The Reunion

lips.
    ‘Crap,’ Lilah said with a grin.
    ‘So, you’re not going to do it again?’
    ‘God, no.’
    ‘You’d be sorry, you know, if you lost Andrew.’
    ‘I would, wouldn’t I?’
    Natalie turned away. She had her back to Lilah as she said: ‘You don’t know how lucky you are.’

Chapter Thirty-seven

    NATALIE HAD GOT herself into a routine. The alarm went off at seven, she hopped into the shower, made coffee and, sitting in her dressing gown, spent an hour writing. Then she got dressed and by 8.40 exactly, she’d be on her way to work. It took her twenty minutes from her flat to the office, and though it might not have been the prettiest of routes – it was grim most of the way except for the bridge and a short stretch along the river – she liked it. It gave her time to think about the words she’d just written, to jumble them around in her head.
    She was working as an editorial assistant to a junior editor at a publishing company. It was about as lowly a position as it was possible to get, and she didn’t care. She worked surrounded by books all day. They were piled high around her, stacked on shelves and under her desk, she could smell them and caress them and take them home with her. She chatted to editors in the smoking room, she stood next to authors, including famous ones, in the lift. It wasn’t quite the dream job, but she was on her way.
    If she hadn’t been cajoled into going to the pub with colleagues, Nat ate lunch alone, with a book. She’d sit at the same table at the back of the same café every day, eating a salt beef sandwich with gherkins and drinking a bottle of water and she would read. Completely undisturbed.
    She left the office at six, and unless she was going out (and she tried to keep nights out on weekdays to a minimum), she’d walk home, hopping straight into the shower when she got there, and then she’d make dinner and write for another hour.
    She wasn’t lonely. Everyone thought she was – well, everyone except Lilah, who understood her better than anyone else. She wasn’t lonely, she was happy. She liked her routine. If she had been asked, in her first year of university, where she’d want to be when she left, she’d have said: I want to live in London, work for a publishing house. I want to write. And here she was, doing exactly that. She’d had a short story accepted for an anthology by new writers under thirty, the letter confirming it pinned to the little notice board above her desk. Every morning when she looked at it, she could feel her heart race, the smile come to her face, she couldn’t quite believe it. Published! Already! She’d never dreamed it would happen this quickly, that her second submission would be accepted. She was exactly where she wanted to be, she felt as though the starting gun had just gone off and already she was racing ahead.
    She was standing at the kitchen counter eating cottage cheese out of the tub, when the phone rang. She let the answering machine get it.
    ‘Nat. What’s up?’ It was Dan. ‘Seems like ages since I saw you. You fancy coming up to Norwich some time in the next few weeks? Would be great to catch up. I…’ There was a long pause. ‘I’ve been… I don’t know. It would be nice to see you. Give me a call, all right?’
    Nat stood there for a moment, then went into the living room and replayed the message. So now even Dan thought she was lonely? Unless he had some ulterior motive. You never could tell with Dan. She listened to the message a third time. He sounded nervous, edgy, as though he had something to say but couldn’t bring himself to say it. Perhaps
he
was lonely. He used to try, rather half-heartedly, to sleep with her at college every now and again. Were they back to that? She thought about ringing him back, but she wasn’t in the mood to be charmed and cajoled. She didn’t want to sleep with Dan, she didn’t want to sleep with anyone at the moment. She liked things the way they were.
That
Lilah could not understand. Neither could Jen. How could they? They’d never really been single. They didn’t understand how liberating it was.
    Dinner at Conor and Jen’s on Friday night took a little of the gloss off her cherished liberation. She watched them, side by side in their tiny kitchen, chopping and sautéing and nudging each other out of the way with their hips, laughing at each other’s jokes, finishing each other’s sentences; she watched them after dinner when they sat side by side