The Guilty Couple by C.L. Taylor

Author:C.L. Taylor [Taylor, C.L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2022-04-25T12:00:00+00:00

Chapter 31

OLIVIA

The taxi drops me outside Esther and George’s enormous detached house in Hampstead and I stare up at it in awe, just like I have every other time I’ve been here. My old house in Crouch End – correction, Esther and George’s second home in Crouch End – must be worth 1.2 million but this place, with its private drive, seven bedrooms, five bathrooms and huge garden, is a palace in comparison.

The first time Dominic brought me to visit his parents I was so intimidated by the house that I refused to get out of the car. I was brought up in Brighton, in a narrow two-bedroom terraced house, miles from the sea. My parents separated when I was five and my mum paid the mortgage with her nurse’s salary. I did well at school and got a place to study Art History at Exeter. I suppose that’s where the ‘posh’ voice came from. I was trying to be accepted by the students whose parents were loaded. Lee and I gravitated towards each other, outsiders who didn’t fit in. After we graduated we moved to London and rented a rundown house in Acton with damp patches on the walls and appliances that were at least twenty years old.

I met Dominic at the private showing of a play written by a friend of Lee’s. I didn’t know the playwright very well but he’d come round to our flat for a party once. Dominic sidled up to me during the interval and said, ‘I’m guessing you’re not one of the actors.’ When I asked why he said, ‘You shudder each time you take a sip of that godawful wine.’

He wasn’t my normal type – he was too well dressed and far too posh – but he was handsome, funny and charming and we both liked the same sort of plays and films and admired the same artists so I chatted to him for a bit. Then I made my excuses and sloped off to find Lee.

The next day I received a text from Dominic saying he’d really enjoyed meeting me and would I like to see Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake the next week? It turned out he’d tracked down my number via a mutual contact, which I found singularly creepy and a little bit flattering. Lee thought Dominic was hot and somehow I let him talk me into going out on a date.

I don’t know if it was the sinewy muscularity of the male dancers’ bodies, the swell of emotion I felt as Prince Siegfried and Odette jumped into the lake, or the woody scent of Dominic’s aftershave as I sobbed into his shoulder. Maybe it was a combination of all three, but when he leaned in for a kiss at the end of the evening I kissed him back. We went on another date – a tour of Highgate Cemetery. I laughed out loud when Dominic told me where we were going but, secretly, I was delighted. I thought I was the only weirdo who found cemeteries fascinating but it turned out Dom did too.

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