‘I am now quite cured of seeking pleasure in society, be it country or town. A sensible man ought to find sufficient company in himself.’
Noah lifted his hand in a half-hearted gesture and Nina could absolutely style this out. Wave back and carry on walking to the end of the carriage.
Or she could just act like a grown-up and sit down opposite Noah. ‘Well, this is a coincidence!’ Of course it wasn’t a coincidence when his parents lived five streets away from hers; God would smite her for all the lying she was about to do. ‘So anyway this is already awkward enough without us ignoring each other all the way to Waterloo, but if you want some quiet time, I can just shove off?’
He shook his head. ‘No, you’re all right.’
Noah really knew how to make a girl feel special. ‘So, where do you live anyway?’ Nina asked.
‘Bermondsey.’ He seemed a little awkward, but Nina was used to working a tough crowd. She had just survived a family dinner, after all.
‘Cool. By the Tate Modern?’ she asked and this feigned interest in the face of zero encouragement was actually a lot like being on a bad date.
‘Nearer to Borough Market.’
‘There’s a stall in Borough Market that sells this salted caramel chocolate tart that makes me want to cry even thinking about it.’ Nina closed her eyes at the memory of said salted caramel chocolate tart, then opened them again to see Noah looking at her. He quickly averted his gaze. ‘Mattie must never know that I’m having impure thoughts about someone else’s French patisserie,’ she added and she wasn’t even joking, though Hallelujah! Was that the tiniest of smiles breaking through the stormy look on Noah’s face?
‘I’ll take your secret to the grave,’ he promised solemnly, then gestured at the Tupperware container on Nina’s lap. ‘Where’ve you been then?’
‘My parents’ house. Sunday lunch once a month is a bit of a ritual slash torment now that I live up town.’ Nina sighed. ‘At least, it was meant to be for Sunday lunch but then World War Three broke out between me and my mother.’
Noah raised his eyebrows. ‘That bad, eh?’
‘Yeah, but we’ll leave it a week then she’ll phone, it’s her turn to phone after we’ve had a row, I did it last time, and neither of us will mention it. It’s our way.’ Nina shook her head at the utter trainwreck that was her relationship with her mother. ‘What about you?’ She just about stopped herself from asking if he’d seen his folks too – after all, they were strangers and she couldn’t know that his family were from Worcester Park too.
Noah had a small collection of Tupperware next to him on the seat. He gave it a look of repulsion. ‘Yeah, same as you, visiting the parents. No World War Three but a few minor skirmishes,’ he confessed in a tired voice. Then he rubbed his eyes like his own trip to the bosom of his loving family had exhausted him.
Nina could empathise. ‘Well, at least you got leftovers out of it,’ she pointed out, because she wanted to turn Noah’s frown upside down. And though she hadn’t been directly involved, she still felt guilty about the rotten time he’d had as a kid. ‘Who doesn’t love a cold roast potato?’
‘I love cold roast potatoes,’ Noah said dreamily then fixed grave green eyes on Nina. ‘There are no cold roast potatoes in any of these containers though. It’s all high-fibre vegan food.’
Her mother had said something about Noah’s parents being hippies with funny ideas, but then as far as Alison was concerned anyone who wore Birkenstocks or didn’t eat meat was a hippy with funny ideas. Nina didn’t share her mother’s viewpoint. In fact, she even willingly went meat-free a few days each week because she cared about the planet and yeah, admittedly, sometimes dinner was just a bowl of cheesy chips from The Midnight Bell. ‘Yum. Some of my happiest moments have involved stuffing my face with a black-lentil dal.’
‘I hear you,’ Noah said morosely. ‘Unfortunately, my parents’ vegan cooking hasn’t moved beyond the nut roasts they learned to make when they were students, though they have got with the times and added chia seeds to them now.’ He rubbed his eyes again. ‘Today’s nut roast was so dry that it’s sucked every last drop of moisture out of my body. Or maybe it was the mung-bean bake.’
Nina had once lived with a militant vegan who’d left bowls of soaking mung beans everywhere so she could empathise.
‘I’m getting cotton mouth just thinking about it,’ she said. And she didn’t realise she’d been tensing her muscles until she settled back in her seat and felt the tension leave her. ‘Was that what the skirmishing was about? Did you try to sneak a Scotch egg past your mum?’
