Elegance. Kathleen Tessaro

her life. I’ve known this for a while. However, cultivating friends has never been my forte. Although I’m perfectly sociable – happy to spend an hour or so in idle chit-chat with any number of people, the thing I’m not terribly good at is the kind of honest self-revelation and shared intimacies that are the backbone of a lasting female friendship. I long to be open and informal, if only my life weren’t such a mess. But now is not the time. After all, if I started confiding my innermost problems to someone, I’d have to do something about them. And I’m not ready for that yet. Someday, when I’ve pulled myself together, maybe I’ll have a real chum of the heart.

      In the meantime, I’m not expected to share any deep personal confidences with Nicki; I’m only required to show up and tag along. And tagging along will do me just fine. It’s easy, undemanding – we talk about nothing more taxing than new lipstick formulations and, even though I could never afford it, the benefits of Pilates versus Hatha yoga techniques. And there’s a certain amount of glamour involved in these weekly escapes. I enjoy basking in the chaotic splendour and excess of Nicki World, complete with multi-million pound homes, £100 face crèmes, and £4 organic lattes, while clinging perversely to the reassuring knowledge that, for all their money, Nicki and Dan are still incredibly unhappy. When your own life remains a baffling, unresolved puzzle, there are few things more comforting than to be surrounded by fellow struggling souls.

      When we’ve downed enough caffeine to bring us to tears, we walk back to Nicki’s and dump our bags in the Moroccan style living room. Almost everything that Nicki and Dan lose is eventually discovered lying camouflaged against the overwhelming profusion of kilim cushions that populate this room. They’ve even managed to create curtains out of old Oriental carpets, so that sitting in it is like being swallowed by a giant carpet bag.

      Then we climb up to Nicki’s Victorian study and she sits in front of her computer, which folds out from a unit made to look like an antique dressing table, and I sit on the daybed. The daybed is an original, painfully uncomfortable and obviously designed to keep Victorian ladies very much awake.

      ‘OK. Right.’ Nicki turns on the computer, clicks into our file and pages down to where we left off.

      ‘Here we are, page fifteen,’ she announces triumphantly.

      No matter how much work we do or how often we meet, we’re always on page fifteen.

      ‘OK, so how did we leave it then?’ I try to gather my enthusiasm.

      ‘Jan was just about to reveal to Aaron why she’d left home.’

      ‘Oh, yeah. Good. And what did we decide about that?’

      Nicki checks through the notes we made at coffee.

      ‘You know, I don’t think we came to any firm conclusions about that one.’

      ‘Did we have any ideas?’

      She flicks through again. ‘I’m not really seeing anything that can be called a solid idea.’

      ‘Oh. OK. Never mind.’ I haul myself out of the sagging centre of the daybed. ‘Right. Let’s get brainstorming!’

      The room goes dead. A dog barks somewhere in the distance. Nicki gnaws at a hangnail.

      Suddenly, like the voice of God, the sound of Dionne Warwick singing ‘Walk On By’ floats down the stairs. Nicki’s on her feet in a flash.

      ‘My God, I can’t believe he’s doing that now! The bastard!’

      ‘Doing what?’ I ask.

      ‘He’s playing Dionne Warwick!’ she shrieks. Flinging the door open, she screams up the stairs. ‘I know what you’re doing, you bastard! I know what you’re doing!’

      ‘My God, Nicki, what’s he doing?’ I’m missing the point badly.