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TWENTY

So,” Ash asks Nina a few days later. “What did Nick say? About the ring?”

Nina is scrolling through the Deliveroo app on her phone, choosing a pizza. She glances up at Ash quickly and then back down again, her finger still on the screen. “He said exactly what I thought he’d say. It’s the ring he bought for the wedding to the dead fiancée.”

“And why did he have it with him?”

She sees a muscle in her mother’s cheek twitch and knows she’s getting on her nerves.

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask. None of my business.”

“Well, it sort of is.”

Nina blinks slowly and Ash hears her exhale. “There,” she says, passing Ash her phone, “your turn.”

Ash sighs and takes the phone, scrolls through to the vegan section, selects the Mozella with wild mushrooms, and hands it back again.

It’s Friday night and Ash has declined an invitation from Ella to spend the weekend at her place in Brighton, said she was tired, thought she might be coming down with something, but she wasn’t coming down with something, she just couldn’t face it.

Ella’s two flatmates were so full-on and always did that thing of trying to impress upon her how well they knew Ella, as if they were insecure about the fact that Ash had known her since they were both seven.

They constantly threw out desperate in-jokes and you-really-had-to-have-been-there stories and Ash found it exhausting.

So here she is on a Friday night, ordering pizza with her fifty-one-year-old mother instead.

“Twenty to forty minutes apparently,” says Nina, turning off her screen.

“Can I open wine?” asks Ash.

“Sure. There’s a fizzy one, I think, in the door?”

Ash opens the door, her eyes find the fizzy wine, and she pulls it out and stares at it for a moment, giving herself a beat to frame her next question. “So,” she says, “when are you seeing him again? Nick?”

“Well, actually, I think he might be coming over tomorrow night.”

There’s an edge to her mother’s voice, a dryness.

She knows that Ash doesn’t want him there, that it is an intrusion, that it is weird and strange for her.

But Ash can also hear the resolve in her mother’s voice, the note of “It’s my house and I’m a grown woman and I can do what I like under my own roof,” and she is, of course, entirely right.

Ash makes herself smile and says, “Oh, that’s good. ”

“He’s taking me to that new place in town, the one where Luc Martin cooks—you know, who your dad used to love?”

Ash shrugs. She’s not a crazed foodie like her parents, or at least, she likes food, but she’s not fussed about who cooked it. “Is it going to be expensive?”

“Yes. Probably.”

“I hope he pays for you.”

Nina throws her a surprised look. “I can afford to pay for my own dinner,” she says.

“Yes, well, just don’t pay for his.”

Nina pushes her reading glasses off her nose and into her hair. She appraises Ash quizzically. “Why did you say that?”

Ash shrugs. “I just want you to be careful. That’s all. He might be… you know, after you for your money.”

Nina laughs. “Oh God, Ash. No! No no no! He is most definitely not after my money. No, he’s very wealthy.”

“So why does he live in Tooting?”

“It’s just temporary. I think he inherited it from someone or borrowed it or something.”

“So he must have a property somewhere? That he owns?”

“He’s in between. He had that house in Pimlico he sold.”

“Why did he sell it?”

“To release some capital, I suppose. To invest in the business.”

“Doesn’t sound that wealthy to me.”

“He’s got other interests. He owns land.

He wants to build a country club on it one day, you know, like a Babington House type of thing.

And he’s a shareholder in lots of companies.

I actually quite like the fact that a man like him is happy living in a one-bed flat in Tooting.

It shows that he’s not up himself, hasn’t lost himself in the rarefied ether, you know. ”

Ash nods as she peels the metal foil from the top of the bottle. “Did he tell you anything,” she says, “about Dad? About what he was like when he knew him, back before you met him?”

“No, not really. Nothing that you wouldn’t have expected him to remember. The smoking. The swearing. The food obsession.”

“Did he ever meet Jane?” Jane was Dad’s girlfriend when he met Ash’s mum. They’d been together since they were both eighteen and the breakup had been a mess. Dad had totally broken Jane’s heart and the whole thing had made the early days of her parents’ relationship really hard.

“No,” says Nina. “Well, at least if he did, he didn’t mention her.”

Ash has always been slightly obsessed with the concept of Jane.

She’d been half hoping she’d turn up at the funeral in a blaze of drama.

The stories she’d heard about her over the years had thrilled her heart: her tragic, loveless childhood, her modeling career, the time she cut all her hair off with blunt scissors, her nervous breakdown, her pet rats.

She’d married an earl or a lord or something and sounded like someone from a movie about mad, posh English people.

Her mother always talked about her in a soft, slightly pitying voice, an unspoken “poor Jane” behind every mention of her.

Her dad had one photo of her; he’d kept it in a box of mementos.

Black hair, a pointed chin, saucer eyes, floaty georgette baby-doll dress with a rosebud print.

Young.

Lost.

Troubled.

Just like Ash.