Si and I shoot each other worried glances, but no, it couldn’t possibly be Josh.
Lucy sits back and grins like the cat that got the cream. ‘I walked in on Ingrid and the mystery lover locked in a passionate embrace in the kitchen.’
‘And?’ Si’s now starting to look bored. ‘Some swarthy Italian? Playboy type? Medallion and hairy chest?’
Lucy shakes her head, her smile growing wider. ‘Nope,’ and she pauses dramatically until even Si starts to look interested. ‘It’s Portia!’
‘WHAT?’ Si knocks his wine glass over, my mouth falls open and my chin hits the floor.
‘You are joking?’ I leave it to Si to speak, as I am, for possibly the first time in my life, completely speechless.
‘Nope.’ Lucy shakes her head. ‘I know! Portia! Isn’t it extraordinary!’
‘Extraordinary. Are you sure?’ Si’s now looking doubtful.
‘Sure? Si, they pulled apart looking terribly embarrassed, and then Portia shrugged and said we had to find out sometime, and they both grinned and left the house holding hands.’
‘Nooooooooo,’ I manage to breathe out eventually, my eyes as wide as saucers, because this is the very last thing I ever expected. I mean, Portia? Ingrid? How? When? Oh Christ. This is just too much for me. I sit down, mouth still agape.
‘I know. Portia and Ingrid! In lurrve!’ Lucy’s loving every second of this.
‘Actually,’ Si says, ‘I always thought Portia had a leaning towards her Sapphic sisters.’
‘Did you bollocks!’ I respond, because it’s the first I’ve heard of it.
‘What?’ He looks at me, innocence personified. ‘Just because I may not have mentioned it to you doesn’t mean I didn’t think it.’
‘Yeah, right,’ I say, grinning, because I know, and he knows I know, that this is absolutely rubbish. ‘But Christ, how did this happen?’
Lucy shrugs. ‘Ingrid’s hardly likely to tell me the whole story, is she?’
‘Didn’t Portia drop any hint at all when you were over there the other night?’ I turn to Si.
‘No. We didn’t even mention Ingrid. And anyway, what’s she going to say, oh by the way, Si, I know we’ve known one another for thirteen years, but I’m now a lesbian and I’m in love with Ingrid?’
‘Si, wouldn’t she be bisexual rather than a lesbian?’ Lucy, ever politically correct, interrupts.
Si shrugs.
‘But Portia!’ It hits me again. ‘It’s just unbelievable.’
‘You should have seen Josh’s face!’ Lucy starts to laugh.
‘Josh?’ Si and I together, and I suddenly think, God, were we wrong again? And a deep shame engulfs me as I realize that yet again Si and I have jumped to conclusions and punished Josh for something he evidently hasn’t done, and I shoot Si a worried glance, only to see him shooting exactly the same back to me.
‘I thought Josh was away?’ Si manages to sound breezily nonchalant as Lucy’s busy concentrating on unwrapping the Dairy Milk.
‘He was supposed to be, but it got cancelled at the last minute.’
‘So where is he now?’
‘Still trying to pull off this big deal. He’s upstairs in his study, working, and I know I should have told you he’d be around but quite honestly he’ll probably be stuck up there all night and I haven’t seen the two of you like this for ages, and I didn’t want you not to come because you thought Josh would be around.’
I for one, am completely speechless, and I can see that Si is also lost for words, but thankfully Max chooses that moment to disrupt the shamed atmosphere in the kitchen by zooming around the kitchen table with Pokémon in hand, screeching into chairs and making a huge amount of noise, until Si scoops him up and asks whether he’d like a story.
Lucy looks at him gratefully, and as Si carries Max out of the room he turns to me and says, ‘Come on, Cath, it’ll be good practice. Come and help me.’
Lucy starts to laugh. ‘Good practice? Good practice? My darling Cath, you cannot mean to tell me you’re already talking sproglets, are you? Although heaven knows it’s about time.’
‘Don’t even go there,’ I whisper furiously, because,-okay, okay, I confess. Lucy does know about James – I had to tell someone – and I don’t want her saying anything, but luckily Si is standing at the foot of the stairs, just out of earshot, making big eyes at me and frantically waving me over.
‘Okay, I’m coming.’ I get up and as soon as we’re safely upstairs Si sends Max off to find last year’s Furby, telling him that the Pokémon wants to destroy it, and then whispers, ‘Christ, we’ve got to apologize to Josh. I feel awful.’
‘I know. But what are we supposed to say?’
‘Oh, God knows, but I think we just have to do it.’ He shoots a glance at Max, who’s on his hands and knees rifling through the toy chest and muttering to himself as he pulls the toys out.
‘Will he be all right?’
‘He’ll be hours,’ Si says, pulling his sweater up to reveal a small brown and white Furby nestling in his waistband. ‘I had to pull the bloody batteries out to stop it speaking Furbish.’ He rolls his eyes as I start to laugh. ‘Come on, let’s go and find Josh.’
As we walk up to the study door we can hear the sounds of typing, and Si makes the sign of the cross, pretends to pray, then knocks on the door. The typing stops.
‘Yup?’
‘Josh? It’s Si. And Cath. Can we come in?’ Si is already opening the door as he asks this, making it a purely rhetorical question, and Josh swivels round from his desk.
‘Hi, guys,’ he says nonchalantly, which, if you didn’t know any better, you might think was a sign that there was nothing wrong, but there is a warmth missing in his voice, and I suddenly realize how awful this must have been for Josh. We are, after all, two of his best friends, and for weeks now we’ve been giving him the cold shoulder without letting him know the reason why, and poor, poor Josh, with all his insecurities, must have felt terrible. Why did I not think of this before?
‘Josh, we need to talk to you,’ I start, then stop, because how on earth do you explain, or justify, or apologize for what we’ve done?
‘The thing is,’ Si says, moving across the room to the futon pushed against the wall and sitting down. ‘We feel ridiculous and we feel ashamed because we thought you were having an affair with Portia – ’
‘Well, actually that was my fault, because I saw you in Barnes one night with Portia and I immediately jumped to the wrong conclusion, but then we discovered you weren’t,’ I interrupt.
Si continues, ‘But only because we then thought you were having an affair with Ingrid.’
Josh just sits there and looks at us, not saying a word, his face giving nothing away.
‘And now we know that you didn’t, you hadn’t, and we feel terrible because we’ve been so awful to you, but we were only trying to protect Lucy,’ I say lamely.
There’s a long silence.
‘What made you think I would be unfaithful to Lucy?’ Josh says after a while.
‘Well, you were hardly ever here, and you kept having these late meetings and then, when you were here, you weren’t interested in sex…’ Whoops. I think I’ve just gone too far, and I see Josh clench his teeth, which means he is seriously pissed off, but, repressed as he is, he won’t be letting it out, which is something of a relief.
I shrug apologetically. ‘I’m sorry, Josh. We both are. We were just so angry and upset at the thought of you hurting Lucy.’ Si and I hang our heads in shame.