‘Cath, my love, did you think my instincts would have failed me? Did you think, perhaps, that they had gone absent without leave? Or perhaps you think I’m rather stupid…’
‘All right, all right. Sorry. But you have to admit it looks okay.’
‘No,’ Si says slowly. ‘Although relatively speaking I suppose I’ll have to concede it does.’ He checks his watch. ‘Josh said quarter to. Shall we wander over?’
I nod and grab my coat, turning to see Si watching me.
‘Sweets,’ he says. ‘You really should make more of an effort. Put on just a tiny bit of make-up on this gorgeous spring evening. What if Mr Perfect turns up?’
‘I don’t need Mr Perfect,’ I say, closing the door behind us and tucking my arm cosily into Si’s. ‘I already have you.’
Chapter four
Josh comes to the door with a tea-towel in one hand and Max in the other, looking, it has to be said, extremely cute in his little striped pyjamas. That is if you didn’t know better.
Even Josh looks rather cute, come to that, with his dirty blond hair mussed up, his shirt sleeves rolled up to show off rather strong and sexy tanned forearms (well, they would be if they didn’t belong to Josh).
It’s funny how I’ve never thought of Josh in that way. Maybe it’s just that he’s too much of an older brother to me now, or maybe it’s because I don’t believe he’s got any sex appeal, but I have never, could never, think of Josh as anything other than a friend.
And yet, looking at him now, purely objectively, he’s a good-looking man. He is the sort of man who grows into his looks, who is just now, at thirty-two, starting to look seriously handsome in a boy-next-door kind of way. The deep laughter lines and creases at the corners of his eyes always seemed slightly incongruous in his twenties, but now they suit him, make him look worldly, as if he’s been around the block a few times, which God knows he needed, because Josh was, still is, the straightest of all of us.
I remember Si and I going through our spliff phase just after university. Si would roll these tiny, tight little joints, and I would try to imitate them, ending up with Super Plus Tampons. We’d sit there, Si and I, rolling around on the floor and screaming with laughter, while Josh puffed away awkwardly, looking slightly perturbed that it wasn’t having the same effect.
‘No, no, Josh!’ Si would say, when the pair of us had recovered enough to actually breathe. ‘You have to inhale,’ and that would set us off again.
His only vice, if you can even dare to call it that, has been drink. First it was pints of Snakebite at university with the rugby team, then pints of lager with the City boys, and now it’s good bottles of claret with dinner.
‘Look!’ Josh says to Max, after rolling his eyes at me briefly. ‘Aunty Cath and Uncle Si! Do you want to give Aunty Cath a cuddle?’ he says brightly, swiftly passing Max to me.
‘No!’ wails Max, turning back to Josh with a look of sheer panic on his face. ‘I want Daddy!’
‘Come to Uncle Si,’ says Si soothingly, as he effortlessly lifts Max up and starts making him laugh immediately by pulling funny faces. ‘Shall we go upstairs and find Tinky Winky?’
Max nods his head vigorously, as Si disappears up the stairs, concentrating hard on Max, who is now chatting away merrily. Josh sighs and closes the door, wiping his forehead with the tea-towel, leaving a big splodge of what could be cream, or could be something that’s not worth thinking about, on the left side of his face.
‘Face,’ I say, gesturing to the cream, as Josh realizes and wipes it away.
‘And it’s lovely to see you too,’ he says, leaning down and giving me a hug. ‘Lucy’s in the kitchen and I’m supposed to be helping her, but Max has been a bugger today.’
‘Kids, eh?’ I sigh. ‘Who’d have ’em?’
‘Tell me about it,’ Josh says, but, tired as he looks tonight, I know that he adores Max, that although he might pretend to be unhappy about having to take Max out of Lucy’s hair, he secretly loves it. Josh loves the fact that he can be a little boy again, can play Cowboys and Indians, teach Max the basic rules about being a man.
Josh and Lucy live in a terraced Victorian house in a narrow street. It looks like nothing from the outside, but is, basically, a Tardis house, i.e., it looks tiny, but once you’re in, it’s enormous.
It is always messy, always noisy, and most of the activity is focused around the large kitchen at the rear, which wasn’t a large kitchen when they moved in two years ago, but, thanks to a smart conservatory extension, is now large enough for a huge dining table that usually has at least three people sitting round it, drinking coffee.
Tonight there is a man I don’t recognize sitting there, strange only because I know most of Josh and Lucy’s friends, and because I thought it was just going to be the four of us tonight.
Lucy has her back to us, chatting away, finishing an anecdote about work; she trained as an illustrator but seems to have done less and less since having Max. When she does have free time, she seems to spend it doing other things – displacement activity, Si always says. Her latest venture is a course in counselling, and I can hear, from the conversation, that the other person sitting at the table is from the course as well.
Lucy stops mid-sentence as she hears my footsteps. Her face lights up as she puts down the lethal-looking knife, and she gives me a huge hug, careful to keep her hands, currently covered with avocado, off my clothes.
Lucy is one of those people whose face always shines, despite not wearing any make-up. She is always radiant, sickeningly healthy-looking, always smiling, and is the best possible person to talk to if you ever have problems.
I love the fact that this is who Josh chose to marry. For a while Si and I were slightly terrified he was going to pop the question to one of an endless stream of identikit girls with streaky blonde hair, braying laughs and a lack of brain cells, but then he went and surprised us by falling madly in love with Lucy. Lucy, with her ruddy cheeks and raucous laugh, with her rounded figure in faded dungarees, with her winks as she ruffled Josh’s hair and told him, repeatedly, that she was built for comfort and not for speed. Lucy, whose maternal instincts were such they were almost oozing out of every pore, who gave birth to Max five months after their wedding.
I love hearing the story of how they met. It gives me hope. Josh hadn’t been working in the City long, when he met Lucy. He was, at the time, desperate to impress, and would spend his nights socializing with City boys who were very definitely not my type.
Josh tried to bring Si and I along a couple of times. I think he thought that if there were enough people going down to the pub, Si and I would just blend in. But of course we didn’t. I had nothing in common with the gaggle of silly little girls that hung on to their every word, and Si had even less with the boozy, macho traders who’d relax in their spare time by having drinking competitions and seeing who could ‘pull the best bird’.
A group of them decided to go off to France on a skiing trip one Christmas. They booked a chalet, and Josh came over one night and sat on my sofa, sighing over and over as he debated whether to bring his latest conquest.
‘I do really like Venetia,’ he sighed. ‘I just know she’s not The One, and I don’t know what to do. She’s already expecting to come, talking about going out to buy a new set of salopettes, but I’m worried she’ll spoil the fun.’
It turned out he meant that Venetia would curl up on his lap every evening, gazing up at him with big blue eyes, taking him by the hand and leading him to bed at nine o’clock, thus preventing him from debauched nights with the boys. Venetia, he said, was gorgeous. She was the perfect trophy girlfriend, and all his mates were green with envy.