“Put it all on the table before you make the leap. Both of you. I know you both like to think there’s nothing left between you two to discuss but I know there are things that you haven’t told each other. Bob, for the eighteenth time, I am on a call. I’ll fuck you later, now naff off.”
It was an uncommonly gloomy October Wednesday morning, one that started far too early when Miranda told her Google Assistant to go to hell. Instead, it repeated back to her: Calling Mel. Unlike rational people, however, she went with it. “Sorry, darling,” she explained. “I kept asking it to tell me what time Waitrose was closing today and it never got it right. But now that I have you on, tell me all about the planning. Has Al seen his sister yet? Are you wearing that navy dress or have you bought that Marchesa you sent me a link to? We are all still getting a link to watch, aren’t we?”
Alex grunted in protest. He rolled over on his back to stretch one long arm above the headboard. “Sounds like Ran,” he yawned. “Tell her to fuck off.”
“That’s not very nice,” I chided, wedging the phone between my shoulder and neck and planting a peck on his forehead.
“Tell him I heard that,” Miranda commanded. “And you’re right, it isn’t very nice. Also, tell him to get his sad little arse out of bed and make you a coffee. That’s what I do with Bob, and he usually obliges.”
Four weeks before, in a fit of childish pique, adolescent horniness, and adult desperation, Miranda had reached out to her ex-fiance to ask if he’d consider taking a COVID test and coming over to fuck her in a few days if he got the all clear. I suppose I hadn’t really thought about how the coronavirus was affecting my single friends — honestly, I hadn’t really thought too much about anyone who wasn’t Alex and me over the past couple of months. I’d had the shifting wedding plans, and the attendant hassle of sorting out accommodation for Fenn when she touched down in LA. I’d engaged in some tense negotiations with Julian on this topic, most of which terminated with one of us calling the other ungrateful in an unduly loud voice. In the end, we settled on a truce — she’d stay with him for the couple of weeks, and then move to a furnished apartment in Santa Monica for two months. It would give her enough space to work in while she visited, and we would never have to travel to Julian’s place to see her. And quite simply, as gorgeous as Julian’s place is, and no matter how very much he wants her with him, he isn’t keen on having her clutter his minimalism with canvases and pots of paint and bits of charcoal that roll under chairs and get ground into pristine cream throw rugs.
But this isn’t about Fenn, it’s about Miranda, who is just as perfectly capable as Fenn at making poor decisions about the men she chooses to let in her bed. Before she decamped to Dorset, Sasha was becoming increasingly convinced that Bob was trying to wriggle his way back into Miranda’s affections, as well as her purse. I’d heard her mention it twice when we were in Sussex. First in passing to Alex in the kitchen the night before the wedding, and then after the Great Poship Incident had passed, and Miranda had excused herself for a sulky nap upstairs. (She continues to pretend she wasn’t furious that she was the only one of us not called out by name: “Tom Gregory gets a mention but not me? I am grateful, but I do wonder.”)
By then, the rest of us had decimated the Domino’s and were all indiscreetly belching semi-toxic pepperoni fumes. Charlie had hidden the remote down his jumper so we were stuck watching Tonga annihilate the USA at rugby. The storm had kicked up again, lashing huge licks of rain against leaded windows that rattled in their ancient casements. Will and I had built a serviceable fire to combat the chill and there was a distinct pong of wet wool and old dog suffusing the room. Everyone but Will was either hungover or still a little drunk. In short, it was an almost consummately English night.
Against my better judgment and at Will’s insistence, I’d stuffed the last two bottles of Bollinger Sasha had swiped from Julian into a battered silver ice bucket and brought them into the library with five flutes. “Bit of ‘poo is just the treat for a black eye,” Will assured Alex and thrust a glass into his hand. While Al peered into his flute with a touch of dubiousness, Sasha and I didn’t need nearly as much convincing.
“For the thirtieth time today, bottoms up,” Sasha joked as we clinked glasses with Will. “Awfully nice of Jules to donate these to our fund.”
Will sank half his glass in one great gulp. “Decent chap,” he mused. Alex grunted, pointing to the half-melted bag of peas he still clutched in a tea towel to his eye socket. “All right, maybe you have to squint to see it sometimes,” Will conceded.
To my right, Sasha squirmed on a red velvet hassock, unable to find a position she found comfortable, before giving up and perching herself on the arm of the wingback I’d turfed Will out of when we sent him to the kitchen. “Do any of you think,” she ventured, swiping her finger along the back of my hand to remove a smudge of soot from the grate I’d been digging around in. She lifted it to the light bouncing off the fire to inspect the transferred mark on her own skin. “Do any of you think I’d be bonkers to think Bob might be trying to get back in Miranda’s life?”
Alex groaned and flipped onto his back. “Oh dear God, why did you have to mention his name? He’s like fucking Beetlejuice. Say it twice more and he’ll appear.”
“Ran blew me off for dinner the other night, said an old friend from Roedean was in town and she was meeting her for a drink at the bar at the Langham,” Sasha continued while Will paced back and forth in front of the fire, cracking his knuckles. Having seen what he could do just blocking Alex’s attempt to batter-ram Julian, I didn’t fancy the weedy Bob’s chances if Will got a chance to lay a hand on him.
“Complete bollocks, of course,” she ploughed on, eyeing Will as he practically wore a trough in the floorboards. Behind him the fire frizzed and popped, consuming what was left of the kindling. “You know what a terrible liar she is, can barely keep the details straight. When she got the gender of her drinking companion messed up, I decided to invite myself along. Not that she knew about it.”
“And?” Charlie had given up again on the rugby; not only was it rubbish, he proclaimed, this news was far more interesting.
“I sat in the lobby — brought along a copy of the Telegraph to fit in a bit more, hid behind it. I knew she’d be late, so I’d had a bellboy bring me some nuts to nosh on while I waited. Hadn’t even been there 10 minutes when who should strut through the door but dear old Bob Trelawney, looking as seedy and vile as ever. Nearly choked on a walnut. Didn’t wait to see if Miranda would show up. Cow.”
It is slightly important here to explain the general lack of bonhomie extended to Mr. Robert Trelawney. I mean, obviously there is a reason we all saw Miranda struggle to tear off her six carat emerald engagement ring — bought with her own money — and throw it at Bob’s head after an otherwise splendid meal of chicken paprikash and spaetzle Sasha had made for us in her Sloane Square flat. Back then, Sash lived only streets away from Minty and Alex, a blessing for Min, who had just given birth to Lucy and needed a bit of tending to by someone not her mother-in-law during while Alex was still grinding out long days at Goldmans. Jules and I were in town to bury his mother’s father, who’d finally passed after a long struggle with liver cancer. I’d had to take Jules’ tomboy sister Annabelle shopping at Harvey Nicks earlier in the day to get something suitable for the service — she owned precisely one dress, bright purple scattered with giant lilac polka dots. Appropriate for every tedious East Suffolk Women’s Institute talk her mother Jocasta dragged her to, but probably not for a funeral at Chelsea Old Church.
I’d met Bob at Al’s wedding the year before. He’d not made a huge impression on me — compared to Alex, he seemed an odd choice for Miranda. Nearing 40, Bob’s defining physical feature was his utter commitment to greyness: grey at the temples, grey in his suit, pinky-grey in his complexion. Though next to Miranda’s (probably inaccurately measured) five feet, he seemed on the tall side, even Jules’ unremarkable 5’10” put him at a height advantage over Bob. What was remarkable about Bob was not his age (a decade older than the rest of us) nor his devotion to indulging Miranda’s whims (entry-level requirement for riding Miranda St. George), nor even his near-encyclopedic knowledge of Cabaret Voltaire’s back catalogue (important to Ran). Alex got to the bottom of it, well before I even met Bob.
“It’s like Uncle B and Uriah Heep spawned a boring monster,” he’d told Jules and me a few nights before our wedding, some 18 months before Alex’s own. “Ever so ‘umble and ready to grab every last penny some poor woman isn’t keeping her eye on.”
I hadn’t been particularly interested in hearing anything about Miranda at the time, to be honest. By Sasha’s account, Miranda continued to slander me to anyone who’d listen, painting a portrait of me that was too familiar, and only somewhat incorrect: awkward, overemotional, inconsistent, unsuited for marriage, and entirely too hung up on Alex for a woman about to wed his best friend. (That last bit was in retrospect completely true.)
