Finally having brought all of her baggage upstairs, a somewhat breathless Kate fumbled with the key and let herself into the flat and deposited the luggage with a sigh. Closing the door behind her, noticing that the intercom was still cloaked in bubble-wrap (and therefore presumably still channelling the outside world), she walked through the flat, sticking her head into each of the rooms as she did so. The bathroom was clean and tidy, as was the bedroom she had been shown on her visit. She walked with an ‘Aha!’ into the spare room that had previously been out of bounds.
Kate surveyed the room quickly. Not very exciting, she thought to herself, vaguely disappointed that it was not the sort of secret room that would be worthy of Captain Bluebeard but just an ordinary spare room. The walls were the same neutral colour as the others, but had flakes of paint missing, as if blue-tacked pictures had been taken down. There was a single divan pushed into the corner of the room, with drawers underneath it, and a plain white bedspread. A low bedside table stood next to the bed, and a pine writing desk on the adjacent wall. A blue roller-blind came halfway down the window. It was a fairly uninspiring, identikit spare room – clearly Anna had not put the design effort into this room that she had with the others.
Leaving the room, Kate walked through into the main living area, flicking on the light switch. It was as airy and bright as she had remembered, and she flopped down onto the sofa and kicked off her shoes. Tilting her head back and resting it on the back of the sofa, she blew her cheeks out and emitted in the air in a loud puff. Bringing her head back to its normal level, she laughed to herself.
“Well! Here I am!” she said aloud. She sat on the sofa for some time longer, partly recovering from her journey and partly thinking out how the next few days would go. She had the first drama class to go to in a couple of days’ time, and she wanted to go to the big university bookshop on Gower Street to get a couple of audition speeches. She had no idea what they would be doing in the first class and thought she should try to find a couple of soliloquies that she could present if necessary. More immediately, once she had done the modicum of unpacking and perhaps had a quick shower, she fancied a glass of wine and a nice meal in some candlelit bistro looking out onto the street. Perhaps Angel might have something to offer. She felt a slight pang as she thought how nice it would be for Neil to be there with her, then shook herself – these next few months were about her, not about her and Neil. There was a whole lifetime of dinners ahead of them. The whole point of this exercise was to get her back to her old happy self, to make her a more enjoyable dinner companion than the red-eyed wretch silently toying with a plate of microwaved baked beans on toast that had sat opposite Neil last time he was home. Grimacing at the thought of how she had felt so recently up in the isolated cottage, she pulled herself off the sofa and out of the negativity of her thoughts. An hour later, washed and made up and dressed in what she hoped was a sophisticated yet understated outfit of black trousers and aubergine silk halter-neck top, she stepped into the energy of the London evening, new bank card and Anna’s ID in her bag and a spring in her step.
Despite her years of practice of eating dinner in restaurants alone and her determination to regard it as a perfectly acceptable thing to do, Kate still hadn’t quite mastered it. She had developed a particular brand of steely glare reserved for waiters who dared to repeat the ‘Table for one’ back at her in a questioning, pitying tone. She had perfected the knack of eating with perfect insouciance, looking like she was concentrating on her food and enjoying it. She had even managed to get over the conviction that everyone was staring at her and wondering what had provoked her to eat by herself. What she had not quite yet managed to do, however, was maintain this poise in the gaps between eating if she did not have a prop. This may be an evening newspaper, a book or a mobile phone, but she liked to have something to keep her occupied in the time between the order being placed and the food arriving, and then disappearing again, that saved her from having just to think to herself, stare vaguely at the other diners or be plain bored. All the while she would be repeating in her head the mantra that she was a grown mature woman and that if she wanted to treat herself to a nice meal, whilst just so happening to be alone, that was totally acceptable and that in any event she didn’t care what they thought. Sadly the fact that she couldn’t get by without thinking this evidently meant that she did care. It was fine if there was someone else sitting alone – suddenly her unaccompanied eating became more socially acceptable. It didn’t do to stare at the other lone diner too much though, particularly if they were a man, in case they thought you were attempting to open a flirtation, in some fantasy world in which single diners in restaurants do actually saunter up to each other and ask if they can join the other for dessert.
That evening started off slightly differently. When the waiter went away with her menu she was so intent on looking out of the window at the London evening, the black cabs going by, the diners on the pavement across the street, couples wandering along at a leisurely pace caught up in their own lives, jostled occasionally by impatient businessmen or a lone evening runner, that she hardly noticed when the walnut and pear salad appeared in front of her. It wasn’t so much that these were scenes she wouldn’t see in Portsmouth – with the exception of the destination indicators on the fronts of the buses, this could in theory be any city almost anywhere. To Kate the difference seemed to be more about the possibilities, and the variety of the places that these people could be coming from and going to, perhaps they themselves as yet undecided as to the latter, combining to create a vibrant buzz of potential. Waiting for the steak that would follow the salad starter, Kate nursed the elegant wine glass and the window again held her attention. This time she looked at her reflection and practised saying in her head “I am Anna Roberts. Pleased to meet you” and “I’m Anna, Anna Roberts” – and then for a bit of fun, “The name’s Roberts, Anna Roberts” with a mysterious Sean Connery-esque wiggle of the eyebrows. She stifled a giggle. She generally tried not to laugh by herself in public, unless she really couldn’t help it, and felt it would be even less excusable to be caught laughing at her reflection.
Diverting as this was, by the end of the steak she was becoming a little bored. She was, she felt, at the cusp of something exciting and it was totally amazing that she was embarking on this experiment, and she herself was totally amazing for doing it (her self-satisfaction having the particular intensity and warmth that a large glass of shiraz often gave her) and wished to tell someone about it. She reached for her mobile, thinking that she would send someone a text to say she was in London, maybe followed up by a call – a lot of her university friends and some colleagues were still based there. Then she realised there were two problems. First, she had agreed with Anna that neither of them would tell anyone they had embarked on the swap as to do so would bring them out of character, and talking to friends of their ‘real’ selves would remove the focus on the social environment created by the other. This alone might not quite have been enough to stop her, diligent though she was, but there was a second more practical point that she had forgotten in her desire to communicate – the mobile phone she had in her bag did not contain the numbers of her friends. She and Anna had swapped phones, and so she did not have any pre-programmed numbers. Like most people in her generation she was almost solely reliant on her mobile to give her the numbers of her friends. There were a few she knew by heart – Neil’s mobile, of course, the office number, and the land line numbers of a couple of friends who had managed to establish themselves in the property market early on and so hadn’t had a string of rental properties with the consequent constantly changing phones – but those people would either not be available or, if they were, may not appreciate a tipsy call at this time on a Friday evening.
Besides, going through this complication in her head was enough to check Kate’s initial impulse. She shouldn’t be thinking of breaking the rules of the experiment on the very first evening, she rebuked herself, and vowed that she would follow the terms of the agreement with Anna. Sure, the point of the exercise for her was to have fun, as Anna had reminded her, but there was the responsibility and trust that Anna had placed on her – and she didn’t want to have to lie in her report back to Anna. The drink was no excuse for falling prey to temptation. Sobered up by her narrowly-avoided fall from grace, as well as irritated by the fact that the lively texts she had been composing