To look at her, you’d never guess Anna could face down a classroom full of hormonal teenagers and convince them that poems actually mean things. Five foot nothing in bare feet, she wore her peroxide-pale hair in a 1960s-style crop. This framed a heart-shaped face with a pretty button nose, pink rosebud lips and bright-blue almond-shaped eyes.
Some bloke in a bar had called Anna ‘Tinkerbell’ once, and Rachel remembered she’d all but eviscerated him. Anna liked to think of herself as ‘not small, but concentrated’. Those who knew her well considered this an apt description.
Wordlessly, Tom handed Rachel a wine glass and poured a large measure into it. Rachel had always thought him very different to Will, who – despite his good nature – could generally be expected to put his foot in his mouth.
Nevertheless, they were as close as she and Anna, and also lived together. Will and Tom had known each other since school, and Rachel imagined that Tom – the former state primary kid who’d won an academic scholarship – had probably been a steadying influence on his friend during their teenage years.
Tom wasn’t unusually sedate or shy but he always seemed calm and composed in comparison with Will, whose gambolling cheerfulness – along with his broad body, thick beard and seemingly permanent smile – put Rachel in mind of a young, rugby-playing Father Christmas.
Like Will, Tom was tall, but he was leaner. With dirty-blonde hair and grey-blue eyes that were often obscured by Clark Kentish heavy-framed glasses, he looked intelligent and sort of artistic, though Rachel doubted this was deliberate.
She took a long drink, then sighed as the rich ruby liquid warmed her throat.
‘Caning it because of the ads, Rach?’ Will asked.
‘No, I couldn’t care less about the stupid ads,’ Rachel snorted. ‘They’re propaganda of the patriarchy. However, I do have a meeting scheduled for 9 a.m. tomorrow during which I’ll need to convince my colleague that we can’t make cauliflowers “sexy”.’
‘In addition to that,’ Anna said as she stirred the pan, ‘she’s scared to tell her mum she’s split up with Laurence.’
Rachel considered refuting this accusation, then decided not to bother. ‘Yes, that is also true,’ she sighed.
‘Surely your mum won’t mourn the loss of Loz too deeply?’ Tom asked, smiling mischievously at Rachel from his seat on the other side of the dining table.
‘Benice,’ Rachel said, but grinned back in spite of herself. Will and Tom had frequently been unkind about Laurence behind his back, and Tom had taken pleasure in calling him Loz whenever they met – a nickname he utterly hated. Her friends were right, however: Laurence was terminally dull, and Rachel’s attempts to find him interesting and attractive had ended in abject failure.
‘Mum just takes it very personally whenever I break up with someone,’ she continued. ‘She seems to think that, while I remain alone and unmarried, my personal stock plummets with every year that goes by. So, as we begin another year with no big white dress or canapés in sight, I’m sure we can all agree this is quite a difficult time for her.’
Tom threw his head back, laughing from his belly. Rachel felt gratified, then guilty: her mum did find Christmas and its aftermath difficult, as she and her friends all knew – though not for the reasons she’d just outlined.
‘Anyway,’ Rachel said, pushing the thought to one side, ‘Laurence wasn’t perfect but he’s nowhere near as awful as some ofyourex-girlfriends.’
‘I resent that!’ Tom cried, fully aware that she was right.
‘Princess Penny,’ Will pretend-coughed, carrying two plates of steaming spaghetti and sauce over to the table. ‘EvenIthought she was bougie.’
As the grandson of a knighted supermarket magnate, Will had grown up with the kind of wealth and privilege that Rachel struggled to comprehend – but he had the grace to acknowledge his good fortune, regularly sending himself up as a posh twat while trying very hard not to be one.
‘She bought him a subscription toTatler, you know.Tatler!Two years on and it’s still being delivered to our flat every month.’
Rachel and Anna dissolved into hysterics at the thought of Tom, who’d spent his student days selling theSocialist Worker, reading glossy magazine features about lesser members of the royal family.
They only stopped giggling when the urge to eat became irresistible.
Later, Rachel and Tom washed up all the stuff that wouldn’t fit into the dishwasher while Will and Anna watched trash TV in the sitting room.
Rachel was sporting a pair of neon-pink rubber gloves, which Tom had wisely handed over without argument. She loathed drying up, and whenever they shared clean-up duty he accepted his fate was to wield a tea towel instead of the scouring sponge.
‘Tell me to shut up if you like,’ he said as she handed him a clean salad bowl to dry. ‘I don’t want to upset you, but … are you sure you’re okay?’
This was another difference between Tom and Will, Rachel thought. She considered them both close friends, but Tom was sensitive to other people’s feelings and reactions: subtle and perceptive in a way that Will was not.
As she scrubbed the last smears of tomato sauce from the bolognese pan, rinsed and then handed it to him, she decided to tell him the truth.
‘I’m not sure, to be honest. I mean, obviously I’m fed up of my mum going on at me about settling down with someone. But I should probably be nicer to her … I should at least answer my phone.’
Tom nodded, perhaps more to show he was listening than to agree that she ought to feel bad.
‘And maybe she has a point, anyway. She keeps on about Anna and Will moving in together. They clearly have a future. Whereas who knows where I’m going to be in two years’ time, or five? Still on my own writing copy about vegetables for a living if I’m not careful … Plus I’ve beenslightlyperturbed by the bus ads,’ she added quickly, before Tom could interject with anything too nice about her employability or chances of finding a life partner. Rachel was suddenly aware that excessive kindness might make her cry, and she didn’t want to end up sobbing and snotting all over Tom’s sweater.