The Sunday Lunch Club Page 7

  She thought of the trunk in her attic, and how she would add to it again this November. That solemn ritual of creeping up the ladder, offering in hand. It was traditionally the worst day of her year, but now its power had leaked all over the other three hundred and sixty-four.

  ‘Ye-ti!’ The two-note call was pointless. The dog was untrainable. Sometimes Anna wondered if she should have his ears tested, but a dog who galloped from the far end of the house whenever the fridge door opened was not deaf.

  Yeti widdled joyously and generously on carpets and floorboards and feet. Any shoe left lolling about was chewed up. He had an irrational loathing for the sofa and ambushed it with his needle-sharp puppy teeth. Anna did her best to love him, but it was hard to love a creature who made your house stink and left tidy poos in the bottom of your wardrobe.

  ‘He’s a rescue dog,’ Luca would remind her. ‘He’s been neglected.’ The tiny dog looked even smaller in Luca’s big hands. He built a kennel in the garden, which the dog refused to use. As a surprise, he took Yeti to be groomed, but the result was disappointing.

  ‘He looks worse,’ wailed Anna, as the demented furball barked indignantly at his own reflection in the back door.

  ‘You’ll learn to love him.’ Luca seemed sure of this. ‘Soon you’ll wonder how you ever managed without him.’

  That’s you you’re talking about, thought Anna, giving in to Luca’s arms, his mouth, his greedy need for her. While giving herself, Anna held something back. Allowing him to eat her up as if she was a cream cake, she managed to withhold a little.

  It wasn’t easy; Anna loved being a cream cake.

  Two weeks into the relationship – for that’s what it was: Anna had heard Luca describe her as his girlfriend; even at forty these calibrations mattered – and it was time for the next Sunday Lunch Club.

  ‘At last I get to meet the mysterious Dinkie.’ Luca was buttoning up his shirt in Anna’s bedroom after removing it in a hurry the moment he’d arrived.

  ‘She’ll have you wound around her little finger by the time you get your coat off.’ Anna scrutinised her wardrobe. Dinkie liked Anna in blue, so blue it was. She slipped on a linen shirt dress and slid her toes into leather flats. Angling her foot, she took pleasure in the stitching of the shoe, and the density of the midnight blue dye. She made a mental note to ask Sam if they could move into shoe production at some point, and picked up her camera.

  Luca threw up his arm and stepped back at the lightning flash. ‘What the—’

  ‘I take a Polaroid a day, remember? For Josh’s project.’ Anna fanned the small square, watching Luca materialise. Off guard, his eyes merry, it was a great likeness. She would pin it to her noticeboard in the shed. Already she perceived it as a keepsake. I’m creating souvenirs for after he’s gone.

  Certain truths had to be faced. One such truth was assembling itself in her uterus. The sexy, thoughtful man currently jiggling his car keys and imploring her to get a move on was not the child’s father. When Anna put these two truths together, it gave her a reason to hold back.

  The Germans probably have a word for a place that is both institutional and cosy. Sunville’s breeze-block blandness was only slightly warmed up by the floral curtains at the double-glazed windows.

  The corridor to Dinkie’s room was a maze that smelled of talc and onions, dotted with figures hunched over walking frames. Anna hated to overtake them; her vigour highlighted their feebleness.

  In a glass-walled communal dayroom, somebody enthusiastically played an electric keyboard. Anna peered in as she and Luca passed, waving hello at an elderly man who raised his stick to her. Doors squeaked shut elsewhere in the building. Radios chattered. Plates clattered in a distant dining hall.

  A hefty Irish woman in a powder pink Sunville tunic recognised her as they passed. ‘You’re Mrs Piper’s granddaughter!’ Over her shoulder, she shouted, ‘Handbags! Divorced! Allergic to coriander!’

  Her warmth brought Anna’s shoulders down a notch. The internet overflowed with stories of sadistic care home staff; she was grateful for evidence that Dinkie was listened to. She wondered what word described the old people around her. Were they inmates? Patients? She dimly remembered the superintendent referring to ‘clients’. Somewhat late, perhaps, she shuddered at the word ‘superintendent’.

  The client in room 43 – a ground-floor garden room w. en suite bath/kitchenette/satellite TV – was holding court in a high-backed chair. Dinkie’s name was appropriate; she was the size of a six-year-old, with a doll’s face and enamel buttons for eyes. Her soft Irish skin was lined now, and her odd bent little beak of a nose gave her a poignant air. It also made her talk in a slightly snuffly way when she called out ‘Anna! Darlin’!’ Dinkie’s Dublin accent was impervious to the decades she’d spent in London. ‘There y’are, hen.’

