Separate Lives (5 page)

Cathy worked hard at being sweetness itself. As she was also a sublime amateur cook, we bonded in the kitchen. (Years later she'd watch
Masterchef
with a permanently wistful look, but, being hopelessly self-effacing, always refused to apply.) Mum, on the other hand, wasn't much cop as a cook, though she was useful in other ways—it was she, for example, who had instructed me always to remove my makeup after parties. Anyway, the point is that this new fractured family reconfiguration may have turned out to be a triangle—and a pretty good triangle—but because it was more isosceles than equilateral it was just not my triangle of choice.

So I stood in Joan Fox's kitchen, bacon butty in hand, surfing an invisible wave of wistfulness and feeling something dangerously close to sorry for myself. And not even for the obvious reason—a potentially vanishing partner—but because
if I lost him, I'd also lose all of this
. At that precise moment I wasn't sure which was worse; all I knew was that if I lost this I had also lost my shot at belonging to a family. And I don't think I'd ever realized quite how much that meant to me, far less ever articulated it.

The rest of the morning was spent mucking in, tidying up, debriefing and re-running scenes from the previous
night. I seemed to have missed a lot. Apparently Nigel's golfing buddy and near-neighbor Adam Purves had turned up to the party with somebody called Jennifer who had implausible Mrs. Slocombe hair, while Mrs. Purves was apparently sitting at home weeping into a Campari and soda. Adam and Jennifer had met while tackling a tricky bunker a month ago and had been inseparable ever since. However, everybody whose surname was Fox, or nearly-Fox, agreed that introducing your amusingly coiffed mistress to the world at your best friend's golden wedding party pretty much ensured golf-club-related social suicide.

Then, to a roomful of laughter, Alex shared the story of my history (and subsequent reconciliation) with “the sausage woman, aka—wait for it!—‘Heinous' Harriet Harvey, Scourge of the Sixth.”

“But Susie, dear, you really should have said!” exclaimed Joan with slightly more glee—a hit TV series-worth of
Glee
, in hindsight—than she might have done. Or perhaps I was just being a bit thin-skinned.

“You know how it is, Joan. Lot on my mind—didn't want to burden you on the big day.”

And I don't think I imagined the triangle of quick glances and furrowed brows that followed this unremarkable statement. A blink-and-you'd-miss-it from Guy—firstly to me and then to Alex. And then from Alex back to Guy, and swiftly on to me. It was almost imperceptible, but not quite imperceptible enough.

“Oh, it wouldn't have been a burden, it would have amused us all!” said Joan, oblivious to all the glancing, which, not knowing whom to trust, felt like the start of a potentially messy game of “wink murder.”

And on it rolled, until we eventually departed after a lunch of leftovers and some overly complicated send-offs, plus kissing.

• * From Isobel: urgent whispered demands not to “breathe a word to Alex about you-know-who. Promise? Strictly
  entre nous
  , yeah?”
  
• * From Guy: “Remember, please don't tell Lisa what I told you about the, y'know, thing!” Which only confused “things” because I couldn't actually recall having had a conversation with Guy at all last night, so I was now entirely up Willow creek without a paddle—or indeed a “Thing.” But I nodded and assured him I wouldn't breathe a word.
  
• * From Lisa: “Hey, hon, Guy doesn't know I know but actually I do know, so it's toadally fine. But isn't that like hilarious?”
  Toadally
  . If I'd known what she was on about. However, I grinned and winked. “Everybody's secrets are safe with me.”
  
• * From Will: a briskly whispered “Hang in there, Susie. You'll be fine.”
  
• * From Joan: “So lovely to see you and the children. I must say you're looking a little pale and peaky but perhaps that's to be expected. Though you're not skinny at all.” What the hell did that mean?
  
• * From Nigel: “Susie. Lovely. Safe home. Bye.” Dear Nigel, the definition of uncomplicated. Such a relief.
  

Having burnt out on the combination of extreme excitement, excess sugar and lack of sleep, Lula and Charlie had both drifted off even before we hit the A12.

“You're quiet,” said Alex after a mile or two.

“It's been a pretty noisy weekend, so . . .” I tailed off. “I hardly saw you. Have a good time?”

“I guess. It was all about the folks, really, and they definitely had a good time. I haven't seen Dad looking quite so chuffed since . . . maybe since Will got his starred first, or Isobel was called to the Bar, or Guy scored his first try for Harlequins.”

It was Alex's turn to tail off and I felt, despite myself—despite everything—an unexpected surge of warmth.

