Can We Still Be Friends (28 page)

Annie recounted the call to Lee now, leaving out the bit about Charlie.

‘And what about Sal and Kendra? What have they said?’

‘I haven’t told them yet. I keep meaning to, but it’s difficult. I know I’m married and they aren’t, but having a baby is such a big difference. It’s going to change everything, and I suppose a bit of me keeps putting off telling them. I’d sort of like them to know without actually having to tell them. I know they’ll want to be pleased’ – she swirled the small quantity of champagne around in her glass – ‘but I’m not sure they really will be.’

Lee looked at her in the spaceship of a kitchen. Annie’s softness seemed out of place in its metallic harshness. The old flat where she used to live was far more her. In this new life, it was as if she was
orbiting above them and looking down from a distance. He hoped she’d be all right when she landed.

The drinkers started to trickle into the Bank straight from the office. Paddy and Marcus, the bar’s owners, were desperate for Annie to fix a write-up in the
Evening
Standard
, which, she had pointed out, might take time, since they’d only recently run a City round-up. Before she’d married she would have fancied Paddy, who had a taut ex-Sandhurst physique camouflaged in the mufti of an entrepreneur: loose jackets, jeans, the occasional tie.

In that afternoon’s meeting, though, she had told them that the idea of giving the place over for an evening to readers of
Ms London
was terrible – the positioning was all wrong. ‘You don’t want to get into that bridge and tunnel thing.
Ms London
’s free to every secretary crossing London Bridge, and that’s not very cool.’

By 6.30 the bar was three deep. She’d suggested Sal get there earlier so they would have time for a proper chat before she had to meet Charlie, but there was still no sign of her. Thank God that, today, she felt OK. Perhaps she was reaching the good bit she’d read you got to after twelve weeks, although her breasts were uncomfortably swollen. Now she knew what Kendra had been talking about when she complained about hers getting so big and painful before her period. Charlie was enjoying them, though. He had arrived home the other night with some exotic bras that made her look like a Playboy bunny. But she didn’t feel at all like sex at the moment. Her body was a tabernacle entrusted with this precious charge, not something for Charlie to tinker around with.

As she sat at the bar she watched the guy opposite pressing buttons on his bulky rectangular phone before holding it to his ear. You saw those new phones around the City more than anywhere else. He must be struggling to hear above the music. Everywhere she went at the moment she heard ‘West End Girls’. The Pet Shop Boys weren’t her cup of tea, but she knew Lee was a fan. She’d lost count of the times she’d heard him tell the story about meeting Neil Tennant.

Eventually, she saw Sal push through the doors, arriving at the table with a gabbled greeting. ‘Sorry, sorry. It got crazy at work and I had to make all these calls. But I’m not that late, am I? It was six thirty, wasn’t it?’

‘It was six, actually, but it’s fine. It’s just that I have to meet Charlie at eight. Let’s order. Have what you like, it’s on expenses.’ She handed over the menu, with its complicated graphic on the cover, a mélange of pound and dollar motifs.

‘Sure. Like the ashtrays. Clever idea to have them in a pound sign.’

Annie wondered how to bring up the pregnancy topic. It seemed so incongruous in this noisy, brittle place filled with the energy of escape from the office. Instead, she asked Sal whether she had found anywhere to live. ‘I’m camping. Ollie says he knows a bloke being sent to Washington for six months and there may be a room in his place coming up. If I could only get a promotion, then I could think about buying. Everybody says I ought to try and buy. But I’d need to find a deposit of at least five thousand pounds, as well as being able to pay the mortgage.’

‘That would be great for you, if you could manage it. I think we’re going to move soon.’

‘Why would you? I thought the flat was pretty amazing.’ Sal contrasted the sleek interiors Annie and Charlie inhabited with Pete’s room, with its lino on the floor and the broken lava lamp by the bed.

‘Because I’m pregnant.’ Annie spoke quickly, looking down, rather than at her friend.

‘But that’s wonderful.’ Sal didn’t miss a beat. ‘You must be so pleased. It’s what you’ve always wanted. It must make you feel like there’s someone up there saying, “Go, girl, you did the right thing.” I mean about getting hitched. It’s happened so quickly.’

