Pear Shaped
Pear Shaped
Stella Newman
A novel about love, heartbreak and dessert.Girl meets boy.Girl loses boy.Girl loses mind.Sophie Klein walks into a bar one Friday night and her life changes. She meets James Stephens: charismatic, elusive, and with a hosiery model ex who casts a long, thin shadow over their burgeoning relationship. He’s clever, funny and shares her greatest pleasure in life – to eat and drink slightly too much and then have a little lie down. Sophie’s instinct tells her James is too good to be true – and he is.An exploration of love, heartbreak, self-image, self-deception and lots of food. Pear-Shaped is in turns smart, laugh-out-loud funny and above all, recognizable to women everywhere.Contains an exclusive extract from Stella’s new novel Leftovers.
Stella Newman
Pear-Shaped
Dedication
To my parents, and in loving memory of
my grandparents.
Epigraph
Oh, the tiger will love you. There is no sincerer love than the love of food.
George Bernard Shaw
If I can’t have too many truffles, I’ll do without truffles.
Colette
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Parfait
Crumble
Icing
Epilogue
Food in the book
A word on brownies…
A few of my favourite things…
Further reading
Acknowledgements
Coming Soon (#litres_trial_promo)
Leftovers (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Parfait
1. noun – a rich frozen dessert, made with eggs, cream and sugar
2. noun [from French] perfect
Two girls walk into a bar. There is no punchline.
I’m the girl on the left in the wildly inappropriate black and white spotty summer dress. It is the snowiest February in thirty-eight years but I flew back from a month in Buenos Aires three days ago and this tan ain’t going to waste.
A month in Buenos Aires: sounds glamorous? Ok: a month in a £6 a night hostel in the Boedo barrio – think Kilburn with 98% humidity. No air con, no overhead lighting, shared showers. I’m thirty-three. I earn okay money. I don’t like sharing showers, not least with 18-year-old Austrians proclaiming Wiener Blut the greatest Falco album ever released. Wieners aside, Laura and I have the time of our lives.
Laura is the girl on the right in the bar. Best friend, tough crowd, northerner. She’s wearing a polo neck and a woolly hat. Together we look ridiculous; we don’t care.
It is one of those evenings. Whether it’s the outfits, the tans or the sociability that a snowy Friday night in London brings, we end up being the epicentre of it all. One guy, Rob, has been trying to impress me for the last twenty minutes. He’s too pretty for my taste and he’s spouting off about knowing Martin Scorsese’s casting director.
‘I can see you playing a gangster’s moll in that dress,’ he says. ‘Those big green eyes. Real curves.’
I laugh. I’m a size 10, with tits and an arse, and the girl he’s abandoned at the bar talking to his mate is one of those girls you can count the vertebrae of through her silk shirt.
‘Are your eyes real?’ he says.
‘No, they’re mint imperials, I paint the irises on every morning to match my shoes,’ I say.
‘I like your brushwork,’ he says, smirking.
‘Your girlfriend’s getting pissed off,’ says Laura.
‘She’s with my mate,’ says Rob, fiddling with his watch. ‘Actually, do you girls want a drink? Two more margaritas?’ He heads to the bar. Before he’s even back there, his mate, who is less pretty and far more my type, heads towards us.
‘He doesn’t waste his time …’ says Laura.
I say nothing. I look at Rob’s friend and a rare but familiar feeling grabs me: something big is about to happen.
‘Why are you talking to Rob?’ he says to me, grinning. ‘You don’t fancy him.’
‘What business is it of yours?’ I say. ‘Do you fancy me?’
He looks at me for a heartbeat. ‘Yeah.’
‘Well, then you talk to me instead. What’s your name?’
‘James.’
‘James what?’
‘James Stephens.’
‘Like the poet.’
‘Ooh, a clever girl.’
‘I’m not,’ I say. ‘My granny has a poem of his she likes to quote.’
‘A love poem?’
‘Yeah, it’s about a man who throttles his over-attentive wife to death.’ He laughs.
‘I can tell you’re smart,’ he says. ‘And warm. It’s in your eyes. Don’t waste your time with Rob, waste it with me.’
So I did. I talked to him, danced a tango round the bar with him, sank three margaritas with him and at the end of the night gave him my number.
He calls when he says he will – the next day. Why do I feel so grateful for this? Because the world of dating has deigned this sort of behaviour too keen. ‘I want to see you again,’ he says.
‘Good.’
‘But I’m going away for a fortnight tomorrow.’
‘Oh.’
‘It’s work. I travel quite a bit.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘China.’
‘What do you actually do?’ I’d imagined he was a high-end builder or something to do with running a warehouse. He’s very masculine, hefty, a bit rough round the edges, and his shirt last night didn’t quite fit.
‘You’ll laugh,’ he says.
‘Are you an international clown?’
‘No. I sell socks.’
‘What, like in a shop?’
‘Sort of.’
‘Everybody needs socks,’ I say.
‘At least two pairs,’ he says. ‘I’m back in a fortnight, I’d like to take you for dinner.’
‘Great. I like dinner.’
‘But do you like to eat?’
‘Are you joking? It’s what I do.’
‘You’re not one of those girls who orders salad and just pushes it round the plate? You’re pretty skinny.’
‘You’ve got the wrong number.’ I have slender arms and a small waist. You can fool most of the people most of the time with this combo.
‘Good. I know the perfect place. I’ll call you in two weeks.’
I work in a twelve-storey shiny building in Soho. Up until six months ago, I had one of the greatest jobs in the world and one of the greatest bosses. I am a Pudding Developer for Fletchers, one of the biggest supermarkets in the country. I worked for a genius called Maggie Bainbridge. She never compromised on quality and had bigger balls than any of the men here.
Six months ago she quit after management fired a bunch of our top talent and brought in a grunt of accountants, intent on putting the bottom line above everything else. Even our loo roll has been downgraded to that tracing paper crap from the 80s that you have to fish out of a cardboard slit.
Maggie’s started up a one-woman brownie business, ‘Happy Tuesday’. Even though we speak often, I miss her, and daydream about running off to work with her again.
So, I still have a great job, but I no longer have a great boss. No. I have Devron.
Devron used to work for a supermarket that was chewed up and spat out by a large American supermarket. He was regional manager for London South East, which is a Big Deal in Retail. Apparently he was very good at driving up and down motorways in his BMW.
His sole qualification for being head of my department seems to be that he is fat, ergo he ‘knows food’. Devron would be happy eating every meal from a service station on the M4. He thinks he’s an alpha male, he’s actually an aggressive little gamma.
The first thing Devron did when he joined was to make us all switch desks. Wanting to make his mark, and attempting to convey his profound creativity he decided to arrange us alphabetically. I used to sit with ‘Hot Puddings’, ‘Family Treats’ and ‘Patisserie’. Makes sense – we share the same buyers, technical advisers and packaging team. We liaise constantly about pastries, sugar prices, trends in the Treat market – all elements that are pudding specific.
But now, because I do Cold Desserts, I sit between Lisa, who does ‘Cocina’ – our fake-a Mexicana range of variety nachos, and Eddie: Curry. Devron says ‘we can learn a lot from talking to our colleagues’. True. I have learnt that Lisa, Eddie and I all agree: Devron is a nob.
The only thing more moronic than splitting us up from the people we need constant contact with, is Devron’s introduction of ‘cross-discipline platform solutions’. He has dumped a marketing wang on our bank of desks: Ton of Fun Tom.
Tom always wants to show me some great viral on YouTube featuring a gorilla or a dancing mouse. Tom’s knowledge of marketing is like my knowledge of Chechen history: he knows three random facts and feels guilty about not knowing more. However, I do not try to bullshit my livelihood as a Chechen historian.
Laura has come for lunch at the Fletchers’ canteen en route to do a voice-over for a car insurance website who want her husky Yorkshire accent to add ‘honest northern values’ to their shonky brand. Laura only has to do two voice-over sessions a month to pay her mortgage, and spends the rest of her time helping her boyfriend Dave run his eBay business selling vintage magazines.
This week’s canteen theme is ‘Pre-Valentine’s Value’ and we have the choice of heart-shaped pork bites or asparagus pasties. Sounds better than the falafel Eddie ordered last month, within which lurked a dog’s tooth.
‘James sounds keen,’ says Laura.
‘D’you think?’ If he was that keen, he wouldn’t wait two weeks to call me.
‘He wouldn’t let go of you the other night. You were dancing for ages.’
I love dancing. My ex, Nick, an introvert, danced with me once in five years: quarter-heartedly, for thirty-eight seconds, at his best friend’s wedding, and only after I’d threatened to embarrass him by dancing on my own if he didn’t.
‘Bet his friend wasn’t pleased,’ says Laura.
‘Rob’s an arse,’ I say. ‘That girl with them was Rob’s fiancée!’
‘She’s stood there while he chats you up?’ I nod. ‘You’re going to have some fun double dating …’ says Laura.
‘Early days, love. He might meet some sock model in China and never call again.’
My mother phones from California. She lives in an apartment in Newport Beach, OC heartland, with her second husband Lenny, a retired orthodontist and professional doormat.
‘Have you spoken to your brother?’ she asks, saving the pleasantries for another time.
‘Why?’
‘It’s Shellii.’ Or ‘the-scrawny-tramp-who-is-bleeding-your-brother-dry-with-her-spirituality-crystals-and-Lee-Strasberg-acting-classes’.
‘What now?’
‘She’s bloody pregnant.’
‘That’s good news, isn’t it?’ It means you won’t harangue me to have children for at least another two years.
A heavy silence on the other end.
‘Mum, she’s not that bad.’ Shellii’s so much worse than ‘that bad’, but I never agree with my mother on point of principle.
‘Huh. What’s news with you? How’s the flat?’
‘The flat’s fine. I’m fine.’
‘Job going well?’
‘I’m heading up cold puddings.’
‘Good, well eat some. Your grandmother said you’re looking very thin.’ My mother speaks to her ex-mother-in-law twice a year and it seems their sole remaining common ground is my weight.
I am currently slim and mostly toned but by no means ‘thin’. I will never be ‘thin’ – the Kleins are big boned. But since I split up with Nick last summer, I have lost a stone and a half through exercise and taking proper care of myself. For the first time since I was twelve, I’m almost happy with my body, save for a few inches around my bottom.
My mother takes my weight loss as a personal slight. A rejection of body fat is a direct rejection of what unites our family and everything she stands for. Food equals love, too much food equals Jewish love. At weddings, my genetically freakish thin cousin is the subject of whispered snipes about anorexia and suspect parentage. My mother feeds Lenny three large meals and half a cake every day. She will feed that man to an early grave and then overfeed everyone at the shiva (think full on Irish wake, but with egg-mayo sandwiches instead of whiskies).
‘Lenny’s just walked in, I’ve got to start lunch.’
Two weeks later James calls from Beijing airport. ‘Remember me?’
‘Clown school’s out for summer?’
‘You should see what I can do with three chopsticks and a scorpion.’
‘Sounds painful. Anyway, how can I help you?’
‘Tell me when you’re free for some spaghetti.’
My favourite. ‘A week on Wednesday.’
‘Too far away. I want to see you before then.’
Then you should have called me before now. ‘Sorry.’
‘Seriously, what are you doing between now and then?’
‘All sorts. Wednesday week, then?’
‘Okay. I’ll call you nearer the time with a plan. Got to go, they’re calling my flight.’
Is an average brownie better than none at all?
This is not the same as asking if a taste of honey is worse than none at all. When Smokey Robinson sang that, we can assume the ‘honey’ in question was just fine.
No, this question goes to the heart of what separates people like my old boss Maggie Bainbridge from most people on the planet who simply like cake.
When I went for the interview at Fletchers two years ago, I received an email from Maggie a week in advance:
Please bring:
1) A cake you’ve baked from a recipe book
2) A supermarket pudding you rate highly
It was like being asked to cook for Michel Roux Jr. on Masterchef. After agonising for days, I decided to keep it simple and make a Claudia Roden orange and almond cake that my mother makes at Passover. The texture is fantastic -totally squidgy yet light. The flesh and zest of the orange offset the sweetness and give the cake a fragrance that makes you think you’re in a Moroccan souk, rather than a fluorescent lit office block round the corner from the most toxic kebab shop on Oxford Street.
Maggie took a bite and her brow furrowed. My first thought: Christ, I hope she doesn’t have a nut allergy. But then she went over to her immense bookshelf, picked up a volume and slowly nodded.
‘It’s based on the Roden,’ she said. ‘But the depth of flavour you’ve got is superior to the original … there’s a pinch of cinnamon in there, you’ve put in slightly less sugar than ground almonds, and you’ve used blood orange, which is quite clever.’
I realise later that ‘quite clever’, from Maggie Bainbridge is like winning a Michelin star.
‘And what did you buy on the high street?’
Maggie Bainbridge famously invented the molten middle caramel pudding. Many chefs claim to have invented this pudding, but Maggie actually did. So, even though it is my favourite shop-bought pudding, there’s no way I could bring it in – far too creepy. Instead, I found a pudding in Marks and Spencer involving cream cheese, mascarpone, raspberries and dark chocolate that I thought was amazing, and took that in.
She gives me a strange look when I take it out of my bag. Shit. Of course, I should have brought in a Fletchers pudding, utterly stupid of me.
‘Why did you pick this?’ she says, with surprise verging on irritation.
‘You said bring something that you really like … it’s four of my favourite ingredients, the texture is amazing, the sharpness and the creaminess work perfectly together, and the chocolate they’ve used is at least 70% cocoa solids….’
‘Do you know anyone in new product development at M&S?’ she asks, looking concerned.
No, I shake my head. I wish – I’d be going for a job there if I did!
‘Have you tried it?’ I ask. I feel I have upset her but I’m not sure why.
‘Yes.’
‘Do you like it?’ I ask.
‘Yes. It’s good. One last question.’
One last question! She hasn’t asked me any proper questions, and now she’s about to get rid of me. What a bitch….
‘Do you think that an average brownie is better than none at all?’
What? What sort of a question is that for an interview? Clearly this must be a trick. Is she just finding out if I’m greedy? Or if I genuinely love pudding, or what? I don’t know what she wants me to say, but all I can tell her is the truth. Well, not quite the truth – my honest answer would be ‘if you are stoned, absolutely’. But then if you are stoned, an average brownie is transformed into a superior brownie anyway.
My truth is this: I would rather not eat a brownie than eat an average brownie.
Not because of the calories.
Not because I’m a snob.
But because for me, brownies are sacred; where they’re concerned I don’t do half measures. In the same way that I couldn’t marry a man I didn’t love, or be in a relationship with someone I didn’t respect, or sleep with a man who wasn’t funny.
‘I’d rather have nothing,’ I say.
She looks at me with the merest hint of approval in her eyes.
‘That M&S pudding you brought in,’ she says. Oh no, what is it? I knew there was something wrong. ‘I created that. Freelance. Entirely against the terms of my contract here, but M&S are the best and I couldn’t stop myself. I tried to push through a similar one here last summer and couldn’t get it signed off. The reason I’m telling you this is because I know I can trust you, because I only ever employ people I can trust.’
And that is how I got my job and came to work for Maggie Bainbridge, the best boss in the world.
Now that Maggie is no longer my boss, I only get to see her every few months. She is busy with her new brownie empire and has a wide circle of friends. She’s a 51-year-old single woman, but it’s harder to get a date in her diary than a table at Rao’s.
She has invited me for dinner the night before my planned first date with James. I would really like to stay at home, eat light and sleep properly so I can look my best for tomorrow. But he still hasn’t called, so I don’t know if we’re on or not. Besides, if I don’t see Maggie tonight I won’t get in her diary for ages, so after work I walk over to her flat in Marylebone.
She opens the door in a well-worn apron and the smell of freshly baked bread and roast chicken wafts through to me like a Bisto ad.
‘My God! You’re practically anorexic!’ she says, holding on to my shoulders and examining me up and down before squeezing me close for a hug. Her grey hair smells of fried onions – it’s wonderful.
‘As if! Look at the size of my arse,’ I say, turning around and offering her a feel.
She pinches my bottom. ‘There’s nothing of you, crazy girl. Come and let me fatten you up.’
We sit down in her kitchen and start drinking. If I don’t drink I’ll be thinking about my phone not ringing all night. Even if I do drink I’ll still be on edge, but it’ll dull the focus a bit.
‘How’s that odious little rat doing?’ she asks, holding out a wooden spoon with a dark golden sauce on it. ‘Honey, soy, tamari, toasted sesame …’
‘Devron’s Devron,’ I say. ‘He’s talking about 20% cuts across the board but he’s just upgraded his car to a convertible, and he’s hanging his new suit jacket the wrong way round on his chair so we can all see it’s Prada.’
‘Is he still dating that poor cow?’
‘Mands, yes. It was her nineteenth birthday last weekend, he took her to The Grove, showed us all the picture of the freestanding bath in their suite. With her in it, wearing only bubbles …’
She shakes her head in disbelief. ‘And Eddie, Lisa?’
‘Eddie’s good, Lisa’s angry. The usual.’
Over dinner we talk about her business. She’s just signed a distribution deal with a chain of luxury boutique hotels – each night at turndown guests will find a box of her mini brownies, beautifully wrapped, left on their pillow.
‘How’s the man situation?’ she asks, handing me a bowl of warm ‘blondies’ – her new vanilla brownies that she’s trialling for the hotels. ‘Macadamia on the left, Vermont maple on the right.’
‘Actually, I’m so sorry but do you mind?’ I say, popping to the hall and fishing my phone from my bag. It’s been on silent and I’m convinced that my removal of it from eyeline and earshot will have elicited a call. I vowed I wouldn’t check till I was on the bus home, but lying to yourself is fine, right?
A flashing light!
Fuck. A text from Laura asking if he’s rung yet.
‘What’s wrong?’ says Maggie.
‘Nothing,’ I say, despondently. ‘Just waiting for a call.’ I explain the scenario, and call upon her greater wisdom of life and men: ‘When is he going to call?’
I still believe James will ring. But I fully object to him not having called by now. I am someone who books up my diary weeks in advance to the time and place of meeting. I often check the menu online in advance, as I like to have something very specific to look forward to. I’m not a control freak, I can do spontaneous as well as the best free spirit (sometimes), but I am uncomfortable with uncertainty, and this man is an unknown unknown.
She refills my wine glass. ‘He said definitely this Wednesday?’
‘Yes.’
‘And he called you from China to fix the date?’
I nod.
‘He’ll call. Some men don’t like nattering on the phone. If he doesn’t call, he’s an idiot.’
‘I want him to call tonight.’
‘Out of your control,’ she says, opening a second bottle of wine.
I still believe that willing something to happen can make it happen. I also believe that particular idea is insane. Isn’t that a sign of intelligence, holding two opposing thoughts at the same time, or is that just a sign of schizophrenia?
I wake at three in the morning to a blue light on my phone. A text message. Is James out, drunk? Is he cancelling?
It’s my friend Lee, on a business trip to New York, wanting to know the name of that Vietnamese sandwich bar near Washington Square I was raving about. I text back, turn off my phone and wake again at 5.30am, dehydrated and in a bad mood.
It’s 2.15pm. I’m sitting in a meeting with Ton of Fun Tom, talking about marketing my new products for spring. My phone is on the desk in front of me and I am increasingly anxious, irritable and pissy. To be fair, every meeting I have with Tom makes me feel like this, but today is worse than usual. If James can call me from China, why can’t he call me now that he’s back in town?
‘Sophie, these raspberry and cream trifles – what are they?’
‘They’re trifles, Tom. Clue’s in the name.’
‘Right, yeah, but how does it work?’
‘How does what work?’
‘The cream and stuff?’
‘Here’s the picture. Those small pink things on top are called ‘raspberries’, that creamy coloured layer is ‘cream’, and underneath is the raspberry and cream trifle.’
‘Oh, so like a fruit trifle but with raspberries.’
My phone starts ringing. My heart pauses. It’s him. ‘Sorry, I have to get this.’
I leap up and leave the meeting – rude, but Tom always fiddles with his apps when I’m talking, so now we’re quits.
‘It’s James. Are you still free for dinner?’
‘Sure.’ I can pretend to be cool for at least one phone call.
‘Great. It’s a little Italian place at the top of Archway Road, I’ve booked a table at 8pm. Do you mind if we meet there? I’ve got something in town beforehand.’
‘See you there at 8pm.’
I breathe a sigh of relief. He’s just one of those guys who doesn’t like nattering. I walk back into the meeting. ‘Cup of tea, Tom?’
‘You look happy,’ says Lisa, Lady of the Nachos, when I return to my desk. I daren’t tell Lisa the smile on my face is because of some guy. Lisa’s turning forty and in a ‘bad place’ right now. She hates her husband, ever since he ran off with their two-doors-down neighbour. She hates her new boyfriend, because he’s not her husband. She hates her estate agent after he inquired if she was a teacher because she wore flat shoes and no make-up when she viewed the one-bedroom flats in her area. And she hates Devron, because he’s asked her to look at making her nachos range ‘bigger, cheaper and lower in fat’. That’s a tough order with a cuisine based on sour cream, cheap ground mince, cheese and tortilla chips.
‘I’ve been thinking about your nacho problem,’ I say. ‘Tell Devron that if he cuts out the cheese, sour cream and mince he’ll save loads of cash and the fat barometer will go from 9.7 to below a 5.’
She grunts a laugh. ‘He’s already brainstormed names with Tom and come up with Nach-Lows, Nosh-os and Skinny Bandito,’ she says, grimacing. ‘I spent a year in South America researching chillies and look at me now. I’m going to kill myself,’ she says. She looks like she means it.
‘Cheer up, Lisa,’ says Eddie, who is our desk’s resident optimist. ‘At least he hasn’t asked you to rethink your entire range based on what his girlfriend likes.’
‘No way.’
‘Apparently Mandy thinks our Chicken Korma’s not a patch on Asda’s, and says our Madras tastes a bit spicy …’
Lisa rolls her eyes, grabs her fag packet and marches off.
If I’m meeting James at 8pm, I need two hours prep time which means ducking out of work early – doable if Devron is in one of his endless meetings or on the phone to his barely-legal girlfriend, and if Janelle is walking the floors. Janelle is Devron’s rottweiler PA. Devron’s swollen self-importance comes from the fact that he is Head of Food Development at the UK’s seventh largest supermarket. La-di-da. Janelle’s comes from the fact that she is ‘PA to the Head of Food Development at the UK’s seventh largest supermarket’. If you printed that on a t-shirt, she’d wear it at the weekends.
Janelle and I have had an uncomfortable relationship since my first week here, when I saved a status report in a more logical place on the shared drive than:
S:/a4/janellestott/general/dayfiles/2010/js/Qzgg67/4/ac/dc/Y-me
By creating: S:/status reports, I have created a nemesis for life.
Janelle thinks I am disobedient. I think ‘I don’t care what you think,’ and we chafe against each other like an extra-small belt on a woman who likes custard and cream with her apple crumble. (No prizes for guessing who is who in that metaphor.)
I’m in luck – neither of them is visible and I bolt out the door and jump in a cab home.
Home is a mansion block in Little Venice: misleading. When I hear mansion, I think Krystle Carrington’s sweeping staircase, not a one-bedroom, fifth floor flat with no lift. And Little Venice is pushing it – more like Little A40, within a Tango can’s throw of the Westway. Still, Little’s accurate. And if I walk out of my flat and turn left I can be at Regent’s Canal in two minutes, and at Baker and Spice eating a blueberry muffin in three and a half.
I take the stairs two at a time – work to do! I dump my bag on top of my mail on the doormat and head straight for the bathroom, disrobing en route. I’m the lowest maintenance girlfriend on the planet after six months, but a first date is a first date and I have waited three weeks to see this man; I am going to look my absolute best.
My long brown hair is naturally curly. No one but Laura and my immediate family have seen me with curly hair since I was fourteen and no one ever will and live to write about it. When I blow-dry it carefully it takes an hour. Today: seventy minutes. Make up is light and for once I don’t cut myself shaving my legs.
To the bedroom: it takes me seven minutes just to find tights that don’t have a ladder below the knee. I find one of the holy un-holey pairs, and ferret out my best four-inch black heels from the bottom of my wardrobe. One day I’m going to be the type of woman with Polaroids on the front of her shoeboxes. Probably the same day I win the Nobel for Services to Custard.
My dress is fantastic – clingy and low on top, flirty and loose from the waist, in a deep purple that makes my eyes look very green. £40 from Topshop and it passes for Roland Mouret. I’d never normally think it, let alone say it, but I leave the flat looking great. Well, I look great, the flat looks like I’ve been burgled – twelve pairs of tights decorating the bedroom floor and my work clothes strewn down the hallway. Ben, the caretaker in my block, double takes and wolf whistles as he helps me into my minicab.
I’m insanely nervous and hopeful and excited. I haven’t been this excited about a man since I met Nick five years ago. I try not to think about Nick and instead pick up the phone to call Laura, my dating guru, the happiest person I know. She and Dave have been together a decade and yet they look at each other like they’re on a fourth date.
‘I’m on my way,’ I say.
‘Relax. Be happy, keep it light, don’t talk about Nick. Just remember, you are exceptional and smart and gorgeous and funny and any man would be lucky to have you.’ I nod. I believe at least half this sentence.
‘What if I don’t fancy him? It’s been so long I can’t remember what he looks like.’ Other than that he’s manly and his eyes have a deviant twinkle.
‘If nothing else it’s a free dinner.’
No such thing, as even the biggest fool knows.
My cab pulls up outside the restaurant a perfect ten minutes late. I see James through the glass looking slightly panicked that he’s going to be stood up, but when I walk in, his eyes open wide and his whole face lights up.
‘Remember me?’ I say.
‘You’re even better than I remember,’ he grins.
So is he. Thick brown hair with just a smattering of grey, blue eyes, a large Roman nose. Tall and broad, with a stomach that he wears well. I love big men; I love big noses. He must drink a lot of water, his skin is amazing – he looks late thirties, tops. Not a hint of hair product or jewellery or any of the metrosexual accoutrements that adorn modern girly-boys. As he stands to kiss me, he rests a firm hand on my back. There is such confidence in his gesture – a mix of strength and gentleness – that I feel myself start to blush.
‘I’ve never noticed this place before,’ I say, taking a seat and trying to stay cool as he pours me a glass of red wine. From the outside it looks like nothing special but inside it’s cosy and romantic: dark oak tables, simple silver cutlery, half-burned candles, warm grey walls. Every table is full.
‘An Italian friend introduced me to it.’ I wonder fleetingly if the friend was female.
‘So how’s your friend Rob?’ I say.
‘Sends his love! He got an earful from Lena that night.’
‘He shouldn’t flirt with other women in front of her,’ I say.
‘Rob’s a dog. A feisty girl like you wouldn’t put up with that, would you?’
‘Don’t try finding out.’
‘Not my style – I’m too forgetful to be a love-rat. Always better to be honest.’
‘So if your memory was better you’d be Tiger Woods?’
He shakes his head. ‘I’m a one-woman man. I never lie.’
My mother’s voice pops into my head telling my anxious 7-year-old self, ‘An axe murderer doesn’t have axe murderer written on his forehead’.
‘How was your day?’ I ask, taking a sip of wine.
‘Good,’ he says.
‘What did you do?’
‘Had a few meetings about a new project, then had a set-to with Camden Council …’
‘Been dodging your council tax?’ I say.
He laughs. ‘No. I’m advising them on a clothing re cycling website for schools.’
‘Sounds interesting.’ And quite worthy. I hadn’t pegged him as a leftie.
‘They’re using a panel of industry advisors – I’m helping on the digital architecture side.’
‘And how come they picked you, are you really Green?’
