People LIke Her(25)

I guess in some ways what I had been hoping to recapture with Coco’s party was a little of what it used to be like living on this street when I first bought the house, back when I shared it with Will and Ben and we used to drink at the Lord Napier after work every single night. When Emmy and I were first going out, we had our second date there, then our third and possibly our fourth as well. Later in our relationship, after Emmy had moved in and the guys had moved out, we would often pop across the road for a pint or a glass of wine; if there was nothing in the fridge we’d just head over to grab a burger and not even need to take our coats. We used to drift over for Sunday lunch with the papers and stay the whole afternoon.

Coco’s party was not like that at all.

It was Monday before I managed to catch the right person at the pub to speak to about booking a room, and it was Tuesday before I finally got around to sending the invitations out. The first responses I got were two bounce-backs saying the email address was not recognized and an out of office. All was silent for a few hours, then steadily the apologies began trickling in. I’d invited around fifty people in total. About twenty of them already had some other London-based social commitment on Saturday—although about half offered to swing by for a quick visit if they got the chance. A dozen or so were away that weekend. One of the couples emailed back to remind me they’d moved to Dubai eighteen months ago, which triggered a vague memory of getting an email I never got around to answering about a leaving drinks thing. Three people were at the football. Two couples would either have literally just had a baby or be very overdue. One person—a writer friend of mine whose first novel came out about the same time as mine did—was reading from his latest at a literary festival in Finland. Polly had a work commitment. Several others replied enthusiastically over the next few days and said they were bang up for it but they had to check with their partner what the plans were and then never got back to me. Quite a few didn’t bother replying at all.

By three o’clock in the afternoon on the day of the party, only about ten people had shown up—and two of them had already left, having some other kid’s party to pop into elsewhere.

Around four o’clock, the landlord took me aside and told me he was going to have to open up our bit of the pub to other people. It was absolutely heaving downstairs, he explained apologetically.

I could hardly object, really.

At least the children seemed to be having a nice time, kicking balloons around, stamping on them—and I was glad to see that Coco was joining in and enjoying herself and screaming and shouting just as loudly as anyone else.

While the kids were playing and Emmy was handing out slices of cake, I got stuck talking to a friend from school, Andrew, who had driven down from Berkhamsted with his wife. He seemed disappointed not to see more of the old gang here, kept asking if Millsy was coming, whether I still see Simon Cooper or that bloke Phil Thornton. I do not. I have not seen Phil Thornton since I bumped into him in a club in Clapham in 2003.

Andrew asked if I was still a writer, and with a slightly forced smile I told him I liked to think so. “Working on a novel at the moment?” he asked. I gave a nod, still smiling. I am still working on the same novel I have been working on for the past eight years, as it happens. This has at times been a source of some slight tension in my marriage. There have been occasions when Emmy has suggested I just send it out or let someone else read what I’ve got or asked if she can have a look and see if she can help with anything. Mostly nowadays we do not discuss the topic at all.

I am, in a sense, the victim of circumstances.

The truth is, for most of my twenties and early thirties I didn’t really feel the need to earn a living. Nor did it ever feel like I was under a lot of financial pressure to finish my second book. When my father died, years ago, the summer between my first and second years at Cambridge, he left me a fairly substantial amount of money, to be administered by a trust fund until I turned twenty-five. To that money, my mother added additional funds from the proceeds of my father’s life insurance. It’s basically what I’ve been living on ever since. Quite a lot of it went into buying the house, of course. Quite a lot more went toward redoing the house. I’ve eked out the rest of it pretty well over the last few years. We did sell the film rights to my novel, and for a while it even looked like it was actually going to get made. I’ve penned a couple of screenplays on spec, had meetings with TV producers, tried my hand at short stories. I spent about six months bashing out a thriller, just to bring some cash in—my agent read it and didn’t think it really played to my strengths. As for my second novel proper, the one I have spent all this time laboring over, there have been multiple occasions when I have been tempted just to scrap the whole thing and start writing something new and different and fresh instead. My laptop is full of openings of novels I was briefly very excited about and abandoned after about five paragraphs. There have been multiple occasions, usually in the middle of the night, when I have considered quitting writing entirely, retraining as a teacher or a lawyer or a plumber. Last time I checked, my life savings—all that I have left of them—consisted of about seventeen hundred pounds.

Sometimes it comes to me with a pang that I will never be one of Granta’s best young British novelists.

I am aware this is not exactly what Emmy would call relatable content.

By about half past four, the last of our guests were donning their coats and attempting to gather their children and wandering around making sure they had definitely got everything before they headed off, and Emmy gave me a look to indicate that it was about time we started to think about doing the same.