Babyville Page 0,6
be if they had kids the same age, but Sam never expected it to happen so quickly, and Julia, naturally, never expected it to happen so slowly.
There was a third wheel to their gang. Bella. They say threesomes never work, but somehow it always did with them. Maybe it helped that Sam and Julia were friendly first, before Bella came into the equation, but they never had any of the petty jealousies that you so often associate with triangles.
Julia and Sam met first, years ago, at a party. Julia watched Sam turn the music up and start dancing in the middle of the living room, while everyone else stood around chatting, watching her out of the corner of their eyes because they also wanted to dance, but no one else had the nerve.
She saw Julia watching her and went over, grabbed her arm with a smile, and Julia started to dance too. Suddenly Julia didn't care that it was one of those snobby parties where you're not supposed to let your hair down and actually have fun. She didn't care that you were only supposed to stand around sipping wine and making small talk. Sam and Julia, despite having never met before, flung their arms around, gyrated their hips, and bonded over a Saturday Night Fever–style pointed-finger movement.
They collapsed on the sofa after about two hours, and once there didn't move for the rest of the night, talking about everything, sharing their lives. Numbers were swapped at the end of the evening, and the next day Sam phoned to suggest going out dancing again. The seeds of friendship were sown.
A couple of years later, Bella joined London Daytime Television. Bella and Julia were both researchers on a newsmagazine show, and hit it off almost immediately. I say almost, because the first time Julia saw her she wasn't at all sure. Bella was twenty-four going on thirty. Actually she has always said that thirty-five is her true age, and even when she was sixteen she was mistaken for someone much older.
Bella, in short, intimidated all but the most confident of people, and it was only when they were sent up to Leeds together to interview a couple of people for the show that they bonded.
For a while Julia would see them separately. With Sam she would go clubbing, to trendy bars, wild parties, and Bella was reserved for sophisticated restaurants, chichi dinner parties, even the odd bit of extremely badly played tennis.
Bella and Sam had met. Their paths crossed at Julia's house from time to time, and although they hadn't disliked one another, they hadn't much liked one another either. It was only when Bella met Paul, Sam's then-boyfriend's best friend, and fancied him, that she and Sam started to become friends, but Julia is still the link between the two, the one that binds them all together.
Bella has moved on now. Literally and figuratively. She was offered a job two years ago in New York: producer of a national morning magazine show, which naturally she couldn't turn down. She was so busy she barely had time to throw a leaving party, and now Julia considers herself blessed if Bella manages to return a voicemail more often than once a month.
On the rare occasions they do catch up, Bella sounds as if she is having a blast. Resolutely single after Paul broke her heart, she has thrown herself into the New York dating scene with wild abandon, astounding her friends back home with the sheer number of men she seems to meet. Most surprising, this, Sam is fond of saying, because she had always thought 90 percent of the single men in Manhattan were gay. Evidently not, according to Bella.
Bella is paying a disgusting amount of money for an apartment roughly the size of a shoebox in a much-sought-after doorman building at 75th and Second. Second Avenue is not quite Fifth, Bella has laughed, but it's still Upper East Side, and in New York address is everything.
Bella has taken to Manhattan like a duck to water. She goes to the gym every morning before work, which Julia and Sam find completely ridiculous, given that the odd sloppy game of tennis Bella used to play was the most she could muster, and even that was only ever an excuse to exchange loud gossip while feeling immensely virtuous.
Bella has always been good at adapting, at adhering to “When in Rome . . . ,” and weekly manicures, lunches at Bergdorf's, and navigating her