A Night In With Marilyn Monroe
A Night In With Marilyn Monroe
Lucy Holliday
The hilarious follow-up to A Night in With Audrey Hepburn from your favourite new author. Perfect for fans of Lucy Diamond and Sophie Kinsella.After dating the hottest man on the planet, Dillon O’Hara, Libby Lomax has come back down to earth with a bump. Now she’s throwing herself into a new relationship and is determined to be a better friend to best pal, Ollie, as he launches his new restaurant.Despite good intentions, Libby is hugely distracted when a newly reformed Dillon arrives back on the scene, more irresistible than ever. And when another unwelcome guest turns up on her battered sofa in the form of Marilyn Monroe, Libby would willingly bite her own arm off for a return to normality.
Copyright (#ulink_9623ba2f-d35c-57ba-af24-42f30b862999)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by Harper 2015
This edition published by Harper 2016
Copyright © Lucy Holliday 2015
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Cover design and illustration by Jane Harwood
Lucy Holliday asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007582273
Ebook Edition © August 2016 ISBN: 9780008163341
Version: 2016-06-29
Contents
Cover (#ud5acc12d-b1bf-5590-bda4-803e6c1d5cbb)
Title Page (#ue18000a8-db17-5d1c-9799-ecc1d9040e04)
Copyright (#ub3fca78e-a5eb-53b4-b8ea-ccf2cf53b619)
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Lucy Holliday (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE (#u187251b9-7f13-54a4-ae36-cef40e8c5002)
WhatsApp message 5 Sept 10.17 a.m. To: Nora
Newsagent at Heathrow had copy of You and Your Wedding magazine!!! Page 84, right? Will look now. L xx
WhatsApp message 5 Sept 10.19 a.m. To: Nora
Ivory bias-cut one with lace sleeves?
WhatsApp message 5 Sept 10.20 a.m. To: Nora
Love it. Would look perfect on you. Let me know when you want me to come up to Glasgow for bridal shop session. Boarding any minute now. Lx
*
WhatsApp message 5 Sept 10.26 a.m. To: Cass
No, Cass, I can’t meet you at Selfridges shoe hall in 5 mins.
WhatsApp message 5 Sept 10.27 a.m. To: Cass
Because am getting on plane to Miami.
WhatsApp message 5 Sept 10.28 a.m. To: Cass
With Dillon.
WhatsApp message 5 Sept 10.29 a.m. To: Cass
Yes, all right, will meet you at Selfridges shoe hall after I get back.
*
WhatsApp message 5 Sept 10.30 a.m. To: Mum
For Christ’s sake, Mum, of course am not moving to America to marry Dillon. Cass obv got wrong end of stick as usual. Is just holiday.
WhatsApp message 5 Sept 10.33 a.m. To: Mum
No, Mum, I haven’t thought about what I’d say if he asked me because he isn’t going to ask me. Has only been 3 months.
WhatsApp message 5 Sept 10.34 a.m. To: Mum
No, Mum, am not worried that he won’t buy cow if getting milk for free.
WhatsApp message 5 Sept 10.35 a.m. To: Mum
Also, have to say that is pretty outdated view of relationships.
*
WhatsApp message 6 Sept 13.02 p.m. To: Nora
Idyllic. Lx
WhatsApp message 6 Sept 13.03 p.m. To: Nora
Everything. Hotel. View. Food. Him. Lx
WhatsApp message 6 Sept 13.05 p.m. To: Nora
Appreciate your concern but don’t worry. Am not falling in love with him. Even I’m not that much of an idiot. Lx
*
WhatsApp message 7 Sept 18.08 p.m. To: Olly
Hi, Ol, didn’t know you knew I was here!! Yep have seen hurricane forecast. But isn’t due until day after tomorrow and we’re leaving tomorrow morning. Will call when back. Any news on that restaurant lease? Lx
*
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 11.13 a.m. To: Nora
Not home yet no. Couple of slight issues on that front. Just wondering: do you know how easy it is to fly from USA to UK if you don’t have your passport?
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 11.18 a.m. To: Nora
That is one of slight issues. Dillon has my passport.
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 11.19 a.m. To: Nora
That is other slight issue. Don’t know where Dillon is.
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 11.20 a.m. To: Nora
Because our last night at hotel he bumped into some people he knew and we ended up at random party in Coconut Grove. Had a bit of a row so I left. Forgot he had passports on him.
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 11.21 a.m. To: Nora
Because he didn’t come back to the hotel and haven’t seen him since.
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 11.22 a.m. To: Nora
He isn’t answering his phone.
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 11.23 a.m. To: Nora
No, Nora. I haven’t forgotten about hurricane.
*
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 11.27 a.m. To: Olly
Thanks for messaging, Olly. Nora obviously keeping you in the loop. But can’t check into another hotel without passport.
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 11.29 a.m. To: Olly
Had already checked out of old one before realized Dillon AWOL. Also minimum room rate there is $800 per night. Also is now fully booked with terrified locals fleeing small houses in advance of hurricane.
*
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 11.42 a.m. To: Cass
No, Cass I can’t bring you back bulk order of Kiehls body lotion.
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 11.46 a.m. To: Cass
Yes I do know it’s pounds for dollars.
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 11.48 a.m. To: Cass
BECAUSE AM STUCK IN MIAMI WITH NO PASSPORT, NO HOTEL ROOM, 26 QUID IN MY CURRENT ACCOUNT, EXACTLY 17 DOLLARS IN MY WALLET AND HURRICANE APPROACHING.
*
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 6.53 p.m. To: Nora
Crisis averted!!! Am spending night bunking down inside Miami Dolphins Football Stadium.
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 6.55 p.m. To: Nora
Is fine, honestly. Everyone being very friendly. Have met nice family from Arizona who have lent me sleeping bag and are cooking me hot dog on their portable bbq. Is actually all very jolly and Blitz-spirity at moment!
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 6.57 p.m. To: Nora
No. He’s still not answering his phone.
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 7.01 p.m. To: Nora
The row? Nothing, really.
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 7.06 p.m. To: Nora
Yes, all right. It was because he was flirting with another girl.
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 7.08 p.m. To: Nora
Norwegian swimsuit model. But not sure that’s really important right now.
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 8.44 p.m. To: Nora
OK, am getting small suspicion lovely family from Arizona may belong to fanatical doomsday cult into which they are trying to indoctrinate me.
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 8.56 p.m. To: Nora
Yes, they definitely belong to fanatical doomsday cult into which they are trying to indoctrinate me.
*
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 21.22 p.m. To: Olly
Am OK. Have to admit is getting a tiny bit scary here now. Winds are starting to make a hell of a noise outside stadium. Also might have accidentally joined fanatical Doomsday cult. Seemed like small price to pay for sleeping bag and hot dog at the time, but am starting to have serious regrets.
*
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 22.23 p.m. To: Nora
Shit Nora this is getting scary now. Winds are getting up. People crying. Praying. Not just fanatical Doomsday cult but normal people too. Signal keeps cutting out. Will message as soon as I can. Love you. Sorry about all this. Lx
*
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 22.26 p.m. To: Cass
Cass. Am slap-bang in middle of worst hurricane to hit Florida in 2 decades. Don’t know when, if ever, will be getting out of here. So no. I won’t be able to meet you at Selfridges today to go shoe shopping.
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 22.29 p.m. To: Cass
No, Cass. It doesn’t even come close to qualifying as a disaster.
*
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 22.31 p.m. To: Olly
I love you, Olly Lx
*
(#u187251b9-7f13-54a4-ae36-cef40e8c5002)
It was a big moment, last night, when my grandmother knocked on the door of my hotel room and handed me this box containing about seventeen layers of tissue and, beneath them all, her wedding veil.
A massive moment, actually.
She’s not the most warm and fuzzy of grandmothers – nobody on Dad’s side is warm and fuzzy; in fact, come to think of it, nobody on Mum’s side is all that warm and fuzzy either – but I’ve always worshipped her a little bit. For her to hand down her wedding veil to me … not to any of Dad’s brothers’ daughters, but me … well, it makes me feel special. Which is nice, for a change.
And all right, it would have made me feel even more special if she hadn’t added, as she watched me open the box, ‘I’d give you my wedding dress, too, Libby, darling, but I’m afraid you don’t have quite the tiny waist I did when I wore it.’
But still. A big moment. A symbol of my super-glamorous grandmother’s esteem.
And then there’s the fact that it’s absolutely stunning.
Seriously, there’s no way you could find anything like this in any bridal shop across the land: hand-stitched, palest ivory lace, with a gauzy elbow-length piece to cover your face at the front and an almost ten-foot drop at the back. (Grandmother only got married in a small village church in her native Shropshire, but she was modelling her entire wedding ‘look’ on her movie idol, Grace Kelly, hence the dramatically long veil, carried up the aisle by her – eight – bridesmaids.) It makes me look stunning, and not just because the gauzy lace covering my face is the equivalent of smearing a camera lens with Vaseline to blur out imperfections. Something about the way the veil hangs, the way my hair is half pulled back to accommodate it, the flattering ivory shade, perhaps … whatever the reason, I feel a bit ravishing, to be honest with you.
And now, looking soft-focus himself from behind all this lace, here comes Olly, striding towards me. He reaches out with both hands, folds back the veil so that he can see my face, and smiles down at me. His eyes look exceptionally soft, and he doesn’t speak for a moment.
‘What on earth,’ he says, when he finally speaks, ‘are you wearing this for?’
‘It’s Grandmother’s. She came round with it last night.’ I pull the veil back down, keen to retreat behind the Vaseline blur again, just for one blissful moment. ‘Does it suit me?’
‘Wonderfully. But – and don’t bite my head off here, Libby – don’t you think maybe you ought to stick to just a simple hat, or something? It isn’t your wedding, after all.’
‘I know that,’ I sigh. I steal one final glance at myself, a vision of Grace Kelly-esque (well, Grace Kelly-ish) bridal loveliness, in the full-length mirror in the corner of my hotel room. ‘And obviously I’m not going to wear this to Dad and Phoebe’s wedding. Though, to be fair, I don’t know if Phoebe could actually object – I mean, Grandmother did offer it to her for the day, and she turned it down …’
This doesn’t at all take the shine off Grandmother offering me the veil afterwards, by the way. I mean, all right, she was in a bit of a grump about her soon-to-be new daughter-in-law refusing to wear the veil because it would swamp her rather fabulous figure, but that wasn’t why she came to my room late last night and handed it over to me instead. She’d only have let Phoebe borrow it – her Something Borrowed for the day – whereas I’ve actually been bequeathed it … if that’s the right word to use when Grandmother is still very much alive.
‘Still,’ says Olly, with a grin, ‘I’m not sure if Phoebe would be all that thrilled at a guest turning up in a ten-foot lace veil on her wedding day. Especially not her new stepdaughter.’
I wince.
‘Sorry, sorry.’ He holds up both hands. ‘I know we’re not calling her your stepmum. My bad.’
Because it’s not as if I don’t have enough problems with the one actual mum I’ve already got. Not to mention the fact that Dad has never really been enough of a dad for me to call the woman he’s marrying my ‘stepmother’. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve got no objection to Phoebe whatsoever, who seemed a pleasant enough woman during the ten-minute chat we had when Olly and I arrived at the hotel last night. But I think we’ll all be much more comfortable, once today is over, if we just go back to being polite strangers, exchanging Christmas cards and the occasional text. Which, where Dad is concerned anyway, would be a massive improvement on the last twenty-odd years.
‘Anyway, we should probably be heading down to the orangery now, don’t you think?’ Olly asks as – a little bit reluctantly – I start detaching the veil from my hair and folding it back into its slim cardboard box. ‘I know your dad said it’s all very informal, but I doubt if that extends to us arriving after the bride and groom.’
‘Well, it’d be a bit ironic of Dad to suddenly start deploring lateness right now,’ I say, ‘given that he only remembered my eighteenth birthday two weeks after the event … but, you’re right. We should get going.’
I head back over to the mirror and look at our joint reflection. Now that I’ve taken the veil off, all I’m wearing is a cap-sleeved silk dress and matching suede heels that, both in charcoal grey, feel more wedding-appropriate than my usual head-to-toe black. Olly is looking dapper, and astonishingly different from his normal self, in a dark blue suit, crisp white shirt and striped tie. It’s been ages since I’ve seen him in an outfit that wasn’t either chef’s whites or, ever since he started doing up his own restaurant a couple of months ago, a paint-spattered T-shirt and baggy jeans, so it’s a bit of a surprise to look at him now and remember how well he scrubs up.
‘Do we look all right?’ I ask, meeting his eyes in the mirror.
Olly studies us both for a moment.
‘I think we look pretty bloody good,’ he says, meeting my eyes in the mirror, too. ‘You in particular. I really like that dress.’
‘Thanks, Ol. Oh, and I apologize in advance,’ I say, linking my arm through his and starting to head for the door, grabbing my hat and bag and pashmina as we go, ‘if any of my relatives mistakenly think we’re a couple. I haven’t told them we are – I mean, I never see any of them from one decade to the next, obviously – but you know how people jump to conclusions …’
‘There’s no need to apologize.’
‘… and some of them might even remember you from when you came with me to my granddad’s funeral eleven years ago, so they’ll probably ask all kinds of questions about why we’re not married yet …’
‘Well, it would be a perfectly legitimate question. If we really had been together all those years, I mean.’
‘… but you should be able to fob them off easily enough without even having to tell them we’re just best friends. Shove a drink in most of their faces and they’ll forget they were even talking to you, anyway.’
‘Don’t worry, Lib. Fobbing off intrusive lines of questioning from well-meaning relatives is pretty much a speciality of mine.’
And Olly holds open the door, impeccably mannered as always, for me to walk out ahead of him.
*
I’m so, so grateful to Olly for agreeing to be my date for Dad’s wedding.
I mean, I know it’s just about the last thing he wants to do with his weekend: schlep all the way up here to Ayrshire, where Phoebe originally hails from, just to keep me company at my father’s wedding. It’s not as if, what with his restaurant opening at the end of this coming week, he doesn’t have plenty to be getting on with in his own life.
And I suppose I could always have asked Adam to accompany me. Given that he and I really are a couple.
But Adam and I have only been an item for about eight weeks. Yes, things are going terrifically well between us – I mean, seriously well – but it still feels a bit soon to be subjecting him to the cauldron of awkward encounters and complicated emotions that are guaranteed to mark Dad’s wedding for me. Anyway, Olly agreed to come with me today as soon as I mentioned the surprise (OK, shock) arrival of the invitation, three months ago, and there’s not a person in the world I’d rather have as my wingman.
(Not to mention the fact that I’ve been keeping quiet about the fact that Adam and I are, to put it in nice, clear Facebook terminology that never quite translates to real life – not my real life, at any rate – ‘in a relationship’. I haven’t even mentioned it, yet, to Nora, my other best friend and Olly’s sister. As I say, it’s still really early days and … well, the last relationship I had ended in such unmitigated disaster – quite literally – that I’m a bit wary of announcing that I’ve headed down that route again, even if it is with a man who’s the polar opposite of my ex, Dillon.)
My gratitude to Olly, though, however much I thought I’d already realized it, was made even more obvious to me when Dad walked back down the aisle with his brand-new wife, Phoebe, roughly fifteen minutes ago.
I don’t know what came over me, but I suddenly felt this massive lump in my throat, and not in a wedding-y, happy-tears sort of way. So it was lovely to be able to reach to my right-hand side and fumble for Olly’s hand to grab on to, and even lovelier to realize that I didn’t need to do much fumbling, because he was already reaching for mine.
It’s a good thing that Grandmother, who was on my other side, didn’t notice our brief-but-meaningful hand-squeeze, because I’m pretty sure she’s already getting all kinds of ideas into her head about me and Olly.
And now I’m absolutely sure she’s getting all kinds of ideas, because we’ve all just milled from the orangery, where the ceremony took place, into the sunny-but-chilly grounds of the hotel for an alfresco drinks reception, and she’s just this very minute seized my arm and said, ‘Libby, darling, your Olly is absolutely wonderful.’
‘I know.’ Thank God Olly has just taken his absolutely wonderful self off to find a glass of champagne for us all, so I don’t have to make I’m really sorry faces at him and hope Grandmother doesn’t see. ‘But he’s not my Olly, in fact, Grandmother. He’s just a friend.’
‘Oh.’ Her face, miraculously unlined for her eighty-odd years (and, fingers crossed, another thing I’ll inherit from her apart from her veil) falls slightly. ‘That’s a pity. I remember him from your grandfather’s funeral. And he wrote me the sweetest condolence letter afterwards. So if he’s just a friend, tell me: what’s wrong with him?’
‘Nothing. God, absolutely nothing at all! He’s just … we’re not together,’ I explain. Or, to be more accurate, I barely explain. So I go on. ‘Do you remember my friend Nora? We came to stay with you for a week one summer when we were fourteen or fifteen? Well, Olly’s her brother.’
Grandmother thinks about this for a moment. ‘Just because he’s somebody’s brother,’ she replies, tartly, ‘doesn’t mean he wouldn’t make a more-than-acceptable boyfriend.’
Which you can’t argue with, I suppose. And certainly I wouldn’t dare to argue with Grandmother, who – for all her Grace Kelly wedding attire – is actually a little more along the lines of one of her other screen idols, Katharine Hepburn, when it comes to spikiness. In fact, she’s dressed rather like Katharine Hepburn today herself, in splendid cream silk palazzo pants and a black kimono jacket and – I’m touched by this, given that we’re not as close as we could be – the beaded lariat necklace I made and sent her for her eighty-fifth birthday a few months ago. (I’m a jewellery designer, I should say, so this isn’t as home-crafty as it might sound.)
‘Anyhow, he couldn’t be any more unsuitable than … what was the name of that chap you’d just stopped seeing the last time I spoke to you?’ Grandmother asks. ‘The one who abandoned you in Mexico in the middle of an earthquake.’
‘It was Miami. And it was a hurricane.’ I can’t, unfortunately, correct her on the ‘abandoned’ part. ‘And his name was Dillon.’
‘Yes. Why should this nice Olly be any worse for you than a man who lets you face natural disasters on your own? You wouldn’t let Libby face a natural disaster on her own,’ she demands, of Olly, who – talk about timing – has just reappeared with three glasses of champagne, two of them impressively balanced in one hand, ‘would you?’
‘Sorry, Mrs Lomax?’
‘You wouldn’t leave Libby in Malaysia with a tidal wave approaching.’
‘Of course he wouldn’t,’ I say, hastily, before Olly twigs that we’re talking about Dillon. Because Olly and Dillon are not, in any way, shape or form, simpatico. ‘Thanks for the champagne, Ol. Can he get you anything else, Grandmother?’
‘No. But he can dance with me.’
She’s pointing an imperious finger in the direction of a very small octagonal dance floor that’s been laid down on what must usually be a patio. Music, from three exceptionally bored-looking members of a jazz trio, is emanating from right beside it.
‘I don’t know if that’s a good idea, Grandmother …’ Because I really don’t want her bearding poor Olly in her den and demanding to know exactly why it is that we aren’t a couple. He didn’t sign up for the third degree when he agreed to be my ‘date’ today, after all. ‘Nobody else has started dancing yet … and maybe Dad and Phoebe want to have a dance before anyone else …’
‘Well, I wanted a son who wouldn’t put me to shame by neglecting his duties as a father,’ Grandmother says, sharply, which is the very closest she ever comes to referencing the Great Unmentionable that is Dad’s history with me. ‘But we can’t always get what we want, Libby, can we?’ She hands me her champagne glass and turns to Olly. ‘So, shall we dance?’
Olly looks part-amused, part-terrified, but either way he doesn’t say no. He puts his own champagne glass down on one of the nearby trestle tables that feature the cold buffet nibbles, shoots me an eyebrow-raise, then extends his arm in a gentlemanly fashion for Grandmother to take as they stroll to the dance floor.
I watch in frozen fascination as they start to put together some surprisingly impressive moves. Surprising because Grandmother is an octogenarian with two artificial knees, and because I literally had no idea Olly could dance ‘properly’. The last time I saw him dance at all must have been at his parents’ big ruby anniversary party a few years back, but he ended up pretty drunk that night and capable of little more than cheerful bursts of (what I hoped at the time was) Dad Dancing.
Well, look at him go right now, wheeling Grandmother around that dance floor like a cross between Fred Astaire and Patrick Swayze. And, thank God, they’re dancing too energetically, by old-age-pensioner standards, anyway, for Grandmother to strike up a conversation, so with any luck I might be able to cut in and insist on a dance with Olly myself before she starts any embarrassing lines of questioning …
‘Libby.’
A voice, right behind me, makes me turn round.
It’s Dad, with one arm around his new wife, Phoebe, and the other arm around the pretty dark-haired girl who acted as the bridesmaid in the ceremony just now: Rosie, Phoebe’s seventeen-year-old daughter.
The fact that Phoebe has a daughter was news to me last night. I mean, the first I’d even heard of Phoebe herself was when the wedding e-vite popped up in my inbox back in April. And I’ve only had the briefest of text-message exchanges with Dad about the wedding since, purely centred on whether or not he might be able to get me the family discount on the room rate at the hotel. (Turns out he could. Which is just about the most family-oriented thing Dad’s done for me at any point in the last thirty years.) Any details – how they met, how long they’ve been together – were a total mystery to me until yesterday. Just for the record, I learned last night that they met last September when Phoebe started teaching speech therapy at the university where Dad lectures in film studies. Which is also when I learned of the existence of Rosie, my – wince alert – brand new stepsister.
‘Dad,’ I say. ‘Phoebe. Congratulations!’
Then, because if I don’t do it, he certainly won’t, I lean forward and give him a quick hug, and then do the same to Phoebe.
‘Aw, thanks, Libby.’ Phoebe, a forty-year-old stunner in a wasp-waisted, extremely plunging wedding gown, returns the hug in a nice, if distracted way. ‘So good of you to come all this way, love.’
‘Oh, that’s OK! It was good of you to invite me.’
‘Glad you could make it,’ says Dad, with one of his rare and extremely fleeting smiles. ‘I know you’re really busy these days.’
‘Honestly, Dad, I wouldn’t have missed it.’
And then there’s a moment of silence.
This, exactly this, is the reason I didn’t bring Adam up here today instead of Olly. This sheer, tooth-clenching awkwardness. And this is better than usual, believe it or not. Up until last summer, it had been years since I’d even spoken to Dad. It took quite a leap of faith, and some gentle pushing from … well, from a new friend of mine … to break that ice at all last year.
‘You should meet your brand-new stepsister!’ Phoebe says.
I wince. Thank God, nobody notices.
‘Rosie, this is Libby. Libby, this is Rosie.’
‘Hi!’ I say.
‘Hi,’ says Rosie.
‘Rosie’s about to start her final year of college,’ Phoebe goes on, ‘and she’s just starting to think which uni courses she might apply for. And you, Libby … you work in a jewellery shop, is that right?’
‘Um, well, I sort of design my own jewellery, actually.’
‘So you’re artistic! That’s nice. Rosie’s very artistic, too. She’s thinking of applying for a fine art degree, or maybe something related to theatre design … oh! I’d better just go over and say hi to Jenny and Nick … no, no, Eddie, you stay here,’ she says, firmly, as Dad does his best to escape after her, ‘and catch up with Libby properly. Get the two girls chatting!’ she adds, making a sort of criss-cross gesture with her hands at Rosie and me. ‘Help them get to know each other!’
This is going to be tricky for Dad, given that he doesn’t even know me himself. So – after shooting a slightly panicked look of my own in the direction of the dance floor, where Olly (oh, God) is now being engaged in extremely intense conversation by Grandmother – I take pity on him and decide it’s best if I take charge of the conversation myself.
‘So! Rosie … you’re … er … about to apply to university!’
‘Yep.’ Rosie nods. Pretty in her pale green bridesmaid’s dress, she has a confident look about her that suggests she’s one of the popular crowd at school. I don’t think her lack of interest in me is anything personal so much as the fact that to her I’m just some boring older person who doesn’t know the ins and outs of her social life. ‘Just like Mum already told you.’
‘Right. So, theatre design, maybe?’
‘Not if I have my way,’ Dad says. ‘You know, this girl here is a contender for a top-notch media and communications course anywhere in the country. I’m trying to persuade her to apply to Kingston, because that’s one of the best places for a terrific all-round media education. And she can specialize in film history in her third year.’
‘Oh.’ I’m slightly startled that Dad is even interested in Rosie’s upcoming choice of tertiary education, let alone quite this invested in it. ‘So you’re a film fan, then, Rosie?’
‘God, yeah, I love movies. Especially all the classics. Eddie’s introduced me and Mum to so many of them. We do, like, these old movie nights on Sundays, and I invite my friends over and stuff—’
‘And I try not to be too much of an old bore and stop the film every five minutes to lecture them all on the things they should have noticed,’ Dad interrupts, with a chuckle.
Yes, that’s right: a chuckle.
A chuckle isn’t something I’ve ever heard Dad emit before.
‘Oh, you’re all right, Eddie,’ Rosie tells him, with a laugh of her own. ‘Anyway, if you do too much of that, we just send you out for more popcorn.’
‘So that’s what I’m reduced to, is it?’ Dad says, with another – another – chuckle. ‘A PhD, and all my years of experience, and author of a highly regarded book on the history of cinema, and you and your mates just want to send me out for popcorn!’
‘Oh, talking of your book,’ says Rosie, ‘my friend Jasper’s been reading it over the holidays, and he said it’s amazing. Like, he’s learned absolutely loads from it.’
‘Well, Jasper is obviously going places!’ Dad says. Only semi-jokingly.
But then Dad is always at his most pompous where His Book is concerned. Which I suppose is a good thing in some ways, because it was the writing of His Book that dominated his life and made him such a crappy, absent father to me for over twenty-five years.
