I grimace.
‘Not for you?’ asks Paul.
‘The funding was pulled,’ I explain. ‘The charity folded and with it my job.’
Both of them look as if I’ve just told them I have less than a month to live. I don’t tell them that while I enjoyed the job it never really felt like the dream job, and that still, with my thirtieth birthday on the horizon, I’ve yet to find my passion in life.
‘But you’ve something to fall back on? Something new lined up?’ asks Liv.
‘Just a bit of temp work.’
‘Lovely,’ she says, though her eyes are pooled with pity. ‘And you’ve a partner to shore you up for a bit?’
I shake my head.
‘But you’ve still got a place to live,’ Paul says rather than asks, as if he couldn’t possibly imagine a worldwhere an ex would be homeless – far too much reality for their cosy Saturday morning in Stockbridge.
I want to give them the full whammy: that my best friend and flatmate Jude, the person who introduced us, is about to move to America, and I can’t afford to take on the rent alone. That I’m surviving, not living. But I spare them the further awkwardness, allow them to keep their middle-class bubble intact.
‘I’ve got my flat in my parents’ house,’ I say, pointing to the top of Mum and Dad’s five-storey Georgian townhouse across the garden, where I’ve only recently moved back in.
‘Wow,’ says Liv, who clearly fantasises about Paul’s salary stretching to something similar.
‘Lucky me,’ I smile tersely, not mentioning that Mum and Dad have had to get rid of their lodger for me to return home just months shy of my thirtieth birthday.
‘Lucky you,’ says Liv, and she reaches out to rub my arm in a way that I’m sure is meant to be supportive but that comes across more as condolence. Her unspoken words being:who are you without a good job, a home of your own and a husband?
‘Well, we’d better get along. Good to see you,’ says Paul briskly when Blair begins to fuss, glad no doubt to have an excuse to get out of here.
‘Good to see you too,’ I call after them.
As they disappear out of sight, I muse on the fact that I don’t want Paul or what he has: his cookie-cutter relationship, his conventional career, his first child of the three he always wanted. It’s more that I’d like tohave something other than nothing – just one small passion, or someone – to call my own.
After they’ve gone, I sit for a while, drinking in the warmth of the morning, the April daffodils, and the townhouses of the crescent that surround the garden.
Almost nothing has changed since I was born here – neighbours have come and gone, law and finance firms having replaced the printers and publishers of days gone by, but the rhythm of the neighbourhood remains: during the week schoolchildren weave through office workers; at the weekend shoppers pass through on their way to the city centre or out to Stockbridge for the market, and always, regardless of the day, tourists stand on street corners, their eyes on maps or phones, trying to figure out how to find the Dean Village. Inevitably they’ve lost their way from Princes Street or from Edinburgh Castle perched high on the hill overlooking the city I love most in the world.
And then there’s my home, where I grew up, a townhouse that’s been part of our family for ever. As I leave the garden and cross the street, I see Elsa and Bill, both like grandparents to me, at their table in the basement window. In the upstairs living room, Mum is folding sheets, and on the ground floor, books are piled high against the arched windows of the family bookshop, which my family has owned in various incarnations for almost two hundred years, and where I’ve worked on and off for as long as I can remember.
‘Morning,’ I say, opening the door to the shop from the black-and-white tiled vestibule.
‘Dad?’ I call, when I fail to find him in the front section of the bookshop, piled with donations for the second-hand section. He isn’t in the back section either with its huge, partly obscured French windows overlooking the long, untidy garden below and the tall trees of the Dean Village beyond. Since returning home, I’ve been more aware than ever that Dad is struggling to keep on top of the place.
‘Office,’ he mumbles.
I find him at his desk in the narrow back room, almost hidden behind books and paperwork and old coffee mugs.
‘What’s up?’ I place my book on top of the filing cabinet, its drawers bulging open, and start clearing the cups.
‘Accounts,’ he mutters wearily.
From the look of his scruffy black hair, dark eye bags and five o’clock shadow, I wonder if he’s been up all night.
‘Any improvement on last month?’
He shakes his head, rubs a hand over his brow.
‘What’s this?’ I ask, picking up a sheet of paper that’s fallen to the floor.