For Jules, some upstart grabbing at another person’s family stash was a personal affront. “What’s his family like? Is it just a matter of… temporary embarrassment until some uncle pops it and his boat comes in?”
Up in the lofty heights of my childhood treehouse, Al was sounding off about the man Miranda was now “parading around as her boyfriend, ” as he put it. “Pfffffffft, he’s skint,” Alex exhaled as he ground out the dying embers of yet another Silk Cut in the makeshift ashtray I’d fashioned from a jam jar top. “Takes one to know one.”
We were all insufficiently drunk after an evening en famille with the Cranford clan at the Beverly Wilshire. Jocasta Cranford had efficiently and brutally policed alcohol intake amongst the “children,” so that anyone under the age of 30 had had their wine swiped after appetizers of steak tartare and Crab Louis. “It’s a terrible look, Amanda,” she’d warned me. “Too aging, and in this sun you can’t be too careful.”
“Melissa,” I’d reminded her, but was immediately blown off in my correction. It didn’t help that my mother concurred about the dehydrating effects of booze, one of the few things she and Julian’s mum ever agreed upon. Rachel was beside herself in indignation and walked out in disgust, announcing she was going to get trashed at home back in Burbank, only to return sheepishly 10 minutes later when she realized she didn’t have cab fare to get there.
As I said, I was not interested in Miranda. But I was interested in Miranda making foolish decisions. “What do you mean by that?” I asked Alex, tipping the cigarette butt and ashes into the jam jar for him.
Alex fiddled with the plastic lighter he’d picked up on a trip to the beach the day before, azure blue emblazoned with a blonde in a bikini on one side and “Santa Monica” in a loopy white script on the other. “Hm? Oh, just that I know his type. Not a pot to piss in back in a big old house somewhere in the country, bit of a pedigree. 2:2 at Oxbridge, that sort. Looking for some rich girl to leech off of, just like Uncle B did when he found Aunt Delia at the Chelsea Flower Show.”
“Fantastic place to pick up girls,” Julian agreed, then rapidly switched course when I shot him a dark look over my mug of red wine. “So I am told, Mel. Not from my own experience.”
“Yes, well, nearly the same with this Bob.” Alex’s voice dripped venom. “I was right about the 2:2. English at Jesus.”
“Cambridge?” Jules pressed. I’d rarely seen him quite so interested in anyone’s love life but his own. And Alex’s, when that intersected with mine. But the supposedly undeserved transfer of money is a topic that continues to grab his attention, whether it’s undocumented immigrants getting emergency Medicaid or me receiving my monthly spousal support.
Al shook his head and flicked the sparkwheel repeatedly, trying to get the lighter to ignite. “Oxford. Managed to worm his way through Fleet Street courtesy of some distant cousin. Now he’s a hack at the Indy. Ran said he’d been run out of his last job for fucking some sub-editor’s daughter, which she thought was hilarious. Sounds like poor form for me if you’re trying to stay employed.”
I’ve mentioned before that Miranda’s a writer herself. Apart from her father, journalism and publishing were the family profession — fairly respectable and sufficiently louche in equal measures. Various St. George relations had convinced her that she’d do well in the business side of things, and secured her a plum trainee role at Penguin. Not that she stayed very long at it, though. It wasn’t the poor pay as an editorial assistant at Penguin that had ruffled her feathers — she had quite enough of her own money. Nor was she put off by cantankerous, crimson-cheeked, jowly executive editors who barked orders and napped most afternoons; after all, her Uncle Geoffrey was one of them, and her Aunt Bernie another, so the type was quite familiar. Rather she was bored. Bored with the emails and the meetings and the drinks after work with pleasant and determined young women named Emily who’d gone to Durham and intended to rise to the top of the heap.
Bored was a condition intolerable to Miranda. I’ve often thought she and Jenn share some mitochondrial DNA, the same restless chug-chug-chug of busy-ness and slight disorder that hovers about them both like Pigpen’s cloud of dust. But Jenn is terrific at channelling her swirl of energy into pinpoint focus, of sinking deep her fangs and claws into whatever her newest project or person or idée fixe might be. “Being bored is for boring people,” Jenn, aged 12, had told me as she shimmied up the trunk of the tree that would lift my treehouse into its branches later that year. “I don’t plan on being boring.”
Miranda upended Jenn’s pronouncement — far from boring, but often bored, and twitchy with restlessness. Sometimes I felt I could sense her soul bristling like the back of a hissing cat, spiky and perhaps for show. Jumpy and moving, moving, moving, from fad to passion to lover. She’d never been faithful to Alex, for one — not that she’d ever promised him that.
“One rule for me,” Al had explained to me during our brief springtime affair, “and one rule for she. I’m to be a good boy, make myself available when she feels like it. Who cares about what Alex wants? Except you, sweetest.”
From my balcony, the lunchtime crowds streamed into the White Bear for a quick pint and a plate of scampi and chips. Sharing a smoke in the middle of the day was fairly innocuous, something two mates might do without colossal neon signs pointing to us, screaming: THEY JUST HAD SEX. But we were getting reckless as the weeks were beginning to push into a month, and regularly rushed to each other’s flats if there was even a sliver of schedule to share.
It wasn’t always the sex that enticed me to throw down my pencil as I marked up my notes in the library and sprint up St. Michael’s Hill and Hampton Road to meet him by my front door, half-obscured in the brickwork portico. More than anything, it was the space to simply be together, alone and ourselves. I won’t lie, though: I did enjoy the sex very, very much — not the mindfuckery and control of Josh, nor the deferential wonder for my body Julian still had back then. It was funny and awkward, arms and legs jutting out and getting in the way, with plenty of weird and rude noises and so, so much laughter. Nothing complicated or dark, nothing to make me feel a goddess or a slave. I was a young human in possession of a body, a body that wanted to be with his and feel nice.
“You don’t have to do what she wants all the time, you know.” I crumbled part of one of the currant scones Minty had left on the counter in my hand and tossed it on the balcony floor for the starling peeping in the far corner. “She’s not really your girlfriend, is she?”
Alex didn’t reply, just bounced his knee up and down repeatedly and gnawed on a hangnail. He was wearing the heather blue pullover I’d bought for him from Marks earlier that week — I’d noticed he didn’t have a jumper that wasn’t riddled with holes, and £30 wouldn’t break the bank for me like it might for him.
But I was getting annoyed by the sneaking around, the cloak and dagger-ness of it all. After a hamfisted shot at an apology (he was just as bad at them then as now), Julian found every excuse not to be near me. Alex and Miranda were on one of their regular lulls after a fantastic firework of an argument when she demanded he borrow Jamie’s Land Rover and drive her to Lincoln for her mother’s 50th birthday. She didn’t take it very well when he called her Lady Muck and suggested she take a coach like the heathens do. If there’s nothing holding us back, I asked, why can’t we step out into the light?
I knew, of course, that they weren’t really broken up, as much as I knew that once she told him to come back, he’d go. With Miranda, he knew his place, and even if it was miserable, it was one he knew. There were no promises with me, just the ticking bomb of my August departure. I’d be back in America, along with his heart, stuffed in my suitcase, wedged in with my jeans and underwear and the way too expensive party dress Julian bought me so we could attend a charity ball in London. I understand now the impulse to stay put, even when the circumstances curdle your soul.
Mere coincidence — truly — that when Minty ratted us out to Miranda, Ran had been thinking about summoning him back anyway. “One terrible fuck with that wretched Canadian who lived down the hallway was enough,” she explained to me years later. “Zander? Zen? I can hardly remember anything except his bony fingers poking at my bits after he’d proclaimed he could make even an ice queen like me come again and again. I nearly reported him to the Advertising Standards Authority for that lie.” And back Alex trotted, the dutiful boy, to hide again beneath her skirts.
Six weeks later, it was over between them for good (bar that one kiss she forced on him the other year). Two weeks after exams were over, she was moving her vintage hifi equipment, kettlebells and Chippendale sideboard into her Uncle Geoffrey’s pied-a-terre in Greek Street, right next to the Pillars of Hercules pub and above a knife shop. “A perfect location for me,” she’d sighed as we walked past it together during one of my pre-divorce visits. “A decent pub to get ratted in with weapons nearby.” The Pillars, long a bastion of quick London wits of a male and literary bent, attracted plenty of losers and wannabes and wasted talents in addition to a “tart little pip of a woman,” as Tom Gregory had described Miranda in the gushing tones common to her most masochistic exes.
