getting desperate. He needn’t have worried. Leila looked right past the discoloured walls, and due to her height, the low sloping ceiling in the galley kitchen didn’t even make her duck. As soon as she’d glimpsed the private garden leading off the bedroom she was sold. It was a walled courtyard more than a garden, but in Leila’s mind it already had trellises of trailing wisteria and honeysuckle. She imagined vibrant earthenware pots adorning every ledge and a small raised bed with a herb garden. And now, two months after she moved in, it had exactly that. The patches of damp had been gotten rid of too, and whitewashed walls made the formerly neglected cellar bright and welcoming. There was just about room for a double bed in the bedroom, but little else, so she’d designed a double bed on six foot stilts and one of the craftsmen at work had made it for her. So she ascended a ladder to bed every night, freeing up the whole of the floor space underneath for her desk that was placed in the middle of the room looking out onto the garden.
Her shopping bags made a loud clunk as Leila dumped them onto the kitchen work surface reminding her almost too late of the two bottles of wine that were in them. She then set about making the salad and marinating the chicken that she was going to serve her sister Tasha for lunch when she arrived.
It was the first time Tasha had seen the flat, despite only living two stops down the tube line. But when one of you owns a basement shoebox in Bayswater and the other a five-bedroom, three-storey townhouse on High Street Kensington, of course you’d choose to dine at the latter. But Leila wouldn’t take no for an answer this time. Apart from the disastrous two years she’d lived with her ex-boyfriend Luke, whose table habits were so vile she never invited anyone round, she’d always shared her kitchen with an endless stream of flatmates, who commandeered every available pan or plate come meal time. This was, and it made her feel ashamed to admit it, the first time she’d cooked for her sister in thirty-two years.
The knocker sounded. That was another purchase that made Leila feel very grown up. One of the first things she’d done after moving in was take a screwdriver to the shrill doorbell and ceremoniously bin it, replacing it with a smart brass knocker like the one the Banks family had in Mary Poppins.
‘Welcome, welcome to my humble abode,’ Leila wrapped her sister in a big hug and stood to one side to give Tasha enough room to squeeze through the door.
‘Ooooo, I am loving the hair! Amazing! You’re actually really pretty! And this is so quaint! And the neighbourhood isn’t as rough as I thought it would be.’
‘I’m sure there’s a compliment in there somewhere Tash!’
Her sister laughed, ‘Sorry, that came out completely wrong, let me rephrase. I just mean, wow, you look incredible, it’s really nice around here, and from what I’m seeing of your flat while standing on the doormat, it looks really lovely.’
‘I would say that it’s bigger than it looks, but after the tour which will take all of, oh, seven seconds, you’ll know that’s not true.’ Leila ushered her older sister into the living room, which was lined with books and pictures. Big vibrant canvases jostled for position next to black and white photographs, and vintage movie posters.
‘It’s very you.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning, your personality shines through everywhere you look. I love it.’ And Tasha meant it. She hadn’t had much of an input at all into the decoration of her own home. As a well-meaning surprise, her husband Alex had thrown an obscene amount of money at one of London’s most well-connected interior designers who had transformed the once tired townhouse into a glittering show home. The end result was stunning, just if not exactly to her taste; but there was no way she could have acted anything other than over-awed and incredibly grateful at the big reveal, such were Alex’s good intentions.
Tasha ran a finger along the spines of Leila’s books – even having books on display would be wonderful, but Patricia-the-designer said they would look untidy and mess up her scheme. Her scheme. So, what books they had were hidden behind the ‘concealed storage’ doors. Apart from the massively heavy hardback book on Chanel that was gathering dust on the big glass coffee table. Glass. In a house with three kids in it. That was a clever purchase Patricia.
‘Honestly Leila, this is perfect for you, it’s just beautiful.’ Tasha said as they stepped out into the garden. Leila had flicked the outdoor gas heater into life and despite it being early February, it was a beautifully crisp day. Tasha didn’t need too much persuading to celebrate it being a Saturday without her kids by indulging in a glass or two of the champagne she’d brought with her. She reached over and touched her sister’s wine glass with hers. ‘I’m buying you champagne flutes as a housewarming present by the way.’
‘But I don’t drink champagne normally.’
‘Well then, at least you’ll have them ready for the next time I come over,’ Tasha smiled. The sisters were sat at the little round white wrought iron table in the garden. What was left of the afternoon’s sunlight was dappling the flagstones with specks of light. ‘You seem very together, considering.’
‘Considering, what?’ asked Leila.
‘Freddie. I know you liked him.’
‘Not anymore.’
‘Well no, obviously, but it’s ok to be honest with yourself and grieve for a future you’re not going to have.’
‘Wow, a future I’m not going to have! Alright, Ms Doom and Gloom, I’m not terminally ill!’
‘I know! I just mean, I know you, and in your head you’d have arrived in India thinking that he was going to twirl you around until your feet left the floor’ – at this, Leila looked a little sheepish – ‘before he booked the rest of the week off work and whisked you to the Taj Mahal where you’d get photographed on the same bench where Princess Diana sat, and then he’d take you to a Maharaja’s palace where he’d booked a candlelit meal on a roof terrace festooned with fairy lights, which is where he’d propose. Am I close?’
Leila stuck her nose in the air. ‘Not remotely.’
‘I had it spot on, didn’t I?’
There was no point pretending otherwise to her sister, she could always see straight through her.
‘But he wasn’t right for you Leila,’ Tasha continued earnestly. ‘You do this, you hop from boyfriend to boyfriend, pinning unrealistic expectations onto each of them. Writing the script in your head of what you want them to say and how you want them to act, and if you keep doing that you’ll always end up being disappointed.’
‘Ok, oh wise one. How have you stayed married to Alex all these years then? What’s the secret to finding and keeping the right one?’ That stopped Tasha in her tracks. Running through Tasha’s mind was the old predicament, to tell the truth or the heavily edited soft-focus version she usually wheeled out. The trouble was, Leila was the only one in the family who knew exactly how she and Alex got together seventeen years ago, and had kept the secret too, so fobbing her off with platitudes almost never worked. If their parents ever found out that their daughter had been Alex’s mistress for a couple of years and was the reason for the breakdown of his marriage they’d be horrified. They didn’t even know their son-in-law had been married before, let alone that he’d got Tasha pregnant which is why he had to divorce his first wife to marry her. But, that was fifteen years ago, so absolutely no point raking it all up now.
‘Top me up before I answer that,’ Tasha held out her empty glass, ‘and can I just say how impressed I am that you have an ice bucket.’
‘Thank you. Now stop changing the subject. You and Alex, what’s your secret?’
Tasha sighed. ‘Oh God Leila, I don’t know. We don’t expect too much from each other I guess.’
‘That’s romantic.’
Tasha laughed. ‘I mean, we don’t conjure up ideals that we know the other one can’t live up to. We just get on with it, and have a lovely life, and don’t think too much about the stuff we can’t change.’