The Party: The thrilling Richard & Judy Book Club Pick 2018

‘They’ve got loads of family staying,’ I said, unbuckling my trousers in preparation for getting changed. ‘Not just Ben’s but Serena’s lot too. I don’t think Ben wanted to inflict that on us.’

Lucy, a mug of tea in one hand, came over to me. She tilted her head. Moist brown eyes looked at me expectantly. A pulse beat in the purplish semi-circle beneath her left socket, as it always did when she was nervous. She placed her free hand tentatively on the small of my back. I could smell her tea-rose perfume. I used to find that fragrance deeply charming. It was, like Lucy, modest and unshowy. That night, it caught in my throat. Too sweet. Too soapy.

‘I’m sorry, I’m—’

Lucy dropped her head and withdrew her hand.

‘Of course,’ she said. She turned away. ‘Only …’ I could see her weighing up whether to say what was on her mind. ‘It’s been months.’

Not this again.

‘Has it?’

She nodded.

‘I’ve had a lot on my mind. The new book.’

I had just delivered a lengthy manuscript on post-Impressionism to my publishers. They hadn’t been especially enthused by the idea but my agent had talked them round. Pointed out that there was a major Manet retrospective coming up at the Tate and who better to write the definitive work on it than esteemed newspaper art critic Martin Gilmour? I had something of a reputation. My first book, Art: Who Gives a F**k?, published five years previously, had established me as an enfant terrible of the art world, the critic who dared to call out bullshit and say things as he truly saw them.

In truth, the contents were not particularly explosive. The title had been my agent’s idea. Credit where it’s due: it sold by the truckload. It became the kind of book people give their trendy friends at Christmas. I’ve seen it in the downstairs loo of some fantastically fashionable, architect-designed house (curtain walls and basement studies). I’m pretty sure no one actually read it from cover to cover. Apart from Lucy, that is. Lucy is loyal to a fault. Always has been.

We met thirteen years ago when I was working on the Bugle, London’s pre-eminent evening newspaper (although, admittedly, there was no competition at that stage. The free-sheets and the morning Metro only came along later). I had wangled myself a position as maternity leave cover for the deputy arts editor and Lucy was the desk secretary. In those days, you could still smoke in the office, something I did regularly and self-consciously, only too aware that when I took a drag on a cigarette my twenty-something cheekbones were highlighted becomingly to anyone who might be looking.

I didn’t notice Lucy for several weeks. She existed as a pleasant blur on the periphery of my vision. She was a plump, prettyish girl with owlish spectacles and shoulder-length brown hair that was neither straight nor curly but instead manifested itself unsatisfactorily in the liminal space between. Her hair, I would subsequently find out, was a source of constant frustration. The rain had only to glower threateningly from an unbroken grey cloud for it to start frizzing at the ends. On wet days, Lucy wore her hair up in a velvet scrunchie as the Duchess of York used to do. There always was something delightfully out of step about Lucy. She was in floaty florals when everyone else was in figure-hugging pencil skirts. She wore men’s brogues and had thick, sluggish eyebrows. She was of a different time. Part of her still is. I have never worked out which time, exactly. It could be that the one she belongs to hasn’t been invented yet.

Anyway, back then, Lucy hadn’t made much of an impression other than of being someone who answered the phone and said ‘hello’ when one walked into the office. Did the odd tea round. Once, I saw her return from her lunch break with her fingernails painted a glossy black and this had momentarily sparked my interest. More going on there than meets the eye, I thought. But then I forgot about it, turning back to my keyboard to bash out five hundred words of guff on the latest insufferably pretentious graduate show from Central Saint Martins or a Hollywood actress of negligible talent who had some hold over the newspaper’s proprietor.

It wasn’t until my second, or even third, month there that Lucy made any sort of lasting impact.

I had been asked by Ian, the section editor, to knock up a piece on the return of the ‘Great American Novelist’. There was some tenuous peg, I seem to recall – a debut by a muscular young author who had been hailed as the new Tom Wolfe. I had tried to farm out the writing of the piece to a willing freelancer, but it was just before Christmas and none of my regulars had been available so I’d decided to have a go myself.

I was sitting at my desk, discussing who should be included with Ian.

‘There’s an argument to be made for Jay McInerney,’ he said.

I nodded, as if I were already across that. ‘And DeLillo, of course,’ I added. ‘Wolfe. Can we get away with Franzen?’

‘Definitely.’ Ian leaned back in his chair, folding his arms across his rumpled shirt. ‘You’ve got Philip Roth, I’m guessing?’

‘Sure, sure,’ I said, even though I hadn’t thought of Philip Roth and hadn’t, at that point in my life, read a single one of his books.

