Patrick looked startled. “Ah, I’m not—”
“We finally worked out it was because we’d all read the same article in Vogue,” said Mel. “About flattering colors for women in their fifties. Not that we’re technically in our fifties.”
“Speak for yourself,” said Anne. Ellen’s mother found it genuinely insulting to be reminded of her actual age.
“You’re thirty-four days older than me, Anne O’Farrell.”
“Diane Keaton!” cried Pip. “That was the third wife. Thank goodness I got it. That was going to drive me crazy for the whole night.”
“Patrick, what can we get you? Beer, wine, champagne, spirits? You sound very dry.” Ellen’s mother flicked her hand at the sideboard containing a selection of drinks on ice, while keeping her violet eyes upon Patrick, like a bird on its prey.
(Anne’s eyes were her most striking feature. Her friends had wanted her to enter an Elizabeth Taylor look-alike competition when she was young, and she probably would have won if she hadn’t thought such competitions beneath her. Unfortunately, she hadn’t seen fit to pass on her beautiful eyes to Ellen. Obviously this wasn’t really her decision, except that Ellen had always suspected that if her mother did have the choice, she might have decided to keep all the glory for herself. She was very vain about her eyes.)
Patrick cleared his throat again. “A beer would be great, thanks, ah…”
“You haven’t actually introduced us properly yet, Ellen. The poor man probably thinks he’s stumbled into some sort of elderly harem.”
“You haven’t stopped talking,” said Ellen. She put her hand on Patrick’s arm. “Patrick, this is my mother, Anne.”
“Can you see the resemblance?” Anne fluttered her eyelashes up at him as she handed Patrick a glass of beer.
“I’m not … I’m not sure.” Patrick clutched his hand around his beer.
“And my godmothers, Mel and Pip,” continued Ellen, ignoring her mother. “Or are you Phillipa tonight? She switches back and forth.”
“Depending on whether I’m skinny or fat,” said Phillipa. She beamed at Patrick and waved a hand up and down her plump body. “So it’s perfectly obvious who I am right now, hey?”
An expression of pure panic flew across Patrick’s face.
“Phillipa,” remonstrated Ellen.
“Aha! So not thin enough for Pip! I have to come back to you for some more hypnotherapy sessions, Ellen.” Phillipa turned to Patrick with a deadly serious expression on her face. “I suffer the most debilitating addiction to carbohydrates.”
“That’s…” began Patrick. He obviously had no idea how to finish the sentence, and drank his beer as if his life depended on it.
“I have tried to get Ellen to hypnotize my addiction away.”
“She giggles the whole way through,” sighed Ellen, as her mother passed her a glass of white wine without asking what she wanted; she would have preferred a juice.
“Come and have a sensible conversation with me, Patrick,” said Melanie. She patted the stool next to her. “Ellen said you are a surveyor, right? My grandfather had a wonderful collection of old maps he left to me. I think the oldest dates back to about 1820.”
Patrick took his beer glass away from his lips and spoke in his normal voice. “Is that right?”
Mel got Patrick settled next to her, and pushed a plate of bread and salmon dip toward him. Ellen watched Patrick’s shoulders relax as Mel chatted calmly to him, steering him on to stable, factual masculine conversational ground where he could be sure of his footing. She always thought that Mel should have been a diplomat’s wife because of her ability to talk graciously and knowledgeably on any subject.
(Although Mel herself would have found that a very sexist remark. “I’d be the diplomat, thanks very much,” she would have said.)
“Let’s go help your mother.” Phillipa grabbed Ellen by the arm.
“Why, how kind of you, Pip,” said Anne, her violet eyes still on Patrick.
“Oh, darling, he’s just adorable!” said Phillipa as soon as they were in Anne’s pristine kitchen. “I bet he’s one of those strong, silent types, isn’t he? I can just see him on a mountaintop with his surveying equipment, squinting into the sun.”
“No,” said Ellen (although that was exactly the way she liked to imagine him). “He’s not like that at all. He’s very chatty when he gets a chance to be. And he mostly does surveys on houses.”
“Oh, to be young and in love,” said Phillipa nostalgically. “I loved being in love. I always lost so much weight.”
“I remember you sitting in this kitchen and saying, ‘Oh, to be young and in love,’ to Julia and me when we were seventeen,” said Ellen. She paused. “And that means you weren’t that much older than me now!”
“Speaking of Julia,” said her mother, who never required anyone’s help and was now giving the last-minute touches to delicately constructed meals on giant square white plates that would be divinely flavored but would no doubt leave Patrick suggesting pizza on the way home and Phillipa reaching for the breadbasket. “I saw Julia’s mother at yoga on Saturday. She said your new boyfriend has a stalker.”
“The grapevine is so efficient,” said Ellen. It sometimes felt like she’d never left that closed little private-school world of her school days where all her friends’ mothers were on the same committees.
“A stalker!” Phillipa’s eyes popped. “How exciting!”
“Oh, yes, it will be all very exciting, Pip, when my daughter is found dead in a ditch.” Anne spoke from inside her walk-in pantry.
“Is it an ex-lover?” continued Phillipa, ignoring Anne. “A woman he spurned? Or just a random homicidal maniac who has taken an interest in him?”
Anne came out of the pantry and put a bottle of vinaigrette down on the bench top with unnecessary force. “Has this person shown any violent tendencies?” she asked. “Has Patrick reported her to the police?”
“It’s just an ex-girlfriend who hasn’t quite moved on,” said Ellen. “There’s really nothing to worry about.”
She wondered how her mother would react if she knew Saskia had been following them tonight, or if she knew that Ellen had felt a discernible sense of disappointment when they lost her at the lights.