Rosie decided to catch the bus back to Walthamstow, where she and James lived. Niamh hugged her goodbye at the stop, then set off to walk the short distance back to the four-bedroom Victorian town house she shared with her family.
Theirs was the kind of home Rosie had once thought existed only in films or interiors magazines: all elegant bay windows, original wood floors and real, working fireplaces. Brendan – a successful barrister who specialised in intellectual property law – had built up a sizeable nest egg before meeting Niamh at a corporate event she’d organised for his firm. He’d immediately fallen head over heels in love with her, and two years later they’d married, then bought the house as a dilapidated shell. Costly, extensive renovations were completed not long before the twins were born.
By contrast, Rosie and James’s rented flat was modest – but Rosie adored it, having spent the past six years sanding, painting, decorating and loving it back to life. Mr Bettini, who’d first rented it to them as a soulless box, had been happy for Rosie to renovate it to her liking. In fact, he’d kept their rent below market value in exchange for her tasteful work on the place. The discount had been enough to dissuade James from pushing Rosie on buying somewhere of their own for now – a compromise she was glad of, since his dream of a sleek, suburban new build clashed horribly with her love of period features, vintage furniture and quirky textiles.
Privately, Rosie suspected that theirs wasn’t the only rent the landlord had kept low. Val and Pat, who occupied the first-floor flat that lay between what used to be Mr Bettini’s place and their ground-floor residence, had lived in the building almost as long as he had. A female couple that he’d referred to as ‘close companions’, they were both in their fifties and semi-retired from teaching careers. Their long-standing presence in the house, as well as that of Mr Bettini, gave the place an unusual sort of homeliness. The old man would never have admitted it, but Rosie got the sense that the occupants of his building felt a little like found family.
She’d been deeply upset when Mr Bettini died – and not just because it put the ownership of her home in doubt. He’d had no other friends or relatives that she knew of, so – taking her cue from Val and Pat – she’d popped in regularly with cake and biscuits she’d made, or books she thought he’d enjoy. Once he stopped pretending to complain about these ‘unsolicited visits’, the two of them had grown close.
His funeral had been a pretty bleak affair. It had been organised in accordance with the funeral plan he’d set up many years before, but attendees were scant – consisting only of Rosie, Val and Pat, gossip-hungry Mrs Beaumont from next door and a few people from the local bridge club.
James had gone to work as normal. He thought Rosie’s sentimental reaction to Mr Bettini’s death was sweet, but told her she’d regret wasting a day of annual leave on an event that was really nothing to do with her. As she’d wept hot, salty tears in an empty church pew, however, she’d felt a strange sort of satisfaction. It was right that someone should cry, that someone should mark and mourn Mr Bettini’s passing. Rosie couldn’t think of anything sadder than leaving the world unnoticed, unremarked and unmissed. She’d helped to ensure that didn’t happen to a person who, in a small but significant way, had mattered to her. The thought still gave her comfort.
As she got off the bus, taking her nose out of her book and making her way back up William Road, Rosie noticed there was a light on in what was now A. Thomas’s sitting room.
She’d feigned a level of disinterest she didn’t truly feel when Niamh had mentioned him earlier, and wasn’t entirely sure why. When she examined her motives, she realised that admitting her own intrigue about ‘Nameless Neighbour’ would feel somehow disloyal. Since the day he’d moved in, James had grown to genuinely hate the man – though Rosie didn’t think his behaviour, stiff and standoffish as it was, justified such loathing.
She’d never mentioned the fact that he’d saved her from falling over in the corridor – possibly even from breaking a bone or two, given the shoes she’d had on at the time. For some reason, she’d even kept the story from Niamh.
But A. Thomas’s conduct in that moment had convinced Rosie he couldn’t be the surly, misanthropic bastard James insisted he was. OK, so he hadn’t actually spoken to her – but there’d been a kindness about him, a sort of warm humanity. He’d helped her without making her feel like an idiot – though in the end, she’d done an admirable job of that all by herself.
What was the word Niamh had used to describe him? Mysterious. A. Thomas was definitely that. In addition to not knowing his name, Rosie and James had no idea what he did for a living, where he was from or what his voice sounded like. Even for London, this was a pretty impressive level of distance to keep from two people who lived under the same roof he did.
While she’d never concede the point, Rosie also agreed with Niamh about A. Thomas’s good looks. He was handsome in a way she found almost far-fetched – like the brooding male lead in a perfectly lit period drama, or the smouldering star of a Vanity Fair photoshoot. The fascination A. Thomas inspired in her was akin to how she felt about exotic zoo animals: she was drawn in by their beauty and wondered about their secret inner lives, but was quite content to admire them from afar.
