Chapter One
‘And that’s how I won her heart,’ he said, smiling. He leant back in his chair, lifting his hands behind his head, expanding his chest. He was always so smug.
He looked at me, and then at the idiot sitting beside me, and then turned back again to me. He was waiting for us to respond. He wanted to see the smiles stretch across our faces, to feel our admiration, our awe.
I hated him. I hated him in an all-encompassing, burning, biblical way. I hated that he repeated this story every time I came to dinner, every Friday evening. It didn’t matter who I brought with me. It didn’t matter which degenerate I was dating at the time.
He always told them this story.
Because this story, you see, was his ultimate trophy. For a man like Charles – successful, wealthy, charming – a beautiful, bright, sparkling woman like Marnie was the final medal in his collection. And because he was fuelled by the respect and admiration of others, and perhaps because he received neither from me, he wrenched them instead from his other guests.
What I wanted to say in response, and what I never said, was that Marnie’s heart was never his to win. A heart, if we’re being honest, which I finally am, can never be won. It can only be given, only received. You cannot persuade, entice, change, still, steal, steel, take a heart. And you certainly cannot win a heart.
‘Cream?’ Marnie asked.
She was standing beside the dining table holding a white ceramic jug. Her hair was pinned neatly at the top of her neck, loose curls around her cheeks, and her necklace was twisted, the clasp beside the pendant, hanging together against her breastbone.
I shook my head. ‘No, thanks,’ I said.
‘Not you,’ she replied, and she smiled. ‘I know not you.’
I want to tell you something now, before we begin. Marnie Gregory is the most impressive, inspiring, astonishing woman I know. She has been my best friend for more than eighteen years – our relationship is legally an adult; able to drink, marry, gamble – ever since we met at secondary school.
It was our first day and we were queuing in a long, thin corridor, a line of eleven-year-olds worming their way towards a table at the other end of the hall. There were groups huddled at intervals, like mice in a snake, bulging from the orderly, single-file line.
I was anxious, aware that I knew no one, psychologically preparing myself for being alone and lonely for the best part of a decade. I stared at those groups and tried to convince myself that I didn’t want to be part of one anyway.
I stepped forwards too fast, too far, and stood on the heel of the girl in front. She spun around. I panicked; I was sure that I was about to be humiliated, shouted at, belittled in front of my peers. But that fear dissipated the moment I saw her. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but Marnie Gregory is like the sun. I thought it then; I often think it now. Her skin is shockingly fair, a porcelain cream tempered only occasionally – after exercise, for example, or when she is overwhelmingly content – by rosy pink cheeks. Her hair is a deep auburn, twisted into spirals of red and gold, and her eyes are a pale, near-white blue.
‘Sorry,’ I said, stepping back and looking down at my shiny new shoes.
‘My name’s Marnie,’ she said. ‘What’s yours?’
That first encounter is symbolic of our entire relationship. Marnie has an openness, a tone that invites warmth and love. She is unassumingly confident, unafraid and unaware of any presumptions you might bring to the conversation. Whereas I am intensely aware. I am afraid of any potential animosity and am always waiting for what I know will come eventually. I am always waiting to be ridiculed. Then, I feared judgement for the pimples across my forehead, my mousy hair, my too-big uniform. Now, my tone of voice, the way it shakes, my clothing – comfortable and rarely flattering – my hair, my trainers, my chewed fingernails.
She is light where I am dark.
I knew it then. Now you’ll know it too.
‘Name?’ barked the blue-bloused teacher standing behind a desk at the front of the line.
‘Marnie Gregory,’ she said, so firm and self-assured.
‘E … F … G … Gregory. Marnie. You’re in that classroom there, the one with the C on the door. And you,’ she continued. ‘Who are you?’
‘Jane,’ I replied.
The teacher looked up from the sheet of paper in front of her and rolled her eyes.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Sorry. It’s Baxter. Jane Baxter.’
She consulted her list. ‘With her. Over there. Door with the C.’
Some might argue that it was a friendship of convenience and that I would have accepted any offer of kindness, of affection, of love. And maybe that’s true. In which case, I might counter that we were destined to be together, that our friendship was inked in the stars, because further down our path she’d need me too.
That sounds like nonsense, I know. It probably is. But sometimes I could swear to it.
‘Yes, please,’ said Stanley. ‘I’ll have some cream.’
Stanley was two years my junior and a lawyer with a number of degrees. He had white-blond hair that flopped over his eyes and he grinned constantly, often for no discernible reason. He could speak to women, unlike most of his peers: the result, I guess, of a childhood surrounded by sisters. But he was fundamentally dull.
Unsurprisingly, Charles seemed to be enjoying his company. Which made me dislike Stanley even more.
Marnie passed the jug across the table, pressing her blouse to her stomach. She didn’t want the fabric – silk, I think – to skate the top of the fruit bowl.
‘Anything else?’ she asked, looking at Stanley, and then at me, and then to Charles. He was wearing a blue and white striped shirt and he’d undone the top buttons so that a triangle of dark hairs sprouted from between the fringes of the fabric. Her eyes hovered there for a moment. He shook his head and his tie – undone and loose around his neck – slipped further to the left.
‘Perfect,’ Marnie said, sitting down and picking up her dessert spoon.
The conversation was – as always – dominated by Charles. Stanley could keep up, interjecting successes of his own wherever possible, but I was bored and I think that Marnie was too. We were both leaning back in our chairs, sipping the last of our wine, and absorbed instead in the imagined conversations playing out within our own minds.
At half past ten, Marnie stood, as she always did at half past ten, and said, ‘Right.’
‘Right,’ I repeated. I stood, too.
She lifted our four bowls from the table and stacked them in the curve of her left arm. A small bead of pink juice from a raspberry still sitting in one of the dishes bled into the white of her shirt. I picked up the now-empty fruit bowl – she’d made it herself at a pottery class a few years earlier – and the jug of cream and followed her into the kitchen at the back of the flat.
This flat – their flat – was testament to their relationship. Charles had paid the hefty deposit, as Charles paid for most things, but at Marnie’s insistence. She had known instantly that the flat was meant for them, and it won’t surprise you to know that persuasion has always come very naturally to Marnie.
When they moved in it was little more than a hovel: small, dark, filthy, damp, spread over two floors and desperately unloved. But Marnie has always been a visionary; she sees things where others cannot. She finds hope in the darkest of places – laughably, in me – and trusts herself to deliver something exceptional. I have always envied that self-confidence. It comes, for Marnie, from a place of stubbornness. She has no fear of failure, not because she has never failed, but because failure has only ever been a detour, a small diversion, on a journey that has ultimately led to success.