Perhaps it’s the fact that the book finally came out last year that has enabled him to be (as he so clearly is) a pretty involved stepdad to Rosie.
Just at this moment, I feel a gentle touch to my elbow, and glance around to see that Olly has come over to join us.
I don’t actually throw myself on him like a drowning woman might throw herself on a passing lifeguard, but it’s a pretty close thing.
‘Hi,’ says Olly, extending a pleasant, if rather chilly, hand to my dad. ‘Congratulations, Mr Lomax.’
‘Oh, thanks … you’re … uh … Oscar, is it?’
‘Olly,’ I say.
‘Are you Libby’s boyfriend?’ Rosie asks, suddenly perking up and showing a bit more interest in me.
Or, to be more specific, in Olly.
At least, I assume this is what all the sudden pouty lips and hair-flicky action are about.
And Olly is looking nice today, in his smart suit, and with his sandy hair vaguely tidy for once, so I suppose I can’t blame Rosie for all the pouting and flicking, even if it does feel a bit … incestuous. Because she’s my (wince) new stepsister, and Olly is practically my brother.
‘No, no,’ I say, hastily, before Olly has to be the one to do so. ‘We’re just friends.’
‘Oh,’ says Rosie, meaningfully, as if Olly, being helpfully single, might suddenly decide that a seventeen-year-old is a suitable match for him, at thirty-three, and whisk her on to the dance floor for a bit of a smooch.
‘I just came over, Libby,’ Olly says, tactfully ignoring Rosie’s eager body language and turning to me instead, ‘to see if you wanted a dance. I think I might have worn your grandmother out, unfortunately, so I’m a partner down. I get the impression the jazz band are keen for some enthusiastic participants, though, so if you’re up for cutting a rug …?’
‘Delighted to,’ I say, with abject relief, as I clasp his outstretched hand. ‘I’ll catch you later, Dad. You probably need to circulate anyway, right?’
‘Absolutely,’ Dad says, looking pretty abjectly relieved, himself, to be rid of me.
‘And great to meet you, Rosie,’ I add, with what I hope is a suitably friendly-but-not-overly-intimate stepsisterly wave. ‘Maybe we can … er … keep in touch? I’m sure Dad can give you my email address if you’d like.’
Her eyes boggle at me as though I’ve just suggested writing each other letters with a quill pen and ink and sending them off by horse-drawn mail coach.
‘Anyway, congratulations again,’ Olly says, swiftly and smoothly, as he starts to lead me in the direction of the dance floor. ‘You’re shaking,’ he adds, to me, in a low voice. ‘Tricky conversation?’
‘Not for my dad and his brand-new stepdaughter, no,’ I say, but quietly, because I don’t want Grandmother to hear. She’s sitting on a chair in the shade of some nearby trees, where Olly must have chivalrously parked her, with a fresh glass of champagne in her hand. ‘They seem to be getting on like a house on fire. He’s taking an interest in her future … introducing her and her friends to all his favourite movies … supplying the popcorn …’
Olly gives a little wince of his own – amazingly, his first of the trip. ‘Sorry, Lib.’
‘It’s all right.’
It isn’t, really. Because although my dad not being bothered about me is something I’ve come to terms with, it’s quite different to see my dad taking such obvious pleasure in building a relationship with a daughter who’s come into his life through circumstance, and not biology.
Those cosy-sounding movie nights Rosie mentioned, for example. They were precisely the sort of thing I used to crave – I mean, really crave – when I was growing up. I had a few of them when I was eight or nine and still staying over at Dad’s for the occasional night (before plans for His Book properly took off, and he lost interest in me entirely). And I can still remember how exciting it was to be treated like a grown-up, and shown Dad’s favourite movies until way, way past my bedtime. Casablanca, and The African Queen, and Some Like It Hot … with hindsight, of course, not all of them exactly the sort of thing an eight-year-old enjoys. But I enjoyed them with Dad. Despite his stiff, rather formal method of showing them, with frequent breaks for him to point out Meaningful Scenes. A method he seems to have loosened up on where Rosie is concerned.
‘Do you want to go?’ Olly asks, lowering his voice still further. He has one hand on my waist and one on my shoulder as we dance (or rather, rock aimlessly from side to side; I evidently haven’t inherited Grandmother’s rug-cutting genes), and he uses the latter hand now to give my shoulder a gentle, comforting squeeze. ‘I’m happy to make the excuses if you want. I could say you’re feeling ill. Or I could say I’m feeling ill. Or I could say we’re both feeling ill – blame it all on those mushroom vol-au-vents I’ve seen doing the rounds, and cause a mass stampede for the exits …?’
I laugh. ‘Thanks, Olly, but I think I’d be even more unpopular around here if I put the kibosh on Dad and Phoebe’s big day.’
‘You’re not unpopular.’ He looks down at me. ‘Not with anyone who matters.’
We’re interrupted by the sound of his phone ringing, somewhere inside his suit jacket.
‘That’s Nora’s ringtone,’ I say, because we’ve both had her programmed in our phones, ever since she moved up to Glasgow a few years ago, with ‘Auld Lang Syne’. ‘We should answer. It might be something to do with her flights, or something.’
My mood is lifted, briefly, by this reminder of the fact that Nora is meeting us at Glasgow Airport later on this evening so that we can all fly back down to London together: she’s coming ‘home’ for the week so that she can help Olly with all the last-minute preparations for his restaurant opening, and come to his opening-night party on Friday evening.
‘No, I expect she’ll just be calling back to see if I’ve decided whether or not to take her up on her suggestion about Tash and the motorbike.’
I blink up at him. ‘Tash and what motorbike?’
‘Er … I was telling you about this in the bar last night, Libby.’ He looks surprised. ‘You weren’t that drunk, were you?’
No; I wasn’t very drunk at all. But there was a full five minutes, possibly even longer, when I got distracted by the sight of the single-malt whisky bottles lined up along the top of the bar. Single-malt whisky bottles make me think of Dillon. And when I think about Dillon, which I very rarely allow myself to do, entire swathes of time can get sucked into this sort of … vortex, I suppose you’d have to call it. So Olly could have been sitting in the bar buck-naked with a loaf of bread strapped to his head, talking about the time he was abducted by aliens, and it wouldn’t have even registered with me.
‘Tash,’ Olly re-explains, patiently (more patiently than he’d be doing if he knew it was thoughts of Dillon that had distracted me last night), ‘is going to come down to London to stay this week, too. Something about a conference, and apparently she’s a dab hand with a hammer and nails … she’s offering to help out at the restaurant in the evenings …’
Tash, one of Nora’s closest friends from the hospital they both work at in Glasgow, is almost certainly a dab hand with a hammer and nails. Tash is the sort of person who’s a dab hand with everything. A bit like Nora, in fact, capable and unflappable, which is probably why they’re such good friends.
I didn’t know she was going to be coming down to London with Nora this week.
Not, I should say, that I’ve got any kind of a problem with Tash, who’s seemed really nice every time I’ve met her.
It’s just that I’d been envisaging some lovely quality time spent with Nora over these next few days: helping Olly get the restaurant ready for the Friday opening; chatting late into the night over a bottle of wine; shopping for the last few bits and bobs she might need for her own wedding at the end of July, just over a month away …
I mean, obviously we can still do all those things with Tash around, too. From the times I’ve spent with her whenever I’ve visited Nora up in Scotland, I know Tash enjoys a drink and a gossip just as much as Nora and I do, and seeing as she’s a fellow bridesmaid, it would make perfect sense for her to come on a wedding-shopping expedition.
But still. It’s not quite the way I’d fondly imagined this week would go, that’s all.
‘Anyway,’ Olly goes on, ‘she’s planning on riding down on her motorbike, and Nora wondered if I wanted to hire a bike and go home that way, too.’
‘Instead of taking your flight?’
‘Yeah. We can do it in eight hours or so, with breaks. I mean, it’s not that I think Tash needs the company, or anything – she’s always seemed pretty self-sufficient whenever I’ve met her.’
I don’t know why the idea of Olly and Tash riding motorbikes all the way from Glasgow to London should make me feel as antsy as it does. After all, even if I did have a problem with Tash (which as I’ve already said, I absolutely don’t), Olly taking the long, uncomfortable route back home with Tash instead of a nice quick flight with me and Nora shouldn’t bother me in the slightest. It’s just because I’ve been a bit thrown by the idea that I might not get to spend this week hanging out with Nora in the way I’d envisaged, I decide. And maybe also by the fact that I hate him riding a motorbike, full stop. I watched a terrifying news segment once about a horrific accident caused by a bike skidding under an articulated lorry, and the memory has stayed with me.
‘So I was going to say no, but I’ve been thinking about it, and … well, a night-time bike ride …’ Olly looks wistful for a moment. ‘Nora suggested it because she thought I might like to clear my head a bit. What with this big week coming up, and all that, it should be pretty quiet on a Sunday night. And I haven’t ridden a bike in so long, I’ve almost forgotten how peaceful it is.’
‘Then you should definitely do it,’ I say. Reluctantly, but as enthusiastically as possible. Because I can tell from that wistful expression on his face that he really wants this.
‘Really?’
‘Absolutely! Just take it carefully, please, please, Olly, and obviously lay off any more champagne for the rest of the afternoon …’
‘You don’t need to worry about me,’ says Olly. ‘I’m here taking care of you today, remember?’
‘I know. And I’ll take care of you all next week, Ol, I promise. I mean, I may not be a dab hand with a hammer and nails, but I’ll bring coffee, and homemade food …’
‘There’s honestly no need for that,’ Olly says, hastily – as well he might, given that he’s a bona-fide foodie and I can’t cook for toffee. ‘Moral support will be fine.’
Which he thoroughly deserves, because he is, indeed, as Grandmother has pointed out, absolutely wonderful.
‘Oh, God … Grandmother,’ I suddenly say. ‘Did she go on and on at you about us, Olly? I’m so sorry, she just gets these crazy ideas into her head, and—’
‘It’s OK, Lib, honestly. I mean, yes, she did mention the concept of you and me a few times during our turn about the dance floor … you’d make an excellent wife, apparently …’
I wince. Not for the first time today and not, I expect, for the last. (I mean, there are still speeches to come, and everything. And if I can get through whatever sentimental mush Dad will have to say about his ready-made new family, I’m going to need a hell of a lot more champagne than I’ve drunk so far.) ‘Ugh, Olly, I’m sorry.’
‘… and she wants to live to see at least one successful marriage for a member of her family, and to see one bride walking down the aisle in her veil who doesn’t make her think the whole thing is doomed from the very start …’
It’s a fair point. Grandmother’s children haven’t exactly managed the most successful set of marriages between them, and if the photos of my own mother in the veil are anything to go by, the clock was running out for Mum and Dad pretty much from the very moment they half-heartedly said I do.
‘… and I remind her of her late husband, apparently. And you remind her of herself. And they were blissfully happy for forty-six years. So really,’ he finishes, with a strained-sounding laugh, ‘what more evidence does anybody need that you and I ought to be together?’
This is mortifying.
I mean, yes, people are always accidentally mistaking me and Olly for a couple: I think both of us are pretty used to that now. But to have it coming from as stern and proper a figure as Grandmother feels, somehow, too real for comfort. It’s a bit like the moment we shared our one and only kiss, in Paris – the Mistaken Thing we’ve never talked about since, after far too much wine and far too intense a conversation about love. I can’t quite look Olly in the eye, and I’m certain, from the strain in his voice, that he’s just as embarrassed as I am.
‘Again,’ I say, sounding pretty strained myself, ‘I’m really sorry. She’s unstoppable when she gets the bit between her teeth. I had no idea she was going to latch on to you like that …’
His phone is going: ‘Auld Lang Syne’ again.
‘You really should get that this time,’ I say, grateful for the diversion. ‘Tell Nora to let Tash know she’ll have a companion for the road ahead.’
‘All right,’ says Olly, taking the phone out of his pocket. ‘And then I’ll just need five minutes online to pre-order a bike. Promise you’ll come and grab me the minute anyone starts speechifying, Lib?’
‘I promise.’
I watch him wander away from the noise of the jazz band, putting his phone to his ear as he goes. And then I take a deep, deep breath, and head for the trees, to see if I can persuade Grandmother, politely, to put a sock in it for the rest of the wedding. After all, if I can stand around here on Dad’s big day and bottle up all the things I might quite like to blurt out, Grandmother – a fully paid-up member of the Blitz generation – can surely do it too.
(#u187251b9-7f13-54a4-ae36-cef40e8c5002)
Like I say, it’s only been eight weeks. But I really think I might actually be falling in love with Adam already.
In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that a) I’m an incurable romantic and b) my standards are embarrassingly low. I mean, if you’re the sort of girl who’s constantly being showered in dozens of red roses just because it’s Tuesday, or whisked away to five-star luxury in the Italian lakes before being proposed to on a gondola, in Venice, at sunset, then my reason for suddenly realizing that Adam might be The One is going to seem a bit … silly.
But then, they do say that it’s the little things that make a relationship go the distance. The offer to dash to the shop at eight a.m. on a drizzly Sunday morning to pick up milk for a cup of tea. The random text message in the middle of a stressful day that tells you how great you make someone feel. The surprise scrawl, at the bottom of the tedious weekly shopping list, that simply announces Thinking about you.
My new boyfriend turning up to meet me outside my Very Important Meeting, bringing a Pret espresso and a packet of yogurt-covered raisins, is exactly this sort of ‘little thing’.
So yes, it’s not red roses, and it’s a long way from Venice at sunset, but it’s thoughtful, and lovely, and it matters.
‘You really, really shouldn’t have,’ I tell Adam, wrapping my arms round him and giving him a kiss. ‘You’re so busy. And your flight only got in two hours ago.’
‘I slept loads on the plane. I’m fresh as a daisy.’ The expression, in his Brooklyn accent, sounds as incongruous as it sounds sweet.
He’s probably not fibbing about this: he works for a swanky investment fund, and today’s flight, back to London from New York, is bound to have been one of the business-class variety. Unlike my mere hour’s flight back from Glasgow last night which, though brief, was of the Ryanair variety: cramped, hectic and a bit like finding yourself in a thirty-five-thousand-feet-high tin of sardines. And Adam does, in fact, look fresh as a daisy: impeccably dressed as ever in his crisp blue shirt and rumple-free grey suit, not a single dark hair out of place. To look at him now, lean and tanned and bright-eyed, you’d think that instead of just stepping off a seven-hour flight, he’d stepped out of a salon.
‘Anyway, it’s right around the corner from my office,’ he goes on.
‘Your office is in Mayfair. This –’ I gesture around at the slightly unlovely street we’re standing on – ‘is Clapham. Now, I know distance is nothing to you Americans, but I wouldn’t say this was just around the corner.’
‘So I’ll drop in on Olly while I’m over here. See how everything’s going at the restaurant.’
Even though Olly is very definitely the proprietor of his brand-new restaurant, most of the money is being supplied by Adam’s investment company. It’s how I met Adam, in fact. He was at Olly’s brand-new premises, the day after the builders started a little over two months ago, and I dropped in with a bottle of champagne. We got to chatting, and then he walked me to the tube … and, eight weeks later, here we are. Proud owners of a fully functioning, mature, adult relationship.
‘Anyway,’ Adam goes on now, fondly pushing a stray lock of hair behind my ear. (At least, I think it’s fond. I can’t help harbouring the suspicion that my hair, the opposite of his own neat, never-a-strand-out-of-place locks, drives him slightly nuts.) ‘I know what a big deal this meeting is for you, Libby. I just wanted you to realize that I’m cheering you on.’
‘You’re lovely. Thank you.’
‘Not to mention that I expect you were up until the small hours polishing up your business plan …’
He’s half right. I did stayup late after I got home last night after the wedding, but that wasn’t so much because I was polishing my business plan as panicking about it.
I mean, this is the first time I’ve ever done what I’m about to do – go into a meeting with a bank manager and ask him for a small business loan – and I’ve no idea if what I’ve produced is even remotely good enough. Professional enough.
But then, perhaps that’s the downside of ending up turning a hobby you love into a career you need to make a go of. I started my jewellery design business, Libby Goes To Hollywood, almost a year ago, but I still can’t quite shake the sense that it’s just a bit, well, rude to be walking into a meeting with a perfect stranger and announcing that you’d quite like him to stump up eight thousand pounds – ten if he’s feeling really generous – so that you can carry on living your dream of being a jewellery designer, just with a bit more all-important dosh around so that you can buy better equipment, and maybe even employ an intern to come and work for you so that you can keep up with all the orders.
‘I was up late,’ I tell Adam, lifting a hand to waggle the espresso and yogurt-covered raisins at him. ‘So these are absolutely perfect.’
Which, of course, they are.
I mean, it’s not Adam’s fault that he thinks I drink espresso, or that I’m a person for whom yogurt-covered raisins are the very acme of pre-meeting treats. I might accidentally have implied, on our second or third date, that I was a go-getting, gym-hitting, green-juice-quaffing sort of girl. Just, you know, to keep up with his own go-getting, gym-hitting, green-juice-quaffing ways.
Obviously in an ideal world, it wouldn’t be an espresso, it’d be a cappuccino. And they might be chocolate-covered raisins instead.
OK: in a really, really ideal world, the snack Adam had so thoughtfully brought me wouldn’t have the faintest whiff of raisin about it at all. It’d be those big, chocolate-coated honeycomb bites I’ve recently developed a slightly worrying addiction to, or a good old Yorkie bar, or – seeing as he’s just got off a plane – a massive great Toblerone.
‘Well, I know you’ll sock it to ’em,’ he says, leaning in to give me another big, encouraging squeeze. ‘And I can’t wait to hear absolutely everything about it – oh, and about your dad’s wedding, of course – tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘Dinner?’ he says. ‘Tuesday – that Thai place you like?’
‘Er … sure … but I thought we were seeing each other tonight. Weren’t we?’
‘I don’t think so, Libby.’ Adam shakes his head. ‘It’s certainly not down in my schedule.’
‘Oh. It must be my mistake, then. I just thought we were going to meet at your place, and … um … you’d said you were going to cook red snapper and kale.’
‘That does sound oddly specific …’ He frowns. ‘But I have a work dinner this evening, Lib. And I’ve asked the Cadwalladrs to keep Fritz for another evening, which you know I’d never have done if I’d planned to be home at a normal time. I mean, I’ve missed him so much … Lottie’s been sweet, and sent photo messages a few times a day while I’ve been away, but it’s not the same as really being with him. Holding him. Smelling him …’
Fritz, I should probably explain, is Adam’s dog.
A very, very cute dog. And I’m a dog person, through and through, always have been. But still. At the end of the day, just a dog.
It’s just about the only thing I’d change about Adam right now, to be honest. This tendency towards ever-so-slight nuttiness about Fritz the German shepherd puppy.
‘Though, now I think about it, he’s probably missed me horribly … I guess I could blow off the work dinner, head home early for some Fritz time … And red snapper with you, too, Libby, of course.’
‘No, no, don’t worry about it. You should go to your dinner. Better not to unsettle Fritz at, er, his bedtime.’
‘You’re right. He hates that. When I picked him up late from the Cadwalladrs one time after I got back late from Chicago, he was so excited, he didn’t sleep all night, and then of course he was grouchy all the next day, and—’
‘And you and I can have a nice meal tomorrow evening, like you thought we were doing,’ I interrupt, before he can go off on one of his Fritz monologues. Fritz-ologues, I suppose you could call them. ‘I can fill you in on all the details of my meeting and my weekend then.’ Except, of course, I’m not going to fill him in on all that many of the details of Dad’s wedding, because even though we’ve reached the Possible Love stage, I still think we’re a fair way away from me opening up to him about the myriad issues within my family. ‘And talking of my meeting …’
‘You should go, you should go.’ He leans in to kiss me on the forehead. ‘Go get ’em!’
‘Thank you … do I look OK?’
‘You look fabulous. Very chic.’ He casts an admiring glance down at my all-black outfit (cigarette pants, silk top and nipped-in jacket) before reaching up a hand to brush my earrings. ‘And I love these. Hey, are these brand new? From that little-known but amazing online jewellery store, Libby Goes To Hollywood?’
‘They are,’ I say, with a little bow. ‘From the new Marilyn collection.’
He frowns. ‘Named for your mom?’
‘Named for Marilyn Monroe!’
‘Oh. Yeah, that makes a lot more sense.’
The jewellery that I make is Old Hollywood-inspired, you see: a costume version of the sort of thing you might have seen, say, Ava Gardner sporting to the Oscars, or Lauren Bacall wearing in a shoot for Harper’s Bazaar. It’s a Lomax thing, I reluctantly have to admit, this obsession with the movies, whether it’s Grandmother with her Grace Kelly wedding or Dad with His Book and his entire university career. My obsession with the movies comes out, these days, in my jewellery line, and since I started Libby Goes To Hollywood, my flat is piled high with endless, and expensive, coffee-table books featuring beautiful posed on-and off-screen photographs of all my favourite stars. These earrings, which as I just said are from my new ‘Marilyn collection’, were inspired by the glittering chandelier-style ones she wears in that iconic dance scene from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: it’s just that in the Libby Goes To Hollywoodversion they’re made from silver and vintage Swarovski crystals, and not the Harry Winston diamonds that Marilyn is singing about.
‘I thought I’d better show the bank manager what his money would be going towards,’ I go on. ‘Which will be a huge mistake if he hates them …’
‘He won’t hate them. They’re gorgeous. You’re gorgeous. And you have to remember, Libby: it’s not his money, it’s the bank’s money. And they’re not giving it to you as a form of charity, they’ll be giving it to you as an investment. You don’t need to go into this meeting to get him to like you. Just show him your stuff, show him what you’ve done and what you know you can do, and you won’t have a thing to worry about.’
‘Thanks, Adam. I …’ Can’t say I love him, because we haven’t said that yet. ‘… really, really like that you came here today.’
‘And I really, really like that you liked it.’ He kisses me, swiftly. ‘Good luck, sweetheart … wait. It’s not bad luck to say that, is it? Should I be saying “break a leg”, or something?’
‘That’s only bad luck for actors. And thank God I’m not one of those any more.’
Seriously, thank God. Because if I were still an actress (as I was, shockingly unsuccessfully, until almost a year ago), I wouldn’t now be about to walk up these steps and into a meeting with a bank manager to ask for great wodges of cash – sorry, an investment – to plough into my very own small business.
It’s a big moment.
I watch Adam for a moment or two after he turns away and starts to head towards Olly’s new premises, partly for the simple pleasure of watching such a fine figure of a man stroll away from me, and partly to see if he’s going to ogle the even finer figure of a hot blonde in a tiny skirt who’s just crossed the road to walk ahead of him.
But he doesn’t.
Because, as I need to get to grips with remembering, he’s Adam. Not Dillon. And I’m not with Dillon any more.
Then I turn away myself and head up these steps, trying to feel as go-getting as Adam thinks I am.
I mean, all his American positivity, it’s bound to be rubbing off on me in some way, isn’t it? If I just believe that the meeting will be a rip-roaring success, then it will be.
*
It wasn’t.
A rip-roaring success, that is.
On a sliding scale, with rip-roaring success at one end to abject failure at the other … well, that meeting with Jonathan Hedley, Barclays Business Development Manager, Clapham branch, was quite a lot closer to the latter end of the scale than the former.
All right, so he didn’t actually tell me I wasn’t going to get the small business loan I was applying for. But then he didn’t actually say, out loud, that there was more chance of his bank investing in a factory that makes inflatable dartboards and chocolate teapots.
It doesn’t mean he wasn’t thinking it.
I don’t know if it was an issue with my business plan, or if he didn’t like the Marilyn-inspired earrings, or if he just didn’t like me, but I certainly didn’t walk away from our half-hour meeting with the sense that the eight grand I urgently need will be forthcoming.
And there isn’t any time for me to properly take stock (or even to endlessly replay the meeting over and over in my head, torturing myself with the things I must have said and done wrong), because I came out of the meeting to a series of texts from my sister Cass.
Libby where are you?
Libby I need to talk to you
Libby why are you ignoring me?
Libby this is really unfair, call yourself my big sister, what a joke, I’m always there for you when you need me and now when I really need you for like once in my life you can’t even be bothered to pick up the phone and call me back
Which did press my guilt button quite a bit because, to be entirely fair to Cass, she did send me a couple of really nice supportive text messages while I was on my way to Dad’s wedding (he’s not her dad; we have different fathers).
So of course I picked up the phone and called her back, only to be directed, through a barrage of incoherent sobs, to come straight to her flat in Maida Vale, ‘because everything’s completely shit, Libby, I can’t do this any more!’
I’m not too worried about all the tears and hysterics. Cass has a tendency to overdramatize things. The last time I was summoned to hurtle to her flat, after a nerve-chilling six a.m. phone call, it turned out to be because she’d stubbed her big toe getting out of bed, wasn’t going to be able to make it to her early morning spinning class, and could, apparently, literally feel the fat blobbing itself on to her thighs. There’s no way of knowing what this afternoon’s crisis has been caused by, but it’s not worth ignoring it in the hope that it goes away. It never does. I have a couple of hours before I need to get to my client appointment in Shepherd’s Bush, so I may as well use it profitably by ensuring that my client appointment in Shepherd’s Bush isn’t constantly interrupted by the pinging of my phone, with increasingly furious messages from Cass.
There’s another message pinging through now, as I emerge from the tube at Warwick Avenue.
Popped to nail salon. Meet me there?
Oh, and another one, a moment after this.
Bring coffee?
When I stamp into the nail bar around the corner from her flat ten minutes later, with a frappuccino for her and the cappuccino for me that I would have really liked from Adam instead of that espresso, she waves me over, imperiously, from where she’s sitting towards the back. Her feet are soaking in one of the foot basins, and a weary-looking Filipina woman is tending to her hands with a cuticle stick.
