was glad when the hour hand on her watch slid past nine and people got beyond the ‘meet and greet’ phase and settled into small groups, leaning against kitchen counters, staking out their places in the various seating areas. It made it easier to skirt around the edges of the party, glass of warm fizz in hand,giving the impression she’d just finished a fabulous conversation with one person and was on her way to another, when really – aside from that brief exchange with Keisha – the only person she’d properly engaged with all evening had been Gabi, and that had been in the car on the way there.
They’d barely pulled out of Anna’s road when Gabi had said in a very off-hand way, ‘Did I mention Jeremy is coming tonight?’
Anna had glanced sharply across at her friend in the passenger seat. Gabi had been sitting calmly, hands folded in her lap, the hint of an angelic smile on her lips. That had troubled Anna, because Gabi didn’t do cool and matter-of-fact. Gabi did squeals and smiles and showers of confetti. Overeverything. The churning in the pit of Anna’s stomach had intensified.
‘Oh?’ she’d said, deliberately keeping her tone light. ‘Remind me who he is again?’ Even though she’d known full well that Jeremy was a pal of Vanessa’s. Even though she’d known he was a graphic designer and had an ‘amazing’ flat in Beckenham.
Anna had known it was only going to be a matter of time before that particular grenade landed because Gabi had been casually dropping his name into conversation for weeks now, almost as frequently as she hinted – not always so obliquely – that it was time for Anna to ‘move on’.
But Anna didn’t want to move on. She wasn’t ready.
However, the fact she’d said this a thousand times had obviously had no impact on Gabi at all, because there her friend was, smile barely contained, weaving her way through the crowded kitchen with a man in tow.
And the penny finally dropped. It hadn’t been her own romantic prospects Gabi had been getting all sparkly and hopeful about earlier on that evening – it had been Anna’s.
