Читать книгу The Family Way - Tony Parsons - Страница 8

Paulo and Michael grew up in one of the rougher parts of Essex, their father an engineer at Ford in Dagenham, and their childish dreams were full of cars.

More than half the men in their neighbourhood worked at the plant. Cars were everything here. Cars meant jobs, a wage packet, a glimpse of freedom. Cars were how the boy became a man. A teenager’s first Ford Escort was a rite of passage as momentous as any tribal scar. Yet although the brothers both loved cars, they loved them in very different ways.

Paulo was fetishistically obsessed with V8 engines, camshafts and the life of Enzo Ferrari. Michael’s interest veered more towards what he called ‘pussy magnets’.

Paulo loved cars for themselves. Michael loved them for what they could get you, the sweet illusions they projected, and the dreams they made come true.

Michael liked girls as much as he liked cars. His specialist subject, even when he was a spotty little virgin, sharing a bedroom with his slightly bigger brother, was ‘what drives them wild’.

While Paulo learned about Modena and Le Mans, Michael read top-shelf magazines and absorbed the lessons of ‘shallow fucking’ (‘You don’t put it all the way in – drives them wild, it says so here’) and locating the G-spot (‘Put a moistened finger inside and then move it as if you want someone to come towards you – drives them wild, Paulo, apparently’).

They both covered the walls with pictures of Ferraris, but Michael had Sam Fox sandwiched between the Maranellos and the Spiders. Until one day their devout mother saw her.

‘I’m not having the Whore of-a Babylon in my house,’ she said, pulling down the poster with one hand and deftly cuffing Michael around the ear with the other. She knew it wouldn’t be Paulo putting up Whore of Babylon pictures. ‘Put up our Holy Mother.’

‘No jugglies on the wall, lads,’ their father quietly told them later. ‘They upset your mother.’

And the brothers thought – jugglies? What would their old man know about jugglies?

Their parents had come across from Napoli as small children, landing within a year of each other, although you would never know it. Their father, another Paulo, sounded every inch a working-class Londoner, all glottal stops and talk of West Ham and Romford dogs, while their mother, Maria, had never lost the accent and the attitudes of the old country.

Maria – who was called ‘Ma’ by both her husband and her sons – didn’t drive, never saw a bill and never had a job. ‘My home is my job,’ she said. Yet she was the volatile, undisputed emperor of their little terraced home, giving her sons what she called ‘a clip round the earhole’ as often as she kissed their cheeks with a fierce, moist-eyed passion. The boys couldn’t recall their father ever raising his voice.

As a child, Paulo felt most Italian when he visited the homes of his friends. That’s when he knew his own family was special, not because they attended Mass or because they ate baked ziti or because his parents spoke to each other in a foreign language, but because they resembled the type of family that was dying out in this country.

Some of his friends lived with just their mother, one of them lived with just his father, many were in strange patchwork families, made up of new fathers, half-brothers and stepmothers. His own family was much more simple, and old-fashioned, and he was grateful for that fact. It was the kind of family that Paulo wanted for himself one day.

There were only ten months between the brothers, and many people mistook them for twins. They grew up unusually close, dreaming of going into business together one day – something with cars. Racing them, mending them, selling them. Anything. This was what they had learned from their father and all those long years at Ford. ‘You can’t get rich working for somebody else,’ said the old man, again and again, just before he fell asleep in front of the ten o’clock news.

After leaving school at sixteen, the brothers drove taxis for ten years, Paulo in a black London cab after passing the Knowledge, and Michael working the minicabs, until finally they had enough of a stake to get a loan from the bank.

Now they sold imported Italian cars from a showroom off the Holloway Road in north London. They brought in small quantities of pre-ordered merchandise from Turin, Milan and Rome, driving the cheaper left-hand-drive cars back to the UK themselves, doing the conversion to right-hand drive in their body shop, or else they bought second-hand in the boroughs of Islington, Camden and Barnet. Above their modest showroom a row of green, white and red Italian flags streamed in the weak sunlight of north London, above the name of the firm – Baresi Brothers.

They made a good living, enough to support both their families, although like many small businessmen they found there was either not enough work or more than they could handle.

