Page 54 of The Fall-Out

I couldn’t think how to respond to this other than with overt snarkiness – Better a man who works in insurance than no man at all, surely? – but I was saved by a waitress bringing water in short-sided glasses so thin and clean they looked like they weren’t there at all, and a bowl of olives.

‘I’ll have the Bellmont Number Five, please,’ Zara requested, smiling.

‘Um… a Limerence for me.’

‘Good choice.’ Zara smiled again, as if she was enjoying some private joke and leaning over the table towards me, although we could hear each other perfectly well if we sat back in our chairs. ‘Anyway. How’ve you been?’

I took a sip of water, carefully weighing up my response to this seemingly innocent enquiry. I didn’t want to reveal how much the landscape of my life seemed to have shifted since Andy’s funeral, but at the same time I didn’t want to reveal just how mundane it had been before – and still was, outwardly.

‘You know. Same as usual. Pretty busy,’ I said guardedly.

‘Been seeing a lot of the girls?’

‘Not as much as usual,’ I admitted. ‘You know, we meet up regularly, but I missed last time because I wasn’t well, and I guess everyone else is pretty busy too.’

Tell me, I urged silently. Tell me you were there, and why, and what happened.

The waitress brought our drinks. Zara’s was purple, with crystals that might have been salt, sugar or something entirely different crusting the rim of the glass. Mine was pale orange, like overdiluted squash, with a brighter orange sphere of something resting atop the huge cube of ice in it.

She took a sip and sighed with pleasure. ‘Here, try this. It’s glorious.’

I hesitated before accepting her glass and tasting the drink – What could she have done, bribed them to poison it? If they had, she’d drop dead too – then passed mine over for her to taste as well. The exchange felt uncomfortably intimate as if we were the very best of friends who swapped sips of our drinks all the time.

Then Zara said, ‘I hope you don’t mind that I gatecrashed the last Girlfriends’ Club. I asked if I could go along, you know, for old times’ sake. And Kate agreed to have me. I didn’t realise you weren’t going to be there, or I’d have said something to you first. They all told me you wouldn’t mind, but I know how it must have looked. Anyway, I’m sorry.’

Her apology was clearly intended to disarm me, and I didn’t want to let it. Still, what could I say? If I’d known you were going to be there, I’d have turned up and puked all over you? Not really. And I certainly wasn’t going let her know how her unexpected presence that night had brought all my old insecurities to the surface. Naomi won’t mind – as if, once again, she was part of the inner circle and I was outside it, an irrelevance being talked about dismissively by the others.

‘It’s okay,’ I said.

Smiling, she went on, ‘I’d forgotten how much fun those evenings were. I’d forgotten, I suppose, what it feels like to have friends.’

‘You must have loads of friends,’ I protested involuntarily.

‘Not really. I’ve been moving around a lot, you see, and it makes it almost impossible to form proper connections with people. You meet someone you like, you go for a coffee or whatever, or you work together for a bit, and then you move on and you promise to stay in touch but you never do. There’s Gabrielle, who I used to share a flat with, but she’s married with kids now, same as you. And that makes you grow apart from people. You of all people must know that.’

I laughed. If she thought I was going to empathise with that, she was wrong. ‘Actually, me having the kids hasn’t made any difference. I see the girls just as much as I did before. They were amazing when the twins were little – they really rallied round. And now they’re older, I can leave them with Bridget sometimes, or get a babysitter. We have our monthly meetings, same as always.’

At least, they were the same as always until you showed up.

Zara sighed. ‘They were such good times. I think about those Wednesdays often. Remember when Rowan brought Clara along? She was only tiny and breastfeeding and the bar tried to kick us out because they had a no-under-18s policy.’

The memory made me smile in spite of myself. ‘And Kate demanded to see the manager so she could explain the Equality Act to him and give him a lecture about reputational risk.’

‘Except then the waiter realised he was going to get to look at Ro’s tits all night, and changed his mind,’ Zara finished, with a throaty laugh.

I took a swallow of water. My cocktail was almost finished and I could feel my defences slipping. I must not allow that to happen.

I didn’t join in Zara’s laughter and after a couple of seconds her face became serious again.

‘You know, I do regret how things turned out.’ She licked a few grains of purple salt off the rim of her glass, her tongue precise as a cat’s. ‘It was partly my own fault, I know. I have trust issues. And of course when you and Patch got together… well, that was hard for me. I never saw it coming.’

Even though you were shagging around for months, I thought.

But I hadn’t come here to have a confrontation with Zara or to score points in a competition that, by any reckoning, I’d already won. I’d come here to hear her out, try and establish what her intentions were, let her know I wasn’t going to be manipulated or walked over.

I said deliberately, ‘Zara, I’m genuinely sorry you were hurt. That was never my intention, and I would never have chosen to damage our friendship like that. But I’d have hoped we would all have moved on from it by now.’

Zara waved a hand as if to dismiss my apology, but our waiter misread her signal and hurried over. Against my will, I found myself ordering a second complicated, expensive cocktail.

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