“I seem to recall he was completely delighted when you became Publishing Director.” (Did I tell you that Alex is the publisher of three men's style magazines? Apologies, distracted.)

“Maybe.” Alex sighed. “You want music?”

Sunday afternoon, Radio 2, Johnnie Walker's
Sounds of the Seventies
.

I'm not in love, so don't forget it. It's just a silly phase I'm going through. And just because I call you up, don't get me wrong, don't think you've got it made
 . . .

Alex punched the retune button. “I hate that song. Always have.” He stared straight ahead while navigating a roundabout. His expression . . . expressionless, unfathomable.

“I like it.”

“Yeah, you would.”

I didn't know what he meant by that but I did know it wasn't the best time to ask, so we drove the rest of the way home accompanied by Radio 4 while, inside my head, I started practicing the beginning of an entirely different conversation. After numerous versions—the traffic was bad—I eventually hit on one that seemed to strike the right sort of tone: potentially quite light but with hidden depths. It went like this:

“So, anyway, Alex, um, I was just wondering . . . who is this person whose name begins with P who wants you to live . . .” (at which point I would do air-quotes with my fingers, so help me Joan) “‘. . . a different sort of life?' A life which apparently includes smiley emoticons and three kisses?”

Now all I had to do was pick my moment. Fingers crossed.

Dear Mum,

After the dinner at Guy and Lisa's, I was at home and in bed by 12:30, having checked up on Hal, who had fallen asleep with his light on and the new iPod Touch on his pillow, so it had probably already fried his brain (does that date me, thinking that all electronic devices are potentially mini-microwaves? Probably), in which case David would be spared the school fees, should Hal ever actually get in to College Hall, north London's most over-subscribed fee-paying-guarantee-of-a-place-at-a-pukka-uni. Though, knowing David, he'd probably offer the bloody school a new IT building. Come to think of it, he probably already had. And I can't believe I've only just thought of that. No wonder Hal was so chilled. “Walked it?” Daddy probably walked it for him.

I worry about Hal. He's a good kid mostly, but like all his mates he's also what used to be described as “spoilt.” “Little Emperors” they call them on Mumsnet (the website?
Are you up to speed?): the children of parents for whom belt-tightening is what you're able to do when you've lost another precious pound at the gym. They have
everybloodything
they want, and loads more they don't want, even in the middle of this recession-what-recession. And then it's all about the screens. I think I'm pretty multi-task-tastic, frankly (and this I definitely get from you), but kids now (kids now? I am turning into you) are super-multi-taskmasters. I'll watch Hal playing a game on his laptop while keeping one eye on the telly as he texts his mate Dom and I just think . . .
give yourself a break
. Though to be fair I did find him in bed the other night actually reading a book. And not even on his Kindle—a proper book made of ye olde dead trees. According to Hal, “sometimes reading's wicked, Mum.” Thank Christ for that, eh?

So Hal's probably mostly OK, even though he leads this weird other life when he's with his dad and the current Mrs. Ashford. Whatever else is going on in my life, it's really important for me to keep his feet on the ground because having a filthy-rich mostly absent father is probably grounds for decades of therapy. He has his dad on a pedestal—and you know that on a pedestal is probably where David is happiest.

Anyway, I'm making it sound as if me and David are still at loggerheads when we're actually sort of OK (did I tell you that?), mostly, kind of, on a day-to-day basis. If only because there isn't a day-to-day basis. I haven't seen him since Hal's handover at Christmas and with a bit of luck I won't see him again until Speech Day, and email actually does seem to work for us, even though so many other divorced parents say it usually makes things worse, because of the possibility of misinterpretation. You know, take an ordinary misunderstanding, multiply it by a thousand, light blue touch
paper and retire. The trick is to keep emails brief, factual and polite and to stop yourself telling the ex what you really think of them. I have always been the mistress of email—you know that, even though I'm writing this letter in the old-fashioned but post-handwritten way, via printer ink on paper. Whatever, email is just about all I ever intended to be the mistress of.

I've got a horrible feeling I may have done my email-spiel to Alex at some point, but with a bit of luck he forgot because it's not like it's relevant. And I'm sure he's the master of email—he works in publishing, FFS (don't know if you know what FFS stands for? For fuck's sake. But you don't say it aloud—it's only written down).