  Anna’s appearance was clucked over – her hair was ‘lovely’, her dress was ‘fabluss’ – and she was kissed and a chair was found and Anna felt her family lap around her like water. Josh was perched on a stool, Paloma on his lap. Santi and Neil roared together at some joke. Maeve sat at Dinkie’s feet like a Labrador, albeit one that smelled of Body Shop musk. Over by the window, Sam and Isabel held hands; Anna made sure to mouth a hello at them.

  ‘And who’s this?’ Dinkie looked Luca up and down, her tiny blue eyes bright and perceptive.

  ‘That’s Anna’s boyfriend,’ said Maeve from the floor, enjoying herself.

  ‘I’m Luca.’ He held out his hand and Dinkie took it imperiously.

  ‘Quare name,’ she said under her breath. Using her telephone voice, she said, ‘Will you take a small sweet sherry, Luca?’

  Luca would, and did. He sat on the arm of Anna’s chair and found her hand.

  He was, Anna realised, nervous; scrawny Dinkie, with her man-made separates and her stiff white perm, had put this big dark man on his best behaviour.

  ‘Is he Catholic?’ asked Dinkie as if Luca wasn’t there. She was joking. But only half joking.

  ‘Actually, yes,’ laughed Anna. She was thankful to Luca’s ancestors for providing him with the correct religion; Dinkie still didn’t know about the baby and today was the ideal opportunity to tell her. She foretold carefully concealed disappointment. She foretold her own heart cracking slightly as old-fashioned, devout Dinkie made the best of it.

  ‘Lapsed, though,’ said Luca apologetically to his hostess.

  ‘Nobody’s perfect,’ said Dinkie.

  ‘Seriously, Dinkie,’ asked Neil, sherry in hand, paunch arguing with his striped shirt, ‘is this really how you want to live?’

  ‘I made me decision,’ said Dinkie stoutly. ‘Sunville is grand. I’m getting used to it.’

  ‘Are you sure,’ asked Maeve, ‘you don’t regret selling the house?’

  The modest terraced Piper homestead was on the corner of a London street that had been dodgy when Dinkie moved in as a newly-wed, but was now slap bang in the middle of trendy territory. The mind-boggling profit would keep Dinkie in Sunville for the rest of her days.

  ‘I never regret a thing,’ said Dinkie. ‘That’s one of me rules.’ In the sixty years since she was widowed, Dinkie had kept herself afloat financially and emotionally. Pride was one of the traits she’d passed to her oldest granddaughter.

  ‘The room looks great,’ lied Anna. The straight edges of the bland architecture sat uneasily with the big old mahogany bed and the wooden shelves crammed with Dinkie’s beloved Catherine Cooksons. The red velvet armchair, its embrace such a part of Anna’s childhood, sat beside a radiator instead of a coal fire. The radiator hummed, ignoring the June mildness, and the room was stuffy.

  Lunch was a buffet affair of sausage rolls and quiche, eaten on laps. Neil sent Anna a look, one she returned with interest – Dinkie’s home-cooking was a thing of the past. It was the end of an era.

  And the start of a new one. When you carry the future around inside you, you’re duty-bound to be optimistic. Anna loaded her plate: a day that included sausage rolls
couldn’t be all bad.

  ‘There’s something you don’t know, Dinkie.’ Maeve was coy at her grandmother’s feet.

  Damn. Anna put down her sausage roll. She’d wanted to tell Dinkie alone, let her grandmother get used to the idea. ‘Um, Maeve—’

  Maeve bunched her shoulders round her ears. ‘I have a new boyfriend, Dinkie. And he’s brilliant!’

  Sidling up to Anna, Neil whispered, ‘Only Maeve could think that trumps a baby.’

  ‘Is he a looker?’ Dinkie liked to point out that her husband – the late, sainted, Grandpa – had been dapper.

  ‘Ye-s.’ Maeve didn’t seem sure. ‘Well, he’s tall and dark and all that shit. Sorry, Dinkie.’ Maeve pulled in her chin, dodging her grandmother’s swipe.

  ‘And is he Catholic?’ asked Dinkie.

  ‘Don’t know. Don’t care.’ Maeve believed in Buddhism on some days, and in Elvis on others.

  ‘As long as he’s kind to you, darlin’,’ said Dinkie, ‘this fella’s all right by me. But if he touches a hair on your head . . .’ She put up two arthritic fists.

