How to Get a (Love) Life (17 page)

I started down the stairs with a smile on my face.

That night we were herded into Guy’s Land Rover, which looked so clean I was convinced he’d hired it for the occasion, and taken to a Christmas drinks party in an enormous house just outside the village where my Mum lived. Amazingly, Mark had shaved and was wearing a new dark blue suit and tie. His arm was draped proudly round Carol, whose green silk wrap dress contrasted with her red hair perfectly. I felt a bit drab in my steel grey pencil dress. My mum had been quick to agree.

The drive was lined with lanterns hanging from the trees and the honey-coloured manor house was bathed in a beautiful golden glow from the fairy lights hung along every available surface. The hostess greeted us in a waft of lavender and Je Reviens. Her husband, a foot shorter and a few inches wider, rushed forward to bury his head in my mother’s breasts, which seemed to be sparkling with a powdery sheen. As he emerged, I stifled a laugh at the fine layer of glitter now covering the tip of his nose. Guy, oblivious to the greeting, having been on his mobile since slamming the door of his Land Rover, shook the host’s hand vigorously, an automatic smile clamped on his face, his eyes already roving to the scene beyond. Duly introduced, we trailed into the large hallway where, beneath a huge Christmas tree decorated in silver and red that still managed to fill the room with the smell of pine needles and Christmas, waitresses greeted us with overloaded trays of canapés and champagne. Other guests clustered in small groups around the room, sipping from crystal flutes, and surreptitiously eyed up each other’s outfits. Lofty ancestors peered down from the enormous oil paintings that lined the walls and I tried not to feel intimidated as we chatted and drank.

Carol and I found ourselves parked beneath a portrait of a heroic-looking soldier with a stump for a leg.

‘Oh dear,’ Carol commented, pointing at the missing appendage.

‘Oh dear indeed.’

‘Let’s hope we don’t get absolutely legless tonight,’ she went on, nudging me conspiratorially.

‘That is dreadful,’ I choked, a little bit of champagne dribbling down my chin. ‘The poor man.’

Carol looked suitably chastised.

‘It can’t have been an easy life,’ I continued. ‘He was probably hoping to have a good knees-up on his return.’

Carol snorted. ‘He might not have been able to foot the bill,’ she chuckled.

‘I take it you are both busy cackling over some poor unfortunate,’ Mark said, appearing at our sides and giving me a friendly squeeze of the waist. ‘Hey, Nic, have you seen who’s here,’ he said, jerking his head towards a huge bunch of flowers that were sadly not quite enormous enough to block out the person he’d indicated.

‘Oh God,’ I muttered. ‘Kill me now.’

‘But it’s Stannnnley.’ Mark laughed, turning to Carol to fill her in on the details. ‘Total, massive, stonking crush on Nic here ever since she sat on him at some dinner do … long story, she’ll protest …’

I was mouthing angrily.

‘Mother thinks he’s completely divine,’ Mark continued, refusing to be interrupted. ‘Because he’s utterly filthy rich.’ He turned to me. ‘Nicola, you must go and say hellooooo, you must, you just must, dahling,’ he pleaded in a frighteningly accurate impression of our mother.

‘Shut it, Mark,’ I said, alarmed that Stanley would sense all the attention and turn around.

‘He doesn’t look dreadful,’ Carol commented, sizing him up.

‘Hmm …’ I muttered, taking a peek at Stanley who, even in a dinner jacket, still managed to look ridiculous. His hair was matted and worn in a straggly ponytail, fastened with a crushed velvet bow for the occasion. His suit seemed two sizes too big because he was a man who had been waiting most of his adult life to ‘grow into things’. His thin face was covered in tufts of unshaven beard that he thought made him look sexy and relaxed but really made most people want to take a blade to his face. It wasn’t so much his physical appearance that had really turned me off Stanley however, it had been his high-pitched voice and his snobbish, uppity manner.

When we’d first been introduced, he’d said to me: ‘Your mother tells me you are a PA, how lovely, I’ve always rally, rally wanted one of them myself.’ It wasn’t absolutely clear what Stanley’s occupation was, but, from what I’d gathered, it seemed Stanley spent much of his time on his parents’ estate, making sure the ‘damn gardener’ was doing the right things, whilst he played his mother at backgammon. He was a real mummy’s boy through and through, still living at home in his early thirties. In fact, I noted with an audible groan, Mummy was here tonight. Red in the face and bursting out of a hot pink taffeta dress that would make it possible to balance a collection of canapés on her ample bosom, she was squawking at someone standing to the right of Stanley; something about the polo season and that ‘gorgeous gel Zara’. As she swung round to introduce some frightened-looking blonde to her son, she almost smacked him in the face with her breasts. I hurriedly looked away before it was too late.

