Anne Billson - Stiff Lips

'I hear you've been a naughty boy,' I said to my friend Graham.

We were sitting in a basement bar just off St Martin's Lane. Graham pretended not to know what I was talking about. He peered warily at me over the top of his Mexican lager and asked, 'What do you mean?'

'Sophie,' I said.

'Oh, yeah,' he said, looking suitably embarrassed. 'That,' he said.

'I told her I'd give you a good ticking-off. That was appalling behaviour. Dreadful.' I'd started off intending to strike a blow for my sex, but now I couldn't help sniggering, as though he and I were part of the same conspiracy. I was rather pleased about the way things had turned out.

Graham looked pained. 'I don't know what got into me. I know that's a terrible cliché, but it's true. I'm so embarrassed; I've never done anything like it before. I've always liked Sophie, and now she thinks I'm an arsehole.'

'But she's right,' I said. 'You are an arsehole.'

I hadn't expected to run into Sophie at that dinner party. After her one disastrous expedition to my flat, I found it difficult to imagine her existing anywhere but in the restaurants and shops of her W11 domain, with occasional excursions to Knightsbridge. As far as I knew, she wasn't even aware there was a south of the river. So I felt slightly miffed when I saw her there. Clapham, evidently, had a cachet which Hackney lacked.

Our hosts, Larry and Berenice, were making strenuous efforts to matchmake Sophie with another guest, which annoyed me because they'd never seemed in the least bit anxious to modify my own single status. Not, of course, that I was in the least bit anxious about it myself. The guest they were trying to pair her off with was Graham.

Now I'd known Graham for years, and even though our relationship had never been anything other than platonic, I tended to feel a little possessive if he started paying too much attention to other women in my presence. In a sense, I'd always looked on him as my property, though of course there was no way I could possibly go out with a man who wore a brand of aftershave named after a small Mediterranean island, who wore sandals with grey socks and woolly tanktops knitted for him by his mother, or who combed his hair across his head to try and hide the fact that it was getting thinner by the second.

I liked Graham, but he was just a little too earnest, a little too nice . He didn't fit the picture of the sort of man I usually fancied, namely swaggering arrogant bastards like Miles. Graham simply hadn't been born with the sort of social ease I required from an escort — he was far too obsequious to waiters and doormen, too easily flummoxed by menus and wine lists, and he always asked what you wanted to do, where you wanted to go, instead of laying out his plans for the evening as though they were fait accompli. Miles glided across the dance-floor of life, whirling his partners into submission, while Graham trod on your toes and tried hard not to lead.

Worst of all, Graham aspired towards political correctness, though this wasn't entirely his fault; he'd been raised by devout Socialists. When I'd first met him, he'd been deeply involved with an environmental consciousness-raising group, and had once helped organize a student sit-in on behalf of a species of otter. Graham liked to complain that pornography was the instrument by which women were subjugated not just sexually, but socially and economically, or that a film in which men with the acting ability of treetrunks beat each other to a pulp with their bare fists was marred by its intensely male ethos, or that sexy choc-ice commercials were degrading to the viewer as well as to the Mexican peasants who harvested the cacao trees.

Larry and Berenice didn't know Graham as well as I did, or they would never have entertained the notion that he might be a suitable partner for Sophie — Sophie — who confidently expected that any suitor who dared ask her out would be pulling in no less than sixty or seventy grand per annum, would be equally at ease on the piste and in the saddle, would be capable of telling the difference between Sevruga and Beluga, and would know instinctively where to purchase amusing little gifts of tasteful silk lingerie. Graham supplemented his income as a freelance illustrator by working as an office cleaner. His idea of a tasteful gift was a year's subscription to the New Statesman .

Sophie was seated next to Graham at the table and although she listened politely I could tell she was finding him tiresome. Her smile was a little too fixed, her responses a little too automatic. Like me, she preferred unreconstructed bastards like Miles, but her doormat tendencies were to the fore, and so she hung wide-eyed on Graham's every word. I noticed, though, that as the evening wore on she spent more and more time facing towards Larry, who was sitting on her other side.

The party broke up around midnight. I was one of several guests who ordered minicabs, and, since Hackney was way off everyone else's route, ended up being the first to leave, so I didn't hear about what happened next until a couple of days later, when Sophie and I met for lunch.

Sophie was especially partial to the pig's liver pâté with parsnips Beijing, but it was a restaurant of which I too was fond, because it was always packed with faces familiar from television arts programmes. I acted cool and pretended not to recognize anyone, even when Sophie hailed one or two writers or painters she knew personally, but their very presence made me feel as though I were feeding directly from the trough of popular culture.

We placed our orders. Sophie was offhand and distracted, responding tersely to the usual conversation openers. I sensed she was angry, but hardly dared ask what about; I was tired of having to stick up for Dirk and Lemmy all the time.

Finally, I plucked up the courage to ask if she was all right.

'No, I am not,' she snapped. 'I'm still recovering from my close encounter with your friend.'

I had no idea what she was talking about. I racked my brains and couldn't come up with a single friend we had in common. She couldn't mean Dirk and Lemmy, because they were plural. And she couldn't possibly be talking about Miles. And though I'd met Carolyn and Grenville and Charlotte and Toby and Isabella on several occasions, they were still more her friends than mine. I was stumped.

'What do you mean?' I asked at last.

'That chap I was sitting next to the other night.'

'Oh, Graham .' I began to relax, feeling as though a catastrophe had just been averted, but was startled by the expression of loathing that flashed across Sophie's face at the mention of his name. My first instinct was to take it personally. First Lemmy and Dirk, and now Graham had been designated persona non grata . Was it my fault if I didn't hang out with Old Etonians or Oxbridge graduates all the time?

'He's not that bad,' I said unconvincingly.

Sophie's face suddenly crumpled. 'Clare, it was awful.'

It was then that she brought me up to date on the post-Clapham party incident. David and Camilla had needed to get back to relieve their babysitter, so they'd taken the second minicab. And then there had been such a lengthy wait that Larry had finally been forced to phone the cab company to find out what had happened.

He had gone into his study to make the phone call, Sophie said, and emerged with the news that there had been a mix-up, and that now there wouldn't be another cab for at least an hour and a half. The next day, when she thought it through, she wondered whether he'd phoned at all. Perhaps there never had been another cab. Perhaps Larry and Berenice had planned what happened next, which was that Graham offered to run her home, and, in the absence of alternative transport, it seemed best to accept.