A Perfect Home (6 page)

‘This next one's silver service,' the boss had told her over the phone. ‘You're fine with that, aren't you?'

‘Oh yeah. No problem.'

Putting down the phone, Claire had turned to her flatmate, Zoë.

‘Help! What's silver service?'

‘It's a bit like using chopsticks but with a large spoon and fork,' Zoë had replied. ‘I once had a boyfriend who was trained in it. He used to serve me baked beans that way and expect me to be impressed enough to sleep with him.'

‘And were you?'

‘No, I was more impressed by his brother who was in a band, so I slept with him instead. Anyway silver service looked easy to me. You'll be fine, Claire. Just practise on me for a few days before the job.'

‘I haven't got a few days,' she had said, sighing. ‘The job's tonight.'

As Claire served the first course to a raucous table of men and women she soon realised that silver service was not easy at all. The large, shiny spoons and forks refused to co-operate in her inexperienced hands. Smoked salmon terrine slipped awkwardly back onto the serving platter and then slid onto the floor. The main course was worse. Miniature sweetcorn and mangetout skittered out of her grasp and onto the table. Claire ended up inelegantly shoving slivers of roast beef and potatoes dauphines onto the plates of increasingly drunken customers.

The men were loud and crude. They threw bread rolls at one another and downed champagne as though they were drinking pints in a beer tent. Their girlfriends giggled and simpered at their partners' juvenile behaviour as they sipped their drinks in black dresses and pearls. Claire wished she was somewhere else, where she didn't have to pretend to be polite to vulgar, spoilt, rich people, and where she didn't have to wrestle with over-sized serving utensils.

Profiteroles for the dessert course seemed like the last straw. Claire emerged from the kitchen laden with a pyramid of golden pastry balls. As she approached her table she could hear some of the men loudly debating the colour of her bra beneath her white shirt. With a shaking hand and immense concentration, Claire successfully managed to pick up two profiteroles between the spoon and fork. She started to transfer them to one of the accountants' waiting plate. As her hand hovered above it, the accountant suddenly slapped Claire's bottom and the spoon and fork skidded apart, sending the profiteroles flying through the air and onto his lap. They rolled slowly down the inside of the man's thighs and nestled neatly in his crotch. He began to laugh lewdly, drawing the attention of the rest of the table. Leaning back in his chair he demanded that Claire remove them herself – with her teeth. She heard laughter around her, and saw a woman watching her with a contemptuous smirk on her beautifully made-up face. Claire flushed red with humiliation and embarrassment, but then she felt anger taking over inside. She managed to smile calmly at the man who looked at her with an expectant grin on his pink, puffy face.

‘Yes, of course I will, sir. But I prefer chocolate sauce with my profiteroles.' She picked up an accompanying jug of hot sauce from the table and swiftly poured it into his lap. He immediately leapt up from his chair, thick, scalding chocolate dripping down his expensive trousers.

Claire didn't wait to listen to the string of insults he shouted at her, just threw the rest of her pile of profiteroles into the middle of the table, from where they bounced and rolled onto the laps of the other diners. She quickly marched across the room, into the kitchen, picked up her bag and coat, and left through the back door, before any of the other waiters, or her boss, had a chance to realise what had happened.

Once outside in the freezing night, Claire walked around the corner and, leaning against a railing by the river, lit a cigarette.

‘I'm so sorry about what happened in there.'

Claire turned to see a tall, fair-haired man whom she recognised as one of the more civilised guests from the table.

‘Sebastian was being his usual obnoxious self. He always gets like that when he's drunk. He deserved what you did to him. Well done.' He grinned at her and she noticed how white and straight his teeth were, his square-jawed face was clean shaven and lightly tanned. He looked older than Claire and handsome in a Nordic, clean-cut sort of way – not Claire's type at all.

Claire said nothing but, blowing out a cloud of smoke, stared at the man through narrowed eyes. She wished he would go away. He leant against the railing beside her.

