The Tennis Party by Sophie Kinsella Page A

go on your own, but you could sit in front of me,’ she said. Toby giggled and shook his head.
    ‘I suppose these two are too small,’ said Charles, gesturing to the twins.
    ‘Yes, they are a bit,’ said Georgina. ‘They probably couldn’t even sit on a pony without falling off.’
    ‘I’d love them to learn to ride,’ said Charles. ‘Perhaps when they’re a bit older.’
    ‘You wouldn’t need to buy two ponies,’ said Georgina. ‘If they stay the same size they could always share one.’
    ‘Maybe,’ said Charles. ‘Ponies are very expensive creatures.’
    ‘So what?’ said Georgina disconcertingly. ‘You must be able to afford it now you’re so rich.’
    As Cressida unpacked her clothes, carefully shaking out the creases as she had been taught at school, afrown furrowed her brow. Charles was angry with her for being rude about his friends – and perhaps she had been a bit blunt – but what was she supposed to say? Surely he could see that she could never become friendly with that jumped-up salesman and his tarty wife?
    It did not occur to Cressida that her own father had been, in his own way, a salesman himself. Owners of large factories were not, in her mind, at all the same thing as vulgar men like Patrick, who, she noticed, hadn’t even bothered to come and greet his guests. Besides, it was her mother, the aristocratic Antonia Astley, with whom Cressida identified most strongly. Her mother had always avoided becoming friendly with the wives of her husband’s colleagues. ‘Think of yourself as a precious present,’ she had once said to Cressida, ‘not to be squandered on whoever happens across you first.’ She had, of course, been talking about sex, Cressida now realized – but it was actually a useful principle for friendships in general.
    The trouble was, people like the Chances had no idea of graduating slowly towards friendship – they seemed to treat every chance acquaintance as familiarly as they did each other. Cressida shrank from the kisses, jokes, references and banter which surrounded this kind of event. Caroline, in particular, was the kind of woman who would soon assume an intimacy thatCressida was far from sharing; who would quiz her on intimate subjects and then perhaps even refer to them in front of strangers. It was safer, Cressida thought, to keep one’s distance right from the start, before things got out of hand.
    She recalled a woman whom she’d met once on holiday, staying in a friend’s apartment at Menton. The woman had been amiable enough as a beach companion; they had lent each other sun cream, magazines and books. But her conversation had gradually turned to areas which Cressida rarely discussed with anybody, let alone a stranger. She had become more and more persistent, first laughing at Cressida, then becoming offended, and calling Cressida a stuck-up cow. It had been even worse when it transpired that the woman was quite a friend of George Wallace, whose apartment Cressida was staying in.
    She frowned uncomfortably at the memory and began to change into her tennis dress. She felt upset by Charles’ determined affection for the Chances, and not just because they were not her sort of people. It was also because the Chances – together with just about everyone else here, probably – belonged to that time of Charles’ life that Cressida preferred not to think about; the period before he had met her, when he had been living in Seymour Road with that woman(Cressida never articulated Ella’s name, even in her thoughts). Of course, everyone could see now that she would have been all wrong for him. But Cressida still felt sometimes that the Seymour Road crowd thought it a shame that he’d left her. There had certainly been a bad atmosphere among them at the wedding.
    They’d managed to avoid seeing any of them since then, apart from the odd chance meeting in Silchester – and Cressida had thought that would be the end of it. But then, after months of silence,