‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘That must have been hard. Was it long ago, that you split up?’
He shook his head. ‘Only a couple of months. And we stayed friends – still saw quite a lot of each other. So I was kind of living in hope that she was just going through a weird phase – that before long we’d get back together. But then suddenly, this … this exchange or whatever you want to call it.’
For a moment he looked at me almost reproachfully, as if it were all my fault. I shook my head, about to tell him that I didn’t force Rachel into this lifeswap, when he spoke again.
‘What about you?’ he said.
‘Me?’
‘Anyone special in your life?’ he prodded, and I couldn’t swear to it but it seemed to me he blushed.
I looked away too, more for his sake than mine. ‘I have a boyfriend, yes,’ I responded at length.
‘What’s his name?’
‘Konrad,' I replied, adding in explanation, ‘He’s half German. A model.’
Kyle turned back to me, and his next question startled me with its vulnerability.
‘Is he very handsome?’ he said, and though I nodded, what I really wanted to do was to grab his hand and say, But so are you, Kyle. In many ways you’re much more handsome than that pretty-boy preener.
But as soon as the instinctive movement made itself known to my brain, I almost recoiled in horror. Handsome Kyle might be, but he was not my type. For all his good looks, he was a square.
I forced a smile, gesturing in front of me. ‘Nice house,’ I said, and Kyle laughed politely as the bus pulled up in front of Buckingham Palace for photo opportunities.
***
Kyle was well aware that I didn’t know a soul in London, and so I found myself without a ready excuse when he invited me, at the end of our bus tour, for dinner at his flat in Hampstead a couple of evenings later. A couple of friends were going to be there, he said – an opera singer and a dancer at Sadler’s Wells. They were intrigued about me, he said.
I raised an eyebrow. I couldn’t believe that he had told them what I did for a living, and I wanted to ask him what they did know about me. I wasn’t going to pretend to be something I wasn’t, but I didn’t want to be an object of prurient scrutiny either. I kept quiet, however, deciding to play it by ear.
And after a couple more days of loafing around the flat and aimless walks in Hyde Park, resisting the call of Park Lane, I felt glad of the offer of company and was actually looking forward to the dinner party. I was also, in a contained way, looking forward to seeing Kyle again. I didn’t know anybody who moved in high cultural circles, like he did, and I found myself interested in him. What would his flat be like? What were his friends like? What was his background, and how had he arrived where he had?
I had long been fascinated by other people’s career paths, never having had one of my own. Life, I often felt, was just something that happened to me, without my really thinking or planning. It had always been this way, and until recently it had never occurred to me to be any other way. But looking at Kyle I felt the strength of having a trajectory, a calling. Kyle, it seemed, knew where he was going. His plans weren’t failsafe, of course – hence his crumbling when Rachel dumped him. But in general he seemed like someone with an overview, a direction in life. He certainly wasn’t the kind of person who would suddenly find himself in a strange city, knowing no one, going half out of their mind with boredom and longing to stir something up, no matter what.
I dressed demurely, for me – there was very little that could be described as toned-down in my wardrobe, but with an uncharacteristically minimal use of accessories and good underwear I found that my black-lace pencil dress didn’t look too sluttish. I went relatively easy on the make-up too. It wasn’t that I was trying not to be me, but I was trying to think about context: a dinner party with a classical music crowd in Hampstead required a little restraint, in some respects.
I arrived on time too, which was virtually unheard of: in Paris, my lateness was a standing joke with Konrad, friends, and the other girls at the club, many of whom found themselves covering for me when I rolled in half an hour after a shift had started. I didn’t mean it to happen, but as Konrad often pointed out, I had trouble ‘getting my shit together’. Not that he could talk, but that was another story. Wherever I seemed to go, chaos inevitably followed, and that went for my time-keeping too.
Kyle answered the door, dressed in snug navy chinos and a well-pressed white shirt. I smiled indulgently, and at once felt like a wife must do who makes the same old excuses for her husband all her life. He was a boring dresser, but underneath it he was a lovely guy. And perhaps I was using his clothes to judge him unfairly and quite wrongly.
I thought of Rachel. Rachel knew what Kyle was like in bed. Not that I could ask her. I hadn’t even met her – I knew her even less than I knew Kyle. Our conversations, via Facebook, had been relatively brief, lacking in intimacies.
We’d had no contact since taking over residence in each other’s home, in each other’s life, though of course the opportunity was there. I wondered if that was because Rachel had just breezed into my life, found her feet without hesitation. Here I was, stumbling around, while she just got on with it.
I wondered what she was doing right now, and whether she’d be jealous that I was at Kyle’s house. Presumably she wouldn’t, given that she was the one who had split up with him. But then people still get possessive about their exes, sometimes, even when it was them who called it off. I also thought, for the first time, about my flat and about how Rachel must be coping with it in all its disarray and dishevelment. Of course, I’d tidied up and cleaned it before leaving. But someone like Rachel would find it very difficult to cope with all that stuff, of that I had no doubt. I thought I might Facebook her the next day, find out how she was in general and let her know that I didn’t mind if she wanted to box some stuff up just to get it out of her sight and make the place her own a little more. I didn’t want her feeling as out of place as I did.
Kyle was just showing me into his kitchen, which smelt of tomatoes and basil and fresh pasta, when the doorbell rang.
‘That’ll be Morg and Tats,’ he said and, telling me to take a seat, he headed back towards the front door.
I felt too uncomfortable to sit down, so I wafted self-consciously around the kitchen, stirring the bubbling pasta sauce, sniffing the mozzarella that lay neatly sliced on the chopping board like a row of creamy white coins.
Then they were there, in the doorway, and Kyle was doing the introductions.
‘Rochelle – Morgan and Tatiana,’ he said, gesturing back and forth between us.
Tatiana stepped forward into the room, one hand extended. My first impression was of a glacial blonde, perfectly groomed, probably swimming in money, with a chip of ice where her heart should be. Of course, it’s ridiculous to make judgements like that about people, but I’m just relating my first impressions. Tatiana had an uptight little smile on her scarlet lips and the aloof air of someone who thinks they’re on a completely different level to you. Which she undoubtedly was. But that’s not the point.
Morgan followed in her wake, a hand hovering in the small of her back. His hair was greying but expensively styled, and a deep, rich, designer cologne matched his navy linen suit, unruffled. His manner, like Tatiana’s, was only superficially warm.
I looked at Kyle. Already I wished I hadn’t accepted this invitation. These people thought I was a piece of shit and could barely hide their feelings. What was Kyle doing even inviting me here? I was not part of this world, and trying to bring me into it – even out of kindness – was a huge error of judgement on his part.
Kyle moved his head slightly from side to side, as if discouraging me from bailing out. His eyes