‘Ellie MacDonald? Is it really you?’
I looked up to meet her gaze.
‘Tabatha Brown, right?’ As if I’d ever forget her.
‘Yeah! So weird seeing you here. What are the odds?’
I felt it would have been facetious to point out that spotting a former classmate less than a twenty minute walk away from your old school was hardly something to write home about, especially when almost everyone, no matter where I knew them from, seemed to live in London now. So instead, I said, ‘I know.’
‘So nice to see you! Although it’s not Tabatha Brown anymore – it’s Tabatha Butler.’ She held up her left hand, flashing two rings, one diamond, one gold.
‘Butler?’ I scanned my memory. ‘As in James Butler?’
She giggled. ‘You remember! Yeah, it’s been a long time, hasn’t it?’
Up until this point, I had engaged a kind of angry fantasy whenever I thought of Tabatha’s life. I’d imagined her jumping from one dysfunctional relationship to another other, never holding a job, and not making anything of her life. Somehow, imagining that people like her had become failures validated my life choices in a way that my own list of successes – running the London half-marathon, making editor at a leading publishing house, learning French – could not. I had sometimes even fantasised about bumping into her like this, telling her about how wonderful my life was now, how socially normal and successful I’d become, just to see the look on her face.
But seeing her in the flesh shattered all that. She was no failure. But she wasn’t the Tabatha Brown I remembered either – she was wearing a spotted dress that I’d have found too mumsy to wear, and as far as I could see she wasn’t wearing any make-up. She had a full Bag For Life with her, with a William Morris pattern on it.
‘So, what are you up to now?’ I asked, thinking, trophy wife.
‘Right now I’m just picking up my shopping,’ she laughed, ‘But generally? I’m a trainee surgeon at St Thomas’s.’
‘Right,’ I said, trying to work out where that fit in with everything I already knew about Tabatha Brown.
‘How about you?’
She didn’t seem to be aware what she’d said might have come as a surprise to me. The last I’d heard about her was that she was taking a second gap year in Australia, just floating around. I couldn’t imagine her going from that to a medical degree, let alone to surgical training.