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

‘I suppose it would have made even more sense for us to stay the night then. I mean, the Premier Inn has its charms, but …’ As soon as I spoke, I realised I sounded defensive.

Ben groaned. ‘I knew you’d be pissed off. I said as much to Serena.’

‘I’m not pissed off.’

‘You are, LS. I can tell. Listen, it’s a family thing. We’ve got all these aunts and uncles and in-laws. You know what it’s like.’

I walked up the aisle of the chapel, trailing my hand along the edge of the hymn-book rails. When I got to the altar, I noticed dust on one fingernail. You know what it’s like. One of his phrases.

‘No, Ben,’ I said, turning back to him, my voice reverberating off the vaulted ceiling. ‘No, I don’t. You seem to forget I have no family.’

In the failing light, I could no longer see his expression. His glass, empty now, hung lazily from his hand.

‘You’re it,’ I said, but too quietly for him to hear.

Notebook of Lucy Gilmour

WHAT WAS IT ABOUT HIM I LIKED?

When I first saw him he just stood apart. It was the way he was dressed. Martin always wore impeccable clothes. He was in well-tailored suits when everyone else at the newspaper was in jeans and loafers. Even when he tried to be casual, he couldn’t quite manage it. Corduroy and cashmere was about as relaxed as he got.

I remember seeing him in the staff canteen, sitting by himself, a copy of the Financial Times folded with precision into a rectangle, comfortably sized so that it could be held easily in one hand. I noticed his fingers: elegant, long, the nails freshly cut and clean. He was eating a salad from one of those clear plastic containers. I watched as he forked limp rocket leaves to his mouth and ate them in small, delicate bites.

He looked up occasionally, as if he wanted to be noticed and, at the same time, his demeanour suggested he didn’t care what anyone else thought. I admired this. I was twenty-two, just out of university, and I questioned everything about myself. I had no faith in my instincts. I needed constant affirmation just to prove I existed. I liked to lose myself in the company of others, hoping that if I found safety in a big enough group, no one would expect me to talk. The idea of sitting on my own in the middle of the canteen and not minding who saw me was completely alien. I would rather have walked naked down Kensington High Street.

Later, when I got to know him a bit, I realised Martin was the most original person I’d ever met. I asked him so much and yet, by the end of each conversation, I would have learned nothing new about him. He had no back-story. He didn’t talk about his family. Unlike most men, he didn’t particularly seem to want to talk about himself. The only person he mentioned with any regularity was his best friend, Ben, and he would refer to him in just that way: ‘my best friend Ben’, as if the label were part of his official title.

I found the mystery interesting. I had just come out of a two-year relationship with a boy I’d known from university and the whole thing had been suffocatingly intense. My ex wanted to share everything. He wanted to hold hands in the street. He wanted to kiss me in public. He wanted to tell me how he imagined us growing old together. Once, he had cried in the cinema at a film about an elderly woman with dementia whose husband struggles to care for her. I was embarrassed for him.

‘It’s just,’ he said afterwards, handkerchief moist, ‘it made me think of us and what would happen if …’

He never finished his sentence but I knew what he meant and although I took his hand, although I told myself how lovely this was and how lucky I was to be loved this way, part of me felt uneasy. An internal voice that said: what a fool he is to feel so deeply for you. You’re not worth it and soon he’ll find out and then where will you be?

Martin never sought to know me, not really. He was interested in my opinions and I think he enjoyed talking to me on an intellectual level, unwrapping the layers of my brain like a Christmas present. But otherwise, it was all surface – at least, to begin with. And this appealed to me. I liked being made to feel smart without having to commit to anything else. Martin took pleasure in the present tense of my company, without needing it to have a future or a past conjugation.

Do you know how rare that is? Very. I’ve never met anyone else with that capacity.

He wasn’t my type, physically. I’d always gone for stockier men with strong arms and big hands and shoulders that looked as if they could lift a car but then, look at where that had got me. I told myself it was time to try something different. Martin was slender, his chest almost concave. He was tall, with fine brown hair parted to one side in an old-fashioned way. He wore glasses and his face was long, the planes of it delicate and handsome. When he smiled, it managed to be both impish and vague. He had narrow hips and the cheekbones of a teenage model.

Later, I would discover Martin had an ability to change his appearance to fit whatever social setting he found himself in. It was never anything I could put my finger on. It was simply as if his surface changed colour to melt into the environment. A chameleon.

At the start, it was a friendship between work colleagues. We went for lunch together. Once, at Maggie Jones, we ordered two globe artichokes and the house white, which came in a huge bottle. The waitress marked it off with a pen to show how much we’d drunk. Martin kept filling my glass slightly more than he filled his.

