Here's Looking at You (20 page)

When Eva slipped through the pub doors, it looked as if prime years Debbie Harry had been given a walk-on part in a fly-on-the-wall reality show. She had Milkybar hair, high cheekbones, feline eyes, and a taut, tiny body, her legs looking like a chicken wishbone in dark denim.

‘Eva, how the devil are you!’ Laurence swooped in for a peck on the cheek.

‘Hi Laurence,’ she said, unsmiling.

Eva’s voice had that diamond hard, sexy edge that came from Scandi-accented English.

James made introductions.

‘Eva, this is Anna, her sister Aggy, and Michelle.’

Eva’s expression implied James had introduced Crystal, Rio and Candy-Blush in Stringfellows. And in the visual sweep, did Anna imagine Eva’s eyes lingered on her the longest?

‘Nice to meet you,’ Eva said, in a voice drained of colour.

Everyone else resumed talking while Anna pretended to listen while in fact earwigging on James and Eva as he handed her the house keys.

‘If you put them under the blue plant pot when you’re done.’

‘I’m going to put the flowers in the bin and take the bin out.’

‘Whatever you think,’ James said. ‘I’ll tell my mum not to make such a thoughtless gesture again.’

Anna glanced over. Eva was staring at James, as if she couldn’t work out whether to rise to this or not.

‘It could kill Luther.’

‘Yep. Got that.’

Anna was struck by how little Eva was making any concession to crashing a social occasion. She’d angled her body to cut James off from the rest of the party, her tone querulous. He looked grim.

She said: ‘Nice to meet you all,’ again before she went, but it had a tone of blunt challenge to it, to Anna’s ears. Like a police officer saying
have a good day
when he actually meant
don’t commit any crimes.

No wonder James might’ve taken the
being hung up on an icicle in a bra
thing personally, what with the refrigerated wife. Bet they suit each other though, Anna thought, as she sipped her sauvignon blanc.

On the Tube on the way home, Michelle and Aggy both loyally tutted about James Fraser. His manners weren’t too bad, they both said. And yes he was horribly handsome. He was so proud of himself, though. They much preferred the garrulous Laurence who, bar the laboured attempts to chat up Anna, had actually been pretty effortfully charming.

For her part, Anna felt as if James looked through her, and Laurence looked at her too much.

It took James some time to realise that Parker was shouting at him, over the din of Duran Duran. He’d been selecting Anna’s footage for the app. She was right, it was so compelling it was a question of choosing what to leave out. As he watched, he realised she looked a fair bit like Empress Theodora herself. They had the same dark, soulful eyes.

‘I saw you last night,’ Parker said, once the music had been turned down.

‘Oh?’ James said, neck prickling slightly.

‘With your girlfriend. Walking through Cov Garden?’

Lexie glanced over.

‘Ah,’ James said.

He was flustered. A simple mistake to make, which in turn he should simply correct. But it was convenient. ‘She’s not my girlfriend,’ might spark more inquiries about his imaginary girlfriend, whose bio he’d yet to invent. Exploiting the confusion was too tempting. But who exactly did Parker see …?

‘You never said when we met her at the museum meeting!’

Ah.

‘Uhm. No. Separating business and pleasure and all that.’

Argh,
what was he doing
? This was bad.

‘She had a go at us!’ Parker guffawed.

‘Yeah. She’s good at separating it,’ James said.

‘You were seeing each other then?’

‘Uh. Kind of …’

What a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive
. Or put another way: lying is a very bad idea.

What a mess.

If James had simply toughed out that horrible power surge of curious pity after he’d told them about Eva, he wouldn’t be in this predicament. He’d been weak. He’d lied and been believed and he was paying the price. It was the gift that kept on taking.

‘What’s this?’ Harris said, from his position at one end of the Subbuteo table. ‘You’ve actually seen the elusive girlfriend, Parks?’

Parker nodded.

‘Well well,’ Harris said. He was playing table football while wearing a chequered bowler hat and a burger restaurant t-shirt saying
In’N’Out, Home Of The Double Double
. ‘We’d started to think your new girlfriend was a butternut squash with a face drawn on it with a Sharpie.’

‘Hey I’d never cheat with one of your butternut squash family, I know what they mean to you,’ James said, limply, to a ripple of giggles.

