David perched on the silk ottoman at the foot of the marital bed, watching his wife apply lipstick through the open door of their ensuite bathroom. Somehow Sabrina managed to speak even while slicking her lips with a particularly bright shade of coral.

“Do be sociable tonight,” she was saying. “It’s so embarrassing doing all the conversational heavy lifting when I look over and there you are, not trying.”

“I just don’t care about the small talk,” David said. If he never went to another cocktail party in his life, it would be too soon.

“You should care,” Sabrina snapped, with a corresponding click of her lipstick lid. Out she strode in her black shift dress and stockinged feet. “You can’t just jump straight into political debate or take off on one of your philosophical diatribes. People just want to be entertained. No one wants to hear you pontificate, for God’s sake. It’s not a university seminar.”

David kept his mouth shut. He’d never won this argument before and knew he wasn’t about to start now. They were as set on their different tracks of thinking as heavy freight locomotives. But that didn’t, he reminded himself, mean he was wrong.

“Some people do find matters of substance entertaining,” he muttered, unable to help himself.

“For one night could you please just deign to come down from your ivory tower,” she said, rummaging his side of the wardrobe. She pulled out an unfamiliar jacket with an expensive sheen and slung it at him. “And leave off your tweed comfort blanket.”

The party was yet another craven excuse for networking in the name of charity. How anyone actually raised money at these things, David had no clue. Part of Sabrina’s job as a producer at the network revolved around raising funds, so he supposed she somehow solicited it from the corporate sleazeballs in attendance. The party, as was common with these things, was held at an art gallery where no-one so much as glanced at the art.

Sabrina’s professional voice always took on a curiously lubricious tone that David could hardly stand. As soon as she became embroiled in the first round of guffawing he took off for the drinks table at the back of the vaulted room.

Double-fisting in the pretence of portering his wife’s cocktail, he skulked near the wall of windows, gazing longingly out at the far-off shore where, in a distant time, he’d foraged for whelks with his new fiancée. Her undone hair had whipped in the wind; her bare legs, trousers rolled up above the knee, had mottled pink with cold. They’d warmed up afterwards by a single-log fire in a decrepit old pub and, later, fried the whelks in butter, licking their glistening fingers. It remained one of his all-time favourite dates, yet for some reason they’d never gone back.

“You look like a man plotting his escape,” came a voice at his elbow.

David started to find a woman in glasses and a sleek ponytail beside him. She gestured at his drinks.

“Are things that bad,” she said, “or are you just freeloading?”

“Both,” he grimaced. “Remembering times past.”

“Put down the madeleine and back away slowly,” she said, smiling, “before you fall down a rabbit-hole.”

“Are you seriously conflating Proust and Alice?” David asked, mocking yet delighted.

Rita was, it turned out, a PhD at a rival university. They spent the next hour agreeing about nothing. For David, it was the most enjoyable hour yet that he’d managed to spend at a cocktail party.

When Sabrina found him, he was still by the window, which now showed the sky turned to dusk. The coastline was no longer visible in the dim landscape. Rita had momentarily departed for the ladies’.

“I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” Sabrina hissed.

“I’ve barely moved,” David protested.

“The least you could have done was bring me a drink,” she said. “I’m gasping.”

Rita reappeared with two glasses of wine and a questioning look.

“This is my wife, Sabrina,” David said, trying to keep a sheepish note out of his voice. “Sabrina, this is Rita.”

“Yes, hi,” Sabrina said. “Is one of those spare? My husband here has been derelict in his duty.”

“Sure.” Rita handed over a glass of white. “I was just making the most of it.”

The three gazed at each other by the window as the last of the twilight faded to black. Rita made her excuses and moved away into the crowd, which was beginning to thin out.

Sabrina shook her head. “She’s Zeke’s new assistant. Part-time,” she said. “Bit full of herself. I doubt she’ll last.” She turned her attention to David. Her lipstick had worn off, he noticed. “Have you seriously just been loitering here all evening? You could at least have fetched me a wine. I’ve been trying to schmooze the new exec from Infinity the past hour without a break.” She fingered his sleeve. “At least your jacket looks nice.” She sighed and necked the remains of her glass. “Shall we go?”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

David put his hand in his pocket as they made their way out, trickling to dinner with the rest of the crowd. Fingering his phone, he reflected on the newly added number, and wondered if now he would no longer be able to call it. The two women having met put him in an awkward position, whereas before, if he might simply have failed to mention… He might have felt that, after all, he was only being sociable.

*

Arthur Heardman has published short stories in magazines including Eclipse Lit, Manchester Review and Dogwood. He works in marketing in London, where he intends to quit his day job as soon as he finds a publisher for his first novel, a psychological thriller set in the world of corporate espionage.