‘Thank God you’re here,’ Cass announces, which is her way of being grateful, and, ‘Thank fuck for this,’ as she grabs the frappuccino from me, which is her way of saying thank you. ‘You won’t believe what’s happened, Libby. You literally won’t believe it.’
‘Tell me.’
‘It’s all off! The whole thing!’
For a fleeting, thrilled moment, I think she’s talking about her relationship with her boyfriend (and manager) Dave. Which, given that he’s married to another woman, is about bloody time, too.
‘Oh, Cass. Well, I’m really sorry you’re upset. But, you know, it was always a terrible idea, and too many people risked being hurt—’
‘Who was going to get hurt? Nobody was going to get hurt! It wasn’t supposed to be a bloody stunt show! It wasn’t Dancing On Ice!’
I’m confused, until I remember the other thing that could be ‘off’.
Her reality TV show, Considering Cassidy.
‘RealTime Media called Dave this morning and they’re pulling the plug,’ Cass sniffs. ‘Not enough interest from advertisers, apparently.’
‘Oh, Cass.’
This is genuinely upsetting news for her. Considering Cassidy was going to be her very own, eight-part ‘scripted reality’ show, on the Bravo channel, documenting – according to Dave’s pitch – ‘the crazy, behind-the-scenes dramas of one of the most famous actresses working in Britain today … from pampering to premieres, from dating to mating; follow much-loved TV It-Girl Cassidy Kennedy as she dishes the dirt on Slebsville, her way!’
(And yes, I was a bit surprised they got as far as they did in talks with the production company, RealTime Media, on the basis of that pitch – but, nevertheless, a deal was about to be struck. No matter that Cass isn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, ‘one of the most famous actresses working in Britain today’ … nor that, thanks to her relationship with Dave, any ‘dating and mating’ the programme intended to depict was going to have to be far more on the ‘scripted’ side than the ‘reality’ side. It was going to be her very own show, her step up from her usual soaps, or her small, regular role in sci-fi drama Isara 364. Her springboard, at least the way Cass was looking at it, to Kardashian levels of fame and glory.)
‘I’m really sorry,’ I begin, only for her to interrupt me.
‘I mean, not enough interest from advertisers? Are they kidding me? I can be used to sell anything, if the angle’s right. I mean, your friend Olly wouldn’t have invited me to that opening-night party of his this week, would he, if he weren’t just using me to get more customers through his doors?’
I’m pretty sure that Olly’s invited Cass to his opening-night party because he needs someone there to whom his youngest sister Kitty will deign to talk; she’s an MTV presenter now, and a competitor of Cass’s from their child-star days, and I very much doubt she’d make a hole in her busy schedule for Olly’s big night if it weren’t for the opportunity to score points off an old frenemy.
‘No, Libby,’ Cass is going on, ‘it’s absolutely nothing to do with the advertisers. It’s Tanya, from RealTime. She hated me, right from the word go.’
‘Um, I’m sure she didn’t hate you, whoever she is …’
‘She’s Ned’s producing partner. And she did hate me. I mean, not that I give a shit. If I had a tenner for every girl who’s ever been jealous of me, I’d have …’ Her eyes, slightly smudged from all the crying she’s been doing, widen as she tries to work out this calculation. ‘Well, enough money to start my own production company, and produce my own show. And win, like, every single Emmy and Golden Globe I possibly could. And then Tanya could fuck off.’
It’s not worth pointing out that scripted reality shows on the Bravo channel aren’t all that likely to be in the running for Emmys or Golden Globes. If Cass wants to imagine herself swanning along some red carpet, holding armfuls of awards in one hand and making rude gestures at this Tanya with the other, then it’s no skin off my nose.
‘Well, look, maybe something good will come out of all this,’ I say, as Cass starts to peruse the selection of polish colours the weary nail technician is holding out to her, wrinkling her pretty nose at too-red reds and not-pink-enough pinks. ‘After all, you’re an actress, Cass. Reality TV would be a bit of a diversion.’
‘Yeah. An amazing diversion. I mean, we had it all mapped out, Dave and I. Considering Cassidy was going to lead to an offer from Celebrity Masterchef, and that would lead to an offer from Strictly, and then I’d be able to call all the shots with one of the really big TV channels, like E!, for an even bigger, better reality show … and now I’m going to have to go back to boring old acting. And learning lines. And, like, pretending to care about character development so the writers don’t give all the good storylines to somebody else.’
‘I know. It’s a tough business,’ I say, in the sort of soothing tone that Mum is good at deploying with Cass whenever she’s having a meltdown. Which reminds me … ‘Have you spoken to Mum about it yet?’
‘Yeah, and she offered to come back early from the tap festival to come round to mine tonight to cheer me up.’
This isn’t the sort of tap you get water from; it’s the sort of tap that hordes of star-struck eleven-year-old girls do with their feet. After working as Cass’s manager for years (mine too, to be fair; it’s just that my own acting career didn’t provide her with quite as much work as Cass’s did), Mum now owns her own weekend stage-school franchise in Kensal Rise. She’s in Cardiff with a posse of those very star-struck eleven-year-old girls now, at the tap festival, and it’s heart-warming to hear that she’s offered to come back early for Cass’s sake. Though it could also be a sign that the reality of spending all day surrounded by star-struck eleven-year-olds, in tap shoes, is starting to get on her nerves.
‘That’s nice of her.’
‘Yeah, but I told her no. She’s working over there. I thought you’d cheer me up instead. So, Dave’s booked a table for me at Roka tonight, and I’ll need you to come with me. I’m going to wear my new cherry-red hot-pants, and Dave’s going to let the 3AM Girls know where I’ll be … I think they might remember you from that time they wrote about you and Dillon.’ Cass gives me a quick once-over. ‘You’ll have to head back to yours and change, obviously …’
I can’t decide whether to feel truly depressed that Cass is so obviously trying to use me for publicity purposes, to increase the chance of the production company revisiting the idea of her show again, or slightly envious of her ability to pick herself up off the floor and get right back on the horse after a tumble.
Either way, my answer is going to have to be the same.
‘Cass, I can’t come out with you tonight. I’m … busy.’
‘Doing what?’
This is an excellent question.
To which the most accurate answer would be, ‘With any luck, having mind-blowing sex with my new boyfriend until the small hours of the morning.’
Because having mind-blowing sex with Adam was, in fact, my endgame for this evening. It’s an endgame that’s been buggered around slightly by him forgetting about our plans to have a cosy night in at his place, and scheduling in that work dinner of his instead, but it’s an endgame that I still fully intend to pursue.
And if that makes me sound like some sort of nymphomaniac, let me just add that while I was being truthful when I stated earlier that we have a mature, adult relationship, and while I may, let’s face it, have fallen in love with him this morning over the whole espresso and yogurt-covered-raisins thing, in eight weeks of dating we still haven’t progressed any further than a good old snog on the sofa.
Yes. Eight weeks.
Given that neither of us is Amish, or anything, and given that – as far as it’s been possible to tell – we’re both in possession of all the necessary working body parts, I can’t help but wonder if this is some sort of a record.
There are several perfectly decent explanations. We’re both extremely busy. He travels a lot. Fritz needs walking a lot. We have such a good time together that quite often hours of just chatting pass by without either of us noticing that we haven’t jumped on each other and started frantically humping.
But still. Eight weeks of snogging on the sofa has left me, at the very least, feeling pretty frustrated. I mean, I fancy the pants off him, and he claims to fancy the pants off me, so I think it’s about time we acted on those urges and, well, got our actual pants off.
Hence the sex, sex, and more sex plan that I’d formulated in my head for tonight. And which no inconvenient work dinner is going to prevent. It doesn’t need to happen after a candlelit supper of red snapper and super-healthy kale. It just needs to happen.
But I’m not going to tell Cass about the (hopefully) mind-blowing sex thing, because that’s not the sort of relationship we have. (Or, let’s put it this way: if I open the door to frank discussions about sex with Adam, I’m very, very scared that she’ll start telling me about sex with Dave. And I value an undisturbed night’s sleep. Which I don’t think I’d ever have again if I had to think about horrible, cheaty Dave having extramarital relations with my sister.)
So I just say, ‘I’m seeing Adam.’
‘Adam? Who’s Adam?’
‘He’s … well, he’s my new boyfriend.’
Cass stares at me.
‘You have a new boyfriend?’
‘I do. Yes.’
‘And you’re choosing him? This new boyfriend? Over me?’
The nail technician lets out a little wince. It’s eerily reminiscent of me at Dad’s wedding yesterday.
‘No, Cass, I’m not choosing him over you. It’s just that, like I said, I have plans with him tonight, and—’
‘What plans?’ Cass demands, in the tone of voice that implies that any answer other than sitting by his side in the hospital as he recovers from major neurological surgery isn’t going to be anywhere near reason enough.
‘You know … plans. Things people make with their boyfriends.’
‘Right. I get it,’ says Cass, with the sort of swoosh of her blonde hair that would say, Et tu, Brute, if hair-swooshes could actually talk. ‘You’re going to swan off and spend all night shagging this so-called Adam—’
‘He’s not so-called Adam. He’s actually called Adam.’
‘… while your only sister sits at home alone, contemplating the end of her career at the bottom of a brandy bottle.’
‘You don’t drink brandy,’ I point out. ‘And anyway, come to think of it, isn’t Monday usually a Dave night?’
‘Not today,’ Cass scowls. ‘His wife’s kicking up some sort of fuss about him staying home tonight. For her birthday, or something.’
‘How unreasonable of her.’
‘Exactly. But only what I’ve come to expect,’ she sniffs, ‘from yet another of the people I love in my life. That when the crisps are down …’
‘The chips.’
‘… you can’t really rely on anyone.’
‘Cass.’ I allow myself, regretting it the moment I do so, to succumb to the twinge of guilt that’s nibbling away at me. ‘Look. I’ve got some time tomorrow, OK? Well, I haven’t, really, but I’ll make some time tomorrow.’ All that moral support I promised Olly is going to have to take a temporary second place, until the day after. Still, I’ll just redouble my efforts as soon as I can. ‘We’ll … we’ll go out for lunch, and then we can go shopping, and I’ll even treat you to a …’ I’m about to say the word ‘massage’ when I remember that all the places Cass likes to go for a massage charge well over a hundred quid for the privilege. ‘… blow-dry, or something,’ I finish, hating the fact I can’t be more generous. But if no bank is going to lend me a penny, I’m going to have to use more of my own meagre savings to put into the business. I can’t afford to splash out any more than absolutely necessary.
‘I don’t need a blow-dry.’ She muses on my offer for a moment. ‘Though I suppose I could do with some eyebrow threading … oooh, or a nice collagen facial …’
‘Threading it is!’ I say, gaily, trying to inject the task with a lot more merriment than it’s actually going to entail. ‘Come on, Cass. It’ll be lovely. And you can get a nice early night tonight, and don’t even think about any of this production company stuff, and then we can discuss it all in a much more positive frame of mind tomorrow. Over that nice dinner out, if you still want to.’
‘We-e-ell … I suppose so. I mean, just for the record,’ she says, never one to end on a peaceable solution where there is drama to be mined, ‘I’d never leave you alone if you were seriously depressed, Libby. I was There For You right after all that mess with stupid Dillon, wasn’t I?’
It’s true: she was ‘There For Me’ right after all that mess with stupid Dillon. Just in her style, which meant hurrying round with a huge carton of homemade (by Harvey Nichols’ Food Hall) soup, snuggling up with me on my sofa to tell me what a shit she’d always thought he was, and then getting involved in a FaceTime row with vile Dave and sobbing on my shoulder (and guzzling all the soup) until three o’clock in the morning.
‘I brought you,’ she says, meaningfully, ‘homemade soup!’
‘I know, Cass, and it was lovely of you. And I promise I’ll be at your beck and call all day tomorrow, OK?’
‘All right,’ she sniffs. ‘I’ll just call Stella for the evening, then, and get her to come over for a quiet night in instead. My roots could do with a retouch, anyway.’
I can’t fail to feel a fleeting stab of sadness that Cass – partly because she’s always accusing other women of being jealous of her, and partly because of her ridiculous habit of sleeping with married men – doesn’t really have any good female friends to call upon in her time of crisis. Stella, although a lovely girl who’s known Cass ever since they were at stage school together, is less her friend and more her hairdresser.
‘OK, good. You do that, and I’ll give you a call first thing in the morning to arrange where and when to meet.’ I lean across the nail technician, apologizing as I do so, and give Cass a hug. ‘But I really do have to go now.’
‘To see this Adam?’
‘Yes. But I’ve got a meeting with a client in Shepherd’s Bush first.’
‘Oh, right.’ She’s lost interest. ‘See you tomorrow then.’
‘Sure,’ I tell her. ‘Love you, Cass.’
‘Hmph,’ she says, which – and I’m translating again here – is her way of saying she loves me too.
(#u187251b9-7f13-54a4-ae36-cef40e8c5002)
Lack of sex aside, things are going sufficiently well with Adam that he’s let me know the code for his key safe, which is hidden under an artfully disguised fake rock in his tiny front garden. He’s told me to let myself into his house on a few occasions since we’ve been dating, mostly when he was running late and wanted me to go in and tell Fritz he loved him, and missed him, and hadn’t forgotten about him. So I’m just sort of hoping he doesn’t mind that I’m going to use the key to let myself in this evening, this time without his explicit say-so, to lie in wait for him in absurdly sexy lingerie and give him a wild night of sex that he’ll never forget.
Or, that if he does mind that I’ve let myself in without his explicit say-so, that the absurdly sexy lingerie and the wild night of sex will go quite a long way to making him not mind any more.
After a great meeting with a new client (a freelance stylist who’s keen to use a few of my pieces in an upcoming shoot with a Sunday supplement; how about that, Jonathan Hedley, Barclays Business Development manager, Clapham branch?) I’ve reached Adam’s house, a stunning Edwardian terrace in the middle of a street of stunning Edwardian terraces in Shepherd’s Bush. I’ve just let myself in through the gate, when I hear the front door of the neighbouring house open.
And then I don’t hear anything else at all, because there’s such a thunderstorm of barking that a small bomb could go off nearby and I don’t think I’d notice.
It’s Fritz, Adam’s German shepherd puppy, who’s just on his way out of the house with James Cadwalladr, Adam’s next-door neighbour.
I’ve never actually met James Cadwalladr in person before, and this moment – as Fritz leaps the fence and starts inserting his nose gleefully into my groin – isn’t the ideal one for it to happen.
I mean, I’m fairly accustomed to coming face-to-face with very, very handsome actors – I woke up next to Dillon O’Hara several mornings a week for the few short months of our relationship, didn’t I? – but James Cadwalladr has that whole arrogant Old Etonian thing going on, which is a lot more intimidating. He’s staring at me over the fence now, looking even more icy-cool and unimpressed than he does when you see him as that toff, cricket-loving detective on TV.
‘Sorry,’ he says, ‘but who are you?’
‘I’m Libby,’ I say, breathlessly, trying to shove Fritz’s nose out of my groin and, when that doesn’t work, squatting down to meet him at doggy eye-level, in the hope that he’ll nuzzle into my neck instead. He doesn’t. He just goes lower and tries desperately to reach my groin again. (I can only hope his owner is equally determined, when he gets home for his surprise sex-fest later.) ‘I’m Adam’s girlfriend.’
‘You’re not.’
‘I am.’
‘You can’t be.’
‘I … er … am?’
‘You’re serious?’ He rakes back his posh-boy floppy hair and stares at me some more. ‘I didn’t know he’d got himself a girlfriend.’
‘Well, he has!’ I give up fighting Fritz and get back up again, whereupon he instantly loses interest in my groin (hurray!) and starts sniffing round the other side of me – to be precise, my bottom – instead. ‘I, um, know your wife, actually.’
Posh James doesn’t look that much more interested in this. ‘Oh, yeah?’
‘Yes. She stocks some of my jewellery in her store.’
I have Adam to thank for this, after he very nicely introduced me to Lottie Cadwalladr when she stopped to make a fuss of Fritz in the street one warm evening. She owns Ariel, an amazing and very hip independent boutique with a branch in Westbourne Grove and a branch in Spitalfields. We got to chatting, and she admired the bracelet I was wearing, and for the past couple of weeks, Ariel has stocked a small selection of my bracelets and earrings in the Westbourne Grove branch. It was a huge coup for me because, even though the orders through my website are nice and steady, it really helps to have a real-life stockist, too. Not to mention that seeing my jewellery in those glass display cases, actually being admired by shoppers the day I went to visit, has given me all sorts of dreams about maybe even managing to open a tiny store of my own one day …
‘Right.’ Posh James slaps his thigh; I’m not quite sure why he’s doing that for a moment (pantomime rehearsal?), until I realize he’s trying to call Fritz. ‘Here, boy! Over here!’ He looks irritated when Fritz ignores him. ‘He likes you,’ he says, in an accusing tone of voice, ‘doesn’t he?’
‘Oh, that’s only because I stupidly sneak him tastes of stuff when Adam and I eat together. You know, I don’t think he looks at me and sees a human woman. I think he looks at me and sees a walking, talking wodge of chicken liver pâté.’
Posh James doesn’t laugh.
‘Here, boy!’ he adds, more commandingly this time, and follows it up with a whistle, which finally persuades Fritz to stop nuzzling my private areas and to jump the fence to join him again. ‘Are you going into the house, or something? I thought Adam was still away. I’m not quite sure why Lottie’s saddled us with this fur-ball for another night otherwise.’
‘Adam’s not back until later tonight. I’m just … er … dropping something off,’ I say, because I don’t want a complete stranger to realize I’m going into my boyfriend’s house to lie in wait for him in my undies. ‘I know he’s really grateful to you for looking after Fritz.’
‘The kids love him,’ Posh James says, with a shrug, as he grasps Fritz’s collar and clips on a lead. ‘Well. Good to meet you, anyway,’ he adds, in a voice that implies it wasn’t so much good as deadly dull and totally tiresome. ‘And good luck.’
Which is an odd thing to say.
But I won’t ask why he’s said it, partly because I don’t want to bore him any more than I already have, and partly because Fritz has started barking again, rendering any attempt at further conversation impossible.
They set off along the street for their evening walk, and I crouch down to tap in the code for the key safe, then let myself into Adam’s house.
As ever, it’s an oasis of tranquillity.
An oasis of ever-so-slightly sterile, obsessive-compulsive neat-freak tranquillity, perhaps, but an oasis nevertheless.
I mean, if I ever ended up living here with Adam, there’s so much I’d do to make the place a bit … well, a bit less like an absolutely stunning show home, and a bit more like a place to really live in. I’d funk up the cream-and-grey colour scheme for starters, put up a few pictures on the walls in the hallway in place of all the space-enhancing mirrors, make the chrome and grey marble kitchen, where I’m just heading now, a warm and welcoming place to hang out in with our friends, rather than like a photo in a glossy interiors magazine. I’d replace the steel kitchen table with a nice big wooden one, like the one Olly has in his kitchen, and I’d replace the Perspex chairs with mismatched painted chairs, again just like Olly’s chairs, and I’d redo the smart, slightly soulless patio area you can see out of the bifold doors at the back; turn it into a proper garden, with grass and flowerbeds and a barbecue … The cosiest part of the whole kitchen is Fritz’s den, in a little nook on the far side of the range cooker (for maximum warmth), and even this is still stylish enough to feature in a doggy version of World of Interiors, with its custom-made safety gate to close him off from any hot-fat-spitting danger when Adam is cooking, and its selection of Kelly Hoppen cushions for him to rest his weary rump on.
But it’s not the time to stand here mentally remodelling Adam’s beautiful home (not to mention that we’re not yet anywhere near the moving-in stage), because I’ve no idea what sort of time he’ll be getting back, and I want to make sure I’m all ready in my sexy lingerie for when he does.
Or rather, my downright slutty lingerie.
Because I’m pulling out all the stops tonight, I’ll be honest. I’ve already ramped up the raunch factor on the lingerie I’ve been wearing for most of our snogging-on-the-sofa nights, in the hope that something – the lacy, plunge-front bra; the tactile silken camisole; the wispy, semi-transparent knickers – might get Adam going enough to override all the perfectly good reasons why we haven’t done the deed. But none of it has worked, so tonight I’m breaking out the Ribbony Elasticky Thing.
I get it out from the bottom of my bag, now, where it’s nestled since I left my flat earlier today.
You know, I’m still none the wiser as to what kind of garment it actually is.
I bought it half-price in the Myla sale at the very height of my relationship with Dillon, and though it provided for several extremely pleasant evenings, its precise definition remains a mystery. It’s not a basque. It’s not a corset. I suppose the most accurate description would be ‘playsuit’, but I’m not at all sure it contains enough material even to fall into that category. It’s just a collection of very, very small pieces of black lacy fabric, held together with strings of black satin ribbon, or lengths of wide black elastic. It requires either a degree in mechanical engineering or nerves of steel and the patience of a saint to get the thing on – though funnily enough Dillon never had the slightest difficulty in getting it off – and tonight, ladies and gentlemen, I shall be hoisting myself into it along with my highest heels, a cheeky smile … and absolutely nothing else.
Oh, well, obviously the ‘Marilyn collection’ earrings Adam admired so much earlier. Just in case all the black lace and general sauciness doesn’t get him going, my fabulous accessories, with any luck, will do the job.
The only trouble is, as I find when I start to hoick myself into it now, that the last time I wore the Ribbony Elasticky Thing, I was a good half-stone lighter (it’s not that Dillon pressured me into losing weight, or anything – in fact, he was always superlatively appreciative of my distinctly non-model-worthy curves – but you try sharing a bathroom mirror with a man as impressively fit as Dillon for more than a couple of occasions, and see if you can resist the temptation to cut out pudding. And bread. And chips. And lunch). The Ribbony Elasticky Thing goes up reasonably smoothly over my thighs, requires a bit of jiggling to get it up over my hips, but when I get to the bit that (barely) covers my stomach, which is where the majority of my regained weight has generously portioned itself, it starts to become a bit of a struggle.
In the war of Libby Lomax versus Ribbony Elasticky Thing, Ribbony Elasticky Thing is definitely winning this particular battle when my phone rings.
When I reach down to grab my phone from my bag, I can see that it’s Nora calling.
Well, at least it’s a call that’s actually worth the temporary defeat to a piece of lingerie.
A regular call, not FaceTime, thank God, because long-time best friends as we are, there’s no way I’d subject Nora to the sight of me half in, half out of my sluttiest underwear. I know she probably sees more disturbing sights on an average shift in her work as an emergency medicine registrar, but I wouldn’t actually put money on it, or anything.
‘Hi, Nor,’ I say, as I answer the phone. ‘Everything OK?’
‘Is everything OK with you?’ she replies. ‘You’re not … exercising, are you?’
It speaks volumes about my affection for physical exertion that Nora sounds so astonished as she asks this.
‘Christ, no. I’m just putting on some … er … clothes.’
‘Full-body armour? A HazMat suit? Because it sounds as if you’re getting out of puff there, Lib.’
‘I am, a bit. But it’s not a suit of armour. The opposite, actually.’ I prop the phone between my ear and shoulder, and start again on my attempt to e-a-s-e the Ribbony Elasticky Thing up over my tummy. ‘I’m at Adam’s. Just getting ready for … well, a nice romantic night in.’
‘Oh. Right.’
It’s ironic – and a bit incomprehensible, really – that Nora, who’s spent much of the past few months urging to me to get out there and meet someone so that I can lay the ghost of my failed fling with Dillon O’Hara to rest, is a bit down on the whole idea of Adam. She was excited when I first told her – waiting for our flight last night – that I’d started seeing someone new, but then she seemed to cool off on the news when I explained how I’d met him.
‘I forgot to ask yesterday,’ she says, now, ‘but have you … er … mentioned anything about this Adam guy to Olly yet? Because if you haven’t, don’t you think that maybe you should? Given that they work together, and everything.’
‘I haven’t, yet. But you don’t really think he’s going to mind, do you, Nor? I mean, I know it could be awkward if they worked together properly – like, in the same office, or something – just in case things didn’t work out between me and Adam, and Olly ended up having to take a side. But they only meet up every so often, and it’ll be even less once the restaurant is actually up and running.’
‘True.’ Nora clears her throat. ‘I wish you’d tell him soon, though, Libby. I’ll feel awkward, if I don’t mention anything about it the entire time I’m staying here.’
‘It’s perfectly OK to mention it! It’s not a big secret or anything. Besides, I’m sure he’ll be pleased. He likes Adam. And it’s not like I’m going out with, well, You Know Who, or anything.’
I’m talking about Dillon, not Voldemort, by the way. I just tend to avoid mentioning his actual name to either Nora or Olly, because they still get a bit worked up about him, even all these months on. I mean, I think I got over Dillon’s shoddy behaviour faster than either Nora or Olly did, and that’s saying something. The trouble is that Olly loathed Dillon right from the start – so much so that he resorted to threats of physical violence with kitchen equipment even before the Miami hurricane fiasco. There isn’t enough kitchen equipment in the world to carry out all the things Olly wanted to do to Dillon afterwards.
‘Hmm,’ Nora replies. ‘So. A nice romantic evening, you said.’
‘Yes.’ I carry on inching the Ribbony Elasticky Thing up over my none-too-perfect stomach. God, I wish I hadn’t put this half-stone back on. ‘At least, I hope so. I mean, I’m here at his house, and I’m going to surprise him when he gets in.’
‘Surprise him?’ She sounds confused. ‘Like a sort of … sex ambush?’
‘No! It’s not a sex ambush! God, Nora, you make it sound like I’m planning to jump out of the wardrobe, knock him out with a tranquillizer dart, manacle him to the radiator and have my wicked way with him for the next three nights.’
There’s a short silence.
‘That does sound,’ Nora says, after a moment, ‘worryingly detailed …’
‘OK, but it wouldn’t be totally incomprehensible if I were to do something of the sort,’ I say, finally – finally! – managing to edge the Ribbony Elasticky Thing up over my tummy before jiggling the shoulder straps into position. ‘I told you on the plane last night. Things are really perfect between us. We just need to work on … the sex part.’
