The Next Best Thing Read online

  ‘Just while I do the ironing . . .’

  ‘You are so quaint.’

  Marion had someone to take care of the ironing. Just as she had someone to take care of her children while she raced round town spending her husband’s money.

  ‘Not quaint, just poor.’

  ‘Come off it, Will can’t be doing that badly. Tell him to spend less money on clothes. And get him to do the ironing.’

  Marion was one of the new breed of stay-at-home wives. Not so much a drab run-down housewife as a bumptious force of nature, out to milk the situation for all it was worth. Jane wished she had her nerve.

  ‘Another time,’ she said.

  ‘Well, make it soon. You’re turning into Norma no-mates.’

  ‘OK, next week maybe.’

  ‘I’ll hold you to it. I’m not having you becoming one of those boring working-mother martyr types, huffing and puffing about having so much to do.’

  ‘All right, you spoilt old bag, I’ll call you.’

  Jane replaced the receiver and turned her attention back to the TV, which was perched on a table alongside the computer, at the far end of the kitchen/dining/family room. A multi-function room for a multi-functioning woman. She honestly didn’t mind the ironing, and so what if she did iron Will’s shirts? They both agreed the great cause of sexual equality should not be reduced to a petty spat about the housework.

  The couple on the programme had now arrived at the dilapidated gentil hommière in the French countryside: holding back the tears they contemplated the disastrous plumbing. This was when the viewers’ Schadenfreude really kicked in. Dear oh dear, went up the sigh from a million sofas, we could have told you it was a bad idea.

  Jane moved on to the Egyptian-cotton duvet cover and wondered whether she really was turning into Norma no-mates. True, she saw less of her friends than she used to. But she had Will and Liberty and her work and that was enough, most of the time.

  Will appeared at the door, an elegant urban figure, his hand running through his boyishly long grey hair. ‘I’m making tea,’ he announced, as though this was of earth-shattering importance, ‘would you like camomile or hibiscus?’

  ‘Camomile, please,’ said Jane, squirting some instant starch onto a pillowcase. Although he was used to roughing it on his travels, Will insisted on certain luxuries at home, and crisply pressed bed linen helped him overcome his insomnia.

  ‘I see you’re indulging in your usual fix of escapist nonsense,’ said Will. ‘What is it this time, an olive farm in Italy for a couple of no-hopers?’

  ‘A guest house in France. I really admire them, getting up and making a go of it.’

  Will switched on the kettle and turned a dismissive eye on the screen. ‘Christ, look at those matching bedspreads and pelmets, and that horrible fake stone floor! What’s the point of going to France and staying with Brits? You might as well go to Surrey for your holidays.’

  ‘You must admit it’s brave of them, though,’ Jane countered. ‘They had an idea and they’ve followed it through. They have achieved their fantasy.’

  But Will wasn’t having it. ‘I don’t think fantasy is the appropriate term for the aspirations of a suburban couple who’ve had a nice holiday abroad and think they can extend it into some kind of bed and breakfast never-never land. I don’t buy it. Now my fantasy . . .’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know,’ Jane interrupted him. ‘Your fantasy is to live in London for the rest of your life.’ She had heard it once too often for her patience. ‘It’s all right for you,’ she added sharply, ‘you’re always hopping off abroad. Most people don’t get the chance to whizz off and live among Native Americans for months at a time.’

  He looked at her in surprise. It was unlike Jane to get all chippy, maybe she was going down with something. ‘That’s for work, Jane, and hardly luxurious. Damned uncomfortable for much of the time.’

  He brought her a cup of tea and set it down on the ironing board. ‘I only wish I had time to watch television,’ he said self-righteously, ‘but I’m afraid I’ll be at least another couple of hours.’

  It was churlish of her to snap at him like that, Jane thought, she hated sounding bitter. Thanks , Will,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry if I was a bit ratty, I’m tired, that’s all, and worried about the deadline on that bridges book, you know what it’s like.’

  Though of course he didn’t know what it was like. He never got in a state about his work. She was the one who flapped and panicked while he remained serenely in command. It was further proof, as if she needed it, of his all-round superiority.