One such man, who managed to package all three in a distressingly bland package, was Robert Trelawney, late of Polzeath. Alex was right — there was an old house there, only slightly less derelict and quite a lot younger than Balcraigie, and unlike Alex’s pile the bathrooms were (according to Ran) generally free from spots of moss growing in the grout. After Jesus, Bob had finagled a job up in Manchester at the Sunday Sport, dreaming up Weekly World News-level journalism about Lord Lucan being spotted behind the bar at a boozer in Tyneside, or breathless reporting about what may be the UK’s longest Cheesy Wotsit, found by “18-year-old stunna Hannah,” who just happened to sport triple-H knockers pushed nearly up to her chin. A mere stepping stone, of course: Bob was itching to get to London, where opportunities, both professional and romantic, were potentially more lucrative.
Julian was right to ask if there had been a rich uncle whose death couldn’t come fast enough for Bob. There had been a distant relative who’d popped it, yes, but the bequest had been connections, not any folding money. Summoned south to his (third cousin, twice removed) Wilfred’s funeral in Liskeard, some well-meaning Trelawney had insisted he meet the other journalist in the family, Wilfred’s niece Saskia. Now, even I knew who Saskia Burne-Wootten was by the time I met Bob. I still read her Saturday Snark column unfailingly in the Guardian — no one skewers clueless media luvvies and the self-absorbed rich and vaguely-titled quite like Saskia, possibly because she is one of them now (though hardly clueless). I even have a gratin dish from the lifestyle/cookware line she had going for a while there, when she had a Wednesday style column at the Telegraph.
Perhaps under the influence of grief or sherry, Saskia agreed to liberate Bob from his bondage (and writing about bondage) in the North, and find him some job to be useful in down in the Big Smoke. By the time Miranda met him in 2010, he’d bounced from respectable (the Times) to questionable (the Daily Mail), from the satirical (Private Eye) to the highly specific (Choir & Organ). The path he slipped along had been greased amply by Saskia, who used him to great comic effect as the pseudonymous “Bert” in her columns as her perennial Plus One. Bert was her perfect foil — full to bursting with class pretensions but no money to speak of, he clawed at the outer edges of the smart journalistic set Saskia was near the center of. Bert never quite got it right, the notes he rung were always a halftone flat or sharp, and he happily let his cousin send him up because being “Bert” at least got him through the door of hosts who wanted to hear themselves written about in the Times or for whatever publication she was then pounding out prose.
At parties and drinks and soirées were eligible women, of course, and even if Bob was frequently off-key and demonstrably grey, he was fantastic at making a woman feeling both desirable and in control of every interaction she had with him. He felt safe and modern and old-fashioned all at once — deferential to women, but not for their fragile femininity, rather for (as he insisted) their better grasp of human nature, wit and general competence at being alive. I’d experienced it myself at Alex’s wedding: over pre-dinner cocktails, we’d struck up a conversation on the topic of the upcoming US election, and he’d deferred to my every opinion about how Mitt Romney was poised to bring about the death of the promise of a progressive America. (Now of course I would happily fuck Bob Trelawney myself if it meant we could go back in time to 2016 and elect Romney instead of Trump during the Republican primaries.) A master of eye contact and the encouraging nod, Bob made me feel like I had missed a trick not pushing for a career as a talking head for MSNBC, or at least starting my own political podcast. (Julian pooh-poohed the last of these when I floated up that particular balloon.)
But when Ran met him at the Pillars, he was in between jobs and getting desperate. Like Alex, his family’s great hope was for him to marry well, as Cousin Saskia had pulled off the year before to the fantastically named Peregrine “Peaches” Beaulieu Burne-Wootten, to bar the door permanently to every lupine invader. But with each week that passed without work, and Saskia temporarily rusticating in Peaches’ family home in Yorkshire on maternity leave, Bob’s stock as “Bert” had fallen precipitously as a party guest. Fewer parties meant fewer matrimonial marks — he’d been doing well with the aforementioned sub-editor’s daughter, until her dear papa found them in flagrante on top of the family dining room table. Did I mention she’d just celebrated her 18th birthday? It was all too embarrassing given Bob was nearly old enough to be her father, and precipitated his sack from the Telegraph. (Let’s gloss over the fact that Alex’s own father was hardly younger than Bob himself when he seduced Cora.)
Miranda used the Pillars as her occasional living room when she locked herself out of her flat and had to wait for Amanda to tear herself away from Big Brother to arrive with the key. But Amanda was nowhere to be found that evening — as it turned out, she’d strongarmed Alex into taking her to Le Gavroche for dinner, then demanded they spend the night at the Connaught. (I know this only because Alex still laughs about Amanda’s temerity, though I don’t find the story to be particularly flattering to either of them. Nor do I enjoy hearing how “she more than sang for her supper” as he put it — I refuse to learn what that entailed.)
“When Bob walked in the Pillars, I was already in full rant,” Miranda proclaimed in the video I’ve seen from their engagement party, raising her glass to a preening Bob beside her. “Absolutely livid with Man for abandoning me in my hour of need — I’d a fresh Bresse Gauloise chicken in my bag and needed somewhere to stash it and myself for the evening. Vic was behind the bar that night, and was kind enough to keep the bird in a bag of ice for me, and he was also kind enough to introduce me to Bob. Who himself was then kind enough to let both the chicken and me stay the night at his flat around the corner in Frith Street. Neighbors, and then friends and then –” Bob caught her hand in his and brought it to his lips; the assembled guests cooed their delight.
I’ll do the Cliffs Notes version of Miranda’s speech, which stretched on for nearly 20 minutes, touching on how satisfying and varied their sex life was (her parents cringed repeatedly, which only egged her on); their shared love of Einstürzende Neubauten; Bob’s unwavering support for her career as a travel writer, which often took her away from him for weeks at a time. “And when I come home from Geneva or Jakarta or Jo’burg, there’s a bottle of white in the bucket and as much or little love as I need. He knows. Bob always knows what I need, and how much of it.”
Even though I still detested Miranda, I choked up when she brought her monologue to a close.
“We were visiting Daddy and Mum, his idea to go home to Lincoln. On Sunday morning, he wasn’t anywhere to be found. Not in the kitchen, not in the back garden having a coffee with Mum nor talking Hegel with Daddy in the music room. When he strolled through the garden gate later that morning, he looked so, so serious. I was terrified I’d done something to hurt him — he barely said a word, asked where Daddy was and stalked in the house. Mum told me not to worry, she said, ‘He looks like a man with a big idea. Let it brew.’
“So I did. I didn’t say a thing. That must be shocking to all of you.” (The guests laughed gently, all but Alex, whose derisory snort I’d recognize anywhere. My guess was confirmed by the fleeting scowl Ran screwed her face into.) “And over Sunday dinner, he let me know he’d been praying in the cathedral that morning. How strange, you know someone for two years and you never realize he’s the type who prays. He was looking for a sign that he deserved me, and at that moment a jackdaw fluttered down the nave to rest on the pulpit. As many of you know, he’s called me his ‘Little Raven’ — then ‘Ray’ — nearly since we met.”
“Because you’re dark and brilliant and outspoken, Ray, just like a raven,” Bob put in, gazing up at his fiancee with the same sort of soppy, wide-eyed devotion I’d only seen displayed in Hallmark Christmas movies starring former Disney child stars. As tooth-snappingly sweet as I knew it to be, I wished Julian would look at me that way just once — just to know what it would be like to be placed above him, not below.
Back onscreen, the bride-to-be hiccuped once before forging ahead. “It’s a silly pet name, but I’ve grown to love it. Nobody tells a raven what to do, even a little one. A little raven, like a jackdaw. And then he knew. He knew. Just like he always knows.” Miranda clutched at the front of her dress and tucked her forehead into her arm — it was an oddly moving moment for a woman not much given to sentimentality.
I suppose many of the Terrible Ten were in the marrying mood by then — I’d married Julian, Minty and Alex were already drawing up seating charts for their own reception in June of that year, and Charlie was getting very serious with Terry, even if they couldn’t legally marry yet. And nearly everyone around Miranda fell in love a little with Bob. What wasn’t to like about a man who reined in only the worst of Ran’s impulses, who gave her room when she asked — and even when she didn’t?