He laughs. ‘No. I live in Camden, my background’s in clothing and online. And I don’t mean to sound arrogant, but I’m good at what I do …’
He doesn’t sound arrogant, just extremely confident. ‘And what was the row, are you arguing about your fee?’
‘Fee?’ he sounds surprised. ‘They’re not paying. No, I think they should take a more aggressive approach, be more ambitious: sell space on the site to other green brands. It all feeds back into the budget and that means lower taxes.’
‘Ah, so you are trying to get out of paying your council tax!’
‘Good point! Smart woman.’ He grins and hands me the menu. ‘What are we eating?’
‘It all sounds delicious … pappardelle with lamb ragu and rosemary, or steak – I do love rosemary …’
‘I was thinking tortellini or steak. The pasta here is great …’
‘I’ll have pasta,’ I say. He looks at me intently and smiles.
‘Me too. And something healthy on the side … let’s see …’
Call me shallow but I think I fell for James Stephens when he ordered the steak as our side dish.
We are a game of snap.
We both love chips with 2 parts ketchup: 1 part mayo, and think brown sauce is the devil’s own condiment.
We both hated our fifth-year maths teachers, and were the second naughtiest in class.
We both only recycle what’s easy to recycle, and think the idea of compost in your kitchen is a bridge too far.
We both have one parent who selfishly died on us before we hit puberty, and one parent who remarried and moved abroad (Victor Stephens, Switzerland/Ruth Klein, California.)
We both suspect Ricky Gervais will never do anything as funny as The Office ever again, and that he’s probably just like David Brent in real life.
We both have a 39-year-old brother (Edward/Josh) who was/is our mother’s favourite, who we see once a year, and who is a reformed playboy, lives in a hot country (Singapore/America) and drives a Porsche (red/navy). Snap x 6.
We both believe that drink drivers who kill should get life, and never be allowed behind the wheel again.
We both feel that getting married in one’s twenties usually doesn’t work out, and that we both know ourselves pretty well by now.
We both think the greatest pleasure in life is to eat and drink slightly too much and then have a little lie down.
We are both narcissists and agree that our evening has been exciting, and that the person sitting opposite us is deeply alluring and fun and we would like to see them again, very soon.
My friend Pete and I are at his local cinema, sitting in overpriced armchairs waiting for a Norwegian vampire movie to start. Having checked the coast is clear, I remove the family pack of Revels I’ve smuggled in under my jacket. I’ve paid £14 for this seat, if they think I’m paying another £6 for their Valrhona chocolate buttons they can think again.
Pete is a serial commitment-phobe. When we were fifteen, Pete and I had a heated dry-hump on the floor of David Marks’s parents’ guest bathroom. Pete has never gotten over the fact that I wouldn’t let him touch me up when I’d allowed David Marks a brief foray the previous summer, and in a tiny part of Pete’s still-teenage mind I am The One That Got Away. If this were a rom-com movie, I’d be played by Kate Hudson and Pete would be played by someone appropriately dreamy and thick-looking – Ryan Reynolds, perhaps – and we’d end up together. That is not how this story ends.
‘Did you kiss him?’ Pete always wants full details of my scant sex life, which is nowhere near as prolific, athletic or incessant as his. Pete’s phone is full of picture-messages from various twenty-something actresses and stylists gazing over their own naked shoulders at their bottoms reflected in Venetian mirrors. These photos make me feel depressed and prudish and make Pete feel moderately aroused and then bored.
‘Briefly, as he put me in a taxi.’
‘Old fashioned!’
‘Old full stop. Did I tell you he’s forty-five? He doesn’t look it or act it. He has way more energy than me.’ I have never dated anyone this much older. One of my few memories of my father was blowing out the candles with him on his forty-fifth birthday cake, when I was six. Forty-five is properly grown up. It is dad aged. Yet James radiates vitality – he is a man in the prime of his life. His expression seems to say ‘I am going where the good times are.’ I want to go with him.
‘You’d like him, Pete. You should meet him.’ If he sticks around. ‘How’s your love life?’
Pete shrugs. ‘I’m seeing one of the PR girls at work, I’m not sure about her …’
‘What is it this time?’
‘Don’t know. She’s gorgeous but she’s a bit … she’s never heard of Bladerunner.’
‘How old is she?’
‘Twenty-two.’
‘Try dating someone your own age. Or IQ.’
‘Why would I want to do either of those things?’ he says, smiling as he shoves a handful of contraband Revels into his mouth as the trailers start.
James and I are three lightning hours in to our second date, stretching out our meal, the last ones in the restaurant. We are in Curry Paradise, my local, my treat. The manager is hovering, the waiter is hoovering. I wish we’d met earlier; I don’t want to go home. I want to keep talking, and keep looking at the way this man smiles at me when I do, with pure delight in his eyes.
‘So, how on earth is a girl like you single, Sophie Klein?’
I’ve made bad choices. I’ve been unlucky. Because it’s really hard out there.
‘I don’t know.’ I say. ‘Why are you single, James Stephens?’
Tall. Charismatic. Good at your job. Such a thick head of hair. Manly: strong features – strong nose, strong jaw. That look in his eye that says ‘take it or leave it, but you’d be better off taking it’. Why has no one snapped this man up in the last twenty years?
He shrugs quickly. ‘Just haven’t met the right person yet.’
‘You’re not secretly married, are you?’
He chuckles and his hand comes up and rubs his cheek. ‘No.’
In poker that would be a tell. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Quite sure,’ he laughs, but his fingers pause briefly near his mouth.
‘Ever been engaged?’
He picks up his beer and takes a long sip, then nods slowly.
‘Who to?’
‘A girl called Lacey Macbride.’
Ironic. ‘How long ago was that?’
‘I was nineteen. She grew up round the corner from me in Wanstead. My first true love. Broke my heart, the Jezebel,’ he laughs.
‘What happened?’
He shrugs and picks up his glass again. I imagine classic childhood sweetheart territory.
‘Any other ex-fiancées knocking about?’
A tiny flicker of discomfort passes through his expression. He nods very slowly. ‘Celine.’
‘Engaged to her as well? How many ex-fiancées do you have?’
‘Just the pair, don’t need a hat-trick,’ he says.
Better than two ex-wives, I suppose.
‘Long relationship?’
‘Three years. Can you pass the spinach?’ He smiles softly, trying to change the subject.
‘How long ago did you split up?’
‘Four years.’
Okay. Definitely beyond statute of limitations for a rebound.
‘Are you on good terms?’ Are you still in love with her?
He pours us both more beer, filling his glass almost to the rim. ‘She went back to Paris, married an Argie. She’s a Wolford model….’ He turns to the waiter, ‘Could we get two more beers, please?’
‘Wolford tights?’
‘And stockings …’
The news that his long-term ex is a French hosiery model has put me right off my chicken balti. I put my fork down.
‘Why do girls always have a problem with that?’ he says, his face crinkling in confusion. I don’t like that word ‘always’.
‘I don’t. It’s just … a man who dates models is … a certain type.’ The type who likes women with abnormally tall, slim bodies. Not my type. Mind you, he’s the type taking me out to dinner.
‘Celine was lovely but totally insecure. Anyway, I’m over beautiful women, they’re all mad.’ He grins, but I do not like those sentences at all. ‘I’m looking for a soul mate. A woman I can talk to.’ That’s a bit better. ‘A wife,’ he says, fixing me with an intense look. His pale blue shirt is making his eyes a deeper blue than usual tonight. I catch myself staring.
‘Tell me something else,’ I say, picking up my fork.
‘What do you want to know?’
Why you’d mention that your ex is a leg model? Was that information strictly necessary?
And how a sock-seller procures that type of trophy girlfriend anyway?
Maybe her legs were perfect but she had a face like a monkfish. I make a note to google her.
‘His ex is a leg model,’ I say to Laura. I’m treating her to an Ottolenghi brunch near her flat in Islington to celebrate my forthcoming end-of-fiscal £100 bonus. When I say treating her, I mean I have already eaten my egg and bacon pie, and have started on her blueberry ricotta pancakes before she’s even halfway through.
‘So?’
‘Well … her figure must be perfect.’
She tuts. ‘You are one of the best women I have ever met, and I don’t give a flying fuck who’s got a perfect body and who hasn’t. It’s not like he’s perfect looking …’
I know Laura didn’t warm to him the night we met him – she thought he was overly confident and slightly shifty. She has some random psychological theory that this actually masks some deep fear within himself.
I do trust her instincts, she is invariably on the nail; however, in this instance, she is being overly protective of me. She spoke to James for all of ten minutes. I know if she spent any time with him, she’d like him.
‘I suppose models are usually quite vain, aren’t they …’ I say, pondering whether to order the pecan praline Danish, then imagining Celine’s thighs, and ordering a sparkling water instead.
‘Are you kidding? Do you not remember Washington Avenue, New Year’s Eve, 1993? Ladies and gentleman, we bring you Ericc and Thor …’
I throw my head back with laughter. How could I ever forget? Laura and I had spent the night with two male models we’d met in a bar Mickey Rourke used to own. We were so overexcitable, having been introduced to Mickey Rourke by some ageing gallery owner who was lusting after our 18-year-old flesh, that we’d been swept like a wave into The Miami Beach Fashion Awards.
‘Ericc with two ‘c’s. God, he was so ridiculously chiselled. That was the most boring eight minutes of my life,’ I say, remembering his pillow talk, detailing his awesome nutritional supplements: chromium picolinate – super-awesome, apparently.
‘I rest my case,’ says Laura.
At the end of our last date James said ‘I’ll be in touch.’
That was six days ago: no call, no text. I’m scared it’s because I kissed him for a full twenty minutes outside the curry house, and maybe he thought that was tacky or overly eager. Or perhaps it’s because I made that silly comment about him dating models, which made me look insecure and jealous.
Hmm, time to make myself feel more insecure and jealous. Excellent idea.
I google image search for ‘Celine’ ‘Wolford’ ‘model’ ‘French’ ‘leg’ and immediately come up with over 700 photos of her. In none of them does she remotely resemble a monkfish.
I know I should stop myself right now. She’s married. What difference if she’s beautiful or not anyway? He is dating me.
Okay, I click on the first image. Relief. Dark blond hair, brown eyes, generic Disney features, looks like she eats a lot of yoghurt and apples. Swiss looking. Maybe she’s from the Alps. Second photo, a close up. Even though she’s smiling, she looks fearful, like she’s just found out her currency’s in free fall. Third photo, taken last year at the Cannes Film Festival. That must be the Argie husband. He’s corpulent. Mid-fifties. Oligarch-y. She is Botoxed to the hilt, skeletal, clutching his arm with a jewelled hand.
It’s not until the fourth photo that I see her in suspenders and a thong and start to feel in any way envious.
Her legs are perfect, long, shapely, amazing. Of course they are. She owns two Wolford legs. That’s her job. I decide it’s high time I get back to my job.
I go to the C-drive and click on the kitchen sample report for my latest trifles.
Besides. She’s married now. And not to James.
Ah, good: thicker, more even deposit of custards with 38% stabilised whipping cream …
And just because her legs are amazing doesn’t mean she’s smart or kind or funny.
Let’s see … uneven almond spread rectified, shelf life now at seven days … Devron will like that …
Just because her legs are amazing doesn’t mean she isn’t also smart and kind and funny.
Get a grip – he’ll call. And if he doesn’t? So be it. They are not together; she is irrelevant. He is dating you. Or is he …?
I’m going to call him because if he likes me it won’t matter, and if he doesn’t, it’ll expedite the ending of the relationship. I don’t want this loop of crap in my head; I have a big Phase 4 meeting in two days that I need to prepare for. Call him: then it’s done, either way.
I dial his number before the sensible voice can stop me. It’s a foreign ring tone. I hang up immediately.
He hadn’t mentioned he’d be going away. Why not? He’s flown to Paris! The Alps!
Enough. I delete James’s number from my phone and from my dialled list. I am not going to do this to myself. Nick called me at least once a day from the first day we met. He loved me and he could show it. He never made me feel insecure, not once. Bored, enraged, despairing, sure. But insecure? Never.
If James Stephens wants me, he’s going to have to make a lot more effort.
The average human touches their nose dozens of times a day. In this sole regard, Devron is a well-above-average human. He touches his nose at least three times a minute. Sometimes he gives it little tugs and pinches. Sometimes he fiddles with the end and you can tell he’s trying to fish something out surreptitiously. Sometimes he holds, squeezes, sniffs loudly and wipes his hands on his trousers. Eddie and I always play ‘Devron Nose Bingo’ – whoever is the first to observe twenty nose manoeuvres in any given meeting and whisper ‘wanker’, wins a luxury hot chocolate from the canteen.
The worst ever time that Devron touches his nose though, is in a Phase 4 meeting.
A Phase 4 meeting is the final stage in taking a new range to market. Phases 1 to 3 involve briefing suppliers, tasting initial product ideas, doing shelf life, transport and safety tests, and evolving the products accordingly.
Phase 4 meetings are the reason why I will never leave this job voluntarily – you’ll have to cart me away in a straitjacket.
At a Phase 4, you basically sit around like a bunch of Roman emperors dressed in Next suits instead of togas, and eat the entire range – whether that’s 12 fools and 8 trifles, like my meeting today, or Eddie’s meeting last week where I sampled 23 different curries in an hour. Of course, you don’t eat the whole dish – you just take a bite, and the majority of people ‘spit in the cup’. Yup, they gob out their food in a paper cup, like a Bulimics Anonymous Christmas party.
I never ever ‘spit in the cup’. It’s not about etiquette. Many women, and even some men, manage to spit quite discreetly, so you barely notice the person next to you opening their mouth to eject a half-chewed lump of naan bread. No, I refuse to ‘spit in the cup’ because I think it’s cheating. Any food that goes in my mouth goes in my stomach. Admittedly, I also see it as a badge of honour – there were six men and four women at Eddie’s Phase 4, and I was the only one to make it through all 23 curries without spitting. It’s just as well I only go to the Phase 4s that are mine, Lisa’s or Eddie’s, and that I walk in to work every day.
The official rules of a Phase 4 are as follows:
you change forks with every dish you taste
you don’t double-dip your fork in a communal dish
you pretend you’re only eating as a duty, not getting real pleasure from the food, for fear you’ll be taxed on it as a perk
Devron ignores all three rules and invariably digs in to the food with the hand that has just been inside his nasal cavity.
Whenever I’m arranging a Phase 4, I make sure to order two of everything – one for Devron and one for everyone else. However, this rarely stops Devron sitting in front of two identical cherry pies, flitting between the two with his sucked fingers. Fingers/nose/fingers/nose. Once Devron has touched a pudding I can’t eat that pudding, even if I try eating it from the other side. I just can’t. I’m pretty sure one day I’ll flip and pie Devron in the face, or ram a churro up his nose and kill him.
Today I pop down to the fridge to fetch the samples my supplier, Appletree, has sent in. I love working with my contact there, Will Slater, not least because he always sends me down a box of custard-filled éclairs he’s had the head chef make specially.
Zoe, our fridge manager, tells me I’m looking a bit skinny, she prefers me with curves. If I ever decide to date a woman it will be Zoe. She has Pantene hair, great Patti Smith t-shirts and a super-fast wit, and above all else, she has an even better job than I do: FRIDGE MANAGER.
This is not just any fridge. This is a fridge the size of a WHSmiths at a major railway station. If it wasn’t quite so cold I would seriously think about living in this fridge. Rows upon rows of shelves, floor to ceiling, stacked with samples of everything we sell and everything we’re thinking about selling, and everything our competitors sell. Zoe calls it ‘Paradise Frost’. I can never think of anything funny that rhymes with fridge in response.
And then there’s the freezer! While I daydream about moving in to the work fridge, I have nightmares about being locked in the work freezer. Our fifteen ice cream variants would only keep me diverted for the first hour or so, and then the thought of a slow icy death with nothing to eat but Coated Protein (that’s fish fingers to you) – death, there is thy sting.
‘Zoe, I can see the fools, but where are the trifles? Zoe?’ I walk through the fridge and back out, and find Zoe deep in the freezer, headphones on, sorting through a stack of giant frozen turkeys.
‘Huh?’
‘Didn’t Appletree send in the trifles and fools on the same courier?’
‘New system … Div-ron’s making us file by packaging colour …’
‘What?’
‘Ridiculous, worse than organising your books by colour …’
‘No, that is really bloody ridiculous. They’re all in different colours according to the fruit.’
‘Don’t worry, babe, I’ve got you covered. Aisle G, shelf 3 on the left – your éclairs are there too. He’s checking in on me this week, but as soon as he gets bored I’ll switch back … man, he is one giant fucking dickhead …’
I load two of every pudding into a giant orange crate and schlep it round to Tasting Room 12.
There’s only three of us attending today – Devron, Ton of Fun Tom and me. I lay sixty spoons, a stack of paper plates, and three glasses of water, then arrange the fools and trifles in the most ramshackle, non-colour co-ordinated order I can think of.
I wait for Devron and Tom to arrive. It’s quarter past, they’re late … Neither of them answers their phone. At half past, I head back up to my desk and find Devron and Janelle laughing at a website that features a selection of goats wearing jumpers.
‘Are you coming to the Phase 4, Devron?’ I say.
Janelle intercepts. ‘I had to move it to next month, I just sent you an email a minute ago.’
‘There’s twenty products that need sign off today, launch date is May,’ I say.
‘Sophie, I’m sure you can push back on suppliers, we give them enough business,’ says Devron impatiently.
‘Fine.’ I go back to the fridge and call up my friends from various departments and tell them to come to Room 12, immediately. Zoe puts the kettle on and six of us eat fruit trifles, chocolate trifles and eight types of fool and take it in turns to do impressions of Devron at the point of orgasm with a frozen turkey.
Afterwards, I return to my desk and a flashing light on my phone. A text message. From James!
‘What are you doing tomorrow?’ Ah, the relief.
I know I should be cooler – he’s left it till Thursday afternoon to ask me out for a Friday night – but I believe in momentum and if I don’t see him soon, I fear I’m going to lose it.
We agree to meet at the Dean Street Townhouse at 9pm. It occurs to me that I have no idea what country he’s texting from.
I wonder if he’d have contacted me if I hadn’t called him.
What does that matter now?
On Friday, I run out of the door at 5.54pm. I’m sure I see Janelle make a note of this in her Book of Snitch. I consider waiting for the bus. I have only three hours’ turnaround time before I’m due back in Soho and an über-emergency-face-and-body-makeover to perform. On Tottenham Court Road I hail a cab, even though I really can’t afford it.
Last night I did as much of the home makeover as I could bear to. I washed my sheets, hoovered for the first time in a fortnight, dried the sheets, and attempted to tidy the piles of recipes, post-it notes and newspapers that adorn any horizontal space in my flat.
I then tried to re-arrange my bathroom products to convey the fact that I am a natural beauty who doesn’t sweat or have body hair: hide all make-up, my razor and deodorant, bring out the cheapest, simplest £3 Superdrug moisturiser (it’s very good, actually).
I am not a total sloven, just messy. My bathroom is always clean, and my kitchen is spotless. I love to cook, and this kitchen brings me more joy than any other room in the flat. Although it’s only Ikea, it’s fairly gorgeous. White units, a grey worktop, a pale yellow glass splashback. The only thing I did in the kitchen last night was pop the bottle of beautiful white wine that Maggie Bainbridge gave me for Christmas into the fridge, just in case.
It’s 6.24pm. Two hours and twenty before I have to leave the house to meet him. I perform all ablutions as carefully as possible but I’m in such a panic that I cut my leg shaving. This happens to me about once every three shaves. I’m clumsy and impatient, but I have the added bonus of having Factor XI deficiency, a harmless but irritating disorder I inherited from my dad that means when I bleed, I take a while to stop bleeding. I once cut myself shaving before I had to get on the Eurostar to Paris for a choux pastry seminar and by the time I got to the Champs Elysees, I had a shoe full of blood. Pas très chic.
It will bleed for at least twenty minutes now, but I don’t have time to sit with my leg up and wait for it to stop, so I end up Sellotaping a wodge of toilet paper to my ankle while I go about drying my hair, flossing, and moisturising.
7.59pm, I remove my makeshift tourniquet and my ankle proceeds to drip blood like a slow-leaking tap. I was planning on wearing tights anyway – it’s freezing out – but I can’t just put them over the wound. I settle for two giant plasters and take a spare pair of tights in my handbag – I’ll have to pop to the loo in the restaurant as soon as I get there and change these, and clean up the blood stains from my foot … sexy stuff.
I put on my soft, slinky Topshop black dress and notice with a hiccup of delight that it has never been this loose on me. Final touches of make-up, perfume, a spritz of fig room spray in the hall, and I’m off.
James is sitting nursing a gin and tonic, chatting to the barman, when I walk in. He grins when he sees me and the barman gives me the once-over too. I have made an effort – high heels, earrings, the hair is behaving well. Or maybe the barman checks me out because there aren’t that many younger women in here – the clientele seems to be 60% gay men, and the rest are middle-aged fashion and media types sporting faux spectacles, frowns and unseasonal tans.
‘Have a drink,’ says James, handing me the cocktail list.
‘I don’t need that, I’ll have an Old Fashioned please, Maker’s Mark,’ I say to the barman, who winks his approval.
James immediately rests his hand on my knee. ‘A girl who knows what she wants.’
‘Well, it took me years of research in the field, but I finally found a drink that I love.’
‘And you never drink other cocktails?’
‘Sometimes. But an Old Fashioned has all the qualities I look for in my booze. Not too sweet, the right size, pretty hard for a barman to mess up….’
‘And what about men, what qualities do you look for in a man?’
I stop myself saying ‘not too sweet, the right size, pretty hard …’ -it’ll sound cheap. Instead I run through the essential criteria that twenty years of dating has reduced me to:
Kind
Funny
Clean
Not mentally ill
Tall, big nosed, and a thick head of hair is a bonus. James appears to tick most of these boxes so far (you can’t judge mentally ill after just two dates). If I say anything on this list, I’ll look too keen.
‘I’m looking for a grown-up,’ I say.
He makes to get up from the bar and leave.
‘And someone thoughtful. What about you?’ I say.
‘I’m looking for someone warm and smart. Feisty. Reasonably attractive …’ he grins.
I wonder if his definition of ‘reasonably attractive’ can encompass a woman with a few stretch marks and a light smattering of cellulite.
‘Would you go out with Nigella?’ I say. Such a good test of a man’s shallowness – can he appreciate a gorgeous woman with a real body.
‘Far too old for me!’ he says.
‘She’s near enough your age, you cheeky git!’
He shrugs.
‘Don’t you think she’s beautiful?’ I say.
‘She’s nice looking. Anyway, looks aren’t everything.’
The maître d’ beckons us over, and as we stand, James reaches under his bar stool and presents me with a bag.
‘I got you something,’ he says.
‘Really?’ I say, shocked. Inside the bag is a large bottle of Aromatherapy Associates Rosemary Bath Oil that he must have bought me in Duty Free, wherever he has been.
‘I know you like rosemary,’ he says. I do? ‘The pasta you ordered at the Italian …’
Bless him, I love the taste of rosemary but I don’t want to smell like a roast lamb. Still, extremely thoughtful and sweet of him.
‘That’s lovely of you, James Stephens. Thank you.’ I kiss him briefly on the mouth and feel his eyes on the back of me as I walk to the ladies’ room to check whether my ankle has stopped bleeding.
The ankle is fine, but I change tights anyway as I have to take off the old ones to dab a slight blood stain on my foot.
When I return five minutes later, there is a bottle of decent red on the table.
‘One of the chefs at work was telling me that this place is famous for its mince and potatoes,’ I say, looking at the menu.
‘I knew you’d be a good woman to go out with,’ he says, ‘I can’t stand girls who don’t eat.’ Men always say this. It is often bullshit and means ‘I can’t stand girls who don’t eat but neither can I stand girls who show signs of having eaten’. It is invariably the same men who say ‘I like girls who look natural’, but actually mean girls who only wear foundation, cover up, pressed powder, blush, a bit of eye pencil and a lot of mascara.
‘Oh, and save room for The Queen of Puddings, it’s meant to be amazing.’
‘Queen of Puddings, isn’t that your job?’ he says, smiling.
‘I wish, I’m only a junior developer,’ I say.
‘Still, it sounds great. I think it’s brilliant what you do for a living … Queen of Puddings. So you just sit around stuffing your face with cake all day, do you?’
‘There’s a little more to it than that. You have to think of new concepts, follow market trends, brief suppliers, work out if a product’s manageable in budget, there’s all the microbiotics, health and safety, shelf life, packaging, travel testing …’
‘So you do, you basically get paid to eat cake,’ he clinks his glass against mine in congratulation.
‘Sometimes I bake cakes all day …’
‘You cook at work?’
‘Great job, huh?’ I say.
‘Is that why you don’t paint your nails?’ He makes it sound like I have half a finger missing that he’s been too polite to ask about, but has been dying to know the story behind – did a squirrel bite it off?
‘No,’ I say, tucking my hands away on to my lap. ‘I’m just not always a full hair and make-up kind of girl. I don’t have the time. Why, do you like painted fingernails?’
‘A little red nail polish never goes amiss …’ he says.
‘You really did have your teenage sexual awakening in the 80s,’ I say, shaking my head.
He laughs and fills my glass, then rests his hands on the table. My hands spontaneously float up from my lap to be beside his.
‘God, you don’t see many women out like that anymore,’ says James, as a six-foot, heavily made-up twenty-something in a full-length fur walks in, flanked by a tubby man of around fifty.
‘Bimbos with sugar daddies? London’s full of them!’
‘No, I mean the coat. That’s Russian sable!’ he says admiringly.
‘– I think it’s a bit tacky,’ I say.
‘The coat?’
‘No, them – he looks like he’s paying her by the hour. – How do you know it’s a Russian sable?’
‘The bluish tinge. Do you know that the mating ritual of the Russian sable can last up to eight hours?’ he says, leaning forward, a huge smile breaking across his face.
‘Sounds like Sting … anyway, how do you know all this?’
‘My grandfather was a furrier – Stephanikov Furs, in the East End. Do you like fur?’
‘I don’t like the thought of animals being hurt just for my benefit, but then I eat meat, so … No, I don’t have a problem with fur, not vintage anyway. Sorry, does that make me mean, horrible and heartless?’
‘No, just asking.’
‘Well, if there are any mink jackets lying round your garage that you need a good home for …’
He laughs and orders a couple of vodka shots.
‘Are you trying to get me drunk, Mr Stephens?’ I say.
He raises an eyebrow and grins. ‘So, what’s the best pudding in the world?’ he says.
‘Hot pudding, cold pudding, cake, tart, fool, mousse, flan, trifle – define your terms, please.’
‘Cake,’ he says.
‘Number one: a Jean Clement praline millefeuille, you can only get them in Paris. Number two: my mother’s chocolate and raspberry cream cheesecake – only available in California, and when my mother is in a good mood. And three: Ottolenghi’s apple and sultana cake – Upper Street, any day of the week.’
He beams back at me. ‘You’re not like anyone else I’ve ever dated,’ he says.
‘Why?’ I say.
He shrugs.
‘In a good way?’ I say.
He nods. I feel a little flutter in my chest.
‘What do you actually do, anyway? I mean, I know you sell socks, but very specifically what do you do?’
‘Okay, where do you buy your socks?’
‘M&S.’
‘Why?’
‘Good quality.’
‘Why else?’
‘The right amount of stretch.’
‘Why else?’
‘No other reason. I’m not that into socks. Sorry.’
‘Never apologise. What about tights?’
‘M&S, same reasons. Do you sell tights too?’ I hope so. I could do with a man who could keep me in tights, the rate I’m going through them tonight …
‘Just socks for now but I’m starting something new in legwear this summer. Another bottle of red?’ He smiles at me and I can’t help but beam back.