  He nodded his forgiveness and went back up to his galleria. The man of her life, absorbed in higher thoughts. She still couldn’t believe her luck that he had chosen her, a two-bit translator, when he could have had his pick of minds more equal to his own. They’d met ten years ago at a publishing party, where she got stuck talking to a miserable crime writer who had recently left London to live alone with some cats on a Welsh mountain. ‘I gave up my full-time job four years ago,’ the writer had told her, staring moodily ahead. ‘It was a big mistake.’ Jane was just wondering how best to sidle off and refill her flaccid paper cup when Will drifted into her orbit, the star of the party and way out of her league.

  ‘Do please excuse me,’ he had said to the cat-lover, ‘I have some urgent business to discuss with this woman.’ And he had quite simply whisked her off her feet.

  He had been wearing a beret that night. This was a detail that Jane now preferred to leave out of the story; she had her doubts about men who wore hats indoors. Or outdoors, for that matter. She knew his name and had read his newspaper column, but not his books. Travel writing bored her on the whole, as she admitted to him after a few more glasses of wine. She took the view that if you had nothing to say at home, you were unlikely to find anything to say a long way from home. It wasn’t as if a few thousand kilometres would change anything.

  Will took her home that night to try to change her mind with a dazzling display of learning. She’d never met anyone so brilliant, who could quote world literature in fifteen languages including Mandarin. Looking back, you could say he’d been showing off, but she was mightily impressed at the time. She’d been used to boys of her own age, well-educated on paper but with little curiosity beyond the sports pages. After that night, Will started taking her to parties, hip bars, restaurants where they all knew his name. She knew it was pathetic to admire the way he asked for his usual table, but she couldn’t help it, being that much younger.

  Naturally, he came with baggage. You didn’t expect to find a brilliant, passionate man approaching forty without a past. But he was already separated from his wife, there was no question of Jane being a home-wrecker. When his sons came to stay, she was tactful and accommodating, and made no demands for children of her own. He’d actually taken it rather well when she’d told him she was pregnant. Though like the Chinese birth-control granny police, he had insisted that one was enough.

  Not being married was a condition Jane enjoyed. It made her feel more exciting than she feared she was, though she still hadn’t worked out what to call Will. He was too old to be her ‘boyfriend’, and ‘live-in lover’ sounded overly vigorous. The ‘father of my child’ implied they were divorced before they were even married, and ‘companion’ brought to mind a frail old person in a bath chair. The only real option was ‘partner’, although it always made her think of sex manuals like The Joy of Sex, where a bearded man is depicted pleasing his partner like a caveman crawling over his prey.

  Mind you, nobody talked about living in sin any more, it had become as conventional as tea and toast. Only Jane’s grandmother thought it was a scam devised to bring financial benefit to men and heap misery upon women. ‘Of course no man would get married if he didn’t have to,’ she had raged when Jane had told her she was moving in with Will. ‘Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free?’ This reactionary view had left Jane lost for words and sent her home to run through the reasons why she and Will had deci
ded marriage was out of the question. Who had presented the argument s and who had agreed? She couldn’t remember now.

  Jane packed up the ironing board and went upstairs to bed, past the galleria where Will was still sitting at his desk, head bent over his work, classical music tinkling in the. background. She reached the top floor of bedrooms where her daughter’s Roald Dahl tape was still quietly playing in the dark. Jane switched it off and kissed her child’s silky head. A little later Will joined her in bed and they lay there, folded together like two of Liberty’s bendy stickle bricks. Yin and yang, mutually complementary, the senior and junior partner in the business of family life.

  Next morning at breakfast, Liberty was playing her questions game. ‘Mum, would you rather die or break a leg?’ Her eyes were glued to the TV screen where a large bear was making slow, child-friendly movements.

  ‘Break a leg. Do you want crisps or Hula Hoops for your snack?’

  ‘Hula Hoops. Mum, what is worse, losing all your money or your daughter dying?’

  ‘My daughter dying. Do you want more milk?’

  There was no reply but Jane topped up her glass anyway. Slimy rings of chocolate cereal floated in Liberty’s bowl, a strange choice of breakfast but supposedly packed with all the appropriate vitamins.

  ‘Are you ready then?’ Jane said.

