The Next Best Thing (16 page)

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

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

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

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

‘Cinderella, you
shall
go to the ball.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Beetroot. It’s salmon with beetroot.’

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

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

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

He pressed his hand on his heart and Jane laughed.

‘It’s OK,’ she said, ‘I’ll spare, you the details. What is it then, your idea?’

‘I’m going to speak out against this shocking new fashion for educated women to give up work to stay home with their kids,’ he told her. ‘An appalling and reactionary
trend. As one of the first male feminists, I can only condemn it. Next thing, they’ll be taking away a woman’s right to vote.’

‘I think people are getting fed up with the superwoman thing,’ said Jane. ‘You know, doing two jobs and only being paid for one.’ She picked up the halves of lime that
Will had left on the chopping board and returned them to the fridge, then took out some green beans. ‘I think they’re starting to ask themselves, what’s the point?’ she went
on, slicing the ends off the beans, ‘working their arses off at the office, then coming home and taking on the domestic shift.’

‘But surely you realise, Jane, that it’s just not fair on men!’ Will had jumped up and opened the fridge to take out the bottle of tequila. ‘Why should men have to go out
to work all day while their lazy-cow wives play tennis and go on coffee mornings? I tell you one thing, I wouldn’t tolerate it, not any more! The last thing men need when they get in is to
hear about how their wives have had a gorgeous day spending all their money.’

Jane thought about how it might be if she had bottomless funds and no paid work to tie her to her computer. She could spend all day shopping, and having lunch, and could go to the French
Institute cinema every day if she felt like it. ‘Sounds all right to me,’ she said, ‘a glamorous take on the 1950s housewife, what’s wrong with that?’

‘At least the 1950s housewife did housework. These new jumped-up stay-at-homers all have cleaners and
au pair
girls. They bring nothing to the household. They are an economic drain,
and should be forced to reimburse the state for the money wasted on their education.’

Jane said nothing and let Will rant on, rehearsing his argument for the compulsory employment for all mothers that he would later flesh out on the Apple in the galleria. She poured boiling water
over a howl of tomatoes the better to release the skins. She would chop them and mix them into the beans along with some garlic. Will always said plain boiled vegetables seemed just too school
dinners for words.

After dinner, Jane cleared up and Will went upstairs to work for a bit, then they went to bed and had sex. It was like mowing the lawn, she thought; same motions, same
frequency of once a week in the growing season. They weren’t yet at the fallow winter stage, where the machine could be locked up for months at a time. Afterwards, Will picked up Wittgenstein
and Jane went back to reading about the architectural uses of roses in
Hortus
magazine. Alter a few years of bed-sharing you didn’t need to bother with post-coital intimacy. A
comfortable fug of indifference replaced the probing conversations of the early clays.

‘I might go Christmas shopping again tomorrow,’ said Jane. She addressed the remark to her bedside lamp, her back still turned on Will, ‘if you wouldn’t mind looking
after Liberty.’

She twisted round to look at him.

‘Of course not,’ he said, after a pause. Me put in his earplugs, pulled the British Airways blindfold into place and turned off the light.

‘Preparing for lift-off?’ she asked.

‘You know I need my sleep,’ he said, ‘particularly now you’ve sprung a morning’s childcare on me. Never mind that I’ve got a deadline. Good night.’

‘Good night.’

Jane switched off her light and lay on her back, making mental lists for tomorrow’s shopping. Already December, and she had barely started. What a bore. She thought enviously of Lydia
going off to South America with stylish disregard for family obligations. Lydia was disdainful of what she termed the red poinsettia Christmas experience. Fat relatives watching telly in ripped
paper hats while outside the rain drizzled down. Waitrose magazine said that Christmas dinner was ‘probably the most important meal of the year’, which struck a note of darkness in
Jane’s soul.

She turned her mind to happier thoughts. Her new friend at the French Institute. The word ‘friend’ sounded both coy and sinister when applied to an adult you barely knew. It carried
dark overtones of an Internet chat room, a hairy man-sized version of a childhood playmate. She’d have to wait two weeks before seeing him again. But he was right, two weeks was no time. Not
with everything else she had to get done. There was the Christmas dinner, still a while off but never too early to plan for. Mustn’t forget the mincemeat, and brandy butter, or should they go
wild this year and ring the changes with rum butter? Bronze-feathered Kelly free-range turkey, or a tasty but fatty goose? And the fill-your-own empty Christmas crackers that she thought would make
an amusing change; she and Liberty could make things out of card and glitter to put inside them: it would be a good arts and crafts project for a Sunday afternoon. Faintly boring, but
heart-warming, a bit like Christmas itself.

On the morning of her party, Lydia woke up early. Rupert was already dressed for work, and was performing the male equivalent of loading a handbag, sweeping the coins and keys
from the top of the chest of drawers into his hand and then into his trouser pocket. It would he easier to have one of those Latin-style men’s clutch hags, but he would look ridiculous, a
large man like him, mincing out of the door with one of those under his arm.

Lydia stretched luxuriously into Rupert’s side of the bed. ‘Big night tonight,’ she said, ‘the day we tell the world that we are to be an item. Oh my God, that’s
just broken my dream!’

‘What was it?’ asked Rupert, rather hoping she’d say she’d learned in a blinding flash that getting married was a bad idea.

‘I dreamed you took me to live in a horrid little house near Milton Keynes with Dralon furniture.’

‘Is that all?’

She curled up on her side and pulled the covers over her head. ‘And now I’m awake too early and won’t he able to get back to sleep,’ she said, her voice muffled through
the goose down. ‘I’ll have bags under my eyes and look hideous tonight.’

Rupert’s heart sank. After tonight there would be no going back. The door would be firmly closed, and he would go from being an anonymous single person who happens to have a sort of
live-in girlfriend, to being Lydia’s fiance, with everything that entailed. He would never know romance again, he would never sleep with anyone else ever again. It was a terrifying
thought.

‘I’ll see you later, then.’ He jangled his pocket, now filled with a ludicrous amount of loose change, and made for the door.

‘Remember, darling, not too late,’ said Lydia, blowing him a kiss from beneath the duvet, ‘don’t forget the caterers are coming at six.’

Climbing into his cab, Rupert thought about Lydia’s dream and what it said about her. He was only averagely romantic, but even he knew that when you were in love with
someone, you didn’t care where you lived. When you loved someone and got engaged, the material details were immaterial, weren’t they? They weren’t living in the dark ages, after
all, when marriage was a crude form of financial barter.

For instance, if things were different and he and Jane were to go off together, he knew for a fact that she wouldn’t care where they ended up. She would show no interest in bathroom taps
or kitchen flooring, or living within spitting distance of Sloane Square. And this he knew without ever having discussed it with her. He knew she didn’t care about things that didn’t
matter.