‘Yes.’
‘You’re not …’ he hesitated. ‘There’s not a young man involved, is there?’
It was so unexpected a question that Delia had to stop herself snorting.
‘Of course not!’
She looked at her mum, who was fussing with her handbag and avoiding Delia’s eyes. This was what they’d come up with, in their concern. She was chasing a boy.
‘I promise you, there’s nothing to this but needing to get away for a while. I’ve barely seen Emma in the last few years, let alone had time to get to know anyone else.’
Her father nodded. As they hustled out of the hallway, her dad huffing and puffing, holding her case at waist height – fathers didn’t acknowledge the wheels on trolley cases, they had to be picked up – Delia felt sodden with guilt for worrying them like this.
Her mum drove her to the station in the old Volvo, with Delia anxiously trying to play down the whole unemployed peril with nonsensical chatter. If she talked fast enough, surely her mum wouldn’t notice.
‘This whole break Paul and I are having, it was the right moment,’ she said, hoping echoing Emma would be the charm.
‘You’re moving to London permanently?’ her mum asked, timidly. Her parents pretty much never lost their tempers or exerted their will. Something in their quiet forbearance was so much more shame-inducing than any shouting or outright disapproval.
It was a good question. It gave Delia stomach snakes. It’d been her right to be vague with Paul, not with her mum.
‘No! I don’t know. It’s more to get away from things for a while.’
The parental relationship loop: fibbing to protect them from worry, and them sensing being fibbed to, and worrying. The truth – that she had no idea what she was doing – would be more worrying, so Delia had no choice.
On the train she sat next to a short old man in a bulky coat, who started a conversation about pollution, which Delia politely tolerated, while wishing she could listen to her iPod.
As they got to Northallerton, he pointed to the tracks and said: ‘See those pigeons?’
‘Yes …?’
‘Pigeons know more than they’re letting on.’
‘Do they?’ Delia said.
‘Think they carried all those messages and never read any of them?’ the man said, incredulously.
Delia said she was going to the buffet car and switched carriages.
Arriving in London, she taxied from King’s Cross to Finsbury Park and told herself she’d definitely economise from tomorrow onwards. It was late, she was tired, and full of Fondant Fancies, cheese toastie, acidic G&T and a mini tube of Pringles, all picked at in nerves and boredom.
As Delia left the station, the evening air in the capital smelled unfamiliar: thick, warm, petrol-fumed. She was hit by a wave of home sickness so hard it was in danger of washing her away.
Emma’s flat was the first floor of one of those haughty, draughty Victorian houses with drama in its high ceilings and cold in its bones. There were bicycles crammed under the plaster arch in the narrow hallway, and subsiding piles of mail for the various residents stacked on a cheap side table by the radiator.
It was a leafy, residential street, yet still felt slightly overrun and run down.
Delia had warned herself not to be shocked by the space that a wage as intergalactic as Emma’s could buy here. But she still was.
She bumped her case up the steep worn-carpeted stairs to the door that separated Emma’s territory from the rest of the building and knocked. Music was humming on the other side and she hoped she wasn’t arriving into a cocktail party. She didn’t feel up to meeting the London society yet.
The door was flung open and all five foot three of Emma Berry filled it to the jambs, in a pale green party dress with circle skirt, pointy salmon satin heels and bouffanted Marilyn-blonde hair. Despite constantly bemoaning imaginary obesity, she had one of those Tinkerbell figures where any weight gained went to the pin-up places.
‘Hey there, Geordie girl!’ she sing-songed.
Delia grinned ‘Hello!’ and did an awkward fingertips-only wave, with her luggage.
There was some fussing and clucking as Emma tried to reach round and take Delia’s case on the vertiginous steps and it became obvious Delia would probably be killed in the attempt. Emma shuffled back into the flat to allow Delia to make a very laborious entry instead.
‘I’m not interrupting anything, am I?’ Delia said.
‘No, I was waiting for you! I admit I possibly started on the booze a bit early. Let me get a hug at you! This is so ridiculously exciting.’
Emma smelled of gardenias and her dress had watery silver sparkles across knife pleats. It rustled with the crispness of new and expensive fabric as Delia leaned in. To Delia’s fairly expert eye, it was not of the high street.
‘I can’t believe you’re here!’ Emma squealed and then it settled in both their faces that it was incredibly well-meant but possibly not the most tactful thing to say.
Delia replied: ‘Neither can-fucking-I,’ and they laughed, breaking the tension.
‘It’s going to be so great.’
Because Delia couldn’t share her confidence but didn’t want to offend with a lack of enthusiasm, she said: ‘Your dress is spectacular.’
‘It’s a Marchesa design.’
Delia gasped. ‘Like the Oscar dresses?!’
‘It’s a replica I got on Etsy for a song. It smells a bit dodgy. So I’ve covered it in Marc Jacobs,’ Emma said. ‘The hair’s backfired a bit too,’ she said, stroking it. ‘I was going for Doris Day bubble flip, I think it’s more New Jersey mob wife.’
Delia giggled.
‘Do you want the tour? It takes less than two minutes.’
‘Yes!’
Delia followed Emma – noisy on the hard floors in her clippy-cloppy shoes – around the flat. It was so very Emma to dress up for Delia’s arrival.
Delia’s weary soul gave a little sigh of relief that the flat was nothing like as ragtag and anonymous as the hallway downstairs.
In fact it was tiny, but beautiful. The floorboards were stripped and varnished Golden Syrup yellow, and the doors were an artfully washed out, distressed chalky aqua with Mercury glass handles.
The bathroom screamed ‘no man lives here’ – a white roll-top, claw-foot bath, Oriental silk dressing gown on a print block hook, thick white towels, a pile of water-wrinkled glossy fashion magazines. And one of those free-standing glass bowl sinks that look like a giant’s contact lens.
‘You’ve done all this?’ Delia said, in awe.
‘Nah, have I bollocks. The last girl had good taste and massive budget. Do not piss your money away on something that isn’t broke, I say. It cost me enough to buy it. I’ve run a J cloth over it and that’s it.’
The front room was another stunner – vaulting ceiling with original plaster rose and ruby-red Murano chandelier dangling from it, deep emerald velvet L-shaped sofa and huge, trailing swathes of Liberty print curtains.
Delia had a little covetous pang about a girls’ place. Paul mostly gave her free rein, but drew the line at ‘busy fussy old teashop spinster’ patterns.
‘Where’s