Bob set about making things right with Miranda’s friends, winning them over one by one. With Sasha, that meant an introduction to Saskia, who plugged Sasha’s new event planning business regularly in her columns. Bob revealed a keen interest in dingy comedy clubs and backroom casinos, both secret passions of Jamie’s. Charlie’s love of all things Doctor Who, not shared by Terry, was shared by Bob, with whom he had tedious chats about whether The Deadly Assassin or The Talons of Weng-Chiang was the better story in the 14th season. (I know. I was there.) While Bob’s permanently empty pockets meant no extravagant gifts for Amanda, he knew his way with a pencil and paper, and crafted for her flattering and unaffected sketches which she’s left hanging on the walls of her home. And Minty he plied with his grandmother’s secret recipe for featherlight suet dumplings.
Will? Well, what a pair, what a pair. Wouldn’t know it to look at them. Will, good-natured and broad, red-cheeked and blustery, like a young John Bull. Bob, the quiet man, well-mannered and well-kempt, and well aware of whose coattails he was riding on his way out of his shabby-genteel circumstances. Bob was the older brother Will had mentioned he’d wanted growing up — his father was (like Julian’s) of the Always-Away and Never-Around persuasion, and had been raised as the solitary male bloom in a garden of three sisters, an aunt and a domineering mother. (Explains a lot about his devotion to the imperious Miranda.) Bob had lived in the world, had had his heart stamped on more frequently than Will had had hot dinners, and Will needed a wingman to help navigate the straits of modern love (or casual sex, at least) in London. And Bob slotted himself in perfectly to the role of elder brother, guiding Will through the sluices of modern dating. If Charlie was a bit miffed at first to have Bob in and out of the flat he shared with Will — Bob did have a terrible habit of helping himself to whatever was in his host’s fridge, saw it in action more than once — he got over it when Bob presented him with a DVD of the entire oeuvre of Jon Pertwee as the Third Doctor he’d ripped off a pirate torrent site.
Perhaps it was that Alex’s own experience as a member of the shabby gentility that made him more sensitive than most to bullshit artists like Robert Sefton Trelawney. And Bob stank of the cow pasture, according to Al. Al’s first meeting with Bob didn’t go as Miranda had planned.
“Of course she wasn’t there when I arrived. Let’s be honest, it’s Ran, there was bound to be a bit of a cock up,” he told Julian and me after the three of us had decamped from the treehouse to greater comfort in the massive colonial Julian and I had just set up home in. As naughty as it seemed to drink and smoke amongst the detritus of my childhood — a poster of the Spice Girls still clung to the wall where I’d pushed it in the studs with my chubby sixth-grade fingers — our new house had the benefit of wine that cost more than $10 a bottle and no parents who occasionally yelled up at us from the lawn below if we wanted a snack. Even though it was the middle of December and after 10pm, we’d swapped our street clothes for swimsuits and were floating around in the pool on some rather silly pool floats I’d spotted in Harper’s Bazaar and had to have. Alex and I settled on the giant pink flamingos, while Julian commandeered the inflatable in the shape of a hundred dollar bill. If it had not been 2010, we might have been doing it for the ‘Gram.
Julian paddled closer to me, taking care not to let the arm of the sweater he’d pulled on drag in the water. “To be fair, it’s also you, so it was bound to be a bit of a cock up,” he teased. I tugged Julian’s float close enough that I could grab his hand. The three of us drifted in silence, the only sound the occasional putt of a car travelling down Madison Avenue. I’d four days to go until I married my very best friend, the man I loved with every pulse that tripped in my body, whose hand gently caressed my own as we barely slid along the water’s surface. And four days until I closed down any route I had away from him, towards the man that I loved even more.
Alex broke the stillness. “Have you had the feeling — either of you — the sensation of walking in a room and feeling that something’s not right here? Like your hair stands on end, or your skin prickles.”
“Like how it feels in your attic,” I replied without thinking how it might sting him.
Julian blew a soft raspberry at me. “Pfffffft, Mel. The only ghosts up there are the mummified bits of cake Fenn brings up there to eat and forgets about.”
“No, she’s right.” Alex sounded far too serious for a young man currently splayed spread eagle on his stomach, sporting bright orange trunks on a giant pink pool float. “Precisely like it feels in the attic.”
“You two are too ooky-spooky gothic for my tastes. But fine, yes, I do know that feeling.” Julian hated to be left out of a moment, and for all I knew was making up his familiarity with the uncanny.
“That’s how I felt when Bob let me in Ran’s flat. Like someone’d walked over my grave. Nasty. Beyond the fact that I couldn’t believe Ran had let someone besides Man have a key to get in the place when she wasn’t about. Two years we were together when she had that flat in Hotwells and she never let me have one, and this… whoever he is gets one after four weeks?” Alex fumed.
“Settle down, Carr, maybe he’s got a magic cock or something that opens the door,” Jules laughed, and scooped a small splash of water with his free hand towards Al.
“He’s a cock, all right,” Alex sulked, returning the splash but missing Julian completely. “But I don’t know how magic he is. I waited 20 minutes with that wanker for Miranda to show up and I could tell immediately what his game is. Shoes are always a giveaway — his were literally down at the heel, but expensive. Someone’d gifted them to him at some point, I assume, and he’d managed to keep them presentable. Brand new shirt — I could see the creases in it from where it had been folded very recently. I saw the Thomas Pink packaging in the bedroom when I went to use the loo.”
“Miranda, then,” Julian shot back. “That’s what she always got you.”
“Exactly. And his trousers practically shone from years of use — again, expensive at some point. He has taste, clearly, but he can’t afford it. As I said, takes one to know one.” Alex paddled away from where Jules and I still clasped hands and gently hoisted himself onto the stairs leading from the water to the concrete lip of the pool. “He’s after her money,” he called out. “Trust me.”
Love is some powerful stuff: it blows a blinding fog of dust in our eyes, makes it hard to scry what the world’s about at times. It doesn’t matter if that dust is fairy sparkles or just plain filth, the effect is the same — the awful truth is often obscured to the one who needs to see most clearly. What Miranda could not, would not, see was how Bob was making himself more than indispensable to a life that now ran as smooth the freshly-waxed floor in the new Marylebone flat they shared. Sure, Bob still had a job — he’d landed a gig at the Independent writing blurbs about books after a word from Uncle Geoffrey in some poor editor’s ear. But primarily he toiled as Miranda’s majordomo, selecting her flights and booking the hotels she’d planned to stay in, collecting her dry cleaning and keeping fresh flowers in the flat at all times, even when she was away on the off chance she might return early. With blistering efficiency, he scheduled her gynecologist appointments (IUD for Miranda, at his suggestion), shopped her spec ideas for articles around magazines across Europe and Asia, and managed which of her friends could see her, and when.
And her accounts. He kept her accounts.
As I said, I didn’t meet Bob until he’d been with Miranda for a couple of years, after their engagement and after he’d planted fully the Trelawney flag chez St. George. By then, Bob had been absorbed into the remaining fabric of the Terrible Ten, as much a presence if not more than I had been in the clutch of friends if only through greater proximity. Jules and I were deep in the weeds of trying to conceive and keeping Josh’s nagging publisher at bay to pay much attention to what was happening with Ran. Even Alex, who’d kept a skeptical eye on Bob before his wedding, soon after found himself understandably distracted by Minty’s miscarriage and his weekend scheming with three colleagues to strike out on their own with a brand new fund.
Bad things happen when no one’s paying attention, particularly when the person suffering is a clever girl who doesn’t want others to spot her pain. I should know better than most. And Miranda, as I’ve mentioned, is easily the most clever of all the OMAMAs. (Sasha has recently lobbied to have us renamed the MAMAS; Miranda is considering the proposal.) She’d noticed early that Bob never had his wallet, or that when they went out to eat it was always at the Stockpot for a plate of stringy meat and dreary gravy if he offered to foot the bill. This being pre-streaming-everything days, he borrowed DVDs from the Charing Cross Library for free entertainment chez Trelawney in Frith Street — always some film Miranda had heard of, and should have watched, but never had. Bob turned her into a lover of Louis Malle (“I bet you looked like Zazie when you were a mite, Ray”) and Black Narcissus and anything with Merle Oberon.
“Miranda is thoroughly Bohemian these days because of Bob,” Sasha mentioned to me at that party where Alex began to lay his snares for Minty, a bit of fortune-hunting of his own. With a languid arc above her taut bun of an updo, she drew my attention to what was quite obviously original Regency ceiling plasterwork, centered with a too fussy (and much later) ceiling medallion. “Though you can hardly tell it in this place.”