‘Lib, I do worry a bit when you start using words like perfect. I mean, don’t get me wrong, Adam does sound lovely. But you know you have a tendency to … well, romanticize things.’
‘I admit, I might have had that tendency in the past, but not this time. When you meet him, you’ll see.’ Now that the Ribbony Elasticky Thing is safely (well, safely-ish) on, I can start the complicated process of arranging the lengths of ribbon and elastic so that they cover the parts they’re meant to cover. ‘He’s steady. Dependable. Reliable …’
‘Well, all right, there’s no need to make him sound like the sort of thing my dad might use for weatherproofing his patio furniture.’
‘… Mature,’ I continue. ‘Well-rounded.’
‘OK, now you’re making him sound like one of those mystery cheeses you and Olly are always bleating on about.’
‘My point is that I really, truly think this could be it. Adam could be it. I mean, he brought me espresso and yogurt-covered raisins before my big meeting this morning! All the way from his Mayfair office to Clapham!’
‘Er, wouldn’t you just have preferred a cappuccino and a bag of those honeycomb bite thingies you ploughed your way through at the airport yesterday?’
‘Not the point. He really cares, Nora. I really, properly matter to him.’
‘Which is great, Lib. And I’m so, so happy for you. I just don’t want to see you getting hurt.’ There’s the briefest of pauses before she adds a light but meaningful, ‘again’.
‘There’s no way, Nora, that I could possibly get hurt.’
Though even as I say this, the Ribbony Elasticky thing starts riding, well, upwards in a manner that’s only going to get more painful if it goes any further. So it’s just possible that Nora might have a point, even if it’s not quite in the way she was meaning it.
‘OK, but after what happened with You Know Who, and all the bloody chaos he caused—’
‘Talking of chaos,’ I say, smoothly interrupting before we get diverted down the Dillon alleyway, from where it’s always difficult to escape, ‘you spent so long asking me about Dad’s wedding yesterday that you didn’t actually tell me anything about your wedding.’ Nora is getting married in five weeks’ time, to her lovely fiancé Mark. ‘Any news? Any updates? Anything your devoted and dedicated chief bridesmaid can do to help?’
‘Actually, that’s partly why I’m calling,’ Nora says. ‘I forgot to ask yesterday, and I know you’re really busy these days, Lib … but do you think you might be able to spare a couple of hours to go bridesmaid’s dress shopping with Tash one day this week?’
Tash, apart from being Olly’s motorbike-ride buddy, is going to be Nora’s only other non-family bridesmaid.
‘I thought maybe you could take along the dress you’ve already chosen for yourself, and try to help her find something that would co-ordinate … I’ll try and come along with you guys too,’ she adds, perhaps proving that she’s noticed that Tash and I, though perfectly amiable together, haven’t quite gelled enough for a girlie shopping trip àdeux. ‘If Olly doesn’t need me to run any errands for him at the same time.’
‘Happy to, Nora. I’ll make a bit of time whenever Tash can do it.’
‘Thanks, Lib. And talking of Tash, I’d better get going … we’re heading into the West End for a bite to eat tonight. Probably the only chance I’ll get to show her the bright lights before we become Olly’s menials for the next few evenings.’
‘Sure, of course. You go.’
‘And good luck with Adam tonight!’ she adds. ‘But you won’t need it. I’m sure he won’t be able to keep his steady, dependable, teak-garden-furniture-protecting hands off you.’
We can but hope.
And we’ll find out sooner than I’d thought, because I’ve only just slipped my phone back into my bag when I hear a key in the front door.
This isn’t a late night! It’s barely gone eight! What did they do at this work dinner: sip sparkling water, nibble a small selection of sushi, turn down coffee and then pay the bill?
Well, there’s no time to find all this American professionalism and healthy living irritating: thank God, I’m all ready and (barely) dressed, so all I need to do is arrange myself as seductively as possible on one of the uncomfortable chairs, attach what I hope is a come-hither smile, and—
‘I don’t see why I had to come over and help you find the bloody thing,’ comes a voice from the hallway. ‘Couldn’t you do it on your own?’
It’s not Adam.
It’s Posh James Cadwalladr.
‘OK, OK, but I feel weird about coming into Adam’s house all by myself. We don’t know him that well.’
And this, I recognize straight away, is Lottie Cadwalladr, my brand-new stockist.
Shit.
I can’t make a dash for the stairs, because they’re out in the hallway, where the Cadwalladrs have just let themselves in. I can’t make a dash for the bifold doors that lead into the garden, because they’re locked and I don’t have time to look for the key. It would be absolutely useless to get on my hands and knees under the table because it’s made of bloody Perspex …
What the hell am I going to do?
As the kitchen door starts to open, I make the only choice I have available to me: a dash to Fritz’s den, where I should be able to hide myself away until the Cadwalladrs have found whatever it is they’re looking for, and buggered off back to their own property again.
I jump up from the table, sprinting to the nook by the cooker, and, despite my heels, leap the safety gate in a rather impressive single bound.
‘… quite sure Adam didn’t bring that one over in Fritz’s bag of stuff, when he dropped him off?’ Posh James is asking, as two pairs of footsteps – one heavy and male, one lighter and ballet-pump-wearing, make their way on to the marble floor. ‘Weren’t there about half a million squeaky toys in there?’
‘Not the green and white one,’ says Lottie, before adding, ‘Go on, Fritzy! Go find your toy! Go find!’
Hang on: they’ve brought Fritz with them, too?
I don’t even need to ask myself the question, because there’s a pitter-pattering of doggy feet across the marble floor, and a moment later I’m gazing, from my crouched position behind the safety gate, deep into Fritz’s chocolate-brown, adoring, eyes.
He starts – surprise, surprise – barking.
‘Fritz, no!’ I whisper, flapping my hands at him. ‘Go away! I don’t have any pâté! Ich habe,’ I hazard, in desperation, dredging up the German I studied, half-heartedly, when I was fourteen years old, ‘kein pâté!’
Mentioning pâté was, with hindsight, a mistake, in either language.
Fritz goes berserk.
‘What the fuck’s he barking about now?’ I can just about hear Posh James saying over the torrent of noise Fritz is making.
‘The toy must be in his den,’ I hear Lottie say. ‘Clever boy!’
His toy! His green and white squeaky toy! That’ll get rid of him. I see it in here, nestling to the side of his (Alessi) bowl, grab it and then, making sure I lean right through the bars of the safety gate for maximum distance, skim the bloody thing as far away across the kitchen floor from the den, and me, as it’ll go.
Which makes not the slightest difference. Fritz could no longer care less about his squeaky toy, not when his beloved Bringer Of Pâté is right here before him, cornered behind his safety gate. Besides, now that I’ve made the mistake of putting my head through the bars to chuck his toy, he’s licking my face, practically water-boarding me with meaty-smelling saliva.
It’s a bit gross, and I can’t pull my head back through the bars fast enough.
Except I can’t pull my head back through the bars at all.
I’m serious. I can’t get my head out.
It makes no sense … I mean, I got my head through them one way, didn’t I?
Unless it’s the Marilyn Monroe earrings. These great, big, chandelier-style Marilyn Monroe earrings. Jamming up against the outside of the bars, making it impossible for me to squeeze my head back through.
Just as this horrible fact dawns on me, a pair of leopard-print French Sole ballet pumps comes past the range cooker and stops, abruptly, right in front of me.
‘Oh, dear God,’ says Lottie Cadwalladr, about four feet above my head.
Which sums it up pretty neatly, really.
‘James!’ she goes on, in a horrified voice. ‘Come quick! Adam’s got some woman … imprisoned back here!’
‘Some woman?’ echoes Posh James.
‘No, no, no!’ I sound a bit panicked, which is understandable, under the circumstances, but is only going to make me feel more mortified in the long run. I’d prefer to sound more nonchalant, debonair, even, because I’ve learned from past experience that if you take this sort of appalling humiliation in your stride yourself, other people have no choice but to take it in their stride along with you. ‘I’m not a woman,’ I go on, in as laid-back a way as I can possibly manage. ‘I mean, I’m not just any old woman! It’s me, Libby Lomax. Um, Adam’s girlfriend? The jewellery designer?’
‘Libby?’ Lottie gasps.
‘That’s right. Hello!’ I add. ‘Nice to see you again!’
Posh James’s shoes arrive, now, and I hear an appalled, ‘For fuck’s sake,’ before he grabs Fritz’s collar and – helpfully – puts an end to the water torture by manhandling him back towards the kitchen door and putting him out in the hallway.
‘Thanks!’ I say, still trying to sound relaxed about all this, in the hope that it convinces them there’s really nothing so very extraordinary about finding a virtual stranger with their head wedged between a set of iron bars at the neighbour’s house, with only some strands of ribbon and elastic to protect her modesty. ‘Much appreciated.’
‘But, Libby …’ Lottie isn’t sounding remotely relaxed. ‘You have to tell me. Are you … in this position … voluntarily?’
‘Adam hasn’t fucking imprisoned her in a sex dungeon, or anything,’ Posh James says, cuttingly. ‘He’s not even home. I saw her letting herself in about an hour ago. At least, I think it’s her …’ There’s a pause. I don’t know why, but I get the impression of a neck being craned. ‘She looks a bit different from this angle.’
‘Then stop looking from that angle!’ Lottie snaps. ‘Let the poor girl have a shred of dignity, will you?’
What I’d quite like, right now, is for the floor beneath Fritz’s den to open up like a large sinkhole, drag me down deep into the earth’s crust, and finish me off in a pit of molten lava.
‘Anyway, if he’s not imprisoned her, what the hell is she doing in here?’ Lottie demands, before crouching down to meet me at eye level. Her pretty face is creased with genuine concern. ‘What are you doing in here?’ she repeats the question to me. ‘If you’re too scared to say anything aloud, just … I don’t know … blink three times … or do you have a safe word, or something …?’
‘No, there’s no safe word!’ I really, really want my very nice new client to stop thinking I’m heavily into sadomasochism. ‘This is all just a silly accident. I put my head through the bars, you see,’ I go on, cleverly avoiding any mention of why I put on slutty lingerie to do this in the first place. ‘I think the problem is my earrings, actually, so perhaps …’ I reach one hand up to start undoing one of the chandelier earrings on one side and then, the moment it’s fallen free, do the same to the other. ‘I’m sure I’ll be able to get my head out, now.’
Wrong again.
My head, even without the earrings, still won’t slide back out through the bars of the safety gate.
‘My head hasn’t grown, has it?’ I’m sounding panicked again. ‘Could that have happened? Do heads just spontaneously grow?’
‘I don’t know about that.’ Lottie puts her own head on one side. ‘I suppose it could have expanded a teeny bit, or something … From the friction of you trying to pull it out, maybe?’
‘For fuck’s sake, the two of you. It isn’t amateur physicist week.’ Posh James doesn’t sound the least bit impressed. ‘Obviously what we need is some sort of lubricant.’
‘James!’ Lottie gasps.
‘To rub on the bars,’ he explains. ‘To help her slide out. Olive oil, butter …’
‘Oh. Well, yes, that might be a good idea, actually. I’ll go and look in the fridge,’ Lottie says, getting to her feet and heading across to the other end of the kitchen. ‘Keep talking to her, James!’ she calls over one shoulder. ‘In case she goes into shock, or something.’
‘She’s not going to go into bloody shock,’ Posh James replies, irritably, before thinking slightly better of this and turning back to ask me, ‘are you?’
‘No,’ I mumble.
‘Good. I might, though.’
Which I think is just him being rude – extremely rude – about the nightmare-inducing sight of my bum, on the other side of the bars from him, until he goes on: ‘I mean, I honestly didn’t know Adam had it in him. I was pretty sure – a hundred per cent sure, in fact – that Adam batted for the other team.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Drove on the right-hand side of the road.’
‘Um, are you pointing out that he’s American, because I did already realize—’
‘I thought he was gay.’
I blink at Posh James. To be more precise, I blink at his battered Converse.
‘Adam’s not gay.’
‘If you say so.’
‘I am saying so.’
‘Well, you’d know better than me, obviously. It must just be a very, very good male friend of his I see leaving here early in the mornings, when I’m heading home from my run … what the hell, Lottie?’ he adds, as Lottie’s ballet pumps return our way again. ‘I suggested olive oil or butter, not half the contents of the store cupboard!’
‘Well, I don’t know what’s going to work, do I?’ Lottie is crouching back down to my level again, clutching an entire armful of assorted packets and bottles. ‘So, which do you think is most slippery? Groundnut oil? Grapeseed oil? Sesame oil? Argan oil … oooh, I’ve never heard of that one before.’
‘It’s often used in North African cooking,’ Posh James says. ‘You can use it to make fresh dips, drizzle it on couscous—’
‘Oh, was that the thing that made the couscous taste so amazing in Marrakech?’ Lottie asks.
‘I think it was the cinnamon, actually,’ her husband tells her. ‘I’ve started adding it when I make couscous at home, you know, but I don’t think the quality of the cinnamon here is as good as it was over there, because—’
‘I honestly think any of the oils will be fine,’ I say, starting to feel more desperate than ever now that – somehow – we all just seem to be sitting around here swapping recipe tips and reminiscing about couscous. ‘Can we just try one?’
‘Of course. Let’s start with the sesame oil!’
So we do. And when that has no effect whatsoever, we try groundnut oil. And when that has no effect whatsoever, we try sunflower oil. And when that has no effect whatsoever (apart from making me smell like some sort of giant Chinese takeaway, that is), Posh James announces, ‘Fuck this for a game of soldiers. I’d better call the fire brigade.’
‘No!’ I moan, gently, because if it’s mortifying enough being semi-naked and wedged between two iron bars on my hands and knees in front of Lottie and James Cadwalladr, I can’t even begin to imagine the horror of importing half a dozen firemen into this kitchen, too. ‘Please …’
‘Well, I don’t see that we have any other option,’ he says, irritably. ‘I don’t own a hacksaw. I suppose I could always go and see if any of the neighbours has a hacksaw—’
‘Bogdan!’ I suddenly gasp.
I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before.
‘My friend Bogdan – he’s a handyman … well, and a hairdresser, too, but …’ Not relevant, Libby! Stick to the important facts! ‘He’ll have a hacksaw, I’m absolutely sure of it. Look, can you just grab my phone from my bag,’ I say, feeling weak with relief, ‘and bring it over so I can call him?’
‘Absolutely!’ Lottie sounds pretty relieved as well, because although this might be the worst evening of my entire life, I don’t think it’s exactly been a night of unbounded pleasure for her and James, either. ‘James, get her phone. I’ll just see,’ she adds, scrambling to her feet as there’s a fresh volley of barking coming from the hallway, ‘what Fritz is going nuts about out there.’
I hear the kitchen door open, and then I hear Lottie say, in a startled voice, ‘Oh! Adam!’
So he really is back pretty early from his work dinner. Just not early enough, unfortunately, to have prevented me from ending up in my current predicament.
‘This probably all looks very strange to you,’ Lottie is going on, ‘but we have, well, a bit of a situation … I don’t suppose either of you happens to have a hacksaw on you, by any chance?’
Wait a second: either of you?
‘I don’t have a hacksaw,’ comes Adam’s voice, sounding bewildered and anxious – unlike him – in equal measure. ‘Ben, uh, I’m assuming you don’t have one either?’
‘No, I didn’t bring a hacksaw,’ comes another voice. Just like Adam’s voice, it’s American-accented.
And just like Adam’s voice, it’s male.
‘And I gotta tell you, Ads,’ the strange man’s voice goes on, with an abrasive chuckle, ‘I’m glad we’ve been dating this long before you asked me that question. I’d be out that door faster than a speeding bullet otherwise.’
I can’t move.
I mean, obviously I can’t move. None of us would be here right now if I could.
Well, Adam and Ben would probably still be here, for their own cosy night in. My boyfriend and … his boyfriend?
The bars of the safety gate may be gradually cutting off the blood supply to my brain, but even I can put two and two together on this one and make four.
There’s the faint squeak of Converse on marble, and then Posh James’s face appears in front of me again.
‘Here’s your phone,’ he says, matter-of-factly, as he hands it through the bars to me and folds my frozen fingers around it. And then he adds, equally matter-of-factly, ‘I told you he was gay.’
Then he gets to his feet and heads towards the hallway, perhaps to give me a moment of privacy.
With a strength of will I didn’t even know I had, I force my fingers to unfreeze so that I can call Bogdan.
He and his hacksaw can’t get here fast enough.
(#u187251b9-7f13-54a4-ae36-cef40e8c5002)
The half-hour after Adam and his date got home turned into a bit of a blur, if I’m honest with you.
Thank God Lottie and James slipped quietly away, and then Adam came (sheepishly) into the kitchen to find me. He didn’t say a lot, and I said even less … I have a dim memory of being peered at, for a moment, by a very scowly man in a very smart suit, who I can only assume was Ben … and then, just as Adam suggested it might be a good idea for me to snack on some edamame beans and a coconut water, to keep my energy levels up, Bogdan arrived.
With Olly.
My second unexpected, unannounced and frankly unwanted visitor of the night.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m always happy to see Olly. It’s a truly rare situation where I don’t want his lovely, friendly face around. I’d hardly have dragged the poor guy up to Dad’s wedding this past weekend if I hadn’t thought it would make the whole thing better, just having him there.
Tonight, however, was precisely one of those rare situations.
‘Am decorating at restaurant,’ was Bogdan’s explanation, through the noise of the hacksaw, when I asked him, through gritted teeth, why he’d decided to announce my predicament to Olly before the pair of them set out in Olly’s van, like cape-less crusaders, to rescue me from Death By Humiliation in Shepherd’s Bush. ‘Olly is right there beside me when am answering phone. You are expecting me to be lying to him about reason for phone call? When he is currently being my boss? And also, am hoping not to be presuming too much, my friend?’
Well, no, I wasn’t expecting him to lie.
And given that he blurted, ‘Let me be getting this straight, Libby – you are trapped somewhere against your will and only wearing what I am guessing to be some sort of undergarment?’ a couple of moments after my terse explanation over the phone, I suppose it’s only to be expected that Olly would grab his car keys and hurtle to my assistance.
But it’s just one more layer of awkwardness to endure: Olly, who didn’t even know I was dating Adam to begin with, coming face to face with me in that terrible, semi-naked, head-wodged predicament.
Quite honestly, the discovery that my new boyfriend, who I really thought might be The One, is in fact gay … well, it’s almost the least bad thing about the last couple of hours.
I said almost.
Olly has insisted on driving me all the way home, which is nice of him, because I’m feeling a bit too bruised – physically and emotionally – for the rough-and-tumble of the tube just now.
The downside, though, is more of that terrible awkwardness.
Even though – obviously – I re-dressed myself as soon as I was free from the bars, the atmosphere between us is so uncomfortable that I might as well be still wearing nothing but the Ribbony Elasticky Thing and a slick of sesame oil. We’ve sat in embarrassed silence ever since Shepherd’s Bush, and we’re over the river and stuck in a bottleneck of traffic near Wandsworth Bridge when Olly finally breaks it.
‘So. Adam Rosenfeld.’
‘Yes.’ I swallow, hard. ‘Did you know he was gay?’
‘Libby, come on. I only work with the guy. And barely even that, really. He dropped into the restaurant this afternoon for the first time in a week. I mean, I don’t remember pondering, as we pored over some thrilling spreadsheets together, what his sexual orientation might be …’
‘Fair point.’
‘And it’s not like I was looking out for anything in particular, one way or the other.’ Olly changes gear as we finally move up a little way in the traffic. ‘I mean, I didn’t even know you were seeing him, Libby. You kept that one pretty close to your chest.’
I wince, inwardly, at Olly’s mere mention of my chest, given that he’s seen more of my chest this evening than I’d have liked him to do in a lifetime.
‘It was pretty recent,’ I mumble.
‘You could have mentioned something over the weekend.’
‘I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t want to shout it from the rooftops in case … well, it didn’t work out. Which has turned out to be pretty prophetic of me, really.’
‘You’re not pathetic.’
‘Prophetic,’ I say.
‘Oh … well, you might be that.’
‘Yeah, except I thought the reasons we might not work out would be because we were both too busy with our jobs, or because we didn’t like each other’s families … I never stopped to think that it might be because he was using me as a beard to hide his true identity from his Orthodox Jewish parents.’
This is based on something that Adam muttered at me, by the way, a few minutes before Bogdan and Olly and the tool kit got there: I’m really sorry, Libby … my mum and dad … it’s an Orthodox thing … they wouldn’t approve …
Which, you know, I can sympathize with. I’ve endured the disapproval of my own mother for the majority of the last thirty years. But I still don’t think it’s reasonable to drag someone else into the middle of it. Someone unwitting. Someone ignorant.
‘I’m just such an idiot,’ I say, miserably, gazing out of the window as unidentifiable bits of southwest London slide by in the gathering midsummer dusk. ‘How did I not realize he was gay? He couldn’t have made any more excuses to avoid having sex with me!’
‘He made excuses?’
‘Dozens of them.’ I never usually talk about sex with Olly, but I feel we’ve crossed that barrier tonight. Actually, not so much crossed as smashed through it. With a ten-tonne truck. ‘He was busy with work. He was tired from the gym. He had a headache … I don’t know. There were a lot of different explanations. And I fell for each and every one of them.’
‘So the … er … dressing up in … er … sexy lingerie was—’
‘My embarrassingly misguided attempt to reverse the situation.’
Olly nods. ‘Got it.’
‘I mean, what’s wrong with me,’ I go on, ‘that I have such crappy awful judgement about the entire male species?’
‘There’s nothing wrong with you.’
‘All right, then, maybe there’s just something wrong with men.’
‘OK, well, that’s a bit of an unfair generalization—’
‘I don’t mean you, Ol,’ I say. ‘I just mean all the others.’
‘Come on, Lib, just because it’s all gone a bit pear-shaped with Adam, and just because you had a hellish experience with a total wanker like Dillon O’Hara—’
At this moment, there’s an angry grunt from the back of the car: it’s Bogdan who, I have to confess, I’d completely forgotten was sitting back there.
He looms forward now, to jab Olly in the shoulder with a large and paint-spattered finger.
‘Do not be saying the impolite things about Dillon,’ he tells Olly. ‘Libby is not having the hellish experience with him. Libby is having the heavenly experience with him. And not just in the bedroom.’
‘Bogdan!’ I turn round and glare at him. ‘That’s none of anyone’s business!’
‘Is being the business of mine,’ Bogdan mutters, darkly, ‘when am hearing the untrue things about the people I am liking.’
(Bogdan is being slightly disingenuous here. He didn’t so much like Dillon as nurse a colossal, simmering, unrequited passion for him, in a tragic, balalaika-accompanied, Moldovan sort of way. Many was the time, in the course of those few heady months with Dillon, that I half expected to open my suitcase in some glamorous hotel room only to find Bogdan stowed away amongst my shoes and my tops and my sexy underwear, all ready to clamber out and hang on Dillon’s every word for the duration of our dirty weekend. I got so paranoid that I even stopped taking the big suitcase, and started cramming everything I might need into the smaller of my two canvas holdalls instead.)
‘My mistake, Bogdan,’ Olly returns, his voice dripping with sarcasm. ‘There’s obviously nothing at all hellish about being abandoned in Miami the day before a major hurricane, with no passport and no credit cards.’
‘Being abandoned in the Miami the day before the major hurricane with no passport and no credit cards,’ Bogdan echoes, ‘by Dillon O’Hara.’
Olly actually takes his eyes off the road for a moment to turn round and stare at Bogdan.
‘I’m sorry … you’re saying that this is some sort of privilege?’
‘Am saying,’ Bogdan says, in the overly patient tone of one who’s decided he’s talking to a complete imbecile, ‘that Libby is being lucky to be involved with man as handsome and charming and funny and—’
‘And coke-addled,’ Olly interrupts, ‘and womanizing—’
‘OK, that’s enough!’ I hold up a hand. ‘Look, I’m incredibly grateful to you both for coming and getting me out of a tight spot – literally – but can we just stop talking about Dillon O’Hara for the rest of the journey?’
‘It would make me a happy man,’ Olly announces, ‘if I never had to so much as hear his name again for the rest of my livelong days.’
Which puts Bogdan into a right old grump, because he inflicts a wounded silence on us all until Olly drops him at the top of his road in Balham a few minutes later. And then thumps on Olly’s window just before we drive off and yells, ‘Dillon O’Hara!’, petulantly, through the glass.
‘Probably not a good idea,’ I say, a moment later, ‘to have made your painter and decorator quite so angry with you four days before your big restaurant opening.’
‘Oh, he’ll be all right. Besides, everything’s on track over there.’
‘Really? Because I feel really awful, Ol, about accidentally dragging him – and you – away from the place this evening …’
‘Honestly, Lib, don’t worry about it. Like I say, we’re right on schedule. And I know you’d do the same for me.’
‘If you got your head stuck in between some iron railings at your secretly lesbian girlfriend’s house while wearing skimpy undies and having cooking oils rubbed on you by a famous television actor?’
‘In that exact scenario,’ Olly says, solemnly, ‘I know you’d leg it across town with your sharpest hacksaw and your trustiest blowtorch.’
‘Well, that’s what friendship is all about,’ I say.
Olly falls silent for a moment, which is a pity as I’d thought we were well on the road to it All Being OK between us again, until he suddenly swerves on to the other side of the road, and into the drive-through McDonald’s on the other side of it.
