The People at Number 9

“No,” Sara sighed, “Neil wanted me and the kids to go without him, but I wasn’t up for a busman’s holiday. We just stayed here and I took them swimming and did the museums and stuff. Lost our deposit on the cottage, but…” she said, shrugging, “... not the end of the world.”

She had been less phlegmatic when Neil had told her, with days to go, that he couldn’t make it to Dorset after all. A mix-up over the holiday rota at work – not his fault, but if he wanted to send the right message, improve his chances of getting the big job, he’d have to lead from the front.

“Sounds like you had a lovely time,” she said, wistfully.

“Yeah. Great to catch up with old mates,” Gav agreed.

They turned the corner, passing the bus shelter where shiny Year Sevens waited for the 108 in over-sized uniforms, like lambs to the slaughter.

“Where was it you went again?”

She knew perfectly well. Tom and Rhiannon’s place in the Lake District. She’d had the full account – the walk up Helvellyn, the skinny-dipping, the toasted marshmallows. She had managed to disguise her envy; had smiled, nodded, agreed with Lou that they should definitely all get up there some time, the six of them and that Tom and Rhiannon sounded lovely.

“The Lakes,” Gav said with a shrug. “Weather was terrible.”

She could have kissed him.

“Neil still odds-on for promotion?” he asked, as they waited at the pedestrian crossing for the man to turn green.

“Looks like it,” she admitted, embarrassed. What, after all, could promotion mean to a man like Gavin? A man for whom success was measured in the raising of hairs on the back of a neck, the falling of scales from the eyes?

They shepherded the children across the road and quickly past the newsagent’s, ignoring their clamour for sweets.

“Smart guy, your husband,” Gav said.

Sara gave him a curious sideways glance.

“No, really, I admire him,” Gavin insisted, “he’s got integrity. Doggedness. Do I mean dogged?”

Sara shrugged.

“He commits to things – his work, his family, the community. I admire that…”

“So, are you a quitter?” Sara blurted.

“Because we left Spain, you mean?” Gavin frowned, after a pause.

Sara looked away, her cheeks hot. She always did this; overstepped the mark, said the wrong thing. A harassed-looking woman came out of her thirties semi, still tucking her shirt into her smart skirt. She waited, with barely disguised irritation, for their procession to pass so that she could reach her car and Sara gave her a meek smile of thanks.

“I didn’t mean that,” Sara said now, turning back to Gav. “Of course you’re not a quitter. Your commitment’s obvious. To Lou; to your work – my God, nobody could doubt your commitment to your work.”

“So you think I’m obsessed?”

“No! Good grief, but even if you were, it goes with the territory, doesn’t it? Artists are supposed to be driven. I mean, can you imagine,” she added, with a manic little laugh, “Picasso getting up in the morning and going, ‘Right, Françoise, shall I reinvent modern art today, or do you need a hand with the kids?’”

“I suppose…” he said, doubtfully, swivelling the buggy up the ramp and through the school gate.

“No, you’re fine. It’s us mere mortals who have to worry about work-life balance.”

“But you’re a writer,” Gavin shouted, above the din of the playground, and Sara winced, hoping no one heard.

“A copy-writer,” she corrected him, “day job comes first. Don’t know when I last got to do any of my own stuff. For all you think Neil’s such a family man, with this promotion in the offing, he’s around less and less. And when he is around, his head’s not around, if you know what I mean.”

“Oh, I get accused of that a lot.”

“Do you?” said Sara curiously. “I’d have thought with you both being creatives—hey, boys, don’t forget your bookbags…” but it was too late, her sons had disappeared into the mêlée.

“Not by Lou,” Gavin replied. “She’s got a sixth sense about that stuff. She gives me plenty of headspace. And I do her. No, it’s other people.”

“Oh,” said Sara, a little deflated. She couldn’t imagine who else would have dibs on Gavin’s headspace. Then again, there was still a lot about Gavin that mystified her. She could have gone on talking to him all day, but this was where they parted, he to deliver Zuley to her childminder, she to catch the 9.47 to Cannon Street.

“Well,” she said, briskly, “for what it’s worth, Neil really likes you too.”

Gavin gave her a grateful glance, and she saw that for all his biennales and his groupies and his five-star reviews, he was just as needy of reassurance and friendship as anyone else. The temptation to put out a hand and touch his skin was almost overwhelming.

“I see you’ve got her kids again,” Carol said, one teatime. She’d come over to see if Neil and Sara were interested in tickets for the new play at the Royal Court.

“I have, yes,” said Sara tartly, and then, in response to Carol’s meaningfully arched eyebrow, “it works really well. I have hers when she’s working. She hangs on to mine if I’m late back.”

“Which you almost never are…”

“I’m actually under the cosh quite a bit since I upped my hours,” said Sara, irritated by Carol’s sly dig. “She’s saved my bacon a few times.”

Carol twisted her mouth into an approximation of a smile and for a second Sara felt like Judas. Hadn’t Carol also saved her bacon over the years? The time Caleb was rushed to A&E with suspected meningitis? The day the guinea pig disappeared?

“Anyway, if you do want to come,” her friend was saying now, as she handed the leaflet to Sara, “can you let me know ASAP?”

