to Wendy, he had been loyal to Sparky. Had they been loyal to him in return? No. And, sadly, he had no doubt that Ashley would take her mother’s side in the divorce. They were two peas in a pod.
He had reconnected in person with Steve at a school reunion a couple of years ago, a hellish event that confirmed Wendy’s belief that men didn’t grow up, they just got bigger. And balder. And fatter. Not Steve though, he had the look of a thoroughbred who groomed himself every morning, nothing shoddy about Steve. ‘Are you keeping your portrait in the attic then, Steve?’ someone said at the school reunion. He laughed the comment off (‘Tennis and the love of a good woman’) but Vince could see that he preened himself a little at the compliment. Girls and money – those had always been the twin targets that Steve had aimed for, Vince supposed, and it seemed he had hit bullseyes in both.
He had morphed into ‘Stephen’ these days, although Vince found it hard to call him that. It was Steve who had introduced Vince to ‘my good friends’ Tommy and Andy. They made an odd trio – the lion, the bear and the fox, like something out of Aesop’s Fables. In Vince’s hierarchy of friends, Tommy and Andy and Steve would be friend friends. There was a pecking order at work though, Vince soon realized. Steve looked down on Tommy because Steve was better educated. Tommy looked down on Andy because Tommy had a gorgeous wife, and Andy looked down on him because, well, because he was Vince. Vince had no one to look down on. Except himself.
‘Andy and Tommy live in your neck of the woods,’ Steve said. ‘You should get to know them. They might be useful to you.’ (For what? Vince had wondered.) And it was Steve, too, who had proposed him for the Belvedere Golf Club.
In Vince’s complex hierarchy of friendship, Steve was a school friend, not a friend friend – too much time had elapsed, too many experiences hadn’t been shared. ‘Old school chum,’ Steve had said, thumping him (rather hard) on the back when he introduced him to Tommy and Andy. It made Vince feel young for a moment and then it made him feel old. ‘This guy saved my life,’ Steve said to Tommy and Andy, ‘and I mean literally. You could say that I owe him everything.’
‘Long time ago now,’ Vince said, staring modestly at his feet. He didn’t think they’d ever used the word ‘chum’ when they were in Dewsbury. He doubted that anyone in West Yorkshire ever had. It was a word more suited to the playing fields of Eton than the shoddy capital of the North.
Steve lived now in an old farmhouse outside Malton, with an attractive, sophisticated wife called Sophie, a strapping rugby-playing teenage son called Jamie and a pony-obsessed, rather sullen daughter called Ida. ‘Princess Ida,’ Sophie laughed as if that was some kind of family joke. ‘It’s a Gilbert and Sullivan opera,’ she explained when she saw Wendy looking blank. (‘Pretentious cow,’ Wendy said in the evening’s debrief later.)
They’d been invited over for dinner, him and Wendy, but it had been a slightly awkward evening, just the four of them, that had left Wendy feeling churlish because Vince hadn’t done as well in his life as his old ‘chum’.
‘Showing off, if you ask me,’ Wendy said. ‘Silver cutlery, crystal glasses, damask tablecloth,’ she inventoried. ‘I thought it was supposed to be a simple kitchen-table supper.’ (What was that? Vince wondered. Something she’d read about in a colour supplement?) He, too, had been a little surprised at Steve’s lifestyle, but you could hardly hold it against a man for doing well.
They had forgotten to take a gift with them and arrived with a last-minute bottle of wine and bunch of flowers from a garage en route as well as a hastily chosen box of After Eights. (‘How lovely,’ Sophie murmured.)
They’d had a little tabby called Sophie, got as a kitten before Ashley was born. She had died only a couple of years ago and Vince still missed her undemanding companionship. Every time Steve mentioned his wife, Vince was reminded of the cat, although the name was the only thing she had in common with Steve’s svelte spouse, apart from a penchant for a brindled colourway. Before her marriage, Sophie had been a high-ranking accountant ‘with Deloitte’, but she had given up work to look after her