*
They came to dinner on the third Saturday of January. I was in the kitchen when they arrived and Clare ushered them straight off for a house tour, so my first impression was of two heads of glossy dark hair yet to lose its pigmentation in a single strand, of alien and seductive fragrances that lingered in their wake. As I opened the wine, I could hear their voices in the stairwell saying the things people always say when exploring our four-storey Georgian townhouse:
‘Oh my God, this is, like, my dream house.’ (Her.)
‘Seriously, isn’t it completely beautiful?’ (Her.)
‘It’s fucking amazing.’ (Him.)
‘Look at this stone staircase. I feel almost depressed, it’s so grown-up.’ (Her.)
And Clare’s delighted laughter, at odds with her murmured modesty.
As I say, we were accustomed to the house being an object of envy, even among our peers. Prospect Square, a five-minute walk from the Thames, is an intact Georgian conservation area sometimes used in the filming of period dramas and number 15 still has many of its original glories: hand-cast ceiling roses, internal shutters, that kind of thing. From the rear window of our bedroom, which occupied the entire top floor, we had a view of the river; out front there was a private garden square. We were fortunate by anyone’s standards and every so often the realization would take possession of me: I’ve got it made here. I’m #Blessed.
Maybe this gushing Melia girl was taking pictures right now for her Instagram feed, so busy cropping, filtering, hashtagging, she didn’t notice she was leaning a little too far over the curved banisters. A gruesome image sprang to mind of a young woman hurtling through the tubular void and landing splat on the flagstones of the hallway, hair fanned around her head, absorbing the blood and turning sticky.
What the . . . ? I shook my head clear.
When the party came back down and settled in the sitting room, I distributed large glasses of Burgundy. Helpfully, the other couple had chosen to sit opposite us on the smaller of the two sofas, a pale high-backed piece that showcased their strikingly twinlike good looks. Both were slightly built, she a beautiful tomboy dressed in an odd but winning combination of velvet shorts, glossy tights and a glittery top the colour of blue hydrangeas, he girlishly handsome in black jeans and a shirt in a paler blue. On closer inspection, of course, they weren’t so similar. She was finer-boned, a proper beauty with large eyes the amber of Pears soap, whereas he had flaws: unusually wide-set eyes, asymmetrical eyebrows, a slightly beaky nose.
‘This is a relief,’ Melia said, gripping the wineglass in two hands as if it might at any moment be confiscated. Her nails were yolk-yellow. ‘Everyone else seems to be doing Dry January.’
‘We do it every other year,’ Clare said, which made us sound not only dull but dull on an advance-notice basis.
‘Wait, so you already know next January is going to be completely miserable?’ said Kit. He was lithe with animation, clenching and twitching in his seat. ‘Why not leave it to the last minute to decide? Give yourselves the gift of hope?’
‘And what if something awful happens just before, like you’re splitting up and you really need a drink?’ Melia spoke with a blurting charm, immediately apologizing: ‘I can’t believe I said that! Of course you’re not going to split up.’
‘If we do, then plans for sobriety will need to be reviewed on an individual basis,’ Clare reassured her, with mock formality.
‘You’ve never been tempted to go dry, then?’ I asked Kit and he gave a loose, roguish smile.
‘Mate, I’ll quit when I’m dead.’
Cliché though it was, we were all excitable enough to splutter at this and at the playful smack Melia landed on the back of his head. They touched and gasped and gestured frequently, I noticed, reinforcing each other’s presence.
‘That’s a refreshing attitude for your gen,’ Clare said to Kit. She was already very taken with him, I could tell. ‘We’ve been led to believe you prefer soya oat flat whites to the strong stuff.’
‘Soya or oat,’ I corrected her. ‘It’s one or the other.’
‘Jamie works in a café,’ she explained.
‘Really?’ Kit said. ‘Where? Here in St Mary’s?’
‘No, Waterloo. It’s called the Comfort Zone, which is appropriate since it challenges about as much as it pays.’
‘It’s only temporary,’ Clare said, loyally, ‘and it actually sounds exhausting.’
‘Well, physically, I suppose,’ I said, and as Melia’s gaze rested on me I wondered what she saw. In the flatteringly soft lamplight of our living room, a still-attractive man, I hoped. Tall, well-built, hair enduringly thick, jawline reasonably sharp. At forty-eight, I wasn’t so far off my prime, was I?
‘I know what those jobs are like,’ Kit said. ‘We’ve both done our share of bar work, haven’t we, Me? That’s what you do when you’re an actor.’ His tone became droll. ‘You never actually act.’
‘I thought Clare said you worked in insurance?’ It had struck me as a staid career choice for a millennial when she’d briefed me; even more so now I’d met him.
‘I do. De Warr Insurance. I’ve got debts to pay off before I can do anything interesting. But for a while there, I was, you know, deluding myself I might be the next big thing.’ He shrugged the easy shrug of someone to whom such acceptance had not come easy at all.
‘That’s where we met,’ Melia explained. ‘Drama school.’
So they were both failed actors: Clare hadn’t told me that. Though I hardly knew them, the detail made sense of them, of their physicality, their confidence, their need to be noticed, if not admired.
‘How much professional acting work did you do?’ Clare asked.
‘Melia was in a rep for a season,’ Kit said. ‘I did a whole load of unpaid stuff, but I gave up after a few years.’
Melia sighed. ‘I stuck it out for a bit longer, but it was the same story every time. You’d be down to the last two and it would go to the girl with the father in the business.’
‘Showbiz does seem like it runs purely on nepotism,’ Clare said.
‘It’s becoming one of those professions where only the rich can do it,’ Kit said. ‘They’re living rent-free in their parents’ house in Hampstead, while you’re running up massive debts just to share a stinking mattress in Catford. You can’t compete.’
There was more than a trace of resentment in this remark. Though they’d brought beautiful flowers and an expensive bottle of wine, a theme of financial hardship was already established and, by the time we’d finished the main course – I cooked beef on the teppanyaki grill – and Clare was serving her cherry and pistachio trifle, had found full voice.
‘I would literally give blood to live on this square,’ Melia said.
‘People “literally” give blood all the time,’ I told her, grinning. ‘It’s called paid donation. But I think you only get a hundred quid, not a house.’
‘Okay, but you know what I mean. I would give an organ or something.’ She’d closed her eyes as she said this, as if she were making a wish before blowing out her birthday candles. Her eyelids were glittery bronze, the lashes extended in some mysterious way. Under the table, restless legs crossed and uncrossed constantly. She was, I acknowledged, insanely cute.