‘Never!’ Martina cackled back.
Rose dreaded to think who she’d be put next to this time. Luna and Rose had met at art college; they were in the same seminar for a Renaissance art history unit and bonded over a mutual dislike of everyone else in their group. ‘Are we the only ones who don’t love the sound of their own voice?’ Luna had turned to her at the end of their first week.
‘Apart from Robin over there, I think so,’ replied Rose, pointing at a boy in a hooded sweatshirt leaning against the wall in the corner. He was asleep.
‘Oh, my flatmate shagged him last week,’ she replied. ‘He definitely loves the sound of his own voice. Could hear him through the walls.’
It was true, everyone else in their seminar talked a lot, especially Sophie Matthews. She had read every text on the reading list and used every opportunity she could to brag about it. The professor eventually banned her from speaking in seminars so that other people had an opportunity to talk.
Luna had a close-knit group from her elite boarding school in Hertfordshire and, bar one or two, they were all fairly awful and would often act as if they’d never met Rose despite having met her several times. It was impossible to know if they were doing this to feign superiority or if they genuinely didn’t recognise her. Maybe it was just a posh thing, like saying ‘loo’ instead of ‘toilet’ (Hives & Dives was always publishing lists of ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ like this).
‘I don’t know why they do that,’ Luna would assure her each time. ‘They’re the most insecure people I know. So, I wouldn’t let it bother you.’
At first, Rose would be polite and introduce herself. But that trick got old by the third time, and she eventually started calling people out on it. Soon, Luna stopped inviting Rose to dinners with people she’d already met. It seemed that the circle of her friendship group was far-reaching enough for her to choose different people every time. Most of the guests worked in either recruitment or property.
Rose wasn’t ever entirely sure what Luna did for work, or if she even worked at all. She knew that her family had money and that, after graduating, Luna’s dad gave her £5,000 to start her own vintage scarf business. Whenever Rose saw her after they left art college, Luna would only ever talk about who she was sleeping with, her most recent holiday, and where she was going on holiday next. She was often pictured in the party pages when she went out – Minnie had even invited her to a few of their events. The scarf business had yet to surface.
‘You’re here! Hi, gorge, so good to see you,’ Luna said, opening her front door, bottle of Laurent-Perrier dangling from one hand. She was barefoot and wearing a tiny black sheath of sheer fabric that had been tightly wrapped around her slim torso, the material clinging to the middle of her thighs. You could quite clearly see she was wearing a pair of tight boxer-short knickers and a matching black lace bra underneath. Her curtain of golden blonde hair had been dyed lighter and was styled neatly into a plait that sat comfortably on her left side. She was wearing a light coat of mascara and a smudge of pink lip gloss that made her bee-stung lips look somehow even more divinely swollen.
‘So good to see you, too,’ Rose replied, her hands wrapping around Luna’s slim back.
‘Do you like it?’ Luna said, twirling around in her hallway.
‘The dress? Yeah, it’s lovely, where is it from?’
‘I made it, babe! New business. Scarves out, sheer mini dresses in!’
‘Will clogs be next, Lu?’ muttered a low voice from inside.
Luna spun around as Rose walked in and closed the door behind her.
‘Funny!’ she scoffed, her head tilting to the side, mockingly. ‘Rose, this is Ben. He’s a family friend.’
‘We grew up in neighbouring villages,’ Ben clarified, leaning forward to give Rose a kiss on the cheek.
He was wearing a navy-blue corduroy shirt tucked into a pair of brown tweed trousers. He looked remarkably smarter than the two other men in the room who were sitting on the sofa behind him.
‘That’s Paul and over there is Marco, who I think you must have met at another one of these,’ said Luna, pointing to the corner of the living room, where both men were cradling cans of Budweiser and looked deep in conversation. They turned to smile at Rose and waved before turning back to face each other; the last time she’d seen Marco was outside a club in Leicester Square when he was asking to borrow her phone so he could ring his dealer. She told him it had run out of battery.
‘And that’s May and Flouff,’ Luna added, gesturing at two girls huddled together on a navy-blue chesterfield sofa.
‘Flouff?’ Rose whispered.
‘Short for Florence,’ Luna whispered back. ‘Her dad is the duke of some shire or other, I can’t remember which.’ She pulled away as if to make an announcement to the room. ‘Right, I just need to check on the vol-au-vent canapés. Mingle amongst yourselves.’
‘So how do you know our precious moon girl?’ Ben asked Rose.
‘We were at art college together.’
‘How lovely. So are you an artist too?’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ She paused. ‘Sorry, that was defensive.’
‘That’s quite all right. I didn’t mean to touch a nerve. You just look like the kind of person who would call themselves an artist.’
‘I see. Which art college did you go to then?’
‘Ha, I didn’t go to university, actually.’
‘That’s unusual for Luna’s group of friends.’
‘Ah yes, well, you see she didn’t exactly choose to be friends with me. It just so happened that our parents liked the same tiny pocket of Somerset and decided to raise their families there.’
‘Why didn’t you go?’
‘Couldn’t decide what to study, wanted to travel, so I did. Then I came back and got an internship at my uncle’s ad agency. Now I’m an account manager there.’
‘You make it sound so simple.’
‘The benefits of being a straight white man with connections.’
Rose laughed. Ben had a pleasing face, the kind that was angular in all the places that made him universally attractive, but soft in parts, too, which made him seem more approachable. His hair was dirty blond, his eyes so light they almost looked grey. He wasn’t characteristically good-looking in the way someone like Milo was. But for a regular person, and by the more lenient standard that accompanied that, this was someone a lot of women would call ‘hot’.
The irony of Luna’s regular dinner parties was that she couldn’t cook. But she was always so generous, probably spending upwards of £200 on preparing inedible three-course meals for everyone, providing copious amounts of wine and not letting anyone go near the dishwasher (Rose had discovered this was because Luna always hired someone to clean the house the day after), so people kept coming.
It was also probably because of this that no one had ever told Luna that she couldn’t cook. Even though the meal was often soggy and tasted a bit like water that had been left in a plastic bottle for too long, people would smile politely, make mmm sounds, telling her she should write her own cookbook.
Her home was also excellent for parties. With five storeys, it was a palatial townhouse tucked behind the King’s Road that had originally been purchased by Luna’s family as their ‘London base’. But all of Luna’s siblings were still at school, and her parents (both retired investment bankers) were constantly travelling the world. So, she almost always had the place to herself and whatever bevvy of friends and lovers she was into at any given moment. People mostly came to socialise or talk about themselves, politics or sex. This time it was the latter.