Now when trade was slow, Michael produced the latest pictures of his daughter, Chloe, and spread them across the gleaming red bonnet of an old Ferrari Modena. If marriage to Naoko had calmed Michael down, Paulo thought, then the birth of Chloe seemed to have tamed him.

As they admired the latest portraits of Chloe, the brothers were joined by Ginger, the showroom’s receptionist. Ginger was married and somewhere in her late thirties, and Paulo couldn’t help noticing that Ginger’s breasts seemed to rise and fall in slow motion as she sighed with longing at the sight of baby Chloe in all her gummy-mouthed glory.

‘Oh, she’s gorgeous, Mike,’ Ginger said.

And Michael smiled proudly, completely smitten by his daughter. Ginger looked all dreamy-eyed, as she went to put on the kettle.

‘They love it if you’ve got kids,’ Michael told his brother when they were alone.

Paulo smiled. ‘I guess it’s a sign that your wedding tackle’s in full working order, and you’re a good provider, and all of that. You know – a good mate.’

‘Yes, all that old bollocks,’ Michael said, as he considered his daughter’s pouting beauty. ‘It drives them wild, doesn’t it?’

Megan didn’t remember too much about the party. A crumbling Victorian house big enough to provide a home to half a dozen trainee doctors. The sweet and sickly smell of dope. All these people she knew acting ten years younger than they really were. And all this really bad music – or at least music she didn’t know.

Then suddenly there was this guy – Kirk, definitely Kirk – and he was different from the other people there.

For a start he wasn’t as unhealthy-looking as all the young doctors. He didn’t drink as much, or smoke as much. He didn’t have the cynical line in chat that Megan’s contemporaries had developed as a way of dealing with the parade of disease and deprivation that was suddenly passing through their lives, expecting to be saved.

He just stood there, a fit, good-looking Australian boy – more reserved than you would expect a guy like that to be – smiling politely as the finest minds of their generation got stoned and drunk while talking shop.

‘Everybody’s so smart,’ he said, and it made her laugh.

‘Is that what you think? I thought this lot were just good at passing exams.’

‘No, they’re really smart. Got to be smart to be a doctor, haven’t you? I don’t understand what they’re talking about half the time. All these medical terms. Someone was talking about a patient who was PFO.’

Megan smiled. ‘That just means, Pissed – Fell Over,’ she said.

He frowned. ‘It does?’

She nodded, and let him into the secret language of medical students. Raising her voice above the bad music, while he tilted his handsome head towards her, Megan told him about ash cash (money paid to a doctor for signing cremation forms), house red (blood), FLKs (funny-looking kids), GLMs (good-looking mums) and the great fallback diagnosis, GOK (God only knows) – all the mocking slang that protected them from the sheer naked horror of their jobs.

‘But you still got to be smart, though,’ he insisted.

What an open and honest thing to say, she thought. And so unlike all the people she knew, who couldn’t open their mouths without trying to make some cynical little joke. She looked at him – really looked at him – for the first time. ‘What do you do?’

‘I teach,’ he said. It was the last thing she would have expected. ‘I teach people how to dive. You know – scuba dive.’

She gestured with her glass, taking in the party, the flat, the city.

‘Not around here.’

His wide white smile. Megan loved his smile. ‘In sunnier places. You ever dive?’

‘No, but I’ve got a certificate for swimming a length in my pyjamas. Not really the same thing, is it?’

He laughed. ‘It’s a start.’

He liked her. She could tell. It happened quite a lot. She knew she wasn’t as pretty as Jessica, who had a kind of baby-faced beauty about her, or as tall as Cat, who was as long-limbed and rangy as a dancer, but men liked Megan. They liked all those curves and a face that, because of some genetic accident, somehow looked slightly younger than her age. They liked that contrast. A girl’s face and a woman’s body, Will always said excitedly, heading straight for Megan’s breasts.

She smiled at Kirk, and he did her the honour of blushing. It felt good to have this kind of contact after being with Will for so long, and having to make sure she didn’t send out the wrong signals. Tonight she could send out any signal she liked.

Then suddenly there was finally a song she knew and loved – the one where Edwyn Collins sings, ‘Well, I never met a girl like you before.’

