The Next Best Thing Page 12

  ‘Kingsley Amis said those were his least favourite words. Along with the question “Red or white?”’

  He looked at her in admiration. Will would have sighed wearily, he would have heard it all before.

  ‘How on earth do you remember what people say?’ he said. ‘I have an appalling memory for words.’

  ‘I suppose it’s because I work with them. You probably don’t.’

  ‘No.’

  He held the door for her, then followed her down the aisle. They sat near the back, near the centre – there was plenty of choice. For the next two hours, Jane knew she would be sitting here, regardless of anything else going on in the outside world. That was the joy of the cinema, and it was all the more delicious to be here with this man that she didn’t know, who felt so comfortable by her side.

  He leaned across to whisper in her ear about the last Louis Malle film he had seen. She caught his unfamiliar smell, an aftershave, soap and something indefinable. You either liked a person’s smell or you didn’t.

  He sat back and she was aware of how he filled his seat. Will’s legs were slightly shorter than hers, he never had a problem in aeroplanes. In contrast, this man’s knees grazed the seat in front, and the breadth of him meant her own shoulder was lightly in contact with his upper arm. In the darkness she found this contact warm and reassuring.

  It was odd to experience the intimacy of the cinema with someone new. Jane was conscious of his breathing pattern, the way he shifted in his seat. At one point she stole a glance at his profile, noticed the point at which the stubble of his beard gave way to the soft skin of his neck. When it got to the part when the child is taken off by the Nazis, she discreetly wiped her tears away. You couldn’t show emotion in front of a stranger like that, it was worse than stripping off naked.

  When the film finished, they sat until the credits stopped rolling.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Rupert asked, passing her a man-sized Kleenex. ‘It’s always grim, isn’t it, the jolt back to reality. Especially after a tear-jerker.’

  Jane dabbed at her eyes impatiently. ‘I’m terrible, I cry at anything. Even the most kitsch and manipulative American piece of saccharine. So it’s even worse when it’s a good one . . .’ She blew her nose. ‘Let’s go, shall we? Are my eyes all red?’

  She held her face up for inspection and he looked down at her. Slowly, he took in her grey eyes, flecked with hazel, the long lashes stuck together by her tears, the fine high line of her cheekbones, the freckles undisguised by make-up. How could he ever have thought of her as Plain Jane? He sat entirely still, and wished they could stay like this forever. It was as if he’d been trapped in a stuffy room and had just discovered a way out.

  ‘No,’ he said eventually, ‘they’re not red, just a bit wet. And I can see both your lenses are in OK.’

  ‘Good. I won’t be needing you then. To crawl around on the floor, I mean.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  They continued sitting there like that, then Jane suddenly stood up. ‘Come on, everyone’s gone except us. Shall we go to the café? If you’ve got time, that is.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve got time all right. And even if I didn’t, I would make time. Just for you.’

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘You know I would.’

  How do I know? she thought, as they made their way out. I don’t know anything about you.

  They crossed the road and walked down to the café. The same waitress was there; she seemed to recognise them from last time.

  ‘Two cappuccinos?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ said Jane. Then, to Rupert, ‘Scary! Do you think she memorises the orders of every passing customer?’

  ‘It’s her job, that’s how you get on in the restaurant business. The personal touch, remembering faces.’

  ‘Yes.’

  They both fell silent, they couldn’t think what to say.

  ‘It’s funny,’ Jane began.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘How you can look forward to something, how our entire lives are geared up to making plans . . .’

  ‘And you were looking forward to this afternoon?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Me too. And now it’s almost over, and we have to think about the next time.’

  ‘Yes. And it’s ridiculous. It’s not as if . . .’

  ‘Not as if we’re on a date or anything.’

  ‘Exactly. There’s nothing between us.’

  ‘No, nothing.’

  She started again. ‘It’s just, you have your life sorted, you get what you wanted, or what you think you wanted. And then you suddenly panic, and turn round and start asking yourself, is this it? Is this to be my life?’