Notably, Bob was absent from an event at which he would be welcomed by nearly all present, and at which he’d be fed and watered copiously and extravagantly. Will waved it off as “family nonsense,” something that required Bob to be in Nice and Fréjus for two weeks.
“Seems a bit odd, don’t you think?” Julian asked me after Will had moved on to decimating one of the cheese plates. “Two weeks on the Côte d’Azur for some ‘family’ gathering? His people can’t rub more than a couple of pennies together and suddenly they’ve enough to spend a fortnight down there.”
“Don’t be so suspicious, Jules. Maybe there’s a house they own there, or Saskia’s putting them all up. You’re listening to Alex too much, and what have you always told me to tell you when you’re taking advice from Alex?”
Julian barked out a stiff laugh. “To get a lobotomy. You’re right, darling.” He slipped his arm around my thin shoulders and bent down to drop a kiss on my cheek. “Please do eat something. Don’t pay attention to what Mum said earlier about you looking plump. She’s just a bit jealous that you’re my number one now. My forever girl.”
No one else thought Bob’s absence was particularly jarring, and Miranda was not a person whose domestic felicity was something I cared about, so I gave it little thought at the party, or in the days afterwards. The next I heard of Bob and Miranda was a scrap of gossip from Will much later in the year: had I heard of the palaver with the Lotus?
I had not, and to be honest, at first I wasn’t particularly listening closely to Will. His phone call was an unexpected and quite pleasant surprise on a wholly unpleasant day. Jules was newly back in the States after six months in the UK, and it seemed to be one thing after another that he wasn’t pleased to find had transpired in his absence, mainly due to Rachel’s haphazard caretaking of the house. “Cats I can manage,” she’d told me when I returned home to find a living room full of discarded and moldering bikinis and beach novels, a broken bed in the master bedroom (“sorry — you know how I am”), but a fat and happy marmalade cat who missed his Auntie Rach once she decamped back to my parents’ house.
Right before Will had called, Julian had stormed out of the house with Carlos, our sometime property manager, headed towards Anawalt Hardware to select a new sprinkler system. Somehow, it was my fault that the setup that had passed muster during inspection hardly more than a year before was now kaput. So when I picked up the phone, I barely even registered it was Will — I was distracted with trying to come up with a plausible reason why it was not my fault the house was, as Jules said, “now a fucking white elephant after your sister treated it as her own whorehouse, population: one whore.”
“Well, Bob’s heart is in the right place, but I have to say, he rather fucked up. Charlie was visiting his mum, she lives just outside of Oxford now while Chaz’s sister Georgie finishes her third year. So Chaz drives into town to pick up Georgie and take her to lunch out at the Trout. Bloody bastard’s a much better brother than me, on top of being better at everything else.”
I chided him, as I twitched the front curtains to look for the return of Jules’ Mercedes. Nothing. “Oh, Will, don’t be mean to yourself.”
“I am who I am, Mel, love me or leave me. Just glad you seem to fall on the former part of that divide. Anyhoo, Chaz and Georgie are there at the Trout — Georgie’s precisely like her brother, by the way, practically perfect in every way, and even more so for doing better at her A-levels than Chaz. Tried it on with her once last year, she thought it a terrific joke and said, ‘Good one, Will, haha.’ Pretended it was a bit of a laugh, only way to save face. Gorgeous girl, Georgie Fawcett, far too bright for me.
“Good God, where was I? Oh yes, Bob. So as Georgie and Chaz are sharing a sticky toffee pudding, he looks out the window and who pulls up in a brand new Lotus Evora?”
I knew the Evora — Jules kept one in London alongside his Mercedes in a secure car park near the flat in Bloomsbury he’d transferred to me as an investment, and to do up as I wished during my stay. It had been delivered the week I arrived for what was supposed to be a five month stay that I cut short when it became clear to me that Julian’s attention was otherwise directed. He’d clapped his hands like a small boy getting a much-wanted Christmas present when an obsequious delivery driver who reeked of Brut handed over the keys. “What’s the point in having all this dosh if I can’t treat us once in a while?” he’d beamed as he opened the passenger door for me to step inside its lush interior. Once the cologne dissipated, it didn’t smell cheap in there.
“Miranda gave that to him?” Miranda is famously incapable of driving — she’s failed her test a grand total of twenty-four times now, which has to be some sort of record. I also knew she was utterly besotted with her boyfriend, and at more than two years into a relationship she’d be likely to gift him more than a stack of new shirts or a Smeg kettle for the kitchen in that beautiful Regency-era flat in Montagu Square. An iPhone, maybe, or a Tusting briefcase — but nothing too too, like a car, because even a man who was conscious of the economic chasm between himself and his beloved girlfriend didn’t want to be made to feel, well, beholden. Rather anachronistic, but it’s the rare man I’ve found, even of my generation of spoilt and overgrown children, who doesn’t chafe a little knowing the woman in his life could buy and sell him as she pleased, if she pleased.
“I thought she might have bought it for him to drive her about, which seems reasonable. But I says to him, Charlie, I mean, what the bloody hell were they doing in Wolvercote in January in a sports car? Well, says Chaz, there was a ‘they’ all right in that car, but no Miranda.”
I dropped the green velvet curtain I’d been clutching as I stood sentinel for an incoming and likely steaming mad Julian. “No.”
Will took a big gulp of something and smacked his lips. “Oh yes. Bob walks around to the passenger side and helps some very, very young blonde out. Georgie recognized her right away, some indie folkie singer even younger than she is, not even out of her teens, would you believe. Never heard of her but supposedly she’s well enough known.” (When he repeated the name to me, it didn’t ring a bell either, and it’s slipped through the fissures of my recollection.) “Chaz said they looked very cozy.
“Georgie’s squealing about how exciting it is to have someone like this chit walking in the pub, but Chaz is running through plausible scenarios for, well, all of it. The car, the girl, the snog he’d seen Bob give her in the car park. Can’t come up with a single one. But it’s Charlie, so of course he has to say something. So while Georgie is in the loo, in comes Bob to the dining room for a bit of recon. Spots Chaz right away and turns around on his heel, apparently, but Charlie calls out to him. Nothing he can do, nope, cornered. Almost feel sorry for him.”
“Will!” I gasped. “How could you?”
“Sorry, Mel. I know how you and Jules feel about faithfulness, but it can be tough on men sometimes. Self-control is rough, you know, when some gorgeous thing like that singer’s throwing herself at you. Don’t doubt your man knows the feeling, he’s just better than most at controlling himself, quite admirable.” (On that point, as I have since learned, Will was staggeringly incorrect.)
“But you know Chaz,” Will blustered on. Still no Mercedes appeared in my line of vision. “Takes Bob to one side and says, don’t know what you’re playing at, old man, but you’re best off ending it. Bob seemed quite contrite, supposedly, teared up, said he was just feeling a bit old. He’d been in Oxford that morning to interview this girl for the Indy and she’d been quite aggressive, very flirty. Not an excuse, of course. Her idea to go to the Trout, said it was her local, no one gives her any gaff there about her comings and goings. Chaz can see Georgie coming out of the loo so he wraps it up with Bob, promises him he won’t breathe a word of it but if Bob wants to keep this up, he can fuck himself.”
By now I’d pulled over one of the gold brocade slipper chairs and was messing with the slightly drooping pelmet above the curtains — another repair needed. “And yet here you are telling me, Will Prater.” There seemed to be little chance of Julian bursting through the door at this rate — more likely Carlos was deep in conversation with Jules about all the things that needed repair at the house, and all the tens of thousands of dollars the new kitchen I’d hinted at might cost, or redecorating the house with an eye towards mid-century modernism.
Will snickered, a little chuff of a laugh. “Not much Chaz keeps from me except his love life. But I mention it to you because he and I could do with a bit of advice. From a woman. A woman who isn’t likely to ring Ran up and blab.”
“Don’t tell her,” I said briskly. Even though Miranda still barely permitted me to step in the wake of her farts, I couldn’t see the point in maiming her with this information. “It’s Bob’s story to explain, not Charlie’s, and definitely not yours, Will.”
As Will blabbed on about the many, many superior qualities of Georgie Fawcett, the distinctive growl of Julian’s car roared down Madison and I lost my footing on the chair, bringing the pelmet, the curtains and me down in a heap with an oof. When Julian walked through our scarlet front door with Carlos, I was hanging up the phone from within a snarl of a green velvet tent. Jules, I need scarcely mention, was not impressed.
