“He wrote a note with his quill pen and stuck it into her bonnet.” Sarika giggles.
“Ha ha.” I lift my eyes to heaven. “Online, obviously. But I didn’t set up a million artificial deal-breakers, I went by instinct.”
“Instinct?” echoes Nell. “Meaning…”
“His eyes,” I say proudly. “There’s a look in his eyes.”
After the disastrous date with Seth, I came up with a new theory: It’s all in the eyes. I never liked Seth’s eyes. That should have told me. So I went online and searched for a guy with gorgeous eyes…and I found one! I’m actually quite excited. I keep looking at his picture and feeling a real connection with him.
“You can tell a lot about someone from his eyes,” concedes Sarika. “Let’s see.”
I summon up a photo and look at it lovingly for a moment before showing it to Sarika, then Nell. “He’s called Stuart,” I tell them. “He’s in IT.”
“Nice eyes,” concedes Nell. “I’ll give you that.”
Nice? Is that all she can say? They’re wonderful eyes! They crinkle with warmth and intelligence and wit, even in a tiny photo on a phone. I’ve never seen such amazing eyes, and I’ve looked at a lot of dating profiles….
“Harold!” Sarika suddenly shrieks, and I leap up in alarm. “That’s my chicken wrap! Bad dog!”
While we’ve been talking, Harold has silently crept over to Sarika’s side of the sofa and swiped her Pret A Manger wrap out of her bag, still in its plastic. Now he’s looking from her to me to Nell as though to say, “What are you going to do about it?”
“Harold!” I chide. “Drop!” I take a step toward him and he backs away a step. “Drop!” I repeat, without much conviction.
Harold’s bright eyes travel around the room again, as though he’s assessing the situation.
“Drop.” I try to sound commanding. “Drop.”
“Drop!” echoes Nell, her alto voice booming round the room.
I lean slowly toward Harold and his eyes follow me, inch by inch, until I make a sudden grab. But I’m too slow. I’m always too slow for Harold. He scrabbles and slides to the corner behind the TV where no one can get him, then starts chewing furiously at the wrap, pausing every so often to regard the three of us with an expression of triumph.
“Bloody dog,” says Nell.
“Shouldn’t have left it in my bag,” says Sarika, shaking her head. “Harold, don’t eat the plastic, you total moron.”
“Harold?” A familiar voice comes wafting in from the hall. “Where’s that gorgeous dog?”
A moment later, Maud appears round the door, holding the hands of two of her children, Romy and Arthur. “Sorry I’m late,” she declaims in her theatrical way. “Nightmare at school pickup. I haven’t seen Harold for ages,” she adds, turning to beam at him. “Is he looking forward to his little holiday?”
“He’s not a gorgeous dog,” says Sarika ominously. “He’s a bad, naughty dog.”
“What did he do?” says Arthur, his eyes lighting up in delight.
Harold is a bit of a legend in Arthur’s year-two class. He once starred at show-and-tell, where he swiped the school teddy, escaped into the playground, and had to be rounded up by three teachers.
“He stole my chicken wrap,” says Sarika, and both children roar with laughter.
“Harold steals everything,” proclaims Romy, who is four. “Harold steals all the food. Harold, here!” She holds out her hand encouragingly, and Harold lifts his head as though to say “Later,” then resumes chomping.
“Wait, where’s Bertie?” says Maud, as though only just noticing. “Arthur, where’s Bertie?”
Arthur looks blank, as though he’d never even realized he had a brother called Bertie, and Maud clicks her tongue. “He’ll be somewhere,” she says vaguely.
Maud’s basic conundrum in life is that she has three children but only two hands. Her ex, Damon, is a barrister. He works insanely hard and is pretty generous on the money front but not on the showing-up front. (She says, on the plus side, at least her kids’ lives won’t be ruined by helicopter parenting.)
“Sarika,” she begins now. “You don’t happen to be driving through Muswell Hill at five o’clock on Thursday, do you? Only I need someone to pick up Arthur from a playdate, and I just wondered…”
She flutters her eyelashes at Sarika, and I grin inwardly. Maud asks favors all the time. Will we mind her children/take in her shopping/research train times/tell her what tire pressure her car should be at? This isn’t since becoming a single parent—this is ever since I’ve known her. I