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Lucy Holliday
The hilarious follow-up to A Night in With Audrey Hepburn from your favourite new author. Perfect for fans of Lucy Diamond and Sophie Kinsella.After dating the hottest man on the planet, Dillon O’Hara, Libby Lomax has come back down to earth with a bump. Now she’s throwing herself into a new relationship and is determined to be a better friend to best pal, Ollie, as he launches his new restaurant.Despite good intentions, Libby is hugely distracted when a newly reformed Dillon arrives back on the scene, more irresistible than ever. And when another unwelcome guest turns up on her battered sofa in the form of Marilyn Monroe, Libby would willingly bite her own arm off for a return to normality.
Copyright (#ulink_9623ba2f-d35c-57ba-af24-42f30b862999)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by Harper 2015
This edition published by Harper 2016
Copyright © Lucy Holliday 2015
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Cover design and illustration by Jane Harwood
Lucy Holliday asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007582273
Ebook Edition © August 2016 ISBN: 9780008163341
Version: 2016-06-29
Contents
Cover (#ud5acc12d-b1bf-5590-bda4-803e6c1d5cbb)
Title Page (#ue18000a8-db17-5d1c-9799-ecc1d9040e04)
Copyright (#ub3fca78e-a5eb-53b4-b8ea-ccf2cf53b619)
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Lucy Holliday (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE (#u187251b9-7f13-54a4-ae36-cef40e8c5002)
WhatsApp message 5 Sept 10.17 a.m. To: Nora
Newsagent at Heathrow had copy of You and Your Wedding magazine!!! Page 84, right? Will look now. L xx
WhatsApp message 5 Sept 10.19 a.m. To: Nora
Ivory bias-cut one with lace sleeves?
WhatsApp message 5 Sept 10.20 a.m. To: Nora
Love it. Would look perfect on you. Let me know when you want me to come up to Glasgow for bridal shop session. Boarding any minute now. Lx
*
WhatsApp message 5 Sept 10.26 a.m. To: Cass
No, Cass, I can’t meet you at Selfridges shoe hall in 5 mins.
WhatsApp message 5 Sept 10.27 a.m. To: Cass
Because am getting on plane to Miami.
WhatsApp message 5 Sept 10.28 a.m. To: Cass
With Dillon.
WhatsApp message 5 Sept 10.29 a.m. To: Cass
Yes, all right, will meet you at Selfridges shoe hall after I get back.
*
WhatsApp message 5 Sept 10.30 a.m. To: Mum
For Christ’s sake, Mum, of course am not moving to America to marry Dillon. Cass obv got wrong end of stick as usual. Is just holiday.
WhatsApp message 5 Sept 10.33 a.m. To: Mum
No, Mum, I haven’t thought about what I’d say if he asked me because he isn’t going to ask me. Has only been 3 months.
WhatsApp message 5 Sept 10.34 a.m. To: Mum
No, Mum, am not worried that he won’t buy cow if getting milk for free.
WhatsApp message 5 Sept 10.35 a.m. To: Mum
Also, have to say that is pretty outdated view of relationships.
*
WhatsApp message 6 Sept 13.02 p.m. To: Nora
Idyllic. Lx
WhatsApp message 6 Sept 13.03 p.m. To: Nora
Everything. Hotel. View. Food. Him. Lx
WhatsApp message 6 Sept 13.05 p.m. To: Nora
Appreciate your concern but don’t worry. Am not falling in love with him. Even I’m not that much of an idiot. Lx
*
WhatsApp message 7 Sept 18.08 p.m. To: Olly
Hi, Ol, didn’t know you knew I was here!! Yep have seen hurricane forecast. But isn’t due until day after tomorrow and we’re leaving tomorrow morning. Will call when back. Any news on that restaurant lease? Lx
*
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 11.13 a.m. To: Nora
Not home yet no. Couple of slight issues on that front. Just wondering: do you know how easy it is to fly from USA to UK if you don’t have your passport?
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 11.18 a.m. To: Nora
That is one of slight issues. Dillon has my passport.
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 11.19 a.m. To: Nora
That is other slight issue. Don’t know where Dillon is.
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 11.20 a.m. To: Nora
Because our last night at hotel he bumped into some people he knew and we ended up at random party in Coconut Grove. Had a bit of a row so I left. Forgot he had passports on him.
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 11.21 a.m. To: Nora
Because he didn’t come back to the hotel and haven’t seen him since.
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 11.22 a.m. To: Nora
He isn’t answering his phone.
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 11.23 a.m. To: Nora
No, Nora. I haven’t forgotten about hurricane.
*
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 11.27 a.m. To: Olly
Thanks for messaging, Olly. Nora obviously keeping you in the loop. But can’t check into another hotel without passport.
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 11.29 a.m. To: Olly
Had already checked out of old one before realized Dillon AWOL. Also minimum room rate there is $800 per night. Also is now fully booked with terrified locals fleeing small houses in advance of hurricane.
*
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 11.42 a.m. To: Cass
No, Cass I can’t bring you back bulk order of Kiehls body lotion.
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 11.46 a.m. To: Cass
Yes I do know it’s pounds for dollars.
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 11.48 a.m. To: Cass
BECAUSE AM STUCK IN MIAMI WITH NO PASSPORT, NO HOTEL ROOM, 26 QUID IN MY CURRENT ACCOUNT, EXACTLY 17 DOLLARS IN MY WALLET AND HURRICANE APPROACHING.
*
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 6.53 p.m. To: Nora
Crisis averted!!! Am spending night bunking down inside Miami Dolphins Football Stadium.
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 6.55 p.m. To: Nora
Is fine, honestly. Everyone being very friendly. Have met nice family from Arizona who have lent me sleeping bag and are cooking me hot dog on their portable bbq. Is actually all very jolly and Blitz-spirity at moment!
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 6.57 p.m. To: Nora
No. He’s still not answering his phone.
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 7.01 p.m. To: Nora
The row? Nothing, really.
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 7.06 p.m. To: Nora
Yes, all right. It was because he was flirting with another girl.
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 7.08 p.m. To: Nora
Norwegian swimsuit model. But not sure that’s really important right now.
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 8.44 p.m. To: Nora
OK, am getting small suspicion lovely family from Arizona may belong to fanatical doomsday cult into which they are trying to indoctrinate me.
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 8.56 p.m. To: Nora
Yes, they definitely belong to fanatical doomsday cult into which they are trying to indoctrinate me.
*
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 21.22 p.m. To: Olly
Am OK. Have to admit is getting a tiny bit scary here now. Winds are starting to make a hell of a noise outside stadium. Also might have accidentally joined fanatical Doomsday cult. Seemed like small price to pay for sleeping bag and hot dog at the time, but am starting to have serious regrets.
*
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 22.23 p.m. To: Nora
Shit Nora this is getting scary now. Winds are getting up. People crying. Praying. Not just fanatical Doomsday cult but normal people too. Signal keeps cutting out. Will message as soon as I can. Love you. Sorry about all this. Lx
*
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 22.26 p.m. To: Cass
Cass. Am slap-bang in middle of worst hurricane to hit Florida in 2 decades. Don’t know when, if ever, will be getting out of here. So no. I won’t be able to meet you at Selfridges today to go shoe shopping.
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 22.29 p.m. To: Cass
No, Cass. It doesn’t even come close to qualifying as a disaster.
*
WhatsApp message 9 Sept 22.31 p.m. To: Olly
I love you, Olly Lx
*
(#u187251b9-7f13-54a4-ae36-cef40e8c5002)
It was a big moment, last night, when my grandmother knocked on the door of my hotel room and handed me this box containing about seventeen layers of tissue and, beneath them all, her wedding veil.
A massive moment, actually.
She’s not the most warm and fuzzy of grandmothers – nobody on Dad’s side is warm and fuzzy; in fact, come to think of it, nobody on Mum’s side is all that warm and fuzzy either – but I’ve always worshipped her a little bit. For her to hand down her wedding veil to me … not to any of Dad’s brothers’ daughters, but me … well, it makes me feel special. Which is nice, for a change.
And all right, it would have made me feel even more special if she hadn’t added, as she watched me open the box, ‘I’d give you my wedding dress, too, Libby, darling, but I’m afraid you don’t have quite the tiny waist I did when I wore it.’
But still. A big moment. A symbol of my super-glamorous grandmother’s esteem.
And then there’s the fact that it’s absolutely stunning.
Seriously, there’s no way you could find anything like this in any bridal shop across the land: hand-stitched, palest ivory lace, with a gauzy elbow-length piece to cover your face at the front and an almost ten-foot drop at the back. (Grandmother only got married in a small village church in her native Shropshire, but she was modelling her entire wedding ‘look’ on her movie idol, Grace Kelly, hence the dramatically long veil, carried up the aisle by her – eight – bridesmaids.) It makes me look stunning, and not just because the gauzy lace covering my face is the equivalent of smearing a camera lens with Vaseline to blur out imperfections. Something about the way the veil hangs, the way my hair is half pulled back to accommodate it, the flattering ivory shade, perhaps … whatever the reason, I feel a bit ravishing, to be honest with you.
And now, looking soft-focus himself from behind all this lace, here comes Olly, striding towards me. He reaches out with both hands, folds back the veil so that he can see my face, and smiles down at me. His eyes look exceptionally soft, and he doesn’t speak for a moment.
‘What on earth,’ he says, when he finally speaks, ‘are you wearing this for?’
‘It’s Grandmother’s. She came round with it last night.’ I pull the veil back down, keen to retreat behind the Vaseline blur again, just for one blissful moment. ‘Does it suit me?’
‘Wonderfully. But – and don’t bite my head off here, Libby – don’t you think maybe you ought to stick to just a simple hat, or something? It isn’t your wedding, after all.’
‘I know that,’ I sigh. I steal one final glance at myself, a vision of Grace Kelly-esque (well, Grace Kelly-ish) bridal loveliness, in the full-length mirror in the corner of my hotel room. ‘And obviously I’m not going to wear this to Dad and Phoebe’s wedding. Though, to be fair, I don’t know if Phoebe could actually object – I mean, Grandmother did offer it to her for the day, and she turned it down …’
This doesn’t at all take the shine off Grandmother offering me the veil afterwards, by the way. I mean, all right, she was in a bit of a grump about her soon-to-be new daughter-in-law refusing to wear the veil because it would swamp her rather fabulous figure, but that wasn’t why she came to my room late last night and handed it over to me instead. She’d only have let Phoebe borrow it – her Something Borrowed for the day – whereas I’ve actually been bequeathed it … if that’s the right word to use when Grandmother is still very much alive.
‘Still,’ says Olly, with a grin, ‘I’m not sure if Phoebe would be all that thrilled at a guest turning up in a ten-foot lace veil on her wedding day. Especially not her new stepdaughter.’
I wince.
‘Sorry, sorry.’ He holds up both hands. ‘I know we’re not calling her your stepmum. My bad.’
Because it’s not as if I don’t have enough problems with the one actual mum I’ve already got. Not to mention the fact that Dad has never really been enough of a dad for me to call the woman he’s marrying my ‘stepmother’. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve got no objection to Phoebe whatsoever, who seemed a pleasant enough woman during the ten-minute chat we had when Olly and I arrived at the hotel last night. But I think we’ll all be much more comfortable, once today is over, if we just go back to being polite strangers, exchanging Christmas cards and the occasional text. Which, where Dad is concerned anyway, would be a massive improvement on the last twenty-odd years.
‘Anyway, we should probably be heading down to the orangery now, don’t you think?’ Olly asks as – a little bit reluctantly – I start detaching the veil from my hair and folding it back into its slim cardboard box. ‘I know your dad said it’s all very informal, but I doubt if that extends to us arriving after the bride and groom.’
‘Well, it’d be a bit ironic of Dad to suddenly start deploring lateness right now,’ I say, ‘given that he only remembered my eighteenth birthday two weeks after the event … but, you’re right. We should get going.’
I head back over to the mirror and look at our joint reflection. Now that I’ve taken the veil off, all I’m wearing is a cap-sleeved silk dress and matching suede heels that, both in charcoal grey, feel more wedding-appropriate than my usual head-to-toe black. Olly is looking dapper, and astonishingly different from his normal self, in a dark blue suit, crisp white shirt and striped tie. It’s been ages since I’ve seen him in an outfit that wasn’t either chef’s whites or, ever since he started doing up his own restaurant a couple of months ago, a paint-spattered T-shirt and baggy jeans, so it’s a bit of a surprise to look at him now and remember how well he scrubs up.
‘Do we look all right?’ I ask, meeting his eyes in the mirror.
Olly studies us both for a moment.
‘I think we look pretty bloody good,’ he says, meeting my eyes in the mirror, too. ‘You in particular. I really like that dress.’
‘Thanks, Ol. Oh, and I apologize in advance,’ I say, linking my arm through his and starting to head for the door, grabbing my hat and bag and pashmina as we go, ‘if any of my relatives mistakenly think we’re a couple. I haven’t told them we are – I mean, I never see any of them from one decade to the next, obviously – but you know how people jump to conclusions …’
‘There’s no need to apologize.’
‘… and some of them might even remember you from when you came with me to my granddad’s funeral eleven years ago, so they’ll probably ask all kinds of questions about why we’re not married yet …’
‘Well, it would be a perfectly legitimate question. If we really had been together all those years, I mean.’
‘… but you should be able to fob them off easily enough without even having to tell them we’re just best friends. Shove a drink in most of their faces and they’ll forget they were even talking to you, anyway.’
‘Don’t worry, Lib. Fobbing off intrusive lines of questioning from well-meaning relatives is pretty much a speciality of mine.’
And Olly holds open the door, impeccably mannered as always, for me to walk out ahead of him.
*
I’m so, so grateful to Olly for agreeing to be my date for Dad’s wedding.
I mean, I know it’s just about the last thing he wants to do with his weekend: schlep all the way up here to Ayrshire, where Phoebe originally hails from, just to keep me company at my father’s wedding. It’s not as if, what with his restaurant opening at the end of this coming week, he doesn’t have plenty to be getting on with in his own life.
And I suppose I could always have asked Adam to accompany me. Given that he and I really are a couple.
But Adam and I have only been an item for about eight weeks. Yes, things are going terrifically well between us – I mean, seriously well – but it still feels a bit soon to be subjecting him to the cauldron of awkward encounters and complicated emotions that are guaranteed to mark Dad’s wedding for me. Anyway, Olly agreed to come with me today as soon as I mentioned the surprise (OK, shock) arrival of the invitation, three months ago, and there’s not a person in the world I’d rather have as my wingman.
(Not to mention the fact that I’ve been keeping quiet about the fact that Adam and I are, to put it in nice, clear Facebook terminology that never quite translates to real life – not my real life, at any rate – ‘in a relationship’. I haven’t even mentioned it, yet, to Nora, my other best friend and Olly’s sister. As I say, it’s still really early days and … well, the last relationship I had ended in such unmitigated disaster – quite literally – that I’m a bit wary of announcing that I’ve headed down that route again, even if it is with a man who’s the polar opposite of my ex, Dillon.)
My gratitude to Olly, though, however much I thought I’d already realized it, was made even more obvious to me when Dad walked back down the aisle with his brand-new wife, Phoebe, roughly fifteen minutes ago.
I don’t know what came over me, but I suddenly felt this massive lump in my throat, and not in a wedding-y, happy-tears sort of way. So it was lovely to be able to reach to my right-hand side and fumble for Olly’s hand to grab on to, and even lovelier to realize that I didn’t need to do much fumbling, because he was already reaching for mine.
It’s a good thing that Grandmother, who was on my other side, didn’t notice our brief-but-meaningful hand-squeeze, because I’m pretty sure she’s already getting all kinds of ideas into her head about me and Olly.
And now I’m absolutely sure she’s getting all kinds of ideas, because we’ve all just milled from the orangery, where the ceremony took place, into the sunny-but-chilly grounds of the hotel for an alfresco drinks reception, and she’s just this very minute seized my arm and said, ‘Libby, darling, your Olly is absolutely wonderful.’
‘I know.’ Thank God Olly has just taken his absolutely wonderful self off to find a glass of champagne for us all, so I don’t have to make I’m really sorry faces at him and hope Grandmother doesn’t see. ‘But he’s not my Olly, in fact, Grandmother. He’s just a friend.’
‘Oh.’ Her face, miraculously unlined for her eighty-odd years (and, fingers crossed, another thing I’ll inherit from her apart from her veil) falls slightly. ‘That’s a pity. I remember him from your grandfather’s funeral. And he wrote me the sweetest condolence letter afterwards. So if he’s just a friend, tell me: what’s wrong with him?’
‘Nothing. God, absolutely nothing at all! He’s just … we’re not together,’ I explain. Or, to be more accurate, I barely explain. So I go on. ‘Do you remember my friend Nora? We came to stay with you for a week one summer when we were fourteen or fifteen? Well, Olly’s her brother.’
Grandmother thinks about this for a moment. ‘Just because he’s somebody’s brother,’ she replies, tartly, ‘doesn’t mean he wouldn’t make a more-than-acceptable boyfriend.’
Which you can’t argue with, I suppose. And certainly I wouldn’t dare to argue with Grandmother, who – for all her Grace Kelly wedding attire – is actually a little more along the lines of one of her other screen idols, Katharine Hepburn, when it comes to spikiness. In fact, she’s dressed rather like Katharine Hepburn today herself, in splendid cream silk palazzo pants and a black kimono jacket and – I’m touched by this, given that we’re not as close as we could be – the beaded lariat necklace I made and sent her for her eighty-fifth birthday a few months ago. (I’m a jewellery designer, I should say, so this isn’t as home-crafty as it might sound.)
‘Anyhow, he couldn’t be any more unsuitable than … what was the name of that chap you’d just stopped seeing the last time I spoke to you?’ Grandmother asks. ‘The one who abandoned you in Mexico in the middle of an earthquake.’
‘It was Miami. And it was a hurricane.’ I can’t, unfortunately, correct her on the ‘abandoned’ part. ‘And his name was Dillon.’
‘Yes. Why should this nice Olly be any worse for you than a man who lets you face natural disasters on your own? You wouldn’t let Libby face a natural disaster on her own,’ she demands, of Olly, who – talk about timing – has just reappeared with three glasses of champagne, two of them impressively balanced in one hand, ‘would you?’
‘Sorry, Mrs Lomax?’
‘You wouldn’t leave Libby in Malaysia with a tidal wave approaching.’
‘Of course he wouldn’t,’ I say, hastily, before Olly twigs that we’re talking about Dillon. Because Olly and Dillon are not, in any way, shape or form, simpatico. ‘Thanks for the champagne, Ol. Can he get you anything else, Grandmother?’
‘No. But he can dance with me.’
She’s pointing an imperious finger in the direction of a very small octagonal dance floor that’s been laid down on what must usually be a patio. Music, from three exceptionally bored-looking members of a jazz trio, is emanating from right beside it.
‘I don’t know if that’s a good idea, Grandmother …’ Because I really don’t want her bearding poor Olly in her den and demanding to know exactly why it is that we aren’t a couple. He didn’t sign up for the third degree when he agreed to be my ‘date’ today, after all. ‘Nobody else has started dancing yet … and maybe Dad and Phoebe want to have a dance before anyone else …’
‘Well, I wanted a son who wouldn’t put me to shame by neglecting his duties as a father,’ Grandmother says, sharply, which is the very closest she ever comes to referencing the Great Unmentionable that is Dad’s history with me. ‘But we can’t always get what we want, Libby, can we?’ She hands me her champagne glass and turns to Olly. ‘So, shall we dance?’
Olly looks part-amused, part-terrified, but either way he doesn’t say no. He puts his own champagne glass down on one of the nearby trestle tables that feature the cold buffet nibbles, shoots me an eyebrow-raise, then extends his arm in a gentlemanly fashion for Grandmother to take as they stroll to the dance floor.
I watch in frozen fascination as they start to put together some surprisingly impressive moves. Surprising because Grandmother is an octogenarian with two artificial knees, and because I literally had no idea Olly could dance ‘properly’. The last time I saw him dance at all must have been at his parents’ big ruby anniversary party a few years back, but he ended up pretty drunk that night and capable of little more than cheerful bursts of (what I hoped at the time was) Dad Dancing.
Well, look at him go right now, wheeling Grandmother around that dance floor like a cross between Fred Astaire and Patrick Swayze. And, thank God, they’re dancing too energetically, by old-age-pensioner standards, anyway, for Grandmother to strike up a conversation, so with any luck I might be able to cut in and insist on a dance with Olly myself before she starts any embarrassing lines of questioning …
‘Libby.’
A voice, right behind me, makes me turn round.
It’s Dad, with one arm around his new wife, Phoebe, and the other arm around the pretty dark-haired girl who acted as the bridesmaid in the ceremony just now: Rosie, Phoebe’s seventeen-year-old daughter.
The fact that Phoebe has a daughter was news to me last night. I mean, the first I’d even heard of Phoebe herself was when the wedding e-vite popped up in my inbox back in April. And I’ve only had the briefest of text-message exchanges with Dad about the wedding since, purely centred on whether or not he might be able to get me the family discount on the room rate at the hotel. (Turns out he could. Which is just about the most family-oriented thing Dad’s done for me at any point in the last thirty years.) Any details – how they met, how long they’ve been together – were a total mystery to me until yesterday. Just for the record, I learned last night that they met last September when Phoebe started teaching speech therapy at the university where Dad lectures in film studies. Which is also when I learned of the existence of Rosie, my – wince alert – brand new stepsister.
‘Dad,’ I say. ‘Phoebe. Congratulations!’
Then, because if I don’t do it, he certainly won’t, I lean forward and give him a quick hug, and then do the same to Phoebe.
‘Aw, thanks, Libby.’ Phoebe, a forty-year-old stunner in a wasp-waisted, extremely plunging wedding gown, returns the hug in a nice, if distracted way. ‘So good of you to come all this way, love.’
‘Oh, that’s OK! It was good of you to invite me.’
‘Glad you could make it,’ says Dad, with one of his rare and extremely fleeting smiles. ‘I know you’re really busy these days.’
‘Honestly, Dad, I wouldn’t have missed it.’
And then there’s a moment of silence.
This, exactly this, is the reason I didn’t bring Adam up here today instead of Olly. This sheer, tooth-clenching awkwardness. And this is better than usual, believe it or not. Up until last summer, it had been years since I’d even spoken to Dad. It took quite a leap of faith, and some gentle pushing from … well, from a new friend of mine … to break that ice at all last year.
‘You should meet your brand-new stepsister!’ Phoebe says.
I wince. Thank God, nobody notices.
‘Rosie, this is Libby. Libby, this is Rosie.’
‘Hi!’ I say.
‘Hi,’ says Rosie.
‘Rosie’s about to start her final year of college,’ Phoebe goes on, ‘and she’s just starting to think which uni courses she might apply for. And you, Libby … you work in a jewellery shop, is that right?’
‘Um, well, I sort of design my own jewellery, actually.’
‘So you’re artistic! That’s nice. Rosie’s very artistic, too. She’s thinking of applying for a fine art degree, or maybe something related to theatre design … oh! I’d better just go over and say hi to Jenny and Nick … no, no, Eddie, you stay here,’ she says, firmly, as Dad does his best to escape after her, ‘and catch up with Libby properly. Get the two girls chatting!’ she adds, making a sort of criss-cross gesture with her hands at Rosie and me. ‘Help them get to know each other!’
This is going to be tricky for Dad, given that he doesn’t even know me himself. So – after shooting a slightly panicked look of my own in the direction of the dance floor, where Olly (oh, God) is now being engaged in extremely intense conversation by Grandmother – I take pity on him and decide it’s best if I take charge of the conversation myself.
‘So! Rosie … you’re … er … about to apply to university!’
‘Yep.’ Rosie nods. Pretty in her pale green bridesmaid’s dress, she has a confident look about her that suggests she’s one of the popular crowd at school. I don’t think her lack of interest in me is anything personal so much as the fact that to her I’m just some boring older person who doesn’t know the ins and outs of her social life. ‘Just like Mum already told you.’
‘Right. So, theatre design, maybe?’
‘Not if I have my way,’ Dad says. ‘You know, this girl here is a contender for a top-notch media and communications course anywhere in the country. I’m trying to persuade her to apply to Kingston, because that’s one of the best places for a terrific all-round media education. And she can specialize in film history in her third year.’
‘Oh.’ I’m slightly startled that Dad is even interested in Rosie’s upcoming choice of tertiary education, let alone quite this invested in it. ‘So you’re a film fan, then, Rosie?’
‘God, yeah, I love movies. Especially all the classics. Eddie’s introduced me and Mum to so many of them. We do, like, these old movie nights on Sundays, and I invite my friends over and stuff—’
‘And I try not to be too much of an old bore and stop the film every five minutes to lecture them all on the things they should have noticed,’ Dad interrupts, with a chuckle.
Yes, that’s right: a chuckle.
A chuckle isn’t something I’ve ever heard Dad emit before.
‘Oh, you’re all right, Eddie,’ Rosie tells him, with a laugh of her own. ‘Anyway, if you do too much of that, we just send you out for more popcorn.’
‘So that’s what I’m reduced to, is it?’ Dad says, with another – another – chuckle. ‘A PhD, and all my years of experience, and author of a highly regarded book on the history of cinema, and you and your mates just want to send me out for popcorn!’
‘Oh, talking of your book,’ says Rosie, ‘my friend Jasper’s been reading it over the holidays, and he said it’s amazing. Like, he’s learned absolutely loads from it.’
‘Well, Jasper is obviously going places!’ Dad says. Only semi-jokingly.
But then Dad is always at his most pompous where His Book is concerned. Which I suppose is a good thing in some ways, because it was the writing of His Book that dominated his life and made him such a crappy, absent father to me for over twenty-five years.
Perhaps it’s the fact that the book finally came out last year that has enabled him to be (as he so clearly is) a pretty involved stepdad to Rosie.
Just at this moment, I feel a gentle touch to my elbow, and glance around to see that Olly has come over to join us.
I don’t actually throw myself on him like a drowning woman might throw herself on a passing lifeguard, but it’s a pretty close thing.