‘I could murder a Scotch egg. I might have to go home via Tesco Express to get one,’ Noah said with the same dreamy expression as before. When he’d first rocked up at Happy Ever After in his suit and with his iPad, Nina would never have imagined that he’d have so many layers. He wasn’t wearing a suit today. There were jeans and underneath his navy-blue peacoat, a navy-blue jumper peeked out. God, he really did love a navy-blue ensemble. ‘But no, I know much better than to try and sneak any animal products past my parents. We skirmished over my lifestyle choices.’
‘You too? I never imagined we’d have so much in common,’ Nina said, and Noah laughed, and Nina didn’t think she’d seen him laugh before. The laughter was like an instant Instagram filter, wiping away the tired, tight look from his face and bringing his features to life again.
‘You mean that your parents are also very disappointed that their own flesh and blood has sold their soul out. Then they harped on about sucking on the corporate teat for a while but I tuned out,’ Noah said with an exasperated edge to his voice. ‘As soon as they start talking about “The Man”, I know what’s coming and I switch off.’
‘They’re not proud of you? But, why not? I mean, you’ve been to Oxford and Harvard,’ Nina reminded him, though Noah was hardly likely to forget.
‘Did I tell you about that at the pub?’ He looked confused and Nina found herself coughing wildly to distract him – no he hadn’t bloody well mentioned it, dammit, that had been Alison.
‘Do you need a sip of water?’ Noah sat up, patting his pockets as though a water bottle would miraculously appear. Nina managed to get control of her ‘coughing fit’, and waved a hand at him weakly.
‘I’m fine,’ she croaked.
‘It’s a bit of a coincidence that you’re from Worcester Park too,’ Noah said as she wiped her watering eyes. ‘And you’re about the same age as me.’ His brow furrowed and Nina closed her eyes in silent agony in anticipation of the next question he was definitely going to ask. ‘What school did you go to?’
‘I’ve pretty much repressed all memory of school,’ she said desperately. ‘Absolutely not the best days of my life. Whoever came up with that expression didn’t know what they were talking about.’
‘Ha, yes! To be honest, I don’t think about school that much either. It was pretty shitty for me too, but do you know what? I learned some life lessons from it and then I moved on,’ Noah said calmly as if his dark days at Orange Hill weren’t that big a deal. ‘I wouldn’t be very good at my job if I couldn’t compartmentalise.’
Was it possible that she was going to get away with dodging his question? After all, Noah didn’t seem to recognise Nina at all from their Orange Hill days, let alone realise that she was Paul’s sister: good thing they didn’t really look alike. But should Nina tell Noah about the connection? Would it be the right thing to do?
How would she even begin to bring it up? Actually my older brother Paul used to beat you up on a regular basis. Nina winced. ‘Yeah, I’ve moved on too. Thank God!’
‘It’s best to leave all that stuff in the past,’ Noah agreed. ‘And right now, all I can think about are Scotch eggs. I’m starving,’ he said plaintively, casting a baleful look at his Tupperware.
Nina stared down at the Tupperware on her own lap. She gave the container a cautious shake. Its contents felt a lot less intact than they had done before she’d run for the train. She prised open the lid to confirm her suspicions. Mattie’s peerless raspberry meringue wasn’t quite smashed to smithereens but it had certainly been broken into large lumps.
‘Will this do?’ Nina offered the box to Noah who peered inside, then an expression of sheer joy came over him, which was much more pleasing to look at than his stony face of before.
He selected a large piece of very crumbly cake and then looked around. ‘I need a plate and also a bib.’
Nina was already delving into her bag. ‘When you wear as much make-up as I do, you never go anywhere without a packet of wetwipes. I also have tissues, cotton buds and some anti-bacterial hand gel.’ She handed Noah a couple of tissues and watched as he took a happy bite of cake.
The smell wafting up from the container was heavenly: the soft, sweet cloud from the meringue and the sharp tang of the raspberries, but Nina wasn’t going to eat cake in public. Not after spending two hours with her mother, meaning all she’d be thinking about was how many calories, carbs and grams of sugar she was consuming.
Hopefully, by the time she’d got home, these feelings would pass and she could eat cake and any other thing she damn well wanted without hearing Alison carping in her ear, ‘A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips’ or ‘Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’ and her very favourite fat-shaming mantra, ‘Little pickers wear enormous knickers.’
She didn’t want to keep staring at Noah as he munched away – there was every possibility that she might start drooling, which was what happened when you denied yourself cake. And what if Noah thought she was slavering over him?