No one ever saw that Evora again. Several years ago, Alex mentioned it in passing — Bob had tried to fob it off as a present to Miranda, quite unsuccessfully. “You could hear the screaming in Portman Square, apparently,” he’d chortled. “He deserved it, that shit, don’t know how he thought he could hide a bloody car from her. He’s not David fucking Copperfield. Quite possibly the only time Ran ever took him to task until, well, you know.”
That I did know. I’d had a front row seat, lined up as one of eight at that dinner party at Sash’s where she served that fantastic paprikash. Tense. The whole evening was, that is. Something had been simmering over drinks, and it wasn’t just the food. Alex and Minty were making me want to puke with their lavish displays of tenderness. Baby Lucy had arrived only a few weeks before, and I knew I was being a terrible friend to them both. The pregnancy had been a shock, a fantastic and beautiful boon so soon after Minty’s miscarriage. The dream of that first, dark-haired, bonny little Bosworth-Carr had tangled them tightly twelve weeks. And then… I knew what it was like, to lose a longed-for life within. I also knew what it was like to lose one whose presence I did not welcome.
I should have been used to seeing them now as a couple, let alone a mother and father to an actual child. I’d been there the night Alex had tipped glass after glass of various flavors of Dutch courage down his throat to work up the nerve to hit on a woman he’d known since she was a girl, whom he found a jolly good laugh, but not really his type. But she’d have to be, unless he could figure out some other plan to save his home from collapsing under the weight of rotting timbers and familial expectations. I’d been there in the weeks that followed, as he slowly learned to love Minty, as a close friend, and then more. Too much more for my preference, though as Julian’s wife I knew I should not have had a preference to begin with.
Julian, for his part, was more witty and affectionate than I’d seen him in a while, teasing Sasha about her (truly tragic) pageboy haircut, listening sympathetically to Alex and Min speak cautiously about their hopes for Lucy, their fears that the jaundice she’d suffered as a newborn might portend future ill health. “As they say in my new country, I’ll pray for your family,” Jules said with an atrocious American accent and an exaggerated wink to pry a few giggles from Minty.
Will was quiet. I’d seen him the evening before, when he’d popped by with Alex to scoop Jules up for a “few light beverages,” as Al had put it, and he hadn’t looked quite himself. Older than his 28 years, tired, like he was carrying stones sewn into the lining of his jacket. In Sasha’s flat, he only looked better for being seated in the path what remained of the dying sun, which turned the blond streaks in his light brown hair a burnished gold. To his left on the windowseat was Bob, whose normally mousy brown hair now glowed bronze as the sun began to dip below the line of brick terraced houses. It had been a drizzly, sticky August day, dripping in the sour London scent of rubbish and summer bodies pushed too close together. The spots of rain did nothing to alleviate the miserable gunk of a grey day; no freshness intruded in the flat’s stale fug despite the late day sun that broke through the clouds.
To me, it was clear something was passing between Bob and Will, something unspoken and as rancid as the smells of the Tube. Tellingly, not a word passed between them. While Will’s brow had the light sheen of a man coming down from a bender and in between bouts of vicious vomiting, Bob was jittery, fussing with his glass of whisky, swirling its contents without rest when he wasn’t sipping at it, and pulling at the open collar of his linen shirt. Through Miranda’s unerring good taste and open purse, Bob Trelawney had no shabby left to his gentility. “Connock & Lockie,” he’d told Jules, who’d asked about Bob’s perfectly tailored moss green trousers, linen, like his shirt. “Bespoke. Part of a suit. Bit less flash than Al over there with his Ozwald Boateng, but made to last. Heard you have your own lasts at Lobb — Miranda convinced me to get my own as well. Quite the thing, bespoke shoes, aren’t they?” Jules could only concur.
In the kitchen, Minty folded napkins while Ran read out the final directions from the recipe. “Now stir the sour cream in the mixture — it is room temperature, correct?” Alex had been deputized by Miranda to “turn off this bloody awful rubbish” (Stereolab) and find something a bit more to her liking, and was flipping through Sasha’s collection of LPs. (A 16-year-old Sasha had been very much ahead of the curve in her vinyl obsession, and the sagging shelves that bore the fruit of bin-digging was proof of that.)
Under the pretense of knowing exactly what might suit the evening, I sidled up to Alex. He was crouching in front of the jazz section, weighing a Duke Ellington against a Miles Davis, shuffling the two albums like a very small and unwieldy deck of cards. “I’d go with the Ellington,” I announced, loud enough for everyone to hear, and dropped down to the floor beside him.
“D’you think? I know pants about jazz.” He looked at at me through the same drooping curl that I’d wanted to push out of his eye that first night in Bristol.
Next to him, I felt the electric buzz I’d come to expect each time our bodies were too close. Impulsively, I let my hand graze his as I pulled Kind of Blue from his grasp and shoved it back in the shelving. “Ellington is good. Listen, I need to ask you something.” I looked over to Julian, who was yucking it up with Bob over what sounded like a joke about Canadian women and bears.
“If it’s about Jules –“
“It’s about Will,” I cut in. “What’s wrong with him? He looks… not well. And he’s not talking to Bob.”
“Fuck if I know,” Alex muttered. He slipped the LP out of its sleeve and liner and blew away the light dust that clung to the grooves. “He was like that last night, too. Brushed me off and said it was allergies. Want to show me how to make this turntable work?”
But Will’s “allergies” seemed to get worse after Sasha called us to the dinner table. From her own kitchen a quarter mile away, Minty had walked over our starter, her famous salmon and butter bean salad. Even now I can’t resist a dish Minty has coaxed into existence from even the most humble ingredients. Julian insisted on saying grace, which under normal conditions might have elicited a raucous piss-take from Alex and a lush raspberry from Will, but we all knew Jules and I were here in London to bury his grandfather. Even if he was a miserable, horny bastard who once asked me if I wouldn’t indulge an old man a little grope, I had reason (for a change) to put my own feelings behind Julian’s. If my husband took some comfort in religion right now, there was no harm to any of us to leave it be.
Seated next to me, Will was fidgety, obsessively checking his phone while the rest of us chattered lightly about how awful the story about Jimmy Savile was, how Miranda completely believed it, while Al and Bob weighed their own memories of the presenter. Minty said she never liked Jim’ll Fix It: “His eyes always felt creepy.” I only knew who Jimmy Savile was through osmosis, from years of being around people who did, but I nodded and agreed as I shoved salmon in my mouth.
It was around the time that Alex was helping himself to a second dollop of the paprikash and two of the larger spaetzle dumplings remaining that Will broke his silence. “Miranda, awfully sorry to bring it up here, but we still haven’t received a transfer for the shares you wanted in my new green midcap fund.”
Miranda had been in mid-flow with Minty about whether a New Year’s trip to Malmo might be just the thing. “Oh! That should have been done weeks ago. So sorry, darling. Bob? I told you to take care of it, so take care of it.”
“Right-o, Ray,” he assured her, training his concentration on slicing a morsel of chicken off the bone. “I’ll take care of it on Monday.”
“No, I want it done now.” Miranda’s tones were chilly, of the sort I’d only heard her use on, well, me when Minty dragged her into the Palace on the Hill upon discovering Alex and me basically half-naked and shoving our tongues down each other’s throats. “You can do it on your phone. You have the app for my brokerage account.”
“Aw, Ray,” Bob chuckled, though he was looking positively ashen, like you might blow on him and he’d float away on the air you pushed from your lungs. Like one of the husks of once-men I’d seen in Pompeii and Herculaneum when Jules and I had visited a few years before. “Right now? Can’t it wait until after pudding?”
“Just take care of it,” she barked, harsh enough that even Julian put down his fork, before she turned back to favor us with a smile and a breezy all-is-well wave. “Awfully sorry, Will. This interview he has with that girl, the young one who wrote that page-turner, you know.” (I didn’t, but everyone else nodded, so I supposed the book would show up in America a few months later. It never did.) “She keeps cancelling at the last moment, highly unprofessional and it completely throws his schedule off.”
But pudding — Miranda’s contribution, a very large and very wobbly summer pudding, bright fuschia and studded with juicy berries — came and went. Bob’s game was familiar to me, as a terminal dissembler myself: keep nudging conversation away from the sticky, awful gunk you’ve found yourself in and hope everyone forgets about for a bit while you’re being charmingly diverting. Alex’s attention was not on Bob or Ran or much of anyone else present — he and Minty were FaceTiming with Cora, visiting from Balcraigie, who’d taken over babysitting duties for the evening. When they weren’t quizzing Alex’s mum about Lucy’s safety or the consistency of the baby shits in her nappy, they were shoving Alex’s phone in our faces to watch a tiny, black-haired child wail so hard at times she turned the color of that evening’s summer pudding.
