Alphabet Weekends - Elizabeth Noble [1]
Eleven fifteen p.m. on New Year’s Eve was actually a great time to be driving. Everyone else was already ‘there’. At the place where they were going to pretend to have the time of their lives, when actually they were thinking about that house party they went to in Cambridge in 1988, or that time in 1967 when they were so stoned they didn’t even hear midnight chime, or the New Year in 1992 when their boyfriend proposed to them in Times Square, or any year when the same ten people sitting round a suburban dinner table with them didn’t seem quite so dull, or so snappy, or so needing to get home because their baby sitter charged double time after midnight.
There was no one else on this bit of road. ‘Dancing in the Moonlight’ was blaring out of the stereo, and Natalie changed empty lanes a couple of times in a kind of Corsa salsa. She was cheering up a bit. Good idea. Good idea of Tom’s.
She’d been going to stay at home, having a sulky night. Rose, possibly the only friend who could have jollied her out of it, had announced apologetically that her boyfriend Pete had got a deal on Eurostar – two nights, three-star in Lille (not Paris, that was two hundred pounds more and he hadn’t yet finished his doctorate, after all). And would Natalie be okay? Et tu, Brute, Natalie had thought (saying a mean, silent prayer that Rose would not come back with a ring on her finger, and instantly feeling awful for wishing it), before she had hugged her friend, offered her lingerie drawer with an ironic shrug – negligées not thongs, obviously – and said that, yes, of course, she’d be fine, she’d go to some party. She’d then, obviously, turned down the two parties she’d had invitations to. Told both hosts she’d already accepted someone else, and managed to fall off the radar (which made her simultaneously relieved and alarmed – it had been pretty easy).
Both her sisters were a waste of time. Susannah was in Marrakesh, if you please, at some sort of New Year’s Eve wrap party for the film Casper had just finished shooting. And Bridget was about ten months pregnant, which made her a very unlikely source of fun this evening. She and Karl were probably already in bed, with their angelic eighteen-month-old, Christina, nestled between them, reading the baby-name book, and toasting the New Year in sparkling apple juice.
Mum and Dad’s? She’d rather be alone. A thirty-five-year-old at home with her parents on New Year’s Eve in any year was bad enough, but after this last year, with the way things were at home… No, she couldn’t have faced that. Not with everything that was going on.
She should have brought in a new flatmate when Susannah finally moved out. They’d liked it, just the two of them, after Bridget had left to get married three years ago, and the mortgage was pretty okay. Bridget had liked it, her room being unoccupied: she could still escape Karl and Christina, sometimes, for the odd night in town. But Susannah had gone so quickly, and apathy had set in. Well, not apathy. Anticipation. She shouldn’t have been there much longer herself. It should have been happening to her, too.
None of it was how it should have been.
Right now, for example, she should not be bombing down the M4 listening to the radio, heading for the public house of her adolescent New Years’ Eves. She should be in the Maldives, after an exhilarating day’s diving, wafting fragrantly and goldenly around in something white and linen, drinking Bollinger imported at great expense. She should be in Simon’s arms.
The bastard.
The complete bastard.
She was half-way through wishing him third-degree sunburn and jellyfish-stung gonads