Page 83 of We All Live Here
The answer had come back an hour later.
Course we are, Bella. Sorry, just a mad week at work x
She had been briefly reassured, and again when he had texted her the following morning:Morning, Bellissima. Woke up thinking about you and the other night x
Since then, nothing.
Lila knows she should just call him, or even text saying she feels a little weird about his lack of communication. But something in her worries that that could come across as a bitextra, as the girls put it. She doesn’t want to seem clingy just because they slept together. She is a forty-two-year-old woman after all. Her thoughts spin and whirl in her head, vacillating between one course of action and another. She hasn’t dated for almost twenty years. She feels like an astronaut on a moon landing, navigating a completely different landscape. How does this whole thing work now, anyway? Normally she would discuss it with Eleanor, but she has an uncomfortable feeling that she knows what Eleanor will say, and it is not positive. She will tell Lila to put her cards on the table, to be direct, to say what she wants. Or she will tell Lila that he is a dickhead so walk away and stop thinking about him. But Eleanor doesn’t understand Gabriel fully; doesn’t understand what he has been through. She wasn’t there for that delicious intimate evening, has never seen how sweet he is to her, or experienced the level of their connection. So she has begun actively avoiding Eleanor’s calls, or texting her back saying,Sorry! All nuts here! Xxx, and feeling uncomfortable about that too.
Gabriel’s mother has just appeared, hurrying across the playground with her car keys in her hand. Lila gazes at her, briefly wondering if Gabriel has said anything about Lila to her. They must be close, mustn’t they? Is that where he gets his advice? The woman briefly meets Lila’s eye as she hurries past, holding Lennie’s hand. Lila smiles and the woman smiles back, but it’s in that vague way you smile when you don’t really know someone and feel obliged to return a gesture. Lila sighs, holds out her hand as Violet, who is in a crabby mood, thrusts her rucksack into it, then braces herself for another long and unsettled evening.
•••
Estella Esperanza hasslept with the handsome young doctor. But she is allowed only half an episode of pleasure, before it emerges that the doctor has actually been employed by Rodrigo to seduce her, so that he can divorce her for infidelity and keep the majority of his fortune (Lila is not entirely sure how divorce settlements work in this part of South America but it seems a little unfair). This time, Estella is not broken by a man’s betrayal. She has been through too much, these last two series, for that. Any woman who has survived marital betrayal, a near drowning (she fell out of a speedboat while following Rodrigo), the near-loss of one of her children, and an assassination attempt by a man dressed as a giant centipede is not likely to be shaken by the discovery that a man barely young enough to cultivate bum-fluff on his chin had ulterior motives. When she discovers from a sisterly nurse that he is not a doctor, but merely posing as one, she waits for him to meet her in the treatment cubicle, tells him sweetly that she has a problem with her ankle, waits for him to bend over to examine it, then kicks him, hard, in the face, while wearing a pair of vertiginous black and gold Yves Saint Laurent stilettos. While he is groaning on the floor, clutching his face, she slides nimbly off the treatment gurney, steps delicately over his prone body, and hissing at him,Next time, pendejo,be careful who you try to fool, walks elegantly past the curtain and out through the hospital lobby.
Lila stares at the credits until they fade, and then, a little wearily, she turns off her light and goes to sleep.
•••
The following morningEleanor appears on the doorstep, two minutes after Bill leaves for his workshop. Lila, who was on the way upstairs to her study with a mug of tea, startles as she opens the door.
“Why are you avoiding me?” Eleanor walks straight past her into the kitchen, shaking off her mackintosh.
“I’m not avoiding you.”
“You’ve missed four dog walks and you’re not taking my calls. You’re avoiding me.”
Lila trails after her into the kitchen and switches the kettle on. She puts her hands to her face. “Ugh. I did something stupid and I know you’re going to say it’s stupid, which makes me feel even more stupid than I did when I did the stupid thing.”
“What?”
“I can’t cope with you telling me off right now, El.”
“I didn’t come here to tell you off! I needed to talk to you.”
“Oh.” Lila’s hands drop from her face. “Why? What’s the matter?” She’s been so wrapped up in her own life that it hasn’t even occurred to her that her friend might need help. By unspoken agreement the conversation is halted until the second mug of tea is made, the door closed, and both are seated at the kitchen table with the tin of biscuits between them.
“I don’t know what I’m doing with my life.”
Lila waits. This could, after all, cover any number of potential categories.
Eleanor pulls a face. “The sex-party thing. I was at this event and I just didn’t feel as giddy as I do normally. It was about eleven at night and I was in this crowded room watching two people go at it and there was something about the whole vibe of it that made me feel really depressed.”
“And?”
“And I really wanted to be home having a mug of tea and chatting to someone about what was on the telly.”
“Really?”
“I don’t regret doing it. For the first few months it felt like an adventure, like I was making up for lost time. But it was this BDSM party inwest London and there was polythene taped to the walls and the music was awful and it was like all the fun disappeared and I just had…the ick. I looked at all these glazed eyes and hairy buttocks and I just felt a bit…urgh. It was like someone turning the overhead lights on at the end of the party and all these crazy cool people you’ve been dancing with all night are just sweaty idiots with their mascara halfway down their faces.”
Lila resists the urge to say that every party Eleanor has described made her picture exactly this vibe. “What did you do?”
“Made a French exit and got an Uber. Jamie and Nicoletta have called a couple of times since but I just…don’t fancy it anymore. It’s literally like a switch has been flicked. Don’t pull that face, Lila. Do you think I need HRT?”
“No. I think you need a mug of tea and a nice man to watch the telly with.”
Eleanor exhales. “Oh, thank God. I thought now you were having all your own sexy adventures you’d be telling me I’d lost the plot and just needed extra hormones or something.”
