He gave her an exaggerated smack of a kiss, and she clung to him, hardly able to believe that he was real, that she had found him, her soulmate, this man who looked like a film star and was rather vain about the fact and knew it, sending himself up at every opportunity.
‘Enter stage left: the doting husband,’ he intoned, ‘who’s just endured half an hour of casual racism, courtesy of an infeasibly stereotypical London cabbie, to rush to his wife’s side with life-saving falafels.’ Lulu’s favourite food in the world and also, spookily, one of his. ‘Your chauffeur awaits, ready, willing and able to blow your mind with his views on immigration.’ He lowered his voice to a stage whisper: ‘Best not to admit to being Australian.’ And then, back in character, he swept an arm around the lobby. ‘I’ve come to take you away from all this! I’ve come to whisk you off to la-la land where, for two shining hours, a load of luvvies will get deep and meaningful about the psychiatric issues of pigeons! Oh, the agony! Oh, the ecstasy!’
Milo was yipping excitedly.
‘Idiot.’ She laughed, pushing her husband away and rolling her eyes at her client, who was staring at this apparition in rather wary bemusement. ‘Paul, this is my husband, Nick. Nick, one of my clients, Paul.’
The two men nodded at each other.
Then Nick said, deadpan, ‘So you’re the man responsible for starving my wife.’
‘Oh,’ said poor Paul. ‘I’m sorry, Lulu. I didn’t realise you had plans.’ He stooped to pick up Milo and looked at his watch. ‘Oh, God – I’ve gone way over my time, haven’t I? I’m sorry!’
Lulu smiled. ‘It was completely down to me that we continued so long. There’s nothing to apologise for.’
She’d forgotten to lock the office door. She left the three of them on the doorstep to do so, but when she came back out, she couldn’t find the main door key.
‘Why don’t you keep them on the same ring, darling?’ Nick murmured.
‘That would be far too sensible. Ah, here it is!’ She locked the door behind them. ‘Well, same time next week, Paul? And Milo, of course?’
Paul set Milo down on the pavement and looked at Lulu for a long moment. Then he nodded. And then he was pulling her into a hug.
‘Thank you,’ he said into her hair. ‘I don’t know how to thank you. You’ve literally saved my life.’
Lulu didn’t look at Nick, but she knew he’d be wearing a look of terrible patience. Nick’s theory was that all the nuances of mental health issues were ‘just a big con’ invented by the woke brigade, while anyone with actual, genuine problems was ‘a nutter’. It was one of the few subjects of contention between them, but she hadn’t pushed it because she knew what was at the root of it. She knew he had a real horror of mental illness because of what had happened to his family, and he felt safer pretending there was a simple dichotomy of nutter versus normal.
She hugged Paul back. Physical contact with clients was generally frowned upon, but sometimes they hugged her, and Lulu was fine with that. When emotions were running high, sometimes a bit of human contact was what you needed.
She patted his back and said a few reassuring words, and gently detached herself.
‘You’re doing really well. You should be very proud of yourself.’
Paul gave her a rueful smile and dabbed at his face with a tissue. Then he turned, unexpectedly, to Nick. ‘You should have seen me a month ago. My wife had just left me. I was a mess.’
You are a mess, said Nick’s raised eyebrows. But he just murmured, ‘Sorry to hear that.’
‘I put my wife through hell – I don’t blame her, she was better off out of it. She’d been trying to persuade me to get help with my anger for years, but it took her leaving me before I actually got up off my arse and did something about it. The day I came to Lulu was the best day of my life.’ He looked at Lulu, his eyes moist with tears. ‘I can’t thank you enough, for what you’ve done for me.’ He turned back to Nick. ‘You’re a lucky man. A lucky, lucky man.’
‘I’m a lucky, lucky man!’ Nick whispered in the silence of the darkened auditorium, walking his hand up under the hem of Lulu’s dress, his fingertips on her bare skin sending desire shooting through her.
‘Not that lucky,’ Lulu hissed back, pushing the hand away, and the two of them giggled like a couple of teenagers.
The woman in the seat in front of Nick turned to glare at them. With her thick, short grey hair and penetrating gaze, she reminded Lulu of her Auntie May, who was never happier than when issuing reprimands to the neighbourhood kids.
‘Sorry – I know, we’re a nightmare,’ Nick murmured with his trademark self-deprecating grimace. ‘You might want to call security to throw us out.’
The woman’s face relaxed in a reluctant smile as she turned back to the stage.
When the lights came up at the interval, Nick leaned forward between the seats and said, ‘I feel I should offer to do penance. Let me buy you a drink. What’s your tipple? No, let me guess – red? Merlot, if they have it?’
The woman laughed. ‘That’s really not necessary. Very kind, but not necessary.’
In the end, of course, she let Nick buy her a glass of Merlot, and a beer for her partner, and he came back with the drinks and a handful of bags of peanuts and crisps. ‘Rustle away in retaliation,’ he suggested.
The woman twinkled at him. ‘Don’t think we won’t!’ And she raised her plastic cup in an impish toast.