Aphrodite's Workshop for Reluctant Lovers (22 page)

‘When I was little I thought I knew what a broken heart smelt like.'

‘And what was that?'

‘Cigarette smoke, wool and Old Spice aftershave.' I stopped and asked him, ‘Sorry, have I got lipstick on my teeth?'

‘Yes, you have, as a matter of fact, but actually I was thinking that you have an unusually expressive face. You would make either a very good witness or a very bad one, depending obviously on what one was trying to achieve.'

I smiled.

‘Thank you, I think.'

He smiled back at me.

‘Sorry, I interrupted you.'

‘That's all right, I'm sure it wasn't anything important.'

‘Broken hearts?'

‘Oh yes. No, I was just thinking of Zoe again, my goddaughter.'

John nodded.

‘I wanted to be able to console her but I just couldn't. I couldn't sit there and tell her that I truly believed that the two of them, she and her fiancé, would end up living happily ever after. Because the truth is that most couples don't. Obviously if you marry enough times till death us do part becomes increasingly attainable, but for twenty-somethings the first time around? No.'

‘Different partners for different stages of one's life,' John Sterling said. ‘It's being talked about. But there will always be victims of that way of doing it, children in particular. But if the uncouplings were conducted in an amicable manner and communications were left open, we could have not a splintering of families but an expanding circle, where each new partnership means another person being brought into the family rather than one leaving.' He reached for his wine glass. ‘But of course life doesn't work that way.'

I sighed.

‘No, it doesn't. I don't think I'd ever contemplate getting married, or even moving in with anyone again. If I met someone, I would insist we each have our own home at least. Men and women simply aren't made to exist together in close proximity for any length of time.'

John Sterling was about to reply when he was tapped on the shoulder. I looked up at a pretty blonde woman in her mid-thirties. She gave me a friendly nod and then, still standing behind him, she bent down and pecked John Sterling on the cheek.

‘Hi, darling. I took a chance I'd find you here.' She slipped into the chair next to him. ‘Hi,' she said again, to me this time, ‘I'm Melanie.'

John looked surprised at seeing her but pleased too.

‘This is Rebecca Finch. Rebecca is a novelist,' he explained.

‘A writer!' she squealed. ‘That's so amazing.'

I smiled, trying to look modest.

‘Not really.'

‘Oh but it is. I love reading. I don't know why I haven't read you. Oh I tell you what, you wouldn't consider coming to speak at my reading group, would you?'

I wrote down my name and details on the back of a napkin and gave it to her.

‘I'd love to,' I said. ‘Now I must go.'

Melanie turned to John.

‘Why don't we give Rebecca a lift back? You've only had one glass, haven't you? Then that's fine. We can go on to my place afterwards. I wanted you to take a look at this file I got from Derek Flint …'

Shutting my front door behind me was like pulling up a drawbridge and blocking out a messy world full of emotion and turmoil. It was good to be on my own, safely at a distance.

What do you mean on your own?
Coco popped his head round the kitchen door.
I'm here
.

No, you're not
, I said and kicked off my shoes, leaving them right in the middle of the hallway, where anyone could have stumbled over them, if anyone had been there.

MOTHER IS FUMING.

‘Why didn't you stop her?' she demands.

‘Stop who?'

‘The Melanie creature.'

‘You didn't tell me to. You told me to stand back and watch.'

‘And if I told you to stand back and watch me cross the road and a bus bore down on me, would you still just stand there or would you actually think and push me out of harm's way?'

‘You're immortal,' I remind her. ‘There would be no need.'

‘You see, this is what I can't stand: your flippancy, your complete inability to act in a responsible and proactive manner. You know perfectly well what I'm saying. The moment this woman appeared you should have –'

‘- Pushed him out of harm's way.'

Mother's eyes are dark-green and her lovely lips are set tight.

‘You are either very stupid or very cheeky. Either way I despair. Yes, Eros, I despair.'

