Chapter 2 First Impressions
First Impressions
I lean back and peer from the kitchen into the hall beyond; through the etched glass of the front door, I see a figure outlined.
The bell goes again, sending a sharp fizzle of apprehension through me.
I’m not expecting anyone, obviously. I’ve just moved in. I don’t have friends in London anymore, and certainly no one I still know well enough to have informed of my return. All my old uni friends and work buddies moved out of town to have kids, or get bigger places, long before I did.
I brace myself, head to the hall, and swing open the front door with as much optimism as I can muster.
It’s a woman, and she is smiling the most breathtakingly reassuring smile I may have ever seen—though, more important, she is not one of the people I just saw arguing outside.
Her expensive ash-blond hairstyle lies in soft, barrel-brush curls against her blouse, her light-hazel eyes instantly affable and on the level.
“Welcome, neighbor,” she laughs, with disarming self-awareness at the quaint social ritual she is performing.
In her arms: a large blue-paper-wrapped bouquet and a condensation-beaded bottle of English sparkling wine, its neck decorated with a hand-tied, duck-egg-blue grosgrain bow and label on which is penned: Welcome to No. 18. X.
It’s the classiest arrangement of objects anyone could be holding. She hands the gifts to me with a “For you.”
“Wow, oh my gosh. This is so lovely, thank you so much,” I manage.
The shock of my low expectations hitting this new reality makes me suddenly emotional and inclined to overshare as I take the gifts from her.
“What an incredibly thoughtful—God, this is like a movie—I didn’t think people actually did things like this in real life. Welcoming the neighbors.”
My neighbor laughs.
“Well, I can’t vouch for real life,” she says, with a wry wince.
“I’m not best qualified to comment on that, but this is a tradition in my family.
Never show up empty-handed. We have our great-aunt Cordelia to blame for starting it all.
Too much time on her hands.” She shakes her head, the scent of shampoo jostled into the air between us.
“I mean, it’s all well and good until you run into another congenital gifter, then this whole thing is hell on earth and everyone’s bankrupt.
Trust me. Back and forth forever. Arabella Spencer-James.
” She stretches out her hand. “Number Nineteen. We had a whip-round, so this is from a few of us on the street. I’m an emissary. We come in peace!” She grins.
Number 19 is the house with the turquoise door, and the nanny, and the three children who listened to her.
“Francesca Green,” I say. “Frankie.” I attempt to free up a hand from my gifts to shake hers but it’s impossible, so I turn to place them behind me on the hall table. But as I do so, I feel something brush past my legs.
Blue darts out of the open door, slipping by Arabella, then down the front steps, and away into the bushes.
“Oh, shit,” I groan. Arabella turns following my gaze in the direction that Blue vanished. She looks back at me with mild concern. “He’s not supposed to go out for two weeks, post-move,” I explain. “They can get confused, lost, sometimes they try to head back to where they used to live—oh God.”
The idea of him wandering all the way back to our old home in the Cotswolds is beyond harrowing, as if he could somehow wander straight back into the past and Ben and I would be waiting there in the kitchen for him.
“Ah, I see.” She nods sympathetically, though without the urgency of a fellow pet owner. “He looked like a smart chap. I’m sure he’ll be back soon,” she offers. “Where was it you were…before?”
I don’t know why, but the question seems suddenly stilted, awkward, even, but when I look back at her, her relaxed smile couldn’t be further from awkward.
“Um, we…I…was in the Cotswolds.”
She registers my micro-correction, and everything that goes with micro-corrections of this sort, with an almost greedy inhale and nod.
“Cotswolds. Oh, so cozy,” she says, smoothly breezing us along, with her impeccable social skills, away from delicate matters that clearly interest her a little more than they should, “but then London is London, right?”
“Right. London is London,” I repeat, grateful for this tidy end to that element of the conversation.
It’s funny—I get the feeling that she already knew that it was just me in here. But then that’s not so bad. She may just have asked the estate agent who was moving in. I’m unsure if that’s weird or normal behavior—normal, I guess, for families with kids, who want to know what to expect.
I hear the distant mew of Blue from down the street, worryingly farther away than I would have expected. I wonder if I should push past this solicitous stranger and run to rescue my cat.
Is there a very real chance that I might never see him again? Like I’ll never see Ben again or anyone I used to know back in Oxfordshire. You only see the people, places, and things of your life until you don’t anymore.
Or maybe I’m overreacting. Blue’s obviously been on a street before, and the vet’s advice not to let him out straightaway was just cautionary.
I do not push Arabella out of the doorway and sprint down the street, baby-voicing Blue’s name into bushes. I wait. Because here, in this new life, here I am not worried about all the things that might go wrong next, here I am the best version of myself.
Old me—middle-aged, middle-class, mid-career, muddling through—is not allowed to make the decisions anymore.
Besides this is the only person I’ve managed to interact with so far and I don’t want to mess it up.
I’m immediately vindicated in my decision, as Arabella leans in with a thrillingly conspiratorial edge to her voice.
“It’s so great that someone’s finally moved in here,” she says.
“It was such a waste; such a beautiful building and it’s been just sitting here empty for well over a year now.
