‘Just wear that blue dress,’ Ant said. ‘You look great in that.’
‘Oh, OK,’ I said, grasping at this rare compliment as a lifeline in what was, after all, an unusual and destabilising situation. ‘OK, the blue one. Yes, that’ll be fine, won’t it? And what time?’
‘He said eight,’ Ant said.
‘Eight!’ I exclaimed. ‘Gosh, that’s late. Especially for Sarah.’
‘Some of us have to work,’ Ant said. ‘But they’ll be fine. They’ll be excited. And you can give them a snack before you go, can’t you?’
‘Can you come home first?’ I asked. I was imagining how excruciating it would be if I got there before Ant and had to wait for him to arrive. Alternatively, I was imagining sitting at home trying to work out if it was late enough to be sure he was already there. ‘So we can go together,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to go alone.’
‘It’s just down the road,’ Ant said. ‘It’s, like, a hundred yards.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘So come home first, and we can walk down together, OK?’
‘You!’ Ant said. Then, ‘Sure, whatever. I’ll come home first.’
It will give you some idea just how isolated and isolating my life had become if I tell you that I was so stressed and so utterly excited about the invitation that I couldn’t think of anything else all day.
Other than the restaurants we visited during our holiday trips, Ant and I hardly ever ate out, and as for dinner at someone’s house, that’s simple: it hadn’t happened since I’d met him. And I mean, really, not once.
I spent most of the day preening myself. I waxed my legs and plucked my eyebrows. I dyed my roots, ran an iron over my blue dress and polished my blue ankle boots. I tried on the outfit I’d envisaged – the blue dress with a grey cardigan and the boots – and then tried on a few other permutations as well. But in the end the best result, or the least ugly one, was definitely the blue dress Ant had suggested.
Finally, I changed back into my day-to-day clothes and walked down to meet the girls.
I passed Amy’s house on the way, and did my best to look inside. But the sunlit leaves of a tree were reflected in the window, and other than the vague outline of the Buddha, I couldn’t see a thing.
As I walked home with the girls, Ant phoned me to tell me the dinner was now at seven. Joe, apparently, thought he could get off work earlier and Amy, like myself, thought that eight was too late.
Ant arrived home just after six and I couldn’t help but wonder if he too was feeling nervous. He showered, shaved, and even trimmed his nose hair, I noticed, before putting on a clean shirt and a more relaxed, tan-coloured suit.
I dressed the girls prettily in Victorian-style velvet dresses and, looking like the Waltons on their way to Sunday Mass, we tripped off down the lane.
It was Amy who opened the front door, with Ben, once again, clinging to her legs. She was wearing a black jumpsuit with a subtle white polka-dot design and a black cashmere wrap-around cardigan. The result looked casual but somehow expensive.
‘Joe’s not in yet,’ she said. ‘But he should be here any minute.’ And exactly at the moment she said this, his truck pulled up behind us.
Joe climbed out and I realised that I’d never seen him before. Then again, perhaps I had, and I hadn’t noticed him. In his blue jeans and mustard builders’ boots, he was somehow a very everyday-looking sort of man. ‘Hi,’ he said, slamming the door to the pickup and crossing the gravel to join us. ‘Am I late?’
‘Not at all,’ I said.
‘Only just,’ Amy corrected, checking her watch. ‘Two minutes late, to be precise.’
‘She’s got an atomic watch, that one,’ he joked, holding out his hand. ‘I’m Joe.’
I introduced myself and then we followed Amy into the house.
‘Gosh!’ I said, looking around. I was just blown away by the decor. In fact, I was so surprised that Ant had described it as ‘normal’ that I glanced at him to see if it had changed since he’d last been here. But he didn’t look surprised, so I could only assume that he was impervious to how beautiful it was. Everything was white, that was the thing. I don’t think I have ever seen so much white and light and sparkle in a house.
The floors were bleached wooden boards with natural-colour vintage rugs strewn around. The white walls were dotted with plank-like shelves holding books and pastel-tinted pots with plants. Amy led us through to the lounge, and it was more of the same, but with stripped antique bits of unmatched furniture, which gave the whole thing a kind of natural hippy-chic look that I hadn’t really come across before. It was perhaps how I’d imagine Gwyneth Paltrow’s place might look, only refreshingly jumbled and relaxed.
As the girls headed off upstairs with Ben, I started gliding around the room inspecting various objects as they caught my eye. There was a weathered builder’s trestle with a sheepskin rug thrown across it, on which a cat was sleeping.
I walked over to stroke the cat and then crouched down to look more closely. ‘He looks just like Dandy. Isn’t this Dandy?’ I asked, addressing Ant.
‘God, I hope not,’ Ant said.
Amy laughed. ‘No, that’s Riley,’ she said. ‘Who’s Dandy?’
‘Dandy was our cat,’ Ant explained. ‘We lost him when we moved here. He did look a bit like yours, actually.’
‘No, this is definitely our cat,’ Amy said, crossing to tickle his chin. ‘You’re Riley, aren’t you?’ she said, and the cat did seem to react to his name, or at least to Amy, more than to me calling him Dandy.
I moved to look the cat in the eye. ‘He does look
