Of course, it would help that I’m known as the quiet one. The observer, melting into the background. That was the dynamic when we lived together, Miranda, Samira and me. They were the performers, I their audience.
If you told all this to the people I work with I reckon they’d be surprised. I’m one of the more senior associates at the firm now. I’m hopefully not far off making partner. People listen to what I say. I give presentations, I’m pretty comfortable with the sound of my own voice, ringing out in a silent meeting room. I like the feeling, in fact … seeing the faces upturned towards me, listening carefully to what I have to say. I command respect. I run a whole team. And I have found that I like being in charge. I suppose we all carry around different versions of ourselves.
With this group I have always been an also-ran. People have often wondered, I’m sure, what someone like me is doing with a friend like Miranda. But in friendship, as in love, opposites often attract. Extrovert and introvert, yin and yang.
It would be very easy to dislike Miranda. She has been blessed by the Gods of beauty and fortune. She has the sort of absurd figure you see held up as a ‘bad, unrealistic example to young girls’ – as though she has been personally Photoshopped. It doesn’t really seem fair that someone so thin should have breasts that size; aren’t they made up largely of fat? And the thick, infuriatingly shiny blonde hair, and green eyes … no one in real life seems to have properly green eyes, except Miranda. She is the sort of person you would immediately assume was probably a bitch. Which she can be, absolutely.
The thing is, beneath her occasionally despotic ways, Miranda can be very kind. There was the time my parents’ marriage was falling apart, for example – when I had a standing invitation to stay at her house whenever I felt like it, to escape the shouting matches at home. Or when my sixth-form boyfriend, Matt, dumped me unceremoniously for the prettier, more popular Freya, and Miranda not only lent me a shoulder to cry on, but put about the rumour that he had chlamydia. Or when I couldn’t afford a dress for the college Summer Ball and, without making a thing of it at all, she gave me one of hers: a column of silver silk.
When I opened my eyes at one point on the train journey up here I caught Miranda watching me. Those green eyes of hers. So sharp, so assessing. A slight frown, as though she was trying to work something out. I pretended to sleep again, quickly. Sometimes I genuinely believe that Miranda has known me for so long that somewhere along the way she might have acquired the ability to read my mind, if she looks hard enough.
We go back even further than the rest of the group, she and I. All the way back to a little school in Sussex. The two new girls. One already golden, the sheen of money on her – she’d been moved from a private school nearby as her parents wanted her ‘to strive’ (and they thought a comprehensive education would help her chances of getting into Oxford). The other girl mousey-haired, too thin in her large uniform bought from the school’s second-hand collection. The golden girl (already popular, within the first morning) taking pity on her, insisting they sit next to each other at assembly. Making her her project, making her feel accepted, less alone.
I never knew why it was that she chose me to be her best friend. Because she did choose me: I had very little to do with it. But then she has always liked to do the unexpected thing, has Miranda, has always liked to challenge other people’s expectations of her. The other girls were lining up to be her friend, I still remember that. All that hair – so blonde and shiny it didn’t look quite real. Eyelashes so long she was once told off by a teacher for wearing mascara: the injustice! Real breasts – at twelve. She was good at sport, clever but not too clever (though at an all-girls’ school, academic prowess is not quite the handicap it is at a mixed one).
The other girls couldn’t understand it. Why would she be friends with me when she could have them, any of them? There had to be something weird about her, if her taste in people was so ‘off’. She could have ruled that school like a queen. But because of this, her friendship with me, she was probably never quite as popular as she might have been. But that didn’t matter to the boys at the parties we began to go to in our teens. I never got the invites to houses of pupils from the boys’ grammar up the road, or parties on the beach. Miranda could have left me behind then. But she took me with her.
When I think of this, I feel all the more ashamed. This feeling is the same one I used to get when I stayed over at her beautiful Edwardian house and was tempted to take some little trophy home for myself. Something small, something she’d hardly notice: a hairclip, or a pair of lace-trimmed socks. Just so I’d have something pretty to look at in my little beige bedroom in my dingy two-up two-down with stains on the walls and broken blinds.
There’s a knock on the front door at about eight: Nick and Bo, thank God. For a moment I had thought it might be Miranda. Nick and I met in freshers’ week, and have been friends ever since. He was there through all the ups and downs of uni.
The two of them come in, checking out the place. ‘Your cabin is just like ours,’ Nick says, when I let them in, ‘except a bit smaller. And a lot tidier … Bo has already covered the whole place with his stuff.’
‘Hey,’ Bo says. ‘Just because I don’t travel with only three versions of the same outfit.’
It’s not even an exaggeration. Nick’s one of those people who have a self-imposed uniform: a crisp white shirt, those dark selvedge jeans, and chukka boots. Maybe a smart blazer, and always, of course, his signature tortoiseshell Cutler and Gross glasses. Somehow he makes it work. On him it’s stylish, authoritative – whereas on a lesser mortal it might seem a bit plain.
We sit down together on the collection of squashy armchairs in front of the bed.
Bo sniffs the air. ‘Smells amazing in here, too. What is that?’
‘I had a bath.’
‘Oh, I thought that oil looked nice. Don’t do things by halves here, do they? Emma’s really knocked it out of the park. It’s awesome.’
‘Yes,’ I say, ‘it is.’ But it doesn’t come out quite as enthusiastically as I’d meant it to.
‘Are you all right?’ Nick jostles me with his shoulder. ‘I hope you don’t mind my saying this, but you seem a bit … off. Ever since this morning. You know, that thing on the train earlier, with you being put in the other carriage, I’m sure it wasn’t intentional. If it had been Miranda, that would be a different story …’ He raises his eyebrows at Bo, and Bo nods in agreement. ‘I wouldn’t necessarily make the same assumption. But it was Emma. I just don’t think she’s like that.’
‘I’m not sure she’s my biggest fan, though.’ Emma’s so decent, and I’ve wondered in the past if it’s that she’s seen something she doesn’t like in me and recoiled from it.
Bo frowns. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘I suppose it’s just a feeling …’
‘I really wouldn’t take it so personally,’ Nick says.
‘No,’ I say. ‘Maybe it’s just that I haven’t seen everyone in such a long time. And I shouldn’t drink in the day – it always makes me feel weird. Especially when I haven’t had enough to eat.’
‘Totally,’ Bo nods. But Nick doesn’t say anything. He’s just looking at me.
Then he asks, ‘Is there something else?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘No, there isn’t.’
‘You sure?’
I nod my head.
‘Well, come on then,’ Nick says, ‘let’s go fuel you up at this dinner. There better be at least some combination of bagpipes, venison, and kilts, otherwise I’m going to ask for my money back.’