Giles! That was him. The bell-ringer! Jesus. He’s probably married with a zillion children by now.
Hugh and I clinked gin and tonics and I explained I had an hour before I’d arranged to meet an old friend from a long-distant part of my life. That made me sound both busy and sophisticated. Hugh asked if it was an old boyfriend and I told him he’d got it in one. He said he was still in touch with several of his exes; he was always pleased, he said, when they were able to make the “conversion” into friends, making me think of bottles that people turned into table lamps. I said that Nicky had been my first significant boyfriend, though if I never saw one or two of the others again, that would be too soon.
“So tell me their names,” I said. “The exes that you’re friends with.”
“Sure. Why, exactly?”
“I don’t know. It’s a new thing I’m trying. Saying the first thing that comes into my head. Cuttlefish. You see, it doesn’t always work! Fried aftershave.”
“Well. There’s Claudia.”
“Woo. Posh.”
“Margaret. Livia. Albertine.”
“Albertine!”
“She’s Belgian.”
“Christ. Go on.”
“Catherine. Emily. Petal.”
“Did you say Petal?”
“Her parents were hippies. In fact, I’m going to her wedding at the weekend.”
I couldn’t help but imagine her; Petal, the exquisite flower child with the porcelain skin drifting through the bluebells.
“Oh, and Francesca.”
“And you’re still mates with all of them?”
“To a greater or lesser degree, yes. Tell me yours now.”
My heart sank. The only name on the list in any way exotic was that of Matthias the drunken poet. The rest were as solidly everyday as they come. Nicky, Simon, Alex, Mike, Andrew and—shudder—Dean.
“Marcus, Oliver, Franklin, Hallam, Wells, Jamie, Didier.”
Hugh nodded—was it approvingly?
“I’m guessing Didier would have been French.”
“He still is!”
“Hallam’s a fairly unusual name.”
“Unusual guy. What can I say?”
Why had I done this? And where had Hallam, Franklin and effing Wells come from? I guess I’d been intimidated by Hugh’s list of posh birds that he was still chummy with. Was it too late to row back?
“I made all those names up. I’m sorry.”
“Really? They’re extremely inventive.”
“It’s sweet of you to say so. The best I can offer you is Matthias.”
There was a long pause while Hugh just looked at me with a quizzical expression on his face. Odd, the number of men I’d met lately who’d done that.
“Would you like to come?”
“Sorry?”
“To Petal’s wedding. The invitation says plus one. You could be my plus one. It’s in Oxfordshire. It should be rather fun.”
I entertained a vision of Hugh’s exes ranged around a wedding table, sipping champagne and gossiping. No one is saying anything to me because I have chocolate cake smeared all over my face.
“It’s lovely of you to ask, but I’m afraid I can’t.”
Hugh said, “Think about it. If your plans change, the offer’s still there.”
I thought about the last wedding I went to: Normotic Andrew’s sister’s. The freezing church in Cirencester; his ghoulish family; my mature response to the whole hideous day being to drink myself stupid. A terrible memory of a massively inappropriate snog with a random cousin; the shame of honking up in the bushes to laughter and catcalling from the car park; Andrew’s complete and absolute refusal to find any offense in my performance.
Something had put me in a funny mood. And I knew what it was. Or rather, who it was.
It would be weird to see him after all this time. A stupid part of me somehow hoped that, older and wiser, we’d fall together like the last fifteen years hadn’t happened. The same part that could hear him saying, “I’ve been a fool, Daisy.” The part that believed in fairy tales. The part—if this isn’t too many parts already—that was still waving a sundress from a hotel balcony in the Aegean.
It was a different part of me that wanted to punch him in his shiny new teeth.
I’m not unhappy with the way things went with Hugh. That he desired her was obvious to us all—his Fitbit numbers told the story even if the body language was necessarily subtle; they are work colleagues, after all. However, Daisy seemed oddly resistant to the young man’s charms. And in this perhaps we have made progress; just because she finds herself to be the object of attraction doesn’t—as has sometimes been the case in the past—automatically activate her feelings in the reverse direction. Or is it possible that she is acting “hard to get”? A first if true, this not being a quality Daisy is especially known for!
Who knows? Hugh may be a low-energy, slow-burn kind of fellow who could turn out to be the last man standing when everyone else has gone down in flames, metaphorically speaking.
Time will doubtless spill the beans.
The pair say their goodbyes, but after Hugh begins his trudge to the Leicester Square Tube, Daisy waits for him to clear the corner and then walks straight back into the pub. There, she joins Antoni—I hadn’t spotted him—who is nursing a drink the color of a Hawaiian sunset. He, good friend that he is, has already bought her a gin and tonic.
They clink.
“Thanks for coming,” she says.
“Mon plaisir,” he replies, inexplicably in French.
Antoni, I have established, is one of Daisy’s oldest friends, the pair having met at secondary school at the age of eleven. It doesn’t appear to be one of those deep friendships, the sort where intimate confidences are exchanged, possibly under the stars, on a sweet-scented lawn one hot summer evening, when views are aired about love, death and the meaning of L. Their bond is not like that, lacking the intensity, but it has somehow endured when other more powerful relationships have gone down the pan.
Long ago they pledged that when each finally marries, the other will be a “bridesmaid.”
Antoni is not this evening playing the part of Daisy’s husband. They have (correctly) decided that scenario would not be believable. Rather, it is what it is; Antoni is an old friend who will overlap with the incoming Nicky for twenty
