Page 13 of Cover Story

The legendary Bel Macauley was tonight in a belted navy dress with flared skirt, and scarlet suede ankle boots. Her hefty quantity of caramel hair was again bird’s nested and coiled into a sloppy approximation of a bun, kirby grips stabbed at haphazard points in its mass.

The outfit looked to Connor still woefully closer to ‘Sunday brunch’ than ‘Lois Lane’ but it was leagues better than thefell out of bed like thislook of Monday. Perhaps, he had to concede, being around women in Dries Van Noten trouser suits in finance had skewed his expectations. Aaron was no Cary Grant either: he kept a rolled-up black tie in his top desk drawer for ‘death knocks’.

He pushed through the door, calling Jen, while dodging the already inebriated pedestrian traffic of a Friday evening.

‘Hi, sorry for missing you. I was sent out on a knifing in Whalley Range,’ he said.

‘I feel like I’ve had a knifing in my Whalley Range after half an hour on the phone with your brother.’

‘Haha. What’s his problem? He’s coming over?’

Shaun lived in Washington DC with his wife, Lauren, and announcements of return to Britain were always like this: fiercely enthusiastic and out of the blue, demanding they drop everything. Shaun’s incredible impatience and buoyancy of mood had brought him much success in life, but it was sometimes like dealing with a Yorkshire Terrier on cocaine.

‘Yeah, he wants to come over for one of his bacchanals. Just him, Lauren’s busy. I explained you’re not here and we’re not … there, anymore, you know?’

Connor had a jolt she meant as a couple.

‘He was going on about tryingSoho Farmhouse? Yeah, no. He’s not caught on to the change of pace.’

Ah. Not there financially.

‘I’ll talk to him, don’t worry. I could draw his fire and invite him up here? I know he’ll have a meltdown at heading north, but … Gives me company.’

‘Yeah, that would work, actually?’ Jen said, with a note of relief, having clearly already considered this option.

Connor thought about their early days together and the hedonistic lost weekends with his brother and sister-in-law – wincing at the mini statement afterwards – were a thing of the past.

If he was able to say:sure,book three nights at Soho Farmhouse, sounds good, charge it to my card, like he used to, would this be going any different? Would it fix it? Yes and no. They’d been falling out of love anyway and this had merely expedited the process. But the fact remained, trips to The Ledbury were no longer available to oil the hinges– so subtracting them meant confronting how much they’d mattered.

He knew exactly what Shaun, never one to hold back with the blunt diagnosis, would say:You Can No Longer Afford Her.Once again, on examining his feelings there was no real pang of loss. Connor was more bothered that he’d previously been affording Jen, which, call him a rash idealist, wasn’t how it was supposed to work.

‘If Shaun’s here soon, want to come up this weekend coming?’

‘I can’t this weekend because I’ve got a work thing on Friday night in Bloomsbury, a book launch. Weekend after?’

Three weeks since he moved up? You’d not mistake this for infatuation.

‘Sure,’ Connor said, as they shifted to awkward chit-chat for the sake of the other.

‘Is everything OK?’ Jen said.

‘Yeah, why?’

‘You sound like you’re in a rush to go, that’s all.’

‘I’m having dinner with my two colleagues. I get the feeling it’s about as appealing to them as it is to me, but we’re pushing through it anyway.’

‘Who are they?’

‘Guy called Aaron from theManchester Newsand a podcaster woman called Bel.’

‘Bel? As inBeauty and The Beast“Belle”?’

‘No, as in Isabel.’

‘What’s she like?’

He was surprised at Jen still doing due diligence on proximate women.

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