‘Yes, you’re so right.’ Annie’s eyes welled up in reaction to the warmth of Sal’s response, guilty that she could ever have doubted that her friend would be pleased for her. ‘That’s exactly it. Oh, rats.’ She smudged away the tears. ‘The whole pregnancy thing does
something crazy with your hormones.’ How could she have thought Sal would be cross or disapproving? After all, she knew her better than almost anyone.

Sal happily downed two champagne cocktails in celebration, even encouraged by Annie, who told her that it would be a great help if she did, since Paddy kept asking her if she’d taste them and give an opinion, and she really couldn’t face it, being pregnant. By the time the second one was finished Sal was confiding in Annie that her relationship with Pete had become something more substantial than the odd night.

‘It’s weird, because I never wanted to end up with a boyfriend back in the sticks, and when it started it was just for a laugh. But I guess it’s kind of nice having someone that you really know to hang out with, especially with work being so full on. When I’m with Pete it’s just not complicated. But I know it’s not something proper, like you and Charlie.’

‘You don’t ever know how things are going to turn out. When I first met Charlie it wasn’t like I thought I’d met my husband. In fact, I probably thought about it less than I had with most of my boyfriends. I suppose that was because he was so keen so quickly; it made the dynamics different. And look what’s happened.’ She glanced at her watch. Charlie hated her to be late.

‘I was thinking,’ Sal said, sticking her finger into the bottom of the glass, where champagne- and brandy-soaked granules of sugar remained, ‘that bloke Mark, Charlie’s best man. He told me at the wedding that Charlie is involved in some deals in Kentish Town. Do you think he might know anything about the people that are trying to get Kendra and Gioia out of the Chapel?’

‘He might. I can ask him tonight. It’s just the kind of thing he may know. I’d heard about the problems with the Chapel – isn’t the roof falling down too? But I don’t remember Charlie ever mentioning Kentish Town. Not that he talks much about work to me.’ Annie waved at the barman to bring the bill. ‘I wish I could stay all evening, but I’ve got to go in a minute. The downside of marriage’ – she laughed – ‘not being able to do what you want all the time. We’ll
have a proper girls’ night soon. We haven’t been able to really talk for ages.’

It was true, thought Sal. There was masses to talk about. For a moment she was irritated. Surely Annie could have managed just one evening alone with her friend.

Annie would have much preferred to go home and have a boiled egg, but Charlie hated to go without proper meals. He always wanted dinner, even if they’d both had lunch. As she became more senior at work, lunches had become a greater part of the working day. Clients liked to talk business over at least two courses and a bottle of wine, sometimes more, and sometimes didn’t even talk much business. The size of the bill was the measure of the value of the meeting. Most of the time she was charging it back to them anyway. She’d got so used to paying that sometimes she handed over the American Express card without even checking the total.

She found Charlie in the corner of San Fred’s making notes in the pocket Filofax she had put in his Christmas stocking.

‘I’d been getting a bit worried about you, darling,’ he said.

‘Terrible traffic.’ Annie picked up the menu, even though she knew that Charlie would order the osso bucco and she would have Parma ham and melon. After the meeting with Paddy and Marcus, and then telling Sal about the baby, she felt exhausted. When the meat arrived Charlie immersed himself in the excavation of the bone for the marrow, finally looking up at her to notice the dark under her eyes.

‘You look tired. We should start to think about what you’re going to do about the job once it gets nearer the time of the birth.’ He paused. ‘We might want to rethink even earlier than that. After all, you won’t want to be trailing out to wine bars on the river, heavily pregnant.’

In her worn-out state Annie didn’t want to engage in this particular conversation, knowing that it would lead to Charlie’s opinion, frequently aired, that she should stop work once she had become a mother. She knew that he wanted her to be happy, but he
didn’t seem to understand that she enjoyed her job. She was becoming annoyed by the way he often made it sound as if it were pointless. She wasn’t only ‘trailing out to wine bars’. She had her own accounts, managed budgets and clients and gave presentations. Although she had always thought that she wanted to be married and have children and that she wasn’t interested in a career, Annie knew that she had become very good at her job. She now had a real sense of pride in what she did. She had been surprised at the feeling of achievement small things like negotiating a better rate from a client or ensuring that a product was featured in not just one but all the weekend colour supplements gave her. She wasn’t at all sure she wanted to give it up, just when it had started to be fun.

