‘You go first,’ she said.
‘Sure? Okay, thanks.’
Evie watched Dan shuffle himself and the bedspread into the bathroom, and then resumed staring at the pink ceiling, trying very hard not to let any tears squeeze out.
Happy birthday, me, she thought. Thirty years old today. She had a lot to be thankful for, like how she’d definitely ticked a lot of the boxes you wanted to tick by your thirtieth. A wonderful family, yes. Great friends, yes. A career that she loved, yes.
No hint of a proper love life and about to be divorced, not so much. Friendship with Dan possibly ruined, also not so much.
In a parallel life, if she was honest, she’d have loved this marriage to have been planned and to have involved all their family and friends and been meant to last forever. Like her occasional fantasies over the years when she thought about their fallback pact.
But this wasn’t a parallel life, it was her actual life, and clearly the pact was never going to have played out like that.
Two
Then – 23rd December 2013
Evie
Evie’s mother pouted at herself in the hall mirror, applied another coat of glossy red Chanel lipstick, pouted again, and scrunched her fingers into her long blonde hair for a bit more volumising.
‘You look gorgeous, Mum.’ Evie smiled at her. ‘Very glamorous.’ Her mother was a lotmore glamorous than all Evie’s friends’ mums, and not just because she was a good ten years younger than most of them. Evie was pretty sure that she was the kind of woman who’d still be glamorous when she was in her seventies and eighties.
Her mum turned round and smiled back at her. ‘You’regorgeous. I amsoproud of myself having given birth to you. Look at your beautiful eyebrows. Honestly,whodoesn’t ever need to pluck? Only my perfect daughter. And your amazing hair. And your beautiful brown eyes. I can’t actually believe you’re twenty-two tomorrow. It’s only five minutes since you were a baby.’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘Evie. I do like that top, and it looks great with your jeans, and you have the perfect figure for what you’re wearing, but I’m thinking if you just undid another button, or maybe even two more, you’d look a lot moreavailable.’
‘Honestly.’ Evie took a step backwards and batted her mum’s hands away from the buttons on her blouse. ‘Available is a grim word.’
‘Youareavailable, though. And I’m not sure the boys realise that.’
‘Mum.Honestly.’ Evie couldn’t say that it didn’t matterif no-one realised straight off that she was available, because what she wanted was a serious relationship, with someone very sensible, who she could eventually get married to and have children with and stay with forever. That might hurt her mum’s feelings, given that it was the exact opposite of all her relationships.
‘I just worry about you, that’s all. You’re turning twenty-two, not sixty-two. You should be havingfun.’
It was lovely that her mother cared so much about her, but Evie could really do without the constant questioning – in person, and by text when she was away in Birmingham at uni – about whether she wassureshe was happy and whether she thought she might have more fun if she ‘let her hair down’ a bit more, specifically with regard to boys and big nights out. It wasn’t like she didn’t enjoy a little drink; she just didn’t like spending the morning after with her head over a toilet bowl. And it wasn’t like she didn’t like boys, just not too many of them and not ones who’d make her cry after they’d slept together once. ‘Maybe you’ll meet someone nice this evening.’
‘Honestly,’ Evie said again, trying really hard not to sigh loudly and roll her eyes.
‘Maybe just one button?’ Her mum was looking at her top again. ‘You have such gorgeous skin and such a fab cleavage. You should be showing that off. Especially in the winter when everyone else is so pale.’ Oh, God. Cleavage. Any minute the conversation would be veering in the direction of actual sex chat. Evie adored her mother and she loved spending time with her, but, if she was honest, she could do without all the openness. She was pretty sure that there were zero sex discussions between her best friend Sasha and her mother, for example. ‘You know your boobs probably won’t be this amazing forever. They lose a bit of bounce over time,’ her mum added.
‘Fine. One button.’ Anything to stop the conversation. She could do it up again in a minute.
Her mum reached forward and tugged Evie’s blouse down away from her shoulder and adjusted her camisole top. ‘Perfect,’ she said. ‘Now, while we’re on the subject…’ No, no, no. This was where her mum was going to start on some advice about sex.
‘We should go,’ Evie said, taking her coat off the hook next to the front door and putting it on. ‘We’re going to be late.’
‘Better to make an entrance than to be boringly on time,’ her mum said as they stepped out of the front door of their cottage.
They walked arm in arm down the little lane from their house to the green in the middle of their village, Melting Bishop, and then round the edge of the green – Evie’s mum didn’t want to ruin her heels on the grass – and up to Sasha’s parents’ wide Cotswold stone house in the middle of the opposite side, arriving at the same time as another family from Melting and a couple who Evie thought she recognised as friends of Sasha’s older sister Lucie.
Sasha’s mother, Fiona – wearing a knee-length, velvet dress, nude court shoes and pale-pink lipstick, and holding a full champagne glass – opened the door. ‘Welcome, everyone. Happy Christmas.’
Two hours later, Evie’s dancing companion gave her one last twirl, let go of her, boogied himself a couple of steps backwards, and started some impressive arm-popping, his eyes locked on hers the whole time. Evie pushed her tinsel headband out of her eyes, smiled at him and decided to stick with some bog-standard swaying and hand clapping. There was a time and a place for pulling serious moves on the dance floor, and that was not here, at her best friend’s parents’ annual Christmas party, with her mother only a few feet away.
Because whatever moves Evie produced, there was every chance her mother would join in and go one better, like she had last year. She’d dropped into the splits, pulled a hamstring, fallen forwards in agony, landed hard on her arm and broken her wrist, and Evie had had to cart her off to A&E in Cheltenham.
The arm popper was very good-looking. Light-brown skin, similar to Evie’s, a lot of dark curly hair, and nice eyes. He was still smiling at her. Evie clapped herself round in a little circle, firstly to give her face a break from smiling back at him, and secondly to check whether her mum had noticed that it looked like she was on the brink of pulling.
If Evie publicly snogged a good-looking stranger this evening, she’d hopefully get her mum off her back for at least the next month or two. Evie would have to make sure there were witnesses, so that her mum heard about it on the village grapevine if she didn’t see it with her own eyes. She could kiss him just outside as they were leaving. She should probably start chatting to him now.