Mark noticed the movement. ‘Aaahhh, see, Carol, she’s smitten. She has the look of love in her eye, check it out. She is practically drooling over him.’

‘I am not!’

‘She is not!’ Carol and I chorused.

‘Hey, Nic. Maybe Stanley could be part of your new project,’ Mark suggested, popping a prawn vol-au-vent into his smug mouth.

‘I warn you, Mark, this sausage comes on a skewer and I will use it on you,’ I said, waving it threateningly at him.

‘Ouch, Nic. Come on, he’s perfect, and you need a new participant in
The Project
,’ he insisted, miming a quotation mark with his one available hand.

‘Shh, Mark, stop it,’ I giggled. ‘And anyway it is not a project.’ I paused. ‘It’s a hopelessly futile attempt to get a love life.’

Carol stared at us both. ‘What are you two blathering about?’ she asked, stealing the last of the canapés from Mark’s hand.

‘Oh dear, please don’t judge me too harshly,’ I said, as Mark launched into a long tale that charted all the various humiliations of the last month of my life. Carol fortunately laughed at the appropriate moments, gasped at the appropriate moments, and slapped Mark at the appropriate moments (‘Sea kayaking, in November … how could he?’).

‘Sounds interesting,’ she commented when Mark had finished. ‘You know, I’ve actually got a cousin who …’

‘Stop right there,’ I said, holding up my hand to her. ‘No more setting me up. Truly,’ I insisted as they opened their mouths to argue. ‘I’m going about things in a new and different way.’

‘Like what?’

‘The minute details of my cunning plan are yet to fully materialise …’

‘Huh?’

‘She means she hasn’t thought of them yet,’ translated Carol.

‘Thank you, Carol.’ I nodded at her. ‘But rest assured, I am going to come up with something. It just won’t involve any more blind dates with total strangers.’

‘But I …’

‘But we …’

‘I have to pee,’ I declared loudly, and then I turned round slap bang into Stanley. ‘Oh, I …’

‘Doesn’t one always have to at the most inopportune moments?’ he leered and I raced away.

‘Where are the blinking, blinding toilets?’ I muttered five minutes later, still searching the long, dimly lit corridors for a lavatory. My feet ached in my new heels as I tottered past paintings of serene rural scenes; cottages, mills, farmers in big hats doing things in the fields, which I assumed to be hoeing or raking or some such. I heard the burble of voices getting further away as I continued, past sculptures and large suits of armour glinting dangerously in the shadows, before entering a wing of the house I was sure I’d already ventured down. Rounding another bend, I pushed open a heavy oak door. The room was lit by the rosy glow of candlelight, and a fire roared beneath an ornate mantelpiece, over which hung a large gilt-framed mirror. The room was too big to be a toilet, and the rows of bookshelves climbing to the ceiling seemed quite over the top for some light bathroom reading; I must have stumbled across the library. I turned to retreat, but a voice called out from the depths of the room.

‘Come in, dear,’ it said.

Hoping the voice was not a figment of my imagination or the Ghost of Christmas Past, I followed the sound to a vast leather armchair placed next to the fire. As my eyes adjusted to the dim lighting I made out the slight figure of an elderly woman.

‘I’m so sorry, I’ve got the wrong room,’ I said quickly.

‘Not at all, come in, sit down,’ she said, indicating another armchair placed opposite her.

The fire crackled, sprigs of holly hung from the mantelpiece, Christmas cards stood to attention, and the whole scene seemed enormously comforting.

‘Wine?’ she offered, producing a glass from a tray beside her.

‘That would be lovely,’ I said, going over and taking the glass. ‘Thank you.’

I sat down. ‘I’m Nicola, by the way,’ I said, pointing slightly unnecessarily to my chest, as if she wouldn’t be aware who I meant.

‘Esther,’ she said, sipping at her wine.

She must have been at least eighty, I guessed. She leaned forward, pouring the wine with two hands to steady the bottle. Dressed in a simple navy dress with a neat string of pearls round her neck, she looked elegant and well at home in this enormous house. Her hair was short and showed off little pearl-drop earrings which sparkled as she moved. Her eyes glinted in the firelight as she spoke.

‘So, why have you squirrelled yourself away here then?’

