a low oak beam. He lifts his arm and wafts his empty pint glass above the heads of several people already waiting at the bar.
‘Yep, I’ve still got the famous left foot.’ Mike can hear the deep tone of David’s voice from the bar despite the clamour of the heaving pub. ‘I’ll be there on Sunday as usual. Of course they’d be lost without me. Are you having another? I’ll get you one in.’
David can never hide for long, the boom of his voice betrays him. The benefit and the curse of a private education, Mike has decided.
‘Another two pints of your best, Mrs L. You’re looking as beautiful as ever, might I say? Off to Barbados for Christmas as usual?’
Mike turns his glass in his hand, wondering if he’ll finish this pint, let alone another. The conversation drifts around him. ‘Mrs L’ is so David. She’s Misty to everyone else, flame-haired bar manager and wife of the affable and obese landlord, Seamus. For a moment he wonders whether Misty is her real name – it seems such a cliché for a woman who once was a model of some sort but whose battle with the booze is evident from the slur of her voice to the tremor of her expensively ringed fingers.
‘So you were thirsty,’ David says, back in his seat. Mike’s pint glass is empty. ‘Been off with the fairies again, Mikey?’
Mike shakes his head, laughs and wonders where he’s been without the dog, the black dog of depression, christened when it first snuck up on him at sixteen.
A black dog, he thinks, not a stork.
‘Probably,’ he smiles, shaking the unwelcome thought away. ‘How’s Antonia?’
‘Fine, she’s fine,’ David answers, glancing towards the bar, the sparkle back in his bright blue eyes. ‘At home with a DVD and guacamole. Jennifer Aniston’s my bet. Actually Mikey, I wanted to ask you. Her birthday’s coming up and I want to buy her something special, maybe something different for a change. Got any ideas? What would you buy Olivia?’
Mike scratches his chin, still smooth from its second shave of the day. He laughs. ‘You mean, what do you buy the woman who has everything?’
‘He treats her like a bloody doll,’ his wife Olivia often remarks, spot on as ever. The statement reminds him of a cardboard dolly set his sister was given one Christmas. She asked him to play, and despite his desire to try out his new bicycle in the biting Irish winter outside, he knelt beside her and joined in the game at the warm kitchen table, detaching the paper outfits from the booklet, the dresses, the hats, the scarves and the shoes, then dressing the doll in different designs for each season of the year.
‘I’m serious, Mikey.’ David interrupts his thoughts. ‘What would you buy Olivia?’
Mike takes a swig of his beer, then wipes the rim of the glass with his thumb. David’s assumption that their respective wives fall into any remotely similar category makes him smile to himself.
‘Vain and vacant. The sort of woman I can’t stand,’ Olivia said of Antonia after meeting her for the first time at one of David and Antonia’s dinner parties. ‘But as it happens, she’s nice and I like her, which is really annoying.’
So what would he buy Olivia? What had he bought her last time? Mike can’t remember, probably something she’d asked for, but then they don’t make a fuss of their own birthdays, preferring to concentrate on their two lovely girls.
And there it is: like Winston Churchill’s dog, his own black dog of despair, bounding back into the pub and sitting by him. Close, comfortable and devastating. He hears his own voice not long after it happened, trying for rationality: ‘I didn’t even know him. It could have been so much worse.’
There are times when Mike wonders if he’s spoken aloud, made his words to the dog public. For a moment he’s forgotten the question, but he’s saved from an answer; David has turned towards the door.
‘What bloody time do you call this?’ he bellows, standing up and gesticulating towards the bar. Mike looks at his watch. It’s getting on for last orders but Sami Richards grins and shrugs, holding out his palms in a dismissively apologetic gesture. Elegant and handsome, he strolls past the Friday regulars clustered at the bar, the turned-up collar of his black leather jacket matching the sheen of his skin.
‘Why does he always look as though he’s walked off the page of a fucking magazine?’ David says, a little too aggressively, as he turns back towards Mike. He knocks back his pint, ready to get in more drinks.
‘Things to do, people to see,’ Sami replies easily as David walks away. He takes off his jacket and leans over the table to shake Mike’s hand, careful as always not to catch his crisp cuff on the spillages. ‘Hey, man, I bumped into Pete on site the other day. Sends his regards. He mentioned the Boot Room.’
Mike smiles. Bloody hell, yes, the Boot Room. It’s what they named Sami’s tiny office when they were working together as trainee surveyors. A happy memory. Before responsibility, marriage, kids. They’d spent lunchtimes in there: football talk over sandwiches, crisps and Coke in their city-centre office building, no women allowed.
‘Was he wearing his Liverpool cufflinks?’
‘Didn’t catch the cufflinks. But he’s just bought a Porsche 911. Lucky sod.’
‘Better dash out and buy one, Sami,’ David says, arriving back at the table with three pints and a whisky chaser. The whisky looks like a double.
‘Might just do that, David, my man. A call here and there. You never know. Are you still driving that tank? Nought to eighty in three minutes?’
Mike watches them quietly. He’s never quite worked it out, their friendship, if that’s what it is. Happy-go-lucky, water-off-a-duck’s-back, is David. Except when it comes to Sami. The barbed comments, the occasional belligerence. He becomes a different person.
Perhaps they’re a little too alike, he thinks. In their late thirties, both from wealthy families, successful in their careers. Married to childhood friends Sophie and Antonia. Both childless. But there the similarities end. David sits back and lets wealth and fortune fall into his lap, whereas Sami’s a hunter, a person who never rests on his laurels; he’s always searching for something bigger, something better.
From the day they first met fifteen years ago, Mike had detected Sami’s restlessness. He changed cars and hairstyles like a chameleon, but then, he could afford to. Yet as Mike gazes at him now, he seems happier, more grounded than ever before. Perhaps he’s reached a plateau in life, a level of contentment which can be sustained for longer than usual. He hopes so; he likes Sami very much. Sami’s one of the good guys.
He shakes himself back to the conversation, picks up his glass of Guinness, murky and dark beneath its creamy facade, and feels the dog’s gentle nudge at his side.
Antonia loves the silence of the countryside, the tranquility of her and David’s large home. It still feels pure and new. Yet she allows the telephone beside the bed to ring, insistent, loud and shrill, without answering. It’s late and she’s sleepy, drifting contentedly in and out of the final chapter of Wuthering Heights, another Brontë novel she should have read as a child.
She knows who’s fruitlessly holding on at the other end of the telephone. Most people call her on her mobile, but years ago she decided to hold back from giving the number to her mother. It made her feel guilty. It still makes her feel mean. But it helps her feel free of the past. Just a little.
‘I think it’s Monday so I’m coming over for a coffee,’ Sophie says, sounding groggy. ‘Put the kettle on.’
It’s what Sophie always says when she phones. Not, ‘Are you in, are you busy, is it all right?’ She expects Antonia to be in whenever she chooses to turn up.
It slightly irritated Antonia