I go up to her and try to give her a hug but she steps away.

‘No, Eros, I'm serious.'

So was I. I'm fed up with trying to please her, with trying to make her love me. Because she never will, it's as simple as
that. There are times when she likes me well enough, she's probably quite fond of me when she remembers to be, but I know what real motherly love is like, I've watched it on the screen. She loved Adonis, though.

‘You could have gone down there yourself,' I mutter.

‘What was that?'

‘Nothing. You told me not to shoot, anyway. You told me it would be too soon, that they weren't fully prepared yet.'

‘Yes, Eros, I did tell you that but then circumstances changed and we had an
emergency
on our hands.'

I shrug.

‘Sorry.'

ALL I WANTED TO do was find some uplifting examples of everlasting love for Angel-face. A reasonable enough task, I had thought. But I had been wrong. Instead, I opened the newspaper to find a headline shouting, ‘A quarter of us regret marriage.' Apparently one in four married people wished they hadn't ‘bothered' and one in seven had doubts when walking up the aisle. I thought, OK, that's not so bad: three in four married people did
not
wish they hadn't bothered. Surely it was not beyond me to find just a handful of them? Though I had said I wouldn't use her, I decided to phone Matilda. Time was ticking by, and according to Bridget, Angel-face's doubts were growing each day.

‘Hi, Rebecca. How's it going?'

‘Hi. Fine. I know I've asked you this before, but you and Chris are happy together, aren't you? Please tell me you are.'

‘Chris and I are happy together.'

‘I'm serious.'

‘Where is this coming from?'

‘It's Angel-face's book. So far all I've got are my maternal grandparents.'

‘I'm not going to tell you all the intimate details about my marriage just so that you can tell the world.'

‘Not the world, just Angel-face.'

‘I know you writers.'

‘No, I mean it. And I won't say it's you. I'll call you something else.'

‘Can I be Nicolette?'

‘Nicolette? Sure.'

‘No, Theo, I want to be Theo. I've always liked those androgynous names.'

‘Whatever you like as long as you tell me you and Chris are happy.'

We are. We're perfectly happy. He should be Scott.'

‘Scott it is, but I don't want perfectly happy, I want completely and utterly happy.'

‘Did your mother not tell you beggars can't be choosers? No, no, I don't suppose Vanessa would have done. But they can't. And
perfectly happy
is my best offer. And after twelve years together it's pretty damn good.'

‘You and I have been together for thirty-seven years,' I said fondly. ‘It's a heart-warming thought. Of course we never had sex. If we had, we probably wouldn't even be talking now.'

Was the secret of happiness low expectations? Hearing Theo's story you might well think that:

I suppose you could say ours was a marriage of convenience, but now I'm beginning to think that Scott and I are the only happy couple around.

We'd always known each other, through our parents initially. Of course at university he was chasing after you. He used to come to my room late at night, drunk, going on
and on about how much he fancied you and how you were his ideal woman but you didn't even know he existed. And you and I used to joke about him. We even took the piss out of his ears. What I never told you was that I rather liked him; I mean admitting that would have been like admitting one liked Val Doonican.

Of course, as we know, Scott never got his dream girl. There's no need to look embarrassed. He still thinks you're great, but love has to feed on something. After university, he and I kept in touch, as you know, bumping into each other at mutual friends,' meeting for a drink or a quick dinner now and then, calling each other up when we had a spare ticket to a concert or the theatre. Neither of us were very lucky in love. It seemed that in life's sitcom we were the eternal sidekicks. In my own case I put it down to my ankles. That probably sounds silly but I really believe that to be a leading lady you need ankles. Scott, of course, is one of those men who narrowly escapes being handsome. If his ears were just a little smaller and his nose a little less beaky …

The years went by. I got promoted to features editor and Scott was climbing the corporate ladder very nicely. We both owned our own homes. Mine was a little basement flat in Earl's Court, remember? And he had a rather grown-up place in Pimlico. We should by rights, we told each other, have been the bee's knees and the cat's pyjamas – in spite of the ankles and the ears. Why hadn't we been snapped up? We spent our thirtieth birthdays together (you were away somewhere, researching a book). I had just been dumped by Rob Herbert and Scott was on yet another Arthurian quest for some unobtainable maiden.