The main course arrives. I realise he still hasn’t told me exactly what he does. This man could be a drug dealer or a pimp for all I know – he has the hustle to be either – but I don’t care because whatever he is, I am bewitched.
We stumble out onto Dean Street to hail a cab. It is freezing and he tucks me inside his coat with him. ‘Come here, you tiny thing.’
On the corner of an alley is a tramp of about sixty. A pink tiara rests on her patchy orange hair. She is wearing a sheepskin coat, a velvet sailor suit that stops mid-calf, and house slippers. When she sees James she points at him and shouts ‘Jackie Boy, you’re a useless cont,’ in a thick Ulster accent.
‘Another one of your ex-fiancées?’ I say, giggling.
He tries not to smile. ‘I told you all beautiful women are mad.’
‘Yeah, well, maybe guys like you make them mad.’
‘Nah, it’s just the way you’re built. Speaking of which, come here.’
I’m already inside his coat with him but he puts both arms around me and kisses me. We stay like this until the tramp lurches towards us and asks James for some change. I expect him to fob her off like the Tory-boy I suspect he really is, but instead he reaches into his wallet and hands her a £20 note. ‘Buy yourself something to eat, please?’ he says.
I’m more amazed than she is.
‘What?’ he says.
‘Nothing. Generous, that’s all.’
He shrugs. ‘Always been a sucker for a well-turned ankle.’ He laughs and grabs my hand and we walk up to Oxford Street to find a taxi.
‘So, how was the morning after?’ says Laura, when I call her back the following afternoon.
‘Great! We had a fry-up in bed, read the papers, then he left to go to White Hart Lane with Rob,’ I say, surveying the mess of pans, wine glasses and crumbs in my kitchen.
‘And the night before?’
I blush remembering it. We had sex. We had quite a lot of sex, all of it good.
I once dated a gorgeous Italian Jewish lawyer who was tall, funny, kind and spoke five languages. The first (and last) time we slept together, it came to light that he had a rare psychosomatic sexual disorder that meant he had a fit at the point of orgasm.
As Eskimos with ‘snow’, Jews have multiple words for ‘disappointment’. None of these came close to covering off that scenario.
Still, since then, whenever I sleep with someone for the first time and they don’t nearly swallow their own tongue and go blue, I’m profoundly grateful.
‘It was good, really natural. I like his body, it’s big – it makes me feel small.’
‘How did you leave it with him?’ says Laura.
‘He rang just after he left to say goodbye, he’s off again tomorrow for five days, to Portugal.’
‘Is he going to call you?’
‘Well, he said “you’re not going to forget about me are you?” and I said why don’t you call me from Portugal, and he sort of evaded the question.’
‘Hmm.’
‘Weird, isn’t it?’
‘Do you think there’s another girl?’
‘No.’ That thought hadn’t actually occurred to me. ‘He’s visiting some financiers, definitely. But I feel like he’s project managing me, putting me on ice for a week.’ And I don’t like it.
‘Ah well, it’s early days, isn’t it. Let’s see what happens when he gets back.’
After I put the phone down, I ignore the washing up and go back to lie on my bed. The pillow still smells strongly of James. I should wash this pillowcase today, and these sheets, or I’ll lie here later and miss him.
I’ll miss his body, his strong arms, his broad shoulders. The weight of him. I’ll miss his mouth. Those confident hands. His head coming to rest in the curve of my neck. His heartbeat finally slowing under my palm….
Who am I kidding – Persil Bio on a 60 isn’t going to wash away those memories. I force myself to get up and make a cup of tea and wash up the pans. The sheets can wait.
It’s nearly 4pm now, so I pop round to the florist in Maida Vale to buy my grandma a bunch of orange tulips, then drive round to her flat in Highgate. I park in the courtyard next to the communal garden. My grandma lived here with my grandpa for thirty-eight of their fifty-five years together. There’s a beautiful teak bench at the back of the garden under an apple tree, bought for them on their ruby wedding anniversary by the residents in the block. The inscription is from The Bible, The Song of Songs: ‘I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine’. My grandparents would sit together on this bench on balmy summer nights, one or both of them dozing off against each other’s shoulder.
I do love coming to my grandma’s flat. It reminds me of Saturday afternoons spent with my brother, riding up and down in the lift with its old-fashioned sliding cage door. Of being chased along the red-carpeted corridors by my dad till my grandma would poke her head out of her door, and announce in a deeply serious tone that if we wanted any of her world famous spaghetti with tomato sauce and meatballs, we’d better come quick before my grandpa ate the last mouthful.
I ring the bell and Evie, my grandma’s part-time carer, buzzes me in. ‘She didn’t sleep well,’ she says, opening the door and greeting me with a kiss. Evie is the longest-serving carer my granny has had. My grandma has despatched various Eastern European carers over the last decade for looking miserable or talking too much or too little (‘the stumers’). Evie is perpetually cheery, talks just the right amount and paints my granny’s impressive fingernails purple and jangly like a west London rude-girl.
My grandma is ninety-seven. Her legs don’t work and her boredom has morphed into depression, but her brain and her tongue are razor sharp.
She is sitting in her pale blue wing back chair, staring out of the window towards the Heath, but her face lights up when I walk in.
‘For you,’ I say, handing her the tulips.
‘My favourite!’ she says. ‘Evie! A vase please? Now sit. Have a biscuit,’ she says, pointing at a dozen star-shaped, sugar-dusted biscuits arranged neatly on a red and white Delft plate. I nibble a lemon shortbread even though I hate lemon with sweet things. ‘What’s new then, Sophola? How was that pistachio lamb?’
We’d discussed that dish more than a month ago.
‘Needed longer on a lower heat,’ I say.
‘Always the lowest heat,’ she says, shaking her head.
My foodie genes come from my grandma, who is my dad’s mother, and my mum. My grandma was an excellent cook before she tired of food in her dotage. Now all she eats is boiling hot soup, stale lemon biscuits and coffee ice cream, washed down with a small whisky of an evening. I inherited her habit of always trying something new, and my mother’s habit of always ordering three times too much of it.
‘So your brother’s making me feel old – a great-grandmother indeed!’
‘It’s so exciting, I can’t wait!’
‘I’m not sure I’ll still be here when the baby arrives.’
‘Oh, stop it. Of course you will.’
‘This is my last winter, I can feel it,’ she shakes her head.
‘Nonsense, you say that every year!’
‘I’m ready to go,’ she says, her shoulders rising and falling slowly. ‘And you? When are you going to stop flitting about?’
‘I’m not ready for all that baby stuff yet.’
‘Of course not, you need to find a decent man first. Is there no one nice at work?’
Raymond Cowell-Trousers in accounts? ‘Not at work, no. But I have met someone who I think you might approve of.’
‘Tell me more.’
‘He’s … he’s very bright. And handsome. Nice and tall.’ I won’t mention his age; I don’t think she’d approve of that.
‘What does he do?’
‘He runs his own company, he sells socks.’
‘Jewish?’ she says, a faint trace of hope in her voice.
‘I think his grandfather was.’ We both know this doesn’t count. ‘East End, furrier.’
‘Your grandfather knew some people in the schmutter trade. What’s this creature’s name?’
‘Stephens. James Stephens, in fact!’
‘Oh dear!’ she raises her hands to her face in mock horror. ‘Don’t be too nice to him! You know how that poem ends …’
Chance would be a fine thing. He’s now been in Portugal for four days and hasn’t even texted me. Still, he’s busy working. And he’s forty-five. Do 45-year-olds really text? Isn’t that a bit teenage? I hate texts anyway, so avoidant, I’d much rather talk. He’s due back tomorrow. I’m sure he’ll call then.
Three days later he phones from Lisbon airport.
‘I was starting to think I’d imagined you,’ I say. And I’m starting to think Laura’s right and there is another woman.
‘Is that a dig?’ he says, with good humour.
‘Have you been terribly busy with work?’
‘It’s not been too bad, actually. A bit of work, a bit of fun.’
‘Are you just one of those people who compartmentalises their life?’
‘No, not really.’
‘So you stayed a few days longer than planned?’
‘Yeah, the Bonders own a place down the coast, they invited me for some golf.’
‘The Bonders?’
‘The venture capital guys.’
‘Are they Portuguese?’
‘Swiss, but they’ve got houses all over the place.’
I daren’t go for a sixth question, the only one I want the answer to, which is: why didn’t you call? Because he is calling. And I know I’d sound needy and weird. Besides, he’s forty-five. He’s been on a business trip. It’s very early days. We’ve only had three dates. Three great dates and some good sex. Still, you aren’t allowed to expect too much attention at this stage, so Pete tells me, and I should stop being paranoid.
‘So, when are you free to see me, woman?’
I pause. I am genuinely busy this week, plus I want to spend more than just an evening and a morning with him. ‘At the weekend?’
‘What are you doing in the week?’
‘I’m busy.’
‘Friday night?’
‘Busy … I wasn’t sure when you’d be back, so I made other plans.’ And if you’d called me sooner then I wouldn’t have had to …
‘I’m not surprised you’re so popular, a girl with your qualities. Okay, Sunday afternoon, let’s see a movie – all these dinners with you are making me fat!’ Nonsense, he had a gut when I met him!
‘I might be free Saturday night …’ I say.
‘Seeing Rob and the boys,’ he says quickly.
‘Fine, no, Sunday then …’
‘I’ll pick you up at 3pm, I’ll choose the film.’
I like a man who takes control.
‘I’m outside your flat, come on down,’ he says at 3pm on the dot.
‘What car are you in?’
‘The little blue one that makes a funny noise.’
For some reason I imagined he’d drive a BMW or a Golf GTi – something mainstream and fast and solid and a little bit flash.
But no. No, no, no. He is, in fact, behind the wheel of a very shiny, fancy sports car.
What make is it? There is a little crown insignia at the front, but I can’t tell. I know the difference between a Porsche, a Ferrari and a Lamborghini. James does not have a small penis and clearly doesn’t feel the need to drive any of these.
But nowadays Jaguars, Aston Martins, even that Ford with the old Steve McQueen ad – all meld into one.
‘Listen to this,’ he says, and revs the engine, ‘it has the best purr of any car. And it’s shaped like a woman’s body …’
‘Sometimes you sound like such an 80s dickhead,’ I say, smiling as he leans over to open the door for me.
As I step in, I see a large Maserati logo in silver on the floor. Handy. In case you forget which of your cars you’re driving.
I am surprised and pleased to see what a tip it is inside, as bad as my Honda Accord. Boots, fleeces, mud, sweet wrappers, even an empty white mug in the drinks holder, that’s surely meant to accommodate a goblet of Krug.
I do so like this about James. He is not precious about things, he’s carefree, careless even. I had a boyfriend at college who had a three-day tantrum after I knocked his Raybans onto the floor as I handed him an orange juice at a Happy Chef on the M6. I hate people who treat generic branded goods like they’re family heirlooms; it’s just stuff.
‘So, what’s with this car?’ I say, trying not to sound impressed.
‘A little toy I bought myself when the Bonders bought 25% equity in JSA. I do like the occasional toy.’
‘How much did they pay you?’ Blunt, but I’m trying to work out just how fancy this car is.
‘Three.’
‘£300,000?’ If that’s 25%, that’s a £1.2 million pound business. Not bad for selling socks.
And a whole house in Camden must be worth a million at least.
He laughs. ‘You’re so sweet, Soph. Add an 0.’
‘Oh.’ Oh, oh, oh.
We’re driving to the Curzon in Soho. I am still in shock about his wealth.
My immediate reaction had been: my God. I’ve found a prince, the last handsome, tall, not-bald multimillionaire in London. That’s lottery ticket win money. That doesn’t happen. Well, the odds are 1 in 12 million.
But a nanosecond later the discovery has started to bother me. It has set off various small alarms that I’m trying to put on snooze:
That sort of money rockets him in to a different universe.
That sort of money lets him do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, without consequence.
That sort of money goes to a man’s head. It is power.
No one makes that much money without being ruthless and hard as nails along the way.
People want to be close to a man like that. Men, yes, but the women. The type of women who would not look at him twice if he was a regular guy. That explains the Wolford model.
I’m bloody glad I didn’t know he was rich when I first met him. I wish I didn’t know now.
Maybe he doesn’t own the whole company; maybe his dad and brother own half …
‘Play some music, would you?’ I say, stroking his thick dark hair and thinking how good his genes are, and hoping if we have kids they’ll inherit his straight, shiny locks rather than my curls.
James fiddles with his CD player and on comes the soundtrack to the inner circle of hell: Dido, Flo Rida, some vocoder crap, the sort of banging dance music they play in gyms.
‘Have you not got the Crazy Frog tune?’ I say.
He presses the forward button and on comes Sam Cook.
‘Well recovered,’ I say.
There is a queue of cars in front of us, and James suddenly pulls to the left and speeds down the bus lane.
‘Bus lane,’ I say.
‘It’s fine.’
‘It says “At any time”.’
‘It’s fine.’
‘You’ll get a ticket.’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
‘Just because you’ve got a crown on your steering wheel doesn’t mean you can act like royalty.’
‘It’s a trident, love.’
‘What about the people on buses? There are bus lanes for a reason.’
‘They’ll still get there,’ he says.
‘If I was on that bus, I’d think you were a dick,’ I say.
‘But you’re not. You’re in my car.’
He has booked tickets to see Antichrist, because he thought I’d like an art house film. The cinema is very warm, and half an hour into the film, he falls asleep. Occasionally I nudge him but he looks extremely content, and quite frankly I wish I could sleep through it too.
As the end credits roll I wake him up. ‘You missed the bit where she drills through his leg, and the bit where she wanks him off and blood spurts out of his cock,’ I say.
He shudders. ‘Thank God.’
‘What now,’ I say, ‘Chinatown for some duck pancakes?’
‘I thought you might like to have dinner at mine.’
‘You’re going to cook for me?’
‘I was thinking more like a takeaway,’ he says.
‘Why don’t we cook?’
‘You’ll see why.’
‘Are you sure your wife’s not at home tonight?’
‘She’s on holiday with the kids and my three mistresses,’ he says.
He pulls up outside a house in Fitzroy Road. That’s Primrose Hill, not Camden. It has the loveliest front door of all the houses on the street – a deep, inky blue, with a semi-circular glass window at the top, like the sun rising.
This is all too good to be true. He’s too sexy, too rich, too tall, too much fun, too interesting, too smart, that door is too perfect. You don’t get to have all this in one person. Maybe you get three of the above but the guy turns out to be a cokehead or a depressive. James is the golden ticket. Something must be wrong.
Inside, everything is homely and unpretentious. On a low wooden sideboard sits a beautiful old-fashioned globe, the countries in faded pinks and yellows and greens and blues.
‘Who are these guys?’ I say, looking at the framed photos next to the globe.
‘That’s me and Rob in Mexico.’
‘You look happy,’ I say.
‘We’d just been skydiving,’ he says. ‘I think I was still high.’
‘And in this one? That must be your grandfather … father’s side?’ I say, looking at a faded photo of a stern looking man with James’s nose and dark eyebrows, his hand on the shoulder of a young boy who’s trying not to giggle. ‘Your hair was so blonde!’
‘My grandad was, what, early seventies? Still smoking thirty a day and drinking a large whisky before lunch. He made me go and find ten different types of leaves in Epping Forest while he sat on that bench with a hip flask, smoking and reading the Essex Chronicle.’
‘And this one! Look at your hair! How old are you here?’
‘Ten. June 3rd, 1975, Woodford Under 11s Junior Chess Champion.’
‘Such a nerd!’ I say. ‘Do you still play?’
‘Not really. But I’ll give you a game if you don’t mind losing,’ he says.
‘I love losing. So, why can’t we cook?’ I say, as we head downstairs to his kitchen.
‘You’ll see.’ And I do. His kitchen is like a student dig. He has a double electric hob, a microwave and a tiny, none-too-clean oven. I open one cupboard and see three Pot Noodles and two tins of tuna. In the next cupboard is some Tesco own brand pasta. ‘I need a wife,’ he says. ‘A wife who can cook!’
‘What’s in here?’ I say, spying a waist-high fridge in the corner.
‘Don’t look!’ he says, but it’s too late. I open the door and see that his fridge has no shelves at all. The few things in it are all stacked on top of each other at the bottom.
‘What’s that all about?’
‘I broke the shelves a while back, I keep meaning to replace them, but I never get round to it …’ he says.
‘How do you even break a fridge shelf?’
‘Ask Jack Daniels,’ he says.
‘I have never seen anything like that,’ I say. ‘How come the rest of your house is so lovely and your kitchen’s so shit?’
He laughs. ‘I’ve been travelling so much in the last year, it’s not been a priority. I’ll get round to it soon.’
‘Takeaway it is,’ I say.
‘There’s a great Japanese on Parkway, I’ll pop out and get some,’ he says, ‘No, it’s Sunday … pizza?’
‘Pizza’s good,’ I say. ‘Or I see you’re harbouring a lovely selection of Pot Noodles in your cupboard.’
‘Don’t say you like Pot Noodle or I’ll think I’ve dreamt you,’ he says.
‘I don’t mind it, if I’m drunk,’ I say. ‘Let’s get pizza. A bit more sociable, isn’t it?’
We lie on his sofa and eat a spicy meat pizza from his local takeaway. I’d never normally eat meatballs from a delivery place – I work at Fletchers, I know how bad a bad meatball can be. But James fancies meatballs, and I fancy James, and they taste delicious.
‘My friend in New York’s just had a baby and called him “Domino”,’ I say.
‘That’s a terrible name,’ he says.
‘Isn’t it?’
‘If I had a boy I’d call him Genghis,’ he says.
‘Gengis Stephens, nice ring. What about girls’ names?’
‘What do you think’s nice?
‘Don’t know. Lauren’s pretty. Olivia, maybe too posh. Martha?’
‘Martha’s a fat girl’s name,’ he says.
‘No, it’s not!’
‘How about Yasmine Jayde, and Anoushka Rose.’
‘You’re not calling our daughters after Bratz dolls and air fresheners.’
‘I’m the husband, you will obey,’ he says, beating his chest.
‘Don’t hold your breath,’ I say. ‘– By the way, do you normally date women a lot younger than you?’ I know Celine is now forty-two, but presumably if he wants children, he’ll want a wife under forty.
‘You’re a few years older than what I’d normally go for,’ he says.
‘Outrageous! You’re pushing fifty!’ I say.
‘Shhhh,’ he puts his finger to my lips.
Truth is we both know his age doesn’t matter. You can knock a year off his real age for every million in his bank account: Forty-five, thirty-five, thirty-three … now he’s my age. Knock another year off for each inch over five foot seven. Twenty-six. A full head of hair buys at least five. Excellent personal hygiene, another couple. Good in bed, another five. He’s officially fourteen.
Yep, I am dating a teenage boy.
He has two very different faces. When he frowns, concentrates or looks anxious – 40% of the time – he looks Sicilian and cruel and sexy; when he smiles he looks like a warm, happy, child. His face glazes with delight. Later, when we are together, I take photos of him, and when people ask to see them, they think they’re looking at two different people. He is a chameleon. There is something about him that makes me want to hold on to him forever.
‘He is really, really rich,’ I say to Laura the following day.
‘Good for him.’
‘I wish he didn’t have that much money.’
‘What would you prefer, three million?’
‘I could even go to four …’
‘Whatever, Soph. It’s a number, isn’t it? Doesn’t make anyone truly happy.’
Insert the cliché of your choice, but she is, I promise you, correct.
It is almost April and I have finally pinned Devron down and made him taste the trifles and fools he should’ve eaten weeks ago. I hate waiting for anything and anyone, but I particularly hate waiting for product sign-off from a man who won’t go to a restaurant that doesn’t serve a well-done steak and wedges.
‘What’s the life like on this one?’ he says, sliding his finger along the top of a chocolate trifle I was planning on taking round to Laura and Dave’s at the weekend.
‘Seven. This is life minus three,’ I say – we’re three days off the ‘eat by’ date, so four days into the pudding’s life.
‘And how does the consistency of that hold up on minus one?’ He points to a raspberry trifle. Devron will always ask one question that makes him sound knowledgeable, but blindfold him and he doesn’t know the difference between a blackberry and a blackcurrant.
‘Flavour’s good, texture and mouthfeel maintained till end of life.’
He nods. ‘Custard’s good on that lot,’ he says. ‘Approved.’
I feel like the proud mother of twenty kids, all of whom have just won the egg-and-spoon race.
‘Appletree are great with custard,’ I say. ‘Brûlées, tarts, crème anglaise …’
‘Brûlées … can you look at a microwaveable brûlée for autumn?’
‘The custard part?’
‘Whole lot.’
‘You won’t get crispy, browned sugar from a microwave, you need direct overhead heat for caramelisation.’
‘Orangy custards? Mands loves tangerines.’
‘Not ideal – citric acid interferes with the protein network, the fat globules separate at heat.’
‘Huh … what’s our margin on those trifles?’
‘38%’
‘And the cost of custard as percentage of total?’
‘Low. Bulk of cost is fruit and labour.’
‘Right, work up a dozen or so new custard-based puddings for launch next summer, margin of 40% plus. Yeah?’
I do like a challenge when there’s custard involved.
James has gone to Paris. When I left his house on Monday morning, he’d said, ‘I’ll call you on Friday.’
And he does. He always calls when he says he will, and very rarely at any other time. Although I’ve been busy all week with Devron’s new brief and out every night with friends, I’ve been distracted, hoping he’ll call just for the hell of it, just to say hi, but that doesn’t seem to be his style.
‘I’m on the Eurostar, so it might cut out. What are you doing tomorrow?’ he says.
I have kept my Saturday free in the hope that I’ll see him, but I’m bothered by his presumption that I’ll have done this.
‘Why?’
‘Meet me at the Tate Modern at 5pm.’
‘I’m not sure if I’m free.’
‘I’ve got something for you, it won’t keep.’
‘What sort of something?’
‘Trust me, you’ll like it. The man in the shop said it’ll be okay till 6pm Paris time, so don’t be late.’
‘We could meet earlier?’ I’d like to spend a bit of the day together.
‘I’ve got some errands. Meet me at the top of the slope?’
I wear a white cotton sundress that I bought in a New York flea market for five dollars. When I bought it two summers ago it was too tight, but I fell in love with the idea of one day fitting into it, and the fact that it cost less than the Thomas Keller chicken sandwich I’d just eaten. My wardrobe has a smattering of random, very cheap clothes like this, most of which will never fit, but when I try the dress on today it’s perfect. I put on a pair of beautiful pale pink silk French knickers. And at the last minute, I grab the large brimmed floppy straw hat that I’ve never dared wear outside of my flat. I feel French. I feel pretty and delicate and like someone in a Vanessa Bruno advert, rather than someone who spends most of her life with perpetual underarm stubble.
Today is the first proper day of spring. As I walk along the embankment from Waterloo I feel like the person I always wanted to be: happy, confident, cool. God, I wish I could make myself feel like this every day. Men stare. Fashiony girls surreptitiously look with a mix of envy and admiration. I should wear this hat more often.
There’s so much I want to do around here with James. Late night cocktails at the Festival Hall overlooking the Thames. A Sunday tea-dance at the Savoy with champagne and scones! Ice-skating, come winter, over at Somerset House. Afternoon Billy Wilder double-bills at the NFT. I browse the second-hand book stalls along the river and find a near-perfect copy of Rapture by Carol Ann Duffy. I’d love to buy it for James, but I suspect he’d be more comfortable with the John le Carré on the next table, or last year’s Top Gear annual.
I have spent too long pottering. I’m fifteen minutes late and as I approach the Tate, I see James from a distance looking at his watch with an anxious frown. God, I love the size of him. He’s so man-shaped, so masculine, so male. He’s wearing a navy coat and his dark blue Levis. This is a man who would never countenance wearing a pair of jeans with Lycra in them. He turns his head in my direction, then does a double take. I have to order myself not to break into a run towards him.
‘Good hat,’ he says, and kisses me for a full five minutes.
‘For you.’ He holds out a box wrapped in pistachio coloured paper with a big pink ribbon. ‘I hope this kitten’s got big lungs or you’ll have one guilty conscience, Miss Klein.’
‘If there’s a dead cat in here it’s your fault for kissing me so long,’ I say.
‘You shouldn’t be such a temptress,’ he says. ‘Come on, open up before the RSPCA nick us.’
Inside the box is a Jean Clement praline millefeuille: a mythical dessert. The cakes in Jean Clement are displayed like diamonds on velvet casings. They cost more than diamonds, and the praline millefeuille is the Great Star of Africa. I once had a migraine that lasted three days, and a Jean Clement millefeuille cured it. They only make ten a day and if you’re not in the queue when the store opens, you’ll just have to take my word for it that you’ll never put anything better in your mouth.
‘I had to wrestle a very determined Japanese lady with a dead fox round her neck to get you this.’
‘Oh my God. You’re a very good boyfriend.’ I kiss him and he smiles. ‘Open wide,’ I say, and attempt to feed him the cake.
He shakes his head. ‘I bought it for you, Queen of Puddings.’
‘I want you to have the first bite,’ I say. He takes a small nibble then looks at me in wonder. ‘Jesus, is that even legal?’ He takes a bigger bite and pretends he’s going to eat the whole thing. I wouldn’t even begrudge him if he did, that is how much I fancy this man.
He grabs my hand and I follow him into the gallery. ‘I read about this guy in the paper. I know how cultured you are,’ he says. I don’t know where he gets this idea from. Oh, yes – it was the fact that I mentioned a poet on the first night we met. I’m entirely not cultured, really. I like art and books and films but I can’t explain Martin Kippenberger. The thought of seeing Ewan McGregor play Shakespeare leaves me cold, and I’d rather watch Trading Places than a Bergman film. However, I get the impression that his previous girlfriends spend a lot of time down the gym and consider Paolo Coelho the best writer in the world, so I guess in the kingdom of the blind….
We kiss on all the escalators up to the fifth floor. If I was behind us on the escalators I’d hate us, we are so goddamned happy.
Tucked away in one of the smaller galleries is the entrance to a tiny exhibit with a grumpy security guard standing outside. A placard on the wall reads, ‘The Beauty of the World, the Paragon of Animals.’
When the guard sees my dress he shakes his head. ‘Put the boots on. And don’t spend more than a couple of minutes in there, it’s bad for your lungs,’ he says ushering us through a door into a narrow corridor, lined with wellies. He closes the door behind us and we’re in darkness, stumbling and giggling as we feel our way along the walls in ill-fitting boots, taking a sharp left, then a right. And then all of a sudden the tunnel ends and our eyes automatically shut and then slowly open against the light, and we’re standing in a room full of sparkling silver glitter. Piles and piles of shimmering dots like a disco moonscape, dazzling and beautiful, shifting softly under our feet.
James dances me to the centre of the room and my dress does a perfect 50s prom twirl, and he laughs in delight. He grabs a handful of the dust and throws it up into the air, and it falls like rainbows of light down on us and suddenly he lifts me up and we kiss passionately and before I know it he has pulled my knickers to one side and he is inside me and I am thinking this hat is going to fall off and laughing and panicking and I don’t want him to stop but I’m scared the guard is going to come in and wondering if there is CCTV in this room and thinking well if this footage ends up on YouTube at least the hat will hide my face and wondering if anyone else has done this in here and then I don’t even care if the guard comes in and finally I am not thinking anything at all.
‘I can’t believe you shagged him in public just because he bought you a cake, you are such a cheap date,’ says Pete, placing a third double gin and tonic and a packet of Tyrell’s in front of me.
‘Trust me, that cake was not cheap,’ I say, ripping open the bag of crisps. I have told Pete about the incident in the gallery because I am very drunk.
