Greenwich Park(43)

‘Ooh, you didn’t tell me we were having a bonfire party, Helen,’ Rachel says abruptly, taking a fistful of nuts from a bowl. She fixes Helen with her gaze. ‘Sounds brilliant!’



Helen looks blankly at Rachel, as if she is speaking another language. Then she turns to me, gives me a hard stare.

‘We’re not having a bonfire party,’ she says. ‘I never said we were having the bonfire this year. Katie, what are you talking about?’ Her tone is unusually firm.

Before I can answer, there’s a huge crash. Everything happens at once. Rory has arrived, holding a bottle of champagne, but he seems to have slipped and dropped it somehow, and in the process, smashed a load of glasses that were set out on the side.

There are gasps, cries of ‘Careful, Serena!’ Serena is standing with her back to Rachel, her hands on her bump, a deep line etched across her brow, as if she is clamping her face shut. There are glinting shards of glass everywhere. Rory is staring at his hand. It is red with blood, coursing from his thumb to his elbow. Hands reach for napkins, kitchen roll, wet cloths. I crouch down to help. Serena and Rachel are urged to avoid the glass. Hands are held out as they are lifted over the jagged puddles of red.





36 WEEKS





SERENA





It is nearly ten. I have been up for hours, sitting on the veranda wrapped in my cashmere blanket, with my mint tea on the table. I hadn’t posted on Instagram for a while, and I wanted to get the light just right.

It is so gorgeous in the garden at this time of year. Shafts of pale sunlight illuminate a lawn dusted with yellow leaves. A wet mist blurring the edges of everything. The wall climbers behind our hammock have started flaming orange and red, a last hurrah before they are claimed by the cold of winter.

It was a day like this the first time I came to Greenwich, the day I first met Rory’s parents. The first time I really met Helen, and Daniel too, or at the least the first time I spoke to either of them properly.

Rory and I had been in bed in his college room all afternoon. Now he was at the window, blowing smoke out over the quad. From his window all you could see was a rippling mass of golden leaves from the sycamore tree outside. I was reading a battered book I’d picked up off his nightstand, the duvet pulled up over my bare breasts. All of a sudden, he had stubbed his cigarette out on the sill. Started getting dressed, fishing at the back of his wardrobe for a shirt.

‘Are we going somewhere?’

Rory hadn’t even turned round. It was his little brother Charlie’s birthday, he said. He was going home for a dinner. Did I fancy joining him, meeting the parents? I closed the book, looked up from the bed, surprised.



‘They’re dying to meet you,’ he said. ‘If you’re up for it.’ Helen would be coming home too, he added, sensing my hesitation. She was bringing a new boyfriend. ‘They haven’t met him either, so you wouldn’t be the only one getting a grilling.’

I knew his younger sister Helen only a little, then. She was at the same college, but we didn’t exactly hang around in the same crowd. Since Rory and I had been seeing each other, she’d started waving to me sometimes, shyly, in the queue for hall, or in the bar, where she and her friends never seemed to be able to get a table. She waved to me on King’s Parade while she was cycling past me once, and nearly wobbled off her bike.

Anyway, I agreed to go, and when Rory and I got to the station, Helen was there, grinning and waving. She was bundled tightly in a winter coat, a thick scarf wound like a neck brace at her throat. ‘Hi, Serena,’ she gushed. Helen had already bought the tickets, and she doled them out to us from her mittened hands, like a teacher shepherding a school expedition. ‘This is Daniel. Have you met Daniel? He’s studying architecture with Rory.’ She motioned to the tall, quiet boy standing next to her, dark overcoat buttoned up like a pallbearer. Daniel locked his dark eyes on mine, held out a wiry hand, hair flopping over his glasses.

It seemed like a long time before we finally reached Greenwich. Rory and I walked silently, hand in gloved hand, under the soft glimmer of Victorian gas lamps dotted along the edge of the park. The trees rustled, their brown leaves falling like crinkling paper bags. When we passed the pub at the end of their road, a blast of warm air escaped from the door, the cackle of laughter, the snap of a roaring fire. I noticed the walls enclosing Greenwich Park were studded with tiny doors. It felt so mysterious to me. Their street seemed hidden away, as if lost in time, perfectly preserved, untouched.

And then their home, with its perfect symmetry, the box hedges, the matchstick-straight black railings. The yellow glow of log fires and lamplight shining from its tall Georgian windows – windows that gazed straight out over the park. It looked like a painting.

‘Here we are.’ Helen was beaming. She couldn’t disguise the catch in her voice; of pride, of nervousness, of wanting us to love it. She kept glancing at me, as if my approval mattered to her almost as much as her boyfriend’s. Neither Daniel nor I said anything. I couldn’t believe this was really their home.

Helen rang the bell, and moments later they were upon us: the mother kissing me on both cheeks, pulling an awkward Daniel into a bony hug with her long slender arms, then steering us all into the kitchen.

The father, Richard – apparently some sort of famous architect, though I’d never heard of him – was in there, on his hands and knees. He was attempting to relight the ancient-looking gas oven with a pipe hanging out of one side of his mouth while still holding a glass of port. I came to suspect it was not his first of the evening. He rose to his feet to hug Rory and Helen. Then he pumped Daniel’s arm before beamingly thrusting a gin and tonic into my hand and planting a hot kiss on my cheek.