‘Potato waffles,’ I explain. ‘Daisy loves them.’
‘Oh,’ Clara says, looking startled. ‘I didn’t realise you’d met Anna before, Daisy …’
‘Yeah, ’course I have,’ she retorts. ‘She’s my friend.’
Clara turns to me. ‘So, er, you’re there sometimes, when Ben has Daisy at the weekends?’
Yep, pushing my illicit Bird’s Eye waffles and youth-corrupting Disney movies. ‘Sometimes I’m around,’ I say lightly. ‘I enjoy it. I love children. I work in a nursery actually, in Brixton, five minutes away from my house …’ As I prattle on, conscious of Clara’s pale blue eyes upon me, and Charles’s baffled gaze from the armchair, I realise how wrong this must seem: their beloved son’s girlfriend living in Brixton rather than Belgravia, and having an ordinary job which involves wiping bottoms and making up industrial-sized jugs of Ribena. I catch Clara looking me up and down. I had highlights yesterday; they came out a bit brassy this time, although the hairdresser did say they’d ‘tone down’ in a week or so. I glance down at my H&M dress – black with tiny white flowers, maybe slightly too short for my age – and wonder if that looks cheap too.
‘Anna’s great with Daisy,’ Ben says firmly.
‘And where are you from, Anna?’ Clara wants to know.
‘Um, well, as I said, I live in Brixton, in a house share – there are four of us …’
‘You have flatmates?’ Charles exclaims, enunciating the last word as if to say, ‘You have scabies?’
‘Yes. Well, housemates actually. I mean, we have an upstairs.’ I emit an awkward, barky laugh. ‘We’re good friends,’ I plough on. ‘We’ve known each other for years, since our early twenties – since college – and it came to the point where we all wanted to buy places, but you know what it’s like, the prices …’ I grind to an abrupt halt. This house has eleven bedrooms. There’s a proper wine cellar, a scullery (whatever that is) and a separate cottage somewhere in the grounds, for guests. Of course they don’t know what it’s like. ‘So we, um, all chipped in and bought a place together,’ I finish, sensing sweat prickling at the underarms of my synthetic dress.
‘You’re not from London, though,’ Charles remarks, ‘originally?’
‘No, Yorkshire. Originally.’ I use the silver tongs to drop two sugar lumps into my coffee.
He nods. ‘I thought I detected an accent …’
‘Anyway, Mum,’ Ben cuts in briskly, ‘tell us what you and Dad have been up to …’
Clara’s expression brightens as she launches into what a triumph the Christmas dance was this year, and how she’s taken the helm of the Little Winterden In Bloom Society: ‘We’re sure to win next year. How could we not, when you see how little effort they make in Haverton Brook and Sorley-on-the-Marshes?’ Although in her late sixties, Clara could be a decade younger; she has the kind of finely honed bone structure which keeps everything perky. There is barely a line on her face. Charles possesses the distinguished features and deep, booming tones of an elderly stage actor; in fact, Ben has told me that he made his money in ‘investments’, although the house has been in the family for generations.
As they fall into discussing Clara and Charles’s forthcoming skiing holiday, I glance at the framed photos arranged on the ornately carved table beside the tree. There’s a rather formal portrait of Daisy, hand propping up her chin, like a movie starlet, and Ben, at around seventeen years old in a regulation school photo, smiling crookedly with hair askew, no doubt the one all the girls fancied. There’s Charles in a tweed hat, clutching an enormous fish on a riverbank, plus wedding pictures, all of Clara and Charles and friends or relatives of a similar vintage … No, not all. There’s one at the back, by far the biggest picture, so it’s visible above all the others. It’s of Ben and Louisa, his ex.
He looks dashing in a black jacket and white shirt, and she’s a vision of wholesome beauty in a simple white, strapless dress and a veil, for God’s sake. It’s a bloody wedding photo! There are blurs of confetti, unless I’m mistaken and there happened to be a flurry of blossom. Have Clara and Charles forgotten they divorced last year, and haven’t actually lived together since Daisy was three? I look away. Some kind of powerful force drags my gaze back to stunning Louisa with her elongated green eyes and little swoopy-up nose and plump, lightly glossed lips.
I sip my coffee from the fine china cup and place it back on its saucer. ‘Could I use your bathroom please?’ I ask Clara.
‘Yes, of course. Ben, would you show Anna where it is?’ A quick glance at the photo as we leave the room confirms that Ben has barely changed in the past seven years. And that the few snapshots I’ve seen of Louisa in more ordinary situations – clutching a drink at a party, reclining on a picnic rug – didn’t do her justice.
‘You okay?’ Ben asks as we make our way upstairs.
‘Yes, I’m fine.’ I muster a tense smile. ‘It’s just … a bit weird, you know?’
‘What is?’
‘Well, that wedding picture, for a start …’
He chuckles. ‘Pretty glamorous in their day, weren’t they? Mum reckons she’d had proposals from four different men before Dad asked her …’
‘No, I mean the one of you and Louisa.’
‘Oh.’ He exhales. ‘Oh, yeah. Sorry about that.’
We’ve reached the landing. An elaborate silver chandelier hangs from the panelled ceiling. I wonder, briefly, how many staff are required to keep everything gleaming around here.
‘Here’s the bathroom,’ Ben mutters, indicating a door to our right. ‘Or there’s the en suite in our room, if you’d prefer …’
‘Is it always there?’ I cut in.
‘What, the en suite?’
‘No, the photo…’
‘Yes, of course it is. You don’t think they put it out specially for you coming, do you? They’re not that twisted, Anna!’
I stare at Ben. I’ve never seen him so awkward and defensive before. Usually so at ease with himself, with a confidence I can only marvel at, he seems to have reverted to being the sixth-form boy in the school photograph. Sweat is beading on his forehead.
‘That’s not what I was suggesting,’ I mutter.
‘Of course it’s always there,’ he says, regaining his composure. ‘At least, I assume it is. You know how things become so familiar you just stop seeing them?’
I study his face. I can’t imagine I’d ever ‘stop seeing’ a huge framed picture of myself and an ex, even if my parents were still around to display one. Not that there’s been anyone significant enough to warrant a lavish photographic display. I have never lived with a boyfriend, although Ben mooted recently that I might ‘tear myself away from the gang’ and move into his smart three-storey townhouse in Clapham at some point in the near future. I reminded him that the four of us own our place together. ‘Couldn’t you let out your room?’ he asked. ‘I mean, there must be a way out.’ For some reason, I have yet to tell Jamie, Kate and Tom about this possible development.
‘Sorry,’ I murmur, sensing my cheeks burning. ‘I didn’t mean to make a thing of it. I s’pose I’m just a bit on edge …’
He kisses my cheek. ‘Look, it was a pretty big deal, my getting married. I suspect they’d given up hope. Maybe that’s why they can’t bear to put it in a cupboard or something …’
‘You were only twenty-nine,’ I remind him.
‘Yeah, and that’s decrepit by their standards. And they liked