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Eighteen

In that moment between sleep and wakefulness where you remember who you are, where you are and what you do, Delia spent longer than usual arranging all the pieces. It made a strange picture.

As the sun leaked through her bedroom blinds and she sensed she’d slept beyond nine, Delia felt the weightless weirdness of having no job to go to.

She imagined her old desk with the pink Post-its framing the computer screen, the photo of Parsnip in the paddling pool no longer there. Life continuing without her. Delia felt oddly bereft – it’d be strange not to, she thought, after seven years at the same office.

Then she thought of how Ann would still be wailing about her arm and Roger glowering at her, and told herself better late to leave than never. She had no wedding to be saving for, any more. Someone else could do battle in the middle ground between the Naan and Roger.

She’d had a big glass of red before she told her parents the night before, and gave them some white lies. Her boss had known of her intentions for a while, everyone was fine with it. She had savings, she reminded them. The wedding fund was a pretty healthy size, in fact.

Nevertheless, their uneasy expressions communicated: Should we be paying more attention to you? Are you unravelling before our eyes?

For all her efforts to act casual, obviously most people who moved from one end of the country to the other didn’t usually make the decision in the space of an afternoon. Or go the next day.

Delia got herself together for a mid-afternoon departure, thinking, at least hanging around workless in Newcastle is of short duration.

She knocked and pushed her head round Ralph’s door.

‘See you later. I’m off to London to stay with Emma for a bit.’

‘Cool. Go to Big Ben!’

‘Is it a favourite spot of yours?’

‘It’s where they fight the Ultranationalists in Call of Duty: Black Ops II.’

Delia laughed.

‘You could come visit me, while I’m there?’

Ralph shrugged and made non-committal noises. Ralph didn’t travel. Neither did her parents. There was an annual tussle to get them all to come into Newcastle city centre for a birthday. Last time they went to a nice restaurant, her mum had complained at the plate having ‘cuckoo spit and frogspawn’ on it.

‘Wait. Take this,’ Ralph said, rummaging around his fold-up sofa and producing a slightly crushed box of Fondant Fancies.

She gave him a hard hug and a kiss on his soft cheek and didn’t meet his eye.

Her dad was in the kitchen, having a cup of tea as her mum bustled around finding the car keys. Delia got the feeling she’d been spoken of, before she entered the room.

‘Off then, Dad! See you soon.’

He gave her a kiss on the cheek and then held out two twenty-pound notes.

‘Oh no, no no,’ Delia said, as her throat and stomach tightened. ‘I’ve got plenty of cash, Dad, honestly.’

‘You might want a sandwich when you get there,’ her dad said, and Delia realised he’d feel better if she took it.

‘Be careful. London’s full of thieves and chancers, and they’ll see you’re a nice girl.’

It was such a kindly fatherly idea that London would see anything about Delia at all, before it spat her back out again.

Delia smiled and nodded.

‘So you’re staying with Emma?’

‘Yes.’

‘She lives on her own?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re not …’ he hesitated. ‘There’s not a young man involved, is there?’

It was so unexpected a question that Delia had to stop herself snorting.

‘Of course not!’

She looked at her mum, who was fussing with her handbag and avoiding Delia’s eyes. This was what they’d come up with, in their concern. She was chasing a boy.

‘I promise you, there’s nothing to this but needing to get away for a while. I’ve barely seen Emma in the last few years, let alone had time to get to know anyone else.’

Her father nodded. As they hustled out of the hallway, her dad huffing and puffing, holding her case at waist height – fathers didn’t acknowledge the wheels on trolley cases, they had to be picked up – Delia felt sodden with guilt for worrying them like this.

Her mum drove her to the station in the old Volvo, with Delia anxiously trying to play down the whole unemployed peril with nonsensical chatter. If she talked fast enough, surely her mum wouldn’t notice.

‘This whole break Paul and I are having, it was the right moment,’ she said, hoping echoing Emma would be the charm.

‘You’re moving to London permanently?’ her mum asked, timidly. Her parents pretty much never lost their tempers or exerted their will. Something in their quiet forbearance was so much more shame-inducing than any shouting or outright disapproval.

It was a good question. It gave Delia stomach snakes. It’d been her right to be vague with Paul, not with her mum.

‘No! I don’t know. It’s more to get away from things for a while.’

The parental relationship loop: fibbing to protect them from worry, and them sensing being fibbed to, and worrying. The truth – that she had no idea what she was doing – would be more worrying, so Delia had no choice.