  Rupert couldn’t believe how she’d just put in words exactly the way he felt.

  Jane pulled herself up. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I shouldn’t be talking like this. I am happy, really. Or as happy as you can hope to be. I have a good and lucky life.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ said Rupert, already envious because it didn’t include him, ‘tell me about your lucky life.’

  ‘Well, I’ve got a lovely daughter. She makes me feel very lucky.’

  His heart sank. She must be married. She didn’t wear a ring, though, maybe she was a single mum, or divorced, or a saintly widow.

  ‘That is lucky,’ he said. ‘I’d like to have kids one day.’

  He didn’t have children then. For some reason this made Jane glad.

  ‘And . . . I have my work, which we talked about last time. I work from home which means I choose my own hours and don’t need to get dolled up for the office. I can slouch around looking ugly.’

  His eyes told her this was unlikely.

  ‘And . . . I have a good social life with my partner.’

  Ah, he thought, here comes the sting in the tail. Well, what did he expect?

  ‘He’s a travel writer,’ she added.

  ‘That’s interesting,’ said Rupert politely, though personally he didn’t think so. Travel writers generally reminded him of those boys at school who felt they deserved to be gentleman explorers from a previous age. The sort who used to go off to the jungle for three years and come hack with a loin-clothed manservant and a new species of insect.

  ‘He thinks so,’ she said. ‘You may have heard of him, his name’s Will Thacker.’

  Rupert shook his head, which pleased her.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  ‘And he knows everyone,’ she added.

  ‘Everyone?’

  ‘Anyone who’s anyone. He’s a journalist as well. Has a column in the Messenger.’

  ‘I don’t read the papers any more. I find them boring. And time-wasting. I found I was spending all weekend reading them and then, come Sunday night, I couldn’t remember a single thing I’d read.’

  ‘I know what you mean. It’s good for getting invited to things, though, living with a journalist. Especially as I’m pretty tied to the home during the day. Though he goes out more than me. He’s . . . quite a bit older,’ she added.

  ‘Is he now?’ Rupert felt encouraged and leaned forward with a surge of youthful energy. Perhaps forty wasn’t the end of the line after all. What did she mean by quite a bit older? Ten, twenty years? Was he over sixty? Maybe he was a white-haired old darling that she pushed out in his wheelchair to take the air, it could be that sort of relationship.

  ‘But that’s enough about me,’ said Jane, ‘you still haven’t told me what you do for a living. I’m getting another coffee, do you want one?’

  ‘Yes, I will.’

  She signalled to the waitress while he shifted uncomfortably on his chair. It was time to come clean about his so-called career. She was bound to consider him dull beyond belief once she found out what he did. You could hardly compare number-crunching on incubator funds with the creative scribbling of a famous writer. Not so famous that Rupert had heard of him, but then Rupert wasn’t a big reader. He pushed his chair back and looked sideways, couldn’t quite meet her
eye while he owned up.

  ‘I run a hedge fund. Or rather, I’m setting one up, with a friend.’

  She looked bemused rather than bored. ‘What’s that then, a charity for old gardeners?’

  ‘Nothing so noble, I’m afraid. The only beneficiaries — if there are any — will be me and my business partner and our investors, who arc already pretty rich otherwise they wouldn’t be putting money our way in the first place.’

  ‘So it’s a sort of City job.’

  ‘Yes. Except it’s in Mayfair, just next door to a gym actually. I go there quite a lot, there’s this rest room with a big sofa that you can lie on and watch fish swimming in a tank.’

  ‘Sounds relaxing.’

  ‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘my job, it’s not really me. I’d much rather be a gardener.’

  Her face lit up. ‘You like gardening too? I love it! Will’s always making fun of me for reading Hortus. He thinks I’m on a slippery slope to wearing big tweed skirts and fancying Alan Titchmarsh. My best-ever job was translating a book on the great French gardens, most of them created by English gardeners of course. I thought, if I ever get the time, I’d like to drive across France and visit them all. You could come with me!’

