‘Cath, you look wonderful.’ Portia comes to the door of her apartment, air kisses me on each cheek and beckons me inside, through a wide, airy corridor to an enormous living room with huge windows overlooking communal gardens off Sutherland Avenue.
Several scented candles are dotted around, and the air is filled with the sweet scent of orange and cinnamon. On the glass coffee table, next to the enormous bowl of white lilies, is a bottle of champagne, already opened, and two glasses.
There isn’t a colour to be seen, and everything looks terrifyingly expensive. The sofas are so white, I’m almost loath to sit down just in case I should have some sort of ghastly period leakage or something, which of course would only happen if you were to find yourself sitting on an immaculate white sofa.
It is exactly where I would have expected Portia to live, the sort of apartment that you only ever normally see in the pages of a glossy interior magazine, the sort of apartment that I’ve never set foot in, in my entire life.
Portia pours me a glass of champagne and collapses elegantly on the sofa next to me, her knee-length skinny skirt more than adequately showing off the length of her legs, helped somewhat by high strappy sandals.
Portia looks rich. She looks as if she doesn’t have a care in the world. And, although I am in my new grey flannel trousers, my new pink cashmere-mix sweater, with my glossy locks sitting sleekly on my shoulders, next to Portia I feel even more frumpy than I did this morning.
There is something about her appearance that looks effortless. If you look closely you will see that she is wearing make-up, and quite a lot of it at that, but unless you are standing nose to nose, she looks naturally beautiful, as if she has just fallen out of bed, brushed her hair, slicked on some lip gloss and run out the door.
And her whole look, the pencil-slim skirt, the elaborate brocade skin-tight top, trimmed with lace and thin velvet ribbon, the high-heeled sandals that cling to her feet with wisps of leather, screams Vogue. It screams super-expensive understatement.
She raises her glass to mine and smiles. ‘Cheers,’ she says, and then sips some champagne, sighing and sitting back, looking for all the world as if she should be in a film or, at the very least, a television advert.
‘Your flat’s amazing,’ I say. ‘I can’t believe how huge it is, how high these ceilings are.’
‘I know. The first time I came to see it, it was in the morning and light seemed to stream through every window. The minute I came into this room I just fell in love with the proportions. Do you want the guided tour?’
I nod, and she leads me through into the kitchen, the dining room, points out the terrace at the back, and shows me the bedroom. All of it is beautiful, and at the last door Portia hesitates and grins before turning the knob.
‘This,’ she says, ‘is the real me. It’s the room I never show people because it’s in such an appalling state, so here goes. Tah dah,’ and she opens the door. ‘My study.’
No wonder she manages to keep her flat immaculate. All the junk, all the papers, all the books, are in here. The walls are lined with bookshelves, and every available inch is crammed full of something. An enormous desk takes up one side of the room, and again piles of papers, letters, scripts, are threatening to topple over on either side of a state-of-the-art computer.
‘This is my real home,’ she says with a smile, gesturing around. ‘It’s the one room in which I feel really comfortable.’
Which of course doesn’t surprise me, because the rest of the flat is like a museum. In here there’s a navy blue sofa, the cushions squashed flat, and Portia flops down on it with a grin.
‘I do all my read-throughs on here,’ she says. ‘My favourite place in the world,’ and for a second I catch a glimpse of Portia before she felt she had to play a role, before she became the sophisticated adult she is today. Portia was always sophisticated, of that I’m sure, but at university it was far less well honed. You knew she came from a wealthy family, but you didn’t know.
Now she wears it like a coat of armour, and it occurs to me that if I were in Portia’s shoes, if I had developed an armour of sophistication to present to the world, I too would probably get in touch with friends I hadn’t seen for ten years because surely those would be the only people with whom I could drop my guard.
We go back to the living room and I ask her. I ask her whether she is comfortable playing this role, and for a second she looks hurt, but she swiftly regains her composure and lets out a small laugh.
‘This was a role I was always destined to play,’ she says. ‘And Christ, it could be so much worse. Far rather the single girl-about-town than a country housewife stuck in some crumbling pile in the middle of nowhere, with just the children, the Labradors and the horses for company.