On the train she sat next to a short old man in a bulky coat, who started a conversation about pollution, which Delia politely tolerated, while wishing she could listen to her iPod.

As they got to Northallerton, he pointed to the tracks and said: ‘See those pigeons?’

‘Yes …?’

‘Pigeons know more than they’re letting on.’

‘Do they?’ Delia said.

‘Think they carried all those messages and never read any of them?’ the man said, incredulously.

Delia said she was going to the buffet car and switched carriages.

Arriving in London, she taxied from King’s Cross to Finsbury Park and told herself she’d definitely economise from tomorrow onwards. It was late, she was tired, and full of Fondant Fancies, cheese toastie, acidic G&T and a mini tube of Pringles, all picked at in nerves and boredom.

As Delia left the station, the evening air in the capital smelled unfamiliar: thick, warm, petrol-fumed. She was hit by a wave of home sickness so hard it was in danger of washing her away.

Nineteen

Emma’s flat was the first floor of one of those haughty, draughty Victorian houses with drama in its high ceilings and cold in its bones. There were bicycles crammed under the plaster arch in the narrow hallway, and subsiding piles of mail for the various residents stacked on a cheap side table by the radiator.

It was a leafy, residential street, yet still felt slightly overrun and run down.

Delia had warned herself not to be shocked by the space that a wage as intergalactic as Emma’s could buy here. But she still was.

She bumped her case up the steep worn-carpeted stairs to the door that separated Emma’s territory from the rest of the building and knocked. Music was humming on the other side and she hoped she wasn’t arriving into a cocktail party. She didn’t feel up to meeting the London society yet.

The door was flung open and all five foot three of Emma Berry filled it to the jambs, in a pale green party dress with circle skirt, pointy salmon satin heels and bouffanted Marilyn-blonde hair. Despite constantly bemoaning imaginary obesity, she had one of those Tinkerbell figures where any weight gained went to the pin-up places.

‘Hey there, Geordie girl!’ she sing-songed.

Delia grinned ‘Hello!’ and did an awkward fingertips-only wave, with her luggage.

There was some fussing and clucking as Emma tried to reach round and take Delia’s case on the vertiginous steps and it became obvious Delia would probably be killed in the attempt. Emma shuffled back into the flat to allow Delia to make a very laborious entry instead.

‘I’m not interrupting anything, am I?’ Delia said.

‘No, I was waiting for you! I admit I possibly started on the booze a bit early. Let me get a hug at you! This is so ridiculously exciting.’

Emma smelled of gardenias and her dress had watery silver sparkles across knife pleats. It rustled with the crispness of new and expensive fabric as Delia leaned in. To Delia’s fairly expert eye, it was not of the high street.

‘I can’t believe you’re here!’ Emma squealed and then it settled in both their faces that it was incredibly well-meant but possibly not the most tactful thing to say.

Delia replied: ‘Neither can-fucking-I,’ and they laughed, breaking the tension.

‘It’s going to be so great.’

Because Delia couldn’t share her confidence but didn’t want to offend with a lack of enthusiasm, she said: ‘Your dress is spectacular.’

‘It’s a Marchesa design.’

Delia gasped. ‘Like the Oscar dresses?!’

‘It’s a replica I got on Etsy for a song. It smells a bit dodgy. So I’ve covered it in Marc Jacobs,’ Emma said. ‘The hair’s backfired a bit too,’ she said, stroking it. ‘I was going for Doris Day bubble flip, I think it’s more New Jersey mob wife.’

Delia giggled.

‘Do you want the tour? It takes less than two minutes.’

‘Yes!’

Delia followed Emma – noisy on the hard floors in her clippy-cloppy shoes – around the flat. It was so very Emma to dress up for Delia’s arrival.

Delia’s weary soul gave a little sigh of relief that the flat was nothing like as ragtag and anonymous as the hallway downstairs.

In fact it was tiny, but beautiful. The floorboards were stripped and varnished Golden Syrup yellow, and the doors were an artfully washed out, distressed chalky aqua with Mercury glass handles.

The bathroom screamed ‘no man lives here’ – a white roll-top, claw-foot bath, Oriental silk dressing gown on a print block hook, thick white towels, a pile of water-wrinkled glossy fashion magazines. And one of those free-standing glass bowl sinks that look like a giant’s contact lens.

‘You’ve done all this?’ Delia said, in awe.

‘Nah, have I bollocks. The last girl had good taste and massive budget. Do not piss your money away on something that isn’t broke, I say. It cost me enough to buy it. I’ve run a J cloth over it and that’s it.’

