Page 44 of Never Too Late
‘Would you like coffee?’
‘Could I be terribly uncouth and ask for tea?’
He gave a chuckle. ‘I’m Indian so can’t be convinced there is anything uncouth about tea.’
‘I’m just going to nip to the loo.’
Ashok nodded and signalled for the waiter as I headed off towards the ladies’. A few minutes later, ablutions done, I checked my appearance in the ornately framed mirror above the sink, took a thick towel from the pile and dried my hands before reapplying my lipstick. Despite Sash’s best efforts, there was no disguising that I had two excellent shiners. The bright-red lipstick I’d applied was striking but there was no detracting from the eye make-up nature had given me following my argument with the side of the bath.
I took one more look, sighed, gave my hair a fluff and walked back out into the restaurant.
‘Kitty?’ The nickname pulled me thirty years into the past. I stopped momentarily before continuing. Of course it wasn’t me being called. There were very few people who had ever used that name and they’d been gone from my life for a very long time.
‘Kitty?’ This time, I turned towards the woman’s voice. ‘It is you!’
There, in front of me, was the friend I hadn’t seen in three decades, still looking as glamorous as she had done all those years ago, if not more so.
‘Gabby?’
‘Oh,mon dieu!’ And suddenly, I was wrapped in the biggest hug, and enveloped in a cloud of perfume with a heady, but not heavy, scent. As it had always been with Gabby, enough but not too much. She pulled back, her hands moving to my forearms, not letting go. ‘You haven’t changed a bit!’
‘Hi,’ I said, immediately feeling pathetic that was the most I could come up with.
My old friend didn’t seem to mind. ‘Hi!’ she replied. ‘Oh my God,’ she said, laughing. ‘Thirty years and all we can say is “hi”.’
‘I know. Sorry.’
‘Non, non, non.’ She waved an elegant hand topped with a perfect manicure. ‘But what is this?’ She touched my face gently. ‘Are you in trouble? Can I do anything?’
With an overwhelming feeling of mortification, I felt the tears begin, powerless to prevent them. Gabby immediately led me back into the ladies’.
‘Now. Tell me everything.’
19
When we returned to the restaurant twenty minutes later, my make-up was repaired, care of my old friend, and a small piece of my heart that had been missing for thirty years finally replaced neatly in the gap that had remained there ever since it was lost. As Gabby had patched up my make-up, we’d each given the other a brief, potted history of our lives from the end of term until now. The one subject we’d both avoided was her brother.
‘Ashok will think I’ve climbed out the bathroom window and abandoned him.’
‘Is that him?’ Gabby slowed our pace as we walked arm in arm back to my table.
‘Yes.’
‘Wow. If you do decide to climb out of the bathroom window, let me be the first to know, won’t you?’
‘It’s not like that. We’re just good friends.’
‘But why not?’ she asked. ‘I think perhaps it should be. You’ve seen him, right?’
‘Yes, and I know. There just wasn’t that spark. But he’s now one of my best friends and somehow, I think that’s even better.’
Gabby made a ‘poof’ sound and shook her head.
‘Then we must agree to disagree because I would definitely not be putting him in the Friend Zone.’
‘It was Ashok who suggested I come back to Paris.’
‘Then I like him already.Vite! Come, introduce me!’ She grinned at me and we giggled as though we were still the twenty-year-olds we had been. For a moment, all those intervening years melted away and it was just us and a handsome man catching our eye.
