Page 21 of Crazy in Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop
Her voice actually cracked on the two syllables that were his name though Verity didn’t seem to notice. ‘Noah’s not in today either. Sent an email late last night saying that he was going to work off-site for the foreseeable future.’
‘Oh?’
‘Not sure he’s going to be able to report back on everything we say and do if he’s not on-site to observe,’ Verity said tartly as if she wasn’t quite on board with the scheme to make Happy Ever After work smarter if not harder, which was news to Nina.
‘Oh?’ Nina said yet again.
‘I love Posy. We all love Posy but she doesn’t need a Noah.’ Verity rolled her eyes. ‘She just needs to find the flipchart that has all the ideas from the brainstorm we had before the relaunch.’
‘That’s so true. My idea for a book group was pure genius and yet we still have no book group. We don’t even have a proper social media presence.’ Nina thought mournfully about the locked Instagram account – damn Sam! ‘Although maybe Noah might come up with some good ideas that we’d never think of,’ Nina said, because she was never ever going to have another uncharitable thought about Noah ever again. He’d had enough uncharitable thoughts aimed his way at Orange Hill to last a lifetime. ‘Fresh pair of eyes and all that.’
‘Noah’s very nice, I’m not saying he isn’t,’ Verity insisted, because thinking uncharitable thoughts was probably covered in the Ten Commandments. ‘I’m just saying that Noah isn’t the answer to all our problems.’
‘When you say problems, it makes me worried. Is the shop really doing that badly?’ Nina asked.
‘You don’t need to worry about that,’ Verity said but she said it in a pretty anxious way. ‘And you don’t need to worry about Noah either. Though I would worry that I heard the shop bell three minutes ago and we’ve probably got customers waiting.’
Nina wished that she could take Verity’s advice and not worry about Noah, but Noah was all that she could think about for a lot of Friday, most of Saturday and especially Sunday when instead of spending it sleeping off the excesses of the week, she was going home for Sunday lunch.
Or rather she was going to her parents’ house in Worcester Park, Surrey. Nina hadn’t lived there for years but instead had shared flats as near to the centre of town as she could afford. The last one had been in Southfields, which Posy had always described as ‘being as far out of London as you could get while still being in London.’
It was just as well that Posy had never been to Worcester Park, Nina thought glumly. The tube didn’t go this far south-west so Nina had to get the tube to Waterloo, then change onto a proper train to travel deep into the suburbs of Surrey and street after street of identical nineteen-thirties semis, broken up by the odd parade of shops, a pub, a park.
The train chugged through Earlsfield, Wimbledon, Raynes Park, Motspur Park and finally Worcester Park. By now a gloom had settled on Nina’s shoulders like a fine coating of dandruff. As she exited the station a gang of teenage boys were doing wheelies on their bikes in the almost-deserted car park but they stopped to gawp at Nina as she strode past them, eyes forward, trying not to thrust her chest out.
‘Freak,’ one of them shouted at her.
‘But nice tits!’
Oh, she wasn’t in Kansas any more. Certainly she wasn’t in Bloomsbury where no one batted an eye at Nina, unless it was another woman giving her an approving glance or someone looking at her in a way that suggested they found her very attractive.
Nina had even toned it down today. She was wearing a little black dress, a vintage nineteen-forties number in rayon, fishnets, black suede shoes with a block heel and her leopard faux fur. Even her make-up was a little less today. She’d decided against the false eyelashes, her eyeliner was a discreet flick, and she’d gone for a tasteful rosy-pink lip when usually she applied several coats of her trusty MAC Ruby Woo.
Though she returned to her ancestral homelands on the second Sunday of every month, every single time Nina forgot that even her most subtle daytime look was still too much for the mean streets of Worcester Park.
She pulled her coat tighter around her and resisted the urge to say, ‘I know your mother, young man,’ to the one who’d shouted out ‘Nice tits.’ Shewaspretty sure that she’d been to school with his mum, he had the same pugnacious look as Tanya Hampton who’d been in the year above her, but it was such a Nana-ish thing to say and what if Tanya Hampton turned up on her parents’ doorstep to have it out with Nina? It was the kind of thing Tanya Hampton used to do.
No, it was best to ignore the boys who were losing interest anyway and cycling off to do wheelies through a large puddle. Nina was going to go home, see her family, eat Sunday lunch, not rise to the bait of her mother’s most passive-aggressive barbs and be back on the train in three hours tops. That was the plan and Nina was sticking to it.
‘Your presence is a moral poison that would contaminate the most virtuous.’
It was a ten-minute walk from the station through identical streets of identical houses until Nina was turning into the cul-de-sac where her parents had lived for the last thirty-three years.
Number nineteen looked the same as it ever did. Front garden completely paved over to make room for her dad’s black cab and her mother’s nippy Mazda convertible. As Nina stood on the doorstep and fished for her keys in her handbag, she could see her reflection in the gleaming gold doorplate.
She nearly jumped out of her skin at the rapping on the window next to her. She turned to see her two nieces, Rosie and Ellie, jumping up and down and waving at her.
Nina waved back, grabbed her keys as she heard shouts of ‘Auntie Nina haspinkhair now!’ and got the door open wide enough that Rosie and Ellie could hurl themselves at her so hard, she rocked back on her heels.
‘Hello! Hello! Hello!’ They both shouted at an ear-perforating volume, hugging Nina so enthusiastically, she was amazed that she didn’t snap a rib.
‘Steady on, ladies!’ Nina panted. ‘Let me put down my bags.’ Rosie and Ellie loosened their grip by a fraction so Nina could drop her bags on the floor then held out her arms. ‘OK. Now you can give me some loving.’
Nina had forgotten that there were some good things about her contractually obligated once-a-month trip home and she had her arms full of them. Two curly blonde heads nestled against her chest, fists clutched around the material of her dress in a way that would definitely leave wrinkles, but Nina didn’t care.
‘I have to breathe now,’ Nina said softly and her nieces relinquished their Vulcan-like hold on her so they could gaze up at her.
‘Your hair makes you look like a mermaid,’ eight-year-old Rosie said gravely.