‘Hi,’ says Olly, extending a pleasant, if rather chilly, hand to my dad. ‘Congratulations, Mr Lomax.’
‘Oh, thanks … you’re … uh … Oscar, is it?’
‘Olly,’ I say.
‘Are you Libby’s boyfriend?’ Rosie asks, suddenly perking up and showing a bit more interest in me.
Or, to be more specific, in Olly.
At least, I assume this is what all the sudden pouty lips and hair-flicky action are about.
And Olly is looking nice today, in his smart suit, and with his sandy hair vaguely tidy for once, so I suppose I can’t blame Rosie for all the pouting and flicking, even if it does feel a bit … incestuous. Because she’s my (wince) new stepsister, and Olly is practically my brother.
‘No, no,’ I say, hastily, before Olly has to be the one to do so. ‘We’re just friends.’
‘Oh,’ says Rosie, meaningfully, as if Olly, being helpfully single, might suddenly decide that a seventeen-year-old is a suitable match for him, at thirty-three, and whisk her on to the dance floor for a bit of a smooch.
‘I just came over, Libby,’ Olly says, tactfully ignoring Rosie’s eager body language and turning to me instead, ‘to see if you wanted a dance. I think I might have worn your grandmother out, unfortunately, so I’m a partner down. I get the impression the jazz band are keen for some enthusiastic participants, though, so if you’re up for cutting a rug …?’
‘Delighted to,’ I say, with abject relief, as I clasp his outstretched hand. ‘I’ll catch you later, Dad. You probably need to circulate anyway, right?’
‘Absolutely,’ Dad says, looking pretty abjectly relieved, himself, to be rid of me.
‘And great to meet you, Rosie,’ I add, with what I hope is a suitably friendly-but-not-overly-intimate stepsisterly wave. ‘Maybe we can … er … keep in touch? I’m sure Dad can give you my email address if you’d like.’
Her eyes boggle at me as though I’ve just suggested writing each other letters with a quill pen and ink and sending them off by horse-drawn mail coach.
‘Anyway, congratulations again,’ Olly says, swiftly and smoothly, as he starts to lead me in the direction of the dance floor. ‘You’re shaking,’ he adds, to me, in a low voice. ‘Tricky conversation?’
‘Not for my dad and his brand-new stepdaughter, no,’ I say, but quietly, because I don’t want Grandmother to hear. She’s sitting on a chair in the shade of some nearby trees, where Olly must have chivalrously parked her, with a fresh glass of champagne in her hand. ‘They seem to be getting on like a house on fire. He’s taking an interest in her future … introducing her and her friends to all his favourite movies … supplying the popcorn …’
Olly gives a little wince of his own – amazingly, his first of the trip. ‘Sorry, Lib.’
‘It’s all right.’
It isn’t, really. Because although my dad not being bothered about me is something I’ve come to terms with, it’s quite different to see my dad taking such obvious pleasure in building a relationship with a daughter who’s come into his life through circumstance, and not biology.
Those cosy-sounding movie nights Rosie mentioned, for example. They were precisely the sort of thing I used to crave – I mean, really crave – when I was growing up. I had a few of them when I was eight or nine and still staying over at Dad’s for the occasional night (before plans for His Book properly took off, and he lost interest in me entirely). And I can still remember how exciting it was to be treated like a grown-up, and shown Dad’s favourite movies until way, way past my bedtime. Casablanca, and The African Queen, and Some Like It Hot … with hindsight, of course, not all of them exactly the sort of thing an eight-year-old enjoys. But I enjoyed them with Dad. Despite his stiff, rather formal method of showing them, with frequent breaks for him to point out Meaningful Scenes. A method he seems to have loosened up on where Rosie is concerned.
‘Do you want to go?’ Olly asks, lowering his voice still further. He has one hand on my waist and one on my shoulder as we dance (or rather, rock aimlessly from side to side; I evidently haven’t inherited Grandmother’s rug-cutting genes), and he uses the latter hand now to give my shoulder a gentle, comforting squeeze. ‘I’m happy to make the excuses if you want. I could say you’re feeling ill. Or I could say I’m feeling ill. Or I could say we’re both feeling ill – blame it all on those mushroom vol-au-vents I’ve seen doing the rounds, and cause a mass stampede for the exits …?’
I laugh. ‘Thanks, Olly, but I think I’d be even more unpopular around here if I put the kibosh on Dad and Phoebe’s big day.’
‘You’re not unpopular.’ He looks down at me. ‘Not with anyone who matters.’
We’re interrupted by the sound of his phone ringing, somewhere inside his suit jacket.
‘That’s Nora’s ringtone,’ I say, because we’ve both had her programmed in our phones, ever since she moved up to Glasgow a few years ago, with ‘Auld Lang Syne’. ‘We should answer. It might be something to do with her flights, or something.’
My mood is lifted, briefly, by this reminder of the fact that Nora is meeting us at Glasgow Airport later on this evening so that we can all fly back down to London together: she’s coming ‘home’ for the week so that she can help Olly with all the last-minute preparations for his restaurant opening, and come to his opening-night party on Friday evening.
‘No, I expect she’ll just be calling back to see if I’ve decided whether or not to take her up on her suggestion about Tash and the motorbike.’
I blink up at him. ‘Tash and what motorbike?’
‘Er … I was telling you about this in the bar last night, Libby.’ He looks surprised. ‘You weren’t that drunk, were you?’
No; I wasn’t very drunk at all. But there was a full five minutes, possibly even longer, when I got distracted by the sight of the single-malt whisky bottles lined up along the top of the bar. Single-malt whisky bottles make me think of Dillon. And when I think about Dillon, which I very rarely allow myself to do, entire swathes of time can get sucked into this sort of … vortex, I suppose you’d have to call it. So Olly could have been sitting in the bar buck-naked with a loaf of bread strapped to his head, talking about the time he was abducted by aliens, and it wouldn’t have even registered with me.
‘Tash,’ Olly re-explains, patiently (more patiently than he’d be doing if he knew it was thoughts of Dillon that had distracted me last night), ‘is going to come down to London to stay this week, too. Something about a conference, and apparently she’s a dab hand with a hammer and nails … she’s offering to help out at the restaurant in the evenings …’
Tash, one of Nora’s closest friends from the hospital they both work at in Glasgow, is almost certainly a dab hand with a hammer and nails. Tash is the sort of person who’s a dab hand with everything. A bit like Nora, in fact, capable and unflappable, which is probably why they’re such good friends.
I didn’t know she was going to be coming down to London with Nora this week.
Not, I should say, that I’ve got any kind of a problem with Tash, who’s seemed really nice every time I’ve met her.
It’s just that I’d been envisaging some lovely quality time spent with Nora over these next few days: helping Olly get the restaurant ready for the Friday opening; chatting late into the night over a bottle of wine; shopping for the last few bits and bobs she might need for her own wedding at the end of July, just over a month away …
I mean, obviously we can still do all those things with Tash around, too. From the times I’ve spent with her whenever I’ve visited Nora up in Scotland, I know Tash enjoys a drink and a gossip just as much as Nora and I do, and seeing as she’s a fellow bridesmaid, it would make perfect sense for her to come on a wedding-shopping expedition.
But still. It’s not quite the way I’d fondly imagined this week would go, that’s all.
‘Anyway,’ Olly goes on, ‘she’s planning on riding down on her motorbike, and Nora wondered if I wanted to hire a bike and go home that way, too.’
‘Instead of taking your flight?’
‘Yeah. We can do it in eight hours or so, with breaks. I mean, it’s not that I think Tash needs the company, or anything – she’s always seemed pretty self-sufficient whenever I’ve met her.’
I don’t know why the idea of Olly and Tash riding motorbikes all the way from Glasgow to London should make me feel as antsy as it does. After all, even if I did have a problem with Tash (which as I’ve already said, I absolutely don’t), Olly taking the long, uncomfortable route back home with Tash instead of a nice quick flight with me and Nora shouldn’t bother me in the slightest. It’s just because I’ve been a bit thrown by the idea that I might not get to spend this week hanging out with Nora in the way I’d envisaged, I decide. And maybe also by the fact that I hate him riding a motorbike, full stop. I watched a terrifying news segment once about a horrific accident caused by a bike skidding under an articulated lorry, and the memory has stayed with me.
‘So I was going to say no, but I’ve been thinking about it, and … well, a night-time bike ride …’ Olly looks wistful for a moment. ‘Nora suggested it because she thought I might like to clear my head a bit. What with this big week coming up, and all that, it should be pretty quiet on a Sunday night. And I haven’t ridden a bike in so long, I’ve almost forgotten how peaceful it is.’
‘Then you should definitely do it,’ I say. Reluctantly, but as enthusiastically as possible. Because I can tell from that wistful expression on his face that he really wants this.
‘Really?’
‘Absolutely! Just take it carefully, please, please, Olly, and obviously lay off any more champagne for the rest of the afternoon …’
‘You don’t need to worry about me,’ says Olly. ‘I’m here taking care of you today, remember?’
‘I know. And I’ll take care of you all next week, Ol, I promise. I mean, I may not be a dab hand with a hammer and nails, but I’ll bring coffee, and homemade food …’
‘There’s honestly no need for that,’ Olly says, hastily – as well he might, given that he’s a bona-fide foodie and I can’t cook for toffee. ‘Moral support will be fine.’
Which he thoroughly deserves, because he is, indeed, as Grandmother has pointed out, absolutely wonderful.
‘Oh, God … Grandmother,’ I suddenly say. ‘Did she go on and on at you about us, Olly? I’m so sorry, she just gets these crazy ideas into her head, and—’
‘It’s OK, Lib, honestly. I mean, yes, she did mention the concept of you and me a few times during our turn about the dance floor … you’d make an excellent wife, apparently …’
I wince. Not for the first time today and not, I expect, for the last. (I mean, there are still speeches to come, and everything. And if I can get through whatever sentimental mush Dad will have to say about his ready-made new family, I’m going to need a hell of a lot more champagne than I’ve drunk so far.) ‘Ugh, Olly, I’m sorry.’
‘… and she wants to live to see at least one successful marriage for a member of her family, and to see one bride walking down the aisle in her veil who doesn’t make her think the whole thing is doomed from the very start …’
It’s a fair point. Grandmother’s children haven’t exactly managed the most successful set of marriages between them, and if the photos of my own mother in the veil are anything to go by, the clock was running out for Mum and Dad pretty much from the very moment they half-heartedly said I do.
‘… and I remind her of her late husband, apparently. And you remind her of herself. And they were blissfully happy for forty-six years. So really,’ he finishes, with a strained-sounding laugh, ‘what more evidence does anybody need that you and I ought to be together?’
This is mortifying.
I mean, yes, people are always accidentally mistaking me and Olly for a couple: I think both of us are pretty used to that now. But to have it coming from as stern and proper a figure as Grandmother feels, somehow, too real for comfort. It’s a bit like the moment we shared our one and only kiss, in Paris – the Mistaken Thing we’ve never talked about since, after far too much wine and far too intense a conversation about love. I can’t quite look Olly in the eye, and I’m certain, from the strain in his voice, that he’s just as embarrassed as I am.
‘Again,’ I say, sounding pretty strained myself, ‘I’m really sorry. She’s unstoppable when she gets the bit between her teeth. I had no idea she was going to latch on to you like that …’
His phone is going: ‘Auld Lang Syne’ again.
‘You really should get that this time,’ I say, grateful for the diversion. ‘Tell Nora to let Tash know she’ll have a companion for the road ahead.’
‘All right,’ says Olly, taking the phone out of his pocket. ‘And then I’ll just need five minutes online to pre-order a bike. Promise you’ll come and grab me the minute anyone starts speechifying, Lib?’
‘I promise.’
I watch him wander away from the noise of the jazz band, putting his phone to his ear as he goes. And then I take a deep, deep breath, and head for the trees, to see if I can persuade Grandmother, politely, to put a sock in it for the rest of the wedding. After all, if I can stand around here on Dad’s big day and bottle up all the things I might quite like to blurt out, Grandmother – a fully paid-up member of the Blitz generation – can surely do it too.
(#u187251b9-7f13-54a4-ae36-cef40e8c5002)
Like I say, it’s only been eight weeks. But I really think I might actually be falling in love with Adam already.
In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that a) I’m an incurable romantic and b) my standards are embarrassingly low. I mean, if you’re the sort of girl who’s constantly being showered in dozens of red roses just because it’s Tuesday, or whisked away to five-star luxury in the Italian lakes before being proposed to on a gondola, in Venice, at sunset, then my reason for suddenly realizing that Adam might be The One is going to seem a bit … silly.
But then, they do say that it’s the little things that make a relationship go the distance. The offer to dash to the shop at eight a.m. on a drizzly Sunday morning to pick up milk for a cup of tea. The random text message in the middle of a stressful day that tells you how great you make someone feel. The surprise scrawl, at the bottom of the tedious weekly shopping list, that simply announces Thinking about you.
My new boyfriend turning up to meet me outside my Very Important Meeting, bringing a Pret espresso and a packet of yogurt-covered raisins, is exactly this sort of ‘little thing’.
So yes, it’s not red roses, and it’s a long way from Venice at sunset, but it’s thoughtful, and lovely, and it matters.
‘You really, really shouldn’t have,’ I tell Adam, wrapping my arms round him and giving him a kiss. ‘You’re so busy. And your flight only got in two hours ago.’
‘I slept loads on the plane. I’m fresh as a daisy.’ The expression, in his Brooklyn accent, sounds as incongruous as it sounds sweet.
He’s probably not fibbing about this: he works for a swanky investment fund, and today’s flight, back to London from New York, is bound to have been one of the business-class variety. Unlike my mere hour’s flight back from Glasgow last night which, though brief, was of the Ryanair variety: cramped, hectic and a bit like finding yourself in a thirty-five-thousand-feet-high tin of sardines. And Adam does, in fact, look fresh as a daisy: impeccably dressed as ever in his crisp blue shirt and rumple-free grey suit, not a single dark hair out of place. To look at him now, lean and tanned and bright-eyed, you’d think that instead of just stepping off a seven-hour flight, he’d stepped out of a salon.
‘Anyway, it’s right around the corner from my office,’ he goes on.
‘Your office is in Mayfair. This –’ I gesture around at the slightly unlovely street we’re standing on – ‘is Clapham. Now, I know distance is nothing to you Americans, but I wouldn’t say this was just around the corner.’
‘So I’ll drop in on Olly while I’m over here. See how everything’s going at the restaurant.’
Even though Olly is very definitely the proprietor of his brand-new restaurant, most of the money is being supplied by Adam’s investment company. It’s how I met Adam, in fact. He was at Olly’s brand-new premises, the day after the builders started a little over two months ago, and I dropped in with a bottle of champagne. We got to chatting, and then he walked me to the tube … and, eight weeks later, here we are. Proud owners of a fully functioning, mature, adult relationship.
‘Anyway,’ Adam goes on now, fondly pushing a stray lock of hair behind my ear. (At least, I think it’s fond. I can’t help harbouring the suspicion that my hair, the opposite of his own neat, never-a-strand-out-of-place locks, drives him slightly nuts.) ‘I know what a big deal this meeting is for you, Libby. I just wanted you to realize that I’m cheering you on.’
‘You’re lovely. Thank you.’
‘Not to mention that I expect you were up until the small hours polishing up your business plan …’
He’s half right. I did stayup late after I got home last night after the wedding, but that wasn’t so much because I was polishing my business plan as panicking about it.
I mean, this is the first time I’ve ever done what I’m about to do – go into a meeting with a bank manager and ask him for a small business loan – and I’ve no idea if what I’ve produced is even remotely good enough. Professional enough.
But then, perhaps that’s the downside of ending up turning a hobby you love into a career you need to make a go of. I started my jewellery design business, Libby Goes To Hollywood, almost a year ago, but I still can’t quite shake the sense that it’s just a bit, well, rude to be walking into a meeting with a perfect stranger and announcing that you’d quite like him to stump up eight thousand pounds – ten if he’s feeling really generous – so that you can carry on living your dream of being a jewellery designer, just with a bit more all-important dosh around so that you can buy better equipment, and maybe even employ an intern to come and work for you so that you can keep up with all the orders.
‘I was up late,’ I tell Adam, lifting a hand to waggle the espresso and yogurt-covered raisins at him. ‘So these are absolutely perfect.’
Which, of course, they are.
I mean, it’s not Adam’s fault that he thinks I drink espresso, or that I’m a person for whom yogurt-covered raisins are the very acme of pre-meeting treats. I might accidentally have implied, on our second or third date, that I was a go-getting, gym-hitting, green-juice-quaffing sort of girl. Just, you know, to keep up with his own go-getting, gym-hitting, green-juice-quaffing ways.
Obviously in an ideal world, it wouldn’t be an espresso, it’d be a cappuccino. And they might be chocolate-covered raisins instead.
OK: in a really, really ideal world, the snack Adam had so thoughtfully brought me wouldn’t have the faintest whiff of raisin about it at all. It’d be those big, chocolate-coated honeycomb bites I’ve recently developed a slightly worrying addiction to, or a good old Yorkie bar, or – seeing as he’s just got off a plane – a massive great Toblerone.
‘Well, I know you’ll sock it to ’em,’ he says, leaning in to give me another big, encouraging squeeze. ‘And I can’t wait to hear absolutely everything about it – oh, and about your dad’s wedding, of course – tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘Dinner?’ he says. ‘Tuesday – that Thai place you like?’
‘Er … sure … but I thought we were seeing each other tonight. Weren’t we?’
‘I don’t think so, Libby.’ Adam shakes his head. ‘It’s certainly not down in my schedule.’
‘Oh. It must be my mistake, then. I just thought we were going to meet at your place, and … um … you’d said you were going to cook red snapper and kale.’
‘That does sound oddly specific …’ He frowns. ‘But I have a work dinner this evening, Lib. And I’ve asked the Cadwalladrs to keep Fritz for another evening, which you know I’d never have done if I’d planned to be home at a normal time. I mean, I’ve missed him so much … Lottie’s been sweet, and sent photo messages a few times a day while I’ve been away, but it’s not the same as really being with him. Holding him. Smelling him …’
Fritz, I should probably explain, is Adam’s dog.
A very, very cute dog. And I’m a dog person, through and through, always have been. But still. At the end of the day, just a dog.
It’s just about the only thing I’d change about Adam right now, to be honest. This tendency towards ever-so-slight nuttiness about Fritz the German shepherd puppy.
‘Though, now I think about it, he’s probably missed me horribly … I guess I could blow off the work dinner, head home early for some Fritz time … And red snapper with you, too, Libby, of course.’
‘No, no, don’t worry about it. You should go to your dinner. Better not to unsettle Fritz at, er, his bedtime.’
‘You’re right. He hates that. When I picked him up late from the Cadwalladrs one time after I got back late from Chicago, he was so excited, he didn’t sleep all night, and then of course he was grouchy all the next day, and—’
‘And you and I can have a nice meal tomorrow evening, like you thought we were doing,’ I interrupt, before he can go off on one of his Fritz monologues. Fritz-ologues, I suppose you could call them. ‘I can fill you in on all the details of my meeting and my weekend then.’ Except, of course, I’m not going to fill him in on all that many of the details of Dad’s wedding, because even though we’ve reached the Possible Love stage, I still think we’re a fair way away from me opening up to him about the myriad issues within my family. ‘And talking of my meeting …’
‘You should go, you should go.’ He leans in to kiss me on the forehead. ‘Go get ’em!’
‘Thank you … do I look OK?’
‘You look fabulous. Very chic.’ He casts an admiring glance down at my all-black outfit (cigarette pants, silk top and nipped-in jacket) before reaching up a hand to brush my earrings. ‘And I love these. Hey, are these brand new? From that little-known but amazing online jewellery store, Libby Goes To Hollywood?’
‘They are,’ I say, with a little bow. ‘From the new Marilyn collection.’
He frowns. ‘Named for your mom?’
‘Named for Marilyn Monroe!’
‘Oh. Yeah, that makes a lot more sense.’
The jewellery that I make is Old Hollywood-inspired, you see: a costume version of the sort of thing you might have seen, say, Ava Gardner sporting to the Oscars, or Lauren Bacall wearing in a shoot for Harper’s Bazaar. It’s a Lomax thing, I reluctantly have to admit, this obsession with the movies, whether it’s Grandmother with her Grace Kelly wedding or Dad with His Book and his entire university career. My obsession with the movies comes out, these days, in my jewellery line, and since I started Libby Goes To Hollywood, my flat is piled high with endless, and expensive, coffee-table books featuring beautiful posed on-and off-screen photographs of all my favourite stars. These earrings, which as I just said are from my new ‘Marilyn collection’, were inspired by the glittering chandelier-style ones she wears in that iconic dance scene from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: it’s just that in the Libby Goes To Hollywoodversion they’re made from silver and vintage Swarovski crystals, and not the Harry Winston diamonds that Marilyn is singing about.
‘I thought I’d better show the bank manager what his money would be going towards,’ I go on. ‘Which will be a huge mistake if he hates them …’
‘He won’t hate them. They’re gorgeous. You’re gorgeous. And you have to remember, Libby: it’s not his money, it’s the bank’s money. And they’re not giving it to you as a form of charity, they’ll be giving it to you as an investment. You don’t need to go into this meeting to get him to like you. Just show him your stuff, show him what you’ve done and what you know you can do, and you won’t have a thing to worry about.’
‘Thanks, Adam. I …’ Can’t say I love him, because we haven’t said that yet. ‘… really, really like that you came here today.’
‘And I really, really like that you liked it.’ He kisses me, swiftly. ‘Good luck, sweetheart … wait. It’s not bad luck to say that, is it? Should I be saying “break a leg”, or something?’
‘That’s only bad luck for actors. And thank God I’m not one of those any more.’
Seriously, thank God. Because if I were still an actress (as I was, shockingly unsuccessfully, until almost a year ago), I wouldn’t now be about to walk up these steps and into a meeting with a bank manager to ask for great wodges of cash – sorry, an investment – to plough into my very own small business.
It’s a big moment.
I watch Adam for a moment or two after he turns away and starts to head towards Olly’s new premises, partly for the simple pleasure of watching such a fine figure of a man stroll away from me, and partly to see if he’s going to ogle the even finer figure of a hot blonde in a tiny skirt who’s just crossed the road to walk ahead of him.
But he doesn’t.
Because, as I need to get to grips with remembering, he’s Adam. Not Dillon. And I’m not with Dillon any more.
Then I turn away myself and head up these steps, trying to feel as go-getting as Adam thinks I am.
I mean, all his American positivity, it’s bound to be rubbing off on me in some way, isn’t it? If I just believe that the meeting will be a rip-roaring success, then it will be.
*
It wasn’t.
A rip-roaring success, that is.
On a sliding scale, with rip-roaring success at one end to abject failure at the other … well, that meeting with Jonathan Hedley, Barclays Business Development Manager, Clapham branch, was quite a lot closer to the latter end of the scale than the former.
All right, so he didn’t actually tell me I wasn’t going to get the small business loan I was applying for. But then he didn’t actually say, out loud, that there was more chance of his bank investing in a factory that makes inflatable dartboards and chocolate teapots.
It doesn’t mean he wasn’t thinking it.
I don’t know if it was an issue with my business plan, or if he didn’t like the Marilyn-inspired earrings, or if he just didn’t like me, but I certainly didn’t walk away from our half-hour meeting with the sense that the eight grand I urgently need will be forthcoming.
And there isn’t any time for me to properly take stock (or even to endlessly replay the meeting over and over in my head, torturing myself with the things I must have said and done wrong), because I came out of the meeting to a series of texts from my sister Cass.
Libby where are you?
Libby I need to talk to you
Libby why are you ignoring me?
Libby this is really unfair, call yourself my big sister, what a joke, I’m always there for you when you need me and now when I really need you for like once in my life you can’t even be bothered to pick up the phone and call me back
Which did press my guilt button quite a bit because, to be entirely fair to Cass, she did send me a couple of really nice supportive text messages while I was on my way to Dad’s wedding (he’s not her dad; we have different fathers).
So of course I picked up the phone and called her back, only to be directed, through a barrage of incoherent sobs, to come straight to her flat in Maida Vale, ‘because everything’s completely shit, Libby, I can’t do this any more!’
I’m not too worried about all the tears and hysterics. Cass has a tendency to overdramatize things. The last time I was summoned to hurtle to her flat, after a nerve-chilling six a.m. phone call, it turned out to be because she’d stubbed her big toe getting out of bed, wasn’t going to be able to make it to her early morning spinning class, and could, apparently, literally feel the fat blobbing itself on to her thighs. There’s no way of knowing what this afternoon’s crisis has been caused by, but it’s not worth ignoring it in the hope that it goes away. It never does. I have a couple of hours before I need to get to my client appointment in Shepherd’s Bush, so I may as well use it profitably by ensuring that my client appointment in Shepherd’s Bush isn’t constantly interrupted by the pinging of my phone, with increasingly furious messages from Cass.
There’s another message pinging through now, as I emerge from the tube at Warwick Avenue.
Popped to nail salon. Meet me there?
Oh, and another one, a moment after this.
Bring coffee?
When I stamp into the nail bar around the corner from her flat ten minutes later, with a frappuccino for her and the cappuccino for me that I would have really liked from Adam instead of that espresso, she waves me over, imperiously, from where she’s sitting towards the back. Her feet are soaking in one of the foot basins, and a weary-looking Filipina woman is tending to her hands with a cuticle stick.
‘Thank God you’re here,’ Cass announces, which is her way of being grateful, and, ‘Thank fuck for this,’ as she grabs the frappuccino from me, which is her way of saying thank you. ‘You won’t believe what’s happened, Libby. You literally won’t believe it.’
‘Tell me.’
‘It’s all off! The whole thing!’
For a fleeting, thrilled moment, I think she’s talking about her relationship with her boyfriend (and manager) Dave. Which, given that he’s married to another woman, is about bloody time, too.
