A night at the Latimers’ soon slashed that particular dinghy. I had long moved out by then of course but the penance I paid for escaping （middle-class kids stay at home throughout their twenties in London; they might rent a flat somewhere else for a bit, but even then they partially live at home until their parents stump up some deposit for a mortgage and they can actually have their own place for real） was that I had somehow found myself promising Sophie that I’d come for supper at least twice a month. This was a promise I really had no intention of keeping – modern life is 75 per cent cancelling plans and both parties feeling relieved – but I underestimated Sophie’s need to stay involved, to always feel as though she played a vital role in the lives of those she knew. I tried to cancel at the beginning – I’d cry off with headaches or late nights at work. Every single time I offered up a plausible excuse that would save us both from the hassle, she’d offer her commiserations and promptly suggest another date instead. And if I cancelled that date, she’d just offer up another. She didn’t really want me there, you understand, but it was a good show to keep up with the orphan that she had so selflessly taken in. I fast realised that I’d be better off picking the dates that worked best for me and sucking it up. For years that meant the second and last Sundays in every month. Always at the family home. Always an Ottolenghi recipe that called for spices that even Sophie, who spun out over local grocery shops in the way that others might salivate when they see a shop window full of diamonds, couldn’t find. As a result, every meal tasted predominantly of basil, since she could get that at any Waitrose going.
The Sunday when I saw that Caro had burrowed deeper than I’d previously realised was an unusual one, in that neither John nor Annabelle （nor Jimmy for that matter） were around to join us. Normally we were buffeted along by other people, indulging in pointless talk about how awful it was that the local library was to close, and wasn’t austerity finally revealing its true victims. The kind of politics talk that achieves nothing but that a certain type of person perseveres with because it makes them feel like they’re doing something about it just by mentioning it. God knows none of the Latimers ever went to the local library in the years I spent with them.
Sophie was completely undeterred by the concentrated chat we would now have to have with each other. Sophie never feels awkward in conversation. The way she views it, she always has something interesting to say, and what on earth could make her feel inadequate when armed with that certainty?
As she poured me a glass of wine and shoved the aged cat off the sofa, she began to gush about Caro. ‘Lovely girl – Jimmy said you’ve met her. She’s actually the daughter of Anne Morton – you know, the last foreign sec, and Lionel Ferguson. He writes fabulous books about the British empire. We knew them fairly well from an NCT class we took when I was pregnant with Annabelle – we both had these big bumps and bonded over the ridiculously judgey group leader we had. We saw them at parties over the years but of course Anne had a demanding job and by then they’d moved to Richmond. So remarkable that our boy has ended up dating little Caro.’
Oh God. Of course. That kind of self-assuredness that Caro had didn’t come from nowhere. Her father was called fucking LIONEL. Her mother was a politician. And on top of the privilege she’d been born with, she was striking and smart too. I used to flick through the society pages of Tatler in the office sometimes, usually to see if Bryony was featured, where the women in the photos were always the daughters of earls or dukes as standard. But it bothered me that they were also ethereal, limby, beautiful. How did the luckiest in society also get to be physically superior? I’d assumed the breeding pool for those kinds of people was so small as to ensure genetic weakness, but here they all were – the Caros floating around looking effortless and perfect, gliding through life with the confidence that they won the birth pool jackpot.
Sophie carried on gushing. Caro had sent her a limited edition of Toni Morrison’s essays last week. Caro had cooked for the family round at Jimmy’s. The chicken had been perfection. Caro had suggested a weekend in France in the spring. I traced my fingers along the scratch marks the spiteful old cat had made on the arm of the sofa and nodded. Sophie didn’t much want me to contribute anything here. And I didn’t have anything to contribute that she’d want to hear anyway.
‘Yes, it’s soon but John and I were only together for a few months before we shacked up in that little flat in the Angel,’ I heard her say. I looked up and rewound the conversation. They were moving in together! It had been … I cast my mind back … a little over two months since they met. What kind of needy lunatic shacks up with someone when they haven’t even admitted that their favourite movie is Die Hard and not, as they’d said on date two, Il Postino? I mean, I don’t think Jimmy has even seen Il Postino. Maybe he’d say some obvious Tarantino film.