‘That can be our song,’ Kirk said, grinning sheepishly, and usually such ham-fisted flirting would have turned her right off. But she let him get away with it because she liked him too. Right at that moment, she liked him a lot. He wasn’t part of her world and that was fine. She was ready for a break from her world.

And then there was that moment she had almost forgotten about after all the years as someone’s girlfriend – the look of recognition in the eyes of someone you don’t know yet – and suddenly his face was an irresistible object, and their heads were slightly tilting to one side, and finally they were kissing.

He was a good kisser and that was nice too. Enthusiastic, but not trying to clean your tonsils with his tongue. A really good kisser, Megan thought – just the right amount of give and take. She liked that too. But what she liked best was that he could have probably fucked any girl at that party, but he clearly wanted to fuck her.

And Megan thought, you’re in luck, mate.

So they found themselves in one of the bedrooms, and Megan started to relax a little when she saw there was a lock on the door, and soon she was fulfilling her biological destiny on a stack of coats, while downstairs Edwyn Collins sang, ‘I never met a girl like you before,’ and, yes, somehow it felt like it was just for them.

Megan smiled to herself as her sister came through the turnstile.

Jessica looked gorgeous passing through the crowd, Megan thought, like a woman without a care in the world among a mob of tube-weary commuters. Men of all ages turned for a second look – checking out the slim legs and that effortlessly size 10 frame and the round baby face that often made strangers believe she was the youngest of the sisters.

Looking at Jessica made Megan feel shabby and fat. That was the trouble with curves. You had to watch them or they got out of control. Megan was suddenly aware that she had only fingercombed her hair that morning, and that she had to stop keeping Mars bars in her desk.

They hugged each other at the ticket barrier.

‘Look at us,’ Megan said, linking arms with her sister. ‘Grace Kelly and a crack whore.’

Jessica sized up her sister.

‘You look exhausted, Dr Jewell. Doesn’t that sound great? Dr Jewell, Dr Jewell.’

‘I’ve been pretty busy. It feels like every woman in the East End wants me to look up her fanny.’

‘Oh, I know the feeling. Are you still okay for lunch? We could have done it some other time.’

‘We’re fine, Jess.’

‘And they do give you a four-hour lunch break, don’t they?’ Jessica said.

She was wide-eyed with concern. There was an innocence about her that both her siblings lacked, as though she had been spared most of life’s sharp edges. The middle child, buffered by the presence of the big sister and the baby.

Megan just smiled. It was true that her morning surgery ended at twelve, and her afternoon surgery didn’t begin until four. But her morning surgery usually overran by almost an hour – she just couldn’t seem to get her consultations down to the required time – and before afternoon surgery began, she was expected to make her round of house visits.

‘I’ve got us a table in J. Sheekey’s,’ Jessica said. ‘Is fish all right for you?’

Fish and a few glasses of something white would have been fine with Megan. But she really didn’t have time for an elaborate lunch in the West End. In truth, she just about had time to grab a sandwich at the nearest Prêt à Manger, but she didn’t want to cancel lunch with one of her big sisters.

‘It’s not really all lunch break, Jess,’ Megan said gently. ‘I have to see someone in their home before surgery starts again.’

‘You mean sick people?’

‘Sick people, yeah. I’ve got to see a woman this afternoon. Well, her little girl.’

‘You visit sick people in their homes? Wow, that’s terrific service, Meg. I thought they only did that on Harley Street.’

Megan explained that the sick people with a doctor on Harley Street didn’t need someone to come round to see them. Those people had cars, taxis, spouses who drove, even chauffeurs. Her patients in Hackney were often afflicted by what was known as no means. No cars, no money for cabs. Many of them were stuck at the top of a tower block with a bunch of screaming kids, and all this stuff in their heads about it getting worse if they sat in a doctor’s waiting room. So house calls were actually far more common at the bottom end of the market.

Megan didn’t tell Jessica that the older, male doctors at the surgery all hated making house visits, and so farmed the majority of them out to her. Despite being four years younger, Megan had always felt the need to protect Jessica from the horrible truth about the world.