  ‘My money’s on the little woman!’ shouted Neil.

  ‘Less of the little, if you don’t mind.’ Dinkie beckoned to Isabel, who stepped forward like a deer stepping out onto a motorway. ‘This girl,’ said Dinkie – everybody under seventy was a girl – ‘is a . . . what is it now, darlin’?’ She cocked her head at Isabel’s prompt. ‘She’s an environmental engineer!’ Dinkie looked amazed as her dentures stumbled over the words. She was from a generation that was amazed if a woman got a degree, even though she herself had worked all her life and raised a son single-handedly.

  Anna was surprised too. I’ve sat with Sam day in day out and never asked what Isabel does for a living. She wondered if he’d noticed and decided that of course he had. She watched him as Dinkie continued to sing Isabel’s praises. Sam had changed . . . was he better looking? His hair was the same. That ribbed jumper was ancient. It’s me who’s changed. Anna was looking at a man who was no longer her property; she was spotting virtues she hadn’t bothered to notice for years. How kind his eyes are . . .

  ‘Hey.’ Luca nudged her. Anna turned and he was super-close. Warmth, and a sweet odour that was related to sex, enveloped her. He leaned in, placed his lips against her forehead and her skull rumbled as he said, in his low deep voice, ‘Looking forward to when we’re alone again?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Anna with considerable understatement.

  When he crossed the room, summoned by Dinkie to tell her all about his career – ‘Therapist! Ooh! And tell me, does that pay well, darlin’?’ – Neil skipped to Anna’s side again.

  ‘About time you told Luca, young lady.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Oh pur-leese. The baby.’ Neil mouthed the explosive word.

  Neil wasn’t to know that she’d told Luca about her pregnancy in the car on the way home from the last Sunday Lunch Club.

  They’d been idling at the lights, a few minutes from her door, when he’d said, ‘We should have dinner one night.’ He turned to her, his smile wolfish in the fading daylight. ‘One night soon. Like tomorrow night.’

  Instead of yes or no or maybe, Anna had said, ‘I’m pregnant.’

  He’d taken his hands off the wheel, sat back in surprise. ‘Wow! You’re super fertile! We haven’t even held hands yet.’

  They’d howled then, and the car behind had beeped at them to get going.

  ‘You don’t look pregnant,’ said Luca, parking smoothly, expertly.

  ‘It’s new. I’m still getting used to it. It was a bit of a shock.’

  ‘I see. So you’re not . . .’ Luca pouted as he worked out how to put it. ‘You’re not with the father?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So, you’re single and I’m single . . .’ Luca put his hands behind his head and smiled that expansive smile that seemed to ping on all the street lights along Anna’s road. ‘And we’re talking dinner, not marriage, so let’s do it, yeah?’

  It was that straightforward. Luca had a way of breaking situations down into bite-size pieces. ‘Yeah,’ she’d laughed. ‘A nice steak. A chip or two. Can’t hurt.’

  ‘Thanks for telling me.’ Luca leaned forward, closing the gap between them in the car. ‘I’m going to kiss you, Anna, and if the kiss goes well I’m going to suggest that I come in for coffee.’

  ‘Jesus, no pressure,’ she mumbled, making him laugh so that he sat back again.

  ‘Was that line crap?’ he asked. ‘It was meant to be smooth.’

  ‘Just kiss me, Luca,’ said Anna.

  So he had.

  ‘Did he come in for coffee?’ asked Neil, underlining the double meaning of the phrase.

  Anna jumped at his apparent mind-reading. ‘Yes. And sex,’ she whispered, with a neurotic look in Dinkie’s direction.

  ‘You cheeky girl!’ Neil shuddered happily. ‘Bet he’s a beast.’

  ‘Not telling.’ Anna subdued him with a look. She wanted to talk about Luca, about his powerful thighs, his muscled back, the way he gasped when he slipped inside her. She wanted to sky-write about the way he’d made love to her in the hallway against the front door, unable to wait, and she wanted to write a one-act play about the love they’d made later, more slowly, in her bed, transforming a John Lewis sale purchase into a tousled temple to Cupid.

  ‘You’ve gone all pink,’ said Neil.

  ‘It’s stuffy in here.’ Usually Anna needed to warm up to a sexual relationship, to coax herself into undressing in front of a man. Pregnancy should have added even more pressure and self-consciousness. With Luca, clothes were superfluous. Being naked felt right. There’d been no moral qualms, no wondering if it was too soon, no doubts that he’d respect her, or that she’d respect him, if they jumped in too fast.