The reason I am very drunk is because I feel insecure, because I have not spoken to James since Monday morning when he left my flat, and it is now Thursday night. So I have dragged Pete to my local, the Prince Alfred, and have banged my head twice in the last hour en route to the bar, on the low wooden partitions that carve up the pub into snug little areas.
I have not told Pete about how James and I spent all of Sunday walking in Regent’s Park, holding hands and talking about our shared family values, because he will find this nauseating, and like any right-thinking person he is only interested in hearing about the sex.
I have also not told Pete about the way James looks at me – like he’s amazed and surprised that he found me. He smiles all the time. Because I have no context for him, no mutual friends, I have no idea if this means he’s specifically happy to be with me, or is generally a very happy man. Either way, it is contagious, and I find myself smiling too. Except for now, when I am not smiling at all.
‘He sent me a text on Monday,’ I say.
‘So what’s your problem?’ says Pete, who it’s fair to say, is neither the paranoid nor the romantic type.
‘It said “I had a wonderful time with you”.’
‘And?’
‘Something’s not right.’ Laura says he must be hiding something.
‘Women are so neurotic. He’s saying he had a great time, what more do you want?’
‘I want to know when I’m seeing him again. We’ve been seeing each other for nearly two months, this isn’t normal.’
‘Look, Soph, this guy is not Nick. Nick didn’t have a job.’
‘Nick’s a musician.’
‘Which is basically the same as being unemployed, so he had loads of time to sit around writing you faggy romantic emails. This guy runs a business, plus he’s older. He’s busy. I hate it when girls text me all the time.’
I’m not texting James ‘all the time’. At all, in fact. I am being very careful not to treat him like I treated Nick. I’d text Nick to tell him the filling of my sandwich because I was fundamentally bored in my old job, and because Nick was also bored pottering around our flat. Eventually we bored each other and then we split up.
I can be guarded and I can be cool and I can hold back, but at the same time today I saw a man on the bus with a moustache that was so long it curled round his ears and I would like to tell James about this moustache because it would make him laugh, and yet I feel I can’t. And that is why I’m not happy.
‘He’ll call. Now tell me about the bit with the glitter again.’
I wake early the next day, hung-over. Outside the sky is already bright and from my bedroom window I can just see a patch of daffodils pushing through, down by the banks of the canal. I consider going for a walk to clear my head – past the colourful boats and vast white stucco houses – then think better of it and climb back under my duvet to replay last night’s conversation.
According to Pete, there’s nothing untoward about James’s behaviour. My instinct tells me something is strange, but I can’t put my finger on it.
When James is with me, he’s highly attentive.
He notices everything. If I apply lip balm when he’s popped to the loo, he’ll notice as soon as he walks back in. Not gloss. Clear lip balm. Nick wouldn’t have noticed if I’d grown a Salvador Dali moustache and started speaking Aramaic, as long as I was still padding around the flat.
If I leave the room, James asks where I’m going.
When I’m cooking a meal, he’ll watch me, try to impress me, touch me.
When we’re in bed he is generous and energetic and passionate. He has the libido of a man half his age.
Afterwards we lie for hours having iPod shuffle conversations, flicking from time travel to Bernie Winters to why mosquitoes don’t get AIDS. We should be sleeping. Our combined age is seventy-eight, we both have work in the morning. It’s 3.47, 2.48, 4.15am. Neither of us ever wants to stop the conversation. Eventually we fall asleep, my hand curled around his fingers.
But when he’s not with me, I feel like ‘we’ don’t exist. The randomness of meeting someone in a bar, of having no mutual friends, of having entirely separate lives, is brought home. He could disappear and I would never cross paths with him again. Sometimes I wake up and wonder if he’s even real.
On days when we don’t speak, I feel laden down with the things I didn’t get to share with him. He won’t call for two, three days. Then, it’s like he has a CCTV on my psyche, and at the precise mid-point between when I’ve done a deal with the devil so that he’ll call, and the point at which I think fuck you, James Stephens, this is not acceptable, he’ll ring. My anxiety will be punctured, he’ll come round and we’ll carry on mid-conversation where we left off, and I’ll realise I am a paranoid, silly woman.
Come on, paranoid, silly woman – get out of bed. Go to work.
It’s four in the morning on Good Friday. James and I are at his house, lying in bed, facing each other. My head is resting on his arm. Everything feels so entirely natural and comfortable and right. I think we are falling in love. He looks at me intently. ‘What’s wrong with you, Sophie Klein? There must be something.’
‘Plenty.’
He shakes his head.
‘I’m impatient,’ I say. ‘I’m not very thoughtful. I never remember birthdays. I forget to send my godchildren cards at Christmas. I’m greedy. I’m sarcastic. Sometimes I get a bit depressed and can’t shrug it off.’
He shakes his head again. ‘No, you don’t. You’re generous. You’re a good woman.’ Why does that sound so church-y?
‘What’s wrong with you, James Stephens?’
He pauses and shrugs. He doesn’t answer. He will never show a weakness. He is a master at evading questions.
‘Say something.’ I mean say something nice. I feel like I’m trying to force a compliment out of him and I know this is bad but he’s looking at me like he adores me, but nothing is coming out of his mouth.
‘Who was the last person you went out with before me?’ I ask.
‘Svetlana.’
Beautiful Russians are two a penny in this city. James has a lot of pennies. I see these women slicing down Bond Street, hard bodies, steely eyes, spiky boots; russet-faced older men in bad jackets dragging behind in their wake.
‘How long did that last?’
‘Two years.’
‘Why did it end?’
‘It wasn’t going anywhere.’
‘Why not?’
‘I couldn’t talk to her the way I can talk to you.’
‘What did you do for two years?’
He raises his eyebrows and gives me a look that instantly makes me regret having asked the question. I turn to face the window and James’s arm wraps itself around my waist.
‘Sophie Klein. I haven’t felt this way about anyone in twenty years.’ I turn back to look at him. ‘I am truly myself with you.’
He is telling me the truth.
I love him, I love him, I love him.
I love the way he moves his fingers when he explains something. I love the way he loses his temper with an obnoxious waiter at exactly the same point that I would. I love the fact that I can flick a spoonful of spaghetti with meatballs at him and he doesn’t have a hissy fit that I’ve stained his shirt. I love talking to him and I love looking at him and I love thinking about him.
It is a rainy Saturday night in April and I’m teaching James the secret of a foolproof Yorkshire pudding, when my mother rings.
‘Have you spoken to your brother?’ she says.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘You’re not going to believe what that lunatic girlfriend of his is up to …’
‘Go on …’
‘She’s booked a Caesarean for the third week in August.’
‘Isn’t the baby due at the start of September?’ I say.
‘Exactly!’
‘So how does …’
‘She’s having it two weeks early so that it’s the same star sign as her!’ No amount of italics can convey the utter disdain in my mother’s voice.
‘Jesus, what is wrong with her?’ I say. ‘Is that even safe?’
‘Apparently. Sheer lunacy. And your bloody brother’s saying he can’t see what all the fuss is about. I said to him …’
‘Mum, my Yorkshire puddings have just pinged … I can’t talk …’
‘I haven’t even told you what dreadful names they’re thinking of calling my first grandchild …’
‘It’ll have to wait.’
I hang up and explain Shellii to James.
‘All women are mad,’ he says, again. This time I can’t really disagree.
After dinner, James asks what’s for pudding.
‘An experiment,’ I say. ‘Step into my office.’
He follows me to the fridge. Inside are two large pots of custard sent by Will at Appletree, as Phase 1 of the new custard project Devron’s briefed me on.
‘Take your tie off and sit down….’ I wrap it round his eyes in a blindfold and he screams ‘Help!’
‘Just be quiet and focus on your mouth,’ I say.
‘Can’t we focus a bit lower down?’
‘Mouth first.’ I take the custards out and put a spoon in each. ‘First one – what does this taste of?’ I say.
‘Custard. I could do your job, Soph!’
‘Ha, funny. What else?’
‘Vanilla?’
‘And?’
‘Something with alcohol?’
‘Good. Bourbon! Now have a sip of water.’ I carefully pass over a glass, and he deliberately misses his mouth and pours half of it down his shirt, and then takes it off and drops it on the floor.
‘Would sir like a bib?’ I say.
‘Can’t we do this naked?’
‘Health and Safety 101! Ok, second custard – what does this one taste of?’
‘Custard,’ he says.
‘Very clever. What else?’
‘Maple syrup?’
‘Bingo. And does it make you want to eat anything else?’
‘You!’ he says.
‘Engage your brain.’
‘… maybe something crunchy?’
‘Ten out of ten! Your brain’s making a connection between the maple syrup and granola. So I might take this custard and create a dessert that has a layer of almond granola, then the custard, and then something lighter on top, three different textures. With this flavour profile I’d want something less sweet, that complements the custard …’
‘How about my cock?’
‘Great idea! Not sure it can feed 40,000 Fletchers shoppers each week …’
‘We’ll start with just the one, shall we?’ he says, taking his blindfold off, unzipping his fly and taking his pants down.
‘James, do not put your penis in my custard samples. I have to feed those to Devron on Monday. James! Stop it!’
‘You told me you don’t like Devron anyway,’ he says.
‘True, but I do like this custard!’
Too late.
My boyfriend is a custard-covered dick, and I adore him.
‘Devron, I’m sorry but the custard samples aren’t ready for tasting,’ I say on Monday morning.
‘Fine, what are you doing on May 3rd?’
Two weeks’ time – no idea. James is rubbish at forward planning, but as he invariably ends up asking to see me at the weekends, I’m now avoiding making plans with other people.
‘Why, Devron?’
‘I need you to do a quick New York inspiration trip. If I don’t complete last year’s number of trips within a month of year-end financials, I won’t get like for like in this year’s allowance.’
Cool. So, because you have to tick a box on a sheet, I get a free trip to New York! Devron, I’m warming to you.
‘Is there actually anything you need me to do out there?’
‘Yeah, go for a night, have a look at a few cakes and whatnot, take some photos.’
‘For one night?’
‘Budget’s only going to pay for one night in a hotel.’
I love New York too much for a one-night stand.
‘I’ll stay at a friend’s, then can I go for a bit longer? If I stay a Saturday night, the airfare’s always cheaper.’
‘Fine, go for a long weekend, just come back with an idea I can take to the board. I want to show them what success looks like.’
New York! New York! I email my old friend Pauly asking if I can stay at his place for a few nights, and a minute later he mails back a yes.
It’s Saturday night and I’m off to meet James at the pub. As I leave my block of flats I see someone waving at me as they’re getting out of a black cab.
It’s my neighbour, Amber: part-time sarong designer and full-time halfwit.
Amber has seen James and me get in to his car several times. Each time she has stared, looking confused.
Now she rushes over to me with her miniature schnauzer, Annalex, in tow, and grabs my arm. ‘Sophie, long time … who is that guy you’re always with? Is that your brother, is he back from the States?’
‘No. That’s my boyfriend.’
‘Really?! I never think of you as someone who goes out with a Porsche driver.’
Welcome to Amber-World.
‘It’s not a Porsche, it’s a Maserati 3200GT.’ I have not told anybody about James’s car because I am mildly embarrassed by his money, but I take pleasure in telling Amber. ‘Anyway, what do you mean by that?’
‘You know, you go out with struggling artist types. Does your boyfriend have any single mates?’
I think about Rob. Rob would love Amber – she is a size 4, has no body fat and sports a permanent Ibiza tan. Tonight she is dressed in cowboy boots, tiny denim shorts and a cutaway silver vest.
‘Yes, his friend Rob. He’s really handsome, thirty-six, he drives a Porsche, works for Goldman Sachs …’
Her eyes couldn’t be any wider if she’d necked a fistful of Es.
‘Oh. Sorry, Amber, I forgot – he’s engaged … Oh well. Anyway, aren’t you still seeing Ritchie?’
She shrugs. This shrug means ‘I am thirty-one, very soon I will have to stop dating sexy rock ’n’ roll wannabe music-producer cokeheads, and bag myself a pudgy older Notting Hill banker. He’ll give me shitloads of cash to do up a huge three-storey second home with a pool in Oxfordshire and then I can ride horses and shag the local talent while the au pair looks after the kids and Rory bankrolls my Moroccan scented candle business.’
‘By the way, remember that £100 I lent you …’ I say, as she hands the cabbie a £50 note.
This always works like a charm whenever I want to get rid of Amber and sure enough, as she takes the £30 change from the cabbie, she says, ‘Babe, I’m totally skint at the moment but I’ll pop round soon,’ and hurries into our block.
James and I are three months into our relationship and I haven’t met any of his friends yet, apart from Rob. Laura thinks this is sinister, but I don’t – he hasn’t met any of mine, apart from her. Most of his friends have kids. James says he doesn’t want to share me with anyone. We keep each other endlessly entertained.
But now Laura has made me feel paranoid. So at the pub on Saturday I invited James round for dinner with Pete tonight. Perhaps if I introduce James to more of my friends he’ll follow suit. Besides, he’ll get on well with Pete – they’re both juvenile, charming, fun. Maybe James might register that Pete has a residual crush on me – perhaps it’ll make him more vocal in his affections.
When James left my flat this morning I said ‘Pete’s coming at 7pm.’ He nodded. I haven’t heard from him since. Although I reason I’ll see him later, when he hasn’t rung by 7.40pm, I have a low ache in my stomach, and it isn’t hunger.
The chicken will be ready any minute. Pete’s asking if we should invite my sexy blonde neighbour instead.
James must be working late.
At 7.50pm I take the chicken out, put it under foil and call James.
‘Hello you,’ he says.
‘Where are you?’ I say.
‘At home.’
‘Are you coming for dinner or what?’
‘Sure, see you soon.’
‘That was weird,’ I say to Pete.
‘What? He’s coming, isn’t he?’
‘He is now.’
James arrives looking slightly nervous. The two shake hands and from their posture I sense a mild rivalry in the air.
‘So, are you a North Londoner too?’ says Pete. I’ve already told him all the facts about James, but I’ve forced these two together and Pete’s having to make small talk.
‘East,’ says James. ‘Woodford, born and bred.’
‘My cousins grew up there. What school did you go to?’
‘Forest.’
‘Do you know Alex and Adam Foster, twins?’
‘One of them amazing at football?’ says James.
‘Alex.’
‘Rings a bell.’
I am delighted that there is now a common link as it brings me closer to James.
With a glass of wine they relax and turn their conversation to cars and girls, as though I’m not here. James says Pete’s Saab is a weird choice for a bloke in his thirties, and Pete says Maseratis are for hairdressers and they both laugh. Pete says his ideal woman would be half Danish, half Brazilian, while apparently my boyfriend’s would be eastern European, definitely.
My grandfather was Polish. Does that count?
I ask Pete to help carve the chicken, and in the kitchen he whispers to me, ‘I was expecting some hunk. He’s just a normal looking bloke.’
‘Don’t you think he looks young for his age?’
‘No, he looks like a 45-year-old who eats a lot of cheese.’
‘You’re just jealous,’ I say.
‘Seriously, Soph, he’s punching above his weight.’
Because of James’s utter self-belief, the confidence that emanates from every pore of him, I always think of it as the other way round. Like I’m punching above mine.
‘Anyway, what do you think Pete?’
‘Seems alright.’
‘And?’
‘What do you want me to say?’
‘… Don’t you find him fascinating?’
‘He’s just a man who sells socks.’
‘Shut up, he’s coming.’
‘Eat some more chicken, Soph, you’re looking too skinny,’ says Pete.
‘Do you think?’ says James, raising an eyebrow.
‘You need to put a bit of weight back on,’ says Pete, looking at my arms.
‘Don’t tell her that!’ says James.
Pete only thinks I’m too skinny because he likes big boobs. It’s true my boobs are smaller than they used to be, but that’s always the way when you lose weight. If only I could transplant the small handful of flab left on my bottom to my tits, I’d be laughing, but if I do lose any more weight, I’ll have no bust left, so I’m happy enough where I am.
I head back to the kitchen to take the ice cream out of the freezer and make coffee. When I return, Pete’s already putting on his jacket.
‘You’re leaving?’ I say, ‘we haven’t even had dessert …’
‘I’m really sorry, hon, I have an early meeting. We’ll catch up properly when you’re back from New York.’
He sends me a text on his way home: ‘Thanks for dinner. You seem very happy. I’m glad x.’
In bed later, I turn to James. ‘You’re a bugger to make plans with, you know that?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s infuriating, I mean I didn’t know if you were coming tonight or not.’
‘I said I was, didn’t I?’
‘You were actually quite non-committal. I feel like if I hadn’t phoned you, you wouldn’t have turned up at all.’
He shrugs.
‘And I never know when I’m going to see you next. What’s all that about?’ I say.
He looks back at me as if he’s keeping a secret.
‘What is it? Are you scared?’ It’s scary for me too, being vulnerable.
‘I’m not scared,’ he says.
I say nothing but he’s better at this silent tactic than I am.
‘What is it?’ I blurt, after what feels like a full minute.
‘I’m just getting to know you, slowly.’
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just get on with this? I think. You’re heading to fifty, I’m thirty-four this year – we’re not teenagers anymore. Does he not realise that?
I feel like I’m so far down the road of saying something that I might as well follow through, though I have to take a deep breath before I do.
‘Slowly, quickly … you’re either in it or you’re not,’ I say.
He nods, looks at me and smiles. His smile: beautiful.
On Friday morning James drops me at Paddington for the Heathrow Express. I could walk, it’s only ten minutes from my front door, but he insists.
‘You want to make sure I’m leaving town!’ I say. ‘You’re not out with Rob tonight by any chance?’
‘No, quiet weekend, honest, Guv.’ He holds three fingers up in a boy scout salute. ‘– Behave yourself with this Paul person …’ he says, frowning.
‘I didn’t know you were the jealous type,’ I say, taking his hand and running my finger along one of his knuckles. He has the tiniest scar, like a white eyelash, just to the right of the bone.
‘I’m not,’ he says. ‘I just know what men are like.’
‘You mean you know what you’re like,’ I say, raising an eyebrow.
‘Hurry up, you’ll miss your train,’ he says, grabbing my face in both hands and kissing me.
I hate goodbyes.
New York is great; New York always is.
I stay at Pauly’s apartment in Tribeca. I met Pauly seven years ago, queuing for a table outside Corner Bistro in the West Village. It was midnight. I’d hopped in a cab straight from JFK to West 4th Street. Pauly had staggered over from the White Horse Tavern, having just split from another poor girl who was at the tiresome stage of demanding a smidgen of emotional intimacy from him. We bonded standing in line with beers, then sitting with cheeseburgers. We carried on after at a dive bar in Chinatown where Pauly explained how the CIA and Sinatra and Castro killed Kennedy. I kissed him just to shut him up, then made out with him on the rooftop until 8am. (Pauly has some insane conspiracy theories, but he’s so hot and so good-natured, you can forgive him most things.)
Over French toast with strawberry butter the following morning, he explained how he’d never gotten over being dumped by Carissa, his volatile high-school girlfriend, the week before prom night, and how his whole twenties had been spent working through a series of beautiful women, trying to find crazy Carissa 2.0.
I realised quickly that Pauly would be a terrible love interest but a great friend. Like me he’ll happily eat a bowl of $4 hand-pulled noodles down an alley off Mott Street, then trek north twenty-five blocks to queue for an hour at the Gramercy Tavern for their $12 warm chocolate bread pudding with cocoa nib ice cream.
Pauly seems to have finally met his match in Giovanna who sounds like the perfect lunatic for him: she thinks George Bush engineered 9/11 and that there were no planes, only holograms. She designs erotic underwear, and is currently in Milan on a buying trip. Even though she’s only been dating Pauly a month, she’s currently got him living in her Nolita apartment over on Elizabeth Street, babysitting her Schnoodles, Basquiat and Warhol. This is a total result – not only do I not have to hang around with an insane woman who owns a pair of Schnoodles, but it means I have Pauly’s place all to myself.
Pauly works in the music business and his place is small but supremely cool, with a giant projector screen instead of a TV, and one sleek silver remote control that seems to govern everything from his state of the art espresso machine to the bathtub. Best of all, the apartment has one wall made entirely of glass with the most amazing views of Brooklyn Bridge.
I wish James was here with me, he’d love it, I think, as I hurriedly unpack the handful of clothes I’ve brought. Still, if there’s one city I know how to have fun in regardless, it’s this one. I head out the door and walk north on Broadway towards Soho.
It’s the first week of May, and the weather’s a perfect 75 degrees with cloudless blue skies. I’m so unbelievably lucky that this is my day job, I think, as I pull open the door of Dean and Deluca and feel the air-con start to cool me down. I’m meeting Pauly in a few hours up by the Lincoln Centre, so I grab a tuna sandwich for now. I dream about these sandwiches: the perfect softness of the white bread, the fineness of the red onions, the saltiness of the capers, the ratio of mayo to tuna, the little fronds of almost sweet fresh dill – I’ve tried to recreate these at home but they’re never quite the same.
I spend the next twenty minutes in the store admiring the packaging of the spices, another twenty in the fruit and veg section marvelling at the price tags. I then head west along Bleeker Street to Rocco’s for a chocolate chip cannoli, up to Chelsea Farmer’s Market to pick up some Fat Witch caramel brownies for Maggie, then hop on the subway uptown for a night out, Pauly-style.
We go to three tequila-soaked Cinco de Mayo parties, and end up wearing purple sombreros, eating guacamole and drinking pomegranate margaritas at Rosa Mexicana, where they make the best guacamole north of Mexico. I think I could live solely on Mexican food for the rest of my life: they put chocolate in their chicken casseroles, they eat avocados every day, and limes, chillies and burritos (my three favourite food groups) are the founding pillars of their national cuisine. Around midnight, we swing by the roof party of a rapper with diamond teeth – James will never, ever believe me – and after a final Old Fashioned at a Lower East Side dive bar, I call it a night.
I spend the following days mostly hung-over, visiting farmers’ markets and bakeries, restaurants dedicated just to puddings, and mobile Bolivian food-carts in Queens. I eat desserts from 3 boroughs, 4 continents, 26 countries, without ever leaving the city. In the evenings, Pauly and I go to gallery openings in Chelsea, secret late-night speakeasies in the East Village and one cocktail bar staffed entirely by Stevie Nicks lookalikes.
I am having an exhausting but amazing time, and yet I can’t wait to fly back and see James. I text him to tell him I’ve just seen a man feeding a giant Hyacinth Macaw an Arnold Palmer in Madison Square Gardens. He texts me back saying, ‘I’ll feed you my Arnold Palmer when you get home,’ and I snigger like Sid James. When I roll in drunk at 2am I send him a photo of the Brooklyn Bridge at night, its strings of light reflected in the East River. He sends me back a photo of his feet resting on the coffee table in his living room – Sainsbury’s ready meal in the foreground, Spurs on the telly in the background.
On my final night I take Pauly back to Corner Bistro for dinner to thank him for letting me stay. I want to take him somewhere fancier but he’s adamant he wants a burger. I don’t push it – I know there isn’t a burger in London that comes close.
I tell Pauly briefly about how things are going with James, how he’s so vague and non-committal with arrangements.
‘How old did you say this guy was? He’s older, right?’
‘Oh, old, forty-five,’ I say. ‘So what, you think it’s just a generation thing?’ I say, hopefully.
Pauly looks at me with pity. ‘No, sweetheart, I don’t think that’s it.’
‘Well what?’ I say, putting down my burger, feeling suddenly nervous.
‘He’s late forties, attractive and rich?’
‘Yeah, so?’
‘And you haven’t met his friends?’
‘He’s met a couple of mine.’
‘Not the same thing. You say he travels a lot?’
‘He does business all over the place, the Far East, Europe. All over. Factories, investors … what?’
‘But he’s away regularly?’
I count the number of times James has gone away for business since I met him. Maybe six.
‘What, Pauly? Just say it, you’re worrying me.’
‘I hate to break it to you, but I think your dude’s married.’
I laugh, relieved. ‘He’s not married. Definitely not. He stayed over last Saturday and Sunday. And Monday. There’s no way his wife wouldn’t twig.’
‘Maybe he tells her he’s away on business.’
‘His phone’s always on, she’d call.’ Now I think about it, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard it ring. Maybe it’s on silent …
‘He has two cell phones, cheaters always do,’ says Pauly, grabbing some fries from my plate. ‘There’s a wife.’
‘No, definitely not. I’ve been to his house, no trace of one.’
‘Okay, maybe not a wife but it sounds like there’s another woman, maybe several.’
You know what? I have a lot of time for Pauly but I’m not going to take advice from a guy whose longest relationship was three and a half months, and who expresses doubts that man ever landed on the moon.
‘Look, he’s just a commitment-phobe, plain and simple.’
‘No. Something’s up. If you’re okay to keep going, just taking these crumbs he’s giving you, that’s cool – but that doesn’t sound like your style.’
‘Let’s change the subject. Where are we going for pudding?’
On my way to the airport the following evening, I replay what Pauly was saying about James offering me ‘crumbs’, and how little I’m demanding from him. Maybe I should say something the next time I see him …
Then, as I board my flight, I get a text from James saying, ‘I’ll pick you up tomorrow at 7pm, you choose the restaurant.’ Now that’s more like it.
I open my front door to him and his eyes widen and he breaks into a grin.
‘Nice top,’ he says, kissing me.
‘You like? $20 from Loehmanns.’
‘I like. Where are we eating? Claridges? The Ivy?’
‘God, no,’ I say. ‘Head west, my treat.’
We are halfway through dinner at my favourite, favourite restaurant, Number One Thai, off Ladbroke Grove. Under the table our legs are touching and when I tell him about all the places I went to in New York, he says, ‘Next time I’m coming with you.’ (He doesn’t believe me about the diamond teeth.)
I pop to the toilet and as I come back to the table he grabs my waist, pulls me toward him and kisses me, holding the back of my head with both hands. I love you, James Stephens. I do, I do.
‘So your friend, Paul …’ he says.
‘Pauly, yes?’
‘Did he try it on then? I bet he did …’
‘Of course not, he’s got some crazy sexy Italian girlfriend.’
‘But you used to have a thing with him.’
‘Not at all, just a snog, years ago. It was nothing, we didn’t have sex or anything.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ he says.
‘We didn’t! We just fooled around, it was all very innocent.’
‘I still don’t think it’s right that you stayed at his apartment.’
‘Why ever not? He wasn’t even there!’
‘It’s just … I don’t know.’
‘There’s nothing whatsoever to be jealous about,’ I say.
‘I’m not jealous. I just think it’s odd. One of you must fancy the other one …’
‘Just because you can’t be friends with a woman you don’t want to shag doesn’t mean other men can’t … now please could you pour me some wine?’
He fills my glass up.
‘It’s not right,’ he says.
‘James, I’ve told you all about Pauly. I’m being totally honest with you because I’m trying to be a grown-up. Because I like you.’
I lift my glass to my mouth and smile, but James looks like he’s been slapped.
‘What? What’s wrong?’ I say.
He takes a long breath.
‘What is it, are you okay?’ I say. He suddenly looks queasy with nerves.
He nods slowly.
‘Ever since I met you, since that first night, I’ve felt there was something very special about you …’
Oh my God. He’s going to propose.
‘And I’ve tried to keep my distance but when I’m not with you I miss you …’
He’s going to propose!
‘And when I don’t speak to you, I just want to call you …’
HE IS GOING TO PROPOSE!
‘But there’s a problem.’
