The House with Blue Shutters by Lisa Hilton

not Claudia’s ‘type’ caused less comment than she expected amongst her
     girlfriends, who themselves as they moved into their thirties, were considering men at whom they would not have looked two
     years before. If she had put off calling Annabelle and Sally, she told herself when she accepted Alex, it was because she
     needed to have everything straight first.
    There was this too, Claudia thought, in her relationship with him. A sense of imminent compromise, unspoken of between her
     and her friends, who had dissected and analysed every incident of one another’s lives over years’ worth of wine bottles and
     coffee cups. This new reticence, a mutual, gentle refusal to insist or to question where once they would have dismissed, even
     laughed at one another’s lovers. It came from a decade of London loves and London disappointments, infatuations that collapsed
     into disillusion, men unremembered and unmourned after ten years of bed-hopping. There was a gravity to this restraint, a
     required discretion, which was not entirely derived from the fact that it was no longer quite form to mock masculine inadequacy,
     sexual inadequacy, for the amusement of the girls. If Claudia and Sally and Annabelle no longer laughed at their boyfriends,
     it was because they needed one another to believe that these men were possibilities, loves rather than affairs, and this magic
     cloak of love was necessary to maintain the invisibility of doubt. They participated, they knew, in a narrative where desperation
     to find a man was funny and also rather risible, the stuff of novels read by secretaries on the Tube, but there was to be
     no admittance, even in unspoken desperation, of the possibility of something other than True Love. Mr Collins had still to
     be Mr Right, thought Claudia, pleased because that was rather clever. Claudia knew that her engagement, once announced, would
     carry with it a similarly unmentioned taint of spinsterish anxiety. It was a loyalty they needed now, she and her friends,
     this mutual pretence that they were the same careless creatures who had come to London together after university, and that
     if they chose such or such a man, it was because they lovedhim as they had once believed they loved other, less suitable incarnations, more beautiful, or cleverer though they had been,
     but that there was nothing in the quality of their love that had changed. That was the essential thing, this new silence.
    There was a woman standing on the terrace below her, holding the handlebars of a bicycle. Her appearance had come so silently
     that it took a moment to realize, so Claudia’s gasp of shock sounded stagy. She was breathless, Claudia could hear her urgent
     panting, she looked around, confusedly, then saw Claudia’s white pyjamas in the moonlight, and called out in French, ‘Quick,
     please, I need to telephone! For the doctor.’
    ‘Who are you?’
    ‘Oh, Ginette. From Aucordier’s. I need the phone for Mademoiselle Oriane.’
    Fear resolved into the simpler timbre of domestic emergency. Claudia jumped off the parapet and ran through the drawing room,
     up the stairs to Aisling’s bedroom, knocked peremptorily and poked her head into the darkness. ‘Aisling, Aisling,’ she hissed
     in a half-whisper, ‘Aisling wake up! There’s some woman downstairs who says she needs the phone. It sounds urgent.’
    The woman waited at the back door. Claudia dithered, London discretion fighting with drama, then turned the key, stepping
     back quickly along the passage. ‘What do you want?’
    Jonathan, down the stairs, ‘What’s going on?’ Aisling in the doorway in a long nightdress. Claudia thought it was typical
     that she would keep up the rustic charm even when she slept.
    ‘Oh, it’s you, Ginette,’ sighed Aisling, as though she were disappointed. ‘It’s only Ginette!’ she shouted over her shoulder.
    ‘The phone?’
    Aisling proffered the portable and Ginette fished in the pocket of her nylon