It’s Not Me, It’s You. Mhairi McFarlane

Delia was braced for the spare room to be the size of a margarine tub. Actually, it was well proportioned and there wasn’t much between it and Emma’s room – the main difference being Delia’s had a futon, while Emma’s had a wrought-iron princess bed. Both filled the floor space, leaving room for a shallow wardrobe only.

      Emma had propped a framed print of David Bowie on the cover of Low on the spare-room windowsill. ‘Do you still like him? To make you feel at home.’

      ‘Oh, Emma, thank you! It’s all amazing.’

      ‘It’ll do,’ she agreed. ‘Given it’s broken me for savings.’

      Emma had wealthy parents and even wealthier grandparents, the latter having obligingly pegged and left six-figure sums to her and her sister right when they wanted to get on the property ladder. It was still only a third of the cost of this flat, Delia guessed. The sums made her dizzy.

      Emma led Delia into the kitchen last, which was a sleek white gloss space-agey fitted affair, with yet more sea green as accent colour.

      A large twisty modern halogen light fitting, like a pipe cleaner animal made of a tungsten filament, hung low over the rustic wooden table in the centre. It was covered with dozens of foil trays of food with cardboard lids.

      ‘I got Thai,’ Emma said. ‘I didn’t know how hungry you’d be so I ordered everything. And I’ve got fizzy! I don’t have an ice bucket though.’

      She lifted a bottle of Taittinger out of a washing-up bowl full of ice cubes and slopped it into a wine glass.

      ‘This fuss for me?!’ Delia said.

      ‘Who else would I make more fuss for? To Delia Moss’s London adventure!’ she said, and Delia accepted the glass and toasted.

      Delia didn’t think she’d be having any adventure, nor did she much feel like one. But she felt so grateful, and humbled, because she’d managed to forget how fun her best friend was. Or ‘a certified loon’, as Paul had always said, fondly.

      Emma had this hedonistic knack for making life more exciting. It wasn’t to do with her income; she’d been the same at university.

      She was the person who produced cheap seats in the gods to a Shakespeare matinee that afternoon, and had been to a market and bought a whole octopus for dinner, its tentacles waving out of the bag. Or came back from the bar with a surprise round of Sambuca sidecars in espresso cups. (Her capacity for any intoxicant was fairly legendary.)

      The odd thing was, if you tried to replicate an Emma gesture at a later date, it was never quite the same. There was something in her spontaneous, generous joie de vivre that made it entirely of the moment, and it lost something in efforts to copy it. An Emma idea lived only once and shimmered briefly, like a sandcastle, or a rainbow.

      Or in this case, pork larb, khao pad and massaman curry.

      Takeaway food, foaming alcohol, cackling laughter, and Delia’s surroundings made sense. Her appetite had come back.

      After half an hour, she knew she was soaring high on the back of the eagle of booze and would no doubt crash hard on to the rocks of a hangover, but she didn’t care.

      As the night wore on, Delia and Emma slumped side by side on the sofa, Emma occasionally reaching down to top up glasses from the third bottle.

      ‘We won’t finish it, obviously,’ she’d said, solemnly, shortly before firing the cork at the chandelier with a soft phut. ‘That would be madness.’

      By the time it was pushing midnight, they’d covered Delia’s exit from the council, and Emma’s ill-fated entanglement with pitiless but vigorous Richard from Insolvency and Restructuring.

      ‘Rick the Dick, as he’s known to the secretaries. Sadly with that nickname, I got the wrong end of the stick, literally and figuratively.’

      And Emma’s sister’s forthcoming giant folly of a wedding.

      ‘Ten days in Rome for the hen, Delia! Ten days! Count them! They add up to ten.’

      ‘But you’re all for that non-stop party stuff,’ Delia said, holding her glass out for a refill, loving being the Delia she was with Emma again.

      ‘Not with Tamsin’s friends I’m not,’ Emma said, twisting the bottle away expertly before the glass frothed over, ‘Like Salem’s Lot, in Joules Breton tops and Hunter wellies. I was hoping for Bath tearooms and a spa, two nights, in and out. Everyone knows what happens on hens, you get wasted on the first night and phone in your performance on the second. Imagine doing that as rinse-repeat for ten days. Ugh.’

      Delia laughed. Emma topped her own glass up. Like a proper friend, Emma had clearly sensed that Delia needed time to work up to discussing Paul.

      ‘Do you think you’ll go back to him?’ she asked, eventually.

      ‘I don’t know. Maybe, yes. When the rage at the thought of him with Celine has subsided. If it ever does.’

      ‘Celine,’ Emma said, trying it out. ‘Oof. He could’ve at least been poking a Hilda. Or an Ethelred.’

      ‘Ethelred’s a man’s name, isn’t it?’

      ‘Exactly.’

      Delia was reminded of the calming effect of someone not doing what they were supposed to, like Ralph.

      ‘Any idea why he did it? I mean, because sex. Paul doesn’t seem the type though.’

      ‘I think he wanted to try it out, take a risk. We’d been together for ten years.’

      Delia hated herself a little for sounding as if she was making excuses for him. She tried a different tack. Total honesty.

      ‘You know something I never admitted to myself, until now? I made it easy for Paul when we got together. I knew that if it was hard, he might not have bothered.’

      ‘What do you mean?’

      ‘He was never that crazy about me …’

      ‘Oh that’s not true!’

      Delia took a deep breath. She’d always shoved this knowledge into a cupboard and shut the door on it, and Paul’s affair now brought the contents cascading out.

      ‘It is, Em. I don’t mind, or I didn’t. I know he loved me, and he liked my company, and he fancied me enough. It was fine, we still had a great life. But that extra-special thing that makes you lie awake and watch someone sleep in the early days, or want to kill your rivals with your bare hands? That kind of passion, it’s never been there for him, like it was for me. I wanted Paul, so I built it all around him. It’s why I was so good about him spending all hours at the pub. It was going to be the same way with the wedding. He only had to show up and say his lines.’