left her to it; went home hugging my happiness. My settled-ness. My all-organized-ness. And if, for a moment, I had any doubts, they were only really tiny ones, like the way he spoke to waiters. The way he’d said to that young girl in the bistro: ‘I’d like my salad dressing without vinegar. What would I like my salad dressing without?’
She’d glanced at him, surprised. ‘Vinegar.’
‘That’s it.’ He’d smiled thinly. And she’d smiled too, relieved.
‘I have to do that,’ he’d confided quietly to me when she’d gone. ‘Otherwise they forget, and I can’t abide salad with vinegar.’
Of course not.
A few months later Phil proposed, and things got even better. We went around Peter Jones with our wedding list and discovered, to our delight, that we had exactly the same taste. We inclined towards the red Le Creuset rather than the blue, the retro fifties toaster, the antique weighing scales, eschewed a dinner service in favour of hand-painted Portuguese plates, more conducive to cosy kitchen suppers which we infinitely preferred to dinner parties, decisively ticking our lists attached to clipboards. Another box ticked. A big one, we felt as we gazed at one another under the bright lights of China and Glass.
We also both agreed we wanted to get out of London.
‘Too frenetic,’ Phil said, frowning thoughtfully, ‘and too …’
‘Superficial,’ I continued and he smiled. Heavens, we were finishing each other’s sentences now.
He favoured Kent, where his mother lived, but I wanted to be near Dad, so we looked at villages in that direction, within an hour’s commute of town. Eventually we decided, somewhat sheepishly, that Jennie and Dan really had done their homework. That it was hard to better theirs. Sleepy, idyllic, with two pubs and a duck pond, but a functioning village too, with a shop and a school.
‘But do you mind?’ I asked her anxiously, when a house at the other end of the village had come up for sale.
‘Mind?’ Jennie shrieked down the phone. ‘Of course I don’t mind, I’d love it!’
She had made one friend, she told me, a lovely girl called Angie, frightfully glam and rich and great fun, but apart from that was bereft of kindred spirits, and couldn’t think of anything nicer than having her best friend down the road. For moral support if nothing else, she said grimly, which she needed at the moment, what with dealing with daily tantrums from Frankie, and Dan’s increasing inability to pass a second-hand car showroom without buying a banger – they were a four-car family at present – which he drove at speed down the country lanes, parp parping like Toad. Not to mention the dawning realization that she appeared to be pregnant.
Unfortunately the house at the other end of the village fell through, but then she rang me to say there was one for sale next door.
‘Bit close?’ I said doubtfully. ‘I mean, for you, not me. I don’t want to – you know, cramp your style?’
‘Trust me, I don’t have a style. Unless you count heartburn that makes me belch mid-sentence, or piles that have driven me to adopt the post-natal rubber ring two months prematurely. Please come, Poppy, before I change the e in antenatal to a vowel I regret.’
I shot down to look at the house: a dear little whitewashed cottage, low-slung, as if a giant had sat on the roof, with bulging walls, a brace of bay windows downstairs – one on either side of the green front door – two more poking out under eaves, a strip of garden that gave onto farmland at the back and the forest beyond. It was attached to Jennie’s similar cottage on one side, and next to a sweet terraced row on the other. Inside was a mess: low, poky rooms and an outdated kitchen and bathroom, but Phil and I decided we could knock through here, throw an RSJ up there, just about have room for an Aga over there. ‘And lay a stone hallway here,’ he said, indicating six square feet just inside the front door.
‘Yes!’ I yelped, thinking how uncanny it was that I’d been thinking the same. ‘Limestone or slate?’ I asked, hoping for the latter.
‘Slate, I think,’ he said thoughtfully, and I almost purred.
We moved in, already engaged, and, once the structural work had been done, got to work. We stripped the walls together, sanded doors, rubbed down floorboards, re-enamelled baths, working every weekend, evenings too, radio blaring so not much chat, whilst Dan and Jennie, who’d got