She was, we all agreed, a magnificent baby.
It was by then quite oppressive in the flat as the night had drawn in, even with the box fans in the window and the large oscillating fans in the corner. I knew summer nights like this only from Providence at the beginning of the school year — like you’re propelling your body through sludge when all you’re trying to do is move from the sofa to the fridge to get another cold one and rub its dew over every inch of exposed skin, but the air won’t give an inch. Bob and Julian were thick in discussion about whether brogues were either ahead of or behind the times, with Bob repeatedly asking for Sasha’s opinion “as our own fashion maven.” (“Just wrong,” was her pronouncement.)
In the windowseat, Will peeled the label from his bottle of Budvar and folded it and unfolded it, never looking at any of us. The unhealthy sheen of illness that had slicked his skin had dissipated slightly after dinner, but like the rest of us he dripped with sweat. I was waiting for whatever great truth or surmising he was keeping tamped inside him, ready to burst out of the swirling brew powering him with an almighty POP!
“I don’t mean to be a pest, Bob,” he said at last, never breaking his concentration on the label origami he fussed with. “But it would be good for me to tick Ran off my list of things to do, so to speak.”
The petulant sneer of exasperation that escaped Miranda would have put a 15-year-old Rachel to shame. “Bob!” she yelled, ignoring momentarily the Adoration of the Child to which Alex and Minty were subjecting her in the far corner of the living room. “Just do it. How bloody hard can it be? Move the money from that Lloyds account to the brokerage account, and purchase the shares. How much did I say I wanted, Will?”
“30,” Will replied coolly, pulling a long draw from his beer. “Decent placement right now, Ran. Fund’s a nice earner.”
No matter how long I am with those born to wealth, no matter how long I have had considerable wealth of my own, the casual nature with which they treat money never loses its shock. £30,000 was more than I earned my first year out of college, not counting subsidies from from Julian. Even with nearly three years of marriage to Julian under my belt, it seemed a wildly excessive number to me to talk about like one might consider buying pears instead of apples that week.
On the sofa next to Julian, Bob made a big show of taking out his phone and hunting for the app. “Let’s see, Lloyds, Lloyds. Where are you? Hmmm. Right, Ran. I’ve got it. Just need to…” His voice trailed off for a moment, and then, barely loud enough for me to hear: “… move some things around.”
With what almost seemed a spring in his step, Will strolled over to the amplifier and turned down the volume on Ellington leading his band in “The Mooche.”
“What’s that, old boy?” He tossed the comment over his shoulder at Bob as he twiddled a gold knob to the left. “Thought you said you’d already taken care of moving things around.”
Miranda paused mid-worship of the sensational Miss Lucy Bosworth-Carr, swiped a lock of her dark bob behind an ear. “Bob,” she started coolly, angling her body away from Alex (too close, if you ask me, for an ex-girlfriend) to her own fiancé. “Why would you need to ‘move some things around’? You know which account I mean, and you know how much is in there.”
“Should be in there,” Will pointed out helpfully. “Not to worry, Bob mentioned to me he’d have it all sorted by now. There must be some –“
“William,” she seethed, her chest heaving visibly through her thin silk blouse. It was the color of fresh violets, and it suited her complexion, even if it did remind me uncomfortably of Josh’s eyes. “I appreciate you trying to help your friend, I do. But I need an answer from him. Robert.”
“Uh oh,” Julian whispered in my ear. When he was younger, he was more closely-tuned to shifts of mood in a room. Will’s frazzling energy had spooked Jules into retreating from the sofa, where he’d been yukking it up with Bob, to the safety of his wife’s side. The wind was blowing in one direction, and that was far, far away from Bob Trelawney, a sea change so marked even Alex pulled himself away from flipping through snap after snap of the little girl he’d help make.
I’ll give it to Bob — there was a moment there when he looked genuinely affronted by Miranda’s accusation, where he looked like he might have a reasonable explanation. A tax bill came in, perhaps, yes, that might be it. I wanted it to be true — the three years of their relationship had cracked away some of the most brittle and frost-covered parts of Miranda’s carapace, to reveal an actual human under the shell. She wasn’t lessened in her ferocious desire for life, no. Ran still ploughed through her days, turning over resistance like so much fertile dark soil in which to plant the seeds of what she wanted to grow there. A new friendship with me, perhaps, or a monthly column in a glossy mag.
Or love. Romantic love was a new one for her, a shoot of life as unexpected as the two blue lines on the pregnancy test Minty took some ten months prior. But she’d let the life take root, she’d fed and watered and coaxed that love into being like any tender gardener, any careful parent.
“Well?” Miranda growled. She’d planted herself in front of Bob, blocking his face from my view but I could still see his hands, which fumbled with the phone, scrolling up and down the screen as if looking for some out, some toggle that might open an escape hatch in the floor.
With a long sigh, Bob finally put his phone in his pocket. “You have to understand, Ray. I always put it back. Always. Just… this time the timing didn’t work. It’ll be in there again, soon. Just give me a week.”
In a rush, so many things happened after this confession. Thinking on this scene some seven years on, it’s still hard for me to order them properly, but I think I know now. Roughly: Alex scrambled from the oak floor towards Miranda, nearly tripping on the Persian rug in front of the sofa as he skidded to her side. Julian wasn’t far behind — he’d paused only to give me a look that said clearly: he fucking did it, just as Alex said he would. By the stereo, Will hung back, hooking the front of his right shoe behind his ankle. He almost looked pleased — that tight-lipped grin spoke of some satisfaction, even if was of the bitter sort. From her nest of Moroccan pillows on the floor, Minty reached up for the hand Sasha offered in support: she could see, we all could see, her husband was teetering on the edge of doling out a thrashing.
Miranda walked backwards, I recall, pressing her hand to her mouth until she thumped into the wall of Will’s chest (“oof”). Me? I froze. That I am certain of.
As Alex drew back his arm to plant a facer on Bob, Julian barred the swipe with his forearm. “Al, let the man speak. There must be a simple explanation.”
And then it all tumbles out in my brain, the explanation, the sobs and the gasping, clawing at air and the slow, slow realization that sometimes love is never enough for some people. Some have appetites far more ravenous, that must be fed with more risk. Some people must lay their bodies down on the precipice of disaster again and again and again to simply feel alive. And if once in a great while you tumble down, the thrill of not dashing yourself against the craggy granite of ill fate when it seemed most probable is worth the occasional loss: to one’s dignity or pocket or reputation. Or heart. One can lose a heart that way.
For so many years, Bob explained, there was so very little to lose. When you’re living off ASDA baked beans on toast, you might as well have a punt once in a while. Buy a scratch-off, maybe you get a few quid. Worst that happens? You lose a pound. Another week with beans on toast, no loss. You date a lovely girl, and then you do something foolish, like flirt with her best mate. Your loss, her loss, but life goes on. Terrible fun while it lasted.
But the compulsion to bet bigger when the stakes were highest bit and snipped at Bob’s ankles. “Being with all you lot,” he said, fanning his arm in front of him as smoothly as if he were slicing through a crest of water, “just made me want more. I don’t blame you, Ray, or any of you. It’s how you all are.”
Alex cracked his knuckles loudly. “Not all of us, mate. Some of us have had to work bloody hard to get out of straits as dire as yours. Now what the fuck have you done with Ran’s money, you dribbling fuckstain?”
“I –” Bob looked to Will, who now cradled a very pale Miranda with one arm. I’d not seen her ever look so small. “I lost most of it playing poker at the Ritz. Bad run of luck. I always, always — Ray, please believe me — I always put it back. You never noticed, not before, see? Just this one time. You can run your accounts, you’ll see — it’s all there but eighteen. And twelve of that I’m to get back on Tuesday, had to run my sister a quick line this month, Freddie’s tuition is due and Roger couldn’t come up with it all and…” He sputtered out, burying his ash brown head of hair in his elegant hands.
“Out.” Miranda had stepped forward, untucking herself from where Will would have held her forever, if she’d let him. She straightened her spine and her blouse and set her jaw firm. This is the Miranda St. George I knew and had feared. “I want you to take the pudding basin and yourself and go to my flat. When I get home, I want the basin there and you gone.”
