Nicci French - Until it's Over

‘Not in the office,’ Pippa said, and looked round the group. ‘How often does this happen? It’s us and just us.’

‘Now we are seven,’ said Dario, clinking his fork against his plate for silence, then immediately shovelled an enormous amount of rice into his mouth and chewed for several seconds while we all waited. ‘Like the Seven Dwarfs,’ he said at last.

‘There are certain things we need to discuss,’ said Miles, rather formally. ‘To start with, can I say -’

‘You’re Doc,’ said Dario.

‘What?’

‘If we’re like the Seven Dwarfs -’

‘Which we’re not.’

‘- you’re definitely Doc,’ said Dario.

‘Because I own this house? And who else is going to get the drains fixed and make sure the bills are paid?’

‘The dwarfs represent the parts that make up the psyche,’ said Dario.

‘Is this what I flew into a car door for?’ I said. The beer was making me feel mellow and the pain had receded.

‘You’re Angry,’ said Dario to Mick.

Mick ignored him.

‘Is there an Angry?’ I asked. ‘I don’t remember him.’

‘There’s Grumpy,’ said Davy.

‘Pippa’s Randy, right?’ said Dario, winking across the table at Davy.

This was a reference to the fact that Pippa was not in a proper relationship, but instead had a fair amount of extremely short ones.

‘Oh, boys, boys,’ I said. ‘That’s pathetic.’

‘I think we can agree that Dopey’s taken,’ said Pippa.

‘You can have Sleepy, then,’ said Dario. ‘No one can sleep like you.’

This wasn’t strictly fair. Pippa only sleeps at weekends, when she goes to bed in the small hours and gets up in the afternoon, looking puffy, dazed and replete. During the week she’s a dutiful worker who rises at seven. Dario, on the other hand, sleeps whenever he likes.

‘We’re running out of the good ones,’ said Davy. ‘Owen can be Sneezy.’

‘Why?’

Davy looked at me. ‘Which leaves you and me fighting over Bashful and Happy,’ he said. ‘And you, Astrid Bell, are not bashful. Unless you want to be Snow White.’

‘I want to be the Wicked Queen. There’s a real woman.’

‘You’re spoiling the game,’ said Dario. ‘You’re Happy.’

Happy. And groggy. And relaxed. I sat back in my chair. I looked round the people at the table: a motley collection who were, just at the moment, the closest I had to family. There were only three of us left who had been here from the beginning, or perhaps the real beginning was before that, when we were at university together. Miles had bought the house when he was still a post-graduate student who wanted to change the world, paying a ridiculously small amount for this rambling, run-down place at the rougher end of Hackney. Then, he had had no beard and his hair was long, often tied back in a ponytail. Now he had a closely trimmed dark blond beard and no hair at all. If I ran my hand over his head I could feel all the bumps of his velvety skull. Pippa was the other long-termer. In fact, she and I had met in my first term at university and we’d shared a house in our final year, so by the time we moved in with Miles I already knew her domestic habits well. She was tall and willowy, and had a delicate kind of beauty that could mislead people.

So we were the original trio and we’d survived, even though for a year of that time Miles and I had been sort of a couple and for another six awful months had been sort of not a couple and then definitely not a couple. Now Miles had a proper new girlfriend, Leah, and that felt good, like a fence between us. ‘Good fences make good neighbours,’ someone had said.

Around us, there had been various others, and the current seven was bound to change sooner or later. Mick was older than the rest of us, and carried his years as if they were a burden that weighed on his broad shoulders. He was stocky and short. He stood with his legs apart as if on the deck of a ship in stormy weather. His eyes were pale blue in a face creased by the sun and wind. He had spent years travelling restlessly round the world. I didn’t know if he’d been searching for something, or even if he had found it. He never talked about it. Now he worked, doing odd jobs, and had drifted to a temporary halt in Maitland Road. When he was at home, he spent much of his time in his small room at the top of the house, though I never knew what he did up there and I’d rarely visited him. None of the doors have locks on them, but some are more firmly closed than others. Sometimes I went downstairs in the middle of the night because I couldn’t sleep, and he was there, sitting quite still at the kitchen table with the steam from a mug of tea curling round his face.

We were never quite sure how Dario had come to be living here. His previous girlfriend (who I suspected was the only real girlfriend he had ever had) had rented a room for a year so he had often stayed over. Then we blinked and she was gone and somehow he was still there, digging himself into the smallest room, which was on the second floor, then gradually colonizing the empty room next door. Although he had no job and couldn’t pay the rent, no one had the heart or the necessary steel to throw him out – perhaps because he didn’t look much like a Dario. He had untidy ginger hair and thick freckles; his teeth were slightly crooked and when he smiled he seemed like a goofy little boy. In the end, Miles came to an agreement with him: that he should renovate the house, top to bottom, in return for living there. I don’t think it was such a good deal for Miles. As far as I could tell, Dario spent most of his time smoking weed, reading astrology columns, watching daytime TV, playing games on other people’s computers and doodling on walls with stiff-bristled paintbrushes that he wasn’t scrupulous enough about cleaning or replacing.

Davy was the most recent member of the household, being here just a couple of months, along with Owen. He was a carpenter and builder. A real one, not like Dario. Despite the disadvantage of not being Polish, he had plenty of work. Enough of it was outside so that he was lightly tanned. He had light-coloured hair, which fell thickly over his shoulders, and grey eyes. He was good-looking, but he didn’t seem to know he was, which I found charming. He had the anxious manner of a new boy in the house, but also a nice smile that crinkled the corners of his eyes, and when he arrived I had let myself think, Perhaps? and then decided probably not. Sex in the house felt like a taboo, and my experience with Miles was an awful warning.

And then there was Owen Sullivan, sitting across from me right now. With his pale skin, his straight, shoulder-length dark hair, and his wide-set, almost-black eyes, he had a faintly Oriental air, though as far as I knew all his ancestors had been Welsh. He was a photographer. He hawked his portfolio round magazines and got the occasional commission. But what he really wanted was to do his own stuff. He had once said he hated magazine work. I had giggled and said then it was lucky he got so little of it. He hadn’t replied but he had given me such a sharp look that I had realized you couldn’t safely tease him where his work was concerned. He used to watch people as if he was sizing them up for a photograph, checking the light, framing them. I sometimes wondered if he really saw, really listened to what they had to say.

‘Seven ages of man,’ said Dario, dreamily. ‘Seven seas, seven continents…’

‘That’s not right.’

‘Listen,’ said Miles. ‘I hate to break into this, but it’s very rare that we’re all together like this. Just the seven of us. Don’t you dare start again, Dario.’

‘You’re right, it is rare,’ said Davy. ‘Why don’t we have a group photo to mark it?’