‘Someone should have told him he was going too far,' he continued. ‘We should have stopped him.' Claire looked at his pale, neatly cut hair. Tiny kinks in it suggested it would have been curly if he let it grow. ‘I should have said something, stopped him myself.'

Claire still said nothing, but looked away, down into the oily water where she threw her cigarette end. It was cold. She shivered and wrapped her thin coat tightly around her.

‘It's a freezing night,' said the man in his perfect English accent. ‘Can I buy you a drink as an apology?'

Claire really didn't want to spend any more time with him, and didn't think he was the one who should be apologising, but the thought of a drink was tempting. She had only enough money in her purse for her tube fare home. The cashpoint machines had stopped giving her anything from her account and she knew she had little chance of ever getting paid for the night's work.

‘OK.'

The man smiled. Tiny lines fanned out from ice-blue eyes. ‘I know a little bar near here that's one of my favourites. My name's William, by the way.'

Claire let herself be led across the road and down a small flight of steps into a warm, red room thick with smoke, people, and the smell of warm beer. Worn velvet sofas lined the room with black and white mosaic tables in front of them. The walls were covered in bright pictures of bullfighters and dark-eyed women posing with castanets.

‘I think it has a rather bohemian atmosphere,' William said, his face close to her ear. It was hard to hear above the guitar music coming from the band in the corner. ‘It doesn't even have a name outside but it's generally known as The Spanish Bar.'

‘I thought there might be a theme,' she replied, still reluctant to be in his company but longing for a drink. She liked to drink lager, but if someone else was paying…

‘A double whisky,' she said, as William left her at a table and started pushing his way to the bar. He raised his eyebrows. Claire smiled at him and lit another cigarette.

The whisky and the womb-like room warmed her. The band in the corner stopped and were replaced with softer Cuban music. William sat beside her and started to talk. He talked about his job, a new firm of accountants he was moving to, his flat, and his family in some village that William said she really must visit one day and that Claire thought sounded deadly dull. She wasn't really listening to most of what he said. She was enjoying the warmth, the whisky, the music, and watching the other people coming and going. She took more notice when he started to talk about the girl he'd been engaged to. They had recently split up.

‘Irreconcilable differences,' he explained when Claire asked what had gone wrong.

‘Like what?'

‘Like she wanted to take the job she'd been offered in New York and I didn't want to go with her. I'm happy living in England.'

Then he started asking her questions about her life. At first she was reluctant to tell him anything but lulled by the mixture of alcohol and intimate surroundings she found herself confiding in him. She told him things she hadn't talked to anyone about for years – about her father walking out on her tenth birthday, her mother's depression, her ambition to set up her own textile business printing scarves when she left college and her recent break-up her boyfriend Liam – a wild-haired Irish sculpture student who filled his days with sleeping and his nights with drinking and climbing up the tallest structure he could find (usually a crane).

William seemed genuinely interested about her life. He asked more, probed deeper.

The guitar trio came back and started to play a furious song. A couple got up to dance in the tiny space in front of the stage; they were soon joined by another couple and a girl who danced on top of one of the mosaic tables.

Claire had had enough of talking.

‘Come on,' she said, pulling William up and leading him to the dance floor. She pulled her white waitress's shirt loose from her short black skirt and tied it tight at her midriff, exposing a flat expanse of stomach. She saw shock and surprise in William's eyes; she'd had three double whiskies in a row and didn't care. Raising her hands above her head she began to dance, slowly and rhythmically in time to the music, speeding up when the beat quickened. Twirling around William, she took his hand and made him spin her away and then back towards him.

‘I don't usually dance,' he shouted into her ear above the noise of the band.

‘I do,' she said.

Another man approached and cut in, whisking her away from William, taking her in his arms in an improvised tango. He dipped her backwards. Claire laughed. Her hair was falling out of the neat ponytail she'd tied it in for work. She was upright again and the stranger spun her around and around. She felt dizzy; her feet were slipping on the beer-soaked floor. The stranger let her go. She thought she would fall but someone caught her. It was William.