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Stella Newman
A novel about love, heartbreak and dessert.Girl meets boy.Girl loses boy.Girl loses mind.Sophie Klein walks into a bar one Friday night and her life changes. She meets James Stephens: charismatic, elusive, and with a hosiery model ex who casts a long, thin shadow over their burgeoning relationship. He’s clever, funny and shares her greatest pleasure in life – to eat and drink slightly too much and then have a little lie down. Sophie’s instinct tells her James is too good to be true – and he is.An exploration of love, heartbreak, self-image, self-deception and lots of food. Pear-Shaped is in turns smart, laugh-out-loud funny and above all, recognizable to women everywhere.Contains an exclusive extract from Stella’s new novel Leftovers.
Stella Newman
Pear-Shaped
Dedication
To my parents, and in loving memory of
my grandparents.
Epigraph
Oh, the tiger will love you. There is no sincerer love than the love of food.
George Bernard Shaw
If I can’t have too many truffles, I’ll do without truffles.
Colette
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Parfait
Crumble
Icing
Epilogue
Food in the book
A word on brownies…
A few of my favourite things…
Further reading
Acknowledgements
Coming Soon (#litres_trial_promo)
Leftovers (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Parfait
1. noun – a rich frozen dessert, made with eggs, cream and sugar
2. noun [from French] perfect
Two girls walk into a bar. There is no punchline.
I’m the girl on the left in the wildly inappropriate black and white spotty summer dress. It is the snowiest February in thirty-eight years but I flew back from a month in Buenos Aires three days ago and this tan ain’t going to waste.
A month in Buenos Aires: sounds glamorous? Ok: a month in a £6 a night hostel in the Boedo barrio – think Kilburn with 98% humidity. No air con, no overhead lighting, shared showers. I’m thirty-three. I earn okay money. I don’t like sharing showers, not least with 18-year-old Austrians proclaiming Wiener Blut the greatest Falco album ever released. Wieners aside, Laura and I have the time of our lives.
Laura is the girl on the right in the bar. Best friend, tough crowd, northerner. She’s wearing a polo neck and a woolly hat. Together we look ridiculous; we don’t care.
It is one of those evenings. Whether it’s the outfits, the tans or the sociability that a snowy Friday night in London brings, we end up being the epicentre of it all. One guy, Rob, has been trying to impress me for the last twenty minutes. He’s too pretty for my taste and he’s spouting off about knowing Martin Scorsese’s casting director.
‘I can see you playing a gangster’s moll in that dress,’ he says. ‘Those big green eyes. Real curves.’
I laugh. I’m a size 10, with tits and an arse, and the girl he’s abandoned at the bar talking to his mate is one of those girls you can count the vertebrae of through her silk shirt.
‘Are your eyes real?’ he says.
‘No, they’re mint imperials, I paint the irises on every morning to match my shoes,’ I say.
‘I like your brushwork,’ he says, smirking.
‘Your girlfriend’s getting pissed off,’ says Laura.
‘She’s with my mate,’ says Rob, fiddling with his watch. ‘Actually, do you girls want a drink? Two more margaritas?’ He heads to the bar. Before he’s even back there, his mate, who is less pretty and far more my type, heads towards us.
‘He doesn’t waste his time …’ says Laura.
I say nothing. I look at Rob’s friend and a rare but familiar feeling grabs me: something big is about to happen.
‘Why are you talking to Rob?’ he says to me, grinning. ‘You don’t fancy him.’
‘What business is it of yours?’ I say. ‘Do you fancy me?’
He looks at me for a heartbeat. ‘Yeah.’
‘Well, then you talk to me instead. What’s your name?’
‘James.’
‘James what?’
‘James Stephens.’
‘Like the poet.’
‘Ooh, a clever girl.’
‘I’m not,’ I say. ‘My granny has a poem of his she likes to quote.’
‘A love poem?’
‘Yeah, it’s about a man who throttles his over-attentive wife to death.’ He laughs.
‘I can tell you’re smart,’ he says. ‘And warm. It’s in your eyes. Don’t waste your time with Rob, waste it with me.’
So I did. I talked to him, danced a tango round the bar with him, sank three margaritas with him and at the end of the night gave him my number.
He calls when he says he will – the next day. Why do I feel so grateful for this? Because the world of dating has deigned this sort of behaviour too keen. ‘I want to see you again,’ he says.
‘Good.’
‘But I’m going away for a fortnight tomorrow.’
‘Oh.’
‘It’s work. I travel quite a bit.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘China.’
‘What do you actually do?’ I’d imagined he was a high-end builder or something to do with running a warehouse. He’s very masculine, hefty, a bit rough round the edges, and his shirt last night didn’t quite fit.
‘You’ll laugh,’ he says.
‘Are you an international clown?’
‘No. I sell socks.’
‘What, like in a shop?’
‘Sort of.’
‘Everybody needs socks,’ I say.
‘At least two pairs,’ he says. ‘I’m back in a fortnight, I’d like to take you for dinner.’
‘Great. I like dinner.’
‘But do you like to eat?’
‘Are you joking? It’s what I do.’
‘You’re not one of those girls who orders salad and just pushes it round the plate? You’re pretty skinny.’
‘You’ve got the wrong number.’ I have slender arms and a small waist. You can fool most of the people most of the time with this combo.
‘Good. I know the perfect place. I’ll call you in two weeks.’
I work in a twelve-storey shiny building in Soho. Up until six months ago, I had one of the greatest jobs in the world and one of the greatest bosses. I am a Pudding Developer for Fletchers, one of the biggest supermarkets in the country. I worked for a genius called Maggie Bainbridge. She never compromised on quality and had bigger balls than any of the men here.
Six months ago she quit after management fired a bunch of our top talent and brought in a grunt of accountants, intent on putting the bottom line above everything else. Even our loo roll has been downgraded to that tracing paper crap from the 80s that you have to fish out of a cardboard slit.
Maggie’s started up a one-woman brownie business, ‘Happy Tuesday’. Even though we speak often, I miss her, and daydream about running off to work with her again.
So, I still have a great job, but I no longer have a great boss. No. I have Devron.
Devron used to work for a supermarket that was chewed up and spat out by a large American supermarket. He was regional manager for London South East, which is a Big Deal in Retail. Apparently he was very good at driving up and down motorways in his BMW.
His sole qualification for being head of my department seems to be that he is fat, ergo he ‘knows food’. Devron would be happy eating every meal from a service station on the M4. He thinks he’s an alpha male, he’s actually an aggressive little gamma.
The first thing Devron did when he joined was to make us all switch desks. Wanting to make his mark, and attempting to convey his profound creativity he decided to arrange us alphabetically. I used to sit with ‘Hot Puddings’, ‘Family Treats’ and ‘Patisserie’. Makes sense – we share the same buyers, technical advisers and packaging team. We liaise constantly about pastries, sugar prices, trends in the Treat market – all elements that are pudding specific.
But now, because I do Cold Desserts, I sit between Lisa, who does ‘Cocina’ – our fake-a Mexicana range of variety nachos, and Eddie: Curry. Devron says ‘we can learn a lot from talking to our colleagues’. True. I have learnt that Lisa, Eddie and I all agree: Devron is a nob.
The only thing more moronic than splitting us up from the people we need constant contact with, is Devron’s introduction of ‘cross-discipline platform solutions’. He has dumped a marketing wang on our bank of desks: Ton of Fun Tom.
Tom always wants to show me some great viral on YouTube featuring a gorilla or a dancing mouse. Tom’s knowledge of marketing is like my knowledge of Chechen history: he knows three random facts and feels guilty about not knowing more. However, I do not try to bullshit my livelihood as a Chechen historian.
Laura has come for lunch at the Fletchers’ canteen en route to do a voice-over for a car insurance website who want her husky Yorkshire accent to add ‘honest northern values’ to their shonky brand. Laura only has to do two voice-over sessions a month to pay her mortgage, and spends the rest of her time helping her boyfriend Dave run his eBay business selling vintage magazines.
This week’s canteen theme is ‘Pre-Valentine’s Value’ and we have the choice of heart-shaped pork bites or asparagus pasties. Sounds better than the falafel Eddie ordered last month, within which lurked a dog’s tooth.
‘James sounds keen,’ says Laura.
‘D’you think?’ If he was that keen, he wouldn’t wait two weeks to call me.
‘He wouldn’t let go of you the other night. You were dancing for ages.’
I love dancing. My ex, Nick, an introvert, danced with me once in five years: quarter-heartedly, for thirty-eight seconds, at his best friend’s wedding, and only after I’d threatened to embarrass him by dancing on my own if he didn’t.
‘Bet his friend wasn’t pleased,’ says Laura.
‘Rob’s an arse,’ I say. ‘That girl with them was Rob’s fiancée!’
‘She’s stood there while he chats you up?’ I nod. ‘You’re going to have some fun double dating …’ says Laura.
‘Early days, love. He might meet some sock model in China and never call again.’
My mother phones from California. She lives in an apartment in Newport Beach, OC heartland, with her second husband Lenny, a retired orthodontist and professional doormat.
‘Have you spoken to your brother?’ she asks, saving the pleasantries for another time.
‘Why?’
‘It’s Shellii.’ Or ‘the-scrawny-tramp-who-is-bleeding-your-brother-dry-with-her-spirituality-crystals-and-Lee-Strasberg-acting-classes’.
‘What now?’
‘She’s bloody pregnant.’
‘That’s good news, isn’t it?’ It means you won’t harangue me to have children for at least another two years.
A heavy silence on the other end.
‘Mum, she’s not that bad.’ Shellii’s so much worse than ‘that bad’, but I never agree with my mother on point of principle.
‘Huh. What’s news with you? How’s the flat?’
‘The flat’s fine. I’m fine.’
‘Job going well?’
‘I’m heading up cold puddings.’
‘Good, well eat some. Your grandmother said you’re looking very thin.’ My mother speaks to her ex-mother-in-law twice a year and it seems their sole remaining common ground is my weight.
I am currently slim and mostly toned but by no means ‘thin’. I will never be ‘thin’ – the Kleins are big boned. But since I split up with Nick last summer, I have lost a stone and a half through exercise and taking proper care of myself. For the first time since I was twelve, I’m almost happy with my body, save for a few inches around my bottom.
My mother takes my weight loss as a personal slight. A rejection of body fat is a direct rejection of what unites our family and everything she stands for. Food equals love, too much food equals Jewish love. At weddings, my genetically freakish thin cousin is the subject of whispered snipes about anorexia and suspect parentage. My mother feeds Lenny three large meals and half a cake every day. She will feed that man to an early grave and then overfeed everyone at the shiva (think full on Irish wake, but with egg-mayo sandwiches instead of whiskies).
‘Lenny’s just walked in, I’ve got to start lunch.’
Two weeks later James calls from Beijing airport. ‘Remember me?’
‘Clown school’s out for summer?’
‘You should see what I can do with three chopsticks and a scorpion.’
‘Sounds painful. Anyway, how can I help you?’
‘Tell me when you’re free for some spaghetti.’
My favourite. ‘A week on Wednesday.’
‘Too far away. I want to see you before then.’
Then you should have called me before now. ‘Sorry.’
‘Seriously, what are you doing between now and then?’
‘All sorts. Wednesday week, then?’
‘Okay. I’ll call you nearer the time with a plan. Got to go, they’re calling my flight.’
Is an average brownie better than none at all?
This is not the same as asking if a taste of honey is worse than none at all. When Smokey Robinson sang that, we can assume the ‘honey’ in question was just fine.
No, this question goes to the heart of what separates people like my old boss Maggie Bainbridge from most people on the planet who simply like cake.
When I went for the interview at Fletchers two years ago, I received an email from Maggie a week in advance:
Please bring:
1) A cake you’ve baked from a recipe book
2) A supermarket pudding you rate highly
It was like being asked to cook for Michel Roux Jr. on Masterchef. After agonising for days, I decided to keep it simple and make a Claudia Roden orange and almond cake that my mother makes at Passover. The texture is fantastic -totally squidgy yet light. The flesh and zest of the orange offset the sweetness and give the cake a fragrance that makes you think you’re in a Moroccan souk, rather than a fluorescent lit office block round the corner from the most toxic kebab shop on Oxford Street.
Maggie took a bite and her brow furrowed. My first thought: Christ, I hope she doesn’t have a nut allergy. But then she went over to her immense bookshelf, picked up a volume and slowly nodded.
‘It’s based on the Roden,’ she said. ‘But the depth of flavour you’ve got is superior to the original … there’s a pinch of cinnamon in there, you’ve put in slightly less sugar than ground almonds, and you’ve used blood orange, which is quite clever.’
I realise later that ‘quite clever’, from Maggie Bainbridge is like winning a Michelin star.
‘And what did you buy on the high street?’
Maggie Bainbridge famously invented the molten middle caramel pudding. Many chefs claim to have invented this pudding, but Maggie actually did. So, even though it is my favourite shop-bought pudding, there’s no way I could bring it in – far too creepy. Instead, I found a pudding in Marks and Spencer involving cream cheese, mascarpone, raspberries and dark chocolate that I thought was amazing, and took that in.
She gives me a strange look when I take it out of my bag. Shit. Of course, I should have brought in a Fletchers pudding, utterly stupid of me.
‘Why did you pick this?’ she says, with surprise verging on irritation.
‘You said bring something that you really like … it’s four of my favourite ingredients, the texture is amazing, the sharpness and the creaminess work perfectly together, and the chocolate they’ve used is at least 70% cocoa solids….’
‘Do you know anyone in new product development at M&S?’ she asks, looking concerned.
No, I shake my head. I wish – I’d be going for a job there if I did!
‘Have you tried it?’ I ask. I feel I have upset her but I’m not sure why.
‘Yes.’
‘Do you like it?’ I ask.
‘Yes. It’s good. One last question.’
One last question! She hasn’t asked me any proper questions, and now she’s about to get rid of me. What a bitch….
‘Do you think that an average brownie is better than none at all?’
What? What sort of a question is that for an interview? Clearly this must be a trick. Is she just finding out if I’m greedy? Or if I genuinely love pudding, or what? I don’t know what she wants me to say, but all I can tell her is the truth. Well, not quite the truth – my honest answer would be ‘if you are stoned, absolutely’. But then if you are stoned, an average brownie is transformed into a superior brownie anyway.
My truth is this: I would rather not eat a brownie than eat an average brownie.
Not because of the calories.
Not because I’m a snob.
But because for me, brownies are sacred; where they’re concerned I don’t do half measures. In the same way that I couldn’t marry a man I didn’t love, or be in a relationship with someone I didn’t respect, or sleep with a man who wasn’t funny.
‘I’d rather have nothing,’ I say.
She looks at me with the merest hint of approval in her eyes.
‘That M&S pudding you brought in,’ she says. Oh no, what is it? I knew there was something wrong. ‘I created that. Freelance. Entirely against the terms of my contract here, but M&S are the best and I couldn’t stop myself. I tried to push through a similar one here last summer and couldn’t get it signed off. The reason I’m telling you this is because I know I can trust you, because I only ever employ people I can trust.’
And that is how I got my job and came to work for Maggie Bainbridge, the best boss in the world.
Now that Maggie is no longer my boss, I only get to see her every few months. She is busy with her new brownie empire and has a wide circle of friends. She’s a 51-year-old single woman, but it’s harder to get a date in her diary than a table at Rao’s.
She has invited me for dinner the night before my planned first date with James. I would really like to stay at home, eat light and sleep properly so I can look my best for tomorrow. But he still hasn’t called, so I don’t know if we’re on or not. Besides, if I don’t see Maggie tonight I won’t get in her diary for ages, so after work I walk over to her flat in Marylebone.
She opens the door in a well-worn apron and the smell of freshly baked bread and roast chicken wafts through to me like a Bisto ad.
‘My God! You’re practically anorexic!’ she says, holding on to my shoulders and examining me up and down before squeezing me close for a hug. Her grey hair smells of fried onions – it’s wonderful.
‘As if! Look at the size of my arse,’ I say, turning around and offering her a feel.
She pinches my bottom. ‘There’s nothing of you, crazy girl. Come and let me fatten you up.’
We sit down in her kitchen and start drinking. If I don’t drink I’ll be thinking about my phone not ringing all night. Even if I do drink I’ll still be on edge, but it’ll dull the focus a bit.
‘How’s that odious little rat doing?’ she asks, holding out a wooden spoon with a dark golden sauce on it. ‘Honey, soy, tamari, toasted sesame …’
‘Devron’s Devron,’ I say. ‘He’s talking about 20% cuts across the board but he’s just upgraded his car to a convertible, and he’s hanging his new suit jacket the wrong way round on his chair so we can all see it’s Prada.’
‘Is he still dating that poor cow?’
‘Mands, yes. It was her nineteenth birthday last weekend, he took her to The Grove, showed us all the picture of the freestanding bath in their suite. With her in it, wearing only bubbles …’
She shakes her head in disbelief. ‘And Eddie, Lisa?’
‘Eddie’s good, Lisa’s angry. The usual.’
Over dinner we talk about her business. She’s just signed a distribution deal with a chain of luxury boutique hotels – each night at turndown guests will find a box of her mini brownies, beautifully wrapped, left on their pillow.
‘How’s the man situation?’ she asks, handing me a bowl of warm ‘blondies’ – her new vanilla brownies that she’s trialling for the hotels. ‘Macadamia on the left, Vermont maple on the right.’
‘Actually, I’m so sorry but do you mind?’ I say, popping to the hall and fishing my phone from my bag. It’s been on silent and I’m convinced that my removal of it from eyeline and earshot will have elicited a call. I vowed I wouldn’t check till I was on the bus home, but lying to yourself is fine, right?
A flashing light!
Fuck. A text from Laura asking if he’s rung yet.
‘What’s wrong?’ says Maggie.
‘Nothing,’ I say, despondently. ‘Just waiting for a call.’ I explain the scenario, and call upon her greater wisdom of life and men: ‘When is he going to call?’
I still believe James will ring. But I fully object to him not having called by now. I am someone who books up my diary weeks in advance to the time and place of meeting. I often check the menu online in advance, as I like to have something very specific to look forward to. I’m not a control freak, I can do spontaneous as well as the best free spirit (sometimes), but I am uncomfortable with uncertainty, and this man is an unknown unknown.
She refills my wine glass. ‘He said definitely this Wednesday?’
‘Yes.’
‘And he called you from China to fix the date?’
I nod.
‘He’ll call. Some men don’t like nattering on the phone. If he doesn’t call, he’s an idiot.’
‘I want him to call tonight.’
‘Out of your control,’ she says, opening a second bottle of wine.
I still believe that willing something to happen can make it happen. I also believe that particular idea is insane. Isn’t that a sign of intelligence, holding two opposing thoughts at the same time, or is that just a sign of schizophrenia?
I wake at three in the morning to a blue light on my phone. A text message. Is James out, drunk? Is he cancelling?
It’s my friend Lee, on a business trip to New York, wanting to know the name of that Vietnamese sandwich bar near Washington Square I was raving about. I text back, turn off my phone and wake again at 5.30am, dehydrated and in a bad mood.
It’s 2.15pm. I’m sitting in a meeting with Ton of Fun Tom, talking about marketing my new products for spring. My phone is on the desk in front of me and I am increasingly anxious, irritable and pissy. To be fair, every meeting I have with Tom makes me feel like this, but today is worse than usual. If James can call me from China, why can’t he call me now that he’s back in town?
‘Sophie, these raspberry and cream trifles – what are they?’
‘They’re trifles, Tom. Clue’s in the name.’
‘Right, yeah, but how does it work?’
‘How does what work?’
‘The cream and stuff?’
‘Here’s the picture. Those small pink things on top are called ‘raspberries’, that creamy coloured layer is ‘cream’, and underneath is the raspberry and cream trifle.’
‘Oh, so like a fruit trifle but with raspberries.’
My phone starts ringing. My heart pauses. It’s him. ‘Sorry, I have to get this.’
I leap up and leave the meeting – rude, but Tom always fiddles with his apps when I’m talking, so now we’re quits.
‘It’s James. Are you still free for dinner?’
‘Sure.’ I can pretend to be cool for at least one phone call.
‘Great. It’s a little Italian place at the top of Archway Road, I’ve booked a table at 8pm. Do you mind if we meet there? I’ve got something in town beforehand.’
‘See you there at 8pm.’
I breathe a sigh of relief. He’s just one of those guys who doesn’t like nattering. I walk back into the meeting. ‘Cup of tea, Tom?’
‘You look happy,’ says Lisa, Lady of the Nachos, when I return to my desk. I daren’t tell Lisa the smile on my face is because of some guy. Lisa’s turning forty and in a ‘bad place’ right now. She hates her husband, ever since he ran off with their two-doors-down neighbour. She hates her new boyfriend, because he’s not her husband. She hates her estate agent after he inquired if she was a teacher because she wore flat shoes and no make-up when she viewed the one-bedroom flats in her area. And she hates Devron, because he’s asked her to look at making her nachos range ‘bigger, cheaper and lower in fat’. That’s a tough order with a cuisine based on sour cream, cheap ground mince, cheese and tortilla chips.
‘I’ve been thinking about your nacho problem,’ I say. ‘Tell Devron that if he cuts out the cheese, sour cream and mince he’ll save loads of cash and the fat barometer will go from 9.7 to below a 5.’
She grunts a laugh. ‘He’s already brainstormed names with Tom and come up with Nach-Lows, Nosh-os and Skinny Bandito,’ she says, grimacing. ‘I spent a year in South America researching chillies and look at me now. I’m going to kill myself,’ she says. She looks like she means it.
‘Cheer up, Lisa,’ says Eddie, who is our desk’s resident optimist. ‘At least he hasn’t asked you to rethink your entire range based on what his girlfriend likes.’
‘No way.’
‘Apparently Mandy thinks our Chicken Korma’s not a patch on Asda’s, and says our Madras tastes a bit spicy …’
Lisa rolls her eyes, grabs her fag packet and marches off.
If I’m meeting James at 8pm, I need two hours prep time which means ducking out of work early – doable if Devron is in one of his endless meetings or on the phone to his barely-legal girlfriend, and if Janelle is walking the floors. Janelle is Devron’s rottweiler PA. Devron’s swollen self-importance comes from the fact that he is Head of Food Development at the UK’s seventh largest supermarket. La-di-da. Janelle’s comes from the fact that she is ‘PA to the Head of Food Development at the UK’s seventh largest supermarket’. If you printed that on a t-shirt, she’d wear it at the weekends.
Janelle and I have had an uncomfortable relationship since my first week here, when I saved a status report in a more logical place on the shared drive than:
S:/a4/janellestott/general/dayfiles/2010/js/Qzgg67/4/ac/dc/Y-me
By creating: S:/status reports, I have created a nemesis for life.
Janelle thinks I am disobedient. I think ‘I don’t care what you think,’ and we chafe against each other like an extra-small belt on a woman who likes custard and cream with her apple crumble. (No prizes for guessing who is who in that metaphor.)
I’m in luck – neither of them is visible and I bolt out the door and jump in a cab home.
Home is a mansion block in Little Venice: misleading. When I hear mansion, I think Krystle Carrington’s sweeping staircase, not a one-bedroom, fifth floor flat with no lift. And Little Venice is pushing it – more like Little A40, within a Tango can’s throw of the Westway. Still, Little’s accurate. And if I walk out of my flat and turn left I can be at Regent’s Canal in two minutes, and at Baker and Spice eating a blueberry muffin in three and a half.
I take the stairs two at a time – work to do! I dump my bag on top of my mail on the doormat and head straight for the bathroom, disrobing en route. I’m the lowest maintenance girlfriend on the planet after six months, but a first date is a first date and I have waited three weeks to see this man; I am going to look my absolute best.
My long brown hair is naturally curly. No one but Laura and my immediate family have seen me with curly hair since I was fourteen and no one ever will and live to write about it. When I blow-dry it carefully it takes an hour. Today: seventy minutes. Make up is light and for once I don’t cut myself shaving my legs.
To the bedroom: it takes me seven minutes just to find tights that don’t have a ladder below the knee. I find one of the holy un-holey pairs, and ferret out my best four-inch black heels from the bottom of my wardrobe. One day I’m going to be the type of woman with Polaroids on the front of her shoeboxes. Probably the same day I win the Nobel for Services to Custard.
My dress is fantastic – clingy and low on top, flirty and loose from the waist, in a deep purple that makes my eyes look very green. £40 from Topshop and it passes for Roland Mouret. I’d never normally think it, let alone say it, but I leave the flat looking great. Well, I look great, the flat looks like I’ve been burgled – twelve pairs of tights decorating the bedroom floor and my work clothes strewn down the hallway. Ben, the caretaker in my block, double takes and wolf whistles as he helps me into my minicab.
I’m insanely nervous and hopeful and excited. I haven’t been this excited about a man since I met Nick five years ago. I try not to think about Nick and instead pick up the phone to call Laura, my dating guru, the happiest person I know. She and Dave have been together a decade and yet they look at each other like they’re on a fourth date.
‘I’m on my way,’ I say.
‘Relax. Be happy, keep it light, don’t talk about Nick. Just remember, you are exceptional and smart and gorgeous and funny and any man would be lucky to have you.’ I nod. I believe at least half this sentence.
‘What if I don’t fancy him? It’s been so long I can’t remember what he looks like.’ Other than that he’s manly and his eyes have a deviant twinkle.
‘If nothing else it’s a free dinner.’
No such thing, as even the biggest fool knows.
My cab pulls up outside the restaurant a perfect ten minutes late. I see James through the glass looking slightly panicked that he’s going to be stood up, but when I walk in, his eyes open wide and his whole face lights up.
‘Remember me?’ I say.
‘You’re even better than I remember,’ he grins.
So is he. Thick brown hair with just a smattering of grey, blue eyes, a large Roman nose. Tall and broad, with a stomach that he wears well. I love big men; I love big noses. He must drink a lot of water, his skin is amazing – he looks late thirties, tops. Not a hint of hair product or jewellery or any of the metrosexual accoutrements that adorn modern girly-boys. As he stands to kiss me, he rests a firm hand on my back. There is such confidence in his gesture – a mix of strength and gentleness – that I feel myself start to blush.
‘I’ve never noticed this place before,’ I say, taking a seat and trying to stay cool as he pours me a glass of red wine. From the outside it looks like nothing special but inside it’s cosy and romantic: dark oak tables, simple silver cutlery, half-burned candles, warm grey walls. Every table is full.
‘An Italian friend introduced me to it.’ I wonder fleetingly if the friend was female.
‘So how’s your friend Rob?’ I say.
‘Sends his love! He got an earful from Lena that night.’
‘He shouldn’t flirt with other women in front of her,’ I say.
‘Rob’s a dog. A feisty girl like you wouldn’t put up with that, would you?’
‘Don’t try finding out.’
‘Not my style – I’m too forgetful to be a love-rat. Always better to be honest.’
‘So if your memory was better you’d be Tiger Woods?’
He shakes his head. ‘I’m a one-woman man. I never lie.’
My mother’s voice pops into my head telling my anxious 7-year-old self, ‘An axe murderer doesn’t have axe murderer written on his forehead’.
‘How was your day?’ I ask, taking a sip of wine.
‘Good,’ he says.
‘What did you do?’
‘Had a few meetings about a new project, then had a set-to with Camden Council …’
‘Been dodging your council tax?’ I say.
He laughs. ‘No. I’m advising them on a clothing re cycling website for schools.’
‘Sounds interesting.’ And quite worthy. I hadn’t pegged him as a leftie.
‘They’re using a panel of industry advisors – I’m helping on the digital architecture side.’
‘And how come they picked you, are you really Green?’
He laughs. ‘No. I live in Camden, my background’s in clothing and online. And I don’t mean to sound arrogant, but I’m good at what I do …’
He doesn’t sound arrogant, just extremely confident. ‘And what was the row, are you arguing about your fee?’
‘Fee?’ he sounds surprised. ‘They’re not paying. No, I think they should take a more aggressive approach, be more ambitious: sell space on the site to other green brands. It all feeds back into the budget and that means lower taxes.’
