Perfect on Paper by Gillian Harvey (top 20 books to read txt) 📕

Once Angela had arrived and already started on the plate of biscuits they put out for her, Clare and Toby climbed into his car and pulled out onto the dark road.

It had been ages since they’d gone out together like this. All those late evenings, all those meetings. It wasn’t just Toby, she realised. She’d started to bring work home – had let it bleed into the evenings and the weekends.

Both of their jobs were the kind that could expand and keep on expanding until you weren’t sure where the job ended and life began. The email you just had to answer; a call from a client in the evening. Bags full of folders.

It wasn’t just Toby not seeing her, she realised. They’d stopped seeing each other.

‘Nice to be going out,’ she said into the silence.

‘You sure?’ he said, his hand briefly leaving the wheel and hovering near to his mouth for a moment. ‘Even to Batty Hatty’s?’

‘Don’t,’ she said, feeling guilty that she’d laughed at the label once. ‘It’s … well, you know. She’s OK, isn’t she? You said she’d helped you.’

‘You’re right. Just joking. But, yeah …’

They drove on, listening to a radio discussion on the pros and cons of recycled loo roll. Sitting in the – ridiculously comfortable – leather seats, Clare began to relax. Darkness had fallen and the street lamps glowed orange in the gloom. Watching them, leaning her head on the window, she remembered sitting in the back of her parents’ car, aged about five, watching the lights on the motorway flash past on the way back from somewhere or other. It was oddly soothing.

Hatty Bluebottle’s London residence was more modest than Clare might have expected. She’d only seen Hatty on TV in the past and she’d struck her as someone who’d been born with a silver spoon in her mouth.

Clare had imagined some sort of four-storey white townhouse – the kind you see in TV dramas; so impossibly expensive and immaculate that the most an ordinary person could do was drool and dream.

Instead, Toby pulled up in front of a tiny terrace of yellow bricked Victorian houses in Farringdon. Still probably easily into the millions, but somehow homely and modest at the same time.

After about half an hour of back and forthing, Toby managed to squeeze his car into the tiny space outside. ‘Residents’ parking,’ he said. ‘Hatty said she’d give us a pass.’

‘Great,’ she said, climbing out of the car.

The Hatty who opened the door looked a world away from the intimidating figure Clare remembered from her TV heyday. In place of the suit and blouse combo she’d sported on screen, she wore some floral leggings, a mis-matched blouse and had grey hair that stuck up like a bird’s nest. In fact, she looked like an actual, real human being.

‘Well hello!’ Hatty said, with more enthusiasm than she’d ever had on Morning Briefing, or 99 Questions. ‘Lovely to meet you. You must be Clare – Toby’s always talking about you!’ She grabbed Clare’s head between her man-sized hands and planted a large kiss on each of her cheeks.

‘Hi, Hatty,’ Toby said, before he, too, was swooped and engulfed in a perfume-clouded welcome.

‘Bill is in the dining room,’ said their host. ‘The kids are both out this evening, thank god. Not that you can call them kids these days of course – they both think they’re far more grown up than they really are. Thirteen is the new thirty, or so it would seem.’

‘Know the feeling,’ Clare said, smiling in spite of herself.

Perhaps the evening wasn’t going to be too bad after all.

Chapter Fourteen

It was almost fifteen years since Clare had last had a hangover.

She knew that, because it was the day she’d taken a pregnancy test and discovered Alfie was on his way, after which she’d duly given up her two-glasses-a-night-but-make-it-three habit. And she had never really developed a taste for alcohol afterwards. These days she was like a teenager. A couple of sips, a grimace, and she was on to the Diet Coke.

It was good, really. Great for the waistline. But she did miss the gentle oblivion she used to feel after a couple of drinks.

Toby, however, had had no such enforced abstinence.

Which meant that after one of their rare nights out, she was usually up and about with no qualms, while he lay in bed in a wretched state of his own making.

This morning, the first sound that pierced her consciousness as she lay half-comatose in bed, was a deep, pitiful groan.

‘Toby? Everything all right?’

She turned over to see her husband sitting up, head in hands, face a little on the grey side.

‘Are you going to be sick?’ she asked, suddenly filled with adrenaline. The last thing she wanted to do was scrub alcohol-scented vomit from the duvet this morning. ‘Do you want me to get a bucket?’

‘No. It’s not that.’ Toby allowed one slightly reddened eye to peek out from between his fingers. ‘I mean … I’ve felt better. It’s just … last night. Did I really?’

‘Yes, Toby. You did.’

‘Oh, fucking hell.’

‘Which bit?’

‘What do you mean, which bit?’ he said, his hands falling from his face in horror and his voice jumping up an octave in panic. ‘There was more than one bit?’

The first thing they’d been offered at Hatty’s was an ‘aperitif’ – basically a shot of something sticky, sweet and alcoholic. Toby – more of a beer drinker ordinarily – had clearly underestimated the kind of power this sort of snifter had and had gone back for seconds, and thirds.

By the time they’d sat down to dinner, his face had been flushed and his eyes alight with a kind of excited abandon.

‘So Hatty, tell me,’ he’d slurred over the lamb shank, ‘who do I have to sleep with to get a slot on prime time.’

Thankfully, Hatty had laughed it off. ‘Well, certainly not me,’ she’d said. ‘The only reason they promoted me, I think, is to get me off the screen.