We sat squashed around a long table in the Chelsea Kitchen, which was really only meant for eight. The children had all been put at one end which meant I found myself elbow to elbow with Phineas. I was so electrified by my proximity to him, my nerve endings so raw, my body so primed and aching for something that I was too young to even begin to understand, that I had no choice but to turn my back to him.
I glanced down the length of the table towards my father who sat at the head.
At the sight of him I felt something inside me plummeting, like an untethered lift hurtling down a shaft. I didn’t quite understand what I was feeling, but I can tell you now that what I had experienced was a terrifying moment of prescience. I had seen my father suddenly rendered short in the company of David Thomsen, who was unusually tall, and I had seen that his hold on the head of the table, once so unquestionable and defined, was flimsy. Even without the damage that the stroke had caused, everyone at the table was cleverer than him, even me. He was dressed wrong, in his too-tight jacket, the flourish of a dark pink handkerchief in his breast pocket that clashed with the rust of his hair. I saw him shuffle in his seat; I saw the conversation dash across the top of his head like clouds on a windy day. I saw him stare at the menu for longer than was necessary. I saw David Thomsen lean across the table towards my mother to emphasise a point and then lean back again to observe my mother’s response.
I saw all this, I saw all this, and I knew already on some subliminal but incredibly uncomfortable level that a power struggle had started under my very nose and that even then, at moment zero, my father was already losing.
15
On Monday morning Libby gets into work twenty minutes late.
Dido looks up at her in surprise. Libby is never late for work.
‘I was about to call you,’ she says. ‘Is everything OK?’
Libby nods, takes her phone out of her bag, then her lip balm and her cardigan, tucks the bag under her desk, unties her hair, ties it up again, pulls out her chair and sits down heavily. ‘Sorry,’ she says eventually. ‘I didn’t sleep last night.’
‘I was going to say,’ says Dido. ‘You look awful. The heat?’
She nods. But it wasn’t the heat. It was the insides of her head.
‘Well, let me get you a nice strong coffee.’
Normally Libby would say no, no, no, I can get my own coffee. But today her legs are so heavy, her head so woolly, she nods and says thank you. She watches Dido as she makes her coffee, feeling reassured by the sheen of her dyed black hair, the way she stands with one hand in the pocket of her black tunic dress, her tiny feet planted wide apart in chunky dark green velvet trainers.
‘There,’ says Dido, resting the cup on Libby’s table. ‘Hope that does the trick.’
Libby has known Dido for five years. She knows all sorts of things about her. She knows that her mother was a famous poet, her father was a famous newspaper editor, that she grew up in one of the most illustrious houses in St Albans and was taught at home by a governess. She knows her younger brother died when he was twenty and that she hasn’t had sex for eleven years. She knows that she lives in a tiny cottage on the edge of her parents’ estate and that she still has the horse she rode as a teenager and that that horse is called Spangles. She knows that the illustrious house has been left in Dido’s parents’ will not to her but to the National Trust and that she is fine about that.
She knows that Dido likes PG Tips, Benedict Cumberbatch, horses, Gianduja, coconut water, Doctor Who, expensive mattress toppers, Jo Malone Orange Blossom, stir fries, Nando’s and facials. But she has never been to Dido’s house or met Dido’s family or friends. She has never seen Dido outside of work hours apart from at the annual Christmas party at the posh hotel up the road and the occasional leaving drinks. She doesn’t actually know who Dido is.
But she looks at Dido now and it is suddenly, blindingly obvious to her that Dido is exactly the person she needs