Page 78 of The House on Sunset Lake

He sat down and balanced the pizza box on his lap, nervous of getting tomato sauce on the pale green sofa. Jennifer came through with two plates, then went to the drinks cabinet and took out a pair of glasses.

‘Red or white?’ she asked.

‘Neither,’ he said carefully. ‘Don’t bother opening a bottle just for me.’

‘I’m having a drink,’ she said.

‘Coffee,’ he said as light-heartedly as he could. ‘I’ll go and brew up if you like.’

She put the glasses back down on the cabinet and Jim felt a note of relief, as if a moment of danger had passed.

She went to make coffee. When she came back, she sat in the chair opposite him and curled her fingers around her cup.

‘How long have you lived here?’ he asked.

‘Ten years.’

‘It’s a real grown-up house,’ he smiled, thinking of himself at thirty, the proud new owner of a maisonette in Kentish Town, his first step on the housing ladder. The scales had since fallen from his eyes about the London housing market. He was older, wiser. He had made sacrifices in his professional life, chasing money and position rather than the creative fulfilment he knew he would have got as a musician. And yet he guessed that short of winning the lottery, that maisonette would be as high as he ever got on the property ladder.

‘And here we are, all grown up,’ she said, stroking Mars Bar, who had come and plonked himself down between them.

‘You make it sound as if we’ve changed.’

‘Haven’t we?’ she smiled, looking up.

‘I still feel the same as I did when I was twenty. Although I’ll see a really bad photo of myself in a trade magazine and think, who the hell is that? Sarah told me the other day that it was time to retire my Converse All Stars. I thought she meant because they were knackered. On reflection, she probably thinks they make me look a bit sad.’

‘You’ll still be cool at sixty, Jim Johnson. I can see it now. Sharp suits, a beautiful woman on your arm, and a cigarette dangling out of your mouth.’

‘You make me sound like an ageing gigolo. That wasn’t what I had in mind when you interviewed me at twenty.’

‘Interview?’

‘The documentary. Or have you forgotten?’

‘The documentary.’ She cringed, throwing her hands behind her head. ‘Did I really think I was going to be the new Martin Scorsese?’

‘Now that would have been impressive. A Savannah gangster movie. What happened to it?’ he said more seriously.

‘Nothing,’ she said honestly. She puffed out her cheeks and looked at him. ‘I was living in New York by the Christmas. It’s hard to make a documentary about your home-town friends when you’re hundreds of miles away from them.’

‘You never applied to film school?’

She gave him a sad smile. ‘I thought about it. But I’d missed the next year’s intake, and by the following year I was married. A housewife at twenty-three. I didn’t imagine that when I filmed myself for the documentary either.’ Her cheeks flushed with embarrassment.

‘It’s very fashionable being a domestic goddess,’ he said, trying to make her feel better. ‘I know loads of women with high-powered jobs in London. Get them drunk and they’ll tell you that all they want to do is give up work and spend the day in the gym and on the school run.’

‘Is that how far feminism has really come?’

‘What I’m saying is that there’s nothing wrong with wanting to stay at home.’

‘Well, I always seem to be busy. Decorating the loft, selling the loft, buying this place. When I look back and wonder where the time went, I guess I’ve probably spent most of it in ABC Carpet and Home. And the charities. They keep me very busy. In fact there was something I meant to ask you. I’m doing an event for a Brooklyn animal shelter at Christmas. We need prizes for an auction. Any chance of a two-night stay in an Omari hotel?’

‘You can have a week in any of our resorts in the world, food and drink included,’ he said, happy to help.

‘Have you still got it?’ he asked after another moment.

‘What?’