“Oh dear God,” said Pippa, squeezing my arm to reassure me. “It isn’t that. The thing is, we—Ari and I—don’t drink. And by that I mean we’re teetotalers, practically Mormons. We gave it up when the doctors showed us the state of Mummy’s liver. We tried AA but couldn’t handle all the praying, so now we just keep a sort of honesty calendar. If one of us falls off the wagon, we get a black mark. Don’t we, Ari?” She addressed the last part to the kitchen, where, presumably, Ari was hiding. “Suki’s here,” she said, more loudly. “She’s come all the way from Australia to see us!”
“New Zealand,” I corrected.
“New Zealand!” she shouted at the kitchen.
I followed her in, where a huge man trussed in a small white chef’s apron stood with his belly jutting out to meet the stove. He was the very opposite of all the snake-hipped rogues Pippa had run around with back in the day, but so was almost any husband you could think of.
“Ari,” said Pippa, prodding him to get his attention. “I said, Suki’s here.”
Ari rested his wooden spoon on a tea towel and wiped his hands on his apron before backing away reluctantly from the stove. “Hope you’re not vegetarian,” he said, holding toward me a hand the size of a bear’s.
“Meat is good,” I said, patting my stomach.
He smiled vaguely and went back to his pots. Pippa swung open the fridge, giving me a clear view of the honesty calendar, which looked as though it had only just survived a violent game of noughts and crosses.
“That’s all Ari,” said Pippa, noticing I’d seen it. “He refuses to cook anything without wine. I have to watch him like a hawk. Don’t I, darling?”
At the stove, Ari huffed, and I thought, with a pang, of the seven quid I’d wasted on plonk, and how it had been a toss-up between that and my tube fare home. Was it rude, in the home of quasi-reformed alcoholics, to demand a glass of wine from the bottle you’d brought? I was starting to think I might need one.
In the two months that had passed since I first called Pippa, my circumstances had bypassed bad and worse and arrived straight at desperate. I had no family in London anymore, no backstop, and since my arrival the city had been behaving in a way that was downright hostile. In the first month, I had tried to open a bank account in Kensington High Street—the same branch my parents had used—but had been told that I couldn’t open one until I’d lived in England for at least a year. “But I was born here and lived here for eighteen years,” I protested, to no avail. Ten years abroad had apparently canceled out the first eighteen in Britain. The same thing happened at the surgery of my old family doctor in Westbourne Grove, where I went to retrieve my National Health Service number. The receptionist informed me that after ten years without patient activity, they had destroyed my health records. Inland Revenue had just done the same. I found such efficiency hard to believe in a country renowned for its grinding bureaucracy but was told that if I’d come back earlier there’d still have been a trace of me left in the system. As things stood, I felt like the recently deceased.
Pippa took a carton out of the fridge and poured me a large glass of orange juice. “Now,” she said, guiding me back to the living room, “the last time we saw you was at the funeral. Next thing we heard, you’d gone to live with your father in New Zealand.”
“I didn’t live with him.”
“How silly of me,” Pippa said. “You were too old. What were you, eighteen or nineteen?”
“Eighteen, but that wasn’t it. He lived in the country and—”
Pippa laughed. “I can’t imagine the disco king ever living in the country—how absurd.”
She talked about my father in a jocular way and I wondered how well she had known him, how much he’d had to do with what I’d seen that night at the party. But it wasn’t something I could ask about. “His new wife,” I said, “is fully into horses.”
She looked as though a light had come on. “Good lord, that’s right. Rowan was horse mad.”
“You knew Rowan?”
“Not well, no,” said Pippa, adding, “only what Hillary told me about her.”
For a moment, I was silent, taken aback. My mother had never mentioned Rowan to me by name, or in any other way, and I’d assumed it was because she didn’t know anything about her.
“I wish I’d made more of an effort to help you and your mother after you left Ladbroke Gardens,” said Pippa. “You do know that, don’t you?”