She shuddered and busied herself with her phone. There was a text from Chloe (Hope you’re OK. We left just after you once I’d told your mum not to give Ellie and Rosie complexes about their bodies. That went down well. Not! Speak soon. xxx) and a couple of messages on HookUpp from men she’d up-swiped but hadn’t HookUpped with yet before she’d sworn off it. Checking it absolutely didn’t count, because she wasn’t going to reply, unless either of them categorically stated that they were looking for the Cathy to their Heathcliff. But neither of them had. They’d just sent her dick pics.
Had any woman ever formed a meaningful relationship with a man who didn’t bother with any of the niceties, not even a ‘how are you doing?’ but went straight to sending her a photo of his tumescent yet still very unimpressive penis? Nina doubted it.
‘I can’t eat any more of this,’ Noah declared and Nina looked up from her phone to see him putting the lid on her Tupperware. ‘I want to leave room for my Scotch egg and I’m starting to go a little trippy from so much sugar.’
They were pulling into Earlsfield station, a few people waiting on the platform to board, and in a few minutes they’d be at Waterloo. Nina was just debating the merits of getting the Northern Line to Tottenham Court Road and then walking the rest of the way or whether she should get an Uber, though maybe she should delete the Uber app off her phone in solidarity with her father, when she realised that Noah had been speaking to her, because all of a sudden he reached across and gently tapped her on the knee.
‘But don’t you think it’s weird?’ he asked.
Nina blinked at him. ‘What’s weird?’
‘That we’ve never met before.’ Noah gestured at Nina with a slightly meringue-y hand. ‘We grew up in the same place, we’re about the same age and you’re not the sort of person to fade into the background.’
At the thought of her days at Orange Hill, even though those days hadn’t been the terror ride that Noah’s had been, Nina got the same twinge in her stomach that she always got. A slightly panicky, sicky feeling. She willed it away. But also Noah had just confirmed that he didn’t know that Nina had attended his school, let alone was related to his chief tormentor, and it seemed a pity to tell him now when they were getting on so well. She’d wait until they were in the shop, in a professional setting, and take him to one side to deliver the news, but for now it could wait.
‘Well, I suppose technically we lived nearer to Cheam than Worcester Park,’ she hastily amended. ‘And I didn’t look like this back then.’
Noah gave Nina a sweeping, assessing glance that started with her suede open-toe shoes and travelled upwards, lingering in the places that Nina wouldn’t have expected him to linger, then settling on her face. He smiled as if her face was especially pleasing though Nina was pretty sure she’d chewed off her lipstick – she’d been planning on doing a quick repair job on the train before she’d bumped into him.
‘I’d definitely have remembered you if you looked like this,’ he said and his tone was appreciative and entirely male in a way that threw Nina off-course. Was he flirting with her? No. She surely wasn’t his type; he certainly wasn’t hers, though at this very moment, Tom’s idea that Nina should do a little light flirting with Noah was quite appealing. Not to discover Noah’s agenda but because Nina liked to be both giving and receiving of flirtation.
‘Well, back then I had buck teeth, braces and bee-sting boobs. Then when the braces came off and puberty finally kicked in, I spent most of my waking hours straightening my hair and making sure that I had plenty of midriff on show, thanks to my huge collection of cropped T-shirts and hipster jeans. Even in winter.’
‘And how did you go from that to this?’ Noah asked with another long look at Nina, his eyes heavy-lidded, so she felt another twinge in her stomach, though this twinge didn’t make her feel panicky or sick. It was the good kind of twinge.
Obviously the scene at her parents’ house had unsettled her. And now Nina was dragged back to the past. To Worcester Park. And the girl she’d once been. ‘Like I said, a lot of things have changed.’ It was time to switch it up. Forget about that girl, be the woman she’d become. ‘What about you? Any teen fashion no-nos lurking in your closet?’
‘Oh, too many to mention. I was a late bloomer.’ Noah shrugged modestly. ‘Also, I eventually realised that pocket protectors and the huge glasses I used to wear weren’t doing me any favours. It was quite a revelation.’
‘I can imagine,’ Nina said carefully, because she didn’t want to blurt out anything tactless about Noah’s former look and the bottle-top glasses and give the game away. ‘Once you get past the pimples and all the hormones, puberty is a wonderful thing, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah, though the acne was hard. You couldn’t tell where it ended and where my freckles began,’ Noah said and Nina’s eyes were drawn to his face, which was blemish free, though he still had freckles, mostly over his nose and forehead.
‘I like freckles,’ she declared truthfully. ‘Sun kisses, aren’t they? When I was going through my Doris Day phase, I even drew some on with brown eyebrow pencil.’
‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t really see you as a Doris Day,’ Noah remarked as the train began to slow down as they approached Waterloo.
‘This is why my Doris Day phase barely lasted a week,’ Nina said over the announcement that they should check that they had all their belongings with them before they left the train. She gestured at Noah’s collection of Tupperware. ‘I was going to suggest that you leave those behind but I guess they might get blown up as a suspicious package.’
‘So true,’ Noah sighed, standing up and gathering his Tupperwared vegan fare. ‘Also, if I don’t return the Tupperware, I’ll wish that I’d been blown up.’
It was perfectly natural to fall into step with Noah once they got off the train to walk towards the ticket barriers. ‘Well, I hope you’ve still got room for that Scotch egg,’ Nina said and actually she was feeling quite peckish herself.
Although they’d only been living together for a few months, Verity always made sure she was home from Johnny’s to spend the evening with Nina after she got back from her trip to the family home. Not that Nina liked to share much about her Worcester Park life, but Verity seemed to sense that all was not well and that Nina needed company and a takeaway as she watched something trashy on TV.
‘I always have room for a Scotch egg,’ Noah said happily. He patiently waited as Nina hunted for her ticket. ‘Though now I think I fancy a steak.’
‘God, you’re really desperate to purge the memory of that nut roast,’ Nina said with a laugh.
They were on the concourse of Waterloo station. Unbelievably it was only three thirty but it felt later, though Nina could see the weak afternoon sun streaming in from one of the street entrances.
‘I’m going to walk home along the South Bank and stop off for steak-frites on the way. There’s a really good French restaurant on Bermondsey Street if you fancy it?’ Noah asked so casually that Nina barely registered what he was saying as she began the hunt for her Oyster card.
Then it registered. ‘Oh! Steak-frites sounds nice but … Very and I have this whole girls’ night in thing on a Sunday after I’ve been to my folks,’ Nina said.
‘Right,’ Noah said and his face set in a sudden and determined expression. ‘Just to be clear, that was me asking you out. On a date.’
‘Oh!’ Nina exclaimed again. ‘OK.’ Was it OK? They were worlds apart … and he was her employer’s husband’s bestie … and the navy-blue wardrobe left a lot to be desired … and there was the UTTER DISTASTER of the secret she was keeping from him … but sharing a four-seater with Noah hadn’t been an ordeal. In fact, it had been a welcome distraction, otherwise she’d have sat there stewing and seething about the argument she’d just had with Alison, so that her mother would have managed to ruin Nina’s entire Sunday.
Also, now Nina felt an obligation to genuinely be nice and charming to Noah, if only to make up for the vile way her own brother had treated him. It was a way to redress the balance, to pay penance, show Noah how to have some fun because he’d certainly never had any when he was at school.
‘So, that is OK, then?’ Noah prompted, his face quite pink though he still looked quite resolute. Nina did actually like a certain steely quality to her men.
‘Yeah, it is OK,’ Nina decided.
‘Dinner then, this week coming. Is Wednesday evening good for you?’ Noah persisted and Nina realised she’d been half expecting/half hoping that they’d swap phone numbers and play a little text tennis and nothing would ever come of it. But no. Noah was going to lock this date down. Again, she had to give him props for being so to the point. She was heartily sick of men who wouldn’t even commit to a vague plan to meet for a drink, as if Nina was going to get the wrong idea and start picking out engagement rings. ‘I’m working on another project this week so I won’t be at Happy Ever After,’ he clarified.
Nina opened the calendar on her phone, though she knew that she was free on Wednesday. If she really wanted to bail, she could invent some longstanding other engagement for Wednesday. ‘No, Wednesday’s fine,’ she heard herself say, because apparently she didn’t want to bail. She’d ponder that later tonight.
‘Great. I’m working in Soho …’
‘I’ll come to you,’ Nina said quickly, because this was just one date, a sympathy date, and she didn’t need any of her friends to know about it. ‘Shall we say eight o’clock outside the Cambridge Theatre?’
‘Perfect.’
And then it was back to being awkward so that Nina died a little inside at the thought that she’d just committed to a date with Noah.
‘Well, I’ll see you Wednesday, then,’ she said brightly as if Wednesday couldn’t come soon enough. She was already backing away while Noah stood there, his face still pink and now frowning as if he was having second thoughts too. ‘Enjoy your steak-frites!’
‘I will,’ he said and Nina couldn’t bear it a second longer. She was now several paces away from Noah and with a farewell salute, she turned around and hurried away so she could be swallowed up in the crowd of travellers back from weekends out of town.