So anyway I met this man called Alex over a bowl of chili at Lisa's and . . . I chose to forget about him almost immediately. I do believe it's possible to choose to put somebody out of your mind—it's probably one of the things that mark you out as a grown-up. But it was easy enough to do it because, two days later, I was going on a proper see-you-at-eight date with somebody who wasn't married. OK, so I hadn't actually met him when we made the date and therefore couldn't categorically say he wasn't married, but I had to believe him when we spoke on the phone to arrange it and I said something like “don't forget to take your wedding ring off” and he laughed, but said (quite earnestly), “Trust me, I'm definitely totally one hundred percent divorced. Shall I bring my decree absolute?”

Internet dating. I honestly never thought it would come to this—and I took a lot of persuading, believe me—but when I finally caved in, well . . . where do you go if you're in my position? I'm forty-two, I can't hang out in bars or clubs and I don't have an office to go to anymore. And even if I did it
would be full of teenage girls, middle-aged women and gay men, which is great if you want to gossip about
X-Factor
or how much cosmetic surgery Madonna is still not admitting she's had, but not if you're looking for love.

So I bit the bullet. Signed up to Imnotinlove.com, spent an entire Friday evening working my way through a bottle of red (two-thirds, actually, just in case you think I'm losing the plot) and constructing a profile.

It's weird, selling yourself. You have to be upbeat and accentuate the positives without being entirely unrealistic. Before I started, I read a few by women my age and they were so unashamedly “Look at me! Look at my tits!” that I nearly gave up, though eventually I constructed something that felt honest but not too honest and found a great snap that Lisa had taken of me in Chamonix last Easter—bit of a ski-tan, not TMI tit-wise (TMI? Too Much Information: the basic currency of the dating website)—and just as I was starting to wobble and think this really wasn't for me, I hit Send and then there I was: a pretty good-looking, fit forty-two-year-old brunette single-mum-of-one with her own teeth (underneath her veneers) and a nice house in Belsize Park and no mortgage and no pressing need to work (not that I don't want to, but have the choice), who loves yoga and the gym and skiing and who recently ran the London marathon for a breast-cancer charity but who isn't averse to quiet sofa-spud nights in front of the telly, and can appreciate a film with subtitles (occasionally) and is happy to eat her own bodyweight in carbs over dinner as long as she can get down the gym the next morning, and . . .

Was it Robert Louis Stevenson who said it is better to travel hopefully than it is to arrive? Whatever, the point is that, wherever I was headed with the internet dating,
the next few days were fun and checking my messages on the website became quite addictive. I don't know what it is about the net that gives you this false sense of security and inspires you to open up and . . . well, if not let it all hang out, then certainly push your boundaries a bit. Within a few days I'd narrowed the fifty-six (I know!) contenders (in fact I'd had more replies, but these were the ones who didn't sound like wannabe serial killers and who could write whole sentences with punctuation) down to a workable ten, and then I'd messaged them and we'd started chatting by email (I couldn't cope with instant messaging; it felt too in-your-face), and then five of those fell by the wayside. Why?

• * One of them revealed he'd read the entire Jeffrey Archer oeuvre. I can understand reading one Jeffrey Archer out of curiosity or because you'd found it in a hotel room. But all of them?
  
• * Another described his ex as a “mad bitch.” Enough said: two sides to every story; save it for therapy.
  
• * Another (and I can't quite believe I'm telling you this, but you lived through the 1960s so . . .) admitted he'd like a threesome. It's not a giant crime (I don't suppose there's a man alive who wouldn't) but still, we hadn't even met.
  
• * One bloke (who I'd really liked the sound of—“GSOH,” etc.—) said he'd recently been forced to move back in with his mum after both his business and marriage had failed. I probably shouldn't judge (he said it was only temporary) but I did. Is that bad? Too late.
  
• * And then the last one admitted he'd let his previous date pick up the restaurant tab “because she'd offered and I thought she'd be offended if I argued the toss.” This was a tough one because of course it's fine to offer to
  pay—almost compulsory if you're a grown-up working woman—but you don't want to have to, do you? I'd be fine with splitting it on a first date and if he seemed really keen to pay—as if it was an affront to his masculinity not to—I wouldn't “argue the toss,” but I'm old enough to think that a reasonably solvent adult male shouldn't let a woman pay. I wonder what you think, Mum?
  

Anyway, once I'd weeded out the bitter and twisted, tight-fisted, sex-addicted Jeffrey Archer-reading Mummy's boys, I was left with five perfectly reasonable-sounding men, so I picked one and went for it.