  Liberty stood up slowly, still watching the screen, then without warning flipped over to turn a perfect cartwheel in the cramped space between the table and the wall. Her grey school skirt fell away, revealing a supple, well-muscled pair of legs. Jane loved those legs, she could eat them for breakfast.

  ‘You’ll be sick,’ she said. ‘Now, where are my keys?’

  Liberty turned a second cartwheel then stood to face her mother. ‘What is worse,’ she asked, ‘losing your keys or having an accident?’

  It could go on forever, this game of choices. For the past week Jane had been forced to play the patient stooge as Liberty bombarded her with questions. That was the thing about having an only child, you had to act the part of sibling and playmate, subjugating the adult mind to the demands of a seven-year-old.

  Liberty was bored with it now. She was staring at Jane in a considered way. ‘Mum, if you died, I could be adopted by a celebrity,’ she said, cocking her head to one side as she ran through the possibilities.

  ‘I suppose you could,’ said Jane, ‘but let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. Have you got your ballet things ready?’

  Liberty pulled a Mickey Mouse bag off the chair and waved it under her mother’s nose. After-school activities were the trademark of a posh private school and gave Jane some precious extra time. She adored Liberty, but also valued the quiet hours when she was away.

  ‘Good girl, now go and say goodbye to Daddy, it’s time to go.’

  Liberty leaped up the stairs to the galleria two at a time, on an important mission, her shiny school shoes clomping loudly on the stone treads.

  Will was already seated at his desk, leafing through The Sexual Life of Savages. It was the book that Paul Theroux had taken with him when he went travelling through the Isles of Oceania to recover from a broken heart. Will considered Theroux a kindred spirit; they both needed a big canvas to explore their private emotions, unlike less adventurous souls who would just tuck it away and get on with it.

  He looked up and saw his daughter beaming at him from above that repressive school uniform with its grey-and-purple-striped tie. Uniforms were something Will felt very strongly about. They were almost as insulting to personal liberty as the suggestion that people should carry identity cards, both notions carrying strong fascist overtones.

  ‘Hallo, big face,’ he said, ‘are you off now?’

  She nodded and kissed him briefly before turning away to make her noisy way back down the stairs.

  The tie was bad enough but what really did it for Will was the outerwear — that purple cape and silly triangular hat. As if his daughter were some kind of fat-cat prelate. Jane didn’t seem to share his discomfort, she just shrugged and said at least there wasn’t an argument every morning about what to wear. Just as there was no argument in the Gulag, was Will’s retort. Unthinking obedience. Mindless dehumanised discipline. He scribbled on his notepad. He might do a short piece on school uniforms in next week’s column.

  Jane shut Liberty, caped and hatted in papal splendour, in the back of the car and edged out into the morning traffic. She hadn’t put her lenses in yet, so she was driving with the aid of an old pair of spectacles that made her look like Nana Mouskouri. It hardly mattered now that Liberty was old enough to be dumped on the pavement outside school; Jane could remain unseen in the car, engine throbbing, dressed like a fright.

  ‘Mum, M.U.M,’ came her daughter’s voice from the back seat, spelling out the letters from beneath the papal crown. ‘What is worse, having an injection or being run over by a car?’

  Jane slyly tried to deflect the question. ‘What do you think?’ she asked, hoping to break the pattern.

  ‘I’m asking you,’ shrieked Liberty, indignant at her mother for changing the rules.

  ‘Don’t shout, darling. Let me see,’ she went on ingratiatingly, I think it’s worse to be run over, definitely.’

  The morning run took them through the traffic-choked nightmare of the Shepherds Bush roundabout and on to the favoured reaches of Notting Hill where Liberty attended her prep school for girls. This was only a matter of faint embarrassment for Jane, but for Will it was a huge loss of face. Private education was so against everything he stood for. Apart from it being grossly unfair, he understood the burden it imposed on a child. He knew from experience how vindictive people could be. Kids from comprehensives didn’t know how lucky they were, stepping freely into the world, untrammelled by the trappings of privilege.

  Jane was not sure she agreed with him on this. Having attended what Will enviously described as a ‘bog-standard comprehensive,’ she couldn’t honestly see it as an advantage. But on the other hand, they could hardly afford to throw money away on school fees. ‘Let’s move further out,’ she had said, ‘all the decent state schools are in the suburbs.’ Will had blanched at the ‘s’ word, so Jane had suggested the Home Counties, which he had found even more insulting. Could she honestly imagine him joining a golf club and hosting barbeques?

