The Next Best Thing Page 15

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Well, you could say you lived on the coat-tails of Notting Hill.’

  ‘I suppose I could, if I really wanted to.’

  ‘And do you know Rupert at all?’

  That was a very good question, but one to which she should give the official answer.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I used to work in the City myself, until I had my second child.’

  That would explain the dated office uniform.

  ‘But then it got too much,’ she went on. ‘I thought, what’s the point? It’s not as if my husband doesn’t earn enough to keep us all. Very comfortably, I am happy to say.’

  ‘Good for you,’ said Jane, wondering if full details of his salary package would follow.

  ‘Mind you, it’s not as if have an easy life. Overseeing the builders, ferrying the kids around, it’s a full-time job all right. I’m on my knees by the time Jonathan comes home. Luckily he’s very understanding, and knows that I don’t cook. He always makes dinner. Or else we get a takeaway.’

  She was irritatingly at pains to point out that she was no put-upon housewife. For some reason it had become a badge of honour for women to boast about not cooking.

  The modern equivalent of burning your bra, as though you were flying the flag for feminism by being inept in the kitchen. Making a virtue of incompetence. Jane didn’t see it that way.

  ‘Do you have children?’ Jenny asked, hoping they might be able to gang up as homemakers.

  ‘A daughter of seven. But I work too, while she’s at school. I’m a freelance translator.’

  What a relief it was to say that and therefore not be counted in the same category as this woman.

  ‘Well, it’s easy when you’ve just got the one,’ said Jenny ungenerously. ‘Didn’t you want any more? It’s such a shame, I think, for only children. They miss out on so much.’

  Jane glanced around the room for someone to escape to. Rupert had his back to her. She had never seen him from that angle before, his shoulders broad and imposing. It made her feel like going up behind him and putting her arms round his waist and pressing her face into the space between his shoulder blades.

  ‘I lave you got any Irish in you?’

  A very drunk man, not unattractive with his curly black hair and blue eyes, had appeared between Jane and the noble housewife.

  ‘Not me, I’m a hundred per cent English, for my sins,’ said Jenny, as though to imply anything else was a slur on her pedigree.

  ‘I wasn’t asking you,’ said the man, rudely, ‘I was asking this lovely looking woman here. Have you now? Got any Irish in you?’ He was lurching, head on one side, waiting for Jane’s answer.

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘Would you like some?’

  He raised his glass in a suggestive toast, slopping champagne over the rim. Jenny turned her back in disgust and left them to it.

  Jane laughed. ‘Well, at least you saw her off with your vulgar proposition. I’m Jane, by the way.’ She held out her hand which he grasped in a clammy squeeze.

  ‘I’m Patrick. I’m in advertising. Do you want to know my motto?’

  ‘Is it filthy?’

  ‘Not at all, I only use filth in my opening lines, but we’re beyond that now.’

  ‘All right then.’

  ‘It is, never leave a job voluntarily.’

  ‘Is that it?’

  ‘Yup. And that’s how I got so rich. I’ve been fired so often I’m awash with redundancy payments. I am the walking embodiment of rewarded failure. That’s how I got to buy my yacht. Guess what Cet it?’ He smiled winningly and stepped hack onto someone’s shoe.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please!’

  Lydia was standing on a chair in the bay window and banging a spoon on the side of her glass, just as she had planned it.

  “Thank you so much for coming tonight, I hope you’re all enjoying yourselves. This is as close as we get to celebrating Christmas, so do spare a thought for us when you’re tucking into the turkey and all the trimmings. We’ll be sweating it out in the desert sun — or else slithering around on a glacier, I can’t remember which comes first in our tour of Chilean extremes.’

  She waited for the waves of envious laughter to subside.

  ‘I’d like to hand over to Rupert now, who has a rather special announcement to make. Rupert!’

  The sea of faces turned expectantly towards Rupert, who looked down at his feet. When he glanced up again, he caught Jane’s eye and she gave him a small smile. Sick at heart, he turned to face Lydia and prepared to deliver. Normally Rupert was a good speaker. He had been best man on six occasions, because people knew they could rely on him to be witty without giving offence. He had an innate sense of what was appropriate.