She opened the heavy front door of the building – old, with peeling red paint and a tarnished brass knocker and letter box – then made her way to the flimsier internal door that led to her flat. As she passed the occasional table in the hallway, she noticed that on one side – their side – it was still piled high with post.
There was a large, messy stack that Rosie assumed consisted mainly of unsolicited junk mail, all addressed to James Gardiner. She felt a brief prickle of irritation at his untidiness.
Once inside the flat, she eyed the detritus of James’s solo evening in: the PlayStation controller and protein bar wrappers on the coffee table, the whirring dishwasher and the dirty wok and chopping boards piled up in the sink.
James himself was nowhere to be seen. Rosie checked her watch: 9.47 p.m. She’d been hoping they could catch up and chat about their days over a cuppa, or at the very least take in an episode of something funny on TV before turning in for the night.
She pushed open the bedroom door softly, in case he was asleep. In fact, James was sitting up in bed, two pillows nestled between his back and the antique wooden headboard Rosie had rescued from a street market five years ago. She grinned as she remembered how she’d had to hire a six-seater taxi to bring home the slab of intricately carved dark wood James was leaning against.
James’s legs were bent triangular under the bedclothes, a thick book resting on his knees. Rosie’s eyes swept its cover, and she made out the words Paleo Perfect: A lifestyle bible for the modern caveman. She felt her eyebrows shoot up and tried not to laugh.
‘All right?’ James said, looking up and running a hand through his dark-blond hair as she bent down to kiss him hello. He was boyishly handsome, Rosie thought – if a little more aware of it than he used to be. There were moments when she missed the somewhat scruffy student she’d first fallen in love with, even though this version of James was more polished, more financially solvent and better acquainted with shampoo.
‘Whoa, are you trying to ward off the local vampires or something?’ James exclaimed, wincing theatrically as Rosie stood up again.
She smiled and rolled her eyes. ‘I might have eaten some garlic bread this evening,’ she said, more sheepishly than she’d intended to. ‘And some pasta, which probably also contained industrial quantities of garlic. Although there definitely wasn’t any in the tiramisu …’
She had no idea why she was confessing this evening’s food choices, but the urge to do so was irresistible. It was as though she were a penitent and James some sort of diet shaman, armed with the unique power to forgive her food sins. It hadn’t always been this way, but his recent conversion to ‘pursuing wellness’ had come with side-effects Rosie could never have foreseen.
‘Yikes – so much starch,’ James went on, in a contradictory echo of Niamh’s comment about double carbs. ‘And sugar. The twin enemies of all body goals.’ He arched a brow and smiled at her, but the expression didn’t quite reach his eyes. After a few seconds, his gaze drifted away and settled on the page he’d been reading before Rosie came in.
For a moment she felt hurt – as if he’d poked an angry bruise. James knew as well as she did that she’d tried every imaginable weight loss regime in the time they’d been together – and that she’d spent long years wishing away the curves that had suddenly appeared around her thirteenth birthday. He also knew that, even before then, she’d been dubbed ‘Roly Poly Rosie’ by her stick-thin younger brother, Michael.
On her best days, Rosie felt zen about not being thin. She was satisfied she’d reached her body’s natural set point. Increasingly, she was convinced that the things she really wanted in life had little to do with the waist size of her jeans – even if comments like this one made her worry James was no longer so sure.
Her thoughts drifted to the spare bedroom – the only space in the flat that Rosie hadn’t painted, furnished or decorated. She cherished the unspoken hope that, at some point in the not-too-distant future, she might be able to fit it out as a nursery.
A sudden rush of tenderness doused the spark of irritation James had ignited – smothering it before it could burn its way up Rosie’s throat and take form in words that would inevitably cause a row. He just wanted the best for her, she told herself. And he’d certainly left her in no doubt when they first met that he considered her attractive. She liked to think she hadn’t changed too much; she’d felt chosen that night – thrilled and amazed that she was preferred above every other woman in the room. He’d laughingly told her she had the face of an angel and a rack to die for – which, while teasing and crude, was unquestionably flattering. If the changes James was making felt like a comment on her lifestyle and appearance, maybe that was her issue?
‘Cup of tea?’ she asked him, keen to chat but hoping to avoid any further discussion of macronutrients or the ‘body goals’ James apparently thought she should have.
‘No, thanks,’ he said, frowning slightly at her offer. ‘Caffeine at this time of night’s probably not the best idea.’
This, Rosie supposed, was true – though she reasoned it would take more than a mug of PG Tips to stop her from nodding off when her head hit the pillow this evening.
‘OK,’ she said, refusing to be cowed or to sound in any way resentful. ‘Well, I’m going to have one – watch the news, maybe. I’ll see you in the morning? Love you.’
‘’Night then,’ James nodded, burying his nose in his tome again. ‘Don’t stay up too late.’