Читать книгу To My Best Friends - Sam Baker - Страница 11

Chapter Six

‘Not early, am I?’ Lizzie asked. The confusion on David’s face when he opened the front door made her wonder if she had the wrong time, or even the wrong day. Instinctively, she glanced at her watch: ten past seven. That was Lizzie, always early or late. Try as she might, she could never just be on time.

Usually she would have thrown her arms around him, hugged him hello. But since letter-gate it felt wrong. Instead, she stood on tiptoe to peck his cheek and stepped back when he took a second too long to respond.

‘No,’ David said, eventually. ‘You’re not.’

He looked, if anything, worse than the last time she had seen him. His usually pink skin was sallow, the bags under his eyes tinged with grey. ‘It’s just . . . I was expecting Jo first.’

‘She isn’t here yet?’

Before he could answer, a shriek came from the far end of the house, followed by a crash and a wail.

David glanced over his shoulder. ‘I better go and see . . . Come in.’

Before Lizzie had a chance to ask how he was coping, David had vanished into the kitchen. Not that she needed to ask. One look told her he wasn’t.

‘Why don’t I take over?’ she offered when she reached the kitchen, and the full chaos Harrie and Charlie had wrought on their bedtime milk and cookies became clear. Crumbs and puddles splattered the oak table. The solid wood worktops were thick with dirty dishes, open cereal packets and the debris of an earlier meal – or two. And the toddlers were hardly to blame for that.

Lizzie headed purposefully towards the sink. ‘I’ll start on this while I wait for Jo,’ she said. Anything was better than this awkward hovering.

David made to protest but Lizzie waved him away. ‘I thought you were going out,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you get off and let me sort this?’

David hesitated. ‘I was . . . am . . . it’s just . . .’

Still he loitered. Surely he wasn’t planning to stay home after all?

‘Off you go then,’ Lizzie said, channelling her mother in the days when her mother could still strike the fear of God into cold callers, and hoping he couldn’t hear the panic in her voice. This evening was going to be hard enough without David here. ‘The reinforcements have arrived.’

At least one-third of the reinforcements was lurking around the corner, sheltering from the rain.

‘Hurry up,’ Mona muttered, adjusting her inadequate umbrella so the drips stopped soaking her back and spattered her boots and jeans instead. It was only five minutes since she’d seen Lizzie park and go inside. But, thanks to the cold and the wet, it felt far longer.

Through the downpour she stared at the solid Victorian end terrace and felt a familiar sense of isolation. Nicci and David had bought the house as part of a probate deal eight years earlier, soon after Mona returned from Australia. ‘In need of modernisation,’ the estate agent had said. Understatement of the year. ‘Buy it while it’s still standing,’ Mona had muttered the first time the proud new owners showed their friends around. That was before the builders and plumbers and electricians had transformed it into the twenty-first-century family home of Nicci’s dreams.

Mona had spent endless Sundays and bank holidays there in the intervening years, but still she felt like an outsider. It was entirely her own fault, she knew. Nicci, Lizzie and Jo had been such a tight-knit group when she’d answered their ad for a fourth person to share their student house that she’d never felt totally part of it. She hadn’t helped herself, of course, by heading off to satisfy her wanderlust as soon as graduation forced everyone to decide how they were going to live their lives. It was in Australia, as far away from home as possible, she hoped to find the person she wanted to be.

Instead she found heartbreak. Although it hadn’t looked that way at first.

Temping by day, Mona learnt yoga by night, which was where she met Callie, the instructor. And through Callie, her brother, Greg. Tall, blond, oozing confidence. As unreconstructed as it was possible to be. One look and, for the first time, Mona fell in love and lust so hard she barely caught her breath. Pregnancy and marriage, in that order, took her by surprise, followed, almost as rapidly, by rumours of Greg’s ‘hook-ups’. At first, she refused to believe the man she loved would do that to her; at second, she turned a blind eye for the sake of their baby boy.

Until he left her.

He. Left. Her. For a blonde waitress called Justine. Just one of many things she omitted to tell Nicci and Jo and Lizzie. Instead, she returned to London, aged twenty-eight, and with nothing to show for her travels but a newfound passion for yoga and a wide-eyed five-year-old boy with a Star Wars rucksack, who looked nothing like her and everything like the man the memory of whom she was running away from.

Glancing irritably at her watch, Mona stamped her feet against the damp, spraying water on to her jeans. Seven twenty – what the hell were they doing in there? And, come to that, where was Jo?

The rain had slowed, but by now the bottom half of her jeans were soaked. Mona knew she should just go in, face David, get it over with. But she couldn’t make herself. Just as she hadn’t been able to make herself tell Nicci about Neil. Though there were many times she’d wanted to.

Neil Osborne. If she’d felt distanced from her friends before, it was Neil who sealed her alienation.

‘Because Sunday afternoons were family time, which, for Mona and Dan, meant long lazy roast lunches around Nicci’s big oak table. And for Mona Thomas’s lover meant roasts at home. With his wife, Tracy (although Mona did her best not to give the woman a name, just as she didn’t want to see her face). Tracy, she forced herself to think, and his three teenage daughters.

So it was always just Mona and Dan. Mona’s lover was never there to top up her glass or squeeze her knee under the table at some private joke; never there to kick a ball around David’s back garden or talk sport in the kitchen.

But then, to be fair, Neil had never been invited.

It wasn’t that Nicci and David excluded him, more that they didn’t know he existed. None of them did.

They knew he had existed. To begin with, they’d even managed sisterly empathy. ‘He wants to have his cake and eat you,’ Jo said, thrilled at her own witticism. Mona had just confessed she’d fallen for a married man, with all the usual qualifications: I didn’t know to begin with . . . She doesn’t understand him . . . He’s not happy . . . They’re only together for the sake of the children . . .

‘Mona,’ Nicci said, as Jo and Lizzie rolled their eyes.

And they all chorused their favourite line from their all-time favourite movie, ‘He’s never going to leave her.’

Mona’s mouth had twisted as it always did when she was a little bit hurt, a little bit guilty, but didn’t want to show it.

‘You’re right,’ she said, forcing a smile and channelling Carrie Fisher as she knew she was required to do. ‘You’re right. You’re right. I know you’re right.’

But that was three years ago. More. What they didn’t know was that he was still around. They thought Mona had dumped him because that was what she’d told them. It wasn’t a lie, exactly; more a lie of omission. She’d intended to end it, putting it off each time she saw him, but then, out of the blue, he dumped her, and to her surprise and horror she’d thought her heart was going to shatter all over again.

In the end, it was easier to let the others think she’d been the one to do the dumping. And when they’d been so pleased they cracked open a bottle of Nicci’s favourite pink Laurent Perrier to celebrate, Mona knew she’d been right. Better by far than telling the truth, which was that she’d do anything – anything at all – to have him back.

Despite the fact she’d been on the receiving end of a cheating husband herself, and knew precisely how it felt to be left.

So when Neil turned up at the fashionable organic restaurant where she was manager, claiming he couldn’t live without her – literally, that was what he’d said: ‘Mona, I can’t live without you’ – well, Mona just ‘forgot’ to mention it the next time she saw her friends. And the next time, and the next. And because there’d always been a part of herself she’d kept private, the deception hadn’t even felt that unnatural. And then it felt too late, like she’d missed her chance to tell them the truth. And now . . . well, now she had.

The sound of an engine igniting brought Mona to, just in time to step back into the shadow of a six-foot garden wall as David’s people carrier appeared, indicated and turned in the opposite direction. Nearly seven thirty. And still no Jo. Lizzie was going to be livid.