to say?’
Patrick frowned. ‘We’re already busy but come for a cup of tea on Monday?’
As always, as soon as I tried to make it right for one person, I made it wrong for someone else. Patrick missed his parents, but he did have the luxury of having the upper hand because he was also automatically saved from finding out quite how badly they would have behaved in any given situation.
‘Shall I see if Cory can come? I could ask him to bring his photo albums of us when we all shared the flat? Give us a joyful way of talking about Ginny while taking the spotlight off Mum?’
‘Christ, what a dream evening for the man about town.’ Patrick flicked his hands in resignation. ‘If he’s free and up for it, why not?’
I rang Cory to ask. I imagined him in his bachelor pad in London overlooking the river, feet on his pale grey sofa, rubbing his beard. ‘See, who knew back then that the twenty-three-year-old advertising exec addicted to Pot Noodles would be the elder statesman you turn to in a crisis?’
I had to grin at that.
He carried on. ‘Fortunately for you, I had planned to cook dinner for my new girlfriend, but we will both come over. I suppose she had to meet Patrick at some point.’
Cory was in the elite band of people who were allowed to criticise my husband. As soon as they got together, Cory would start teasing him about his idiosyncrasies. ‘Jo, don’t tell me he still does that thing of leaving a millimetre of milk in the carton so he can claim “there was still some left”?’ ‘How’s his sportsmanship at Monopoly these days?’ – a nod to a marathon game we’d played over an Easter bank holiday – at least twenty years ago – when Patrick had gone to bed in a huff after landing on Cory’s Mayfair hotels.
Patrick, in return, would throw his arms out, gesturing to our cottage, me and Phoebe and say, ‘Yeah, but I don’t have to go to champagne bars and fancy restaurants to find my entertainment. Look where my competitive spirit got me, eh, Cor?’
And Cory was too kind to say, ‘A fairly average wife, with dirty blonde hair and teeth that would have benefitted from a brace.’
To be honest, I don’t think Cory even ‘saw’ me any more. We’d been friends for so long, since we all worked at the magazine back in the nineties. In the same way, to me, he was just Cory, good-looking – though the years of client entertaining and international conferences were starting to pad him out – but I never gave it much thought until a new girlfriend came along, making every excuse to touch him, straighten his tie and, like many before her, hoping to be the first woman to get him up the aisle.
‘Looking forward to seeing you and Lulu on Saturday. Come here first and have a glass of champagne with Victor. Will Lulu mind if you bring the photo albums? I don’t want her to think we’re deliberately excluding her, but it would be nice for Victor to see some photos of his mum in her younger days.’
Cory’s voice was serious. ‘Victor needs this. Don’t suppose it will endear me to Lulu from a feeling part of the gang point of view, but it’s not like Ginny and I were lovers. Though I think I tried it on a few times when I’d been at the Smirnoff Ice.’
It was ridiculous after all these years to have a twinge that Ginny had always been a man magnet. When we all lived together, I always had a tingle of unease that, behind my back, the boys were lusting after Ginny and saying, ‘Yeah, I mean, Jo, she’s a lovely girl and all that, but, you know, you wouldn’t, would you?’
I pulled my focus back to arrangements for the weekend. ‘I owe you big time, Cory. Thank you. Oh, and one thing I forgot to mention was that my mum will be with us.’
Cory let out a big hoot of merriment. ‘Now you tell me. No worries, I’ll be thrilled to see Gwen, treat her to a bit of the Cory charm… she’ll be the perfect baptism of fire for Lulu.’
I wanted to be sarcastic, to tell him off for thinking he was God’s gift to women, but I was so relieved that Patrick would have someone to talk to, and I was pretty sure Victor would enjoy getting