How to Kill Your Family(52)
Simone has her own gallery now. She married a well-known playwright and they have a Doberman, which feels like the height of arrogance when living in a city that really can only accommodate Chihuahuas. I know this because when Jimmy gets drunk he loads up her Instagram and thrusts his phone in my face, trying to show that he’s happy for her while also asking me whether the V-neck T-shirt her husband is wearing makes him look like a twat.
Six months after Simone left for New York and Jimmy moved around the corner from his parents, he met someone else. I’d like to say that he shook off some of his cowardice after the breakup and met her whilst on a three-day bender in some ungentrified corner of South London, but he didn’t, because he rarely leaves North London at all now except for the odd book launch. He met her at a supper party at his godfather’s house in Notting Hill. Horace is some kind of hotshot QC (he put me on to Thorpe, so I guess I’m just as guilty as Jimmy when it comes to celebrating the middle-class connections that his parents gave us) and holds monthly dinners where he invites ‘interesting young people’ to come and talk about world events. I have never been invited to one of these hideous sounding salons. I have squared this in my mind by reminding myself that Horace is a stuffy old snob and also by taking £50 out of his wallet the last time I saw him at the Latimers.
I didn’t see Jimmy for a few weeks after the dinner, because I had bigger things on my mind at that point. I’d just sent Bryony packing – more on this later – and was veering between exaltation at my progress and frustration at failing to come up with a workable way to get to Simon. The whole process had meant I’d not had much time for Jimmy. It was too hard to talk to my closest friend while I was in the middle of it all without being able to talk about even the smallest aspect of my activities. I should have known something was up though, because his texts had petered off until there had been radio silence for eight days. And then he turned up at my flat one Saturday morning unannounced with coffee and croissants. There is nothing that screams ‘I have news’ quite like ringing someone’s doorbell without texting first. It’s so self-absorbed that the only excuses would be to inform you of a terrible accident or to bang on about a new love affair. Since I knew from his face that his mother hadn’t died in a hideous jet-ski accident, the only real alternative was some new woman. As a result, I tortured him slightly by not asking anything and instead talking endlessly about plans I had for renovating my kitchen. I had no plans to renovate my kitchen. I lived in this flat precisely because it was completely serviceable, and thank God, because people who talk about remodelling plans are insufferable.
Eventually, just as I got going with a particularly monotonous soliloquy about drawer handles, he’d cracked and told me all about Caro. Caro Morton was a young barrister, working at Horace’s chambers. They’d been sat next to each other at the grim ideas dinner and Jimmy was, he insisted, set on her within minutes. They’d been on several dates in the weeks since, and discussed moving in together already. Caro, it emerged, was not a woman who played it cool and pretended that she wasn’t looking for commitment.
‘I want you to meet her, Gray,’ he said. ‘She’s met John and Sophie but she needs to pass your bar.’ I was shaken by this. Met his parents? Simone didn’t hit that milestone for months. But then, Caro was in the same circle, wasn’t she? An associate of Horace, a lawyer who doubtless went to Oxbridge and had a parent that the Latimers either knew or professed to know. Simone, as lovely as she might have been, was not. East London born, daughter of a nurse and a council worker, she never fitted in with Jimmy’s family with the ease that one of his own tribe would have. Sophie and John showered her with praise – Sophie once took her to the country house they rented in Oxfordshire for a bonding weekend where she forced them to make marmalade all day – but there would never be a true ease. I should know. Being embraced into that family is not the same as being truly accepted. Someone feeling smug for helping you is not the same as loving you.
Caro. I won’t waste time here. I hated her from the moment I met her. Intensely. I imagine you’re wondering if this is because her presence threatened to take away my oldest friend, the man I’d relied on since I was a child. To you I say: try harder. We shall have no banal cod psychology here. A month after I’d first heard about the new girlfriend, we were set to meet.
We arranged drinks at a bar in Maida Vale one Wednesday night, something I was silently furious about because I still hadn’t made any headway with my grand finale. But it was clearly a three-line whip and I couldn’t come up with a good enough reason to postpone again. Jimmy and I downed a bottle of wine as we waited for her. She was so busy with work, he explained, as he scanned his phone for an update on her whereabouts. Ten minutes later, she walked in. I didn’t need to be told that it was her – I knew. Caro pushed her way past the group of people waiting to be seated without having to say a word. Phone clamped to her ear, she had long red hair (which looked intensely natural but which I later found out was dyed. Never trust an artificial redhead – their need to be different and interesting marks them out as neither) and wore a cream silk shirt and wide-leg trousers. The only makeup I could discern was a swipe of red lipstick. And it goes without saying that she was beautiful, ethereal, captivating, blah blah. She knew it. Women always know it. And Jimmy would think that he’d discovered some untapped beauty because she didn’t wear tight clothes or bother with nail varnish. Men always think that a surface level lack of vanity is a winning trait, as if the amount of effort women like Caro put into their appearance was any different from the dolled-up girls you see on any British street on a Saturday night. It’s just a different way of approaching it. And the beauty is still obvious, but men think it’s more refined, as if beauty in women is only pure when they pretend not to care about possessing it.