‘Oh, Cass. Well, I’m really sorry you’re upset. But, you know, it was always a terrible idea, and too many people risked being hurt—’
‘Who was going to get hurt? Nobody was going to get hurt! It wasn’t supposed to be a bloody stunt show! It wasn’t Dancing On Ice!’
I’m confused, until I remember the other thing that could be ‘off’.
Her reality TV show, Considering Cassidy.
‘RealTime Media called Dave this morning and they’re pulling the plug,’ Cass sniffs. ‘Not enough interest from advertisers, apparently.’
‘Oh, Cass.’
This is genuinely upsetting news for her. Considering Cassidy was going to be her very own, eight-part ‘scripted reality’ show, on the Bravo channel, documenting – according to Dave’s pitch – ‘the crazy, behind-the-scenes dramas of one of the most famous actresses working in Britain today … from pampering to premieres, from dating to mating; follow much-loved TV It-Girl Cassidy Kennedy as she dishes the dirt on Slebsville, her way!’
(And yes, I was a bit surprised they got as far as they did in talks with the production company, RealTime Media, on the basis of that pitch – but, nevertheless, a deal was about to be struck. No matter that Cass isn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, ‘one of the most famous actresses working in Britain today’ … nor that, thanks to her relationship with Dave, any ‘dating and mating’ the programme intended to depict was going to have to be far more on the ‘scripted’ side than the ‘reality’ side. It was going to be her very own show, her step up from her usual soaps, or her small, regular role in sci-fi drama Isara 364. Her springboard, at least the way Cass was looking at it, to Kardashian levels of fame and glory.)
‘I’m really sorry,’ I begin, only for her to interrupt me.
‘I mean, not enough interest from advertisers? Are they kidding me? I can be used to sell anything, if the angle’s right. I mean, your friend Olly wouldn’t have invited me to that opening-night party of his this week, would he, if he weren’t just using me to get more customers through his doors?’
I’m pretty sure that Olly’s invited Cass to his opening-night party because he needs someone there to whom his youngest sister Kitty will deign to talk; she’s an MTV presenter now, and a competitor of Cass’s from their child-star days, and I very much doubt she’d make a hole in her busy schedule for Olly’s big night if it weren’t for the opportunity to score points off an old frenemy.
‘No, Libby,’ Cass is going on, ‘it’s absolutely nothing to do with the advertisers. It’s Tanya, from RealTime. She hated me, right from the word go.’
‘Um, I’m sure she didn’t hate you, whoever she is …’
‘She’s Ned’s producing partner. And she did hate me. I mean, not that I give a shit. If I had a tenner for every girl who’s ever been jealous of me, I’d have …’ Her eyes, slightly smudged from all the crying she’s been doing, widen as she tries to work out this calculation. ‘Well, enough money to start my own production company, and produce my own show. And win, like, every single Emmy and Golden Globe I possibly could. And then Tanya could fuck off.’
It’s not worth pointing out that scripted reality shows on the Bravo channel aren’t all that likely to be in the running for Emmys or Golden Globes. If Cass wants to imagine herself swanning along some red carpet, holding armfuls of awards in one hand and making rude gestures at this Tanya with the other, then it’s no skin off my nose.
‘Well, look, maybe something good will come out of all this,’ I say, as Cass starts to peruse the selection of polish colours the weary nail technician is holding out to her, wrinkling her pretty nose at too-red reds and not-pink-enough pinks. ‘After all, you’re an actress, Cass. Reality TV would be a bit of a diversion.’
‘Yeah. An amazing diversion. I mean, we had it all mapped out, Dave and I. Considering Cassidy was going to lead to an offer from Celebrity Masterchef, and that would lead to an offer from Strictly, and then I’d be able to call all the shots with one of the really big TV channels, like E!, for an even bigger, better reality show … and now I’m going to have to go back to boring old acting. And learning lines. And, like, pretending to care about character development so the writers don’t give all the good storylines to somebody else.’
‘I know. It’s a tough business,’ I say, in the sort of soothing tone that Mum is good at deploying with Cass whenever she’s having a meltdown. Which reminds me … ‘Have you spoken to Mum about it yet?’
‘Yeah, and she offered to come back early from the tap festival to come round to mine tonight to cheer me up.’
This isn’t the sort of tap you get water from; it’s the sort of tap that hordes of star-struck eleven-year-old girls do with their feet. After working as Cass’s manager for years (mine too, to be fair; it’s just that my own acting career didn’t provide her with quite as much work as Cass’s did), Mum now owns her own weekend stage-school franchise in Kensal Rise. She’s in Cardiff with a posse of those very star-struck eleven-year-old girls now, at the tap festival, and it’s heart-warming to hear that she’s offered to come back early for Cass’s sake. Though it could also be a sign that the reality of spending all day surrounded by star-struck eleven-year-olds, in tap shoes, is starting to get on her nerves.
‘That’s nice of her.’
‘Yeah, but I told her no. She’s working over there. I thought you’d cheer me up instead. So, Dave’s booked a table for me at Roka tonight, and I’ll need you to come with me. I’m going to wear my new cherry-red hot-pants, and Dave’s going to let the 3AM Girls know where I’ll be … I think they might remember you from that time they wrote about you and Dillon.’ Cass gives me a quick once-over. ‘You’ll have to head back to yours and change, obviously …’
I can’t decide whether to feel truly depressed that Cass is so obviously trying to use me for publicity purposes, to increase the chance of the production company revisiting the idea of her show again, or slightly envious of her ability to pick herself up off the floor and get right back on the horse after a tumble.
Either way, my answer is going to have to be the same.
‘Cass, I can’t come out with you tonight. I’m … busy.’
‘Doing what?’
This is an excellent question.
To which the most accurate answer would be, ‘With any luck, having mind-blowing sex with my new boyfriend until the small hours of the morning.’
Because having mind-blowing sex with Adam was, in fact, my endgame for this evening. It’s an endgame that’s been buggered around slightly by him forgetting about our plans to have a cosy night in at his place, and scheduling in that work dinner of his instead, but it’s an endgame that I still fully intend to pursue.
And if that makes me sound like some sort of nymphomaniac, let me just add that while I was being truthful when I stated earlier that we have a mature, adult relationship, and while I may, let’s face it, have fallen in love with him this morning over the whole espresso and yogurt-covered-raisins thing, in eight weeks of dating we still haven’t progressed any further than a good old snog on the sofa.
Yes. Eight weeks.
Given that neither of us is Amish, or anything, and given that – as far as it’s been possible to tell – we’re both in possession of all the necessary working body parts, I can’t help but wonder if this is some sort of a record.
There are several perfectly decent explanations. We’re both extremely busy. He travels a lot. Fritz needs walking a lot. We have such a good time together that quite often hours of just chatting pass by without either of us noticing that we haven’t jumped on each other and started frantically humping.
But still. Eight weeks of snogging on the sofa has left me, at the very least, feeling pretty frustrated. I mean, I fancy the pants off him, and he claims to fancy the pants off me, so I think it’s about time we acted on those urges and, well, got our actual pants off.
Hence the sex, sex, and more sex plan that I’d formulated in my head for tonight. And which no inconvenient work dinner is going to prevent. It doesn’t need to happen after a candlelit supper of red snapper and super-healthy kale. It just needs to happen.
But I’m not going to tell Cass about the (hopefully) mind-blowing sex thing, because that’s not the sort of relationship we have. (Or, let’s put it this way: if I open the door to frank discussions about sex with Adam, I’m very, very scared that she’ll start telling me about sex with Dave. And I value an undisturbed night’s sleep. Which I don’t think I’d ever have again if I had to think about horrible, cheaty Dave having extramarital relations with my sister.)
So I just say, ‘I’m seeing Adam.’
‘Adam? Who’s Adam?’
‘He’s … well, he’s my new boyfriend.’
Cass stares at me.
‘You have a new boyfriend?’
‘I do. Yes.’
‘And you’re choosing him? This new boyfriend? Over me?’
The nail technician lets out a little wince. It’s eerily reminiscent of me at Dad’s wedding yesterday.
‘No, Cass, I’m not choosing him over you. It’s just that, like I said, I have plans with him tonight, and—’
‘What plans?’ Cass demands, in the tone of voice that implies that any answer other than sitting by his side in the hospital as he recovers from major neurological surgery isn’t going to be anywhere near reason enough.
‘You know … plans. Things people make with their boyfriends.’
‘Right. I get it,’ says Cass, with the sort of swoosh of her blonde hair that would say, Et tu, Brute, if hair-swooshes could actually talk. ‘You’re going to swan off and spend all night shagging this so-called Adam—’
‘He’s not so-called Adam. He’s actually called Adam.’
‘… while your only sister sits at home alone, contemplating the end of her career at the bottom of a brandy bottle.’
‘You don’t drink brandy,’ I point out. ‘And anyway, come to think of it, isn’t Monday usually a Dave night?’
‘Not today,’ Cass scowls. ‘His wife’s kicking up some sort of fuss about him staying home tonight. For her birthday, or something.’
‘How unreasonable of her.’
‘Exactly. But only what I’ve come to expect,’ she sniffs, ‘from yet another of the people I love in my life. That when the crisps are down …’
‘The chips.’
‘… you can’t really rely on anyone.’
‘Cass.’ I allow myself, regretting it the moment I do so, to succumb to the twinge of guilt that’s nibbling away at me. ‘Look. I’ve got some time tomorrow, OK? Well, I haven’t, really, but I’ll make some time tomorrow.’ All that moral support I promised Olly is going to have to take a temporary second place, until the day after. Still, I’ll just redouble my efforts as soon as I can. ‘We’ll … we’ll go out for lunch, and then we can go shopping, and I’ll even treat you to a …’ I’m about to say the word ‘massage’ when I remember that all the places Cass likes to go for a massage charge well over a hundred quid for the privilege. ‘… blow-dry, or something,’ I finish, hating the fact I can’t be more generous. But if no bank is going to lend me a penny, I’m going to have to use more of my own meagre savings to put into the business. I can’t afford to splash out any more than absolutely necessary.
‘I don’t need a blow-dry.’ She muses on my offer for a moment. ‘Though I suppose I could do with some eyebrow threading … oooh, or a nice collagen facial …’
‘Threading it is!’ I say, gaily, trying to inject the task with a lot more merriment than it’s actually going to entail. ‘Come on, Cass. It’ll be lovely. And you can get a nice early night tonight, and don’t even think about any of this production company stuff, and then we can discuss it all in a much more positive frame of mind tomorrow. Over that nice dinner out, if you still want to.’
‘We-e-ell … I suppose so. I mean, just for the record,’ she says, never one to end on a peaceable solution where there is drama to be mined, ‘I’d never leave you alone if you were seriously depressed, Libby. I was There For You right after all that mess with stupid Dillon, wasn’t I?’
It’s true: she was ‘There For Me’ right after all that mess with stupid Dillon. Just in her style, which meant hurrying round with a huge carton of homemade (by Harvey Nichols’ Food Hall) soup, snuggling up with me on my sofa to tell me what a shit she’d always thought he was, and then getting involved in a FaceTime row with vile Dave and sobbing on my shoulder (and guzzling all the soup) until three o’clock in the morning.
‘I brought you,’ she says, meaningfully, ‘homemade soup!’
‘I know, Cass, and it was lovely of you. And I promise I’ll be at your beck and call all day tomorrow, OK?’
‘All right,’ she sniffs. ‘I’ll just call Stella for the evening, then, and get her to come over for a quiet night in instead. My roots could do with a retouch, anyway.’
I can’t fail to feel a fleeting stab of sadness that Cass – partly because she’s always accusing other women of being jealous of her, and partly because of her ridiculous habit of sleeping with married men – doesn’t really have any good female friends to call upon in her time of crisis. Stella, although a lovely girl who’s known Cass ever since they were at stage school together, is less her friend and more her hairdresser.
‘OK, good. You do that, and I’ll give you a call first thing in the morning to arrange where and when to meet.’ I lean across the nail technician, apologizing as I do so, and give Cass a hug. ‘But I really do have to go now.’
‘To see this Adam?’
‘Yes. But I’ve got a meeting with a client in Shepherd’s Bush first.’
‘Oh, right.’ She’s lost interest. ‘See you tomorrow then.’
‘Sure,’ I tell her. ‘Love you, Cass.’
‘Hmph,’ she says, which – and I’m translating again here – is her way of saying she loves me too.
(#u187251b9-7f13-54a4-ae36-cef40e8c5002)
Lack of sex aside, things are going sufficiently well with Adam that he’s let me know the code for his key safe, which is hidden under an artfully disguised fake rock in his tiny front garden. He’s told me to let myself into his house on a few occasions since we’ve been dating, mostly when he was running late and wanted me to go in and tell Fritz he loved him, and missed him, and hadn’t forgotten about him. So I’m just sort of hoping he doesn’t mind that I’m going to use the key to let myself in this evening, this time without his explicit say-so, to lie in wait for him in absurdly sexy lingerie and give him a wild night of sex that he’ll never forget.
Or, that if he does mind that I’ve let myself in without his explicit say-so, that the absurdly sexy lingerie and the wild night of sex will go quite a long way to making him not mind any more.
After a great meeting with a new client (a freelance stylist who’s keen to use a few of my pieces in an upcoming shoot with a Sunday supplement; how about that, Jonathan Hedley, Barclays Business Development manager, Clapham branch?) I’ve reached Adam’s house, a stunning Edwardian terrace in the middle of a street of stunning Edwardian terraces in Shepherd’s Bush. I’ve just let myself in through the gate, when I hear the front door of the neighbouring house open.
And then I don’t hear anything else at all, because there’s such a thunderstorm of barking that a small bomb could go off nearby and I don’t think I’d notice.
It’s Fritz, Adam’s German shepherd puppy, who’s just on his way out of the house with James Cadwalladr, Adam’s next-door neighbour.
I’ve never actually met James Cadwalladr in person before, and this moment – as Fritz leaps the fence and starts inserting his nose gleefully into my groin – isn’t the ideal one for it to happen.
I mean, I’m fairly accustomed to coming face-to-face with very, very handsome actors – I woke up next to Dillon O’Hara several mornings a week for the few short months of our relationship, didn’t I? – but James Cadwalladr has that whole arrogant Old Etonian thing going on, which is a lot more intimidating. He’s staring at me over the fence now, looking even more icy-cool and unimpressed than he does when you see him as that toff, cricket-loving detective on TV.
‘Sorry,’ he says, ‘but who are you?’
‘I’m Libby,’ I say, breathlessly, trying to shove Fritz’s nose out of my groin and, when that doesn’t work, squatting down to meet him at doggy eye-level, in the hope that he’ll nuzzle into my neck instead. He doesn’t. He just goes lower and tries desperately to reach my groin again. (I can only hope his owner is equally determined, when he gets home for his surprise sex-fest later.) ‘I’m Adam’s girlfriend.’
‘You’re not.’
‘I am.’
‘You can’t be.’
‘I … er … am?’
‘You’re serious?’ He rakes back his posh-boy floppy hair and stares at me some more. ‘I didn’t know he’d got himself a girlfriend.’
‘Well, he has!’ I give up fighting Fritz and get back up again, whereupon he instantly loses interest in my groin (hurray!) and starts sniffing round the other side of me – to be precise, my bottom – instead. ‘I, um, know your wife, actually.’
Posh James doesn’t look that much more interested in this. ‘Oh, yeah?’
‘Yes. She stocks some of my jewellery in her store.’
I have Adam to thank for this, after he very nicely introduced me to Lottie Cadwalladr when she stopped to make a fuss of Fritz in the street one warm evening. She owns Ariel, an amazing and very hip independent boutique with a branch in Westbourne Grove and a branch in Spitalfields. We got to chatting, and she admired the bracelet I was wearing, and for the past couple of weeks, Ariel has stocked a small selection of my bracelets and earrings in the Westbourne Grove branch. It was a huge coup for me because, even though the orders through my website are nice and steady, it really helps to have a real-life stockist, too. Not to mention that seeing my jewellery in those glass display cases, actually being admired by shoppers the day I went to visit, has given me all sorts of dreams about maybe even managing to open a tiny store of my own one day …
‘Right.’ Posh James slaps his thigh; I’m not quite sure why he’s doing that for a moment (pantomime rehearsal?), until I realize he’s trying to call Fritz. ‘Here, boy! Over here!’ He looks irritated when Fritz ignores him. ‘He likes you,’ he says, in an accusing tone of voice, ‘doesn’t he?’
‘Oh, that’s only because I stupidly sneak him tastes of stuff when Adam and I eat together. You know, I don’t think he looks at me and sees a human woman. I think he looks at me and sees a walking, talking wodge of chicken liver pâté.’
Posh James doesn’t laugh.
‘Here, boy!’ he adds, more commandingly this time, and follows it up with a whistle, which finally persuades Fritz to stop nuzzling my private areas and to jump the fence to join him again. ‘Are you going into the house, or something? I thought Adam was still away. I’m not quite sure why Lottie’s saddled us with this fur-ball for another night otherwise.’
‘Adam’s not back until later tonight. I’m just … er … dropping something off,’ I say, because I don’t want a complete stranger to realize I’m going into my boyfriend’s house to lie in wait for him in my undies. ‘I know he’s really grateful to you for looking after Fritz.’
‘The kids love him,’ Posh James says, with a shrug, as he grasps Fritz’s collar and clips on a lead. ‘Well. Good to meet you, anyway,’ he adds, in a voice that implies it wasn’t so much good as deadly dull and totally tiresome. ‘And good luck.’
Which is an odd thing to say.
But I won’t ask why he’s said it, partly because I don’t want to bore him any more than I already have, and partly because Fritz has started barking again, rendering any attempt at further conversation impossible.
They set off along the street for their evening walk, and I crouch down to tap in the code for the key safe, then let myself into Adam’s house.
As ever, it’s an oasis of tranquillity.
An oasis of ever-so-slightly sterile, obsessive-compulsive neat-freak tranquillity, perhaps, but an oasis nevertheless.
I mean, if I ever ended up living here with Adam, there’s so much I’d do to make the place a bit … well, a bit less like an absolutely stunning show home, and a bit more like a place to really live in. I’d funk up the cream-and-grey colour scheme for starters, put up a few pictures on the walls in the hallway in place of all the space-enhancing mirrors, make the chrome and grey marble kitchen, where I’m just heading now, a warm and welcoming place to hang out in with our friends, rather than like a photo in a glossy interiors magazine. I’d replace the steel kitchen table with a nice big wooden one, like the one Olly has in his kitchen, and I’d replace the Perspex chairs with mismatched painted chairs, again just like Olly’s chairs, and I’d redo the smart, slightly soulless patio area you can see out of the bifold doors at the back; turn it into a proper garden, with grass and flowerbeds and a barbecue … The cosiest part of the whole kitchen is Fritz’s den, in a little nook on the far side of the range cooker (for maximum warmth), and even this is still stylish enough to feature in a doggy version of World of Interiors, with its custom-made safety gate to close him off from any hot-fat-spitting danger when Adam is cooking, and its selection of Kelly Hoppen cushions for him to rest his weary rump on.
But it’s not the time to stand here mentally remodelling Adam’s beautiful home (not to mention that we’re not yet anywhere near the moving-in stage), because I’ve no idea what sort of time he’ll be getting back, and I want to make sure I’m all ready in my sexy lingerie for when he does.
Or rather, my downright slutty lingerie.
Because I’m pulling out all the stops tonight, I’ll be honest. I’ve already ramped up the raunch factor on the lingerie I’ve been wearing for most of our snogging-on-the-sofa nights, in the hope that something – the lacy, plunge-front bra; the tactile silken camisole; the wispy, semi-transparent knickers – might get Adam going enough to override all the perfectly good reasons why we haven’t done the deed. But none of it has worked, so tonight I’m breaking out the Ribbony Elasticky Thing.
I get it out from the bottom of my bag, now, where it’s nestled since I left my flat earlier today.
You know, I’m still none the wiser as to what kind of garment it actually is.
I bought it half-price in the Myla sale at the very height of my relationship with Dillon, and though it provided for several extremely pleasant evenings, its precise definition remains a mystery. It’s not a basque. It’s not a corset. I suppose the most accurate description would be ‘playsuit’, but I’m not at all sure it contains enough material even to fall into that category. It’s just a collection of very, very small pieces of black lacy fabric, held together with strings of black satin ribbon, or lengths of wide black elastic. It requires either a degree in mechanical engineering or nerves of steel and the patience of a saint to get the thing on – though funnily enough Dillon never had the slightest difficulty in getting it off – and tonight, ladies and gentlemen, I shall be hoisting myself into it along with my highest heels, a cheeky smile … and absolutely nothing else.
Oh, well, obviously the ‘Marilyn collection’ earrings Adam admired so much earlier. Just in case all the black lace and general sauciness doesn’t get him going, my fabulous accessories, with any luck, will do the job.
The only trouble is, as I find when I start to hoick myself into it now, that the last time I wore the Ribbony Elasticky Thing, I was a good half-stone lighter (it’s not that Dillon pressured me into losing weight, or anything – in fact, he was always superlatively appreciative of my distinctly non-model-worthy curves – but you try sharing a bathroom mirror with a man as impressively fit as Dillon for more than a couple of occasions, and see if you can resist the temptation to cut out pudding. And bread. And chips. And lunch). The Ribbony Elasticky Thing goes up reasonably smoothly over my thighs, requires a bit of jiggling to get it up over my hips, but when I get to the bit that (barely) covers my stomach, which is where the majority of my regained weight has generously portioned itself, it starts to become a bit of a struggle.
In the war of Libby Lomax versus Ribbony Elasticky Thing, Ribbony Elasticky Thing is definitely winning this particular battle when my phone rings.
When I reach down to grab my phone from my bag, I can see that it’s Nora calling.
Well, at least it’s a call that’s actually worth the temporary defeat to a piece of lingerie.
A regular call, not FaceTime, thank God, because long-time best friends as we are, there’s no way I’d subject Nora to the sight of me half in, half out of my sluttiest underwear. I know she probably sees more disturbing sights on an average shift in her work as an emergency medicine registrar, but I wouldn’t actually put money on it, or anything.
‘Hi, Nor,’ I say, as I answer the phone. ‘Everything OK?’
‘Is everything OK with you?’ she replies. ‘You’re not … exercising, are you?’
It speaks volumes about my affection for physical exertion that Nora sounds so astonished as she asks this.
‘Christ, no. I’m just putting on some … er … clothes.’
‘Full-body armour? A HazMat suit? Because it sounds as if you’re getting out of puff there, Lib.’
‘I am, a bit. But it’s not a suit of armour. The opposite, actually.’ I prop the phone between my ear and shoulder, and start again on my attempt to e-a-s-e the Ribbony Elasticky Thing up over my tummy. ‘I’m at Adam’s. Just getting ready for … well, a nice romantic night in.’
‘Oh. Right.’
It’s ironic – and a bit incomprehensible, really – that Nora, who’s spent much of the past few months urging to me to get out there and meet someone so that I can lay the ghost of my failed fling with Dillon O’Hara to rest, is a bit down on the whole idea of Adam. She was excited when I first told her – waiting for our flight last night – that I’d started seeing someone new, but then she seemed to cool off on the news when I explained how I’d met him.
‘I forgot to ask yesterday,’ she says, now, ‘but have you … er … mentioned anything about this Adam guy to Olly yet? Because if you haven’t, don’t you think that maybe you should? Given that they work together, and everything.’
‘I haven’t, yet. But you don’t really think he’s going to mind, do you, Nor? I mean, I know it could be awkward if they worked together properly – like, in the same office, or something – just in case things didn’t work out between me and Adam, and Olly ended up having to take a side. But they only meet up every so often, and it’ll be even less once the restaurant is actually up and running.’
‘True.’ Nora clears her throat. ‘I wish you’d tell him soon, though, Libby. I’ll feel awkward, if I don’t mention anything about it the entire time I’m staying here.’
‘It’s perfectly OK to mention it! It’s not a big secret or anything. Besides, I’m sure he’ll be pleased. He likes Adam. And it’s not like I’m going out with, well, You Know Who, or anything.’
I’m talking about Dillon, not Voldemort, by the way. I just tend to avoid mentioning his actual name to either Nora or Olly, because they still get a bit worked up about him, even all these months on. I mean, I think I got over Dillon’s shoddy behaviour faster than either Nora or Olly did, and that’s saying something. The trouble is that Olly loathed Dillon right from the start – so much so that he resorted to threats of physical violence with kitchen equipment even before the Miami hurricane fiasco. There isn’t enough kitchen equipment in the world to carry out all the things Olly wanted to do to Dillon afterwards.
‘Hmm,’ Nora replies. ‘So. A nice romantic evening, you said.’
‘Yes.’ I carry on inching the Ribbony Elasticky Thing up over my none-too-perfect stomach. God, I wish I hadn’t put this half-stone back on. ‘At least, I hope so. I mean, I’m here at his house, and I’m going to surprise him when he gets in.’
‘Surprise him?’ She sounds confused. ‘Like a sort of … sex ambush?’
‘No! It’s not a sex ambush! God, Nora, you make it sound like I’m planning to jump out of the wardrobe, knock him out with a tranquillizer dart, manacle him to the radiator and have my wicked way with him for the next three nights.’
There’s a short silence.
‘That does sound,’ Nora says, after a moment, ‘worryingly detailed …’
‘OK, but it wouldn’t be totally incomprehensible if I were to do something of the sort,’ I say, finally – finally! – managing to edge the Ribbony Elasticky Thing up over my tummy before jiggling the shoulder straps into position. ‘I told you on the plane last night. Things are really perfect between us. We just need to work on … the sex part.’
‘Lib, I do worry a bit when you start using words like perfect. I mean, don’t get me wrong, Adam does sound lovely. But you know you have a tendency to … well, romanticize things.’
