The Next Best Thing (26 page)

He unclenched his hand, felt a rush of blood to his head.

‘Next Friday it is then.’

Sunday morning invariably found Will and Jane in bed with the papers. Piled up on their laps, spilling out onto the floor from all sides, awash with magazines and Internet
supplements and sections about homes and business and the arts. It frightened Jane to think of it, all those people like Will being paid to produce the endless, spewing words, words, words, that
you never had time to absorb. It was always with a sense of personal failure that she gathered them up for recycling, confronted by reams of unread pages.

Going out to buy the papers was Jane’s job. Will was not a morning person so it was Jane who carried them back like a weightlifter in two extra-strong stripey nylon laundry baskets,
remembering to ask for a receipt so Will could set the cost off against his tax. She didn’t mind, it made her feel less guilty about agreeing to meet Rupert again, going back on everything
she had decided. When she got his message, all her determination to cut him out of her life had evaporated. She had to see him. She’d tell him they must just be friends, there was no harm in
that.

The mood in their bedroom could be volatile on these mornings, but today it was relatively serene. Will’s spirits were dictated by what he read in the papers; it all came down to how the
competition was faring. This morning he was in luck, there was a scathingly bad review for a friend’s book that set his heart singing.

‘Dear oh dear,’ he chuckled to himself, shaking the paper out in front of him so he could make the most of the experience. ‘I think this deserves another cup of ayurvedic tea,
Jane, if you wouldn’t mind.’ He held his cup out to her, his eyes alight with pleasure. ‘Poor old Jeremy, he’s going to be mortified. Mind you, I’m not entirely
surprised, he is a bit second-rate.’

Jane filled his cup and handed it back to him, then picked up a health and well-being supplement that explained how to achieve shiny eyes from inner peace and eating more vegetables. It insisted
you could be even more fabulous if you really, really tried. Then they offered a quiz to assess your stress levels to see if you needed to go on a swanky spiritual retreat in Tibet. The whole tone
of the thing was that you were one very special person who deserved endless, narcissistic grooming.

‘I’m sick of the papers,’ she said, pushing them onto the floor. She thought about Rupert saying how he no longer bothered with them. What did he do, then, on Sunday mornings?
What was he up to now? She felt like ringing him to find out.

‘Careful,’ said Will, pulling on his Chinese embroidered dressing gown. ‘Don’t go biting the hand that feeds you. Speaking of which, I’d better get upstairs to the
thought laboratory.’

He had renamed his workspace since reading that Barratt homes had launched a new development in Peckham under the name of The Galleria.

‘Just something light for lunch, please,’ he added. ‘Don’t you go trying to fatten me up with a stodgy Sunday roast!’

‘I’m going out, remember?’ she called out, but he didn’t hear.

She sank hack in bed, picking up a travel section although it was her least favourite part of any paper. Journalists gushing about their all-paid-for stay in a luxury hotel. Who cared if the end
of the bog paper was folded into a peak or if they scattered scented mimosas on your pillow at night? Will was with her on this, he couldn’t stand travel journalism, and would never stoop so
low as to be sent on what he termed a tart’s freebie. He was fond of pointing out that travel journalism was to travel literature what penny dreadfuls were to Dostoevsky. Like Tolstoy, he
considered journalism a brothel from which there was no return, except for his own column, which was a mere sideline to his true vocation.

She turned the page to read the question-and-answer column. A school-leaver wanted to know where in the world he should go and spend his gap year that would be free from terrorism. He had a
budget of six thousand pounds, and would like to do something a little different from the usual hippy trail. His sense of entitlement was that of an eighteenth-century aristocrat setting out to do
the Grand Tour before coming home to run the family estate. Why don’t you get a job in a canning factory to pay for your tuition fees, you spoilt little toad, she thought, moving into the
bathroom to run the taps.

