‘Lucky lady of the moment, Kate Kennedy,’ smiled Peter, gesturing over to their friend.
‘The MP?’
Peter nodded.
Peter James was nice enough, but he was what they used to call a stiff: boring, conventional. He even looked the part: tall and thin and very upright. Amy always thought of him as ‘the Grey Man’. He was yin to Juliet’s yang. While Juliet was acerbic, knowing, switched on, Peter seemed to live in a bygone age of clubs and dinner parties and country houses. There was no doubt the two of them shared common ground in that they both thrived in the upper echelons, though Juliet liked to mix with the new elite – Old Etonian actors and entrepreneurs – while Peter preferred the fox hunters and art collectors, people who spoke about their great-great-grandfathers as if they were still running India. Amy doubted he had done anything unusual or unexpected in his life.
‘Minister, I think you’ll find,’ said Juliet, tossing back her red hair. ‘Trade and industry. Max will have schmoozed her into some sort of complicated tax break before she’s finished her starter.’
Everyone laughed, and Amy was reminded how much she loved her Sunday lunches.
‘Where are Hettie and Alex?’ she said, looking around for Claire and Max’s seven-year-old twins.
‘Nev has taken them to play in the garden. Tilly, why don’t you go and join them,’ said Claire, motioning towards an enclosed courtyard at the back of the restaurant.
Tilly squealed and ran off.
‘I’ll go and check she’s okay,’ said Amy, getting to her feet.
David stopped her with a gentle touch on the arm. ‘Tilly’s fine,’ he said. ‘She’s five now. She’s not going to swallow the soap. Besides, she’s with Hettie.’
Amy looked down at him, biting her tongue. It was one of those niggling snag points that parenthood threw up. David had been sent to boarding school at the age of seven and believed that children should be given independence as soon as possible, whereas Amy was a modern mother who wanted to wrap her daughter in cotton wool until she was thirty. They disagreed on just about everything in between, too: schools, diet, bedtime; about the only thing they did agree on was the fact that Max and Claire’s daughter Hettie was like a big sister to Tilly and, against all genetic precedent, a good influence.
‘Nev’s such a star. I can’t believe she’s going back to Spain,’ said Amy.
‘Neither can I,’ replied Claire, raising an eyebrow. ‘Before the bloody Provence trip as well.’
‘Amy, David,’ said Max Quinn, throwing his arms out in an extravagant gesture as he returned to the table. ‘Where’s my darling god-daughter?’
‘Playing with my darling god-daughter outside,’ grinned David.
Amy couldn’t resist a smile. The two men were so different in many ways. At university, Max Quinn had been a poster boy for the Hooray Henry set: floppy hair, flinty eyes, cufflinks and sports cars, looking down on everyone else and scrabbling for places in the City, where they’d make even bigger pots of money. And he hadn’t changed a bit since. He was still obsessed with money, still loud, brash, braying. Sometimes Amy had to stop and ask herself why he was one of her closest friends – at Oxford she’d barely tolerated his pompous antics – but somehow he had a way of growing on you.
Her husband was a much more restrained character. When Amy had first met David in Oxford, she had mistaken his quiet pragmatism for stand-offishness, but had soon come to admire his loyalty and kindness, even before they had become a couple many years later.
But the two men shared one thing – twelve-hour working days and hugely successful careers, David in finance, Max’s as CEO and founder of the yummy mummy’s favourite fashion label Quinn – and they were bonded by a steadfast friendship that Amy envied, even though she sometimes worried, on their raucous boys’ away-weekends to Beaujolais or Vegas, that Max was a bad influence.
Max sat down and summoned the waitress to bring them some drinks. ‘No need for menus,’ he said, ordering the chef’s special for everyone.
‘So,’ he said, swilling his red wine around his glass. ‘Are we sorted for Provence? Tell me all plane tickets are booked and paid for.’
This would be Amy’s first visit to Claire and Max’s Provence bolthole, a villa in the dusty hills just outside the pretty village of Lourmarin. She and David had spent a few days in Lourmarin six years previously; the honeymoon period, as Amy thought of it, wedged between the romance of their wedding and the drama of childbirth. In her mind, it had all been sunlit and rose-tinted, a whirl of EasyJet and packing like Grace Kelly in Rear Window: just a ball gown and a hairbrush. Presumably there had been real-life problems back then too – cover shoots and dull meetings about budgets – but she didn’t remember anything but four-poster beds and roaring fires. She blushed at the memory.
‘Claudia’s still all right to come?’ asked Claire quickly. After Nev had announced that she was returning to Madrid, Amy’s own nanny, a cheerful Dutch girl, had been drafted in.
‘She thinks it’s the most exciting thing that has ever happened to her,’ smiled Amy, happy that they could bring her. ‘And we’re glad we’ll be able to go for a few adult dinners. Do I sound terrible saying that?’
‘Maybe I can get us a table at Bastide Moules,’ said Juliet, checking her messages.
Juliet’s magazine, Living Style, was an upmarket interiors magazine with a few pages devoted to food and travel. Its circulation was a fraction of Verve’s but Juliet seemed to have every PR and society shaker on speed-dial and had even managed to get a table at mythical foodie haunt El Bulli for David’s birthday a few years earlier, with only a week’s notice. The Bastide had the reputation of being the new El Bulli. It was rumoured that it had already received a million reservation requests for the five thousand covers it did in a season. Amy had no doubt that Juliet could get them in.
‘I can’t wait for three weeks in the sun,’ she said with a sigh, already thinking about the warm, dappled French countryside.
‘Have you told Douglas you’re out of the office for that long?’ said Juliet, sipping her wine.
‘William signed it off.’
‘You should still tell Douglas. You know what he’s like.’