  She was teasing of course, but as he watched her laughing excitedly, he knew that he would like nothing better. They could leave tonight, throw a bag in the back of the car, take the night ferry and just drive. It was easy. Happiness was always easy, it was there for the taking, so why did people waste their lives getting tied up in knots of misery?

  ‘You’re on,’ he said.

  By the time they came out of the café they had sketched out their entire route, starting at Le Havre and working their way down through Normandy and the Loire valley, before heading down to the Dordogne and the Pyrenees.

  ‘We don’t even need to do it now,’ she said. ‘I feel that I’ve already been there.’

  He shrugged. ‘I still think it would be better in the flesh.’

  She looked at her watch. ‘I have to go, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Don’t be afraid.’

  ‘No.’

  She wished he would wrap his arms round her and kiss her right there in the street. ‘Better go and get my daughter.’

  ‘Better had.’ He stood there, hands in his pockets.

  ‘Next week?’

  ‘Yes . . . no, I don’t know, I’ve got a thing in the evening, so I really should work all day . . .’

  She should take his number, that was the logical thing to do, but she couldn’t do that. As long as it wasn’t properly arranged, as long as it could count as just bumping into each other, there was nothing to hide. But if you started getting into phone calls and secret rendezvous, then it became something else.

  He knew this, too.

  ‘Maybe we should say Friday week then,’ he said, pulling out the programme, ‘they’re showing Belle de Jour.’

  ‘It seems a long way off.’

  She blushed then, worried she appeared too eager.

  ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘Not in the greater scheme of things. Two weeks is no time at all.’

  Reliance on fantasy was what kept people going on the whole. You had to have a dream, or else why bother getting up in the morning? It was far more logical to lie there and wait for death to come.

  These were Jane’s thoughts that evening as she wiped down the kitchen table and shook the crumbs from Liberty’s homework book before returning it to her school satchel. She had already put in an apple and a Penguin biscuit for Monday’s snack. Getting in front, beating the clock, organising the week ahead to avoid an unsightly last-minute panic. The routines of domesticity were soothing and at the same time insufferably dull. No wonder you needed to project another parallel life, imagining yourself elsewhere. Driving through France, for instance, with a man whose name you didn’t even know.

  She set the table for two and turned her attention to a recipe for salmon with roasted beetroot that she had thought would appeal to Will’s taste for unusual combinations. Phil had gone home a day early, which was cause for celebration, so she had made a panecotta for pudding. She always said ‘pudding’ these days. For Will, dessert belonged to a whole category of outlawed suburban vocabulary: serviette, settee, lounge, pardon — all so terribly lower-middle. Just like the set of avocado dishes and cut-glass decanter that she had been obliged to cast off, along with her fondness for doileys.

  She put the salmon in the oven and washed up the pans from Liberty’s tea. Will was working in the galleria and had requested a late dinner as he wanted to get on with his column. Jane had hoped to fit in a bit of work, too, but decided to go upstairs to clean the bathroom instead, fishing out long strands of grey hair from the plughole with a pair of tweezers.

  Back in the kitchen, she peeled off the Marigolds and hung them to dry on the pair of upstretched chrome hands that a friend had given her. Rubber gloves scored high on Will’s naff register, but Jane drew the limit here. It was one thing playing Cinderella and taking care of all the household chores, but she refused to let her hands turn into ragged old bits of meat.

  Maybe it was the Cinderella thing that was the problem. She couldn’t help thinking that going out to work might shake her out of this self-indulgent fantasy. If you got to chat round the water cooler, you wouldn’t need to strike up conversations with strange men at the cinema. Whereas she spent her days in solitude, tapping away at her computer then tidying up the house, like the inmate of a closed order of nuns. She often went all day without speaking a word, until she went to fetch Liberty. It must have the effect of making her more eager for male company, mustn’t it? Why else would she be thinking endlessly now about her new friend, and running this afternoon through her mind, and wondering when they might see each other again.

  ‘Cinderella, you shall go to the ball.’

