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cavalry wasn’t much pleased with what it saw.
    As their faces turned towards her, she had one of those funny moments where your breath catches in your throat, your heart high-fives your ribcage and all sound seems distant.

7
    James really had to ask himself who he’d become if he’d put himself through this to score a tiny point against Eva.
    Stuck in a windowless function room upstairs in a dingy boozer, pear-shaped pairs of semi-shrivelled balloons were dotted about the place, like garish testes. As always with forced gaiety, it came off as the very antimatter of fun. There was textured wallpaper painted the colour of liver below a dado rail, and the stale musk of old, pre-smoking ban tobacco. These were the kind of pubs he never went in.
    Against one wall stood a trestle table with paper tablecloth and plates of mini Babybels, bowls of crisps and wizened cocktail sausages. In a nod to nutritional balance, there were withered batons of cucumber, celery and carrots arrayed in a sunburst formation around tubs of supermarket guacamole, bubblegum-pink taramasalata and garlic and onion dip. Only a sociopath would eat garlic and onion dip at a social event, James thought.
    The room was sparsely populated and had divided broadly into two groups, each single sex, as if they had rewound to pubescent years of the genders not mixing. There were the men, many of whom he recognised, their features softening, melting and slipping. Hair migrating south, from scalps to chins.
    James felt a shiver of schadenfreude at still looking more or less the way he did when he was a fifth-former, albeit a good few pounds heavier.
    Everyone had given him quick, hard, appraising stares, and he knew why. If he’d gone to seed, it’d be the talk of the evening.
    And hah – he’d said hello at the bar, and Lindsay Bright had actually blanked him! She may be an ex-sort-of-girlfriend, but surely she didn’t still have the hump about things that happened seventeen years ago? I mean, they could have a kid doing A-levels by now. Perish the thought.
    Returning with two pints of Fosters, Laurence nodded back towards where Lindsay stood.
    ‘Blimey, she’s not aged like fine wine,’ Laurence muttered. ‘Made of lips and arse now, like a cheap burger. Shame.’
    ‘So can we go?’ James said, under his breath. Bloody Laurence and his bloody schemes to meet women. These were even women he’d met already. ‘I don’t think there’s anything here for you.’
    ‘Yeeeaah … No. Wait. Holy moly. Who the hell is that?’
    James followed Laurence’s line of sight, towards a woman standing on her own. James realised he’d overlooked her numerous times but it wasn’t because she wasn’t worth looking at. She was dark: black hair, olive skin, black clothes, so much so that she had disappeared into the background like a shadow.
    Mysterious Woman was done up to the nines in something that he thought looked a bit ‘
Eastenders
trattoria owner throws a divorce party’. He could imagine Eva telling him it was doing things the male mind was too crude to appreciate.
    She radiated a kind of European art house film or espresso-maker advert beauty. Heavily lashed, vaguely melancholy brown eyes, thick eyebrows like calligraphic sweeps of a fountain pen, big knot of inky hair in an unwinding bundle at the crown of her head. All in all, it wasn’t especially his thing, but he could certainly see the appeal. Particularly in these drab surroundings.
    ‘Oh, we
have got
to say hi. I am appalled that she must’ve done an exchange programme and we didn’t introduce her to our country’s customs,’ Laurence said.
    ‘You realise you’re getting to the age where this is grotesque?’
    ‘You’re not the slightest bit curious about who she is?’
    James glanced over again. Her body language was that of someone desperate to be left alone, the arm holding her glass clamped tight to her body. It was a puzzle who she was, and why she’d come here. If James was on his