‘Somewhere closer then,’ said Jessica, trying not to sound disappointed.

‘Somewhere closer would be good.’

They bagged the last table in Patisserie Valerie, and after they had ordered, the sisters smiled at each other. Because of Megan’s new job, it had been a while since they had seen each other. They both realised that it didn’t matter where they had lunch.

‘How’s Paulo and his business?’

‘Good – business is up eighty per cent on last year. Or is it eight per cent?’ Jessica bit her bottom lip, staring thoughtfully at the mural on the Pat Val wall. ‘I can’t remember. But they’re importing a lot of new stock from Italy. Maseratis, Ferraris, Lamborghinis, all that. People here order them. Then Paulo and Mike go and get them. How’s Will?’

‘Will’s sort of out of the picture.’

Jessica flinched. ‘Oh, I liked Will. He was really good-looking. For a short guy.’

‘He wasn’t so short!’

‘Kind of short. I suppose it’s hard to keep a relationship going when you’re both working so hard.’

‘Will’s never done a day’s work in his life. It’s actually hard to keep a relationship together when one of you is a slut hound.’

‘Oh. Oh, I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be. Best to find out these things before – you know. Before it’s too late. Before you go and do something stupid.’

‘But you loved Will, didn’t you?’

‘I think I was grateful that somebody seemed so interested in me,’ Megan said. ‘Especially such a good-looking short guy.’ They laughed. ‘Don’t worry about it. Really. It was never one of the great love matches. Not like you and Paulo.’

‘Still – it’s sad when people break up. I hate it. Why can’t things just stay the same?’

Megan smiled at her sister. Jessica – last of the great romantics. She was exactly the same when they were growing up. Jessie always had Andrew Ridgeley on her wall, and some unreachable boy she had a hopeless crush on.

‘You look good, Jess.’

‘And you look worn out. Nobody would guess that I’m the ill one.’

‘You’re not ill!’

‘Got this bloody test coming up. Where they drill a hole through your belly button, for God’s sake.’

‘The laparoscopy. Who’s doing it?’

Jessica named an obstetrician and an address on Wimpole Street.

‘He’s good,’ Megan said. ‘You’ll be fine. Everything okay with Paulo’s sperm?’

A businessman at the next table turned to look at them. Megan stared back at him until he looked away.

‘There’s a slight mobility problem.’

‘Motility problem. That’s not the end of the world. It just means some of them are lazy little buggers. You would be amazed what they can do with lazy sperm these days.’

The businessman stared at them, shook his head, and signalled for his bill.

‘I’m not so worried about Paulo.’ Jessica idly ran her fingers through some spilled sugar on the table in front of her. ‘What I’m worried about is me, and what they are going to find when they cut me open.’

Megan had her own ideas about what they might find when they looked inside her sister. But she smiled, taking her sister’s sugar-coated hands in her own, saying nothing.

‘I feel like I’ve got something wrong with me, Meg.’

‘You’re lovely. There’s nothing wrong with you.’ Megan shook her head. Nobody who looked like her sister should ever feel this sad. ‘Look at you, Jess.’

‘I feel defective.’ Jessica gently released herself from Megan’s grip, and considered the small crystals of sugar stuck to her fingertips. ‘That I don’t work the way I should work.’ She carefully placed her fingers in her mouth, and grimaced, as if the taste wasn’t sweet at all.

‘You and Paulo are going to have a beautiful baby, and you’re going to be the best mother in the world.’

The waitress arrived with Jessica’s pasta and Megan’s salad, and that’s when the wave of nausea struck. Megan pushed back her chair, shoved her way through the crowded café, knocking aside an authentically French waiter, and just about made it to the toilet before she threw up.

Back at the table, Jessica hadn’t touched her lunch.

‘What’s wrong with you, Megan?’

‘Nothing.’

Jessica stared at her with a sullen stubbornness that Megan knew from their childhood.

‘What is it?’

‘Just really tired, that’s all. Working too hard, I guess. It’s nothing. Eat your pasta.’

Megan couldn’t tell her sister.

Jessica had to be protected from this secret, more than she had ever needed to be protected from anything.

How could she ever tell Jessica? Megan’s baby would only break her heart.