  She jumped as Will came into the kitchen, waving an invitation in a flourish of mock excitement. Had she actually spoken aloud?

  ‘It’s from Lydia. That drinks party you were warning me about. It must have arrived a while ago and got caught up with my papers.’

  He passed it to her and opened the fridge to fix himself a drink. The invitation was properly engraved, hobbly black italic letters on thick cream card. ‘Lydia Littlewood and Rupert Beauval-Tench’ at the top, then the words ‘At Home’ in the centre, and in the bottom corner ‘Drinks: 6.30—8.30’. Like Jane, Lydia had enjoyed an upwardly mobile education. She came from a home where you might be at home with a cold, but were never At Home in a posh, hostessy way. It meant that as an adult, she had adopted such habits with Dickensian energy.

  ‘Better make sure I leave before midnight then,’ said Jane. ‘Don’t want to lose a glass slipper or find myself in rags.’

  ‘If we’re not out of there three hours before midnight, I shall turn into a pumpkin myself with boredom.’ Will was dipping the rim of his glass tumbler in a plate of salt, preparing a margarita. ‘Have we got any limes?’

  ‘Bottom of the fridge,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why you’re being so horrid about it. I thought you liked Lydia.’

  ‘I like her well-enough. It’s that stuffed shirt she’s living with I’m worried about.’ Will poured a generous shot of tequila into his glass and thought back to the time when he had liked Lydia well-enough to engage in regular sex sessions with her in her Bayswater apartment. It was when Jane was pregnant, and he had been suffering a terrible sense of déjà vu. Once again he had been trapped into the role of father provider, feeling the same itch as when his ex-wife had swapped her miniskirt and patent-leather kinky boots for a brown maternity smock and Dr Scholl sandals.

  Lydia had been a release from the crushing burden of domestic responsibility. While Jane was smugly preparing her nest, he had been going at it hammer and tongs with her best friend. It went some way to redressing the balance of power. And Lydia was a smart kid, she took it for what it was, a bit of fun, nothing more. It was just a pity that her taste in men had since hit ro
ck-bottom. Going from one of the most talked-about writers of his generation to a stiff in a suit couldn’t have been easy for her.

  He sat down at the table with his drink and rocked backwards on his chair, his arms folded behind his head, watching Jane as she wiped up the saucepans and crouched down to replace them in the cupboard. She was a good girl, really: easy-going, and she had quickly got over that little outburst last night, thanks to some soft-soaping on his part. It had been easy to reassure her that of course he hadn’t meant it about her forcing them into living together. Not strictly true, but it had all worked out in the end. He had no reason to complain. He wouldn’t have wanted a live-in relationship with Lydia. She might have been hot, but she was endlessly demanding. Very keen on expensive restaurants — he couldn’t imagine her knocking out home-made dinners the way Jane did — and she was ruthlessly out for what she could get. This was a quality he actually rather admired, but you only had room for one person like that in a relationship.

  ‘Surprise me,’ he said to Jane, putting his feet up on the table and brushing a fleck of dust off his moleskin trousers with the back of his hand. He raised his nose to breathe in the smell from the oven. ‘I’m getting fish of some kind. Coriander, a hint of caraway. Lemon, obviously.’

  ‘Sicilian unwaxed, you can rest easy,’ said Jane. ‘As gnarled and misshapen as you could hope for, and I got them from Alistair Little’s deli.’

  ‘That’s my girl.’ He took a sip of his drink and sniffed the air again. There’s something else . . . no, it’s no good, you’ll have to put me out of my misery.’

  ‘Beetroot. It’s salmon with beetroot.’

  ‘Well I never . . . how very original.’

  Thank you, thought Jane, thank you for showing appreciation of the ingenuity I put into my menu-planning. It was good that they shared a passion for food. You needed something like that as the years went by, people said; common interests to tide you over once the sex had quietened down.

  ‘You’ll be pleased to know I’ve cracked it,’ said Will, ‘my idea for next week’s column. Sorry, there I go again, talking about myself. Mow did your work go today? You see, I do care.’