Climbing into the bath, Jane planned her day ahead. Her cousin was in town, over from New York, and she had arranged to meet him in the V&A. It was the first place that had come to mind when
he rang and he sounded pleased with the idea. ‘Tell Liberty I can’t wait to see her,’ he said, ‘but you don’t need to bring Will.’ Simon had never liked him and
after their first, disastrous meeting he had tried to put Jane straight. ‘I just don’t get it,’ he said, ‘you can’t possibly want to spend the rest of your life with
him.’ Jane had been very offended and they had barely spoken for a year, but it was all forgiven now. She missed Simon and wished he lived closer.

Liberty came wading through the sea of papers into the bathroom. ‘Cartoons have finished,’ she announced. ‘What can I do now?’ She slipped on a pair of high-heeled shoes
that Jane had kicked off last night and neglected to put away in the wardrobe. ‘Look, Mum, I’m a top model.’ She stuck her nose in the air and walked towards Jane, striking a pose
and delivering a fearsome scowl, then turning on her heel and sashaying back to the door, swinging her narrow little bottom.

Jane smiled. ‘Very good. Is that what you want to do then, when you grow up?’

‘Got to get my bosoms first,’ said Liberty. ‘Then I might marry someone nice and do my exercises and have lunch with people.’

‘Lucky we’re giving you that expensive education, then,’ said Jane. ‘There goes a century of feminism down the toilet.’ ‘What can I do? I’m
boredy-boredy.’

‘How about tidying up my bedroom? Pick up all those newspapers and put them in that bag in the corner.’

Liberty set about it, gathering the papers, folding them neatly, like a small and slightly manic housemaid. Jane was reminded of the Montessori nursery school that Liberty had first attended,
where a lot of expensively crafted wooden objects were imported from Scandinavia in order to teach the children how to put them away. The headmistress had promised the Montessori system provided a
tidy mind for life, so maybe they were reaping the benefits of that precious establishment where, the head had once told her in a frighteningly controlled whisper, the voice of the teacher was
never raised above that of the children.

‘We’re going out soon,’ she said, ‘don’t you remember, we’re going to meet cousin Simon.’

Liberty looked up from her folding. ‘Hooray, I like Simon! Where are we going?’

To look at some tiny shoes. They’re only as big as dolls’ shoes, but they were worn by Chinese ladies who tied their feet up in bandages to stop them growing.’

Liberty nodded her approval. She would enjoy it, and Jane need not feel guilty about engineering an outing to the place where she last saw Rupert. Only five more days, and she would see him
again.

On the morning of her date with Rupert, Jane was planning her tactics. She would play it cool, tell him they could just be friends. There was no need to be dramatic about it,
friendship was a fine thing. Except that friends didn’t usually wake up at 6 a.m. in excitement at the thought of seeing each other.

‘I know how the world began,’ said Liberty from her soapbox in the back seat of the car.

‘Do you?’ Jane was always grateful when Liberty claimed to have the answer. It meant she didn’t have to cast around for one that was accurate but also comprehensible to a
seven-year-old.

‘Yes. Monkeys were thrown out of a volcano, then they turned into people.’

‘Mmm, nice idea. Kind of Darwin meets Big Bang.’

They were just coming up to Hyde Park, and Jane thought maybe she should unload Liberty at Speaker’s Corner, so she could share her theory of evolution with a wider audience.

‘Mum?’

She was off again, on her philosophical half-hour. Thank goodness they didn’t live any further from the school, otherwise it could turn into a full hour of high-level debate.

‘Yes?’

‘What is the point of living if you are going to die?’

She was going for the big ones this morning.

‘That’s a very good question. I think I would say, the point is you should try to lead a useful life.’

‘Is that what you do?’ Children were ruthless, they hadn’t yet learned that it was bad manners to question the meaningless lives of their parents.

‘In a way. I earn money to pay for things, and I look after you. That’s useful.’

The streets round Leinster Square were clogged, as usual, with the cars of useful parents pouring their hopes for the future into their children. When Jane was growing up, children were
accommodated into their parents’ lives. Now it seemed it was the other way round. The child was the tyrant king, and woe betide the parent who didn’t put them first.

Most of the children were looking tanned this week, after the Christmas break. The skiers had white goggle-marks round their eyes, while the winter-sun brigade were all-over honey brown. Jane
had joined the mothers for coffee on the first clay back, so knew all about the benefits of Club Med mini-club versus going it alone in a villa with only the nanny to entertain the children.
‘No, we stayed at home this year,’ she had replied to their questions, as if this were an act of astonishing originality.