  But tonight, Rupert’s heart was not in it. He felt the way he did as a child when his mother used to force him to recite grace before Sunday lunch with his grandparents.

  ‘Thank you, yes,’ he began. He would keep it brief, get it over with as soon as possible. ‘I, or I should say, we, do have something to tell you, and that is that we are going to . . . that I have asked Lydia to be my wife, and that she has agreed. So we are engaged.’

  His diffidence was swamped by a deluge of enthusiasm. It was partly the drink talking. Ply a roomful of people with champagne and they’ll celebrate anything. You could tell them you were getting your teeth fixed and they’d whoop with delight. And an engagement was best of all. The married people in the room took it as an endorsement of their own slate, while those still single could cheer and thank their lucky stars it wasn’t them. As he received the back thumping and handshaking, Rupert steeled himself to look at Jane once again. She gave him a small, ironic smile that cut him to the quick, then turned to join Lydia’s coterie of well-wishers.

  Rupert watched Jane as she kissed Lydia, then headed across the crowded room towards the door. He made his excuses to the director of creativity who was going on about how she had learned to grow through the failure of her own marriage, then followed Jane out into the corridor. She was waiting alone outside the bathroom.

  ‘You’re not going, are you?’ he said.

  ‘No, I’m waiting for the loo. Why, did you expect me to walk out?’

  ‘Of course not. Look, there’s another bathroom down here, I’ll show you.’

  He took her by the elbow and propelled her into his bedroom, shutting the door behind them. The intimacy of the surroundings embarrassed them both. He pointed towards the en suite bathroom.

  ‘It’s in there.’

  She laughed.

  ‘Thanks. And are you going to wait here? Pass me a towel on the way out and hope for a tip?’

  ‘Sit down. Please.’

  The bed was piled high with coats, so he sat on the floor on the far side of the bed, leaning against its side.

  She sat down beside him and he took her hand as though it were only natural.

  ‘It’s quiet in here,’ he said. ‘Such a relief to get away from that awful chit-chat.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I saw your other half. hate him of course.’

  ‘Of course ‘ She smiled.

  He squeezed her hand and she looked across at him. How could she have told herself he wasn’t her type? From where she was sitting now, he looked like the most attractive man in the world, Russell Crowe meets Harrison Ford.

  ‘I just want you to know,’ he said, ‘that all this was agreed a long time before we met. It was all sorted out, you see . . . I don’t think . . . I know that I couldn’t have suggested any such thing once I’d met you.’

  ‘No. Well, there’s absolutely no need to feel bad about it,’ she said. She must remain reasonable and keep things in perspective. There was no point in going along with a wild romantic fantasy: he had his life and she had hers. ‘I’m not exactly single myself, as you know,’ she added. ‘No.’

  ‘Although I suppose you could have told me you had a girlfriend, a fiancee eve
n. Who happens to be a friend of mine.’

  ‘So it seems.’ He hung his head.

  ‘And anyway,’ she went on, ‘as we’re always reminding ourselves, we’ve got nothing to hide. It’s not as though there’s anything going on between us.’

  He turned to her, his face half in shadow from the bed. ‘Now, we both know that’s not true,’ he said. And then, all of a sudden, they were kissing, passionately, wildly, sprawled on the floor like a couple of teenagers, and any pretence of them being just friends was quietly discarded along with the champagne glasses that they let slip onto the shag-pile carpet that would soon be falling victim to Lydia’s renovation programme.

  It was only when they heard someone clip-clop down the corridor towards the bedroom door that they sprang guiltily apart.

  ‘Oh, excuse me, am I interrupting something?’ Two bird-like eyes were peering at them from behind the door. It was the director of creativity, from whom no hiding place was safe.

  ‘Oh, my! Rupert, is that you? My goodness, it seems I really am interrupting.’

  ‘No, no, honestly,’ said Jane hastily, brushing herself free of the bits of shag-pile. ‘It’s my lens, you see, it fell out and luckily Rupert came in to help me find it . . . and just put it back in my eye for me. He’s very good at that sort of thing, you see.’

