My anger was sharpening, becoming more easily accessible to me. No one else could tell. I was good at keeping it to myself. But any time I saw a chef on the TV sampling the delights of Mexican cuisine (where there was never even a mention of a burrito), or talking about Mayan civilization or walking round Aztec ruins, I would have to switch over. I had begun to loathe burritos. I had felt the failure of the business to launch every morning when I left for a shift at Clean Bean and when I came back. The van continued to rust on the drive of Joe’s parents’ house, where his mother Dorothy had agreed to house it, providing it was under a canvas cover so that no one could see its hideous burnt-orange colour. She also paid the road tax and insurance. I don’t think Joe’s father knew this.
The year turned into two, and now Joe’s inheritance from his grandfather was almost gone, and we were in the same state: testing burrito recipes and saying that we would try this county fair or that village fete. It was an astonishing blind spot, and we only argued about it when we were very drunk, because for me to insult the existence of the van was as if I were attacking Joe’s very being, and everything he hoped for – as if I were stamping on his dreams and laughing at his attempts to achieve. He was manipulatively sensitive about the whole thing, and I knew that one false move might turn back the burrito clock even more than it had been turned already.
*
I was not apprehensive about our forthcoming lunch at Joe’s parents’, because although I never enjoyed myself particularly, it was all familiar. Joe had a sister, Daisy, who was three years younger than us, but married with two children, who diverted the bulk of attention and enabled me to avoid too much scrutiny. It had long been a source of tension for Daisy that she’d got everything right: school grades, gap year before university, graduate-training scheme, charity bungee jumps, a marathon, a solvent spouse, two kids, lost the baby weight – and Joe, who had done literally none of those things, was imperceptibly but nevertheless undoubtedly their parents’ favourite. I’d met Daisy’s friends at her wedding to her husband, Radek, and they were as competitive as she was. Compared to them, Daisy fancied herself as a little outré, because she smoked a bit of weed and had a small tattoo of a peace sign on her inner arm. She was not outré, and the peace sign looked like a Mercedes Benz badge. She’d been in the City like her father, before having her children. Radek was still there, working every hour God sent. I figured I might be out all the time too, if I was Daisy’s spouse.
At these Sunday lunches, we often talked about six-year-old Lucia’s schooling or baby Wilf’s ‘fevers’. Joe’s mum was a GP. His dad, Ben, was due within the year to retire from some sort of CEO-ship of something financial I’d never quite understood. Ben was easier to deal with, a lifetime of networking and delivering his own voice across boardrooms made him predictable, manipulable company. Dorothy was more difficult. I always had the impression that she felt Joe had not reached his ‘potential’, and that somehow it was me who had failed to make it happen for him. It was possible that she thought it was entirely my fault. More recently it was making me feel rebellious and irritated. She’s his mother: she was there first! I thought.
*
Approaching Dorothy and Ben’s house, there was the burrito van, hidden under its tarpaulin. I pulled the roses I had purchased from the Shell garage out of my handbag, and peeled off the label. We passed the van, saying nothing, and made straight for the front door, lifting the brass knocker.
Lucia opened it. She was wearing her riding helmet. ‘You’re the right height for a jockey,’ I said to her, stepping inside.
‘I know!’ she cried, galloping down the hallway on her invisible horse, into the large extension that contained the kitchen. ‘They’re here!’ she shouted.
‘Hullo!’ called Ben, from the front room.
‘Hi, Ben!’ I said brightly. He appeared at the doorway and we kissed each other on the cheek.
‘Can I get you two a drink?’ he asked, patting his son on the shoulder.
‘A glass of red would be lovely,’ I said.
‘Yeah, me too,’ said Joe, slouching off to the kitchen like he was fourteen.
‘Coming up,’ said Ben, making his way to the cellar stairs. They had a wine cellar, but they wouldn’t have called it that. They would have just said they had a couple of wine racks down there.
I followed Joe, passing the pretentious grandfather clock and the studio portrait of Daisy as a young teenager. There were endless school pictures, and the deliberate-casual engineered photo collages of the family on holiday through the nineties, everyone cut out in their stripy swimsuits, Dorothy with an ill-advised perm. I could feel a cloak of claustrophobia envelop me and paused a moment to breathe.
‘Ah!’ said Dorothy. ‘The wanderers return!’
I smiled at her and gave her a kiss. ‘These are for you,’ I said, handing her the roses.
‘Oh, thank you darling,’ she said. ‘Oh, they’re from Morocco! I wondered how a rose would grow this time of year. Luce, do you want to put them in a vase for me?’
‘I’m riding,’ said Lucia.
‘It won’t take a minute,’ said Dorothy.
‘I’ll do it,’ I said. I took the roses back, feeling their North African identity had courted Dotty’s disapproval: carbon footprint or racism? It was hard to tell.
‘How are you?’ she said.
‘Good, thanks,’ I replied, feeling a malaise melding with the claustrophobia and settling rapidly into the centre of my stomach. Daisy appeared at the kitchen door. ‘Hello!’ I said.
She too kissed me on the cheek. ‘Hi, Rose.’
‘Where’s Rad?’
Daisy rolled her eyes. ‘Stag do. You’d think they’d all be married by now.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Actually, this is a second marriage. They’re far more suited.’
Dorothy sighed. ‘Will you tell your father to come and cut this beef? What on earth is he doing in there?’
‘I think he’s getting wine,’ I said.
‘No, he’s trying to set the Sky player to record,’ said Lucia.
‘Again? Go and do it for him, Luce. I don’t want everything to get cold. You two made it just in time,’ Dorothy added, but she only looked at me.
*
At lunch, we talked mainly about the impending wedding of a couple none of us knew except Daisy. I watched her mouth moving, and thought how utterly exhausted she looked. I tried to tune out, thinking of Constance Holden and how she might have fallen for my mother, but Daisy had a persistent voice, and as she went on and on, I began to yearn for a change of subject. A new update on Wilf’s phlegmy lung, or Lucia’s curriculum, and the latest way Daisy’s daughter had excelled beyond her classmates – (‘although it’s a far better idea to keep her with them, because it’s really important that she knows how to deal with people her age?’). I had a vision, suddenly, of what Lucia might be like in fifteen years’ time. I saw her, friendless, cluelessly brainy. It was bleak. I stared round the blandly decorated dining room, at the aspirational portraits of Dorothy’s distant Victorian relatives. The grandfather clock chimed in the hall.
‘And talking of weddings, what about you two?’ Daisy said as I cleared away the plates.