‘Ah, so you are trying to get out of paying your council tax!’
‘Good point! Smart woman.’ He grins and hands me the menu. ‘What are we eating?’
‘It all sounds delicious … pappardelle with lamb ragu and rosemary, or steak – I do love rosemary …’
‘I was thinking tortellini or steak. The pasta here is great …’
‘I’ll have pasta,’ I say. He looks at me intently and smiles.
‘Me too. And something healthy on the side … let’s see …’
Call me shallow but I think I fell for James Stephens when he ordered the steak as our side dish.
We are a game of snap.
We both love chips with 2 parts ketchup: 1 part mayo, and think brown sauce is the devil’s own condiment.
We both hated our fifth-year maths teachers, and were the second naughtiest in class.
We both only recycle what’s easy to recycle, and think the idea of compost in your kitchen is a bridge too far.
We both have one parent who selfishly died on us before we hit puberty, and one parent who remarried and moved abroad (Victor Stephens, Switzerland/Ruth Klein, California.)
We both suspect Ricky Gervais will never do anything as funny as The Office ever again, and that he’s probably just like David Brent in real life.
We both have a 39-year-old brother (Edward/Josh) who was/is our mother’s favourite, who we see once a year, and who is a reformed playboy, lives in a hot country (Singapore/America) and drives a Porsche (red/navy). Snap x 6.
We both believe that drink drivers who kill should get life, and never be allowed behind the wheel again.
We both feel that getting married in one’s twenties usually doesn’t work out, and that we both know ourselves pretty well by now.
We both think the greatest pleasure in life is to eat and drink slightly too much and then have a little lie down.
We are both narcissists and agree that our evening has been exciting, and that the person sitting opposite us is deeply alluring and fun and we would like to see them again, very soon.
My friend Pete and I are at his local cinema, sitting in overpriced armchairs waiting for a Norwegian vampire movie to start. Having checked the coast is clear, I remove the family pack of Revels I’ve smuggled in under my jacket. I’ve paid £14 for this seat, if they think I’m paying another £6 for their Valrhona chocolate buttons they can think again.
Pete is a serial commitment-phobe. When we were fifteen, Pete and I had a heated dry-hump on the floor of David Marks’s parents’ guest bathroom. Pete has never gotten over the fact that I wouldn’t let him touch me up when I’d allowed David Marks a brief foray the previous summer, and in a tiny part of Pete’s still-teenage mind I am The One That Got Away. If this were a rom-com movie, I’d be played by Kate Hudson and Pete would be played by someone appropriately dreamy and thick-looking – Ryan Reynolds, perhaps – and we’d end up together. That is not how this story ends.
‘Did you kiss him?’ Pete always wants full details of my scant sex life, which is nowhere near as prolific, athletic or incessant as his. Pete’s phone is full of picture-messages from various twenty-something actresses and stylists gazing over their own naked shoulders at their bottoms reflected in Venetian mirrors. These photos make me feel depressed and prudish and make Pete feel moderately aroused and then bored.
‘Briefly, as he put me in a taxi.’
‘Old fashioned!’
‘Old full stop. Did I tell you he’s forty-five? He doesn’t look it or act it. He has way more energy than me.’ I have never dated anyone this much older. One of my few memories of my father was blowing out the candles with him on his forty-fifth birthday cake, when I was six. Forty-five is properly grown up. It is dad aged. Yet James radiates vitality – he is a man in the prime of his life. His expression seems to say ‘I am going where the good times are.’ I want to go with him.
‘You’d like him, Pete. You should meet him.’ If he sticks around. ‘How’s your love life?’
Pete shrugs. ‘I’m seeing one of the PR girls at work, I’m not sure about her …’
‘What is it this time?’
‘Don’t know. She’s gorgeous but she’s a bit … she’s never heard of Bladerunner.’
‘How old is she?’
‘Twenty-two.’
‘Try dating someone your own age. Or IQ.’
‘Why would I want to do either of those things?’ he says, smiling as he shoves a handful of contraband Revels into his mouth as the trailers start.
James and I are three lightning hours in to our second date, stretching out our meal, the last ones in the restaurant. We are in Curry Paradise, my local, my treat. The manager is hovering, the waiter is hoovering. I wish we’d met earlier; I don’t want to go home. I want to keep talking, and keep looking at the way this man smiles at me when I do, with pure delight in his eyes.
‘So, how on earth is a girl like you single, Sophie Klein?’
I’ve made bad choices. I’ve been unlucky. Because it’s really hard out there.
‘I don’t know.’ I say. ‘Why are you single, James Stephens?’
Tall. Charismatic. Good at your job. Such a thick head of hair. Manly: strong features – strong nose, strong jaw. That look in his eye that says ‘take it or leave it, but you’d be better off taking it’. Why has no one snapped this man up in the last twenty years?
He shrugs quickly. ‘Just haven’t met the right person yet.’
‘You’re not secretly married, are you?’
He chuckles and his hand comes up and rubs his cheek. ‘No.’
In poker that would be a tell. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Quite sure,’ he laughs, but his fingers pause briefly near his mouth.
‘Ever been engaged?’
He picks up his beer and takes a long sip, then nods slowly.
‘Who to?’
‘A girl called Lacey Macbride.’
Ironic. ‘How long ago was that?’
‘I was nineteen. She grew up round the corner from me in Wanstead. My first true love. Broke my heart, the Jezebel,’ he laughs.
‘What happened?’
He shrugs and picks up his glass again. I imagine classic childhood sweetheart territory.
‘Any other ex-fiancées knocking about?’
A tiny flicker of discomfort passes through his expression. He nods very slowly. ‘Celine.’
‘Engaged to her as well? How many ex-fiancées do you have?’
‘Just the pair, don’t need a hat-trick,’ he says.
Better than two ex-wives, I suppose.
‘Long relationship?’
‘Three years. Can you pass the spinach?’ He smiles softly, trying to change the subject.
‘How long ago did you split up?’
‘Four years.’
Okay. Definitely beyond statute of limitations for a rebound.
‘Are you on good terms?’ Are you still in love with her?
He pours us both more beer, filling his glass almost to the rim. ‘She went back to Paris, married an Argie. She’s a Wolford model….’ He turns to the waiter, ‘Could we get two more beers, please?’
‘Wolford tights?’
‘And stockings …’
The news that his long-term ex is a French hosiery model has put me right off my chicken balti. I put my fork down.
‘Why do girls always have a problem with that?’ he says, his face crinkling in confusion. I don’t like that word ‘always’.
‘I don’t. It’s just … a man who dates models is … a certain type.’ The type who likes women with abnormally tall, slim bodies. Not my type. Mind you, he’s the type taking me out to dinner.
‘Celine was lovely but totally insecure. Anyway, I’m over beautiful women, they’re all mad.’ He grins, but I do not like those sentences at all. ‘I’m looking for a soul mate. A woman I can talk to.’ That’s a bit better. ‘A wife,’ he says, fixing me with an intense look. His pale blue shirt is making his eyes a deeper blue than usual tonight. I catch myself staring.
‘Tell me something else,’ I say, picking up my fork.
‘What do you want to know?’
Why you’d mention that your ex is a leg model? Was that information strictly necessary?
And how a sock-seller procures that type of trophy girlfriend anyway?
Maybe her legs were perfect but she had a face like a monkfish. I make a note to google her.
‘His ex is a leg model,’ I say to Laura. I’m treating her to an Ottolenghi brunch near her flat in Islington to celebrate my forthcoming end-of-fiscal £100 bonus. When I say treating her, I mean I have already eaten my egg and bacon pie, and have started on her blueberry ricotta pancakes before she’s even halfway through.
‘So?’
‘Well … her figure must be perfect.’
She tuts. ‘You are one of the best women I have ever met, and I don’t give a flying fuck who’s got a perfect body and who hasn’t. It’s not like he’s perfect looking …’
I know Laura didn’t warm to him the night we met him – she thought he was overly confident and slightly shifty. She has some random psychological theory that this actually masks some deep fear within himself.
I do trust her instincts, she is invariably on the nail; however, in this instance, she is being overly protective of me. She spoke to James for all of ten minutes. I know if she spent any time with him, she’d like him.
‘I suppose models are usually quite vain, aren’t they …’ I say, pondering whether to order the pecan praline Danish, then imagining Celine’s thighs, and ordering a sparkling water instead.
‘Are you kidding? Do you not remember Washington Avenue, New Year’s Eve, 1993? Ladies and gentleman, we bring you Ericc and Thor …’
I throw my head back with laughter. How could I ever forget? Laura and I had spent the night with two male models we’d met in a bar Mickey Rourke used to own. We were so overexcitable, having been introduced to Mickey Rourke by some ageing gallery owner who was lusting after our 18-year-old flesh, that we’d been swept like a wave into The Miami Beach Fashion Awards.
‘Ericc with two ‘c’s. God, he was so ridiculously chiselled. That was the most boring eight minutes of my life,’ I say, remembering his pillow talk, detailing his awesome nutritional supplements: chromium picolinate – super-awesome, apparently.
‘I rest my case,’ says Laura.
At the end of our last date James said ‘I’ll be in touch.’
That was six days ago: no call, no text. I’m scared it’s because I kissed him for a full twenty minutes outside the curry house, and maybe he thought that was tacky or overly eager. Or perhaps it’s because I made that silly comment about him dating models, which made me look insecure and jealous.
Hmm, time to make myself feel more insecure and jealous. Excellent idea.
I google image search for ‘Celine’ ‘Wolford’ ‘model’ ‘French’ ‘leg’ and immediately come up with over 700 photos of her. In none of them does she remotely resemble a monkfish.
I know I should stop myself right now. She’s married. What difference if she’s beautiful or not anyway? He is dating me.
Okay, I click on the first image. Relief. Dark blond hair, brown eyes, generic Disney features, looks like she eats a lot of yoghurt and apples. Swiss looking. Maybe she’s from the Alps. Second photo, a close up. Even though she’s smiling, she looks fearful, like she’s just found out her currency’s in free fall. Third photo, taken last year at the Cannes Film Festival. That must be the Argie husband. He’s corpulent. Mid-fifties. Oligarch-y. She is Botoxed to the hilt, skeletal, clutching his arm with a jewelled hand.
It’s not until the fourth photo that I see her in suspenders and a thong and start to feel in any way envious.
Her legs are perfect, long, shapely, amazing. Of course they are. She owns two Wolford legs. That’s her job. I decide it’s high time I get back to my job.
I go to the C-drive and click on the kitchen sample report for my latest trifles.
Besides. She’s married now. And not to James.
Ah, good: thicker, more even deposit of custards with 38% stabilised whipping cream …
And just because her legs are amazing doesn’t mean she’s smart or kind or funny.
Let’s see … uneven almond spread rectified, shelf life now at seven days … Devron will like that …
Just because her legs are amazing doesn’t mean she isn’t also smart and kind and funny.
Get a grip – he’ll call. And if he doesn’t? So be it. They are not together; she is irrelevant. He is dating you. Or is he …?
I’m going to call him because if he likes me it won’t matter, and if he doesn’t, it’ll expedite the ending of the relationship. I don’t want this loop of crap in my head; I have a big Phase 4 meeting in two days that I need to prepare for. Call him: then it’s done, either way.
I dial his number before the sensible voice can stop me. It’s a foreign ring tone. I hang up immediately.
He hadn’t mentioned he’d be going away. Why not? He’s flown to Paris! The Alps!
Enough. I delete James’s number from my phone and from my dialled list. I am not going to do this to myself. Nick called me at least once a day from the first day we met. He loved me and he could show it. He never made me feel insecure, not once. Bored, enraged, despairing, sure. But insecure? Never.
If James Stephens wants me, he’s going to have to make a lot more effort.
The average human touches their nose dozens of times a day. In this sole regard, Devron is a well-above-average human. He touches his nose at least three times a minute. Sometimes he gives it little tugs and pinches. Sometimes he fiddles with the end and you can tell he’s trying to fish something out surreptitiously. Sometimes he holds, squeezes, sniffs loudly and wipes his hands on his trousers. Eddie and I always play ‘Devron Nose Bingo’ – whoever is the first to observe twenty nose manoeuvres in any given meeting and whisper ‘wanker’, wins a luxury hot chocolate from the canteen.
The worst ever time that Devron touches his nose though, is in a Phase 4 meeting.
A Phase 4 meeting is the final stage in taking a new range to market. Phases 1 to 3 involve briefing suppliers, tasting initial product ideas, doing shelf life, transport and safety tests, and evolving the products accordingly.
Phase 4 meetings are the reason why I will never leave this job voluntarily – you’ll have to cart me away in a straitjacket.
At a Phase 4, you basically sit around like a bunch of Roman emperors dressed in Next suits instead of togas, and eat the entire range – whether that’s 12 fools and 8 trifles, like my meeting today, or Eddie’s meeting last week where I sampled 23 different curries in an hour. Of course, you don’t eat the whole dish – you just take a bite, and the majority of people ‘spit in the cup’. Yup, they gob out their food in a paper cup, like a Bulimics Anonymous Christmas party.
I never ever ‘spit in the cup’. It’s not about etiquette. Many women, and even some men, manage to spit quite discreetly, so you barely notice the person next to you opening their mouth to eject a half-chewed lump of naan bread. No, I refuse to ‘spit in the cup’ because I think it’s cheating. Any food that goes in my mouth goes in my stomach. Admittedly, I also see it as a badge of honour – there were six men and four women at Eddie’s Phase 4, and I was the only one to make it through all 23 curries without spitting. It’s just as well I only go to the Phase 4s that are mine, Lisa’s or Eddie’s, and that I walk in to work every day.
The official rules of a Phase 4 are as follows:
you change forks with every dish you taste
you don’t double-dip your fork in a communal dish
you pretend you’re only eating as a duty, not getting real pleasure from the food, for fear you’ll be taxed on it as a perk
Devron ignores all three rules and invariably digs in to the food with the hand that has just been inside his nasal cavity.
Whenever I’m arranging a Phase 4, I make sure to order two of everything – one for Devron and one for everyone else. However, this rarely stops Devron sitting in front of two identical cherry pies, flitting between the two with his sucked fingers. Fingers/nose/fingers/nose. Once Devron has touched a pudding I can’t eat that pudding, even if I try eating it from the other side. I just can’t. I’m pretty sure one day I’ll flip and pie Devron in the face, or ram a churro up his nose and kill him.
Today I pop down to the fridge to fetch the samples my supplier, Appletree, has sent in. I love working with my contact there, Will Slater, not least because he always sends me down a box of custard-filled éclairs he’s had the head chef make specially.
Zoe, our fridge manager, tells me I’m looking a bit skinny, she prefers me with curves. If I ever decide to date a woman it will be Zoe. She has Pantene hair, great Patti Smith t-shirts and a super-fast wit, and above all else, she has an even better job than I do: FRIDGE MANAGER.
This is not just any fridge. This is a fridge the size of a WHSmiths at a major railway station. If it wasn’t quite so cold I would seriously think about living in this fridge. Rows upon rows of shelves, floor to ceiling, stacked with samples of everything we sell and everything we’re thinking about selling, and everything our competitors sell. Zoe calls it ‘Paradise Frost’. I can never think of anything funny that rhymes with fridge in response.
And then there’s the freezer! While I daydream about moving in to the work fridge, I have nightmares about being locked in the work freezer. Our fifteen ice cream variants would only keep me diverted for the first hour or so, and then the thought of a slow icy death with nothing to eat but Coated Protein (that’s fish fingers to you) – death, there is thy sting.
‘Zoe, I can see the fools, but where are the trifles? Zoe?’ I walk through the fridge and back out, and find Zoe deep in the freezer, headphones on, sorting through a stack of giant frozen turkeys.
‘Huh?’
‘Didn’t Appletree send in the trifles and fools on the same courier?’
‘New system … Div-ron’s making us file by packaging colour …’
‘What?’
‘Ridiculous, worse than organising your books by colour …’
‘No, that is really bloody ridiculous. They’re all in different colours according to the fruit.’
‘Don’t worry, babe, I’ve got you covered. Aisle G, shelf 3 on the left – your éclairs are there too. He’s checking in on me this week, but as soon as he gets bored I’ll switch back … man, he is one giant fucking dickhead …’
I load two of every pudding into a giant orange crate and schlep it round to Tasting Room 12.
There’s only three of us attending today – Devron, Ton of Fun Tom and me. I lay sixty spoons, a stack of paper plates, and three glasses of water, then arrange the fools and trifles in the most ramshackle, non-colour co-ordinated order I can think of.
I wait for Devron and Tom to arrive. It’s quarter past, they’re late … Neither of them answers their phone. At half past, I head back up to my desk and find Devron and Janelle laughing at a website that features a selection of goats wearing jumpers.
‘Are you coming to the Phase 4, Devron?’ I say.
Janelle intercepts. ‘I had to move it to next month, I just sent you an email a minute ago.’
‘There’s twenty products that need sign off today, launch date is May,’ I say.
‘Sophie, I’m sure you can push back on suppliers, we give them enough business,’ says Devron impatiently.
‘Fine.’ I go back to the fridge and call up my friends from various departments and tell them to come to Room 12, immediately. Zoe puts the kettle on and six of us eat fruit trifles, chocolate trifles and eight types of fool and take it in turns to do impressions of Devron at the point of orgasm with a frozen turkey.
Afterwards, I return to my desk and a flashing light on my phone. A text message. From James!
‘What are you doing tomorrow?’ Ah, the relief.
I know I should be cooler – he’s left it till Thursday afternoon to ask me out for a Friday night – but I believe in momentum and if I don’t see him soon, I fear I’m going to lose it.
We agree to meet at the Dean Street Townhouse at 9pm. It occurs to me that I have no idea what country he’s texting from.
I wonder if he’d have contacted me if I hadn’t called him.
What does that matter now?
On Friday, I run out of the door at 5.54pm. I’m sure I see Janelle make a note of this in her Book of Snitch. I consider waiting for the bus. I have only three hours’ turnaround time before I’m due back in Soho and an über-emergency-face-and-body-makeover to perform. On Tottenham Court Road I hail a cab, even though I really can’t afford it.
Last night I did as much of the home makeover as I could bear to. I washed my sheets, hoovered for the first time in a fortnight, dried the sheets, and attempted to tidy the piles of recipes, post-it notes and newspapers that adorn any horizontal space in my flat.
I then tried to re-arrange my bathroom products to convey the fact that I am a natural beauty who doesn’t sweat or have body hair: hide all make-up, my razor and deodorant, bring out the cheapest, simplest £3 Superdrug moisturiser (it’s very good, actually).
I am not a total sloven, just messy. My bathroom is always clean, and my kitchen is spotless. I love to cook, and this kitchen brings me more joy than any other room in the flat. Although it’s only Ikea, it’s fairly gorgeous. White units, a grey worktop, a pale yellow glass splashback. The only thing I did in the kitchen last night was pop the bottle of beautiful white wine that Maggie Bainbridge gave me for Christmas into the fridge, just in case.
It’s 6.24pm. Two hours and twenty before I have to leave the house to meet him. I perform all ablutions as carefully as possible but I’m in such a panic that I cut my leg shaving. This happens to me about once every three shaves. I’m clumsy and impatient, but I have the added bonus of having Factor XI deficiency, a harmless but irritating disorder I inherited from my dad that means when I bleed, I take a while to stop bleeding. I once cut myself shaving before I had to get on the Eurostar to Paris for a choux pastry seminar and by the time I got to the Champs Elysees, I had a shoe full of blood. Pas très chic.
It will bleed for at least twenty minutes now, but I don’t have time to sit with my leg up and wait for it to stop, so I end up Sellotaping a wodge of toilet paper to my ankle while I go about drying my hair, flossing, and moisturising.
7.59pm, I remove my makeshift tourniquet and my ankle proceeds to drip blood like a slow-leaking tap. I was planning on wearing tights anyway – it’s freezing out – but I can’t just put them over the wound. I settle for two giant plasters and take a spare pair of tights in my handbag – I’ll have to pop to the loo in the restaurant as soon as I get there and change these, and clean up the blood stains from my foot … sexy stuff.
I put on my soft, slinky Topshop black dress and notice with a hiccup of delight that it has never been this loose on me. Final touches of make-up, perfume, a spritz of fig room spray in the hall, and I’m off.
James is sitting nursing a gin and tonic, chatting to the barman, when I walk in. He grins when he sees me and the barman gives me the once-over too. I have made an effort – high heels, earrings, the hair is behaving well. Or maybe the barman checks me out because there aren’t that many younger women in here – the clientele seems to be 60% gay men, and the rest are middle-aged fashion and media types sporting faux spectacles, frowns and unseasonal tans.
‘Have a drink,’ says James, handing me the cocktail list.
‘I don’t need that, I’ll have an Old Fashioned please, Maker’s Mark,’ I say to the barman, who winks his approval.
James immediately rests his hand on my knee. ‘A girl who knows what she wants.’
‘Well, it took me years of research in the field, but I finally found a drink that I love.’
‘And you never drink other cocktails?’
‘Sometimes. But an Old Fashioned has all the qualities I look for in my booze. Not too sweet, the right size, pretty hard for a barman to mess up….’
‘And what about men, what qualities do you look for in a man?’
I stop myself saying ‘not too sweet, the right size, pretty hard …’ -it’ll sound cheap. Instead I run through the essential criteria that twenty years of dating has reduced me to:
Kind
Funny
Clean
Not mentally ill
Tall, big nosed, and a thick head of hair is a bonus. James appears to tick most of these boxes so far (you can’t judge mentally ill after just two dates). If I say anything on this list, I’ll look too keen.
‘I’m looking for a grown-up,’ I say.
He makes to get up from the bar and leave.
‘And someone thoughtful. What about you?’ I say.
‘I’m looking for someone warm and smart. Feisty. Reasonably attractive …’ he grins.
I wonder if his definition of ‘reasonably attractive’ can encompass a woman with a few stretch marks and a light smattering of cellulite.
‘Would you go out with Nigella?’ I say. Such a good test of a man’s shallowness – can he appreciate a gorgeous woman with a real body.
‘Far too old for me!’ he says.
‘She’s near enough your age, you cheeky git!’
He shrugs.
‘Don’t you think she’s beautiful?’ I say.
‘She’s nice looking. Anyway, looks aren’t everything.’
The maître d’ beckons us over, and as we stand, James reaches under his bar stool and presents me with a bag.
‘I got you something,’ he says.
‘Really?’ I say, shocked. Inside the bag is a large bottle of Aromatherapy Associates Rosemary Bath Oil that he must have bought me in Duty Free, wherever he has been.
‘I know you like rosemary,’ he says. I do? ‘The pasta you ordered at the Italian …’
Bless him, I love the taste of rosemary but I don’t want to smell like a roast lamb. Still, extremely thoughtful and sweet of him.
‘That’s lovely of you, James Stephens. Thank you.’ I kiss him briefly on the mouth and feel his eyes on the back of me as I walk to the ladies’ room to check whether my ankle has stopped bleeding.
The ankle is fine, but I change tights anyway as I have to take off the old ones to dab a slight blood stain on my foot.
When I return five minutes later, there is a bottle of decent red on the table.
‘One of the chefs at work was telling me that this place is famous for its mince and potatoes,’ I say, looking at the menu.
‘I knew you’d be a good woman to go out with,’ he says, ‘I can’t stand girls who don’t eat.’ Men always say this. It is often bullshit and means ‘I can’t stand girls who don’t eat but neither can I stand girls who show signs of having eaten’. It is invariably the same men who say ‘I like girls who look natural’, but actually mean girls who only wear foundation, cover up, pressed powder, blush, a bit of eye pencil and a lot of mascara.
‘Oh, and save room for The Queen of Puddings, it’s meant to be amazing.’
‘Queen of Puddings, isn’t that your job?’ he says, smiling.
‘I wish, I’m only a junior developer,’ I say.
‘Still, it sounds great. I think it’s brilliant what you do for a living … Queen of Puddings. So you just sit around stuffing your face with cake all day, do you?’
‘There’s a little more to it than that. You have to think of new concepts, follow market trends, brief suppliers, work out if a product’s manageable in budget, there’s all the microbiotics, health and safety, shelf life, packaging, travel testing …’
‘So you do, you basically get paid to eat cake,’ he clinks his glass against mine in congratulation.
‘Sometimes I bake cakes all day …’
‘You cook at work?’
‘Great job, huh?’ I say.
‘Is that why you don’t paint your nails?’ He makes it sound like I have half a finger missing that he’s been too polite to ask about, but has been dying to know the story behind – did a squirrel bite it off?
‘No,’ I say, tucking my hands away on to my lap. ‘I’m just not always a full hair and make-up kind of girl. I don’t have the time. Why, do you like painted fingernails?’
‘A little red nail polish never goes amiss …’ he says.
‘You really did have your teenage sexual awakening in the 80s,’ I say, shaking my head.
He laughs and fills my glass, then rests his hands on the table. My hands spontaneously float up from my lap to be beside his.
‘God, you don’t see many women out like that anymore,’ says James, as a six-foot, heavily made-up twenty-something in a full-length fur walks in, flanked by a tubby man of around fifty.
‘Bimbos with sugar daddies? London’s full of them!’
‘No, I mean the coat. That’s Russian sable!’ he says admiringly.
‘– I think it’s a bit tacky,’ I say.
‘The coat?’
‘No, them – he looks like he’s paying her by the hour. – How do you know it’s a Russian sable?’
‘The bluish tinge. Do you know that the mating ritual of the Russian sable can last up to eight hours?’ he says, leaning forward, a huge smile breaking across his face.
‘Sounds like Sting … anyway, how do you know all this?’
‘My grandfather was a furrier – Stephanikov Furs, in the East End. Do you like fur?’
‘I don’t like the thought of animals being hurt just for my benefit, but then I eat meat, so … No, I don’t have a problem with fur, not vintage anyway. Sorry, does that make me mean, horrible and heartless?’
‘No, just asking.’
‘Well, if there are any mink jackets lying round your garage that you need a good home for …’
He laughs and orders a couple of vodka shots.
‘Are you trying to get me drunk, Mr Stephens?’ I say.
He raises an eyebrow and grins. ‘So, what’s the best pudding in the world?’ he says.
‘Hot pudding, cold pudding, cake, tart, fool, mousse, flan, trifle – define your terms, please.’
‘Cake,’ he says.
‘Number one: a Jean Clement praline millefeuille, you can only get them in Paris. Number two: my mother’s chocolate and raspberry cream cheesecake – only available in California, and when my mother is in a good mood. And three: Ottolenghi’s apple and sultana cake – Upper Street, any day of the week.’
He beams back at me. ‘You’re not like anyone else I’ve ever dated,’ he says.
‘Why?’ I say.
He shrugs.
‘In a good way?’ I say.
He nods. I feel a little flutter in my chest.
‘What do you actually do, anyway? I mean, I know you sell socks, but very specifically what do you do?’
‘Okay, where do you buy your socks?’
‘M&S.’
‘Why?’
‘Good quality.’
‘Why else?’
‘The right amount of stretch.’
‘Why else?’
‘No other reason. I’m not that into socks. Sorry.’
‘Never apologise. What about tights?’
‘M&S, same reasons. Do you sell tights too?’ I hope so. I could do with a man who could keep me in tights, the rate I’m going through them tonight …
‘Just socks for now but I’m starting something new in legwear this summer. Another bottle of red?’ He smiles at me and I can’t help but beam back.
The main course arrives. I realise he still hasn’t told me exactly what he does. This man could be a drug dealer or a pimp for all I know – he has the hustle to be either – but I don’t care because whatever he is, I am bewitched.
We stumble out onto Dean Street to hail a cab. It is freezing and he tucks me inside his coat with him. ‘Come here, you tiny thing.’