  ‘Apparently so,’ said Page, holding her hand to her throat like she was the wounded party in a stagy old Hollywood film. ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ she said. ‘Let’s just say I never came in here.’

  And with that she closed the door.

  Jane and Rupert giggled in nervous relief.

  ‘We’d better get hack to the party,’ said Jane, ‘before our reputations are ruined.’

  They were standing now, and Rupert pulled her to him. ‘Just once more,’ he said, kissing her, ‘just to remind me.’

  Afterwards he stood hack, and rested his hands on her shoulders. ‘We’re quits now,’ he said, ‘we’ve both got baggage.’

  ‘Don’t say that,’ she said, ‘it makes it all sound too serious.’

  ‘All right, if that’s how you want to play it.’

  ‘How else could we play it?’

  He didn’t reply.

  ‘So, we’ll see each other on Friday, then,’ he said eventually. ‘At the Institute.’

  Things were different now. It was a date instead of a chance encounter, with all the lies and deceit that went with that.

  ‘I don’t know . . .’ she said, ‘I don’t know if I can do that.’

  ‘But you must.’

  ‘Must I?’

  ‘Yes. Please don’t refuse. We don’t have to let things go any further. But if you refuse I won’t have anything to look forward to.’

  Only planning your future with Lydia, she thought. ‘And neither will you,’ he added.

  She couldn’t disagree.

  ‘All right then,’ she said, then slipped out of the bedroom to rejoin the party.

  ‘Well, I daresay that could have been worse,’ said Will, as he lowered himself regally into the ear. ‘I hope you’re not over the limit, the last thing we want is for you to lose your licence, that would really screw us up.’ He frowned as he imagined the inconvenience. ‘Home James, and don’t spare the horses,’ he added, tilting the seat back as far as it would go, and closing his eyes.

  ‘Don’t worry, I only had two glasses,’ said Jane, taking off her stilettos and slipping on a pair of sensible driving shoes. She used to laugh at her mum for keeping driving shoes in the car, and now look at her. Next thing, she’d be wearing tan-coloured driving gloves with that hole cut out of the back.

  ‘Bloody funny when I went to say goodbye to that banker,’ said Will. ‘There was a group of them standing there in their appalling suits and ties, and I couldn’t remember which one was him. They all look the bloody same! So I just said, “Bye, Rupert, thanks for the party,” and waited to see which one answered!’

  He gave a burst of smug laughter at the thought. Identikit bankers. You could never accuse him, Will Thacker, of not standing out in a crowd. No wonder Lydia had seemed so pleased to see him. She was looking pretty good tonight, too, he thought.

  Jane reversed out of her parking place, and moved slowly out onto Sloane Street. ‘What did you think of him?’ she asked casually.

  ‘The banker?’

  ‘Yes, the banker. Rupert,’ she added, taking pleasure in saying his name.

  ‘Just what you’d expect. Boring as buggery.’

  ‘Did you talk to him?’

  ‘Of course not. That would have been excessive. My duties as a guest did not extend to listening to someone bang on about the Dow Jones Index.’

  Nor did mine extend to snogging the host on the floor of his bedroom, thought Jane, with a tremor of guilty delight.

  ‘Anyway, the man’s obviously a fool,’ Will went on, ‘getting himself hitched to that gold-digger. I know she’s your friend, Jane, but she knows when she’s on to a good thing. When will men realise that they’ve got to slop being taken for a ride by freeloading women? All in the name of ‘marriage’, that appalling, calculating, money-orientated trap of an institution.’

  He reached across and patted Jane’s knee.

  ‘At least we’ve got the right idea, eh? Financial independence and mutual respect.’

  In bed that night, Jane went through the motions of sex with Will and wondered about her own financial independence. The house belonged to him, but she paid all the bills. That had always sounded fair enough to her: it wasn’t as though he was asking her to pay rent or anything. She had no idea how much he earned, but she knew he had heavy outgoings: alimony and club memberships and dining out that couldn’t always be charged to expenses. She was usually pretty skint, but that was because of her lifestyle choice, working part-time from home. And anyway, thinking about money bored her. It was the life you led that counted, it was what you did every day that made you what you were.