“Ray!” Bob shouted and launched himself from the sofa towards Ran, but Alex stopped him with one long arm about the shoulders. Bob struggled briefly, trying and trying to reach her, like a dog held tightly on a lead from bolting after whatever its fancy was in that wisp of a moment, before he slumped in defeat. “I’m so sorry. I… never deserved you. Not once, and probably will never. I love you so much I cannot trust myself with it.”
Sasha cleared her throat lightly. “I think it’s best you leave now.”
“Ray, Miranda, my love,” Bob sobbed. “I did it for my family. I did it for Freddie. I didn’t spend it on me.”
“How dare you lie to me? How dare you?” she spat back at him. “You spent it on yourself, you twat! Most of it you lost gambling. Gambling with money that I earned, that my family earned. Don’t play on my heartstrings talking about your nephew. All you had to do was ask about his tuition, you fucking idiot!” After three fierce tugs at her left hand, she at last tugged free her engagement ring and threw it at Bob’s head, though it fell slightly short of its mark. Bob made to scoop it up but Julian put his foot over it.
“You heard her, OUT!” Will boomed at last.
I will say this: as Bob slid by, Miranda did reach for him one last time, but he shook his head and gave her a weak smile so full of regret it made me cry once the door was closed. I knew that smile: it was the very one I gave myself in the mirror sometimes. You broke it, you bought it, Melissa. This is what you wanted, this life with Julian.
Sasha doled out the whisky and someone got Amanda on the phone and in a cab and out of what did sound like a tedious date with one of Alex’s co-workers. (“Really, Al. How could you? I thought we were friends!” she whined over the phone en route to Sloane Square. “He’s into caravanning. I can’t imagine being stuck in a tin on wheels with anyone, let alone with a man named Trevor.“)
Will explained how he’d sussed out something was going off the rails with Bob over the past month. “Loved the man, truly, Ran. But I love you more, always will. Something didn’t smell right. Asked him three times about when we could expect the funds, explained I was only asking because I knew you wanted to support the new fund. Every time it was, ‘Oh, slipped my mind, right on it.’ Which was fine enough the first few times, I knew he’d been having a rotten time with that novelist. Things happen.
“But the fourth time he says to me, ‘On it, just need to move some money around.’ Sounded very odd to me. Hope you don’t mind, Ran, I don’t need to know your finances, but you’ve always struck me as the sort who doesn’t need to move things around, robbing Peter to pay Paul, so to speak. Said it again to me yesterday when I asked and, well. Awful sorry to have sat on this one, made me quite literally sick. Ask Jules what I was like in the pub last night.”
By the time Amanda and Will got her home, Bob had kept one of two last promises to Miranda. The pudding basin was clean in the dish drainer and he was gone. I spent much of the gathering following Jules’ rancid granddad’s funeral the next afternoon listening to Ran tell me over the phone that Bob had been shifting about the money to and from accounts and himself for well over a year, from what her accounts looked like. Will had also filled her in about the hot young folkie at the Trout earlier that morning as they boxed up Bob’s possessions for collection. Miranda sobbed as she confessed she knew that the problems with the novelist weren’t real, they were excuses for Bob to see her again and again at the Ritz, where he’d gambled away all that money.
The second promise came the following Tuesday, when two checks were delivered by courier, along with two notes. One from Bob’s sister for £12,000, with a sweet and effusive thank you message for keeping her son at the school he loved “even more than home, sometimes.” The second was for £6,000, and from Jamie.
Dearest Ran, the note read, Bob told me what happened and I’m sorry. I’m sorry that you didn’t reach out to tell me yourself — have we really grown that far apart? — and I’m sorry I’m the one who got him into all this mess. I’m the one who got him gambling in the first place. I’m the one who bought him the membership to the Ritz casino, and I’m the one who never twigged that it was odd that he suddenly was flush enough to play high stakes games. I’d rather him owe me the debt than you. I’d rather you feel whole sooner than I will. I hope someday you will forgive me. Until then, I remain, your friend, Jamie Fairleigh.
“What a tit,” Miranda laughed between sniffles, shoving the note across the table at me. We’d met up at a Café Rouge near her flat — Julian was at his office on what was my last full day in London before I was due back at my job in Pasadena. “‘Your friend, Jamie Fairleigh’! Like I don’t know which Jamie it is. He’s such a darling.”
Four nights later, he was in her bed, but that’s another story altogether. When they weren’t casting shy glances at each other over breakfast the next morning, they were sucking up Saskia’s latest missive in the Guardian. With the headline, “Never mind the boll*cks, it’s Bert,” Saskia informed her readers that “after three years of looking nearly-respectable and being kept in line by a strong woman of whom my family greatly approved for her massive stores of wit and cash, my cousin Bert is back in my orbit looking for another Plus One. Only women who prefer to be called Mistress and know their way around a riding crop need apply.”
“I did ask Jamie if that meant I was a sadist, but he told me it’s far too early for him to tell, and that’s not his kink anyway. Do you want to know what is, San?”
I passed, as did their brief rebound time romping in bed. It was enough to push the reset button for Ran, but she never really did return to bounding from man to man after Bob. As far as I was aware, there had been the extremely handsome Sanjay Partha, Ph.D. (Cantab), who also turned out to be extremely married; and Sam Toledano, clever and naughty in many of the same ways as Miranda, whose mother put an end to it when she discovered her son’s dark-haired, olive-skinned girlfriend was not a Sephardic Jew, as he’d promised.
But Bob was never truly out of sight, not completely. There were blind-ish items in Saskia’s columns that made it clear Miranda had made an appearance at some industry junket or another with Bob “holding up his mistress’s train,” as his cousin had put it once. Minty had once clipped these columns to share with Alex and Amanda, though after she left her marriage, Alex kept loosish tabs on the “Bob situation,” as it was usually referred to by us all. When confronted — even with photographic evidence on two occasions — Miranda would claim to have no knowledge of these scurrilous tales. “Utter rubbish and revenge digs. Saskia detests me,” she’d claim. “Once I dumped Bob, he was her responsibility again.”
And yet, here he was, Robert Trelawney himself, no secret at all. Pestering Miranda for sex (in the middle of the afternoon, on a Wednesday, no less) while she had the nerve to repeat to me the words Alex drives home again and again, like they are some massive revelation to me, rather than the beat of my heart: no secrets, no secrets.
“There’s so little left to tell him now,” I told her. “What, that I nearly made out with Julian once before our divorce at that auction? Pfft, he knows.” (I had fessed up to it two nights before; Al had merely shrugged his shoulders. “I spent a week trying to mend things with Minty while I was telling you I loved you. Even if she’s not a plonker like Jules, it was a crap move on my part, lovely.”)
“Get her off the phone or you’ll get none of that carnal embrace on your wedding night,” Alex grunted from beneath the duvet.
“Tell him,” Miranda said, loud enough for Alex to hear through a much thicker duvet than the one on our soon-to-be marital bed. “Tell him that he could try being pleasant for a change. It does suit him, you know.”
Alex threw the bedclothes off him with a huff of disgust and stomped off to the bathroom, muttering that he’d now take Rachel up on that offer from 10 years ago for a bit of post-wedding shagging. We had three days to go until the big day — Fenn had landed a week and a half ago and was holed up with Julian until we all finished self-isolating after COVID tests. Everyone’s result was due today, and soon we’d all (sans Julian, mais bien sûr) gather at my parents, providing we were all negative. (Reader, we were.) The Zoom link would be set up and tested, and soon I’d be pledging my life to be joined with Alex’s. As we should have so many years ago, if we weren’t such cowards.
“But seriously. Mel. Sandra Dee. Tell me you’ve told him about what happened after Seattle. He needs to know. You’ve held onto the secret far too long.”
Some secrets are worth holding onto. Bob Trelawney? Maybe not. I have held this one tight for nearly eleven years. To let it go will make it real again. Tucked away in the haunted house of tiny rooms locked up by keys I cannot locate, is a room to which only I hold the key somewhere within myself, had I the courage to use it. Within its walls, a young woman sits on a tidy double bed, its pinky-posy-sprinkled white duvet cover contrasting pleasingly with grey pillows and a rosy throw blanket at its foot. She is so, so still, the only movement in the room the motes of dust that are caught by the sunlight of a late January afternoon. She holds in one hand a crumpled tissue, nearly soaked with snot and tears. In the other, a plastic wand on which two bright blue lines appear.
No, that’s a secret that’s not quite ready to be set free.
meandering again 