On the corner of an alley is a tramp of about sixty. A pink tiara rests on her patchy orange hair. She is wearing a sheepskin coat, a velvet sailor suit that stops mid-calf, and house slippers. When she sees James she points at him and shouts ‘Jackie Boy, you’re a useless cont,’ in a thick Ulster accent.
‘Another one of your ex-fiancées?’ I say, giggling.
He tries not to smile. ‘I told you all beautiful women are mad.’
‘Yeah, well, maybe guys like you make them mad.’
‘Nah, it’s just the way you’re built. Speaking of which, come here.’
I’m already inside his coat with him but he puts both arms around me and kisses me. We stay like this until the tramp lurches towards us and asks James for some change. I expect him to fob her off like the Tory-boy I suspect he really is, but instead he reaches into his wallet and hands her a £20 note. ‘Buy yourself something to eat, please?’ he says.
I’m more amazed than she is.
‘What?’ he says.
‘Nothing. Generous, that’s all.’
He shrugs. ‘Always been a sucker for a well-turned ankle.’ He laughs and grabs my hand and we walk up to Oxford Street to find a taxi.
‘So, how was the morning after?’ says Laura, when I call her back the following afternoon.
‘Great! We had a fry-up in bed, read the papers, then he left to go to White Hart Lane with Rob,’ I say, surveying the mess of pans, wine glasses and crumbs in my kitchen.
‘And the night before?’
I blush remembering it. We had sex. We had quite a lot of sex, all of it good.
I once dated a gorgeous Italian Jewish lawyer who was tall, funny, kind and spoke five languages. The first (and last) time we slept together, it came to light that he had a rare psychosomatic sexual disorder that meant he had a fit at the point of orgasm.
As Eskimos with ‘snow’, Jews have multiple words for ‘disappointment’. None of these came close to covering off that scenario.
Still, since then, whenever I sleep with someone for the first time and they don’t nearly swallow their own tongue and go blue, I’m profoundly grateful.
‘It was good, really natural. I like his body, it’s big – it makes me feel small.’
‘How did you leave it with him?’ says Laura.
‘He rang just after he left to say goodbye, he’s off again tomorrow for five days, to Portugal.’
‘Is he going to call you?’
‘Well, he said “you’re not going to forget about me are you?” and I said why don’t you call me from Portugal, and he sort of evaded the question.’
‘Hmm.’
‘Weird, isn’t it?’
‘Do you think there’s another girl?’
‘No.’ That thought hadn’t actually occurred to me. ‘He’s visiting some financiers, definitely. But I feel like he’s project managing me, putting me on ice for a week.’ And I don’t like it.
‘Ah well, it’s early days, isn’t it. Let’s see what happens when he gets back.’
After I put the phone down, I ignore the washing up and go back to lie on my bed. The pillow still smells strongly of James. I should wash this pillowcase today, and these sheets, or I’ll lie here later and miss him.
I’ll miss his body, his strong arms, his broad shoulders. The weight of him. I’ll miss his mouth. Those confident hands. His head coming to rest in the curve of my neck. His heartbeat finally slowing under my palm….
Who am I kidding – Persil Bio on a 60 isn’t going to wash away those memories. I force myself to get up and make a cup of tea and wash up the pans. The sheets can wait.
It’s nearly 4pm now, so I pop round to the florist in Maida Vale to buy my grandma a bunch of orange tulips, then drive round to her flat in Highgate. I park in the courtyard next to the communal garden. My grandma lived here with my grandpa for thirty-eight of their fifty-five years together. There’s a beautiful teak bench at the back of the garden under an apple tree, bought for them on their ruby wedding anniversary by the residents in the block. The inscription is from The Bible, The Song of Songs: ‘I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine’. My grandparents would sit together on this bench on balmy summer nights, one or both of them dozing off against each other’s shoulder.
I do love coming to my grandma’s flat. It reminds me of Saturday afternoons spent with my brother, riding up and down in the lift with its old-fashioned sliding cage door. Of being chased along the red-carpeted corridors by my dad till my grandma would poke her head out of her door, and announce in a deeply serious tone that if we wanted any of her world famous spaghetti with tomato sauce and meatballs, we’d better come quick before my grandpa ate the last mouthful.
I ring the bell and Evie, my grandma’s part-time carer, buzzes me in. ‘She didn’t sleep well,’ she says, opening the door and greeting me with a kiss. Evie is the longest-serving carer my granny has had. My grandma has despatched various Eastern European carers over the last decade for looking miserable or talking too much or too little (‘the stumers’). Evie is perpetually cheery, talks just the right amount and paints my granny’s impressive fingernails purple and jangly like a west London rude-girl.
My grandma is ninety-seven. Her legs don’t work and her boredom has morphed into depression, but her brain and her tongue are razor sharp.
She is sitting in her pale blue wing back chair, staring out of the window towards the Heath, but her face lights up when I walk in.
‘For you,’ I say, handing her the tulips.
‘My favourite!’ she says. ‘Evie! A vase please? Now sit. Have a biscuit,’ she says, pointing at a dozen star-shaped, sugar-dusted biscuits arranged neatly on a red and white Delft plate. I nibble a lemon shortbread even though I hate lemon with sweet things. ‘What’s new then, Sophola? How was that pistachio lamb?’
We’d discussed that dish more than a month ago.
‘Needed longer on a lower heat,’ I say.
‘Always the lowest heat,’ she says, shaking her head.
My foodie genes come from my grandma, who is my dad’s mother, and my mum. My grandma was an excellent cook before she tired of food in her dotage. Now all she eats is boiling hot soup, stale lemon biscuits and coffee ice cream, washed down with a small whisky of an evening. I inherited her habit of always trying something new, and my mother’s habit of always ordering three times too much of it.
‘So your brother’s making me feel old – a great-grandmother indeed!’
‘It’s so exciting, I can’t wait!’
‘I’m not sure I’ll still be here when the baby arrives.’
‘Oh, stop it. Of course you will.’
‘This is my last winter, I can feel it,’ she shakes her head.
‘Nonsense, you say that every year!’
‘I’m ready to go,’ she says, her shoulders rising and falling slowly. ‘And you? When are you going to stop flitting about?’
‘I’m not ready for all that baby stuff yet.’
‘Of course not, you need to find a decent man first. Is there no one nice at work?’
Raymond Cowell-Trousers in accounts? ‘Not at work, no. But I have met someone who I think you might approve of.’
‘Tell me more.’
‘He’s … he’s very bright. And handsome. Nice and tall.’ I won’t mention his age; I don’t think she’d approve of that.
‘What does he do?’
‘He runs his own company, he sells socks.’
‘Jewish?’ she says, a faint trace of hope in her voice.
‘I think his grandfather was.’ We both know this doesn’t count. ‘East End, furrier.’
‘Your grandfather knew some people in the schmutter trade. What’s this creature’s name?’
‘Stephens. James Stephens, in fact!’
‘Oh dear!’ she raises her hands to her face in mock horror. ‘Don’t be too nice to him! You know how that poem ends …’
Chance would be a fine thing. He’s now been in Portugal for four days and hasn’t even texted me. Still, he’s busy working. And he’s forty-five. Do 45-year-olds really text? Isn’t that a bit teenage? I hate texts anyway, so avoidant, I’d much rather talk. He’s due back tomorrow. I’m sure he’ll call then.
Three days later he phones from Lisbon airport.
‘I was starting to think I’d imagined you,’ I say. And I’m starting to think Laura’s right and there is another woman.
‘Is that a dig?’ he says, with good humour.
‘Have you been terribly busy with work?’
‘It’s not been too bad, actually. A bit of work, a bit of fun.’
‘Are you just one of those people who compartmentalises their life?’
‘No, not really.’
‘So you stayed a few days longer than planned?’
‘Yeah, the Bonders own a place down the coast, they invited me for some golf.’
‘The Bonders?’
‘The venture capital guys.’
‘Are they Portuguese?’
‘Swiss, but they’ve got houses all over the place.’
I daren’t go for a sixth question, the only one I want the answer to, which is: why didn’t you call? Because he is calling. And I know I’d sound needy and weird. Besides, he’s forty-five. He’s been on a business trip. It’s very early days. We’ve only had three dates. Three great dates and some good sex. Still, you aren’t allowed to expect too much attention at this stage, so Pete tells me, and I should stop being paranoid.
‘So, when are you free to see me, woman?’
I pause. I am genuinely busy this week, plus I want to spend more than just an evening and a morning with him. ‘At the weekend?’
‘What are you doing in the week?’
‘I’m busy.’
‘Friday night?’
‘Busy … I wasn’t sure when you’d be back, so I made other plans.’ And if you’d called me sooner then I wouldn’t have had to …
‘I’m not surprised you’re so popular, a girl with your qualities. Okay, Sunday afternoon, let’s see a movie – all these dinners with you are making me fat!’ Nonsense, he had a gut when I met him!
‘I might be free Saturday night …’ I say.
‘Seeing Rob and the boys,’ he says quickly.
‘Fine, no, Sunday then …’
‘I’ll pick you up at 3pm, I’ll choose the film.’
I like a man who takes control.
‘I’m outside your flat, come on down,’ he says at 3pm on the dot.
‘What car are you in?’
‘The little blue one that makes a funny noise.’
For some reason I imagined he’d drive a BMW or a Golf GTi – something mainstream and fast and solid and a little bit flash.
But no. No, no, no. He is, in fact, behind the wheel of a very shiny, fancy sports car.
What make is it? There is a little crown insignia at the front, but I can’t tell. I know the difference between a Porsche, a Ferrari and a Lamborghini. James does not have a small penis and clearly doesn’t feel the need to drive any of these.
But nowadays Jaguars, Aston Martins, even that Ford with the old Steve McQueen ad – all meld into one.
‘Listen to this,’ he says, and revs the engine, ‘it has the best purr of any car. And it’s shaped like a woman’s body …’
‘Sometimes you sound like such an 80s dickhead,’ I say, smiling as he leans over to open the door for me.
As I step in, I see a large Maserati logo in silver on the floor. Handy. In case you forget which of your cars you’re driving.
I am surprised and pleased to see what a tip it is inside, as bad as my Honda Accord. Boots, fleeces, mud, sweet wrappers, even an empty white mug in the drinks holder, that’s surely meant to accommodate a goblet of Krug.
I do so like this about James. He is not precious about things, he’s carefree, careless even. I had a boyfriend at college who had a three-day tantrum after I knocked his Raybans onto the floor as I handed him an orange juice at a Happy Chef on the M6. I hate people who treat generic branded goods like they’re family heirlooms; it’s just stuff.
‘So, what’s with this car?’ I say, trying not to sound impressed.
‘A little toy I bought myself when the Bonders bought 25% equity in JSA. I do like the occasional toy.’
‘How much did they pay you?’ Blunt, but I’m trying to work out just how fancy this car is.
‘Three.’
‘£300,000?’ If that’s 25%, that’s a £1.2 million pound business. Not bad for selling socks.
And a whole house in Camden must be worth a million at least.
He laughs. ‘You’re so sweet, Soph. Add an 0.’
‘Oh.’ Oh, oh, oh.
We’re driving to the Curzon in Soho. I am still in shock about his wealth.
My immediate reaction had been: my God. I’ve found a prince, the last handsome, tall, not-bald multimillionaire in London. That’s lottery ticket win money. That doesn’t happen. Well, the odds are 1 in 12 million.
But a nanosecond later the discovery has started to bother me. It has set off various small alarms that I’m trying to put on snooze:
That sort of money rockets him in to a different universe.
That sort of money lets him do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, without consequence.
That sort of money goes to a man’s head. It is power.
No one makes that much money without being ruthless and hard as nails along the way.
People want to be close to a man like that. Men, yes, but the women. The type of women who would not look at him twice if he was a regular guy. That explains the Wolford model.
I’m bloody glad I didn’t know he was rich when I first met him. I wish I didn’t know now.
Maybe he doesn’t own the whole company; maybe his dad and brother own half …
‘Play some music, would you?’ I say, stroking his thick dark hair and thinking how good his genes are, and hoping if we have kids they’ll inherit his straight, shiny locks rather than my curls.
James fiddles with his CD player and on comes the soundtrack to the inner circle of hell: Dido, Flo Rida, some vocoder crap, the sort of banging dance music they play in gyms.
‘Have you not got the Crazy Frog tune?’ I say.
He presses the forward button and on comes Sam Cook.
‘Well recovered,’ I say.
There is a queue of cars in front of us, and James suddenly pulls to the left and speeds down the bus lane.
‘Bus lane,’ I say.
‘It’s fine.’
‘It says “At any time”.’
‘It’s fine.’
‘You’ll get a ticket.’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
‘Just because you’ve got a crown on your steering wheel doesn’t mean you can act like royalty.’
‘It’s a trident, love.’
‘What about the people on buses? There are bus lanes for a reason.’
‘They’ll still get there,’ he says.
‘If I was on that bus, I’d think you were a dick,’ I say.
‘But you’re not. You’re in my car.’
He has booked tickets to see Antichrist, because he thought I’d like an art house film. The cinema is very warm, and half an hour into the film, he falls asleep. Occasionally I nudge him but he looks extremely content, and quite frankly I wish I could sleep through it too.
As the end credits roll I wake him up. ‘You missed the bit where she drills through his leg, and the bit where she wanks him off and blood spurts out of his cock,’ I say.
He shudders. ‘Thank God.’
‘What now,’ I say, ‘Chinatown for some duck pancakes?’
‘I thought you might like to have dinner at mine.’
‘You’re going to cook for me?’
‘I was thinking more like a takeaway,’ he says.
‘Why don’t we cook?’
‘You’ll see why.’
‘Are you sure your wife’s not at home tonight?’
‘She’s on holiday with the kids and my three mistresses,’ he says.
He pulls up outside a house in Fitzroy Road. That’s Primrose Hill, not Camden. It has the loveliest front door of all the houses on the street – a deep, inky blue, with a semi-circular glass window at the top, like the sun rising.
This is all too good to be true. He’s too sexy, too rich, too tall, too much fun, too interesting, too smart, that door is too perfect. You don’t get to have all this in one person. Maybe you get three of the above but the guy turns out to be a cokehead or a depressive. James is the golden ticket. Something must be wrong.
Inside, everything is homely and unpretentious. On a low wooden sideboard sits a beautiful old-fashioned globe, the countries in faded pinks and yellows and greens and blues.
‘Who are these guys?’ I say, looking at the framed photos next to the globe.
‘That’s me and Rob in Mexico.’
‘You look happy,’ I say.
‘We’d just been skydiving,’ he says. ‘I think I was still high.’
‘And in this one? That must be your grandfather … father’s side?’ I say, looking at a faded photo of a stern looking man with James’s nose and dark eyebrows, his hand on the shoulder of a young boy who’s trying not to giggle. ‘Your hair was so blonde!’
‘My grandad was, what, early seventies? Still smoking thirty a day and drinking a large whisky before lunch. He made me go and find ten different types of leaves in Epping Forest while he sat on that bench with a hip flask, smoking and reading the Essex Chronicle.’
‘And this one! Look at your hair! How old are you here?’
‘Ten. June 3rd, 1975, Woodford Under 11s Junior Chess Champion.’
‘Such a nerd!’ I say. ‘Do you still play?’
‘Not really. But I’ll give you a game if you don’t mind losing,’ he says.
‘I love losing. So, why can’t we cook?’ I say, as we head downstairs to his kitchen.
‘You’ll see.’ And I do. His kitchen is like a student dig. He has a double electric hob, a microwave and a tiny, none-too-clean oven. I open one cupboard and see three Pot Noodles and two tins of tuna. In the next cupboard is some Tesco own brand pasta. ‘I need a wife,’ he says. ‘A wife who can cook!’
‘What’s in here?’ I say, spying a waist-high fridge in the corner.
‘Don’t look!’ he says, but it’s too late. I open the door and see that his fridge has no shelves at all. The few things in it are all stacked on top of each other at the bottom.
‘What’s that all about?’
‘I broke the shelves a while back, I keep meaning to replace them, but I never get round to it …’ he says.
‘How do you even break a fridge shelf?’
‘Ask Jack Daniels,’ he says.
‘I have never seen anything like that,’ I say. ‘How come the rest of your house is so lovely and your kitchen’s so shit?’
He laughs. ‘I’ve been travelling so much in the last year, it’s not been a priority. I’ll get round to it soon.’
‘Takeaway it is,’ I say.
‘There’s a great Japanese on Parkway, I’ll pop out and get some,’ he says, ‘No, it’s Sunday … pizza?’
‘Pizza’s good,’ I say. ‘Or I see you’re harbouring a lovely selection of Pot Noodles in your cupboard.’
‘Don’t say you like Pot Noodle or I’ll think I’ve dreamt you,’ he says.
‘I don’t mind it, if I’m drunk,’ I say. ‘Let’s get pizza. A bit more sociable, isn’t it?’
We lie on his sofa and eat a spicy meat pizza from his local takeaway. I’d never normally eat meatballs from a delivery place – I work at Fletchers, I know how bad a bad meatball can be. But James fancies meatballs, and I fancy James, and they taste delicious.
‘My friend in New York’s just had a baby and called him “Domino”,’ I say.
‘That’s a terrible name,’ he says.
‘Isn’t it?’
‘If I had a boy I’d call him Genghis,’ he says.
‘Gengis Stephens, nice ring. What about girls’ names?’
‘What do you think’s nice?
‘Don’t know. Lauren’s pretty. Olivia, maybe too posh. Martha?’
‘Martha’s a fat girl’s name,’ he says.
‘No, it’s not!’
‘How about Yasmine Jayde, and Anoushka Rose.’
‘You’re not calling our daughters after Bratz dolls and air fresheners.’
‘I’m the husband, you will obey,’ he says, beating his chest.
‘Don’t hold your breath,’ I say. ‘– By the way, do you normally date women a lot younger than you?’ I know Celine is now forty-two, but presumably if he wants children, he’ll want a wife under forty.
‘You’re a few years older than what I’d normally go for,’ he says.
‘Outrageous! You’re pushing fifty!’ I say.
‘Shhhh,’ he puts his finger to my lips.
Truth is we both know his age doesn’t matter. You can knock a year off his real age for every million in his bank account: Forty-five, thirty-five, thirty-three … now he’s my age. Knock another year off for each inch over five foot seven. Twenty-six. A full head of hair buys at least five. Excellent personal hygiene, another couple. Good in bed, another five. He’s officially fourteen.
Yep, I am dating a teenage boy.
He has two very different faces. When he frowns, concentrates or looks anxious – 40% of the time – he looks Sicilian and cruel and sexy; when he smiles he looks like a warm, happy, child. His face glazes with delight. Later, when we are together, I take photos of him, and when people ask to see them, they think they’re looking at two different people. He is a chameleon. There is something about him that makes me want to hold on to him forever.
‘He is really, really rich,’ I say to Laura the following day.
‘Good for him.’
‘I wish he didn’t have that much money.’
‘What would you prefer, three million?’
‘I could even go to four …’
‘Whatever, Soph. It’s a number, isn’t it? Doesn’t make anyone truly happy.’
Insert the cliché of your choice, but she is, I promise you, correct.
It is almost April and I have finally pinned Devron down and made him taste the trifles and fools he should’ve eaten weeks ago. I hate waiting for anything and anyone, but I particularly hate waiting for product sign-off from a man who won’t go to a restaurant that doesn’t serve a well-done steak and wedges.
‘What’s the life like on this one?’ he says, sliding his finger along the top of a chocolate trifle I was planning on taking round to Laura and Dave’s at the weekend.
‘Seven. This is life minus three,’ I say – we’re three days off the ‘eat by’ date, so four days into the pudding’s life.
‘And how does the consistency of that hold up on minus one?’ He points to a raspberry trifle. Devron will always ask one question that makes him sound knowledgeable, but blindfold him and he doesn’t know the difference between a blackberry and a blackcurrant.
‘Flavour’s good, texture and mouthfeel maintained till end of life.’
He nods. ‘Custard’s good on that lot,’ he says. ‘Approved.’
I feel like the proud mother of twenty kids, all of whom have just won the egg-and-spoon race.
‘Appletree are great with custard,’ I say. ‘Brûlées, tarts, crème anglaise …’
‘Brûlées … can you look at a microwaveable brûlée for autumn?’
‘The custard part?’
‘Whole lot.’
‘You won’t get crispy, browned sugar from a microwave, you need direct overhead heat for caramelisation.’
‘Orangy custards? Mands loves tangerines.’
‘Not ideal – citric acid interferes with the protein network, the fat globules separate at heat.’
‘Huh … what’s our margin on those trifles?’
‘38%’
‘And the cost of custard as percentage of total?’
‘Low. Bulk of cost is fruit and labour.’
‘Right, work up a dozen or so new custard-based puddings for launch next summer, margin of 40% plus. Yeah?’
I do like a challenge when there’s custard involved.
James has gone to Paris. When I left his house on Monday morning, he’d said, ‘I’ll call you on Friday.’
And he does. He always calls when he says he will, and very rarely at any other time. Although I’ve been busy all week with Devron’s new brief and out every night with friends, I’ve been distracted, hoping he’ll call just for the hell of it, just to say hi, but that doesn’t seem to be his style.
‘I’m on the Eurostar, so it might cut out. What are you doing tomorrow?’ he says.
I have kept my Saturday free in the hope that I’ll see him, but I’m bothered by his presumption that I’ll have done this.
‘Why?’
‘Meet me at the Tate Modern at 5pm.’
‘I’m not sure if I’m free.’
‘I’ve got something for you, it won’t keep.’
‘What sort of something?’
‘Trust me, you’ll like it. The man in the shop said it’ll be okay till 6pm Paris time, so don’t be late.’
‘We could meet earlier?’ I’d like to spend a bit of the day together.
‘I’ve got some errands. Meet me at the top of the slope?’
I wear a white cotton sundress that I bought in a New York flea market for five dollars. When I bought it two summers ago it was too tight, but I fell in love with the idea of one day fitting into it, and the fact that it cost less than the Thomas Keller chicken sandwich I’d just eaten. My wardrobe has a smattering of random, very cheap clothes like this, most of which will never fit, but when I try the dress on today it’s perfect. I put on a pair of beautiful pale pink silk French knickers. And at the last minute, I grab the large brimmed floppy straw hat that I’ve never dared wear outside of my flat. I feel French. I feel pretty and delicate and like someone in a Vanessa Bruno advert, rather than someone who spends most of her life with perpetual underarm stubble.
Today is the first proper day of spring. As I walk along the embankment from Waterloo I feel like the person I always wanted to be: happy, confident, cool. God, I wish I could make myself feel like this every day. Men stare. Fashiony girls surreptitiously look with a mix of envy and admiration. I should wear this hat more often.
There’s so much I want to do around here with James. Late night cocktails at the Festival Hall overlooking the Thames. A Sunday tea-dance at the Savoy with champagne and scones! Ice-skating, come winter, over at Somerset House. Afternoon Billy Wilder double-bills at the NFT. I browse the second-hand book stalls along the river and find a near-perfect copy of Rapture by Carol Ann Duffy. I’d love to buy it for James, but I suspect he’d be more comfortable with the John le Carré on the next table, or last year’s Top Gear annual.
I have spent too long pottering. I’m fifteen minutes late and as I approach the Tate, I see James from a distance looking at his watch with an anxious frown. God, I love the size of him. He’s so man-shaped, so masculine, so male. He’s wearing a navy coat and his dark blue Levis. This is a man who would never countenance wearing a pair of jeans with Lycra in them. He turns his head in my direction, then does a double take. I have to order myself not to break into a run towards him.
‘Good hat,’ he says, and kisses me for a full five minutes.
‘For you.’ He holds out a box wrapped in pistachio coloured paper with a big pink ribbon. ‘I hope this kitten’s got big lungs or you’ll have one guilty conscience, Miss Klein.’
‘If there’s a dead cat in here it’s your fault for kissing me so long,’ I say.
‘You shouldn’t be such a temptress,’ he says. ‘Come on, open up before the RSPCA nick us.’
Inside the box is a Jean Clement praline millefeuille: a mythical dessert. The cakes in Jean Clement are displayed like diamonds on velvet casings. They cost more than diamonds, and the praline millefeuille is the Great Star of Africa. I once had a migraine that lasted three days, and a Jean Clement millefeuille cured it. They only make ten a day and if you’re not in the queue when the store opens, you’ll just have to take my word for it that you’ll never put anything better in your mouth.
‘I had to wrestle a very determined Japanese lady with a dead fox round her neck to get you this.’
‘Oh my God. You’re a very good boyfriend.’ I kiss him and he smiles. ‘Open wide,’ I say, and attempt to feed him the cake.
He shakes his head. ‘I bought it for you, Queen of Puddings.’
‘I want you to have the first bite,’ I say. He takes a small nibble then looks at me in wonder. ‘Jesus, is that even legal?’ He takes a bigger bite and pretends he’s going to eat the whole thing. I wouldn’t even begrudge him if he did, that is how much I fancy this man.
He grabs my hand and I follow him into the gallery. ‘I read about this guy in the paper. I know how cultured you are,’ he says. I don’t know where he gets this idea from. Oh, yes – it was the fact that I mentioned a poet on the first night we met. I’m entirely not cultured, really. I like art and books and films but I can’t explain Martin Kippenberger. The thought of seeing Ewan McGregor play Shakespeare leaves me cold, and I’d rather watch Trading Places than a Bergman film. However, I get the impression that his previous girlfriends spend a lot of time down the gym and consider Paolo Coelho the best writer in the world, so I guess in the kingdom of the blind….
We kiss on all the escalators up to the fifth floor. If I was behind us on the escalators I’d hate us, we are so goddamned happy.
Tucked away in one of the smaller galleries is the entrance to a tiny exhibit with a grumpy security guard standing outside. A placard on the wall reads, ‘The Beauty of the World, the Paragon of Animals.’
When the guard sees my dress he shakes his head. ‘Put the boots on. And don’t spend more than a couple of minutes in there, it’s bad for your lungs,’ he says ushering us through a door into a narrow corridor, lined with wellies. He closes the door behind us and we’re in darkness, stumbling and giggling as we feel our way along the walls in ill-fitting boots, taking a sharp left, then a right. And then all of a sudden the tunnel ends and our eyes automatically shut and then slowly open against the light, and we’re standing in a room full of sparkling silver glitter. Piles and piles of shimmering dots like a disco moonscape, dazzling and beautiful, shifting softly under our feet.
James dances me to the centre of the room and my dress does a perfect 50s prom twirl, and he laughs in delight. He grabs a handful of the dust and throws it up into the air, and it falls like rainbows of light down on us and suddenly he lifts me up and we kiss passionately and before I know it he has pulled my knickers to one side and he is inside me and I am thinking this hat is going to fall off and laughing and panicking and I don’t want him to stop but I’m scared the guard is going to come in and wondering if there is CCTV in this room and thinking well if this footage ends up on YouTube at least the hat will hide my face and wondering if anyone else has done this in here and then I don’t even care if the guard comes in and finally I am not thinking anything at all.
‘I can’t believe you shagged him in public just because he bought you a cake, you are such a cheap date,’ says Pete, placing a third double gin and tonic and a packet of Tyrell’s in front of me.
‘Trust me, that cake was not cheap,’ I say, ripping open the bag of crisps. I have told Pete about the incident in the gallery because I am very drunk.
The reason I am very drunk is because I feel insecure, because I have not spoken to James since Monday morning when he left my flat, and it is now Thursday night. So I have dragged Pete to my local, the Prince Alfred, and have banged my head twice in the last hour en route to the bar, on the low wooden partitions that carve up the pub into snug little areas.
I have not told Pete about how James and I spent all of Sunday walking in Regent’s Park, holding hands and talking about our shared family values, because he will find this nauseating, and like any right-thinking person he is only interested in hearing about the sex.