  They’d finished now; and with a theatrical moan and a self-satisfied smile Will slumped back to his side of the bed and took a sip of water.

  That’s one thing Lydia won’t be getting as part of the marriage package,’ he said. ‘An interesting and imaginative lover. Beyond all price, wouldn’t you say, Jane?’ He smiled a rakish, crooked smile at her, the kind of smile that she’d fallen in love with, but now she felt a chill in her heart. Was she destined to only ever sleep with this man for the rest of her life? Would she grow old and grey by his side, and never know the thrill of someone new? Married or not, that was what loyalty demanded. She turned her back on him and went to sleep, thinking of Rupert and reliving their stolen kisses at his engagement party.

  EIGHT

  He was there first, as she knew he would be. He was waiting downstairs, by the door, and touched her on the shoulder as she came in.

  She turned to him and he wrapped his arms around her, bulky in his heavy overcoat. ‘You came, thank goodness,’ he murmured into her hair.

  ‘Of course,’ she said, detaching herself gently from his embrace, ‘I promised, didn’t I?’

  ‘You did.’

  He smiled in relief. The fear that had been plaguing him for the past week, that she wouldn’t show up, that she would say there was no point, had evaporated, leaving him light-headed and full of plans.

  ‘I thought we might skip the film,’ he said. ‘As we haven’t got very long, I thought we should go somewhere we can talk. There’s something I want to show you at the V&A, a tiny pair of Chinese shoes, from when they used to bind their feet. It’s only a five minute walk from here.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Jane, catching his enthusiasm, ‘whatever you want.’

  He opened the door for her, and they stepped out into the cold, like two children excited at the prospect of an outing. The pavement was still sparkling with the morning frost, and the shop windows were filled with tinsel and Santa Claus, angels and the occasional Christ child.

  Walking into the Victoria and Albert Museum was like st
epping into an Aladdin’s cave of possibility. An enormous green and blue glass chandelier hung like a giant bauble in the middle of the cavernous entrance hall, a modern head of Medusa bristling with snaky twists of glass. Off one side, there was a room of marble statues, cool and light and empty. Far busier, on the other side, the shop was packed with people thinking of Christmas, stuffing glittery tree decorations, miniature gothic treasure chests, Victorian jigsaw puzzles into wire baskets.

  Museums were so much more satisfying now you could take a bit of them home with you.

  Rupert put his arm around Jane’s shoulders, directing her straight ahead, on to the Chinese rooms. He then took her hand and led her to the glass cabinet where a pair of blue satin shoes were on display, the size of a baby’s foot, but once worn by a woman. They stared at them, compared them to another purple pair above, talked about the pain the children must have felt, having their toes broken and folded back beneath their feet, then bound with tight bandages. They moved on to the next cabinet to see richly embroidered robes from the Qing dynasty, alive with flowers and birds, then back to the eighteenth century, a folding ivory fun and a cabinet laquered with a different landscape on each drawer. Everywhere were scenes of idyllic life.

  Jane felt the warmth of his hand, and rubbed her thumb against his, feeling the dry skin. She had forgotten what it felt like to hold hands with someone other than her daughter. She couldn’t remember the last time she had held Will’s hand, and wondered if perhaps she never had.

  ‘You know that Chinese proverb, don’t your?’ he said, as they stood in front of a screen panel from the Ming dynasty depicting phoenixes playing amid rocks and flowers. ‘If you want to be happy for an hour, make love to a woman; if you want to be happy for a day, read a book; but if you want to be happy for a lifetime, plant a garden.’

  ‘Why not all three?’ she said, pulling at his hand to make him stand still, ‘then you’d be really, really happy’

  ‘I suppose,’ he said, standing closely over her. ‘I feel quite happy now, actually, without doing any of those things.’

  They finished with China and headed down a corridor in search of the café. On either side, rooms led off, revealing further treasures: 1950s ball gowns, Indian art treasures, fascinating artefacts from history, carefully assembled from all around the world and displayed for their pleasure. Jane felt lucky to be there, walking along beside this man.