Criminal. I can’t tell you how nice it is to have new blood on the street.
A fresh face. Everyone’s dying to meet you. ”
I don’t believe a word of it, not one.
The neighbors I’ve seen so far do not in any way appear pleased to see me, unless they were so happy to see me that they needed to argue about it, and then stare at me like hawks.
“Aw, that’s nice,” I tell her. “I’m looking forward to getting to know everyone, too.” This is also a lie.
The last thing I need right now is to meet lots of very rich, very successful, very contented people and be forced to tell them everything about my private life.
No, I need a few days, weeks, months. I need something to show for almost forty years on this planet, even if it’s only a beautifully furnished house.
“Is it a close…community?” I ask tentatively, testing the waters.
“Close…Good Lord, no. Well, I mean, you get to know people, for sure, but no. It’s hardly a community. I mean, it’s London. We’re all very different. But you’ll get a feel for it.”
Will I?
I take her in: she’s dressed impeccably—if I had to guess, her children are in private school, her family and his probably come from money, there’s a holiday home, and more hired help than I’ve seen….
She is smiling at me; I realize I haven’t said anything for a while.
“Sorry, moving-in brain. You said the house had been empty for a while, but the owners were overseas, and it was being renovated, wasn’t it?”
She looks at me blankly, clearly playing back her own words internally.
“Oh, yes,” she says finally, “I believe so.” Her energy brightens as she suddenly recalls something. “Oh. I can add you to the neighborhood group chat, if you’d like. That way you can pop a photo on and we can all look out for the cat?”
The group sounds terrifying, and yet the fastest way to inclusion. I tap my number into Arabella’s phone, and when I hand it back, I notice she is looking past me and into the house, as if looking for something. She bites her lip, cheeks instantly reddening at being caught.
“Can’t lie—I’m dying to see inside,” she confesses. “What they’ve done to the place, with the renovation, you know. I remember it from before. How are you finding it?” she asks with an inference that I can’t quite place.
Her words hang in the air. It’s a weird series of things to say, or maybe it was the way she said them. It’s clear that she wants to snoop around, and the entrance fee is clearly my flowers and sparkling wine.
“Oh, of course. I’d love to have you over, once I’m all settled and—”
“Of course,” she interjects. “Yes, I’m sure you’re still unpacking—such a slog.
What goes where, do I still need this…and it’s just you.
Listen, let me know if you need any help.
I’m just over the road, and very open to bunking off on work-from-home days.
Oh, and I’d love, we’d love, to have you over to ours for coffee, too.
Best avoid the kids if you value your hearing. But you’ve got my number.”
A text from her pings onto my phone right on cue. God, she’s smooth. If I could cut her out and paste her onto a vision board, I would. I have no idea how she’s making me like her so much, but I do.
After goodbyes, I shut my door, blocking out the bright summer glare, enveloped once more in the cool of my new hallway.
All I can think about is Blue, and how I’ll find him and get him back in the house before he’s lost forever.
My thoughts immediately leap to him a week from now, shivering and starving, as he shelters under a London underpass, dreaming of his soft cat bed.
I try to wait long enough for Arabella to get back into her turquoise front-doored house, before opening up my front door again and searching for Blue; the last thing I want is for her to think I’ve forgotten to tell her something—or worse, that I’m a completely mad cat lady.
I count to ten in my head, then ten again, then grab my keys and pull open my gleaming new front door.
I briskly make my way down both sides of my new street, before circling back and peering closer into people’s front gardens, looking behind bin stores and singsonging, “Blue!” Every now and then I catch the eyes of someone behind a window, someone with AirPods in, at a laptop in the middle of a Monday-morning e-meeting, another sipping tea, a cleaner washing the dishes through a low basement kitchen window.
They crease their brows. Look elsewhere, their eyes seem to say.
I know how I must look, skulking from front gate to front gate, peering into bushes: vaguely suspicious, or completely unhinged.
I do only one proper loop of the street—it’s all I can reasonably get away with without causing a scene. But Blue does not emerge.
The whole idea of moving here is to start again. I am supposed to be a new person—not an anxious, unemployed, scorned woman who can’t even keep hold of a cat.
Blue will come home, I know that. Arabella was right, he is clever. He’s also always hungry, so he won’t go far. I let myself head back home.
—
I spend the rest of the day unpacking, in between sessions of calling out for Blue, but this time from the back garden, not the street, at hourly intervals until 10 p.m., by which time I realize there’s a chance he’ll be out gallivanting for the whole night now.
Which in the Cotswolds I never worried about but here feels so much more dangerous.
After a delivery driver brings me my first-night celebration pizza, I resign myself to eating alone and lock the front and back doors before heading upstairs.
I lock my bedroom door, it’s habit now. I’ve been doing it since the night I confronted Ben about the messages. And now, since living alone, I can’t sleep at all unless the door is locked.
In bed, my concerns and creeping anxieties slip over Blue and the new street to my deflated life and totally uncertain future. But I am too physically tired from lifting and moving boxes and cabinets and heavy-hangered clothes to keep it all going. I slip almost unwillingly into sleep.
At 4 a.m., I wake in the darkness, every sense alive to the fact that someone is in the room with me.