There was an audible tsk-ing sound from the other side of the desk.

‘I mean, if we’re going back a bit further, we could look at Salinger …’ I continued.

The tsk-ing turned into a loud, impatient grunt. Ian’s lips twitched at the corners.

‘Do you have something to say, Lucy?’ he asked, amused.

‘No,’ she said, face flushed. ‘Actually, I mean, sorry, yes, yes I do.’ She coughed and a pink dot appeared in the centre of each cheek.

‘Please …’ Ian said, motioning with one hand that the floor was hers.

‘Well, have you thought of, you know, including any women in your list?’ she asked, her voice gathering momentum and volume as she spoke. ‘It’s just always the same boring, old, white, men. I mean, soon you’ll be citing John bloody Updike.’

I scoffed, while mentally reminding myself to include John Updike. How could I have overlooked John Updike? It was those kind of mistakes that made me stand out. That made me look like a boy who didn’t have a home full of packed bookshelves but who instead relied on his mother’s Reader’s Digest for reading material.

‘… who basically write everything with their dicks out and who all congratulate each other on being so fantastic,’ Lucy was saying, ‘when really their “state of the nation” novels are just family dramas repackaged with extra testosterone. You know, there are incredible female authors in America who, just because they write about families and have these … f-f … awful covers with close-up photographs of children and sandcastles, they just get ignored all the damn time.’

She dropped her head. Hair fell loose across her pale forehead.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I just …’

I smiled at her. How sweet it was, I thought, to feel so impassioned about something. She caught my eye and smiled back, lips parting just enough for me to see her precise, straight and entirely sensible teeth.

‘Blimey,’ Ian said. ‘Didn’t realise we had Emmeline sodding Pankhurst sitting here. So who would you suggest, then?’

‘Anne Tyler, Joan Didion, Donna Tartt,’ Lucy said without looking up. ‘And that’s just for starters. That’s if you even agree with the fundamental premise of there being something that is “The Great American Novel”. Which I don’t, by the way.’

Ian chortled. ‘Thanks, Luce. Remind me, what did you study at Bristol again?’

‘English,’ she mumbled. ‘And it was Durham.’

‘Thought so.’

‘I actually think it’s a good idea,’ I said, surprising myself at the sound of my own voice. ‘We should include some women.’

Lucy grinned. Her glasses had slid down her nose and she pushed them back up with a single nail-chewed forefinger and I noticed, as she did so, that her hand was shaking.

‘Thanks, Martin,’ she said and she looked at me with shining eyes.

The more I got to know her after that, the more I was charmed in spite of myself. She was so respectful, so admiring of me, so fundamentally grateful that I would pay her any attention. And I, in turn, found her intelligent and interesting company. She knew a lot.

We started taking lunch together. At first, it was just a hurried sandwich in the staff canteen but soon we graduated to the restaurant across the road from the office where we sat in wooden booths and drank wine from a magnum that the waiter would mark off at the end of the meal, charging us according to how many inches we had drunk. It was only a matter of time before lunch turned into an after-work drink in the pub – me: a pint of Guinness; Lucy: a gin and tonic. (I never liked Guinness. I only drank it when I was trying to give the impression of blokeishness.) After six months, we were having dinner. We both had a penchant for Persian food and would seek out the best places for a night-time meal of aubergine stew and lamb with barberries at the wrong end of Kensington.

And then she kissed me and I didn’t know how to say no. It was on the pavement outside a brightly painted eatery called Tas or Yaz or Fez or something similar. We were standing under a streetlamp, dank drizzle coating our faces like wet muslin and I found myself looking at her face, at the speckles of moisture on her unfashionably large glasses, at the discreet jiggle of extra flesh just underneath her chin, at the double freckle on the lobe of one ear so that it looked as if she had got them pierced even though she was one of the few women of my acquaintance who hadn’t.

‘Too scared of infection,’ she had said, explaining it to me once. ‘Too scared of everything.’

She isn’t stupid, Lucy.

It was as I was looking at her that Lucy’s expression changed. Her eyes – brown, lively – acquired a liquid quality, as though their brownness could seep out if left unguarded. I realised, too late, that what I was seeing in those darkened pupils, was lust. She leaned in, clasping her hands behind my neck and I succumbed because it was easier than anything else. And would it do so very much harm?

Her lips were soft and doughy. The kiss became moister and more enthused. I could hear a faint moaning sound coming from Lucy’s throat and then I pulled away, hands on her shoulders, a firm, paternal, ‘We shouldn’t be doing this.’

She looked at me sadly.

‘Why not?’