Clara was what her grandmother used to call old-fashioned pretty. Dark bobbed hair, big eyes and bow-shaped lips, but short at just over five foot and with a tiny waist but curvy elsewhere. People told her she was cute, which made her feel angry, as though she was a kewpie doll, so she strived to annul this assumption by being business-like in her life. She had a finance degree. One of the youngest and few female bank managers at her bank, and very good with money, Clara never did anything that was a real risk. She always bought tickets early to events, she had insurance for everything – including a very good life insurance policy that Giles would have benefitted from if she popped her clogs early – and she kept receipts for everything she ever bought, just in case she had to return it. She wished she could return Giles and Judy.
More like Piles and Judas, she thought, as she put her Learn to Knit books into the bin bag and tied it off at the top and threw her River Cottage Cookbook that Giles had given her into the actual bin.
How could her best friend and boyfriend have betrayed her? She wiped away the tears that hadn’t seemed to stop falling since the dinner four weeks ago. Why hadn’t she seen the signs? No real intimacy. No real connection. No real love. But then again, Giles had not been into sex even before they moved in with each other, and Clara was tired from her job at the bank, so they were like housemates: polite and respectful, but with no passion. But Giles was stable, a sensible accountant; he would be reliable for life. And with her best friend, who was now dancing on his pole. God, Clara hated her.
Clara had always tried to be what she thought was a responsible, sensible adult. The business degree, the savings account, the accountant boyfriend who didn’t drink or swear, the most sensible man she had ever met, so far removed from her own father – she was so sure she had chosen well.
Judy was her best friend because Judy had said so – and Clara agreed because she didn’t have time for friends. Judy had sort of pushed her way into Clara’s life a few years ago when she came for a loan at the bank for a mobile pole dancing service. Clara declined the opportunity for the bank to invest in Judy’s Pole Dancer on the Move bus, but Judy still pursued the friendship.
Giles had always said Judy was a flake and she was pretentious. He’d also said she was a slut, and Clara had told him off for that because having sex didn’t make you a slut. He’d always made fun of Judy’s pole dancing career and told Clara off when she loaned Judy money as a friend, not as a bank manager. Not that it was ever paid back, as Judy was always in some sort of financial and emotional crisis. It seemed to be her default position. But mostly Clara had felt sorry for Judy. She was always wanting something that other people had. A dress, a necklace, a handbag, a boyfriend.
For three months Judy had been telling Clara to leave Giles after she confided that she would have liked more connection, more conversation and now she knew why. Judas was getting Giles’s love and Clara had the privilege of cooking him dinner.
And that was ultimately how she found out.
She’d found her Tupperware container – the one she had filled with cottage pie and given Giles for his ‘weekend away with the lads’ – at Judy’s house. It wasn’t any old Tupperware container. It had her name underneath it, written in marker, with the orange lid and a tiny burn mark on the corner of it from once being too close to the hotplate. Judy had never cooked a cottage pie in her life; her hapless on and off boyfriend, Petey, did everything for her.
Clara had found the evidence in Judy’s kitchen while looking for a bowl for nuts, and she had wanted to put Giles’s nuts in the container there and then.
‘Why is this here?’ she’d asked Giles and Judy and Petey at their monthly Food of the World Dinner. The dinners had started as a joke when Clara had received a sushi making kit from Giles and she made so much sushi that she had to invite Judy and whatever boyfriend she had at the time to eat it. The dinner turned into a thing and now they were eating their way around the world. Except that night was Italian, which Judy always resorted to when she was lazy or pressed for time, which was often. Clara knew the lasagne was a store-bought one, shoved into a glass lasagne dish that she knew was hers and Judy hadn’t yet returned. Judy seemed to have a habit of doing that. Clara had waved the Tupperware container at the audience eating their soggy dinner.
‘You said you took this to Cornwall,’ Clara had said to Giles.
‘I did,’ Giles had answered but she saw the red flush rise up his neck that was his tell when they played Scrabble and he had a good word.
‘But you didn’t because it’s here,’ she’d said calmly. ‘You were on the lads’ weekend last month, and Petey, where were you on the weekend of the 5th?’ She was starting to feel like Hercule Poirot but in a less smug way and more of a ‘my boyfriend is cheating’ way.
Petey had looked worried. ‘I was at a conference in Guilford.’ He had turned to Judy. ‘You said you couldn’t come because you had to help Clara with cleaning out her mum’s house. You told me how messy the house was when I came back, and that Clara’s mum must have been off her rocker from the medication.’
Clara had gasped at this comment because while Lillian, her mother, was off her
