Page 57 of The Woman Who Said Yes

Sam’s foot nudges mine under the table. ‘Well, these things happen,’ he says flatly.

‘They do.’ Dom’s face softens and he musters a smile, as if relieved it’s all out there and has turned out so well. ‘Thank you for understanding,’ he adds. ‘I know you both care about Eva a great deal and I promise you, so do I.’

32

WEDDING COUNTDOWN: 8 DAYS

Sam

Was Dom lying that day? Was the cracked house and the caring-for-Mum stuff a load of baloney? Is there even a house at all – let alone one that’s breaking apart? Sam can’t be certain and so they have decided, he and Andie, that they’ll do as Dom has asked. They won’t say anything to Eva.

It’s a damp and chilly Friday evening as Sam strides towards a bar in Bermondsey. Eva isn’t so conventional as to want a girls-only hen night, or in fact a hen night at all. Instead, there’s a little party in a basement bar underneath a Spanish restaurant. Eva’s group’s area is roped off and already bustling when he arrives: all exposed brickwork and booths in arches, and incredibly good-looking young staff. This being Eva’s night, Dom won’t be here, and Sam is relieved about that. But he can’t help wondering, is he having a night out too? Some kind of stag night equivalent? And if so, who’s going? Because – aside from his mum and a small clutch of Facebook friends including Nigel Rider, his barbecue champion – there’s still no evidence of anyone else in Dom’s life.

Isn’t that weird? Sam reflects. For friends and family members not to be dropped casually into conversation? Sam doesn’t have a huge family – just one brother, a decade older and long settled in New Zealand and without kids, doing something in engineering that he’s never fully understood. With the age gap, they have never really been close. But there are cousins dotted around, and Sam still has friends from school and college and the design studio he worked at – and of course Andie and Eva.

Sam orders a beer and spots Eva surrounded by people he doesn’t know, laughing and looking extremely glamorous in a red dress, her curly hair all piled up on top of her head. He’ll go over in a minute. He just needs to rev himself up for it. In the meantime, he takes his beer and looks around for another familiar face. Actually, Andie’s face. Once he’s found her he’ll be fine, but right now she is nowhere in sight.

Instead, it’s Eva who zooms over and grabs him by the arm and leads him around, as if he’s the shy kid at a party when he’s fine, of course he is! ‘So, what’s happening with Lucy?’ she asks.

‘Oh, you know.’ He smiles and colours a little, not wanting to go into it now. ‘Nothing to tell really…’

‘You’re such a closed book these days,’ she admonishes, pulling him across the room where she introduces him to a whole clutch of people – too many to remember anyone’s name – before flitting off again to greet another new arrival. Sam and Andie aside, most of Eva’s friends are models, photographers, hairdressers and other assorted fashion types. Although they are all perfectly friendly on the rare occasions he encounters them, Sam always worries that his trousers are wrong.

They’re not, he was pretty certain of that when he left the flat tonight. Throughout adult life Sam has adhered to the most basic approach possible to dressing which, he has always believed, leaves no room for error. But now, as a make-up artist called Milla tells him how ‘madly, brilliantly bonkers it is’ that Eva is getting married, he is aware of feeling utterly out of place. ‘Have you met him yet?’ she wants to know. ‘The lucky man, I mean?’

‘Yes, a few times,’ he says with forced enthusiasm.

‘What’s he like?’

‘He’s great!’ Sam manages, eyebrows shooting up. They are joined by a tall and reedy bald man with a twinkling diamond earring – apparently the croquembouche baker – and a woman in a turquoise trouser suit. Both seem to assume that Sam has the intel on Eva’s beau.

‘Is he a real sweetheart?’ the man asks, his tone suggesting that Sam should reply, Oh, yes! He really is.

‘Oh, yes, he really is,’ Sam says.

Trouser-suit woman pulls a jokey expression of concern. ‘And does he deserve our beautiful Eva?’

‘Yeah, of course!’

‘Because when we first heard,’ Milla chips in, ‘we thought we might have to stage an intervention.’

Sam barks out a laugh, hard and metallic and fake. Where the fuck is Andie? Not that he needs rescuing or is socially inept. He’d just feel better, that’s all. With a tendency towards shyness, and having grown up virtually as an only child, Sam has always felt more comfortable in small groups of people he knows well.

That’s what triggered his love of radio, back in the day. At his unremarkable north London secondary school, he was neither especially sporty nor gifted academically. He loved art – but the lessons back then mainly focussed on sketching a slowly withering bunch of grapes with an HB pencil for seventeen weeks. It was amazing that they hadn’t turned into wine by the time they’d finished. The people Sam hung out with tended to skulk in the library or at the chess club, which was fine. He had no problem with that; he enjoyed chess. However, Sam felt that he really should get himself out there, onto the wide expanse of cracked tarmac where, he suspected, life was really going on.

One lunchtime he noticed how a small group would gather around a tinny transistor radio in the playground to hear the new Top 40 chart. Although Sam wasn’t particularly interested in the charts, he saw how the little plastic device drew other kids to it like wasps to a sugary doughnut. And so, with money from washing up at the local Chinese restaurant, he bought a tiny radio and took it into school and found alternative, non-chart music shows. And that had a magnetising effect on other kids who, like him, loved music that was unlikely to feature on Top of the Pops.

Music became his thing. It helped him to find his tribe – not that it was called a ‘tribe’ then, it was just ‘mates’. And then, by extension, Sam gained the courage to pursue his love of art and apply to colleges and find a part-time job in a West End knitwear store which, of course, led him to Andie and Eva.

‘She’s such a sly fox,’ Milla announces now.

‘Sorry, who?’ Sam’s attention had wandered.

‘Eva! Keeping him all to herself – a catch like that.’

‘Maybe she thinks we’d scare him off?’ the bald man suggests, and they laugh. ‘I love a mad love story like theirs, though,’ he adds, turning to Sam. ‘Don’t you?’

‘I do,’ Sam enthuses. Like I loved the sole colonoscopy I’ve had in my life.