He hated playing Harris’s games, but he didn’t know how else to deal with him without lapsing into open hostility. It was like being back at school.

‘She’s on the British Museum exhibition,’ Parker added. Parker wasn’t bitchy, but he was guileless, so as an informant to Harris he could do damage inadvertently.

‘Really?’
Harris said, rattling the handles, obviously working out if there was any way he could use this to cause trouble. ‘So you’ve been sticking to your briefs as well as sticking to the brief?’

‘Oh God, Harris, yuck,’ James said.

‘Sorry, DAD,’ Harris said, yelling, ‘Goooaallllll! Mona, I am king of tiny man football! I am Lord of the Dance, said he!’

Harris did a revolting gyrating dance to this, leaving James feeling sick with dislike.

Ramona turned the music up and Harris started telling his anecdote about drop-kicking a plastic flamingo off Kensington Roof Gardens in front of Nick Grimshaw again, indicating that James’s ordeal was over. For now.

He turned back to his laptop and regrouped. Parker would see Anna again at the exhibition launch party. He had two unappealing options in front of him: wait for a quiet moment with Parker and admit he made up the whole girlfriend thing, begging him not to say anything to Anna. Maybe claim he was on anti-depressants that made him briefly loopy, or something.

Yet Parker was, with all goodwill, something of a toolbox. He’d let it slip, or he’d tell a flesh-eating microbe like Harris in confidence. He could imagine Harris’s
vegetable girlfriend
jokes would still be going strong in 2020. No, he might as well tell them all as tell Parker.

This put the next option up against some pretty stiff competition in the unappealing stakes. Keep Parker and Anna apart at the exhibition launch and hope to hell she never hears of this.

Yup. James was going to have to go with the high-wire Option Two.

It looked as if Laurence was right, never a comfortable thing to admit. James’s own investigations when he got home from the theatre suggested Eva was doing some sort of on-the-spot domestic inspection.

He’d observed the pale circle left by the flower pot on the windowsill, but in order to gnaw the foliage in a death-or-glory shower of terracotta powder, Luther would’ve had to hurl himself at the flowers and drag them onto the floor with his teeth.

Incredible feats of athletic dexterity weren’t your go-to associations with that cat. Luther often seemed surprised by his own tail. James also had a notion that he’d left the bedroom door half open, not closed, as he found it. Although Eva could be going in to pick up more of her things, he supposed.

But then Eva texted the next day to suggest they meet on the Heath for a walk and a talk that evening. It was the first time she’d shown any interest in the process of possibly reconciling with James since she left. So it seemed the ‘putting the house on the market’ threat had begun to work its magic. What an empty victory it felt.

It was a mild evening for the time of year and when he saw Eva waiting for him, hair split in two winsome little buns at the nape of her neck like a college kid, he felt heavy of heart, heavy of limb, and very old. Eva got straight down to business, arms folded tightly against her chest as they tramped through the park, at a speed that suggested they were going somewhere.

‘Don’t you think you should ask me before you put the house up for sale?’

‘I have done. I told you I was getting it valued.’

‘I didn’t think we’d made the decision to sell it.’

‘You’ve left. I don’t need a house that size for myself.’

‘Are you trying to bounce me into a decision?’

James fought to keep his temper under control. ‘Shouty man in park’ wasn’t the role he wanted to play this evening.

‘
Bounce
you? Is the deal that I sit around like an idiot, waiting for you and Finn to finish The Sofa Series in charcoal? Moving on to a whirlpool bath in watercolours? You’ve left me, Eva. Don’t you know what that means?’

He breathed in air so cold that it hurt his throat and lungs, and waited for Eva to say it was over with Finn, it was all a mistake, she didn’t want to sell the house. Why would she be here, otherwise?

She didn’t say anything.

‘Sara’s must be feeling a little cramped. Doesn’t her bloke mind?’

He looked sideways. Eva stared at the ground.

James lurched, as if he was in an old Mini with bad suspension that had gone over a speed bump.

‘You’re not at Sara’s?’

She pursed her lips and shook her head.

His ribcage was suddenly far too small for all the organs inside it. He wanted to ask whether
that was that
then
in a robust way, but his windpipe felt like it had been flattened.

They walked on.

