8
In fact, Thomas doesn’t seem in the least smug, and the first few minutes of their meeting at the Regent are surprisingly pleasant–considering that the last time Sophie had seen him he was handing her a laundry basket in which he’d collected every gift, letter and card she’d ever given him throughout their relationship.
Sophie asks him about his baby girl and Thomas speaks with quiet pride and joy. It is obvious that he is very happy. He is so happy he probably doesn’t need to be smug. He is beyond smug.
Listening to him talk, doing an imitation of the ‘grrr’ and ‘meow’ sounds that Lily brilliantly makes whenever she sees a dog or a cat (‘without any prompting whatsoever!’), Sophie realises that she will always love Thomas, a little.
But she also realises, as she observes the slight suggestion of a well-fed double chin, that breaking up with him is not, after all, the biggest mistake of her life. She doesn’t want to be Deborah at home with pretty, growling, meowing baby Lily. She really doesn’t. She would rather be single, desperate-for-a-man Sophie. This revelation makes her feel euphoric with relief and she takes a handful of peanuts and settles back in her chair, ready to enjoy all the things she used to like about Thomas.
Finally, he gets down to business.
‘So, as I said on the phone, Aunt Connie died yesterday.’
‘Yes, I’m very sorry,’ says Sophie. ‘She was such a sweet lady.’ She’d actually found Aunt Connie ever so slightly terrifying, but now she is dead ‘sweet’ seems an appropriate description.
Thomas clears his throat. ‘The reason I needed to see you is because I’ve been through her paperwork and it seems that Aunt Connie has left you something in her will.’
‘Oh! Gosh. That’s unexpected.’
Sophie feels awkward. Nobody has ever left her anything in a will before, and it seems to her that if someone is going to do something so thoughtful it is only courteous to be devastated by their death. Ideally she should be crushed, red-eyed and sniffly, clutching a soggy hanky. She should certainly be a few levels higher up the grieving stakes than ‘a little sad’. At the same time, she is flattered and even–she hates to admit it–a bit covetous, wondering if it is something nice, perhaps an antique plate, or a lovely old-fashioned piece of jewellery.
She says, trying not to sound too interested, ‘So, what exactly did she leave me?’
Thomas places his drink down squarely on its coaster and meets her eyes. ‘She left you her house.’
‘Her house?’
‘Yep, her house.’
‘Her house on Scribbly Gum Island?’
‘That’s the one.’
Sophie is staggered. Her ex-boyfriend’s aunt, a woman she barely knew, has left her a house. A beautiful house. An extraordinary house.
It is very inappropriate and it is probably, somehow, her fault.
So she blushes.
Of course she blushes. Sophie is a blusher. It isn’t cute or funny. It’s a disorder. It even has a name: ‘Idiopathic Craniofacial Erythema’, or ‘severe facial blushing’. Her blush isn’t a petal-pink virginal stain stealing disarmingly up her neck; it’s a burning, blotchy, all-enveloping beetroot, a phenomenon which is impossible for even the most tactful person to ignore, or the least observant person to miss. Her fair skin doesn’t help. Like fine porcelain, her mother says proudly, as if she’d purchased her complexion at David Jones. Like a corpse, her friend Claire says.
She’s been blushing since she was seven. She knows this because she can remember her first blush. Her mother had dropped her off at school and Sophie was trotting into the playground when she heard the toot of a horn and turned to see her mum leaning out of the car window waving her teddy bear and calling, ‘Sophie, darling, did you remember to kiss Teddy goodbye?!’ A dozen kids witnessed this profoundly humiliating incident, including Bruno Tripodopolous, the most glamorously wicked boy in her class. (Twelve years later she dated Bruno for two weeks, during which time they had a lot of vigorous sex and only spoke when absolutely necessary. Even when she was seven, before she knew what sex was, some part of her must have known that Bruno would be good at it.) When Sophie heard Bruno making smacking sounds with his lips she was shattered. Her face went boiling-hot purple. Bruno stopped snickering and looked at her with scientific interest, calling over his friends to ‘Come check out what’s happened to Sophie’s head!’ Her mother instantly grasped the enormity of her error and quickly withdrew Teddy from the car window, but it was too late. Sophie was thenceforth a blusher.
‘What colour is red?’ the boys used to yell, squashing their cheeks together like gargoyles. ‘Sophie’s face, Sophie’s face!’ ‘Oh, poor Sophie is embarrassed,’ the girls would snigger with fake sympathy. ‘Poor Sophie is shy.’ For the rest of that year she spent every recess and lunchtime hidden under the tuckshop stairs with another outcast, a boy called Eddie Ripple, who had a horrendous facial twitch. They were the school ‘retards’, until Eddie left and Sophie, in the same way that fat kids learn to be funny, learned to be extremely social and eventually became popular, so much so that she was voted school captain in high school. She can now walk straight into a cocktail party of strangers and within five minutes be part of the group that’s laughing the loudest and making everyone else feel jealous and left out. But she has never managed to fully vanquish the blush and it continues to make regular appearances at the most inconvenient times.
‘This must be a mistake,’ she says to Thomas as her face heats up as reliably as a hotplate. ‘She can’t have left me her house. That’s ridiculous.’
Thomas looks everywhere except at her. He is one of those people who writhe in empathetic embarrassment whenever she blushes. They really had been quite incompatible.
‘I’ve seen the paperwork,’ he says. ‘It’s all very clear.’
Sophie picks up a piece of ice from her glass and holds it against her forehead. ‘But I would have thought she’d leave the house to you or Veronika. Or your cousin. The beautiful one who does the children’s books. Veronika said she just had a new baby. What is her name again? Grace?’
‘Yes, Grace. Well, Grace has just moved into her mother’s place on the island. Aunt Laura has gone travelling for a year and Grace and her husband are building a home. Maybe Aunt Connie thought they didn’t need another one. Anyway, apparently she has left all three of us some money.’
‘But she hardly knew me! And my history with your family isn’t that good, is it?’
Thomas smiles slightly and doesn’t say anything.
‘What does your mother say? Oh, God, what does Veronika say? I hope they don’t think I somehow manipulated your aunt! I complimented her on her house, that’s all. I didn’t mean I wanted it!’
‘I know,’ says Thomas. ‘I was there.’
But Sophie is in agonies of guilt because this sort of thing has been happening to her all her life–although on a much smaller scale. She admires some person’s belonging, and the next thing she knows they are absolutely insisting she take it as a gift, which naturally causes Sophie to blush. ‘Darling, don’t be so heartfelt when you like something,’ her mother advises her. ‘It’s when you get that shiny-eyed look.’