  ‘Careful,’ said Neil, serious now. ‘This isn’t a good time to fall for somebody.’

  ‘Nobody’s falling for anybody,’ she assured him as Luca returned to her, swimming through the crowded room.

  ‘Miss me?’ he asked hopefully.

  ‘Brazen,’ sighed Neil, shaking his head in Dinkie’s direction. ‘Bloody brazen behaviour.’

  ‘What are you on about?’ Anna fed Luca some quiche with her plastic fork. They laughed, in a bubble of their own making. Delicious, erotic, she didn’t want it shattered by one of Neil’s rants.

  ‘Dinkie. Refusing to even acknowledge Paloma.’ Neil shut his eyes, turned away.

  ‘Eh?’ Anna wondered if he was joking, but the pain on his face was real. ‘Dinkie loves Paloma, you idiot.’

  Santi had pulled a chair near to Dinkie, and placed Paloma’s carrycot by Dinkie’s feet, like an offering to a very small, slightly tipsy goddess.

  ‘See?’ Anna nudged her brother. ‘She smiled down at her.’

  ‘Big deal.’ Neil chewed his cheek.

  Luca, using a softer version of his usual voice which Anna knew was his therapeutic tone, said, ‘There are many people vying for your grandmother’s attention, Neil. She’s an old lady, she—’

  ‘Excuses,’ said Neil in a bitter whisper. ‘She doesn’t accept Paloma because she’s not her granddaughter by blood.’

  ‘That’s not true.’ Anna frowned; this was hard to hear.

  ‘You know it, Anna, and I know it.’

  ‘It’s dangerous,’ suggested Luca, ‘to tell people what they know.’

  ‘One thing I do know about is prejudice. I didn’t come out until I was thirty, Luca.’ Neil said this as if it might be Luca’s fault. ‘I was so scared of how my parents and Dinkie would react. Santi there . . .’ He waved an arm in his partner’s direction. ‘He didn’t even have to come out!’

  Santi, hearing his name, approached them, lugging the carrycot like an oversized handbag.

  ‘Oh do shush, precious, for God’s sake,’ said Neil at his daughter, who was grizzling and kicking her bootees in the air.

  ‘She wants to be held,’ said Santi, who understood every gesture and sound the baby made.<
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  ‘Dinkie!’ called Neil, shame-faced, as if asking a huge favour. ‘Paloma’s fussing. Would you like to . . .?’

  ‘Later, pet.’ Dinkie held up her plate. ‘Sure, I’m still eating.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Neil. ‘I get it. Too busy.’

  ‘Afters!’ shouted Maeve, who regressed to toddler manners around Dinkie. ‘Is it cake?’ she asked lustfully.

  ‘Of course. Chocolate cake. What else?’ Dinkie seemed shocked at the idea of a Sunday lunch without its traditional finale.

  ‘Abuela,’ asked Santi. ‘Did you make it yourself?’

  Dinkie’s cake was famous within the confines of the family. ‘Of course not,’ said Sam. ‘She couldn’t make it here, could she?’

  ‘I could, Sam,’ said Dinkie smugly. ‘And I did. Press that buzzer for me there, love.’

  Sam did as he was told. A statuesque woman who wore the pink Sunville tunic as if it was couture brought in a dark towering cake. Her hair was piled high in dozens of plaits.

  ‘This is Sheba.’ Dinkie thanked the care worker, whose face was an introverted mask, her eyes cast down. ‘She’s from, where is it, love?’

  ‘Lagos,’ said Sheba curtly. When she lifted her eyes, they were a soulful brown.

  ‘I love your hair, Sheebs,’ said Maeve, who had a habit of awarding perfect strangers instant nicknames. Sheba didn’t answer.

  The cake was divided, given out, swooned over. It was as moist as it was rich as it was moreish; Anna’s carefully applied lipstick was replaced with chocolate icing.

  ‘Stay, Sheba, please,’ said Sam as the woman backed out noiselessly. ‘Have a piece.’

  ‘Yes, stay,’ the others echoed, and Sheba clamped her lips together, which seemed to be her best stab at smiling.

  It was typical of Sam to notice her, to include her. Anna saw Isabel study the back of his head as Sam cut a slice of cake for Sheba. Possibly Isabel was also thinking how kind he was, how attentive.

  Anna examined the past; had she noticed that about Sam when they were together? Did I ever comment on it? Isabel seemed to be doing a better job of being Sam’s woman; Anna suffered a twinge of territorial annoyance. She called to him: ‘Sam, did you look into that new accounting software Neil mentioned?’