Page 78 of We All Live Here
“I’m sure. Not really my world. My dad had a book published once. But it was about Ancient Greek architecture. Quite different. Pretty dull, if I’m honest, though obviously the entire family had to buy a copy.”
“I make my children buy copies of mine with their pocket money.”
He laughs, and she starts to relax.
“Did you always want to write books?”
“I never intended to actually, unlike half the population. I wrote a jokey online article about my marriage while I was working in marketing and an agent approached me to expand it into a book. And then there was this bidding war and it went on to sell a few hundredthousand copies and sat in the Top Ten for a couple of months.” She tries to say this casually, as though she is not trying to impress him. As though she is clearly equal to his architectural prizes and designer chandelier.
“That’s incredibly impressive,” he says, obligingly. And she tries not to preen a little.
“So what’s the rest of your family like? Do you have brothers and sisters?”
“Two brothers. We’re all horribly competitive.” He grins at her. “My elder brother is a lawyer and the younger one is a doctor. We’re basically a middle-class cliché of a family.”
“And some mother’s absolute dream.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t go that far. You?”
“Just me. One mother, two fathers. I think I’d love a couple of siblings to share that particular burden.”
“Well, it’s nice for your girls. To have their grandparents around, I mean.”
“Do you still see your wife’s parents?”
His face closes. “It’s tricky. They took Victoria’s side when we split, and relations are a little strained. They do see Lennie, though. She does a couple of weeks with them in the summer.”
“I’m so sorry you’ve had to deal with that as well.”
“You’re very kind. It’s been…less than ideal.” He gets up and pours more wine, as if to change the conversation.
She would like to ask him more about this. She would like to ask him how Victoria died. Whether he has been out with anyone since. She wants to ask him approximately eight thousand other questions. But Lila has realized that she really is quite drunk. She gazes at her second glass, which seems, inexplicably, to be empty, and suspects Gabriel is some way behind her. She has to keep reminding herself to stop talking. She thinks she might be too emphatic when he says things. And sometimes she catches herself grinning goofily at him. She tells herself torelax. She is on a dinner date with Gabriel Mallory. Why shouldn’t she let go and enjoy herself a little?
She is not entirely sure what time the food comes. She is aware of him pulling out plates and cutlery and they sit at the marble table, which is uncomfortably cold against her bare arms. At some point he has put on some kind of Cuban folk music and dimmed the lights. They eat something with charred corn and meat skewers and she thinks she is so hungry by now that she could eat the cardboard containers it comes in. She listens to him talk, and the way the light bounces off his hair, and the soft, almost hesitant nature of his smile, and even though she has eaten and drunk, she cannot relax, because a question is thumping like a muffled drum beat at the back of her head. Her brain, though, skewed by the drink, keeps veering off in unexpected directions.
“Tulip!” she says abruptly.
He looks startled.
“Your table. It’s a Tulip table.”
“Yes,” he says, nodding. “Eero Saarinen. From a 1955 design.”
“I knew it!” She slaps the table slightly too enthusiastically and his hand shoots out to save one of the glasses.
Finally he clears away the food.He is like Bill, she thinks.He cannot leave stuff on the side. She may have said this aloud. She sits and watches, just holding the glass, letting the music and ambience wash over her. She feels, in this beautiful kitchen in her black silk dress, with this man, like a woman in a film. She feels like the best possible version of herself…
“So, shall we sit in the other room?” he says, when he has finished, offering her his hand. It is warm and strong and his fingers close around hers like they were meant to be there. “It’s a little more comfortable.”
•••
The living roomis smaller than she expected: it contains a large curved sofa made of a dark turquoise tweed and an enormous televisionscreen. There are no toys or clutter. Just a sideboard that appears to have no doors, a dome-shaped chair, and a long, low coffee-table made of some kind of concrete. Two swooping lights illuminate small spots around the room and a beautiful antique Persian rug covers a pale herringbone oak floor. A navy blanket that looks like cashmere is folded over one end of the sofa. The Cuban music has somehow manifested itself in this room too. She takes a seat on the sofa and he sits beside her.
“It doesn’t look like you even have a child,” she says, gazing around her. She makes sure she smiles admiringly when she says it, so that it doesn’t come across as a criticism.
“Ah. Yes. It’s my weak spot. I need to know there’s one space in the house that I can come to in the evenings and just relax. She has a playroom across the hall—if it makes you feel better, it looks like the aftermath of a particularly manic jumble sale in there.”
“I might have to look in later,” she says. “Just to make sure you’re not perfect.”
