Page 20 of Stella is Starting Over

‘I’ve never even heard of Ruislip.’

‘It’s the arse end of the Metropolitan line. Lots of pampas grass outside semi-detached “villas”. Swinging central in the eighties, apparently. And the high street has three different bed showrooms.’

‘Sexy.’

‘Exactly.’

‘And your parents have always lived there?’

He shakes his head. ‘I lived with my grandparents.’

‘Why?’

I probably wasn’t being invited to ask why, but I’ve done it now. He looks down at his food, rather than at me. ‘My parents split up when I was a kid; they had me super young, so me and my mum lived with them and my dad just sort of fucked off.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘That’s shit.’

‘I mean, it was and it wasn’t. My grandparents were pretty great. Apart from watching The Good Life when everyone else was watching Robot Wars, it was a pretty sweet deal.’

‘I fucking love The Good Life,’ I say, responding to totally the wrong part of this story. ‘I wanted to name Rose after Barbara, and he wouldn’t let me.’

‘What a twat.’ He smiles. ‘As if I needed to be convinced that he had bad judgement.’

There’s a moment. A static moment, with a sort of crackle between us. I could kiss him. I could lean forward and kiss him. We’ve kissed before, he was into kissing before, it wouldn’t be bad or weird or presumptuous. And maybe I won’t start crying again this time, maybe we’ll go upstairs and I’ll get to feel another person’s body against mine for the first time in months and months.

He looks at me, searchingly. ‘Shall we go and watch the housewives?’

I blush bright red and thank the god I’ve really gone off believing in that I didn’t try to snog him a minute and a half ago. ‘Yes!’ I say, way too enthusiastically.

We go through into the TV room, which is my favourite room of the house. It’s a small one, off the kitchen, made smaller by my insisting on lining it with bookshelves. There’s a TV on the wall but other than that, all books. And a squashy sofa I bought from a hotel that was going bust. I wrestled it into a hastily hired minivan by myself just before I found out I was pregnant with Rose and then worried the whole first trimester that I’d somehow broken her by doing it. The walls are a dark red colour in here, so it has a sort of cloistered, comforting warmth.

Dom sits down on the sofa heavily, like he’s lived here his entire life, then looks at me guiltily. ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘I keep forgetting I’m a guest.’

‘Fine by me,’ I say, sitting down as far from him as I reasonably can, because I’m never getting over the humiliation of nearly kissing him when he just wanted to watch TV. ‘If you’re not a guest then I can make you wash up.’

I click on the programme, which is about a group of women who are ostensibly friends and ostensibly deeply pious but spend most of their time shagging other people.

‘Are those the Mormons?’ Dom asks.

‘Are you the kind of person who talks over the TV?’

‘It’s the title sequence,’ he says defensively.

‘I’m just checking. I need to know what I’m in for.’

‘Okay, well, yes, I have occasionally been told that I’m a talker during TV. So are these the Mormons.’

‘Yes.’

‘I thought they wore long dresses and had plaits?’

I can feel the warmth of his leg radiating out towards mine. Or maybe I’m imagining it. ‘That’s the Amish.’

‘Oh. Right.’

He’s silent until the two women are having coffee, less than a minute later. ‘Are they married to the same guy?’

‘No.’