I have also not told Pete about the way James looks at me – like he’s amazed and surprised that he found me. He smiles all the time. Because I have no context for him, no mutual friends, I have no idea if this means he’s specifically happy to be with me, or is generally a very happy man. Either way, it is contagious, and I find myself smiling too. Except for now, when I am not smiling at all.
‘He sent me a text on Monday,’ I say.
‘So what’s your problem?’ says Pete, who it’s fair to say, is neither the paranoid nor the romantic type.
‘It said “I had a wonderful time with you”.’
‘And?’
‘Something’s not right.’ Laura says he must be hiding something.
‘Women are so neurotic. He’s saying he had a great time, what more do you want?’
‘I want to know when I’m seeing him again. We’ve been seeing each other for nearly two months, this isn’t normal.’
‘Look, Soph, this guy is not Nick. Nick didn’t have a job.’
‘Nick’s a musician.’
‘Which is basically the same as being unemployed, so he had loads of time to sit around writing you faggy romantic emails. This guy runs a business, plus he’s older. He’s busy. I hate it when girls text me all the time.’
I’m not texting James ‘all the time’. At all, in fact. I am being very careful not to treat him like I treated Nick. I’d text Nick to tell him the filling of my sandwich because I was fundamentally bored in my old job, and because Nick was also bored pottering around our flat. Eventually we bored each other and then we split up.
I can be guarded and I can be cool and I can hold back, but at the same time today I saw a man on the bus with a moustache that was so long it curled round his ears and I would like to tell James about this moustache because it would make him laugh, and yet I feel I can’t. And that is why I’m not happy.
‘He’ll call. Now tell me about the bit with the glitter again.’
I wake early the next day, hung-over. Outside the sky is already bright and from my bedroom window I can just see a patch of daffodils pushing through, down by the banks of the canal. I consider going for a walk to clear my head – past the colourful boats and vast white stucco houses – then think better of it and climb back under my duvet to replay last night’s conversation.
According to Pete, there’s nothing untoward about James’s behaviour. My instinct tells me something is strange, but I can’t put my finger on it.
When James is with me, he’s highly attentive.
He notices everything. If I apply lip balm when he’s popped to the loo, he’ll notice as soon as he walks back in. Not gloss. Clear lip balm. Nick wouldn’t have noticed if I’d grown a Salvador Dali moustache and started speaking Aramaic, as long as I was still padding around the flat.
If I leave the room, James asks where I’m going.
When I’m cooking a meal, he’ll watch me, try to impress me, touch me.
When we’re in bed he is generous and energetic and passionate. He has the libido of a man half his age.
Afterwards we lie for hours having iPod shuffle conversations, flicking from time travel to Bernie Winters to why mosquitoes don’t get AIDS. We should be sleeping. Our combined age is seventy-eight, we both have work in the morning. It’s 3.47, 2.48, 4.15am. Neither of us ever wants to stop the conversation. Eventually we fall asleep, my hand curled around his fingers.
But when he’s not with me, I feel like ‘we’ don’t exist. The randomness of meeting someone in a bar, of having no mutual friends, of having entirely separate lives, is brought home. He could disappear and I would never cross paths with him again. Sometimes I wake up and wonder if he’s even real.
On days when we don’t speak, I feel laden down with the things I didn’t get to share with him. He won’t call for two, three days. Then, it’s like he has a CCTV on my psyche, and at the precise mid-point between when I’ve done a deal with the devil so that he’ll call, and the point at which I think fuck you, James Stephens, this is not acceptable, he’ll ring. My anxiety will be punctured, he’ll come round and we’ll carry on mid-conversation where we left off, and I’ll realise I am a paranoid, silly woman.
Come on, paranoid, silly woman – get out of bed. Go to work.
It’s four in the morning on Good Friday. James and I are at his house, lying in bed, facing each other. My head is resting on his arm. Everything feels so entirely natural and comfortable and right. I think we are falling in love. He looks at me intently. ‘What’s wrong with you, Sophie Klein? There must be something.’
‘Plenty.’
He shakes his head.
‘I’m impatient,’ I say. ‘I’m not very thoughtful. I never remember birthdays. I forget to send my godchildren cards at Christmas. I’m greedy. I’m sarcastic. Sometimes I get a bit depressed and can’t shrug it off.’
He shakes his head again. ‘No, you don’t. You’re generous. You’re a good woman.’ Why does that sound so church-y?
‘What’s wrong with you, James Stephens?’
He pauses and shrugs. He doesn’t answer. He will never show a weakness. He is a master at evading questions.
‘Say something.’ I mean say something nice. I feel like I’m trying to force a compliment out of him and I know this is bad but he’s looking at me like he adores me, but nothing is coming out of his mouth.
‘Who was the last person you went out with before me?’ I ask.
‘Svetlana.’
Beautiful Russians are two a penny in this city. James has a lot of pennies. I see these women slicing down Bond Street, hard bodies, steely eyes, spiky boots; russet-faced older men in bad jackets dragging behind in their wake.
‘How long did that last?’
‘Two years.’
‘Why did it end?’
‘It wasn’t going anywhere.’
‘Why not?’
‘I couldn’t talk to her the way I can talk to you.’
‘What did you do for two years?’
He raises his eyebrows and gives me a look that instantly makes me regret having asked the question. I turn to face the window and James’s arm wraps itself around my waist.
‘Sophie Klein. I haven’t felt this way about anyone in twenty years.’ I turn back to look at him. ‘I am truly myself with you.’
He is telling me the truth.
I love him, I love him, I love him.
I love the way he moves his fingers when he explains something. I love the way he loses his temper with an obnoxious waiter at exactly the same point that I would. I love the fact that I can flick a spoonful of spaghetti with meatballs at him and he doesn’t have a hissy fit that I’ve stained his shirt. I love talking to him and I love looking at him and I love thinking about him.
It is a rainy Saturday night in April and I’m teaching James the secret of a foolproof Yorkshire pudding, when my mother rings.
‘Have you spoken to your brother?’ she says.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘You’re not going to believe what that lunatic girlfriend of his is up to …’
‘Go on …’
‘She’s booked a Caesarean for the third week in August.’
‘Isn’t the baby due at the start of September?’ I say.
‘Exactly!’
‘So how does …’
‘She’s having it two weeks early so that it’s the same star sign as her!’ No amount of italics can convey the utter disdain in my mother’s voice.
‘Jesus, what is wrong with her?’ I say. ‘Is that even safe?’
‘Apparently. Sheer lunacy. And your bloody brother’s saying he can’t see what all the fuss is about. I said to him …’
‘Mum, my Yorkshire puddings have just pinged … I can’t talk …’
‘I haven’t even told you what dreadful names they’re thinking of calling my first grandchild …’
‘It’ll have to wait.’
I hang up and explain Shellii to James.
‘All women are mad,’ he says, again. This time I can’t really disagree.
After dinner, James asks what’s for pudding.
‘An experiment,’ I say. ‘Step into my office.’
He follows me to the fridge. Inside are two large pots of custard sent by Will at Appletree, as Phase 1 of the new custard project Devron’s briefed me on.
‘Take your tie off and sit down….’ I wrap it round his eyes in a blindfold and he screams ‘Help!’
‘Just be quiet and focus on your mouth,’ I say.
‘Can’t we focus a bit lower down?’
‘Mouth first.’ I take the custards out and put a spoon in each. ‘First one – what does this taste of?’ I say.
‘Custard. I could do your job, Soph!’
‘Ha, funny. What else?’
‘Vanilla?’
‘And?’
‘Something with alcohol?’
‘Good. Bourbon! Now have a sip of water.’ I carefully pass over a glass, and he deliberately misses his mouth and pours half of it down his shirt, and then takes it off and drops it on the floor.
‘Would sir like a bib?’ I say.
‘Can’t we do this naked?’
‘Health and Safety 101! Ok, second custard – what does this one taste of?’
‘Custard,’ he says.
‘Very clever. What else?’
‘Maple syrup?’
‘Bingo. And does it make you want to eat anything else?’
‘You!’ he says.
‘Engage your brain.’
‘… maybe something crunchy?’
‘Ten out of ten! Your brain’s making a connection between the maple syrup and granola. So I might take this custard and create a dessert that has a layer of almond granola, then the custard, and then something lighter on top, three different textures. With this flavour profile I’d want something less sweet, that complements the custard …’
‘How about my cock?’
‘Great idea! Not sure it can feed 40,000 Fletchers shoppers each week …’
‘We’ll start with just the one, shall we?’ he says, taking his blindfold off, unzipping his fly and taking his pants down.
‘James, do not put your penis in my custard samples. I have to feed those to Devron on Monday. James! Stop it!’
‘You told me you don’t like Devron anyway,’ he says.
‘True, but I do like this custard!’
Too late.
My boyfriend is a custard-covered dick, and I adore him.
‘Devron, I’m sorry but the custard samples aren’t ready for tasting,’ I say on Monday morning.
‘Fine, what are you doing on May 3rd?’
Two weeks’ time – no idea. James is rubbish at forward planning, but as he invariably ends up asking to see me at the weekends, I’m now avoiding making plans with other people.
‘Why, Devron?’
‘I need you to do a quick New York inspiration trip. If I don’t complete last year’s number of trips within a month of year-end financials, I won’t get like for like in this year’s allowance.’
Cool. So, because you have to tick a box on a sheet, I get a free trip to New York! Devron, I’m warming to you.
‘Is there actually anything you need me to do out there?’
‘Yeah, go for a night, have a look at a few cakes and whatnot, take some photos.’
‘For one night?’
‘Budget’s only going to pay for one night in a hotel.’
I love New York too much for a one-night stand.
‘I’ll stay at a friend’s, then can I go for a bit longer? If I stay a Saturday night, the airfare’s always cheaper.’
‘Fine, go for a long weekend, just come back with an idea I can take to the board. I want to show them what success looks like.’
New York! New York! I email my old friend Pauly asking if I can stay at his place for a few nights, and a minute later he mails back a yes.
It’s Saturday night and I’m off to meet James at the pub. As I leave my block of flats I see someone waving at me as they’re getting out of a black cab.
It’s my neighbour, Amber: part-time sarong designer and full-time halfwit.
Amber has seen James and me get in to his car several times. Each time she has stared, looking confused.
Now she rushes over to me with her miniature schnauzer, Annalex, in tow, and grabs my arm. ‘Sophie, long time … who is that guy you’re always with? Is that your brother, is he back from the States?’
‘No. That’s my boyfriend.’
‘Really?! I never think of you as someone who goes out with a Porsche driver.’
Welcome to Amber-World.
‘It’s not a Porsche, it’s a Maserati 3200GT.’ I have not told anybody about James’s car because I am mildly embarrassed by his money, but I take pleasure in telling Amber. ‘Anyway, what do you mean by that?’
‘You know, you go out with struggling artist types. Does your boyfriend have any single mates?’
I think about Rob. Rob would love Amber – she is a size 4, has no body fat and sports a permanent Ibiza tan. Tonight she is dressed in cowboy boots, tiny denim shorts and a cutaway silver vest.
‘Yes, his friend Rob. He’s really handsome, thirty-six, he drives a Porsche, works for Goldman Sachs …’
Her eyes couldn’t be any wider if she’d necked a fistful of Es.
‘Oh. Sorry, Amber, I forgot – he’s engaged … Oh well. Anyway, aren’t you still seeing Ritchie?’
She shrugs. This shrug means ‘I am thirty-one, very soon I will have to stop dating sexy rock ’n’ roll wannabe music-producer cokeheads, and bag myself a pudgy older Notting Hill banker. He’ll give me shitloads of cash to do up a huge three-storey second home with a pool in Oxfordshire and then I can ride horses and shag the local talent while the au pair looks after the kids and Rory bankrolls my Moroccan scented candle business.’
‘By the way, remember that £100 I lent you …’ I say, as she hands the cabbie a £50 note.
This always works like a charm whenever I want to get rid of Amber and sure enough, as she takes the £30 change from the cabbie, she says, ‘Babe, I’m totally skint at the moment but I’ll pop round soon,’ and hurries into our block.
James and I are three months into our relationship and I haven’t met any of his friends yet, apart from Rob. Laura thinks this is sinister, but I don’t – he hasn’t met any of mine, apart from her. Most of his friends have kids. James says he doesn’t want to share me with anyone. We keep each other endlessly entertained.
But now Laura has made me feel paranoid. So at the pub on Saturday I invited James round for dinner with Pete tonight. Perhaps if I introduce James to more of my friends he’ll follow suit. Besides, he’ll get on well with Pete – they’re both juvenile, charming, fun. Maybe James might register that Pete has a residual crush on me – perhaps it’ll make him more vocal in his affections.
When James left my flat this morning I said ‘Pete’s coming at 7pm.’ He nodded. I haven’t heard from him since. Although I reason I’ll see him later, when he hasn’t rung by 7.40pm, I have a low ache in my stomach, and it isn’t hunger.
The chicken will be ready any minute. Pete’s asking if we should invite my sexy blonde neighbour instead.
James must be working late.
At 7.50pm I take the chicken out, put it under foil and call James.
‘Hello you,’ he says.
‘Where are you?’ I say.
‘At home.’
‘Are you coming for dinner or what?’
‘Sure, see you soon.’
‘That was weird,’ I say to Pete.
‘What? He’s coming, isn’t he?’
‘He is now.’
James arrives looking slightly nervous. The two shake hands and from their posture I sense a mild rivalry in the air.
‘So, are you a North Londoner too?’ says Pete. I’ve already told him all the facts about James, but I’ve forced these two together and Pete’s having to make small talk.
‘East,’ says James. ‘Woodford, born and bred.’
‘My cousins grew up there. What school did you go to?’
‘Forest.’
‘Do you know Alex and Adam Foster, twins?’
‘One of them amazing at football?’ says James.
‘Alex.’
‘Rings a bell.’
I am delighted that there is now a common link as it brings me closer to James.
With a glass of wine they relax and turn their conversation to cars and girls, as though I’m not here. James says Pete’s Saab is a weird choice for a bloke in his thirties, and Pete says Maseratis are for hairdressers and they both laugh. Pete says his ideal woman would be half Danish, half Brazilian, while apparently my boyfriend’s would be eastern European, definitely.
My grandfather was Polish. Does that count?
I ask Pete to help carve the chicken, and in the kitchen he whispers to me, ‘I was expecting some hunk. He’s just a normal looking bloke.’
‘Don’t you think he looks young for his age?’
‘No, he looks like a 45-year-old who eats a lot of cheese.’
‘You’re just jealous,’ I say.
‘Seriously, Soph, he’s punching above his weight.’
Because of James’s utter self-belief, the confidence that emanates from every pore of him, I always think of it as the other way round. Like I’m punching above mine.
‘Anyway, what do you think Pete?’
‘Seems alright.’
‘And?’
‘What do you want me to say?’
‘… Don’t you find him fascinating?’
‘He’s just a man who sells socks.’
‘Shut up, he’s coming.’
‘Eat some more chicken, Soph, you’re looking too skinny,’ says Pete.
‘Do you think?’ says James, raising an eyebrow.
‘You need to put a bit of weight back on,’ says Pete, looking at my arms.
‘Don’t tell her that!’ says James.
Pete only thinks I’m too skinny because he likes big boobs. It’s true my boobs are smaller than they used to be, but that’s always the way when you lose weight. If only I could transplant the small handful of flab left on my bottom to my tits, I’d be laughing, but if I do lose any more weight, I’ll have no bust left, so I’m happy enough where I am.
I head back to the kitchen to take the ice cream out of the freezer and make coffee. When I return, Pete’s already putting on his jacket.
‘You’re leaving?’ I say, ‘we haven’t even had dessert …’
‘I’m really sorry, hon, I have an early meeting. We’ll catch up properly when you’re back from New York.’
He sends me a text on his way home: ‘Thanks for dinner. You seem very happy. I’m glad x.’
In bed later, I turn to James. ‘You’re a bugger to make plans with, you know that?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s infuriating, I mean I didn’t know if you were coming tonight or not.’
‘I said I was, didn’t I?’
‘You were actually quite non-committal. I feel like if I hadn’t phoned you, you wouldn’t have turned up at all.’
He shrugs.
‘And I never know when I’m going to see you next. What’s all that about?’ I say.
He looks back at me as if he’s keeping a secret.
‘What is it? Are you scared?’ It’s scary for me too, being vulnerable.
‘I’m not scared,’ he says.
I say nothing but he’s better at this silent tactic than I am.
‘What is it?’ I blurt, after what feels like a full minute.
‘I’m just getting to know you, slowly.’
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just get on with this? I think. You’re heading to fifty, I’m thirty-four this year – we’re not teenagers anymore. Does he not realise that?
I feel like I’m so far down the road of saying something that I might as well follow through, though I have to take a deep breath before I do.
‘Slowly, quickly … you’re either in it or you’re not,’ I say.
He nods, looks at me and smiles. His smile: beautiful.
On Friday morning James drops me at Paddington for the Heathrow Express. I could walk, it’s only ten minutes from my front door, but he insists.
‘You want to make sure I’m leaving town!’ I say. ‘You’re not out with Rob tonight by any chance?’
‘No, quiet weekend, honest, Guv.’ He holds three fingers up in a boy scout salute. ‘– Behave yourself with this Paul person …’ he says, frowning.
‘I didn’t know you were the jealous type,’ I say, taking his hand and running my finger along one of his knuckles. He has the tiniest scar, like a white eyelash, just to the right of the bone.
‘I’m not,’ he says. ‘I just know what men are like.’
‘You mean you know what you’re like,’ I say, raising an eyebrow.
‘Hurry up, you’ll miss your train,’ he says, grabbing my face in both hands and kissing me.
I hate goodbyes.
New York is great; New York always is.
I stay at Pauly’s apartment in Tribeca. I met Pauly seven years ago, queuing for a table outside Corner Bistro in the West Village. It was midnight. I’d hopped in a cab straight from JFK to West 4th Street. Pauly had staggered over from the White Horse Tavern, having just split from another poor girl who was at the tiresome stage of demanding a smidgen of emotional intimacy from him. We bonded standing in line with beers, then sitting with cheeseburgers. We carried on after at a dive bar in Chinatown where Pauly explained how the CIA and Sinatra and Castro killed Kennedy. I kissed him just to shut him up, then made out with him on the rooftop until 8am. (Pauly has some insane conspiracy theories, but he’s so hot and so good-natured, you can forgive him most things.)
Over French toast with strawberry butter the following morning, he explained how he’d never gotten over being dumped by Carissa, his volatile high-school girlfriend, the week before prom night, and how his whole twenties had been spent working through a series of beautiful women, trying to find crazy Carissa 2.0.
I realised quickly that Pauly would be a terrible love interest but a great friend. Like me he’ll happily eat a bowl of $4 hand-pulled noodles down an alley off Mott Street, then trek north twenty-five blocks to queue for an hour at the Gramercy Tavern for their $12 warm chocolate bread pudding with cocoa nib ice cream.
Pauly seems to have finally met his match in Giovanna who sounds like the perfect lunatic for him: she thinks George Bush engineered 9/11 and that there were no planes, only holograms. She designs erotic underwear, and is currently in Milan on a buying trip. Even though she’s only been dating Pauly a month, she’s currently got him living in her Nolita apartment over on Elizabeth Street, babysitting her Schnoodles, Basquiat and Warhol. This is a total result – not only do I not have to hang around with an insane woman who owns a pair of Schnoodles, but it means I have Pauly’s place all to myself.
Pauly works in the music business and his place is small but supremely cool, with a giant projector screen instead of a TV, and one sleek silver remote control that seems to govern everything from his state of the art espresso machine to the bathtub. Best of all, the apartment has one wall made entirely of glass with the most amazing views of Brooklyn Bridge.
I wish James was here with me, he’d love it, I think, as I hurriedly unpack the handful of clothes I’ve brought. Still, if there’s one city I know how to have fun in regardless, it’s this one. I head out the door and walk north on Broadway towards Soho.
It’s the first week of May, and the weather’s a perfect 75 degrees with cloudless blue skies. I’m so unbelievably lucky that this is my day job, I think, as I pull open the door of Dean and Deluca and feel the air-con start to cool me down. I’m meeting Pauly in a few hours up by the Lincoln Centre, so I grab a tuna sandwich for now. I dream about these sandwiches: the perfect softness of the white bread, the fineness of the red onions, the saltiness of the capers, the ratio of mayo to tuna, the little fronds of almost sweet fresh dill – I’ve tried to recreate these at home but they’re never quite the same.
I spend the next twenty minutes in the store admiring the packaging of the spices, another twenty in the fruit and veg section marvelling at the price tags. I then head west along Bleeker Street to Rocco’s for a chocolate chip cannoli, up to Chelsea Farmer’s Market to pick up some Fat Witch caramel brownies for Maggie, then hop on the subway uptown for a night out, Pauly-style.
We go to three tequila-soaked Cinco de Mayo parties, and end up wearing purple sombreros, eating guacamole and drinking pomegranate margaritas at Rosa Mexicana, where they make the best guacamole north of Mexico. I think I could live solely on Mexican food for the rest of my life: they put chocolate in their chicken casseroles, they eat avocados every day, and limes, chillies and burritos (my three favourite food groups) are the founding pillars of their national cuisine. Around midnight, we swing by the roof party of a rapper with diamond teeth – James will never, ever believe me – and after a final Old Fashioned at a Lower East Side dive bar, I call it a night.
I spend the following days mostly hung-over, visiting farmers’ markets and bakeries, restaurants dedicated just to puddings, and mobile Bolivian food-carts in Queens. I eat desserts from 3 boroughs, 4 continents, 26 countries, without ever leaving the city. In the evenings, Pauly and I go to gallery openings in Chelsea, secret late-night speakeasies in the East Village and one cocktail bar staffed entirely by Stevie Nicks lookalikes.
I am having an exhausting but amazing time, and yet I can’t wait to fly back and see James. I text him to tell him I’ve just seen a man feeding a giant Hyacinth Macaw an Arnold Palmer in Madison Square Gardens. He texts me back saying, ‘I’ll feed you my Arnold Palmer when you get home,’ and I snigger like Sid James. When I roll in drunk at 2am I send him a photo of the Brooklyn Bridge at night, its strings of light reflected in the East River. He sends me back a photo of his feet resting on the coffee table in his living room – Sainsbury’s ready meal in the foreground, Spurs on the telly in the background.
On my final night I take Pauly back to Corner Bistro for dinner to thank him for letting me stay. I want to take him somewhere fancier but he’s adamant he wants a burger. I don’t push it – I know there isn’t a burger in London that comes close.
I tell Pauly briefly about how things are going with James, how he’s so vague and non-committal with arrangements.
‘How old did you say this guy was? He’s older, right?’
‘Oh, old, forty-five,’ I say. ‘So what, you think it’s just a generation thing?’ I say, hopefully.
Pauly looks at me with pity. ‘No, sweetheart, I don’t think that’s it.’
‘Well what?’ I say, putting down my burger, feeling suddenly nervous.
‘He’s late forties, attractive and rich?’
‘Yeah, so?’
‘And you haven’t met his friends?’
‘He’s met a couple of mine.’
‘Not the same thing. You say he travels a lot?’
‘He does business all over the place, the Far East, Europe. All over. Factories, investors … what?’
‘But he’s away regularly?’
I count the number of times James has gone away for business since I met him. Maybe six.
‘What, Pauly? Just say it, you’re worrying me.’
‘I hate to break it to you, but I think your dude’s married.’
I laugh, relieved. ‘He’s not married. Definitely not. He stayed over last Saturday and Sunday. And Monday. There’s no way his wife wouldn’t twig.’
‘Maybe he tells her he’s away on business.’
‘His phone’s always on, she’d call.’ Now I think about it, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard it ring. Maybe it’s on silent …
‘He has two cell phones, cheaters always do,’ says Pauly, grabbing some fries from my plate. ‘There’s a wife.’
‘No, definitely not. I’ve been to his house, no trace of one.’
‘Okay, maybe not a wife but it sounds like there’s another woman, maybe several.’
You know what? I have a lot of time for Pauly but I’m not going to take advice from a guy whose longest relationship was three and a half months, and who expresses doubts that man ever landed on the moon.
‘Look, he’s just a commitment-phobe, plain and simple.’
‘No. Something’s up. If you’re okay to keep going, just taking these crumbs he’s giving you, that’s cool – but that doesn’t sound like your style.’
‘Let’s change the subject. Where are we going for pudding?’
On my way to the airport the following evening, I replay what Pauly was saying about James offering me ‘crumbs’, and how little I’m demanding from him. Maybe I should say something the next time I see him …
Then, as I board my flight, I get a text from James saying, ‘I’ll pick you up tomorrow at 7pm, you choose the restaurant.’ Now that’s more like it.
I open my front door to him and his eyes widen and he breaks into a grin.
‘Nice top,’ he says, kissing me.
‘You like? $20 from Loehmanns.’
‘I like. Where are we eating? Claridges? The Ivy?’
‘God, no,’ I say. ‘Head west, my treat.’
We are halfway through dinner at my favourite, favourite restaurant, Number One Thai, off Ladbroke Grove. Under the table our legs are touching and when I tell him about all the places I went to in New York, he says, ‘Next time I’m coming with you.’ (He doesn’t believe me about the diamond teeth.)
I pop to the toilet and as I come back to the table he grabs my waist, pulls me toward him and kisses me, holding the back of my head with both hands. I love you, James Stephens. I do, I do.
‘So your friend, Paul …’ he says.
‘Pauly, yes?’
‘Did he try it on then? I bet he did …’
‘Of course not, he’s got some crazy sexy Italian girlfriend.’
‘But you used to have a thing with him.’
‘Not at all, just a snog, years ago. It was nothing, we didn’t have sex or anything.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ he says.
‘We didn’t! We just fooled around, it was all very innocent.’
‘I still don’t think it’s right that you stayed at his apartment.’
‘Why ever not? He wasn’t even there!’
‘It’s just … I don’t know.’
‘There’s nothing whatsoever to be jealous about,’ I say.
‘I’m not jealous. I just think it’s odd. One of you must fancy the other one …’
‘Just because you can’t be friends with a woman you don’t want to shag doesn’t mean other men can’t … now please could you pour me some wine?’
He fills my glass up.
‘It’s not right,’ he says.
‘James, I’ve told you all about Pauly. I’m being totally honest with you because I’m trying to be a grown-up. Because I like you.’
I lift my glass to my mouth and smile, but James looks like he’s been slapped.
‘What? What’s wrong?’ I say.
He takes a long breath.
‘What is it, are you okay?’ I say. He suddenly looks queasy with nerves.
He nods slowly.
‘Ever since I met you, since that first night, I’ve felt there was something very special about you …’
Oh my God. He’s going to propose.
‘And I’ve tried to keep my distance but when I’m not with you I miss you …’
He’s going to propose!
‘And when I don’t speak to you, I just want to call you …’
HE IS GOING TO PROPOSE!
‘But there’s a problem.’
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Stella Newman
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: A novel about love, heartbreak and dessert.Girl meets boy.Girl loses boy.Girl loses mind.Sophie Klein walks into a bar one Friday night and her life changes. She meets James Stephens: charismatic, elusive, and with a hosiery model ex who casts a long, thin shadow over their burgeoning relationship. He’s clever, funny and shares her greatest pleasure in life – to eat and drink slightly too much and then have a little lie down. Sophie’s instinct tells her James is too good to be true – and he is.An exploration of love, heartbreak, self-image, self-deception and lots of food. Pear-Shaped is in turns smart, laugh-out-loud funny and above all, recognizable to women everywhere.Contains an exclusive extract from Stella’s new novel Leftovers.