It wasn’t as though she was planning to keep it.

‘I tell you, doctor – I’m so knackered today I ain’t hardly got the energy to light up.’

Megan soon understood why the other doctors were reluctant to make house visits.

It was hardly ever the truly sick and infirm that demanded a doctor come to their door. The pensioner crippled with arthritis, the single mum with a disabled child, the middle-aged woman who had just been told that there were cancer cells throughout her body – these people somehow struggled to the overcrowded waiting room of the surgery.

The ones who called you out were invariably the loud ones who talked a lot about their rights, the ones who managed to be both self-pitying and egocentric. Like Mrs Marley.

She was a large woman in a small council flat in the bleak heart of Sunny View, one of the most notorious estates in London. If you didn’t live among these concrete warrens, then you didn’t venture into the Sunny View Estate unless you were buying drugs, selling drugs or making a concerned documentary. Apart from summer, when the annual riots came round, even the police gave the Sunny View Estate a wide berth. Megan didn’t have that option.

She had been frightened before. During her year as a hospital house officer she had spent six months attached to a consultant at the Royal Free, and then six months working in casualty at the Homerton.

The Royal Free was a breeze – her consultant, a paediatrician, was a kind and generous man, and the children of Highgate and Hampstead and Belsize Park were mostly beautifully behaved little children who wanted Megan to read them Harry Potter. But casualty at the Homerton was another world.

After the first shift Megan felt that she had seen more of the world than she ever wanted – stabbed teenagers, beaten wives, mangled bodies pulled from car wrecks. Meat porters with hooks in their heads, pub drinkers who had been glassed at closing time, drug entrepreneurs who had been shot in the face by a business rival.

It was Megan’s responsibility to assess the level of injury when the patients crawled, hobbled or were carried in. Seeing those wounds and that misery, and having to make an instant judgement about what needed to be done – that was as scared as she had ever been. Somehow walking through the Sunny View Estate to see Mrs Marley and her sick child was worse. How could that be? Hormones, Megan thought. It’s just your hormones going barmy.

At the foot of the stairwell to Mrs Marley’s flat, a group of teenagers were loitering. With their unearthly white skin and hooded tops, they looked like something out of a Tolkien nightmare. They didn’t say anything when Megan passed through them, just smirked and leered with their generic contempt and loathing. They stank of fast food and dope – a sweet, rotting smell coming from under those hoods.

‘You look a bit young to me, darling,’ Mrs Marley said suspiciously. ‘Are you sure you’re a proper doctor?’

Megan was impressed. Most people never questioned her authority. ‘I’m a GP registrar.’

‘What’s that then?’

‘I have to do a year under supervision before I become fully registered.’

Mrs Marley narrowed her eyes. ‘Next time I want a proper quack. I know my rights.’

‘What appears to be the problem?’ said Megan.

The problem was the woman’s daughter. An impossibly cute three-year-old – how do such repulsive adults produce such gorgeous children? – who lay listlessly on the sofa, staring at a Mister Man DVD. Mr Happy was having the smile wiped off his yellow face by all the other inhabitants of Mister Town. Megan knew the feeling.

She examined the child. Her temperature was high, but everything else seemed to be normal. Megan saw she was wearing small diamond studs in her ears. They couldn’t wait for their children to grow up on the Sunny View Estate, although with their casual clothes and recreational drugs and loud music, the Sunny View adults seemed to stew in a state of perpetual adolescence.

‘What’s your name?’ Megan said, pushing the child’s hair from her moist forehead.

‘Daisy, miss.’

‘I think you’ve got a bit of a fever, Daisy.’

‘I’ve got a kitty-cat.’

‘That’s nice.’

‘I’ve got a puppy.’

‘Lovely!’

‘I’ve got a dinosaur.’

‘I just want you to take it easy for a couple of days. Will you do that for me, Daisy?’

‘Yes, miss.’

‘Are her bowel movements normal, Mrs Marley?’

‘Shits like a carthorse, that one,’ said the mother, running her fat pink tongue along the edge of a cigarette paper. Megan stood up and faced the woman. When she spoke she was surprised to find her voice shaking with emotion.