‘Anyway,’ she says, peering at me closely, ‘what sort of role do you think I’m playing?’
‘God, I’m sorry, Portia, I didn’t mean to offend you. It’s just that everything about you is so perfect, so polished, and nobody I know lives like this. I mean, if this were my flat these sofas would be grey by now, and nothing would match, and there’d be washing-up all over the kitchen, and it just looks like it must be such hard work, living like this.’
She shrugs. ‘Not hard work. You get used to it, and this is, I suppose what’s expected of me.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, every time anyone writes about the new league of single superwomen, I’m usually in there at the top of the list, and they always want to photograph me at home and examine the contents of my fridge, and quite frankly I wouldn’t want to disappoint.’
‘So what does a single superwoman keep in the fridge?’
Portia laughs. ‘Help yourself,’ she says, and I get up and open the fridge.
‘Portia,’ I start to laugh. ‘Lucy would have a fit if she saw this.’ Because there is, quite simply, nothing remotely edible in the fridge. There are two shelves devoted to champagne and white wine, another devoted to bottles of mineral water, both still and sparkling, and a few tins at the back which on closer inspection reveal themselves to be – surprise, surprise – caviar.
‘What do you live on?’ I come back into the living room, shaking my head in amazement.
‘I eat out mostly,’ she says. ‘And occasionally I’ll pick something up on my way home from work.’
‘What if you have dinner parties? And I’m assuming you must have dinner parties, given the size of your dining room table.’
‘Darling,’ she says, fixing me with a mocking look, ‘what do you think caterers were invented for?’
I laugh, and then a question occurs to me. ‘Portia, I can see why you’re portrayed as a single superwoman, but why are you?’
‘Why am I what?’
‘Why are you single? I just don’t understand it.’
Is it my imagination or does Portia suddenly look slightly uncomfortable? ‘I just haven’t found the right person yet,’ she says breezily, but somehow I don’t believe her. Then again, this is typical of Portia. She probably has some terrible tale of loss and heartbreak which makes my dalliance with Martin look like child’s play, but this is what Portia does when she doesn’t want to talk about something: she switches off.
She pours some more champagne for us both, and then sits back, looking at me over the rim of her glass, and before I have a chance to ask more questions she deftly changes the subject.
‘How have these last few years been for all of you?’ she says, continuing without waiting for an answer. ‘You and Si told me a bit about your lives at the bookshop the other week, but what about Josh? Is he happy? I must say that Lucy seems… she seems charming. Not perhaps what I expected, but obviously the relationship works… Does it?’
‘Does it what?’
‘Does it work?’
‘Josh and Lucy? God, they’re amazing. Well, you’ll see for yourself later on, but they’re the most perfect couple imaginable. I know what you mean about Lucy not being what you’d expect – you should have seen the horrors he kept picking up throughout his early twenties. All these identical Sloanes called Serena who were desperate to get Josh into Daddy’s business.’
‘Lucy definitely doesn’t fit into that category,’ Portia says. ‘So how come he ended up falling for Lucy?’
I think back to the story of how Josh and Lucy met, how they fell in love, and even as I think about it I feel a slow smile spread upon my face, because after all these years, after all this time, the memory of it still warms the cockles of my heart.
Josh and Lucy, as I now tell Portia, are in no doubt that they were meant to be together, and Lucy has always been convinced that fate played a pretty strong hand, because had it not been for that skiing trip, they would never have met.
Of course I don’t tell Portia all the details. I tell her they met on a skiing trip, that Lucy was the chalet girl, that Josh was with a ghastly woman called Venetia. And then I look at my watch and let out a yelp, and we order a minicab and dash over to Josh and Lucy’s.
And throughout the entire cab journey, Portia asks me questions about Josh, about Lucy, about Max, and I’m not entirely sure why I don’t give her the full story, why I don’t tell her more, but I find myself clamming up slightly. Perhaps I’m not entirely comfortable with her interest. Perhaps I’m starting to think that Si might be right, that she might be up to something after all.