Liberty slammed the car door shut and Jane turned the car homewards, back to her useful life spent translating books to pay the fees for Liberty’s horrid school for spoilt brats. No, stop
it, she chased the madness from her head. The school had been chosen for good reasons, and she worked not just for the money, but because she enjoyed the mental stimulation, and working from home
gave her so much freedom.

Freedom to do what, exactly? This is what she wondered as she parked the car and let herself into the house that smelt of laundry and last night’s dinner. Freedom to sit alone in front of
her computer? Freedom to let in the gasman? Freedom to get ahead with preparing an interesting supper of sustainably farmed Norwegian cod?

Her brother Simon had been amused to hear about her life.

‘You’ve become a real home-bird,’ he had said over lunch at the V&A, ‘and when I think how intimidated I was by you. You were always the high-flyer.’

‘Oh, rubbish,’ she’d said, ‘you’ve always been cleverer than me.’

‘But you were the A student. Mum was so proud of you. She was proud of me, too, in the end, but you were the steady performer.’

They had talked then about their mother, how glad she had been to see Jane taking opportunities her generation had never had. The chance to walk out the front door in a sharp suit and be clever
all day. Earning the money to pay someone less clever to come in and clear things up at home.

Well, that was ail over now and the sharp suits were gathering dust in the wardrobe. In the best music-hall tradition, she had turned into her mother, holding things together at home and doing
the best she could for her daughter. Patterns repeated themselves.

Rupert rang at ten thirty. She pushed her chair back from the table and held the phone tightly to her ear in anticipation of the pleasure of seeing him again.

‘Are you working?’ he asked.

‘Of course. You too?’

‘Sort of. Richard’s just gone out, so I can speak freely and tell you how much I HATE MY JOB!’ Me shouted the words and she giggled.

‘Why don’t we have lunch this time?’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen you eat, I think it could be sexy’

‘Wouldn’t count on it, I’m a messy eater.’

‘I remember a friend of mine left his wife because he couldn’t stand watching her eat. It’s something you need to clear up early on in a relationship.’

‘We’re not in a relationship, remember.’

‘No, of course not. I’ve told Richard I’m having lunch with a prospect, so that’s what you are.’

‘Makes me sound like something out of
The Crucible.
Goody Prospect.’

‘Do you know Racine? It’s in the Brompton Road, opposite the V&A. French food in a rather stern setting, solemn rows of dark tables. The mussels in saffron broth are quite
something.’

Three hours and a great deal of preparation later, Jane was able to agree with him that the saffron broth was indeed quite something. And so are you, she thought, seeing him
again for the first time in three weeks. He said he was glad she agreed with him, and she noticed that when he smiled the skin around his eyes broke into laughter lines of unconditional
enjoyment.

He was telling a story against himself now, about being the only unfashionable person in the hotel in the desert. ‘I took the same shorts I always take on holiday, but everyone else was in
a djallaba, leaving me to be the token fat Englishman.’

He couldn’t care less about appearing gauche, very different from Will who would never invite ridicule by casting himself in an unflattering light.

‘It was one of those minimalist hotels where you can never find the door handle or the light switch. Switches aren’t aesthetic so they have to be hidden under a flat panel,
apparently. So was the minibar: I had to press every bit of wall space before I found it.’

She should stop drawing comparisons, it wasn’t fair. Of course it was more fun to listen to the stories of someone you barely knew rather than tread the familiar paths of conversation with
the person you lived with. It was too easy to exaggerate or romanticise. She shouldn’t read too much into it.

‘I’m so happy to see you again,’ she said. ‘It’s such a treat to meet for lunch . . .’ She wanted to let him know that happiness was something that could be
measured out in small doses, that it didn’t require any life-changing decisions. ‘It’s all you can ask, isn’t it?’ she went on. ‘Live each day as if it were your
last, because one day it will be. And know that at least you had the saffron broth.’

Rupert was not prepared to play the game, he couldn’t trivialise his feelings.