Chapter 31
31
Bel put the roasting tin into the built-in wall oven with a satisfying snap of the spring-loaded door and pulled her watch round her wrist to check the time.
‘As for the other plan, I’m not doing starters. I’m with Nigella, I think they make everyone feel too formal,’ she told Connor. ‘My unfailing method for dinner success is start with cocktails and plates of small salty things. Then a hefty main where you can serve yourself second helps, and a dessert that kids would eat. So it’s Greek-style leg of lamb and vanilla ice cream with rum-soaked spiced sultanas. Obviously, I’d give hypothetical kids teetotal ones.’
‘Isn’t that how Danny, Champion of the World, drugs pheasants, rum-soaked dried fruit?’
Bel barked with laughter. ‘OK, didn’t expect that feedback.’
‘Sounds amazing anyway,’ Connor said. ‘Tonight’s dinner represents a major upgrade for me. I’ve only been cooking things that can be topped with fried eggs and strafed with hot sauce.’
‘Strafed. Good word.’
‘I didn’t only go into journalism to be Aaron Parry’s bitch-boy,’ Connor said.
Bel grinned. ‘Why did you go into it? A big change from what you were doing before.’
‘Oh well … there is the sanitised shorter version which I think you had in Platzski’s, about finance being the wrong fit. The longer version, which I’d rather we kept within these walls …’
‘Of course.’
‘It’s a horrible, cut-throat environment where hairdryer bollockings are what you’re expected to withstand in return for the monthly pay cheque. After a particularly stressful quarter, a colleague jumped out a third-floor window. Up until then I’d bought into this idea that buckling was for the weak and it was to be endured. When someone lost their life I thought, no, this is dysfunctional to the point of evil.’
‘Fuck!’ Bel gasped, pausing while pushing ice cubes out of a rubber mould.
‘You know, my colleagues had multiple banking apps on their phones. When they got bawled out they’d go to the toilets and look at the balances in all these apps to remind themselves why it was worth it. Hoarding piles of gold like dragons. I got through Eli’s funeral on Grey Goose and beta blockers and I started to think, you know, maybe being well-off isn’t worth this. A spiral into clinical depression and the Citalopram followed. I had a few months off and did a course, rediscovered what college Connor wanted to do.’ He paused. It felt good to be honest. ‘Jen and I are collateral from that. She wasn’t as keen on Connor 2.0. Or a return to Connor 1.0, however you want to see it. Is this the right size?’
He pointed at the cheese.
‘I’m sorry,’ Bel said. ‘Yes, they’re ideal. Size of a dice.’
‘Would you mind if we did a quickfire round on each other’s life and times?’ Connor said. ‘I’m slightly concerned that total ignorance might find us out, over the course of an evening. Like, do you have any brothers or sisters?’
‘One, my younger brother, Miles, thirty. Lives in York. We get on well. He’s a children’s party entertainer, believe it or not.’
‘Really? Is that a thing you can full-time be?’
Bel curled the skin from an orange with a potato peeler and threw it into two lowball glasses.
‘Yes, if you’ve got a Rowlf the dog costume, boundless energy for dealing with noisy under-tens, are a member of the Magic Circle and have a girlfriend, Yasmin, willing to chauffeur and DJ. He gets loads of work from weddings, when they want kids present but not involved.’
‘I’m jealous, frankly. What a joyful career.’
‘You, siblings?’
‘Apart from my dead sister?’
Bel grimaced. ‘Erk.’
‘Are we calling her Jennifer? How did she die?’ Connor asked.
‘You decide.’
‘This is the most tasteless and disrespectful conversation imaginable and I am going with an aneurysm in Sainsbury’s two years ago.’
Bel nodded.
‘My phone’s got a picture of Maurice on it now, by the way,’ Connor said. ‘Sadly genuinely passed away. Erm, moving on, my elder brother, Shaun, who lives in D.C. with his wife, Lauren, works for a senator over there.’
‘He’s the one who’s visiting soon?’
