By the time the last box of books was carried out, she’d made a second round of tea and a quick batch of chocolate chip and hazelnut cookies, which she brought out as Verity left the flat for one final time with her most prized possession. In a special carrier, mewling unhappily, was Strumpet, her immense British blue short-hair cat. He might be going to live in five-bedroom splendour in Canonbury with a massive back garden, but that couldn’t even begin to compete with living round the corner from a fish and chip shop and a Swedish deli with its own smokehouse for curing salmon.
‘You’re an ingrate, Strumpo,’ Verity said, as she struggled under the weight and heft of her enormous feline. Her boyfriend Johnny hurried over to relieve her of her precious burden.
‘I’m sure he’ll settle in once we get back to mine.’ He paused. ‘Not mine. Ours. When we get back to our house.’
Generally, it could be quite hard to read Verity unless she was going through the petty cash receipts, in which case it was clear that she was very stressed indeed and it was best to leave her well alone. But now she smiled up at Johnny, with his ridiculously chiselled good looks like he spent his spare time modelling for Burberry.
‘Not our house,’ she corrected him. ‘Our home.’
It was all very lovely and heart-warming, Mattie thought, but her heart refused to be warmed. It stayed just where it was, beating out a steady rhythm, which in itself was miraculous, considering all the traumas she had endured.
‘I hate to spoil the moment,’ Pippa said bluntly, because there was only so long that Verity and Johnny could stand there making googly eyes at each other while everyone else was on a clock. ‘But according to my spreadsheet, you two should have been out of here twenty-seven minutes ago.’
Of course, by this point Tom and his friends had all disappeared, leaving their van blocking the entrance to the mews, so Verity and Johnny and Posy and Sebastian couldn’t get out. After several texts from Posy, he eventually reappeared with his little posse, all of them clutching breakfast paninis from the Italian café round the corner, even though it was now gone five on a Wednesday. Mattie clenched her fists.
‘These are amazing,’ one of them said and then they all doffed imaginary caps.
‘Top marks to the professor!’
Mattie had no one to roll her eyes at because Pippa was glued to her spreadsheet and Guy had abandoned her for the delights of Rochester Street. Despite numerous texts, he eventually turned up twenty minutes later, once Mattie had carefully manoeuvred the car as close to the entrance of Happy Ever After as she could get, and after telling Tom in no uncertain terms to stop trying to box her in with his rent-a-van.
It very quickly became apparent that you couldn’t have six people going up and down the narrow stairs, ferrying boxes and bin liners and laundry bags and suitcases, without bottlenecks and chaos. Pippa decided that Mattie should stay in the flat and have her stuff brought to her, and Mattie agreed profusely.
‘That sounds like an excuse to get out of all the fetching and carrying,’ Guy grumbled.
‘If you stop whinging, I’ll make you both dinner when you’ve finished fetching and carrying,’ Mattie said tartly, which sped him on his way.
That still left all three of Tom’s helpers getting in the way, giving her curious looks as if they’d never seen a real live woman before. Maybe they hadn’t. Who was to know what Tom and his friends got up to?
‘Are they your people?’ Mattie asked Guy when he brought up the holdall with all her bathroom paraphernalia in it.
Guy raised one impeccable eyebrow in horror. ‘With those T-shirts? God, no, they are nothing to do with us. Your gaydar is worse than useless.’
By now, one of Tom’s friends was lingering in the kitchen where Mattie was unpacking a box of cooking utensils: it seemed that Verity had taken pretty much every last teaspoon with her.
Said friend was small and wiry and quite incapable of standing still, bouncing on the soles of his boxy trainers.
‘I’m Phil or the Archbishop of Banterbury,’ he said at last, holding out his hand.
Mattie shook the hand. ‘I think I’ll stick with Phil,’ she said. ‘I’m Matilda. Mattie.’
‘A beautiful name for a beautiful lady,’ Phil said and they heard a pointed cough from the hall.
‘Don’t even bother,’ said Tom as he passed the doorway with a couple of tweedy suits over his arm. ‘She’s not interested and she’s way out of your league.’
Mattie blinked. Was that Tom paying her an actual compliment? Surely not! Phil nodded in agreement. ‘True that,’ he said gallantly.
Over the course of the next fifteen minutes, Tom’s other two friends introduced themselves. By their given names: Daquon and Mikey; and their respective preferred names: The Bantmeister and Bantdaddy.
‘And what do you call Tom?’ Mattie asked Daquon as he wiped down the little bookcase in the kitchen so she could arrange her cookbooks on it. All three of them had cracked on to her, but she was quite capable of batting them away and they were also very helpful. ‘Bants-R-Us?’
‘Haha! Tom has no banter. He’s like a banter-free zone. The banter stops when it gets within fifty metres of him.’ Daquon slapped his thighs at the very notion of Tom having good banter. ‘These days we call him The Professor, on account of all the book-learning.’
‘Right …’ Mattie filed this piece of information away for later use. ‘And where do you know Tom from?’
‘Funny you should ask that, because The Professor you see before you today is very different from …’
‘Shut up! Seriously, stop making sounds come out of your mouth.’ Tom was in the kitchen doorway again. He’d even taken his glasses off, all the better to polish them furiously and glare, although Mattie wasn’t sure if the glare was for her or The Bantmeister. Most likely, it was meant for both of them. ‘We talked about this.’
‘You talked about it,’ Daquon muttered.
‘Didn’t stop talking about it all the way here,’ said Mikey, coming up behind Tom. ‘But what we didn’t talk about is why you have the big room and the lovely lady here is stuck in a tiny cupboard like Harry Potter when he was living at the Dursleys’.’
‘Mattie and I have already discussed that,’ Tom said, and if he kept polishing his glasses with such vigour, there was every possibility that they might shatter.
‘We didn’t really discuss it.’ Mattie sighed. ‘He made me toss a coin and then he was very smug about the outcome.’
‘Rude!’ decided Mikey, with a shake of his head. ‘You should let the girl have the biggest room on account of the fact that she’ll have loads of girly stuff to put in it.’
‘Handbags and shoes and pretty dresses,’ said Phil dreamily because now he was at the kitchen doorway too. ‘Probably Matilda really needs an extra room just for her shoes.’
‘She doesn’t have that many shoes,’ piped up Guy, who was passing. ‘Just several pairs of very ratty Converse.’
Fortunately, everyone ignored his contribution. ‘Mattie should have the bigger room. It’s just, like, basic good manners,’ Phil said, bouncing on his feet again and working his jaw furiously. ‘It’s not like you even need a double bed.’
‘Yeah! Like, who’s going to want to pull your ugly mug?’
There were hoots of laughter and Tom’s face was clenched so tight that it looked as if he had lockjaw. Mattie even felt a little bit sorry for him.
‘It’s all right,’ she said and she sighed again. She knew that she looked quite forlorn in the