‘So much for the not sleeping together, eh? What a shocking twist,’ he said eventually, hearing the misery in his voice. There were no points to be scored. He’d lost. ‘Hope you’ll forgive me now for calling bullshit on the stuff you called art and I called foreplay, what with me being right and everything.’

‘This is it, James. All you care about is whether I’ve had sex. You’re not interested in the reasons I left.’

‘All you’ve said is that you were bored. I don’t know what you were expecting marriage to be. We were living together anyway. Marrying is a party, a holiday, then more of the same. Are you going to make a go of the wild life with Finn, then? How’s that going to work when he’s clubbing and you’re knocking forty?’

‘Finn talks to me like an equal. Not some
hausfrau
whose opinions he finds ridiculous.’

‘Oh God, Eva. As if. Are you Betty Draper with the shotgun all of a sudden?’

‘I’ll tell you when I knew I had to leave, James. That evening when Jack and Caron came round.’

‘What? My tagine wasn’t that bad.’

‘You spent all night talking to Caron.’

‘The civil servant?’

‘And you were fascinated in everything she had to say, laughing away. You couldn’t care less what I have to say. You think I’m trivial.’

‘Of course I was interested in what she had to say, I had to be. It’s polite, with guests.’

‘And then she said private education shouldn’t have charitable status, and you agreed with her!’

‘She made a good case. Also, I thought you felt that way?’

‘I’d be out of a job!’

James had a memory of an early date at a gastro pub in Clapham, and a conversation about how Eva was only doing her job to stockpile money so she could set up as a tutor. Then she’d take on talented cases for free as well as wealthier clients, and make the world fairer. He remembered thinking she was so giving, and the only person he’d ever met who looked wonderful in beige.

‘And then my friends. What did you call them? Captain Cocksman and the low lights with highlights.’

Ach, they were awful, though. Eva’s promiscuous, hairdresser friend Wolfram was the kind who’d bitch about his dying mother’s lack of a cut and blow dry. And the clubbing harpies and self-appointed ‘prominent creatives’ who’d met at his salon were just plain frightening. Velociraptors in Kurt Geiger. James was fairly sure one of them had tried it on with him at her ‘cook out’ in Kew. They’d have been encouraging the Finn thing, without a doubt.

‘Who were you with? At the pub the other night?’ Eva carried on, as if this wasn’t a non sequitur.

‘I was with several people.’

‘The woman with the long hair who stared at me.’

Hope glimmered. Given that couldn’t be true, was Eva projecting rivalry?

‘Anna? She’s someone I’m working with.’

‘Are you seeing her?’

James was unsure how to answer. Was it looking a gift horse in the mouth to admit to Eva she had zero cause to be jealous? He’d try for evasive bluster.

‘Would you care if I was?’

‘You can do what you want, James, you’re a free agent. Are you seeing her?’

‘So that’s a no, you don’t care.’

They passed another young couple on the path. They smiled at them as if they were all in Happily Coupled-Up Club.

James looked at a kid flying a kite in the middle distance, gurgling with excitement as its ribbons rippled.

Eva stopped and turned to him, nose and cheeks chilled to bright pink. Most people would look like a slab of boiled ham, but she looked like a tuck shop sugar mouse.

Time to seize the initiative.

‘I’m putting the house on the market. I don’t know what’s happening with you and Finn but I’m going to start moving on,’ James said.

‘Are you seeing that woman?’

James hesitated. It was a good sign she wanted to know. Don’t lie, but don’t extinguish all doubt.

‘We’ve just hit it off as friends.’

When James got home, he steeled himself to look up Finn Hutchinson’s model profile online and found an entire website. He discovered he was an ‘aspiring musician’ –
of course you are
– who was also ‘a keen surfer who’s always chasing the swell’. Please do, chase it all the way to Beachy Head.

James found himself clicking through the portfolio photos, grimly hitting ‘next’ like a monkey with a toffee hammer.

One showed Finn in a tuxedo, tie undone, legs ‘alpha male’ apart in an armchair, like a 1970s brandy or Dunhill advert.
‘This was a great shoot. Channelling the Rat Pack, classic tux.’

In another one he was doing that awful
aw-shucks-me?
back of the head rub and smirk, leaning into the lens, spiky hair centre parted, in a V neck Fruit of the Loom t-shirt and silver dog-tags.
‘People use words like sexy hunk but I think I’m more of a goof.’