‘Let’s be clear, Megan, I was at Fethering Library for his talk in the evening. I wasn’t actually there when he died.’
‘No, of course not.’
Again, there was an edge of scepticism in the voice. Jude was the last person in the world to get paranoid, but events of the last twenty-four hours had unsettled her deeply.
‘I think we ought to meet, Megan.’
‘As I said in my email, yes, I think we should.’
‘Where do you live now?’
‘Still in Morden.’
‘Oh.’
‘The same house. I got it as part of the divorce settlement.’
Jude didn’t have a car. Morden was the southernmost stop of the Northern Line. Trains from Fethering terminated at Victoria. ‘Probably make sense if we were to meet in London … what, for lunch maybe?’ she suggested.
‘I don’t go to London,’ said Megan.
‘What?’ Jude reminded herself that she was talking to Megan Georgeson, who at the height of her television fame was photographed at every first night and queened it into the small hours at the Groucho Club and Soho House. Her not going to London was inconceivable. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t go to London,’ Megan repeated with no further explanation.
‘Well, do you want me to come to the house?’
‘No, I don’t like people coming to the house. That’s an invasion of my privacy.’
Jude tried to keep the exasperation out of her voice as she asked, ‘Is there anywhere you would like to meet?’
‘There’s a restaurant in Morden called Ancient Persia. I go there quite often. The owners know me.’
‘So, shall we meet there?’
‘Very well.’ Megan made it sound as though she was making a big concession.
‘When? I think it should be as soon as possible.’
‘I agree.’
‘Tomorrow?’
There was a moment of hesitation from the other end of the line. ‘Yes, all right.’
‘Fine.’
‘One o’clock. Ancient Persia.’
Jude had a couple of healing sessions set up for the Thursday, but she rang the clients and rescheduled them. This was unusual. In her professional life, her loyalty to her clients was paramount. She knew how dependent they were on their regular therapy. That she took such action was a measure of how important she considered her meeting with Megan Sinclair to be.
There was probably an easier way to get from Fethering to Morden by public transport, but Jude didn’t investigate it. Carole, she knew would have done, but Jude was content to get the train from Fethering Station to Victoria, get to the southbound Northern Line and stay on the tube as far as it went.
She had taken a book with her, a treatise a friend had written about the relationship between the NHS and complementary medicine, but her gaze kept sliding off the page. She was tired; the last night had been a troubled one, though that wasn’t the only reason for her poor concentration. Thoughts whirled around her head in unaccustomed agitation. And for some reason, she felt worried about the forthcoming encounter with Megan. Her old friend’s manner on the phone had set up a barrier between them. And, though Jude was not a person to let grievances fester, she did not think their meeting was going to be an easy one.
Getting off at the underground station was familiar from the many times she’d made the journey to visit the newly married Sinclairs, but when she emerged she found herself in a slightly different Morden from the one of twenty years before. Then it had been a depressed, dreary outer suburb. But, as house prices in London rocketed, even well-heeled commuters found themselves having to move further away from the centre to find an affordable family house. Places like Morden were suddenly in danger of becoming trendy. The change hadn’t happened yet; it was a work in progress. Morden remained a depressed, dreary outer suburb, but one perhaps on the verge of gentrification.
Jude noticed a few more coffee shops and restaurants than there had been before. Some of them even had seats and tables outside, supporting England’s doomed attempt to recreate what people liked to call ‘café society’ (which will never quite work until there’s a change in the country’s weather). In January, the only people sitting outside were desperate cigarette-puffers driven there by the smoking ban.
The Ancient Persia was a sign of the change to come. It didn’t look ancient at all. Nor particularly Persian. But it did look very new. Apart from a couple of tall, non-functioning hookahs by way of set dressing, everything else was scrubbed wood, stainless steel and glass. It was one of the new wave of exotically ethnic restaurants that were invading all parts of London. Though giving the impression of individuality, most of them were parts of chains. Equally ‘individual’ Ancient Persias could be found in Shoreditch, Crouch End and Stoke Newington. The fact that one had opened in Morden was a very encouraging sign for the area. Waitrose might come next.
The first thing that struck Jude about Megan, already sitting at the table, was her size. It was at least twenty years since they had last met and Jude knew that the menopause could be cruel. She herself had put on the pounds, but nothing to compare with the scale on which Megan had. She had given up ‘waiflike’ for ‘tubby’. Her once ‘surprisingly’ blue eyes had sunk into rolls of flesh. No one now would speak of her ‘fragile beauty’ without irony. Nor, to be uncharitably accurate, would anyone speak of any kind of beauty. Megan Georgeson, having flitted for some years through the steamy dreams of so many male television viewers, in her fifties had transformed into a dumpy woman to whom no one would have given a second glance.
She didn’t rise to meet Jude. She stayed in her seat with a half-empty glass of wine in front of her. ‘Long time no see,’ she drawled, in what now sounded like a parody of her theatrical voice.
Jude followed her instinct and did what she would have done with any of her friends, arms round neck and a kiss. The gesture wasn’t made easier by the recipient’s seated immobility.
As Jude took her seat opposite, Megan said, ‘Well, there’s a lot more of you than when we last met.’
It wasn’t in Jude’s nature to snap back with a line about pots and kettles. Instead, she chuckled. ‘Which of us can resist the march of the years, eh?’
Megan laughed cynically and downed her remaining wine. ‘Must get some more of this. Do you drink red?’
‘Well, I usually—’
But her friend wasn’t listening. She waved to a purple-jacketed waiter who was taking the order from an adjacent table. ‘Cyrus,’ she called, and held her two hands apart at the height of a bottle. Cyrus nodded to acknowledge the order. Clearly Megan was a regular at the Ancient Persia. Also, it seemed, a regular drinker.
‘Still on the red wine, I see,’ Jude observed. ‘Al always liked his red wine, didn’t he?’
‘Red wine, beer, whisky. He liked everything alcoholic. Hardly ever left the house without his little hipflask of Scotch – but you remember that, don’t you, Jude?’
‘I’m not sure I—’
‘Of course you do.’ Megan reached for her glass and was disappointed to be reminded it was empty.
Jude was beginning to feel their conversation had got off on the wrong foot. So, perhaps belatedly, she said, ‘I suppose I should be offering you condolences about Al’s death.’
‘Why? He’s nothing to do with me. He hasn’t been anything to do with me for fifteen years.’
‘Maybe not, but—’
‘Anyway, why should I care what’s happened to the bastard? He screwed up my life pretty thoroughly. Five wasted years of marriage, and then I discovered the slime-ball was screwing everything in sight. I had a complete breakdown after the divorce – did you know that?’