‘You’re not smoking drugs in the presence of this child, are you?’

Mrs Marley shrugged. ‘Free country, innit?’

‘That’s a common misconception. If I discover you are taking drugs in front of this child, you will find out exactly how free it is.’

‘You threatening me with the socially serviced?’

‘I’m telling you not to do it.’

The woman’s natural belligerence was suddenly cowed. She put down the cigarette papers and began fussing over Daisy as though she was up for mother of the year.

‘You hungry, gorgeous? Want Mummy to defrost you summink?’

Megan let herself out. That woman, she thought. If Daisy were mine I would feed her good nutritious food and read her Harry Potter and never pierce her little ears and never let her wear cheap jewellery and –

Her eyes suddenly filled with tears. Daisy was not her child. She was just her patient, and she had three more to see on the Sunny View Estate before the start of afternoon surgery.

Megan pushed through the hooded youths at the foot of the stairwell. They didn’t laugh at her this time, even though their ranks had been swollen by a number of smaller hooded creatures, who looked like elves on mountain bikes.

These people, thought Megan. The way they breed. Like rabbits.

It was lucky she was here to save them.

Cat’s boss was the woman with everything.

Brigitte Wolfe had a business she had built from nothing, a boyfriend she had met in one of the more exclusive resorts in Kenya and, above all, independence.

If Cat’s dream on leaving home was pure, unencumbered liberation, then surely Brigitte was closer to achieving that dream than anyone she had ever known. There was no husband to answer to, no children to prevent her jumping on a plane to anywhere she felt like going. Nobody owned Brigitte. Unlike most people on the planet, Brigitte wasn’t trapped by her past.

So Cat was surprised to walk into Brigitte’s office at Mamma-san on Saturday night and find her boss feeding a shoebox full of photographs to a shredding machine.

Brigitte held up her hand, requesting silence. Cat stood there and watched her deleting a box full of memories.

Brigitte would select a photograph from the shoebox, give it a cold smile, and then feed it to the growling shredder. A wastepaper basket overflowing with coloured streamers indicated Brigitte had been at her work for some time. Cat noticed that the photographs were all of Brigitte and her boyfriend. If a forty-five-year-old property developer called Digby could reasonably be called a boyfriend.

There had been a string of men in the past, all that bit older and bit richer than Brigitte, and she tended to stick with them for two or three years, and then trade them in. ‘Like cars,’ she told Cat. ‘You get a new one before the old one fails its MOT.’

Digby had been around for longer than most. Brigitte always said that he could stay until she found a vibrator that liked going to galleries. Now Digby was clearly out, but it didn’t look as though it had ended the way these things had for Brigitte in the past.

Brigitte had taught Cat everything she knew about the restaurant business, and a lot of what she knew about life.

So while Brigitte fed her relationship to the shredding machine, Cat stood there in patient silence, as if she might learn something.

Cat owed her career to this woman.

When she had first met Brigitte Wolfe, Cat was a twenty-five-year-old freelance journalist eking out a minimum wage by knocking out restaurant reviews for a trendy little listings magazine. Write about what you know, they all told her, and after feeding her younger sisters thousands of meals when they were growing up, what Cat knew about was food.

And by now she also knew about restaurants, because the well-brought-up public school boys she met at university had all wined and dined her before attempting to take her to bed. It was a different world from the one she knew – the restaurants she had occasionally glimpsed with her father and his actor friends had seemed more concerned with drinking than eating – but she took to it immediately. Usually the food was better than the sex. What she liked most of all was that you didn’t have to cook it yourself.

When she met Cat, Brigitte Wolfe was nearly thirty, and was the owner, accountant and head cook of Mamma-san, a tiny noodle joint on Brewer Street where young people queued out on the narrow pavement for a bowl of Brigitte’s soba and udon noodles.

Over the next ten years London would become full of Asian restaurants that were neither owned nor run by Asians – bright, funky places with menus that served Thai curry and Vietnamese noodles and Chinese dim sum and Japanese sashimi, as if that continent was really just one country, with a cuisine that was perfect for beautiful young people who cared about their diet and their looks. Mamma-san was among the first.

