‘I want you to meet her, Gray,’ he said. ‘She’s met John and Sophie but she needs to pass your bar.’ I was shaken by this. Met his parents? Simone didn’t hit that milestone for months. But then, Caro was in the same circle, wasn’t she? An associate of Horace, a lawyer who doubtless went to Oxbridge and had a parent that the Latimers either knew or professed to know. Simone, as lovely as she might have been, was not. East London born, daughter of a nurse and a council worker, she never fitted in with Jimmy’s family with the ease that one of his own tribe would have. Sophie and John showered her with praise – Sophie once took her to the country house they rented in Oxfordshire for a bonding weekend where she forced them to make marmalade all day – but there would never be a true ease. I should know. Being embraced into that family is not the same as being truly accepted. Someone feeling smug for helping you is not the same as loving you.
Caro. I won’t waste time here. I hated her from the moment I met her. Intensely. I imagine you’re wondering if this is because her presence threatened to take away my oldest friend, the man I’d relied on since I was a child. To you I say: try harder. We shall have no banal cod psychology here. A month after I’d first heard about the new girlfriend, we were set to meet.
We arranged drinks at a bar in Maida Vale one Wednesday night, something I was silently furious about because I still hadn’t made any headway with my grand finale. But it was clearly a three-line whip and I couldn’t come up with a good enough reason to postpone again. Jimmy and I downed a bottle of wine as we waited for her. She was so busy with work, he explained, as he scanned his phone for an update on her whereabouts. Ten minutes later, she walked in. I didn’t need to be told that it was her – I knew. Caro pushed her way past the group of people waiting to be seated without having to say a word. Phone clamped to her ear, she had long red hair （which looked intensely natural but which I later found out was dyed. Never trust an artificial redhead – their need to be different and interesting marks them out as neither） and wore a cream silk shirt and wide-leg trousers. The only makeup I could discern was a swipe of red lipstick. And it goes without saying that she was beautiful, ethereal, captivating, blah blah. She knew it. Women always know it. And Jimmy would think that he’d discovered some untapped beauty because she didn’t wear tight clothes or bother with nail varnish. Men always think that a surface level lack of vanity is a winning trait, as if the amount of effort women like Caro put into their appearance was any different from the dolled-up girls you see on any British street on a Saturday night. It’s just a different way of approaching it. And the beauty is still obvious, but men think it’s more refined, as if beauty in women is only pure when they pretend not to care about possessing it.
Ah look, I have wasted time. But it pays to have a sense of her – even if it’s just so that I can congratulate myself on my restraint as I remind myself what eventually happened. She was young – younger than Jimmy and me, but she was remarkably possessed. A lawyer, as I’ve mentioned, who specialised in complex business takeovers. She explained her job as ‘the organiser if Nike wanted to buy Adidas’。 I had not asked for an explanation. I think this particularly patronising description was the specific moment when I realised that I hated her. She neither tried to win me over nor did she smother Jimmy to show her ownership. She was cool with him, which of course made him even more frantic in his affection, and she was matter-of-fact with me. We spent a couple of hours circling around each other, but I didn’t really give it my best shot because all I could really focus on was how rapt Jim was. How much nervous energy he was emitting. How desperate he was for us to connect, be firm friends, link around him. I felt rising anxiety, feeling my fingers crawl up my neck, desperate to scratch. At 11 p.m., in the middle of a story Jimmy was telling about a family holiday where we ended up climbing a mountain by mistake, Caro put her hand over his and rubbed the skin between his thumb and finger and said that she had to go to bed. And just like that, the evening was over. The bill was requested, Ubers were ordered, and I was dispatched with a bear hug from Jimmy and an air kiss from Caro which did not require her to touch me. Their cab came first, and they drove off, Caro looking down at her phone without a backwards glance. Neither of them had suggested another meet up.
I knew that there was no way to play this and win. Jimmy was completely infatuated with this woman, and any sign of reluctance from me would have propelled him towards her even faster. I’ve always wondered why people get so defensive about criticism of their partners. If your mother, a person who has known you since you were a screeching potato in a onesie, thinks that the person you’re with is a bit off, why the fuck would you discount that? Tell me if the person I’ve fallen in love with seems like a monster. List the ways. Do a deep dive into it, make graphs. I want all the information. But nobody else ever seems to. And Jimmy was no different. All I could do was be nice and hope that Caro got bored. Her attitude towards him had hardly screamed ‘devoted’ and I clung to that for a while.