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

‘I … well, look …’

‘We get on well, don’t we? I mean, I like you.’ A meaningful little lacuna. ‘I really like you. Can’t we just … see where it goes? I’m lonely. I know you’re lonely …’ This came as news to me. The truth was, I did feel alone but I thought I had masked it sufficiently well from prying eyes in the office. At that stage, Ben was getting more serious with Serena and I was increasingly at a loose end in the evenings. Whereas, previously, the two of us had frequently gone drinking in Soho, starting off in a private members’ club before graduating to dinner at Quo Vadis and a nightcap at the Atlantic, these days Ben was more likely to stay in cooking pasta and watching films with Serena. He had asked me to find my own place so that she could move into the mews house I had shared with him since we graduated.

‘Time to grow up, mate,’ he had said, slapping me on the back. Touch came so easily to Ben. It was something I both hated and loved about him.

So perhaps I was particularly vulnerable to attention when Lucy came along. I realise now that is not an excuse.

I walked her home that evening. She lived in a surprisingly nice flat off the North End Road. I say surprisingly because I had assumed, from the dowdiness of her clothing and her penchant for buying men’s jackets from charity shops, that money was tight. It turned out I was wrong about that. Lucy’s parents were quite well off, in a hearty, middle-class kind of way. They had sent their children to private school and lived in a red-brick farmhouse in Gloucestershire. At Christmas-time, they attended the carol concert at Tewkesbury Cathedral.

I deposited her at the door.

‘Come up,’ Lucy said, tugging at the sleeve of my coat.

I shook my head, feigning regret.

‘No,’ I said, trailing my fingers down her cheek. ‘That wouldn’t be right. Next time.’

I kissed the top of her head, inhaling Timotei and light sweat, and walked away, raising one arm aloft as I went.

‘See you tomorrow,’ she called out to my retreating form.

For whatever reason, the evening with Lucy had left me experiencing an uncomfortable surge of different emotions. I thought of my mother, of the way she looked at me when I told her, when I was back from school one Easter holiday, that she shouldn’t say ‘settee’ but ‘sofa’ and that the way she pronounced ‘cinema’ without elongating the final ‘a’ was embarrassing.

I found myself walking towards Brompton Cemetery and although it was late and I knew the main gates would be closed, I also knew from previous visits that there was a point in the wall on the Lillie Road where the stones had come loose and you could crawl through quite easily on your hands and knees.

This I did, the palms of my hands gathering up bits of twig and pine cone and leaving a latticed indentation of dirt across my skin. I stood, brushing myself clean. A piece of lichen had lodged itself in my hair. I shook it out.

The cemetery stood in the gloom of night, half lit here and there by a weak streetlamp. Gravestones and silhouetted stone angels loomed out of the shadows. Some notable historical figures were buried nearby although I’d never tried to seek out their graves. My favourite gravestone (if one can have such a thing) was to mark the passing of a young man called Horace Brass who died at the age of sixteen in 1910. His name was carved in looped art nouveau cursive.

I started walking towards it, hands in my pockets. A man fell into step beside me. I glanced to one side and saw that, no, this was not a man but a boy. A teenage boy, like Horace Brass, pale and thin as a silver birch. He had greasy hair and spots around his mouth.

‘Looking for company?’ he said.

‘No,’ I said too loudly. ‘No I don’t … I mean, I’m not.’

A fizz of anger in my solar plexus. I doubled up my pace and walked swiftly back the way I had come.

The next day, I was late into the office. I had a migraine, I recall, and with every step I took, the ground felt too far away for my feet to make contact with it. I sat at my desk, shading my eyes from the sunlight spooling through the windows, and flicked through the latest issue of the Art Newspaper, pretending to concentrate on the words. When Lucy came in, she smiled at me and I remember this internal surge of relief that she still liked me. In Lucy’s mind, I was still the man she had kissed outside her front door, the man she had wanted to come upstairs, the man she respected and liked and enjoyed spending time with. In her mind, I was the nice Martin Gilmour. I was the Martin Gilmour I wanted to be.

I smiled back at her. That day, we went again for lunch together, taking our supermarket sandwiches to sit on our coats in Kensington Gardens. I kissed her, taking her face in both my hands, conveying a tenderness I almost felt. She tasted of prawns and mayonnaise. I felt no stirring, no passion, no love. But there was affection there, and fondness too. And there was an understanding of sorts. I am sure of that. I did not pull the wool over her eyes, as my mother might have said. Lucy knew what I was. Really, she can’t complain.

Of course, nothing is as easy as it first appears. I used to like Lucy so much, truly I did. Over the years, that like has been dulled: brass left unpolished. The same qualities that drew me to her: an uncomplicated view of the world, her mild eccentricity, her un-groomed refusal to make the best of herself and above all, her adoration of me, now set me on edge. And then there’s the children thing, naturally. I’d always told her I didn’t want any of my own and she accepted it in the beginning. But that was before her friends started popping them out with alacrity, posting twelve-week scans and pictures of bleary-eyed newborns on Facebook with humdrum frequency. Our socialising changed – it was no longer nights in the pub but picnics in the park surrounded by screaming toddlers, or early-evening barbecues, the timing of everything defined by when babysitters could be relied upon to arrive and leave or when Isadora or Humphrey or Matilda could be put down for their naps.