The front room was another stunner – vaulting ceiling with original plaster rose and ruby-red Murano chandelier dangling from it, deep emerald velvet L-shaped sofa and huge, trailing swathes of Liberty print curtains.

Delia had a little covetous pang about a girls’ place. Paul mostly gave her free rein, but drew the line at ‘busy fussy old teashop spinster’ patterns.

‘Where’s your … things?’ Delia said, nailing what had confused her. It was as clutter-free as a photo shoot.

‘Got rid of things from Haggerston and stored a load with my parents back near Bristol.’

Slight worry still tickled at Delia. Emma was clearly never here.

They thundered up the small flight of hollow wooden stairs leading to the sleeping quarters. Delia was braced for the spare room to be the size of a margarine tub. Actually, it was well proportioned and there wasn’t much between it and Emma’s room – the main difference being Delia’s had a futon, while Emma’s had a wrought-iron princess bed. Both filled the floor space, leaving room for a shallow wardrobe only.

Emma had propped a framed print of David Bowie on the cover of Low on the spare-room windowsill. ‘Do you still like him? To make you feel at home.’

‘Oh, Emma, thank you! It’s all amazing.’

‘It’ll do,’ she agreed. ‘Given it’s broken me for savings.’

Emma had wealthy parents and even wealthier grandparents, the latter having obligingly pegged and left six-figure sums to her and her sister right when they wanted to get on the property ladder. It was still only a third of the cost of this flat, Delia guessed. The sums made her dizzy.

Emma led Delia into the kitchen last, which was a sleek white gloss space-agey fitted affair, with yet more sea green as accent colour.

A large twisty modern halogen light fitting, like a pipe cleaner animal made of a tungsten filament, hung low over the rustic wooden table in the centre. It was covered with dozens of foil trays of food with cardboard lids.

‘I got Thai,’ Emma said. ‘I didn’t know how hungry you’d be so I ordered everything. And I’ve got fizzy! I don’t have an ice bucket though.’

She lifted a bottle of Taittinger out of a washing-up bowl full of ice cubes and slopped it into a wine glass.

‘This fuss for me?!’ Delia said.

‘Who else would I make more fuss for? To Delia Moss’s London adventure!’ she said, and Delia accepted the glass and toasted.

Delia didn’t think she’d be having any adventure, nor did she much feel like one. But she felt so grateful, and humbled, because she’d managed to forget how fun her best friend was. Or ‘a certified loon’, as Paul had always said, fondly.

Emma had this hedonistic knack for making life more exciting. It wasn’t to do with her income; she’d been the same at university.

She was the person who produced cheap seats in the gods to a Shakespeare matinee that afternoon, and had been to a market and bought a whole octopus for dinner, its tentacles waving out of the bag. Or came back from the bar with a surprise round of Sambuca sidecars in espresso cups. (Her capacity for any intoxicant was fairly legendary.)

The odd thing was, if you tried to replicate an Emma gesture at a later date, it was never quite the same. There was something in her spontaneous, generous joie de vivre that made it entirely of the moment, and it lost something in efforts to copy it. An Emma idea lived only once and shimmered briefly, like a sandcastle, or a rainbow.

Or in this case, pork larb, khao pad and massaman curry.

Takeaway food, foaming alcohol, cackling laughter, and Delia’s surroundings made sense. Her appetite had come back.

After half an hour, she knew she was soaring high on the back of the eagle of booze and would no doubt crash hard on to the rocks of a hangover, but she didn’t care.

As the night wore on, Delia and Emma slumped side by side on the sofa, Emma occasionally reaching down to top up glasses from the third bottle.

‘We won’t finish it, obviously,’ she’d said, solemnly, shortly before firing the cork at the chandelier with a soft phut. ‘That would be madness.’

By the time it was pushing midnight, they’d covered Delia’s exit from the council, and Emma’s ill-fated entanglement with pitiless but vigorous Richard from Insolvency and Restructuring.

‘Rick the Dick, as he’s known to the secretaries. Sadly with that nickname, I got the wrong end of the stick, literally and figuratively.’

And Emma’s sister’s forthcoming giant folly of a wedding.

‘Ten days in Rome for the hen, Delia! Ten days! Count them! They add up to ten.’

‘But you’re all for that non-stop party stuff,’ Delia said, holding her glass out for a refill, loving being the Delia she was with Emma again.