‘I admit, I might have had that tendency in the past, but not this time. When you meet him, you’ll see.’ Now that the Ribbony Elasticky Thing is safely (well, safely-ish) on, I can start the complicated process of arranging the lengths of ribbon and elastic so that they cover the parts they’re meant to cover. ‘He’s steady. Dependable. Reliable …’
‘Well, all right, there’s no need to make him sound like the sort of thing my dad might use for weatherproofing his patio furniture.’
‘… Mature,’ I continue. ‘Well-rounded.’
‘OK, now you’re making him sound like one of those mystery cheeses you and Olly are always bleating on about.’
‘My point is that I really, truly think this could be it. Adam could be it. I mean, he brought me espresso and yogurt-covered raisins before my big meeting this morning! All the way from his Mayfair office to Clapham!’
‘Er, wouldn’t you just have preferred a cappuccino and a bag of those honeycomb bite thingies you ploughed your way through at the airport yesterday?’
‘Not the point. He really cares, Nora. I really, properly matter to him.’
‘Which is great, Lib. And I’m so, so happy for you. I just don’t want to see you getting hurt.’ There’s the briefest of pauses before she adds a light but meaningful, ‘again’.
‘There’s no way, Nora, that I could possibly get hurt.’
Though even as I say this, the Ribbony Elasticky thing starts riding, well, upwards in a manner that’s only going to get more painful if it goes any further. So it’s just possible that Nora might have a point, even if it’s not quite in the way she was meaning it.
‘OK, but after what happened with You Know Who, and all the bloody chaos he caused—’
‘Talking of chaos,’ I say, smoothly interrupting before we get diverted down the Dillon alleyway, from where it’s always difficult to escape, ‘you spent so long asking me about Dad’s wedding yesterday that you didn’t actually tell me anything about your wedding.’ Nora is getting married in five weeks’ time, to her lovely fiancé Mark. ‘Any news? Any updates? Anything your devoted and dedicated chief bridesmaid can do to help?’
‘Actually, that’s partly why I’m calling,’ Nora says. ‘I forgot to ask yesterday, and I know you’re really busy these days, Lib … but do you think you might be able to spare a couple of hours to go bridesmaid’s dress shopping with Tash one day this week?’
Tash, apart from being Olly’s motorbike-ride buddy, is going to be Nora’s only other non-family bridesmaid.
‘I thought maybe you could take along the dress you’ve already chosen for yourself, and try to help her find something that would co-ordinate … I’ll try and come along with you guys too,’ she adds, perhaps proving that she’s noticed that Tash and I, though perfectly amiable together, haven’t quite gelled enough for a girlie shopping trip àdeux. ‘If Olly doesn’t need me to run any errands for him at the same time.’
‘Happy to, Nora. I’ll make a bit of time whenever Tash can do it.’
‘Thanks, Lib. And talking of Tash, I’d better get going … we’re heading into the West End for a bite to eat tonight. Probably the only chance I’ll get to show her the bright lights before we become Olly’s menials for the next few evenings.’
‘Sure, of course. You go.’
‘And good luck with Adam tonight!’ she adds. ‘But you won’t need it. I’m sure he won’t be able to keep his steady, dependable, teak-garden-furniture-protecting hands off you.’
We can but hope.
And we’ll find out sooner than I’d thought, because I’ve only just slipped my phone back into my bag when I hear a key in the front door.
This isn’t a late night! It’s barely gone eight! What did they do at this work dinner: sip sparkling water, nibble a small selection of sushi, turn down coffee and then pay the bill?
Well, there’s no time to find all this American professionalism and healthy living irritating: thank God, I’m all ready and (barely) dressed, so all I need to do is arrange myself as seductively as possible on one of the uncomfortable chairs, attach what I hope is a come-hither smile, and—
‘I don’t see why I had to come over and help you find the bloody thing,’ comes a voice from the hallway. ‘Couldn’t you do it on your own?’
It’s not Adam.
It’s Posh James Cadwalladr.
‘OK, OK, but I feel weird about coming into Adam’s house all by myself. We don’t know him that well.’
And this, I recognize straight away, is Lottie Cadwalladr, my brand-new stockist.
Shit.
I can’t make a dash for the stairs, because they’re out in the hallway, where the Cadwalladrs have just let themselves in. I can’t make a dash for the bifold doors that lead into the garden, because they’re locked and I don’t have time to look for the key. It would be absolutely useless to get on my hands and knees under the table because it’s made of bloody Perspex …
What the hell am I going to do?
As the kitchen door starts to open, I make the only choice I have available to me: a dash to Fritz’s den, where I should be able to hide myself away until the Cadwalladrs have found whatever it is they’re looking for, and buggered off back to their own property again.
I jump up from the table, sprinting to the nook by the cooker, and, despite my heels, leap the safety gate in a rather impressive single bound.
‘… quite sure Adam didn’t bring that one over in Fritz’s bag of stuff, when he dropped him off?’ Posh James is asking, as two pairs of footsteps – one heavy and male, one lighter and ballet-pump-wearing, make their way on to the marble floor. ‘Weren’t there about half a million squeaky toys in there?’
‘Not the green and white one,’ says Lottie, before adding, ‘Go on, Fritzy! Go find your toy! Go find!’
Hang on: they’ve brought Fritz with them, too?
I don’t even need to ask myself the question, because there’s a pitter-pattering of doggy feet across the marble floor, and a moment later I’m gazing, from my crouched position behind the safety gate, deep into Fritz’s chocolate-brown, adoring, eyes.
He starts – surprise, surprise – barking.
‘Fritz, no!’ I whisper, flapping my hands at him. ‘Go away! I don’t have any pâté! Ich habe,’ I hazard, in desperation, dredging up the German I studied, half-heartedly, when I was fourteen years old, ‘kein pâté!’
Mentioning pâté was, with hindsight, a mistake, in either language.
Fritz goes berserk.
‘What the fuck’s he barking about now?’ I can just about hear Posh James saying over the torrent of noise Fritz is making.
‘The toy must be in his den,’ I hear Lottie say. ‘Clever boy!’
His toy! His green and white squeaky toy! That’ll get rid of him. I see it in here, nestling to the side of his (Alessi) bowl, grab it and then, making sure I lean right through the bars of the safety gate for maximum distance, skim the bloody thing as far away across the kitchen floor from the den, and me, as it’ll go.
Which makes not the slightest difference. Fritz could no longer care less about his squeaky toy, not when his beloved Bringer Of Pâté is right here before him, cornered behind his safety gate. Besides, now that I’ve made the mistake of putting my head through the bars to chuck his toy, he’s licking my face, practically water-boarding me with meaty-smelling saliva.
It’s a bit gross, and I can’t pull my head back through the bars fast enough.
Except I can’t pull my head back through the bars at all.
I’m serious. I can’t get my head out.
It makes no sense … I mean, I got my head through them one way, didn’t I?
Unless it’s the Marilyn Monroe earrings. These great, big, chandelier-style Marilyn Monroe earrings. Jamming up against the outside of the bars, making it impossible for me to squeeze my head back through.
Just as this horrible fact dawns on me, a pair of leopard-print French Sole ballet pumps comes past the range cooker and stops, abruptly, right in front of me.
‘Oh, dear God,’ says Lottie Cadwalladr, about four feet above my head.
Which sums it up pretty neatly, really.
‘James!’ she goes on, in a horrified voice. ‘Come quick! Adam’s got some woman … imprisoned back here!’
‘Some woman?’ echoes Posh James.
‘No, no, no!’ I sound a bit panicked, which is understandable, under the circumstances, but is only going to make me feel more mortified in the long run. I’d prefer to sound more nonchalant, debonair, even, because I’ve learned from past experience that if you take this sort of appalling humiliation in your stride yourself, other people have no choice but to take it in their stride along with you. ‘I’m not a woman,’ I go on, in as laid-back a way as I can possibly manage. ‘I mean, I’m not just any old woman! It’s me, Libby Lomax. Um, Adam’s girlfriend? The jewellery designer?’
‘Libby?’ Lottie gasps.
‘That’s right. Hello!’ I add. ‘Nice to see you again!’
Posh James’s shoes arrive, now, and I hear an appalled, ‘For fuck’s sake,’ before he grabs Fritz’s collar and – helpfully – puts an end to the water torture by manhandling him back towards the kitchen door and putting him out in the hallway.
‘Thanks!’ I say, still trying to sound relaxed about all this, in the hope that it convinces them there’s really nothing so very extraordinary about finding a virtual stranger with their head wedged between a set of iron bars at the neighbour’s house, with only some strands of ribbon and elastic to protect her modesty. ‘Much appreciated.’
‘But, Libby …’ Lottie isn’t sounding remotely relaxed. ‘You have to tell me. Are you … in this position … voluntarily?’
‘Adam hasn’t fucking imprisoned her in a sex dungeon, or anything,’ Posh James says, cuttingly. ‘He’s not even home. I saw her letting herself in about an hour ago. At least, I think it’s her …’ There’s a pause. I don’t know why, but I get the impression of a neck being craned. ‘She looks a bit different from this angle.’
‘Then stop looking from that angle!’ Lottie snaps. ‘Let the poor girl have a shred of dignity, will you?’
What I’d quite like, right now, is for the floor beneath Fritz’s den to open up like a large sinkhole, drag me down deep into the earth’s crust, and finish me off in a pit of molten lava.
‘Anyway, if he’s not imprisoned her, what the hell is she doing in here?’ Lottie demands, before crouching down to meet me at eye level. Her pretty face is creased with genuine concern. ‘What are you doing in here?’ she repeats the question to me. ‘If you’re too scared to say anything aloud, just … I don’t know … blink three times … or do you have a safe word, or something …?’
‘No, there’s no safe word!’ I really, really want my very nice new client to stop thinking I’m heavily into sadomasochism. ‘This is all just a silly accident. I put my head through the bars, you see,’ I go on, cleverly avoiding any mention of why I put on slutty lingerie to do this in the first place. ‘I think the problem is my earrings, actually, so perhaps …’ I reach one hand up to start undoing one of the chandelier earrings on one side and then, the moment it’s fallen free, do the same to the other. ‘I’m sure I’ll be able to get my head out, now.’
Wrong again.
My head, even without the earrings, still won’t slide back out through the bars of the safety gate.
‘My head hasn’t grown, has it?’ I’m sounding panicked again. ‘Could that have happened? Do heads just spontaneously grow?’
‘I don’t know about that.’ Lottie puts her own head on one side. ‘I suppose it could have expanded a teeny bit, or something … From the friction of you trying to pull it out, maybe?’
‘For fuck’s sake, the two of you. It isn’t amateur physicist week.’ Posh James doesn’t sound the least bit impressed. ‘Obviously what we need is some sort of lubricant.’
‘James!’ Lottie gasps.
‘To rub on the bars,’ he explains. ‘To help her slide out. Olive oil, butter …’
‘Oh. Well, yes, that might be a good idea, actually. I’ll go and look in the fridge,’ Lottie says, getting to her feet and heading across to the other end of the kitchen. ‘Keep talking to her, James!’ she calls over one shoulder. ‘In case she goes into shock, or something.’
‘She’s not going to go into bloody shock,’ Posh James replies, irritably, before thinking slightly better of this and turning back to ask me, ‘are you?’
‘No,’ I mumble.
‘Good. I might, though.’
Which I think is just him being rude – extremely rude – about the nightmare-inducing sight of my bum, on the other side of the bars from him, until he goes on: ‘I mean, I honestly didn’t know Adam had it in him. I was pretty sure – a hundred per cent sure, in fact – that Adam batted for the other team.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Drove on the right-hand side of the road.’
‘Um, are you pointing out that he’s American, because I did already realize—’
‘I thought he was gay.’
I blink at Posh James. To be more precise, I blink at his battered Converse.
‘Adam’s not gay.’
‘If you say so.’
‘I am saying so.’
‘Well, you’d know better than me, obviously. It must just be a very, very good male friend of his I see leaving here early in the mornings, when I’m heading home from my run … what the hell, Lottie?’ he adds, as Lottie’s ballet pumps return our way again. ‘I suggested olive oil or butter, not half the contents of the store cupboard!’
‘Well, I don’t know what’s going to work, do I?’ Lottie is crouching back down to my level again, clutching an entire armful of assorted packets and bottles. ‘So, which do you think is most slippery? Groundnut oil? Grapeseed oil? Sesame oil? Argan oil … oooh, I’ve never heard of that one before.’
‘It’s often used in North African cooking,’ Posh James says. ‘You can use it to make fresh dips, drizzle it on couscous—’
‘Oh, was that the thing that made the couscous taste so amazing in Marrakech?’ Lottie asks.
‘I think it was the cinnamon, actually,’ her husband tells her. ‘I’ve started adding it when I make couscous at home, you know, but I don’t think the quality of the cinnamon here is as good as it was over there, because—’
‘I honestly think any of the oils will be fine,’ I say, starting to feel more desperate than ever now that – somehow – we all just seem to be sitting around here swapping recipe tips and reminiscing about couscous. ‘Can we just try one?’
‘Of course. Let’s start with the sesame oil!’
So we do. And when that has no effect whatsoever, we try groundnut oil. And when that has no effect whatsoever, we try sunflower oil. And when that has no effect whatsoever (apart from making me smell like some sort of giant Chinese takeaway, that is), Posh James announces, ‘Fuck this for a game of soldiers. I’d better call the fire brigade.’
‘No!’ I moan, gently, because if it’s mortifying enough being semi-naked and wedged between two iron bars on my hands and knees in front of Lottie and James Cadwalladr, I can’t even begin to imagine the horror of importing half a dozen firemen into this kitchen, too. ‘Please …’
‘Well, I don’t see that we have any other option,’ he says, irritably. ‘I don’t own a hacksaw. I suppose I could always go and see if any of the neighbours has a hacksaw—’
‘Bogdan!’ I suddenly gasp.
I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before.
‘My friend Bogdan – he’s a handyman … well, and a hairdresser, too, but …’ Not relevant, Libby! Stick to the important facts! ‘He’ll have a hacksaw, I’m absolutely sure of it. Look, can you just grab my phone from my bag,’ I say, feeling weak with relief, ‘and bring it over so I can call him?’
‘Absolutely!’ Lottie sounds pretty relieved as well, because although this might be the worst evening of my entire life, I don’t think it’s exactly been a night of unbounded pleasure for her and James, either. ‘James, get her phone. I’ll just see,’ she adds, scrambling to her feet as there’s a fresh volley of barking coming from the hallway, ‘what Fritz is going nuts about out there.’
I hear the kitchen door open, and then I hear Lottie say, in a startled voice, ‘Oh! Adam!’
So he really is back pretty early from his work dinner. Just not early enough, unfortunately, to have prevented me from ending up in my current predicament.
‘This probably all looks very strange to you,’ Lottie is going on, ‘but we have, well, a bit of a situation … I don’t suppose either of you happens to have a hacksaw on you, by any chance?’
Wait a second: either of you?
‘I don’t have a hacksaw,’ comes Adam’s voice, sounding bewildered and anxious – unlike him – in equal measure. ‘Ben, uh, I’m assuming you don’t have one either?’
‘No, I didn’t bring a hacksaw,’ comes another voice. Just like Adam’s voice, it’s American-accented.
And just like Adam’s voice, it’s male.
‘And I gotta tell you, Ads,’ the strange man’s voice goes on, with an abrasive chuckle, ‘I’m glad we’ve been dating this long before you asked me that question. I’d be out that door faster than a speeding bullet otherwise.’
I can’t move.
I mean, obviously I can’t move. None of us would be here right now if I could.
Well, Adam and Ben would probably still be here, for their own cosy night in. My boyfriend and … his boyfriend?
The bars of the safety gate may be gradually cutting off the blood supply to my brain, but even I can put two and two together on this one and make four.
There’s the faint squeak of Converse on marble, and then Posh James’s face appears in front of me again.
‘Here’s your phone,’ he says, matter-of-factly, as he hands it through the bars to me and folds my frozen fingers around it. And then he adds, equally matter-of-factly, ‘I told you he was gay.’
Then he gets to his feet and heads towards the hallway, perhaps to give me a moment of privacy.
With a strength of will I didn’t even know I had, I force my fingers to unfreeze so that I can call Bogdan.
He and his hacksaw can’t get here fast enough.
(#u187251b9-7f13-54a4-ae36-cef40e8c5002)
The half-hour after Adam and his date got home turned into a bit of a blur, if I’m honest with you.
Thank God Lottie and James slipped quietly away, and then Adam came (sheepishly) into the kitchen to find me. He didn’t say a lot, and I said even less … I have a dim memory of being peered at, for a moment, by a very scowly man in a very smart suit, who I can only assume was Ben … and then, just as Adam suggested it might be a good idea for me to snack on some edamame beans and a coconut water, to keep my energy levels up, Bogdan arrived.
With Olly.
My second unexpected, unannounced and frankly unwanted visitor of the night.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m always happy to see Olly. It’s a truly rare situation where I don’t want his lovely, friendly face around. I’d hardly have dragged the poor guy up to Dad’s wedding this past weekend if I hadn’t thought it would make the whole thing better, just having him there.
Tonight, however, was precisely one of those rare situations.
‘Am decorating at restaurant,’ was Bogdan’s explanation, through the noise of the hacksaw, when I asked him, through gritted teeth, why he’d decided to announce my predicament to Olly before the pair of them set out in Olly’s van, like cape-less crusaders, to rescue me from Death By Humiliation in Shepherd’s Bush. ‘Olly is right there beside me when am answering phone. You are expecting me to be lying to him about reason for phone call? When he is currently being my boss? And also, am hoping not to be presuming too much, my friend?’
Well, no, I wasn’t expecting him to lie.
And given that he blurted, ‘Let me be getting this straight, Libby – you are trapped somewhere against your will and only wearing what I am guessing to be some sort of undergarment?’ a couple of moments after my terse explanation over the phone, I suppose it’s only to be expected that Olly would grab his car keys and hurtle to my assistance.
But it’s just one more layer of awkwardness to endure: Olly, who didn’t even know I was dating Adam to begin with, coming face to face with me in that terrible, semi-naked, head-wodged predicament.
Quite honestly, the discovery that my new boyfriend, who I really thought might be The One, is in fact gay … well, it’s almost the least bad thing about the last couple of hours.
I said almost.
Olly has insisted on driving me all the way home, which is nice of him, because I’m feeling a bit too bruised – physically and emotionally – for the rough-and-tumble of the tube just now.
The downside, though, is more of that terrible awkwardness.
Even though – obviously – I re-dressed myself as soon as I was free from the bars, the atmosphere between us is so uncomfortable that I might as well be still wearing nothing but the Ribbony Elasticky Thing and a slick of sesame oil. We’ve sat in embarrassed silence ever since Shepherd’s Bush, and we’re over the river and stuck in a bottleneck of traffic near Wandsworth Bridge when Olly finally breaks it.
‘So. Adam Rosenfeld.’
‘Yes.’ I swallow, hard. ‘Did you know he was gay?’
‘Libby, come on. I only work with the guy. And barely even that, really. He dropped into the restaurant this afternoon for the first time in a week. I mean, I don’t remember pondering, as we pored over some thrilling spreadsheets together, what his sexual orientation might be …’
‘Fair point.’
‘And it’s not like I was looking out for anything in particular, one way or the other.’ Olly changes gear as we finally move up a little way in the traffic. ‘I mean, I didn’t even know you were seeing him, Libby. You kept that one pretty close to your chest.’
I wince, inwardly, at Olly’s mere mention of my chest, given that he’s seen more of my chest this evening than I’d have liked him to do in a lifetime.
‘It was pretty recent,’ I mumble.
‘You could have mentioned something over the weekend.’
‘I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t want to shout it from the rooftops in case … well, it didn’t work out. Which has turned out to be pretty prophetic of me, really.’
‘You’re not pathetic.’
‘Prophetic,’ I say.
‘Oh … well, you might be that.’
‘Yeah, except I thought the reasons we might not work out would be because we were both too busy with our jobs, or because we didn’t like each other’s families … I never stopped to think that it might be because he was using me as a beard to hide his true identity from his Orthodox Jewish parents.’
This is based on something that Adam muttered at me, by the way, a few minutes before Bogdan and Olly and the tool kit got there: I’m really sorry, Libby … my mum and dad … it’s an Orthodox thing … they wouldn’t approve …
Which, you know, I can sympathize with. I’ve endured the disapproval of my own mother for the majority of the last thirty years. But I still don’t think it’s reasonable to drag someone else into the middle of it. Someone unwitting. Someone ignorant.
‘I’m just such an idiot,’ I say, miserably, gazing out of the window as unidentifiable bits of southwest London slide by in the gathering midsummer dusk. ‘How did I not realize he was gay? He couldn’t have made any more excuses to avoid having sex with me!’
‘He made excuses?’
‘Dozens of them.’ I never usually talk about sex with Olly, but I feel we’ve crossed that barrier tonight. Actually, not so much crossed as smashed through it. With a ten-tonne truck. ‘He was busy with work. He was tired from the gym. He had a headache … I don’t know. There were a lot of different explanations. And I fell for each and every one of them.’
‘So the … er … dressing up in … er … sexy lingerie was—’
‘My embarrassingly misguided attempt to reverse the situation.’
Olly nods. ‘Got it.’
‘I mean, what’s wrong with me,’ I go on, ‘that I have such crappy awful judgement about the entire male species?’
‘There’s nothing wrong with you.’
‘All right, then, maybe there’s just something wrong with men.’
‘OK, well, that’s a bit of an unfair generalization—’
‘I don’t mean you, Ol,’ I say. ‘I just mean all the others.’
‘Come on, Lib, just because it’s all gone a bit pear-shaped with Adam, and just because you had a hellish experience with a total wanker like Dillon O’Hara—’
At this moment, there’s an angry grunt from the back of the car: it’s Bogdan who, I have to confess, I’d completely forgotten was sitting back there.
He looms forward now, to jab Olly in the shoulder with a large and paint-spattered finger.
‘Do not be saying the impolite things about Dillon,’ he tells Olly. ‘Libby is not having the hellish experience with him. Libby is having the heavenly experience with him. And not just in the bedroom.’
‘Bogdan!’ I turn round and glare at him. ‘That’s none of anyone’s business!’
‘Is being the business of mine,’ Bogdan mutters, darkly, ‘when am hearing the untrue things about the people I am liking.’
(Bogdan is being slightly disingenuous here. He didn’t so much like Dillon as nurse a colossal, simmering, unrequited passion for him, in a tragic, balalaika-accompanied, Moldovan sort of way. Many was the time, in the course of those few heady months with Dillon, that I half expected to open my suitcase in some glamorous hotel room only to find Bogdan stowed away amongst my shoes and my tops and my sexy underwear, all ready to clamber out and hang on Dillon’s every word for the duration of our dirty weekend. I got so paranoid that I even stopped taking the big suitcase, and started cramming everything I might need into the smaller of my two canvas holdalls instead.)
‘My mistake, Bogdan,’ Olly returns, his voice dripping with sarcasm. ‘There’s obviously nothing at all hellish about being abandoned in Miami the day before a major hurricane, with no passport and no credit cards.’
‘Being abandoned in the Miami the day before the major hurricane with no passport and no credit cards,’ Bogdan echoes, ‘by Dillon O’Hara.’
Olly actually takes his eyes off the road for a moment to turn round and stare at Bogdan.
‘I’m sorry … you’re saying that this is some sort of privilege?’
‘Am saying,’ Bogdan says, in the overly patient tone of one who’s decided he’s talking to a complete imbecile, ‘that Libby is being lucky to be involved with man as handsome and charming and funny and—’
‘And coke-addled,’ Olly interrupts, ‘and womanizing—’
‘OK, that’s enough!’ I hold up a hand. ‘Look, I’m incredibly grateful to you both for coming and getting me out of a tight spot – literally – but can we just stop talking about Dillon O’Hara for the rest of the journey?’
‘It would make me a happy man,’ Olly announces, ‘if I never had to so much as hear his name again for the rest of my livelong days.’
Which puts Bogdan into a right old grump, because he inflicts a wounded silence on us all until Olly drops him at the top of his road in Balham a few minutes later. And then thumps on Olly’s window just before we drive off and yells, ‘Dillon O’Hara!’, petulantly, through the glass.
‘Probably not a good idea,’ I say, a moment later, ‘to have made your painter and decorator quite so angry with you four days before your big restaurant opening.’
‘Oh, he’ll be all right. Besides, everything’s on track over there.’
‘Really? Because I feel really awful, Ol, about accidentally dragging him – and you – away from the place this evening …’
‘Honestly, Lib, don’t worry about it. Like I say, we’re right on schedule. And I know you’d do the same for me.’
‘If you got your head stuck in between some iron railings at your secretly lesbian girlfriend’s house while wearing skimpy undies and having cooking oils rubbed on you by a famous television actor?’
‘In that exact scenario,’ Olly says, solemnly, ‘I know you’d leg it across town with your sharpest hacksaw and your trustiest blowtorch.’
‘Well, that’s what friendship is all about,’ I say.
Olly falls silent for a moment, which is a pity as I’d thought we were well on the road to it All Being OK between us again, until he suddenly swerves on to the other side of the road, and into the drive-through McDonald’s on the other side of it.
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Lucy Holliday
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 17.04.2024
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О книге: The hilarious follow-up to A Night in With Audrey Hepburn from your favourite new author. Perfect for fans of Lucy Diamond and Sophie Kinsella.After dating the hottest man on the planet, Dillon O’Hara, Libby Lomax has come back down to earth with a bump. Now she’s throwing herself into a new relationship and is determined to be a better friend to best pal, Ollie, as he launches his new restaurant.Despite good intentions, Libby is hugely distracted when a newly reformed Dillon arrives back on the scene, more irresistible than ever. And when another unwelcome guest turns up on her battered sofa in the form of Marilyn Monroe, Libby would willingly bite her own arm off for a return to normality.