Page 65 of The Vintage Dress Shop in Primrose Hill
‘Technically, no, but it’s the way you keep saying friend, like it should have quote marks.’
That was the thing with sisters and even sister-friends: they knew how to wind each other up without even trying.
‘I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.’ Cress was the picture of innocence, her lower lip trembling, so that Sophy felt guilty for giving her attitude.
‘Sorry,’ she mumbled. ‘Long day. Lots on my mind.’
‘That’s all right,’ Cress said magnanimously, as theyboth caught sight of Charles waiting at the top of the road. He waved. Sophy waved back. ‘What are you and Charles going to have for dinner? Each other’s mouths if last night was anything to go by.’
Chapter Twenty-Five
Sophy was footsore and weary, and had been quite sure that she was going to beg Charles to let them take the bus to wherever this restaurant was, but he looked so pleased to see her, swooping down to kiss both her cheeks despite Cress’s harrumph, that the butterfly flutter of her stomach at seeing him was all she needed to agree to walk through Regent’s Park.
It was a gorgeous spring evening, still warm, still cotton-wool clouds drifting lazily across a blue sky. They weren’t the only people lingering in the park. There were the ubiquitous joggers huffing and puffing their way round the Outer Circle, sprawling groups of youngsters on the grass surrounded by picnic debris. Then there were the dogwalkers, children still on the swings as they passed the playground, and lots of couples like them, walking slowly because their real destination was each other.
When they left the park to cut through the many tiny streets of Fitzrovia, they passed crowds spilling out of pubs clutching drinks and people making the most of each drop of sunshine by dining al fresco, though Sophy always thought that it was too congested to eat outside. She wouldn’t really fancy a side order of pollution with her spaghetti carbonara.
She mentioned this to Charles, who looked slightly crestfallen.
‘That’s a pity,’ he said in what was probably meant to be a light voice but sounded very strained. ‘Maybe I can see if they have a table inside.’
‘I didn’t mean to ruin everything,’ Sophy said, the flutter replaced by a leaden feeling. The time she had with Charles was on a clock, not just this evening, but all the other evenings they might spend together before she left, and she wanted every single one – every hour, every minute, every second – to be perfect.
‘You haven’t ruined anything,’ Charles said firmly. Then he took her hand so they could walk like that, when before Sophy had had to make do with their arms occasionally brushing. ‘That’s not possible.’
‘I’m not perfect, Charles. Far from it. I’ve been ruining stuff since for ever.’ Her argument with Johnno was still fresh in her mind. Her ingratitude. That piercing top note she got to her voice.
Charles shook his head. ‘I refuse to believe it.’
It turned out that the evening wasn’t ruined. It improved immediately when they got to their destination: a little Italian tapas place tucked into a little mews, which in turn was hidden away down a small cobbled street. On the other side of the mews was a large bookshop, or rather what looked like a series of little shops all joined together in a higgledy-piggledy fashion. The shop was called Happy Ever After and, although Sophy couldn’t say that she was a very romantic person, seeing the shop sign and those three words in a cursive script made her sigh a little.
She definitely didn’t want to sit inside when in this mews it felt as if they’d left the hustle, bustle and pollution of London behind. They couldn’t even hear the rumble of traffic any more as they sat down at a table for two and admired the fairy lights strung across the yard. There were candles on each table and soft fleece blankets in case they felt cold and, like everything that Charles planned, it was exactly what Sophy wanted without her even knowing that she’d wanted it.
Just as not going with Radha all those years before had been Sophy’s big ‘what if’ moment, she knew that going to Australia now and leaving Charles behind would be another. One that she suspected would haunt her for the rest of her life. If she wasn’t going to Australia, if this thing could be more than snatched evenings and heated kisses, then Sophy also suspected that Charles would be the god of boyfriends and who knew what else beyond that?
She couldn’t tell Charles any of this, especially as he was gloating enough at her obvious delight with his choice of restaurant. They knocked knees under the table as the servers brought out a selection of tiny plates of delicious things: stuffed olives, courgette and ricotta arancini, a four-cheese crostini, meatballs in a delicious tomato sauce and fritto misto.
Usually they could talk about everything and nothing, without gaps, without any desperate searching for a topic of conversation, but tonight there was silence, apart from appreciative comments about the food and what they were going to order for pudding and was it too late for fully caffeinated coffee?
The silences grew longer but, instead of being awkward, they were charged with a tension that made Sophy feel both on edge and quite languorous. By the time their pudding had arrived, their knees weren’t knocking any longer, because their legs were pressed together as they leaned forward, elbows on the table. Which was bad manners but how else could they keep locking eyes or Sophy reach across the table to wipe a stray crumb from the corner of Charles’s mouth or he feed her tiny spoonfuls of tiramisu?
By the time they asked for the bill, Charles’s eyes were as dark as the night sky and Sophy’s leg was trapped between his. Not that she wanted to get free.
There was a slight tussle over who was going to pay, which Sophy won by simply thrusting her debit card at the server and saying in a tone ofvoice that even worked on Phoebe, ‘I’m getting this.’
‘So fierce,’ Charles murmured, but he sounded as if he didn’t mind her fierceness, whereas Egan had been always telling her not to get ‘so aggy, babe’. Egan had also never helped Sophy on with her jacket, though it was wrong to keep comparing them, especially when Charles was a complete one-off.
He tucked her arm in his as they left the little mews. ‘I should probably go home,’ Sophy said, not bothering to hide her reluctance at the thought of heading back to boring, unromantic Hendon.
‘You probably should,’ Charles agreed. ‘I would ask you to come back to mine for a nightcap but, well, I think we both know that it wouldn’t really be for a nightcap.’
The unspoken question hovered between them.
‘Where do you live anyway?’ she asked, which wasn’t a yes but it wasn’t a no.
It was getting chilly now, which was at least part of the reason why she curved her body into his. He wrapped a long arm round her shoulders. ‘Not far from here. A little garret round the corner from the British Museum.’
‘Of course you do,’ Sophy said with a little laugh, because that was so quintessentially Charles. ‘I bet it’s not at all garret-like. You’d keep banging your head on those sloping, leaking ceilings for one thing.’
