His girlfriend
Noémie has found herself in many places, and she expects to find herself in many more.
But she never saw herself here, in a fusty village pub on the outskirts of Leicester.
Seb is a creature of habit, and Noémie is like a cat he has picked up off the street.
Does he think she will curl up cosily into his existing life?
This is not Noémie. She does not go where she is told.
And yet, it is his godson’s second birthday, so she will grit her very straight teeth until they’re on the train back down to London.
The function room is small, all thick patterned carpets and screaming children, so she holds on tightly to her subpar Pinot Noir.
Seb’s parents are here, as are a smattering of old friends with young families.
Almost all of them she met for the first time at Maisie and Nimesh’s wedding, then never again.
She has been kept separate, and she does not know if this is for her sake, or his.
Perhaps Seb became a different person when he left England, and he’s still trying to reconcile this new Seb with the one he left behind.
‘I don’t have to stay here if you don’t want me to.’
That’s what Seb says, when he wakes in her bed and drinks her coffee in only his boxer shorts.
Noémie tells him that self-pity is unbecoming of a kept man.
He’s been living rent-free at her apartment in Knightsbridge for months, but she does not mind.
Things were equal between them, on the continent.
Their relationship had been built on the fact that they saw eye to eye.
Noémie is used to men gazing up at her, because in Paris she was a model, because she knows she was hewn for a runway.
Her mother is from Nepal, and she has her to thank for her complexion, her cheekbones.
Her father was French, far older. She thanks him for nothing.
There is barely an inch between her and Seb; neither had stooped when they’d first kissed outside that Neapolitan hotel bar.
He’d had a vape. She’d fixed him with eyes darker than his and told him that he should smoke cigarettes, like a real man.
When he’d said that wasn’t very politically correct of her, she’d gnashed those sharp teeth of hers.
Bite me. And he had, because she’d been insistent.
From then, they’d roamed at a safe distance, neither one wanting to be pulled in any one direction, neither one able to exert such a pull.
She is always travelling in search of art and artefacts, rare pieces for wealthy clients.
So, he’d left Italy from time to time, following her to Ithaca or Istanbul.
Or she’d returned, finding him beneath the sheets in Pisa and Nice.
It was around then that she’d been offered the position in New York, a permanent curatorship that even a proud nomad like her couldn’t turn down.
They decided that he’d come with her, that they’d try something a little more serious.
Then he’d left her, for Leicester, and she’d joined just in time for the wedding.
Now they’re living in London, preparing their paperwork, circling around the subject of a green-card marriage so he can count on her work visa.
Neither of them much likes commitment, but needs must. In the meantime, she is helping build collections for sheikhs and stock-traders and scions of the British aristocracy, while Seb looks pretty and keeps her bed warm.
At least, that’s how she puts it, to him.
‘One hundred and ten thousand?’ Nimesh repeats, with a whistle.
‘Million,’ Noémie replies.
‘One hundred and ten million?!’ his voice reaches a new octave.
Noémie shrugs. ‘It was a Basquiat.’
‘I don’t know what that means.’
Noémie likes Nimesh. She likes the fact that he speaks plainly, something that could never be said for Seb.
She likes the fact that he is a vet, a noble profession.
That he has good teeth like hers, a good bearing, a symmetrical face, his salt-and-pepper hair just long enough to be chic while still short enough to be considered professional.
She appreciates men with well-fitting clothes, fingernails that are kept clean and short.
She gets a sensual pleasure from order, from drawers of freshly laundered clothes, from the feel of Seb’s head when his hair’s just been shaved.
She likes to climb atop him so that she can run both of her hands over his head as she reaches orgasm.
Noémie speaks plainly, too. She has no boundaries, and has banished shame from her life.
She thinks of such things as easily as breathing, and she says them without fear of awkwardness or reprise.
She does not use flowery words. Perhaps that’s why Nimesh’s wife, the poet, doesn’t seem to like her.
It hadn’t occurred to Noémie that there might be another reason for Maisie’s indifference.