‘You should do something different with your hair,’ he said, tearing off a crust of bread and popping it in his mouth.

It was the first time he had ever mentioned my physical appearance. I reddened under the scrutiny, immediately self-conscious.

‘Well!’ I tried to make light of it. ‘That’s very forward.’

‘Those velvet scrunchie things …’ Martin waved his hand as if ridding the room of a smell. ‘Why do you put it up all the time? Let it fall to your shoulders and frame your face.’

I was flattered that he had put such thought into it. That, by extension, it meant he had been studying my face. It was Martin’s form of a compliment, I realised, and I seized on it gratefully, immediately sliding the scrunchie from my ponytail and shaking my hair out, tucking it behind my ears.

He reached across the table, untucking it. A breadcrumb from his finger stuck to my cheek.

‘There,’ he said. ‘Much better.’

I didn’t like my hair down because it was neither straight nor curly. It was frizzy and never looked intentional. But under the warm glow of Martin’s approbation, I started seeing myself differently. At his desk, he had a postcard of a Lord Leighton painting propped up against a pile of books. Perhaps, I thought, he saw me as one of those pre-Raphaelite heroines whose hair (now that I brought it to mind) was wavy too.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘Pleasure.’

When I got home that evening, I studied myself in the mirror. My eyebrows were too thick. My cheeks too full. I tried sucking them in and squinted, attempting to make myself look thinner. I played with my hair. It fell on my shoulders and I wished it were longer and glossier and easier to manage. I had a small scar on the side of my nose from a bicycle accident when I was a child and I worried that it looked like a spot. I sighed. I put my hair back up in a scrunchie and, even though I wasn’t seeing anyone but was just going to spend the evening watching television, I dabbed some concealer on my scar. It made me feel better not to see it.

The next day, I put concealer on in exactly the same place. I left my hair down. I passed the mascara wand over my lashes. I never normally wore make-up in the office.

When Martin came in, he had headphones on. Not the in-ear ones that most people wore, but the old-fashioned kind that used to come with Walkmans. I tried to catch his eye but he didn’t notice me. At lunch, he left without asking me along. It was only in the afternoon, when I handed him a page proof of an interview he’d done with a young actress, that we spoke.

‘You look nice,’ he said.

I flushed.

‘Hair,’ I replied, stupidly.

He smiled. ‘A marked improvement.’

That day, we went for a drink after work. He ordered Guinness, I remember, which sat oddly with his slightly fey aestheticism. I thought of him like a languorous cat: elegant but distant. He had these tortoiseshell glasses with round rims that reminded me of a writer from a different era. He took them off and rubbed the bridge of his nose, leaving them folded by a soggy beer mat on the table between us.

When he got up to go to the loo, I picked up the glasses. I don’t know why but I tried them on. They sat tightly around my skull and I was surprised to notice they weren’t prescription lenses, just plain perspex.

Before Martin, my own personal appearance wasn’t something that ever bothered me, partly because my parents never cared that much. They were lovely people and I had a lovely upbringing. Lovely. I remember an American friend of mine once saying ‘lovely’ was such an English word – ‘Like you’re describing a picnic,’ she said.

But it was lovely. My older brother took up most of my parents’ time and pride. He was the brainy one, the sporty one, the popular one. I was happy to sit on the sidelines of his success. I’d always been the not-quite child. I got Bs in exams, not quite As. I didn’t quite get into Oxford so went to Durham instead. I wasn’t quite pretty, but I was pleasant-looking and I was taught that those kinds of things didn’t much matter. It was what was inside that counted. I made myself pliable and easy and nice to be around. I was helpful.

‘You see what needs doing before it has to be pointed out to you,’ my mother once told me as she heaved a roast chicken out of the oven. ‘You anticipate.’

That was my thing. Lucy: she looks after people. And it was true. All through my teens, I anticipated what others wanted from me and then I shaped myself accordingly. I was shy and quiet and never a threat. They liked me for it.

Except for Martin. Martin was a tougher nut to crack.

I used to do the tea round for my desk at the Bugle. I knew everyone’s orders: milk and two sugars, no milk but a slice of lemon, Earl Grey not English Breakfast. Martin never wanted one, no matter how many times I offered. Eventually, I plucked up the courage to ask why.

He pursed his lips. He had pale lips that always made his face look cold.

‘That stuff they serve in the canteen?’ He rolled his eyes. ‘Please. It’s hardly worthy of the name.’

‘I can get coffee if you’d rather.’