‘Babe, let’s not talk about it now. We’ve got months. Can you get me a Coke? That might wake me up.’ Annie didn’t feel much like talking about anything, but if it would help Kendra to ask Charlie about the Chapel she should do it now. ‘By the way, Sal asked whether you might know anything about a consortium that’s trying to get Gioia out of the Chapel so they can develop it. She said that Mark had mentioned you might know something about it.’ As she spoke, she realized that words like ‘develop’ and ‘consortium’ had become part of her vocabulary.

‘Chapel?’

‘Come on.’ He must know what she was talking about. ‘The centre Gioia runs with Kendra. I’ve mentioned it millions of times.’

‘Oh yes. That place.’ Charlie scraped every scrap of creamy potato from his plate as if it were the last time he would ever taste such a delicacy. ‘Yes. As it happens, I do. It’s in the Charterhouse scheme. We’ve got three firms pitching to include some juicy apartment blocks, a shopping mall and some cheap housing.’

The smells of the food, her tiredness and the knowledge that what Charlie had said was a big problem made Annie break out into a sweat. If Charlie was part of a team that was trying to evict Gioia, how could she possibly explain that to Kendra? Heaven knows, London was a huge city. Why did he have to be involved
with their place? She should try and talk to him about it, but she was simply too tired right now to say anything that would be effective. All she wanted was to be asleep in bed, she thought, watching Charlie as he pushed around the smears of gravy on his plate.

Sal was furious. It wasn’t as if there wasn’t any proper news. There were all kinds of stories she could get her teeth into, if only the paper would let her. There was the whole Aids awareness thing where it looked like the government was dragging its heels, and she wouldn’t have minded working on the debate over women bishops. But what had they given her? A rubbish piece on how the recently engaged Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson were managing. She thought she’d left the royal stuff behind. It wasn’t like she had ever wanted to be a royal correspondent. Yes, it was better than the story last week about the mad woman in Kent who had left £25,000 to her two pugs. But it was a close thing.

She ran to catch the bus, flinging herself on to the platform before it moved off. For some reason, she hadn’t been feeling right recently and, even though she’d never been a morning person, at the moment she was completely wiped out when the alarm went off, even if she’d been to bed early the night before. Maybe Kendra and Annie were right and she should do something about the drink. Go on a health kick and get vitamins and stuff.

Last weekend, she had walked with Kendra around the ponds on Hampstead Heath, where her friend had shown her some of the trees she would play in as a small child, before the Rootsteins had moved to Notting Hill. There was a horse chestnut tree with a deep indentation in the trunk where Kendra remembered hiding.

Sal always felt a foreigner on the Heath, just a moment away from being completely lost. The young families, elderly couples and kite-flying kids all seemed to have been there for ever but it made her feel more a newcomer to the city than any of the shops or restaurants ever did. She picked up a stone from the path, hurling it as far as she could towards the thicket.

‘So, what you’re saying is that, when it comes down to it, Charlie’s trying to chuck me and Gioia out of the Chapel?’ Kendra was wrapped in some blanket that even covered her head, which was not a bad idea, since it was freezing.

‘No, I’m not saying that. Not exactly. When Annie told me, she said that there are lots of different people involved in this group, this consortium, and they haven’t got it all sorted yet. But it’s true he’s definitely involved in some way.’

‘I thought he was dodgy from the first time we met. He looks like a guy who irons his underpants. How could Annie marry him? I know he makes her feel safe, but there are tons out there she could have picked.’

‘I don’t think she did pick him. He picked her. But what does it matter? You can’t fall out with her over this. I know you don’t like him, and he’s not my favourite biscuit in the tin either, but he’s part of her now, and so we’ve got to deal with it.’

‘I like that. You being so Miss Reasonable. If you were in my shoes, you’d be ranting. I don’t think you have any idea how miserable Gioia is about this. If you did, you’d understand how much it means to me. If that place goes, I don’t know what will happen.’ Kendra stopped as they reached the top of a slope where you could look out over the city, the distinctive buildings of the skyscape turning into a blurred mass of greys and blues as they stretched on towards the hills on the far horizon. ‘There must be something you can do. Come on. You’re a journalist. Aren’t you meant to be a campaigner? To have influence? I know the Chapel isn’t a huge story, but isn’t there something there?’