Sara took this as a veiled reference to the last time they had gone to the theatre, when Sara’s prevarication had meant the only available tickets had been for the surtitled performance for the hard of hearing. Sara smiled, closed the front door after Carol, and put the leaflet straight in the recycling.

She was sorry they were drifting apart, but sometimes you just outgrew people. Friends like Lou and Gavin didn’t come along every day, and she felt such warmth towards them, such gratitude that they had come into her life and made it three-dimensional and vivid. She felt she had been sleepwalking until now, lulled by the conformity, the complacency of everyone around her. How could she go to Carol’s book group and discuss the latest Costa prize fodder now that Lou had introduced her to the magic realists of Latin America whose profound ideas wrapped up in hilarious flights of fantasy were like fairy tales for grown-ups? There was no doubt about it, Sara was learning a lot. It wasn’t a one-way street, though. Sometimes she surprised herself with her own perceptiveness. She had recently aired her pet theory that Georgia O’Keefe’s famously Freudian flower paintings were perhaps just flowers and not, as the art fraternity would have it, symbolic vaginas, only for Lou to confirm that this was, in fact, what the artist herself had always claimed.

The most rewarding aspect of their friendship, though, wasn’t the head stuff, but the heart stuff. After a surprisingly short time, Sara had found herself confessing things to Lou that she had never said to anyone else, not even Neil. Lou had set the tone that first afternoon, when she had cried about the trout farm, but since then, whether surrounded by childish clamour at teatime or listening to Dory Previn beside the dying embers of a late-night fire, they had shared some of the most intimate aspects of their lives. Sara didn’t even mean to say half of it – it just came tumbling out, her unhappy teenage promiscuity; her botched episiotomy and its impact on her and Neil’s sex life; her disappointing career and suspicion that Neil was secretly happy about it because he wanted a traditional wife. Lou was such a good listener. She had a way of asking just the right question, or upping the ante with a heartfelt confession of her own. She managed to make Sara feel both entirely normal in her anxieties and utterly exceptional in her talents. “But you’re so gorgeous, I can’t believe you had to shag a bunch of spotty oiks to prove it,” she would say, or “Creativity just oozes from you, Sara; the way you live, the way you raise your kids – I don’t think you realise how inspiring that is to someone like me.”

It was true that Lou had her shortcomings, but this only made her more interesting. Sara had heard her lose it with the children on a number of occasions. She blatantly favoured Dash over Arlo in a way that made Sara wince for the younger boy. Then there was the rather complex matter of Lou’s relationship with Gavin. There was a neediness in the way Lou related to her husband that didn’t seem quite healthy to Sara. Surely one shouldn’t be competing with one’s own children for the attention of their father? Yet Sara saw this happen often. Once, she had been in the kitchen chatting amiably with Gavin while she waited for Lou to get ready. The two women were going to see a film together, though if Lou didn’t get a move on they’d miss the beginning. Gav had been dandling little Zuley on his lap and marching toy farm animals across the table, interspersing adult conversation with a variety of silly moos and grunts that were making the three of them giggle. They were so absorbed that it was a moment or two before they noticed Lou had joined them. Wreathed in perfume and got up like an art-school vamp, she began clattering cupboard doors noisily in what looked, to Sara, like a flagrant bid for attention. And did Zuley, at nearly three years old, really need a bottle of milk thrust into her mouth, mid ‘‘Baaaa,” just so that Lou could pirouette girlishly in front of Gavin and solicit his opinion on her outfit?

Yet Sara wasn’t quite sure she was being objective. The air around Gav and Lou fairly crackled with sexual static and it made Sara envious. If the roles were reversed, would she care what Neil thought of the way she looked? If he were absorbed in a game with the boys – well, first of all she’d pinch herself to make sure she wasn’t seeing things, and then she’d leave while the going was good. No pirouetting, no eyelid-batting. All that was in the past. They’d been married fifteen years, for goodness’ sake. Surely, a certain amount of complacency was natural, desirable even?

Then again… ever since she’d witnessed it, she’d been unable to get that tango out of her mind. It had made her wonder whether all her life she had been doing sex wrong or, worse, with the wrong person. She watched, now, as Lou leaned in to kiss Gavin languidly on the lips. Zuley, eyes rolling with pleasure as she slugged back the milk, reached up a plump fist to grasp her mother’s forearm, but Lou prised the child’s fingers away and gave them a cheerful shake of admonishment.

“Mummy’s got to run,” she said, glancing at the sunburst clock on the kitchen wall. “You’re making Mummy late.”

They arrived five minutes into the film, just as the opening credits were starting. It was a gritty, low-budget number, which had got four stars in the Guardian. Sara took a little while to acclimatise, but half an hour in, she was starting to enjoy it; Lou, on the other hand, seemed to be growing restless. She kept shaking her head and laughing under her breath at things Sara didn’t think were meant to be funny. Finally, after what seemed to Sara a rather moving scene, Lou groaned loudly and rested her head on Sara’s shoulder.

“Do you want to leave?” Sara whispered anxiously. She couldn’t have been more mortified by Lou’s reaction if she had made the film herself. Lou nodded and, muttering apologies, they climbed over the laps of their fellow audience members before escaping to the bar.

“I had a feeling it’d be like that,” said Lou (Like what? wondered Sara). “I nearly said something when you suggested it, but I thought, give the guy a break.”

“Do you know the director?”