‘Not with Tamsin’s friends I’m not,’ Emma said, twisting the bottle away expertly before the glass frothed over, ‘Like Salem’s Lot, in Joules Breton tops and Hunter wellies. I was hoping for Bath tearooms and a spa, two nights, in and out. Everyone knows what happens on hens, you get wasted on the first night and phone in your performance on the second. Imagine doing that as rinse-repeat for ten days. Ugh.’

Delia laughed. Emma topped her own glass up. Like a proper friend, Emma had clearly sensed that Delia needed time to work up to discussing Paul.

‘Do you think you’ll go back to him?’ she asked, eventually.

‘I don’t know. Maybe, yes. When the rage at the thought of him with Celine has subsided. If it ever does.’

‘Celine,’ Emma said, trying it out. ‘Oof. He could’ve at least been poking a Hilda. Or an Ethelred.’

‘Ethelred’s a man’s name, isn’t it?’

‘Exactly.’

Delia was reminded of the calming effect of someone not doing what they were supposed to, like Ralph.

‘Any idea why he did it? I mean, because sex. Paul doesn’t seem the type though.’

‘I think he wanted to try it out, take a risk. We’d been together for ten years.’

Delia hated herself a little for sounding as if she was making excuses for him. She tried a different tack. Total honesty.

‘You know something I never admitted to myself, until now? I made it easy for Paul when we got together. I knew that if it was hard, he might not have bothered.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He was never that crazy about me …’

‘Oh that’s not true!’

Delia took a deep breath. She’d always shoved this knowledge into a cupboard and shut the door on it, and Paul’s affair now brought the contents cascading out.

‘It is, Em. I don’t mind, or I didn’t. I know he loved me, and he liked my company, and he fancied me enough. It was fine, we still had a great life. But that extra-special thing that makes you lie awake and watch someone sleep in the early days, or want to kill your rivals with your bare hands? That kind of passion, it’s never been there for him, like it was for me. I wanted Paul, so I built it all around him. It’s why I was so good about him spending all hours at the pub. It was going to be the same way with the wedding. He only had to show up and say his lines.’

‘That’s Delia-ish caringness. You’d be that way with anyone.’

‘I wasn’t trying that hard with men before Paul, though. I usually had the upper hand.’ Delia swiped her travel-greasy fringe out of her eyes, ‘Am I allowed to say I was quite a bit in demand, now it’s so long ago?’

‘You completely were,’ Emma said. ‘I remember in the union bar when you wore your hair in those buns which had all the boys sighing. You were one of those manic pixie dream girls. Without being a twat with a ukulele.’

What was different about Paul? It was his wasn’t-much-fussed nature, the carelessness. It made Delia determined: you WILL notice me, you WILL want me.

‘Maybe Paul being half-hearted is why I wanted him so badly. How messed-up is that? I knew I had to strive for him. I was so demented about winning him over, I never considered if I wanted to be with someone who needed convincing.’

The truth of the last line landed heavy. Delia felt depressed. Accepting she’d got something so vital wrong filled her full of regret. Would she wish the last ten years away? No. She should’ve walked into them and through them with her eyes open, though. She encouraged Paul’s complacency.

‘I never thought of you as unequal,’ Emma said, adjusting the stem of her glass on her glamorously girdled stomach. The shoes had long been kicked off, her flesh-coloured tights pouching at her toes.

‘We weren’t in a day-to-day way. But his house was my house. His lifestyle was my life. His friends were mine. Parsnip is the only truly joint project we’ve ever had, come to think of it.’

‘You feel like now you’ve thought this, you can’t un-think it?’

‘Kind of. I have to face it and it has to change, if we’re ever going to be together again.’ Delia absently touched the edge of her glass against her lips, in contemplation. ‘You know all the things you never have to ask yourself, because you know? In your gut?’ she said. ‘This might sound odd but whenever I popped into the bar unexpectedly, Paul always looked pleased. Instantly. You know that split second when you can’t disguise how you feel? Like when you see someone you know in the street at the same time, and you think “Oh shit now we have to chat” and you both see it on each other’s faces, just for a moment? Paul never did that with me, not even through the Celine months.’

‘Maybe he’s always pleased to see you. As they say.’

‘Yeeaah, but never to show any concern I might run into the other woman? It turns out he’s also really good at lying to me. That’s what I can’t un-think. I’m not sure I know him as well as I thought I did. It’s almost like, if I suspected, it’d be easier. Now I think, it could all happen again. Because I didn’t spot one clue.’

‘You and Paul had a good life together though. I know it’s tempting to see everything through this massive mistake, but it doesn’t undo everything you have together.’

