Friendaholic by Elizabeth Day

Author:Elizabeth Day
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2023-02-10T12:37:07+00:00

By this stage in our conversation I was almost crying with laughter. Yet Sharmaine had made a serious point: the reason White Wine Wednesdays are never satisfying is because there’s a lack of depth. The stories over the restaurant table in a group of people you don’t really know any more can only ever scratch the surface. Without getting deep, neither Sharmaine nor I feel the conversation is truly honest. So it can’t be equal either. Our Zoom call came to an end and I shut my laptop feeling as I always feel after a chat with Sharmaine: I felt seen.

A few months after that, Sharmaine and her family travelled from Berlin to London. She and her husband and the girls came for dinner at ours. It was the first time I’d met my new guide-children and although all adults are more or less legally obliged to say something sweet about babies that aren’t theirs, I was relieved that the compliments came naturally. These were two ravishingly cute babies.

My thirteen-year-old stepdaughter was staying over and joined us for dinner and I was struck by how instantaneously Sharmaine could strike up a connection with her. Children are extremely good at sussing out inauthenticity or any whiff of falsity (and a savvy thirteen-year-old girl is probably the most adept at it: if MI6 knew what they were doing they’d start recruiting from single-sex London day schools). With Sharmaine, there was no need for my stepdaughter to be wary. Sharmaine simply asked the questions she wanted to know the answer to with no agenda or guile. Then she shared her own memories of going to school in the same city. At one point, the two of them had an impassioned exchange about the best bus routes.

The twins slept sweetly through dinner, as if to prove that they really were too good to be true. When they woke, they didn’t cry but treated us all to matching gummy smiles. The night was long, fuelled by laughter and shared stories and great conversation. It was so good to be around Sharmaine again and it was the antithesis of White Wine Wednesdays.

Reader, it was a Friday. And we drank Pinot Noir.

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