‘Well,’ Nimesh says, looking over Noémie’s shoulder. ‘I’ll be damned.’
Noémie, like everyone else in the room, turns to the door and to the two people who have just stepped through it.
One of them, a short, blonde and carelessly beautiful woman in a creased linen shirt and a vintage leather jacket.
The other, a little girl with glowing red hair and an almost-comically frightened expression.
Her mother doesn’t look much more at ease.
Noémie turns back to Nimesh, but Nimesh is looking at Seb, and so Noémie looks at Seb, too. Straight away, she knows.
‘Who is she?’ Noémie says to Nimesh, despite herself.
‘Long story.’
The newcomer greets Maisie, then crouches to wish Finn a happy birthday, handing him a present and a card and asking if he’s having a nice time.
All the while, the red-headed child keeps her mouth clamped firmly shut.
Eventually, when it seems like the woman has done her rounds of everybody else in the room, when she has exhausted every other option, she approaches Seb.
‘Hi,’ she says. ‘I didn’t know if you’d be here.’ Her eyes flicker downwards, up again. ‘I didn’t realise your parents would be. The boys from the band.’
‘It’s Finn’s birthday,’ Seb says, eventually, dumbly.
An awkward silence. Then Seb finally acknowledges the child. ‘Hello again,’ he says.
The child looks up at Seb with unsure eyes, then looks back down, fiddling with the zip of her mother’s jacket as she mutters a quiet ‘Hello.’
Noémie has stiffened. Nimesh is looking at her, because he must have picked up on that same word.
Again. It had seemed strange to her, when Nimesh asked Seb to be Finn’s godfather, because Seb doesn’t typically have much to do with children.
He avoids them, doesn’t know what to say around them.
He gets this glazed-over look in his eyes when he holds Finn, when he talks to Nimesh about being a dad.
Seb and Noémie have never spoken about kids, and she has generally assumed that Seb is like her: indifferent, unbothered, untouched by the parental urge.
A ship that has all but sailed, and one that she was not particularly sad to see disappearing over the horizon.
Now, looking at him and this little girl, she wonders if there’s more to the story.
‘Thanks for coming all this way,’ Nimesh says, joining the bridge between conversations, trying to smooth something over, though Noémie isn’t sure what.
He gives the woman a hug. ‘It’s been a while.
’ He waves at the girl. ‘Hi, Nora.’ His own son is running past, so he scoops up the boy like an offering. ‘You remember Finn?’
If she does, she doesn’t make it known. But there are toys and picture books in one corner of the room, and the girl is just about content to be placed down on the carpet, to play with the birthday boy.
Even with the kids occupied, Seb seems unable to relax.
If anything, he’s more tense. Looking at his face, the worry lines on his forehead, Noémie feels uncharacteristically protective.
The newcomer has eyes like a wolf’s, and she trains them on Seb.
Noémie steps forward, clears her throat.
She takes Seb’s hand, looks down on the newcomer, makes a challenge with her own eyes.
‘Hello,’ she says. ‘Who are you?’
To have known Seb in Italy is to have known that he was running away from something.
From someone. Noémie had just assumed that this someone was consigned to Seb’s past, like the skeletons in her own closets in Paris and San Francisco.
It is near-impossible to unbalance Noémie.
And yet, this is how to do it: with the startled look on the newcomer’s face, and the pained one on Seb’s, and the complete lack of expression on Nimesh’s, as he begins backing away towards the bar.
Noémie’s confidence falters, and she has a sense that she has not been let in on something, that conversations have taken place behind her back.
She can tell, from the woman’s flushing cheeks, that until now they were each just as unaware of the other’s existence.
And just like that, Noémie is standing out in the open, exposed, once again that silly little French girl who first visited England as a teenager and burned with shame when the English boys mocked her for dropping the ‘H’ in ‘Hello’.
She wonders if this is a cruel country. If Seb has been oblivious or unkind, and if one is worse than the other.
‘I’m Clara,’ says the woman, extending a hand.
‘I’m Noémie,’ says Noémie, taking it.