He did find a girl, Fiona King, who briefly loved him back, but in the end, of course, she broke his heart; he has the kind of heart, open and trusting, that's easily damaged. For a while there I was worried that he'd never bounce back.

For me there was the old ticking biological clock. I had never been one of those women who dream of motherhood, cooing over every passing pram. In fact you could say I was one of the least cooing amongst our circle of friends, other than you, obviously. But even you were married. Then, as I approached my mid-thirties, I began to find it increasingly difficult to imagine a life without a family. Maybe it's no more profound than wanting curly hair when one's own is straight, or straight when it's curly, but what I had, what I was, single, successful, high-earning, high-spending, home-owning, triple-holiday-taking, didn't make me fulfilled. Instead I peered into prams and lurked by Mothercare windows. I smiled at the crocodiles of four- and five-year-olds in their school uniforms crossing the street on their way to the park and I envied the mothers double-parking in front of the school, some perky, others exhausted, some shiny-haired and some a mess, but all of them purposeful, needed, at the centre of a family and of life.

Friends with children told me how they envied
me
. How humdrum and plain exhausting their lives were, how unfair it was that the brain is the only body part that shrinks when not exercised. They pointed to my Betty Jackson jacket and my Gucci handbag and told me that the last time they'd been on a holiday that did not involve sand-castles and tonsils was so far back in time that they'd forgotten what it felt like to visit an art museum or read a book in the sun. And yet, behind all the tales of
woe, lay a basic fulfilment they could not hide. That fulfilment was at the core of them. What was at the core of me? More chic suits and must-have handbags and holidays in the sun with my dwindling group of single, childless friends.

Another lonely Sunday dragged on and I phoned Scott and asked him if he felt like going to the cinema. We ended up watching some art-house film that had received prizes and rave reviews. It was dreadful so we left halfway through, squeezing our way out, apologetic and giggling. With anyone else, I thought, I would have felt the need to stay watching until the last credit had rolled and the camera faded out of another rainy urban street.

We had dinner round the corner and he took my hand as we walked back down the King's Road to get a taxi. As one pulled up, he gave my address and jumped in after me. We didn't speak for the entire journey. He got out first, paid and walked me in through my own front door. It was a new side of him, this decisive, silent man.

He put his hand over mine as I reached for the light switch.

‘Leave it,' he said.

That night we ended up in bed together. And it was good.

We woke in the morning and there were no dramas or questions. He got up, whistling, comfortably naked, leaving me to admire his legs that were straight and strong. He went to the bathroom and appeared again, still whistling, a towel around his waist, and went downstairs to the kitchen.

On his way he said, ‘You like tea in the morning, don't you?'

He brought breakfast and the papers back to bed and we remained there side by side, reading and sipping our tea, the morning sun shining through the windows.

After a while he said, ‘We should treasure this: once the kids start arriving we won't have any mornings like these for a long while.'

‘I HAVE WONDERFUL NEWS.' It was Dorothy, my editor. ‘You are on the shortlist for the Great Romantic Read of the Year!'

Coco immediately began to practise his acceptance speech.

Judges, sponsors, Ladies and Gentlemen, losers, I stand before you the winner of this prestigious award. Obviously, less prestige and more money would have worked just as well, if not better, but
…

Shut up, Coco
.

I phoned Maggie Jacobs to ask, ‘What should I wear?'

‘Not black.'

‘Really? I want to feel comfortable, and anyway I don't want to look like a cliché romantic novelist.'

‘Nor would you want to look like a romantic novelist trying hard not to look like a cliché romantic novelist.'