Cat joined the noodle queue on Brewer Street, and wrote a rave review for her little listings magazine. When she came in again, not working this time, Brigitte offered Cat a job as manager.

As the listings magazine took a very casual approach to paying its contributors, Cat took the job. The magazine went out of business soon after. Mamma-san moved up-market and out of Soho, although Cat believed that the clientele were still the same ragged-trousered kids who had queued up on Brewer Street all those years ago before going dancing at the Wag, just ten years older and, a decade into their careers, a lot more affluent. Brigitte seemed to enjoy her restaurant as much as they did.

‘A great man once said, Arrange your life so that you can’t tell the difference between work and pleasure.’

‘Shakespeare?’ said Cat.

‘Warren Beatty,’ said Brigitte.

It was love at first sight. Cat had never met anyone who could quote Warren Beatty, although her mother claimed that he had once touched her arse backstage at the London Palladium. Brigitte had more fun than anyone Cat had ever known. After the domestic drudgery of her childhood, here was life as it ought to be lived.

When most of the city was still sleeping, the two women toured the markets – Smithfield for the restaurant’s meat, Billingsgate for their fish, New Spitalfields for vegetables. Red-faced men in stained white coats shouted at each other in the pre-dawn gloom. Cat learned how to hire good kitchen staff, and how to fire the bad ones when they turned up drunk or stoned, or couldn’t keep their hands off the waitresses.

Cat learned how to talk to the wine merchant, the VAT man, the health inspector, and to be scared of none of them. Although she was only four years older, Brigitte felt like the closest thing to a mother that Cat had ever had.

Brigitte was one of those European women who seem to discover a lifestyle they like in their middle twenties, and then stick with it for ever. She had never married. She worked harder than anyone Cat knew, and played hard too – twice a year she flew off to walk in the foothills of the Himalayas or dive in the Maldives or drive across Australia.

Sometimes she took Digby with her, and sometimes she left him at home – more like a favourite piece of luggage than a man. Brigitte enjoyed her life, and for years she had been Cat’s North Star, guiding her way, showing her how it was done. This unencumbered life.

But now Brigitte selected a photograph of Digby and herself on a blinding white beach. The Maldives? Seychelles? One last look, and she fed the photo to the shredding machine.

‘What’s he done?’ Cat said.

‘He wants to be with someone who can bring something new to a relationship.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like, for example, a pair of twenty-four-year-old tits.’

Cat was speechless. And outraged. Men didn’t treat Brigitte like this. She was the one who did the dumping.

‘Some well-stacked slut from his office.’ Brigitte calmly fed the shredding machine a Polaroid of Digby and herself atop a couple of drooling camels, the pyramids shining in the background. Dry-eyed, Cat noticed with admiration. Even now, Brigitte seemed in control. From the floor below they could hear the clatter and din of Saturday night at Mamma-san.

‘I just wanted to tell you there are a couple of footballers at the desk. They haven’t booked.’

‘Alone?’

‘Two women with them. They look like lap dancers. Although of course they could be their wives. What should I tell them?’

‘Tell them to call ahead next time.’

‘Could be good publicity. There are a couple of photographers outside.’

‘It’s even better publicity if we turn them away.’

‘Okay.’

Cat turned to leave. Brigitte’s voice caught her at the door.

‘Do you know what I am this year?’

Cat shook her head.

‘Forty. I am forty years old. How can I compete with a big bouncing pair of twenty-year-old tits?’

‘Twenty-four. And you don’t have to compete. You’re a strong, free woman who has seen life, and lived life, and all that kind of stuff. You don’t need to latch on to some man to prove you exist. She has to compete with you.’

Brigitte began to laugh. ‘Oh, my darling Cat.’

‘She’s not the catch,’ Cat said, warming to her theme, ‘you are!’

Brigitte stared wistfully at a photograph of Digby and herself at a crowded party – New Year’s Eve? – and then gave it to the shredder.

‘The trouble is, Cat, as women get older, the pool of potential partners gets smaller. But for men, it gets bigger.’ She fed the shredding machine a picture taken on a bridge in Paris. ‘So where does that leave women like us?’

And as the roar of Saturday night boomed beneath her feet, Cat thought, women like us?