Sushi for Beginners - Marian Keyes [69]
Then they went home for pizza and bed. Their first date lasted sixty hours and ended when he dropped her off at work on the Monday morning.
By their third excursion they were officially in love.
On their fourth, Oliver decided to take her down to Purley to meet his mum and dad. Lisa thought it was a fantastically good sign, but, as it happened, it was almost the undoing of them. The unravelling began when they’d been in the car about half an hour and Oliver remarked, ‘I’m not sure Dad will be home from work yet.’
‘What does he do?’ Lisa had never thought to ask before, it hadn’t seemed important.
‘He’s a doctor.’
A doctor! ‘ What kind of doctor?’ A doctor of road-hygiene – in other words, a street sweeper?
‘Just a GP.’
The shock rendered her speechless. Here, she’d been affectionately thinking of Oliver as a bit of rough, and it turned out that he’d been middle-class all along and she’d been the bit of rough. There was no way now that she could take him to meet her parents.
For the rest of the drive, she hoped and prayed that, despite the dad being a doctor, they might be poor. But when Oliver drove up to a big, square house, the fake-Tudor lead-paned windows, the Laura Ashley Austrian blinds and the plethora of knick-knacks on the visible window-sills declared that they weren’t exactly strapped for cash.
Before they’d set off, she’d expected Oliver’s mum to be a big-thighed, good-natured woman in Minnie Mouse shoes who drank Red Stripe at breakfast and laughed in a high-pitched, ‘Heee! Heee! Heee!’ Instead, as she answered the door, she looked like the queen. A few shades darker, but with the helmet curls and Marks & Spencer’s prim duds, all present and correct.
‘Pleased to meet you, dear.’ The accent was pure Home Counties and Lisa felt her self-esteem wither even further.
‘Hello, Mrs Livingstone.’
‘Call me Rita. Do come through. Daddy’s late at the surgery, but he should be here soon.’
They were led into the well-appointed sitting-room and when Lisa saw that the soft furnishings had had their plastic covering removed, it was the final blow.
‘Tea?’ Rita suggested brightly, stroking the golden labrador which had laid his head in her lap. ‘Lapsang Suchong or Earl Grey?’
‘Don’t mind,’ Lisa muttered. What was wrong with PG Tips?
‘This wasn’t what I’d expected,’ Lisa couldn’t stop herself from whispering when she and Oliver were alone.
‘What did you expect? Dat we be eatin’ rice’n’peas, drinkin’ rum,’ Oliver slipped into a perfect Caribbean accent, ‘an’ dancin’ to steel drums on de porch?’
Exactly! It’s the only reason I came.
‘I don’t think so, my dear.’ He changed swiftly to BBC wartime speak. ‘For we are Brrrritish!’
‘The correct name for us, so I’m told,’ Rita had reappeared with a tray containing a plate of unsweet, no-fun, handmade biscuits, ‘is “Bounties”. Or “Choc-ices”.’
‘Wh – why?’ Lisa was confused.
‘Brown on the outside, white on the inside.’ She flashed a sudden, melon grin. ‘That’s what my family call us. And you can’t win because the white neighbours hate us too! Next-door told me that the value of their house went down by ten grand when we moved in.’
Unexpectedly, totally at odds with her M&S appearance, she gave a high-pitched laugh. ‘Heee! Heee! Heee!’ And Lisa felt the chip on her shoulder dissolve like the sugar she didn’t take in her tea. Well, so long as the neighbours hated them, that was all right then, wasn’t it? They weren’t half as scary now.
On their fifth date Oliver and Lisa talked about moving in together. They explored the notion further on the sixth. Their seventh date consisted of driving a van from Battersea to West Hampstead and back again, as they ferried Lisa’s considerable