‘I know. All I can do is wait to see how I feel after time’s passed.’

Emma nodded.

‘And another thing,’ Delia said, conscious she didn’t want to alarm or cast judgement on Emma’s singleness, ‘I have to accept that if I don’t go back to Paul, I might not meet someone else who wants a family in time.’

‘Yeah,’ Emma sighed. ‘I can’t lie to you, dating over thirty is full of that fear. Sometimes I worry I’m too fussy. I mean, look at Dan. I got bored, but maybe that was my fault.’

‘Which one was Dan?’

‘The one with the rich family in Hertfordshire who turned out to have the raging coke habit that day at the races.’

‘Oh yeah,’ Delia said, not sure she remembered him. Wealthy drug taker and a trip to Ascot wasn’t really pinning it down in Emma’s romantic CV.

‘The cocaine might’ve been a problem if you’d spawned.’

‘I know. But compared to the usual idiots I meet, he wasn’t a git. He was pleasant. He was … benign.’

‘Tumours can be benign.’

‘That is so fucking deep! Write that down,’ Emma said.

After so much chatter they lay in peace on the sofa, watching a small breeze move the curtains, listening to an argument taking place outside the flat between a taxi driver and his fare. It was like being back in halls again.

‘You know what annoys me?’ Emma mumbled. ‘When people act as if not having your personal life sorted out by our age is some sort of failure of paying attention. Like if you want it, you can automatically have it. As if it isn’t mostly down to luck. We’ve both gone at it in different ways and here we both are. On my sofa.’

‘On your sofa,’ Delia agreed.

‘I read this interview the other day. You know that blonde woman …’

‘That blonde woman?’

‘You know. Used to do that telly thing in the nineties, I forget. She was all “Women should remember that they’re less fertile after thirty-five and remember to get pregnant by then.” Remember?!’ Emma roared. ‘Yeah thanks, it had totally slipped my mind. And where did I put that perfect father material partner? Must have left him in the pub with my umbrella. What a shitcranker.’

Delia laughed. Not for the first time, she imagined Emma as a formidable opponent in a boardroom.

‘Don’t you need to get to bed?’ Delia said, twisting her watch round.

‘I’ll inject Costa Americanos. Two of them and I’m riverdancing these days. No major meetings tomorrow. And, on the subject of the opposite sex: I have to share something so awful it can only be with my best friend,’ Emma continued. ‘Rick the Dick did this freaky thing. Oh God it’s so awful I can’t even tell you! I’m not exaggerating when I say it’s the worst thing to ever happen to anyone ever.’

‘You said that when you were bought gift vouchers for Zara Home and couldn’t swap them to Zara fashion.’

‘Worse even than that.’

‘Did he bring out spiky toys? Like a rubber prickly pear?’

‘When he reached his … conclusion, he said stupid stuff.’

‘What, dirty talk?’

‘Kind of …’

‘You filthy slut, dirty whore, sort of thing?’

‘No, I could’ve coped with that! It was surreal, irrelevant.’

‘I’m not sure I get what you mean …?’ Delia said.

‘He came out with nonsense-speak. Gibberish. I can’t tell you!’ Emma covered her face with her arms and her voice came through muffled. ‘I let this man into my bed, I’m implicated.’

Delia sat upright.

‘Emma Berry, tell me what he said!’

‘The first time he said “Fuerteventura!”’

‘What?’ Delia sat stunned, then clapped a hand over her mouth. ‘Ahahahaha …’

‘Another time it was “Drambuie!” The worst was,’ Emma was hyperventilating in the attempt to get the words out now, ‘“Charles Dickens!”’

She did an overbite face when she said the words. Delia was utterly destroyed, face down in the cushions, shaking with whole-body laughter.

‘Did you ask him why?’ Delia gasped, face wet with tears.

‘How could I? Why did you mention the greatest novelist of the Victorian period when you spaffed?’

They collapsed into more howling and weeping.

‘Must be some very specific form of Tourettes,’ Delia said, wiping under her eyes. Why did laughter with Emma feel so therapeutic? She wanted to send Richard a thank you note. Signing off: Emily Bronte

There was a pause, where they watched lights from passing cars strobe across the darkened room and sigh-giggled, pondering the mysteries of love and relationships. Delia opened her mouth and thought she might be about to give birth to a profound thought.

‘Where do I go from here? I can’t date. I mean, thongs have come back in, for God’s sake. I look like my dad in a thong.’