One Day in May - Catherine Alliott [77]
‘She eat you for breakfast, no?’
‘Who, Lucinda Carr or Maggie?’ I said, glaring at my friend. ‘And anyway, what am I supposed to tell her?’
‘Tell her it’s fine,’ Maggie replied without taking her eyes off the screen. ‘She wants reassurance, that’s all. You know what she’s like. I told her you’d be there at eleven.’
‘Did you,’ I muttered as I slunk to the door. Childishly, I let it bang shut behind me.
Once out on the street, however, standing a moment to breathe in the heady mixture of carbon monoxide, coffee, and delicious restaurant smells wafting on the cool air, I relaxed. If truth be told I needed a walk. And I loved to walk in London: loved sauntering past the bars and cafés in our street, greeting my friends – the Italians and Poles clearing morning coffee, laying their tables for lunch – seeing what the competition was up to. Munster Road fairly bristled with antiquarian activity – lighting shops, carpets, fabrics – and one or two French establishments too. In the main they were less formal than us, more pine-based and farmhousey, and despite our supposed rivalry, we were friends with all of them.
‘How’s it going?’ I called out to Penny, who ran Magpie on the corner. She was wheeling a distressed green wheelbarrow full of terracotta pots outside.
‘Slow,’ she groaned, setting it down with a bump. ‘And you?’
‘The same,’ I agreed.
‘Where are the tourists? she wailed.
‘In the King’s Road, paying silly prices,’ I called back. She gave me a despairing shrug then, with a wave, went back into her shop.
I walked away from Fulham and its sprawling grids of redbrick terraced houses, and made my way towards the wider avenues of more gentrified Chelsea. It was quite a hike through Parson’s Green, along New King’s Road and on towards Stamford Bridge, but I enjoyed the exercise, and after a while, the houses grew taller and whiter, the pavements squeakier, the window boxes more luxurious, and the door knockers shinier.
When I’d lived with Laura in Pimlico, I’d walked past similar houses on my way to work in Westminster. In an immature sort of way, I used to imagine living in one, and indeed, a whole other life could flow, pretty much uninterrupted, under my everyday existence. I’d peer into basement kitchens and within a twinkling be breakfasting in one myself, with my pinstriped husband and my little blond children, waving them off to school in their straw boaters and blazers. Even back in those days, as I swung my Topshop handbag and smacked the pavements with the flip-flops I’d swap later for heels, I was disinclined to be trapped at home, so I’d invent a part-time job for myself, a spot of charity work perhaps. Not tin-rattling in the cold, you understand, more arranging balls in the warm, with other well-dressed women with tiny ankles. Later I’d change into something sexy and expensive – Ungaro, maybe? Or was that a country? – issue instructions to my nanny, and hurry to my taxi, purring outside my perfect house, pausing only to breathe to the cabbie, ‘The House of Commons, please.’
I rocked to a standstill in the street. Where was I? Oh. Yes. Standing outside another perfect house. Mrs Carr’s, in fact. I gave myself a moment, marvelling at the magnitude of my youthful gall. Then I took a deep breath and looked up. White, stuccoed and occupying four floors – a waste, I thought scathingly, since everyone knew these women lived in the basement – it was by anyone’s standards, a supremely elegant house. But these days, I wasn’t envious, only a little wistful. And not for the house, but for the way of life. Naturally I’d dreamed of having a more conventional family. Naturally I’d have liked a husband, a few children, a nice house, but life had decided otherwise. And occasionally, I had to quell the feeling it had treated me unfairly. I pulled myself together, but as I mounted the steps and pressed the bell,