Oh, and isn’t Lucy wonderful with kids? Look at how she plays with them! Forever kneeling down to meet their eyes; taking them by the hand; running after them in a game of tag, her floral dress breezing round her knees. She had six godchildren. But every time she went to Tiffany to buy a silver charm bracelet or engraved tankard for yet another christening, something within her hardened. She lost that yielding softness she once had.

I suppose it didn’t help that Ben and I were so close. Difficult for any woman to come into that situation and hope to get my undivided attention. But, as I often told her, that’s the way it had always been. Ben and I went way back. Best friends from school. So close we had, at one stage, been informally christened by his mother as ‘Starsky and Hutch’. Later, Ben’s wife Serena had coined a different phrase.

‘You’re always there, aren’t you, Martin?’ she had said. ‘Ben’s little shadow.’

For whatever reason, the moniker had stuck. Little shadow. Even Ben calls me it now. I’m in his phone under ‘LS’.

The real reason we weren’t staying at the house on the night of the party was that Ben hadn’t asked. Lucy was right: there were more than enough rooms to accommodate a small army of guests even on the night of his fortieth birthday. And, yes, I had been offended by this omission. I’d left it too late to book anywhere decent. Their new house was in Tipworth, a bucolic Cotswold village overburdened with twee shops selling novelty oven gloves and packets of fudge, but severely under-served by decent hotels. All the nice boutique places were fully booked when I tried, by other guests, most of whom, presumably, would have got their PAs to do it for them. Ben’s fortieth was going to be a grand affair. Le tout W11 in attendance.

In the end, the only place available was a Premier Inn just off the motorway roundabout. The room cost £59.99, which seemed absurd.

‘Are you sure?’ I had asked on the phone when the receptionist recited the price list.

‘Yeah. Breakfast not included. But there’s a Little Chef across the road.’

The glamour!

And now, here we were. Lucy upset in the bathroom. Kettle boiled. Me standing trouserless on scratchy carpet. As I unpacked my dress shirt and bow-tie, I didn’t explain why Ben hadn’t asked us to stay. It unsettled me to have to stare it in the face.

Although it would have taken us less than ten minutes to walk to the party, Lucy insisted on a taxi.

‘Shoes!’ she said, pointing down to a pair of bright red, sparkling, strappy heels.

‘Very nice,’ I lied. ‘Are they new?’

She flushed with pleasure.

‘Yes. I got them off eBay.’ She twirled her right ankle, the better to show off how truly garish they were. Like every conventional woman, Lucy likes to pretend she is unconventional by buying attention-seeking shoes. In all other respects, she was playing according to type: a long A-line dress in a stiff, dark green material with two thin straps, her shoulders covered by a pale red pashmina. She held a tiny evening bag in one hand. I knew, without it being opened, that it would contain a folded tissue, a lipstick worn down to the nub, a pen, a compact mirror and our hotel room key. She would always insist on carrying a hotel room key.

‘Have you left the key at reception?’ I asked, by way of a test.

She shook her head. ‘You know I never like to do that. What if they go in and steal something?’

‘You do realise they have a master key?’

‘Well,’ she said, climbing indecorously into the taxi. ‘Still.’

The cab driver turned back to look at us.

‘Tipworth Priory?’

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘How did you know?’

He chuckled. ‘The way you’re dressed sort of gives it away, mate. Not normally that much call for black tie around these parts.’

Ben and Serena Fitzmaurice were famous for their parties. It was a point of pride for them. This one was ostensibly Ben’s fortieth but was doubling up as a housewarming. They had bought the seventeenth-century Tipworth Priory a few months previously. It was their second home.

During the week, they lived in a white, stucco-fronted house in the expensive part of Notting Hill. At the weekends, or so they had told me, they needed ‘more space’ for the children.

‘We just want to get away,’ they had said, as they pored over glossy brochures from estate agents with three names and no ampersand. It baffled me as to quite what they were getting away from. Still, it wasn’t for me to try and fathom the desires of the super-rich. I had nodded and murmured sympathetically when they talked in this way and soon enough they’d stumbled across Tipworth Priory in a picturesque part of Oxfordshire that had fields and sheep and all the requisite trappings of the countryside, while also comprising cafes that served soya lattes and organic mackerel salads in light-filled converted chapels. An outpost of a Soho private members’ club had just opened up nearby, doing wonders for the local economy, if not the local inhabitants, who promptly complained to the reporters at the Tipworth Echo that they were being priced out of their own villages.

In fact, Ben and Serena had had their own run-in with the local press at the time contracts were exchanged, involving a kerfuffle over the eviction of a handful of elderly monks who still lived in the Priory. The Fitzmaurices confided that they felt it had all been terribly overblown and the monks became, in their retelling, a light-hearted dinner-party anecdote designed to highlight the amusing narrow-mindedness of benighted country folk.

(I read subsequently in the Echo that a new location was found for the monks in a nondescript Oxford suburb. They are now housed in a purpose-built block sandwiched between a multi-storey car park and one of those discount stores that sells value packs of pickled onion crisps and more plastic clothes pegs than anyone could reasonably need over the course of an average lifetime.)