  They tried to get Liberty into the only decent local state school, but there were ten applicants for each place. Unsurprisingly, most people seemed to think the best school was right for their child, nobody wanted to exercise their ‘right to choose’ the crap ones. So Will caved in and Liberty ended up kitted out in a purple cape in a class of children with even sillier names than her own. Boudicca, Olympia, Cassandra, lanthe, a full galaxy of Greek and Roman deities, a canon of sainted military heroines, as well as the usual sprinkling of monied bohemians called things like India, Sky and Panda.

  Jane turned into Leinster Square and joined the queue of big shiny vehicles searching for somewhere to park. Crouched low in her unremarkable Vauxhall, she was the beggar at the rich man’s feast, presuming to infiltrate a world beyond her reach. Plain Jane from Nowheresville getting above herself, scraping together the school fees because she thinks her daughter’s too good for the local comp.

  Liberty kissed her mother goodbye and walked purposefully towards a stuccoed pair of townhouses. Brightly painted butterflies decorated the window of the front classroom. Girls with neat hair were escorted by expensive blonde mothers. Jane watched Liberty go through the door, serious and dignified. She felt a rush of pity. It wasn’t what she wanted for her, this precious little academy of girls from well-off homes.

  On the way home, Jane played her own version of Liberty’s game of choices. What was worse, having a child or not having a child? Not having a child. What was worse, a posh little prep in Notting Hill or a failing school on a sink estate? It had to be the sink estate. What was better, a terraced house in Shepherds Bush or a country rectory with a gravelled drive and an orchard? She wasn’t sure she wante
d to think about that one, she’d better come back to her reasons for living in London. Who would you rather live with, a well-connected travel writer who was a personal friend of Salman Rushdie, or a sad old commuter whose idea of fun was taking part in the village quiz-night? No contest, and anyway, she’d made her choice now. She had chosen Will and the whole urban package that came with him.

  TWO

  Lydia Littlewood leaned back into the seat of the train and pulled her coat (Nicole Farhi, a classic wrap) more tightly around her. The window wouldn’t shut, and the wind whistled into the tatty, half-empty carriage. This country was a disgrace with its third-world transport system. Expensive, too: it had cost her an arm and a leg to take a day return to Oxford and put in an appearance — and a much-needed dose of glamour — at Miss Lancaster’s memorial service.

  It had been worth every penny though. The sight of all those dowdy academics made her realise how right she had been to turn down the chance of post-graduate research. Not for her a lifetime dressed in library clothes, shuffling around in an old cardi and a depressing pair of tan lace-ups. Lesbian shoes, she called them. Not lesbian shoes in the modern sense, those clumpy black fashion-statements of political indignation. But lesbian in that faded blue-stocking way of marriage being out of bounds to a woman with a mind. It was hard to imagine now that she might have been a research fellow, with all its mannish overtones.

  No, she had done well to turn her back on the groves of academe. She lacked the gnat-sized vision required for the work of a scholar. How could you spend years of your life — the only life you had — poring over the minute details of a medieval French manuscript and speculating on what might have been written on the bit of it that had broken off? How unspeakably dull was that? Far better her own giddy existence in the magazine world, fluttering like an exotic butterfly from one colourful story to the next.

  There had been a few other high-flyers at the memorial service – it wasn’t entirely wall-to-wall pedants. You could tell the ones who had made something of themselves by the way they glanced swiftly at their watches, and scanned the church with a professional eye, making a mental note of those worth talking to after the service. She had managed to touch base with one or two useful contacts, which was the whole purpose of these events. Funerals were for grieving, but memorial services were different. They were for reflecting on a life well lived (you didn’t get one if you were a complete nobody) and lent themselves to networking. There was one girl there she remembered from school who had done terribly well and was now practically running Condé Nast. She’d mentioned a school reunion that was taking place next week, and Lydia fully intended to go along. Her Essex roots weren’t something she liked to make a song and dance about, but she’d make an exception for Condé Nast. Jane should come along too, get out of her rut for a change.