he asked, while patting his pockets to double-check on keys, wallet, mobile phone. ‘Shall we go?’
‘But how do I look?’ Alice said, standing her ground a little petulantly. ‘Will they approve? Do you think I should wear a skirt instead?’
‘You look gorgeous,’ Mark assured her, congratulating himself on the earrings he’d bought her. ‘You look – brown?’
‘Thea did my fake tan,’ Alice said, with no embarrassment. ‘I felt a bit pale and peaky from my cold last week – I don’t want your mum to think you’re not looking after me. Do you think your parents will approve? Do you think they’ll like me? I hope your mum is a good cook – I’m starving.’
‘Of course they will,’ said Mark, ‘who wouldn’t. Come on. Mum’s Sunday Roast is legendary – but don’t touch the white wine. They only do Liebfraumilch.’
Gail Sinclair busied off to the kitchen to prepare the dessert, turning down Alice’s keen offer to help. Gail was delighted. Better still, she was charmed.
‘Charmed, absolutely charmed,’ she practised quietly to herself in the kitchen whilst decanting Marks & Spencer custard into a jug and carefully transferring their cherry Bakewell onto her best cake dish. Charmed, she continued in a whisper, Alice is delightful, Hazel. Absolutely winning to look at. A magazine person. She brought us copies – a real variety, Mary. She dotes on Mark, Carole – absolutely dotes on him. Chris and I couldn’t be more happy.
‘She’s a cracker,’ Chris Sinclair, who’d never mastered the art of the whisper, told his son; while Alice sat to his right and tried to look as though she wasn’t eavesdropping. Gail heard, even though she was at a clatter changing their everyday crockery for the best china. Chris thinks she’s a cracker, Joyce, and I know you’ll agree once you’ve met her.
Alice reckoned Chris to be in his mid-sixties, dapper despite the patterned sweater and corduroy slippers. Thinning silvery hair cut neatly, bright eyes, elegant hands and a healthy complexion due to his love of golf and gardening. She reckoned Gail to be five years younger, her hair cut into a short, neat style appropriate for her age, any grey expensively masked by an overall coppery sheen. While Mark talked to his father about PELS and Gail poured Marks & Spencer’s coulis into another jug, Alice thought how best to describe Mark’s parents and his childhood home to Thea. ‘Refreshingly nice,’ she would probably say, ‘just normal, nice people.’ She stifled giggles into her serviette, predicting how she and Thea would then analyse the mothers of boyfriends past. Callum’s mother who wore the same Whistles jeans as her own but a size smaller, Finlay’s mother who’d insisted Alice call her Mrs Jones despite allowing them to sleep together. Tom’s mother who was insanely jealous of his affection for Alice and would thus drape herself over him quite alarmingly for the duration of their visits. But Mark’s parents seemed to be simply nice, ordinary people.
‘You look like your dad,’ Alice suddenly announced though it momentarily halted conversation and fixed Gail’s cake slice mid-air. Alice was happy to predict that in thirty years or so, the man seated opposite her, whom she was soon to marry, would look a little like the gentleman currently seated to her left.
Charmed, Gail thought to herself again, charmed.
Chris and Mark browsed the Sunday papers while Gail poured coffee and Alice effervesced over the beauty of their garden.
‘God, I completely love your verbena.’
‘Viburnum,’ Gail corrected lightly. ‘Have you a garden?’
‘Well, at the moment, I’m restricted to what the lifestyle mags call patio living,’ Alice said. ‘It’s basically a small, glorified back yard covered with cream gravel and pots with plants that die on me on an annual basis. And twisty wire furniture that looks amazing, cost a bloody fortune and is bloody uncomfortable.’
Gail looked at Alice without expression at much the same time that Alice thought to herself shit! Is ‘bloody’ swearing? And Mark jerked up from the Sunday Times thinking oh shit, she bloody swore.
‘Perhaps once you’re married, you’ll find a house with a garden,’ Gail said diplomatically. ‘Herbaceous borders pretty much look after themselves and perennials do just what they’re meant to do.’ She took a thoughtful sip of coffee. ‘They needn’t be expensive either.’ See, no need for ‘bloody’.
‘Lovely idea,’ said Alice warmly, helping herself to another chocolate because she noted that Gail was on her third.
‘Now, I want to hear all about the proposal,’ Gail said expectantly, ‘all the romantic details.’
‘Mum –’ Mark remonstrated, raising his eyebrow at his father for sympathy and assistance.
‘Did he get down on bended knee?’ Gail asked. ‘Did he take you to a restaurant and have the maître d’ present you with a diamond ring?’ Mark groaned but Alice giggled. She thought Gail probably had the makings of a rather good mother-in-law. ‘Perhaps he whisked you off to Venice for the weekend and popped the question aboard a gondola?’
‘Last week,’ Alice grinned over to Mark who was attempting to disappear behind the Sunday Times, ‘at Mark’s flat. He was cooking that amazing chorizo and butterbean casserole thing with the six cloves of garlic. We had a glass of Rioja. I was eating a carrot.’
Gail had never been a fan of garlic, let alone Spanish peasant fare, but she tried to look enthusiastic.
‘It struck me, it simply struck me that it was the best idea ever,’ Alice said dreamily.
‘Yes, but how was the question itself popped?’ Gail persisted. ‘Mark’s father whisked me to Paris expressly to propose.’
Alice grinned. ‘It was quite matter of fact, actually,’ she said, ‘I had to turn down the radio to be heard. It all made such perfect sense. Even though I had a mouth full of carrot, I just looked at Mark and said “Marry me, Mark, marry me.” He looked at me as if he was having difficulty understanding my language. So I swallowed the carrot, repeated the question and added “please”. Still he stared. And then he said yes.’
Gail stared at Alice as if she had difficulty understanding her language. Chris just stared. ‘What’s that on your shirt?’ Gail exclaimed, looking horrified. ‘On the collar and cuffs? It’s brown.’
‘What?’ Alice looked at her collar and cuffs. ‘Oh bugger!’ she declared. ‘It’s fake tan. I’ll bloody kill Thea.’
‘Do you think they liked me?’ Alice asked Mark as they drove away.
‘Of course,’ Mark assured her, concentrating on the road, biting his tongue on being cut up by a man with a sharp haircut driving a car that was obviously meant to look like a Porsche but was glaringly not. Alice gazed out of the car. She pressed her cheek against the passenger window. She needn’t have had the fake tan – the wine at lunchtime, the effort of being on best behaviour had made her feel quite warm. She looked at the trees, some bursting into leaf, others in full blossom. She’d learn the names of lots of plants by the time she next met Mark’s parents. And she’d try not to swear.
Saul Mundy had assumed he’d buy a sensible two-bedroom house in a popular postcode, take out a mortgage with Emma and have a leg-up onto the London property ladder. He had been thinking about Brondesbury or Tufnell Park or Ealing as safe bets. But then he hadn’t been thinking about breaking up with Emma. Twelve hours after the relationship ended, Saul signed a short let on a top-floor space in central London, a location he’d previously never considered as residential. It was uncompromisingly open plan, and he reckoned the landlord had probably marketed it variously as office space, storage space, apartment or studio according to the potential tenant’s requirements. Saul chanced upon it en route to a meeting in Baker Street and rented it because