‘Next weekend, in fact. He chose Hotel Gotham in the end– remember he had me scouting Didsbury? Shaun’s unlike anyone you’ll ever meet. Astonishing forward momentum, Messianic levels of self-belief. Will analyse and summarise you to your face and, even worse, is usually accurate. This makes him sound awful but he’s great, if alpha dog mental, and I love him a lot.’
Bel registered minor surprise at Connor being this unguarded and warm.
‘Does this mean I’m meeting him?’ Bel said, placing a drink by Connor. ‘Old Fashioned. Sip it or it’ll blow your doors off.’
‘I’d not thought, you can do? I’m staying with him so I’ll be in the city that weekend. Might make sense for the cover story.’
‘Cool. Parents?’
‘Two, Stuart and Elaine, both retired teachers and very nice people. Still in Barking. Shaun has tried to help them move to somewhere more retirement villagey, but they’re settled. You?’
‘My dad died when I was twenty, my mum Bridget is in York. She’s a GP’s receptionist.’
‘I’m sorry about your dad,’ Connor said.
‘My dad’s side is where the money comes from,’ Bel said. She had decided to reward openness with the same approach. If they’d mirrored each other’s disdain in the past, maybe it was time to harness that habit for positivity. ‘My paternal grandparents were “own land” wealthy. But my parents have always been firm that they’ll make our “lives comfortable, not idle”. Miles and I have always worked, but we’ve been free to make more risky choices because we had them to fall back on. We went to state school. My mum works because she thinks she should and she enjoys it.’
‘You don’t owe me explanations, I was completely out of order,’ Connor said.
‘It’s OK, I want to be open about it. Thing is, people think you’re blithely unself-aware about being a “rich kid”, and I’m not. My dad gave me a lot of confidence but maybe the source code of that confidence was being well-off. So there’s all sorts of advantage you can’t unpick. My conclusion is you can’t choose the privilege you’re born with, but you can choose how you live.’ Bel glanced around. ‘Not that I’m slumming it! I’d had such a bad time before I left York I needed cheering up.’
She had said too much and shot Connor a look she hoped conveyed: let’s not dig into that .
‘Trivia round, what perfume do you wear? It’s unusual?’ Connor said, interpreting it correctly.
‘Oh,’ Bel said, feeling her skin pinken with self-consciousness that he’d got that close, and noticed, ‘Malin + Goetz Dark Rum.’
‘Booze as a scent? I like it. Jen always wore jasmine something or other.’
Bel decided it wasn’t the moment to share Shilpa’s conviction that ‘Bitches wear jasmine. Not all jasmine wearers are bitches but all bitches like jasmine. Scientific fact.’
‘How are you bearing up regards Jen?’ Bel said, carefully.
‘Shamefully well. It should be a lot more difficult than it is and it’s now obvious I had been shuffling “break up” down the to-do list for months, if not a year, and I shouldn’t have. She called me out on that, in fact.’
Bel hesitated. ‘She called you out? Didn’t she send you the bombshell nude?’
‘Yup. Jen got over the ignominy of the misfired topless selfie very quickly and then it became a savage indictment of my lack of caring that she was lured into sexting with the other guy, when minutes away from seeing me.’
‘That’s …’ Bel paused.
‘Say it.’
‘An inspiring degree of self-esteem,’ Bel concluded, ‘I want to “match her freak”, as they say.’
Connor burst out laughing. For an unwary split second she thought she saw Actual Like on his face.
She bolted upstairs and changed, reappearing as Bella with hair in a long plait over one shoulder, bright red lipstick and matching shift dress (￡25, Vinted). (There was something peculiarly freeing about trying on someone else’s taste, even if that person didn’t exist, Bel observed.)
‘You look really nice,’ Connor said, and sounded genuinely approving, brushing the last of his Old Fashioned from the corner of his mouth.
‘Of course you think I look nice, I’m dressing completely differently to my own taste.’
‘You could find the coded insult in absolutely anything I say, couldn’t you?’
The doorbell rang at a punctual five past seven. The food smelled great, the lighting was glimmering-perfect, the music was the right level, candles lit, glasses out, their eyes lightly spangled by cocktail.
If only this wasn’t a sinister masquerade.