‘You would have thought that they’d push the party back a couple of hours,’ she said as she set off down the deserted road. ‘I’m taping the service, but I would much rather be watching it in real time.’
‘Why?’ asked Angie. For once she wasn’t trying to be difficult. She really didn’t understand. ‘You didn’t know her.’
Maggie turned and stared at Angie before snapping her head back to look at the road. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Of course, I didn’t know her, but it feels like I did.’
Angie shook her head. Wasn’t this just rubbernecking of the worst possible kind?
‘And those poor boys,’ Maggie continued. ‘They’ve lost their mother.’
Angie sniffed. ‘Lots of people lose their mothers,’ she said. ‘That’s just life. And she wasn’t even royal any more. Not that that should make any difference. I can’t see why one dead rich person merits all this fuss.’
Angie could feel the irritation rising up from Maggie, who had clenched her jaw so hard that Angie could see the outline of it through her cheek.
‘Well,’ said Maggie huffily. ‘I’m just saying that I, for one, would have liked to have watched it. But we are where we are. Now, there’s a map on the back seat. I’ve written the route down on that piece of paper. Can you navigate once we get into Leeds? I’m okay in the city centre, but I get a bit lost in the suburbs.’
Angie smiled to herself. Of course, Maggie had the route written down already.
‘Yep,’ she said, ‘but don’t blame me if I get us lost.’
‘You can’t get lost. All you have to do is just . . .’ Maggie turned to face her and then realised that Angie was joking. She rolled her eyes. ‘Oh, ha ha,’ she said. ‘Very droll.’
Leon’s house turned out to be a neat little semi in a road of neat little semis, each nearly identical, with neat square gardens at the front and clean cars parked on neat driveways to the side. It was Angie’s idea of hell.
‘How has this happened?’ she asked. ‘Our lovely Leon living in this suburban horrorfest.’
‘I think it’s quite nice,’ said Maggie.
‘Nice. That’s precisely the word.’ Angie pronounced the word as if it meant the precise opposite. ‘This isn’t Leon, though. He’s got so much more about him than this.’
‘No,’ disagreed Maggie. ‘This is Leon. It’s just that you’ve always wanted him to be someone else.’
Angie considered this for a moment.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I want him to be true to himself. And this . . .’ She waved her arm in the direction of the street. ‘This is not it.’
Maggie got out of the car and popped open the boot from where she took out a small box exquisitely wrapped in blue paper with white curling ribbon. Angie looked at it curiously for a moment. Then it occurred to her what it was.
‘Shit!’ she said. ‘Am I supposed to have brought a present?’
Maggie looked at her, eyebrow raised. ‘Well, it is a birthday party,’ she said sarcastically.
‘Oops,’ said Angie. ‘It never even crossed my mind. I don’t suppose . . .’ She looked balefully at Maggie’s box.
‘No!’ said Maggie indignantly. ‘This is my gift.’ Then she sighed and rolled her eyes. ‘Oh, I suppose so. I haven’t sealed the card, suspecting that something like this might happen . . .’ She eyed Angie like a schoolteacher with a disappointing pupil. ‘And . . .’ She went back into the boot and brought out a second box identical to the first. ‘I do have this one spare.’
She grinned at Angie.
‘It’s a train and there were some carriages too, so I bought both and got them to wrap them separately. You owe me fifteen quid. Pay me when you’ve got it,’ she added.
Angie felt humbled. Not only did Maggie know her well enough to know that buying a gift would never have occurred to her, but she had fixed the problem for her too. That was why cool, organised, slightly anal Maggie was her friend. Why she was Maggie’s friend she had absolutely no idea.
20
There were blue balloons with Happy First Birthday written on them tied on to the gatepost and attached to the knocker of Leon’s neat front door.
‘I love the way people do that with the balloons,’ said Maggie. ‘It makes the birthday into a real community affair. I always smile when I see them.’
Angie had never seen birthday balloons on houses before. She assumed that this was because having children was so far off her agenda that she had never noticed or maybe it wasn’t something that they did in York, although that seemed unlikely. Then again, Maggie had no children either, so Angie wasn’t sure why it was a practice that had registered with her. They had talked about children from time to time, most recently on the arrival of the birthday party invitation.