Dinner for Two Read Online Free PDF Page A

subject is off limits because of what happened between him and Adalia.
    Stella went for a passive-aggressive comedy routine. ‘You’ve activated my biological clock, Izzy,’ she’d said. ‘I’m a thirty-three-year-old woman who’s going out with a twenty-four-year-old who’s not going to want to have kids until my eggs are old and shrivelled.’ Izzy thinks she’d only been half joking. After Stella had met Lee, Jenny and Izzy had acted as agony aunts to her while she hadn’t been sure about the relationship. As good friends do, they didn’t tell her the truth – i.e., that Stella and Lee were pretty much doomed from the start – because that wasn’t what she wanted to hear. Instead they told her that opposites attract, love conquers all, and everything would be all right in the end.
    All in all, our announcement had without question managed to upset and partially alienate every one of our four friends.

    look
    It’s the following Tuesday, early evening. It’s been really hot all day and it’s still warm. Everyone’s wearing short sleeves, and all the pubs and bars I pass are surrounded by alfresco drinkers. I’m on my way over to Covent Garden from Holborn to meet Izzy so that we can go out for the evening for the first time in ages. We decide we’re going to be really cool parents-to-be even though all we want to do in the evenings after work these days is sit at home, firmly ensconced on the sofa in front of the TV. In short, nesting. So tonight we’re back, just to show that we can still do it. The plan for the evening is to meet Lee and Stella for a few drinks at the launch party of a new bar on James Street, and after that the four of us will meet up with Jenny and Trevor, then head over to the Astoria for a gig – I’m on the guest list, plus five. Afterwards we’ll probably spend half an hour or so at the after-show party then head home.
    Izzy calls to say she’s running late from a photo-shoot at a studio in Kentish Town and won’t be with me for another half-hour. So I turn on my personal stereo and head towards Long Acre, hoping to lose myself in window-shopping to an old Elliot Smith album, XO .
    Half-way there, I find myself drawn towards one shop window in particular and stop. I look at the sign above my head: babyGap. I glance furtively from side to side then I walk through the doors into a place that is, to all intents and purposes, on another planet. Strolling along the aisles are women of all ages, whom I guess are expectant mothers, mothers with children, mothers-in-law or friends of mothers. I am the only male who isn’t attached to reins or being manoeuvred in a pushchair. I catch a glimpse of myself in one of the store’s mirrors and realise I stick out like the proverbial sore thumb, but it doesn’t bother me. My personal stereo gives me the illusion of detachment – a cloak of invisibility – allowing me to roam without embarrassment.
    Suddenly I’m drawn towards a sky blue romper-suit for children aged six to eight months. I pick it up by its hanger and hold it up in the air in a similar fashion to many of the female shoppers in the store and again my imagination goes into overdrive. I picture my baby-to-be in it, then with an orange sun hat adorned with animal ears. My child is going to be the best-dressed kid in the crèche. Then I pick up a pair of lime green corduroy dungarees and I’m lost. Right there in the middle of the shop I conjure up my child from head to toe. Izzy, I decide, should be the main contributor as she has the kind of face, thoughtful, sweet-looking, that will take a child far in life. Perhaps I’ll chip in with the ears or the chin, but on the whole I want the baby to be more her than me. Its personality should be split fifty-fifty between me and her. I’ll contribute a relatively analytical mind, the ability to keep calm in a crisis and a love of music. Izzy can give it her generosity, the way she makes people feel good about themselves and