Page 120 of Meet Me Under the Mistletoe
Nory was never more grateful for her friends, but being surrounded by two such loved-up couples was a bittersweet experience.
When they spilled outside—replete with fine French cuisine and house wine—the night air felt ice-sharp against their warmcheeks. But the Christmas lights glittering above their heads below the thick black sky, and the city pulsing with energy, the thrum of cars and the wild melody of a million voices, soothed the sting.
Andrew and Seb hailed a cab.
“Don’t you want to get more drinks?” asked Ameerah.
“This is the most excitement we’ve had in months,” said Andrew. “I think we’ll quit while we’re ahead.”
“In bed with a sleep tea by midnight is our idea of how to end a perfect evening,” Seb added. “Our daughter will be awake and ready to play at six thirty a.m., and there is nothing, and I mean nothing, worse than toys that light up and sing when you have a hangover.”
Ameerah grimaced. “Fair play.”
They waved Seb and Andrew off, Nory wrapping her arms around herself against the cold.
“What about you, Nory? Fancy another drink?”
“Not really. I’ve got to open the shop tomorrow—only two Sundays left till Christmas! But you two go on.”
Ameerah puffed out her cheeks. “To be honest, I’m trying to kid my body into thinking it’s still twenty, but it isn’t working. It’s taken me all this week to recover from last week. When did we get so old?”
Despite being bitterly cold, it was a clear and lovely night, and the three of them decided to walk back to Mayfair and soak up the atmosphere. Central London was never quiet, but it was never so alive as at Christmas. High above the shops and the offices, Christmas trees twinkled in the windows of studio flats and apartments.
When Nory was little, she had dreamed of a life in London, of living practically in the sky, like the roof scene inMary Poppins. Well, she had done it. And for the most part, it had lived up to expectation—though she was yet to meet a handsome singing chimney sweep named Bert. What she couldn’t have anticipated in her fantasies of escape was that, once she was ensconced in the big city, Hartmead would forever tug at her soul.
Thirty-seven
Sunday became Monday, and Monday became Tuesday. Nory’s days were busy, and her nights were long. Her mum texted, multiple times a day, with banal anecdotes or queries, which Nory knew was her way of being supportive and keeping an eye on her daughter without actually raising the subject that they both knew was on Nory’s mind.
She didn’t hear from Thomas, and she was grateful for it; he’d asked her to stay away from his friend and she hadn’t, and look what had happened. She half wanted to message Thomas to give her side of things, but what would be the point? He was always poised to think the worst of her and now she had given him a carte blanche.
“What does Thom say?” she asked her mum on Tuesday night’s phone call. “I’m guessing by now he knows that something went down.”
“Don’t you worry about your brother, you know he loves you,” said her mum diplomatically.
“Does he?”
Her mum blustered. “What kind of a question is that? Of course he loves you. You’re his sister, we’re a family. I do notwant to hear any more of this nonsense from you, young lady. Your brother would throw himself in front of a bus for you.”
“Only so that he could haunt me for eternity.”
Her mum tsked. “I give up.”
The conversation moved back to safer territory—who had been seen smooching who in the White Hart and how Aunty Jada was recovering after her disastrous hysterectomy and so forth—until Nory heard her dad come in.
“Is that Nory?” she heard him ask.
“Yes, love, I was just telling her about Jada’s hematoma.”
“Tell her Isaac looks like hell. Every time he came down last week, he looked worse.”
“Jake!” her mum hissed. But her dad was unrelenting.
“Those two want their heads banging together. You haven’t been on the phone to her this much since she first went up to that school up the hill. With all that’s going on in the world...”
Her dad was about to go into a rant. This happened sometimes; Nory would be on the phone with her mum, and her parents would suddenly begin a whole discussion about what was happening on the TV or in the news, and Nory would be left sitting on the phone, quietly waiting for her mum to remember she was still on the end of the line.
“Don’t belittle people’s feelings, Jake. You always do this. You compare every problem to world hunger, and you can’t do that! Just because a person isn’t experiencing a global tragedy doesn’t mean they aren’t suffering...”