‘I think you need to sit down,' he said, guiding her back to their table.

He bought her a glass of water and she began to think how nice his eyes were and that she liked the little dimple in his chin. It crossed her mind to ask him home with her and then she knew it was time to leave – alone.

She tried to persuade him that she would be fine getting the tube, but William insisted on hailing a black cab and asking her address so that he could pay the driver in advance. He hadn't asked her to come home with him or made any attempt to even kiss her. Claire was surprised; most men wanted something for the cost of a few drinks and even more for the cost of a cab.

He waved at her as the taxi pulled away. Claire sat back and began thinking about what she'd wear to a party she had been invited to the next night, and how she was going to get through another bleak, grey Christmas day with her mother and a small roast chicken in her lonely basement flat.

‘The hall is full of roses,' said Claire groggily, as she shuffled, into the tiny kitchen of their Clapham flat the next morning. The smell of stale cooking fat wafted up from the takeaway kebab shop beneath them.

‘And they're all for you,' said Zoë, sounding disgruntled.

Three dozen pink roses and a note.

I enjoyed our drink and dance, would you like to do it again? William x

And then a phone number.

Claire phoned him to say thank you. They met for dinner in a small French restaurant off the Strand; afterwards Claire took him to a club in Soho. The following weekend they had another dinner in Chinatown, and then a visit to the theatre, and then a Sunday drive to Lewes for lunch beside a log fire in a pub. He constantly sent flowers.

‘It's like living in a bloody florist's,' said Zoë, peering at Claire through a vase of gladioli on the Formica kitchen table.

For Christmas he gave her a charm bracelet with one tiny silver heart hanging from it.

After a lingering Valentine's Day meal on the King's Road, they walked over the Albert Bridge as snow began to fall. Surrounded by the glittering lights and the swirling snow, William took Claire in his arms and told her that he loved her. Claire told him that she loved him too and then, seized with the sudden joy at being alive, she had run over the bridge and shown him how to make snow angels in the park. Later he took her back to his pristine flat, undressed her very slowly, and took her to his bed. She'd been as impressed by his clean white sheets and matching pillow cases as she was by his love making. She'd been used to Liam's grey bedding that had been strewn across a mattress on the floor of his bedsit; he would no more have thought to neatly pull his duvet up each morning than actually wash it.

In the morning William woke her up with croissants and real coffee and the Sunday papers. Later she lay, stretched out, along his brand new sofa, naked except for a neatly ironed, pin-striped shirt she'd borrowed from his immaculately tidy wardrobe. Her head nestled in his lap as he read the Sunday supplements and she marvelled at the warmth and cleanliness around her.

‘It's nice here,' she said looking up into his handsome face.

‘It's just a place I've lived in since Vanessa and I split up, a box I come back to after work,' he wound his fingers around her tangled auburn hair and smiled. ‘Move in. Come and live with me and we'll make it into a home.'

Within a week she had moved all her things into the bright top floor rooms of the red-brick mansion block. She set about transforming it with 1950s vases, chintz cushions, fairy lights, and old furniture that she found in skips and junk shops. She painted a mural of mermaids on the tiny bathroom wall. In the evenings Claire cooked invented meals made from ingredients she found in the Turkish supermarket on the Fulham Road, played him Leonard Cohen, and took him to her favourite club in Brixton. William seemed constantly amazed and entranced by what he saw as her lack of inhibitions and unconventional attitude to life.

‘My beautiful bohemian girl,' he called her.

He seemed to find Claire's comprehensive school and art college education exotic; it was so different from his own conventional public school experience. She made him laugh and he made her feel safe and secure. He was seven years older than her and seemed so sensible, so grown-up.

He took her away for long romantic weekends to Prague and Barcelona; walking hand in hand through the ancient streets, lingering over long meals and even longer mornings in bed. They spent Easter in Crete and a May bank holiday in Paris. Over thick black coffee on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, William asked her to marry him.