‘I’m looking for the loo is my excuse.’ I blushed. ‘You?’

‘Oh, just a bit of quiet. My ex-husband is out there. Both of them in fact.’ She cackled.

‘I see.’

‘Yes, one’s brought his new wife to show off. She looks like the Christmas turkey, trussed up in layers of what looks to me to be turquoise tin foil.’

I wrinkled my nose at the thought.

‘Never did marry well,’ she said, swilling the wine round in the glass.

‘Why?’ I found myself blurting out.

She didn’t look annoyed, her brow wrinkled as she sat and thought for a while.

‘Nothing in common,’ she concluded, sipping again at her wine.

‘Like?’ I ventured.

‘Like fine wine.’ She cackled again, pouring another glass. ‘And music, and dancing, and a sense of humour and books. They didn’t read a book between them,’ she went on. ‘Just sport – fishing, shooting and bloody horses. I can’t stand bloody horses, or rather bloody polo. If I had to watch another polo chukka, I’d end it all right out there in the hall.’

‘Wow, you
really
don’t like polo,’ I commented.

‘How about you, Nicola, are you married?’

‘No.’

‘Courting.’

I laughed. ‘Not courting, not seeing anyone in fact, I am …’ I paused.

‘Shopping around?’

‘Exactly.’ We both laughed.

‘Well, you keep shopping, Nicola. You need to find someone you can share your life with, someone you have something in common with … although a handsome face always helps … and good legs. They’re vital.’

‘Absolutely. Thank you for the wine.’ I lurched over and gave her a hug. Then straightened up, feeling embarrassed. ‘Sorry,’ I laughed.

She just smiled. ‘You’re a gem,’ she said simply.

‘Thank you.’

‘Nicola,’ she called as I reached the door.

‘Yes,’ I said turning, anticipating a wise word, a piece of advice or some thought-provoking proverb.

‘The loo’s on the left, dear.’

Tottering out of the loos and realising I might have had one mulled wine too many, I couldn’t avoid the looming figure of Stanley, who was standing next to an alarming sculpture of a naked man with long, flowing hair, one arm pointing towards the sky, the other resting on his hip as if frozen in a dance move from ‘Night Fever’. This thought made me giggle. Stanley lit up and walked purposefully over to me so that I was pinned back against the wall.

‘You’re looking rally, rally, lovely this evening,’ he said, smoothing his ponytail down with a hand and licking his bottom lip.

‘Thank you,’ I squeaked, a hand flying self-consciously to my chest.

He leaned closer. ‘Just been having a rather enlightening
tête-à-tête
with Mark,’ he said.

‘Have you?’ I said, playing dumb.

Note to self: kill Mark
.

‘And I’m planning to act on it,’ he said in a whisper.

‘Gosh, really, well that’s nice. Oh look! They’ve hung tinsel from the beams, how gorgeous.’

‘Nic,’ came a shout. Carol waved at me from the end of the carpeted corridor. I exhaled loudly.

‘Coming.’ I waved back, scooting under Stanley’s arm before he could stop me. ‘Lovely to see you, Stanley,’ I threw over my shoulder. ‘Happy Christmas.’

Carol linked arms with me as I appeared.

‘Bloody Mark,’ I said in a low, dangerous voice.

Many mulled wines later, we piled back into the Land Rover, Guy talking into the hands-free as he drove us home. Mother sat silently next to him, her right eye wandering as it always did after too many glasses of wine. I told Carol and Mark about meeting Esther on my trip to the loo.

‘Esther isch right. Isch about interests. We
have
to have the shared intereschts.’

Carol turned to Mark with a hiccup. ‘What are you intereschrested in?’

Marks eyes were crossed. ‘You ’n bats.’

‘Yesch, but you’re a bit weird.’

‘Yeah, but we did schpend a lot of time in the same places when we met.’

‘Yesch, but you just followed me to them, which is called stalking, so waschn’t a coincidence.’

‘Thish is true,’ Mark said. ‘But
sometimes
we met by accident in the same place because we do have similar intereschts.’

‘True,’ Carol said, leaning across to peck him on the nose. She turned to me. ‘Men juscht love cars, tools and football so you should do something with that.’

‘Amazshing idea. I will,’ I announced, lurching forward as Guy parked the Land Rover in the driveway.

We tumbled out and crunched up the gravel path to the house, laughing stupidly as mum missed the keyhole three times.

Sniffing about us behaving childishly, she seemed surprised when I gave her a warm hug. ‘Night Ma,’ I said, pecking her on the cheek.