His name was Gary. He was forty-four, worked “in finance” (better the devil . . .) and lived in Islington. He'd been divorced for three years after having been married for thirteen, with two daughters of eleven and eight and had had one “rebound relationship that lasted a year—lovely woman, just wasn't meant to be . . .” He had even been in Chamonix last year, just the week before I had. He sounded totally unscary, normal, and he was good-looking but not too good-looking, if you know what I mean? Not vain-looking. So.

We hooked up at a quiet-ish bar in Soho on the Friday after I'd met Alex at Lisa's, had a couple of drinks and made polite small talk before going round the corner for dim sum at a Chinese we both knew, and then we loosened up a bit. And he was properly nice, funny but not wannabe-stand-up funny. He looked good too, not uptight (Richard James suit, John Smedley sweater underneath) and he smelled delicious. He was losing his hair but that's not a problem and he was, on first impressions anyway, really quite lovely and we were getting on brilliantly. He kept touching my arm over
the table—just fleeting little touches, not lingering clings—and though he talked about work (he's a man) it was just the right amount. And he spoke very well of his ex-wife and was good with the eye-contact.

And so, after dinner, when he suggested a nightcap at a members' club he belongs to round the corner, I was up for that. And quite surprised he'd belong to that sort of club, frankly, being a city boy. But he said that his work involved a lot of media contact and not all city boys were obsessed with numbers to the exclusion of all else. “Some of us are actually interested in the world outside the square mile.” And obviously I liked that, having been Mrs. David Ashford. (And no, if you're wondering, I didn't flag up the Mrs.-David-Ashford thing. I just said I'd been married to a man called David who worked in finance and hoped his radar wasn't that attuned, and luckily it wasn't. I mean, I don't think I send out Ex-Mrs.-Hedge-Fund vibes. Not anymore.)

In short it couldn't have been going any better. And I really did think
this internet dating lark is great. What took me so long
? So we were inside the club, having another drink and feeling pretty relaxed, and Gary introduced me to a couple of people and it was all very easy and fun and by midnight he had introduced me to another friend as “my hot date. Didn't I do well?” and I didn't mind a bit and was even thinking: if he tries to kiss me later, I'll just go with it.

By about midnight (it was Friday night, so what the hell) we were quite a little gang on the sofas. Two other couples, plus two former colleagues of Gary's, and a couple of their friends. It was all very convivial and gossipy and pleasant. Made me realize how much time I've spent alone. Made me realize I don't want to. Anyway, eventually I needed to go to the loo and one of the other women, Amanda, to whom I'd
just been talking—one half of one of the couples—said she'd come too, so, we were in the ladies', doing our lips (that tube of Mon Rouge you gave me still hasn't run out) when Amanda suddenly said—blurted—“So, you and Gary? How's that going?”

And I said, “Well, for a first date I think it's going pretty well. What do you think? You know him better than me.”

And she pulled an odd face, a kind of smile-cum-grimace. And then she kind of checked herself, before saying: “I think you look very comfortable together. Listen, Gary is a man any woman would want to have as a friend.”

And I looked at her quizzically. It seemed to me that (and even after X glasses of whatever) she was trying to tell me something.

“Friend? But not boyfriend?”

“No, not boyfriend. Look, I'm sorry, I'm talking—the wine's talking—out of turn and I'll shut up now. Please don't get me wrong—Gary's a lovely bloke, he really is. You'll work it out.” And then she was gone.

“You'll work it out?” Did she mean Gary and I would work it out? Or did she mean I'd work out why Gary wasn't good boyfriend material? I lingered in the loo for a couple more minutes, grappling with this information. And then I thought
sod it, I'm having a fun evening
 . . . and went back upstairs.

It was after 1 a.m. when the party started breaking up, and eventually it was just me and Gary, and he had an arm round my shoulder by now—but not in a creepy way. And I said, “Well, it's been great but I'd better be going. Babysitter.” And Gary said, “Yes, of course. Look, Pippa, I've had a fantastic evening, I really have. And I hope I'm not being presumptuous but I think you might have done too—they're
a good bunch, aren't they?—and . . . I would really, really love to see you again. Very soon, if you think . . .”

And I dived in. “I'd love to; it's been great.” And I was both delighted and relieved, because I definitely wanted to see Gary again but I wasn't quite drunk enough to feel comfortable about the your-place-or-mine routine. As first dates went, though, it had been pretty perfect, so why screw things up? I'm forty-two. I can do delayed gratification. And apparently so could he.

Gary said, “I'll get you a cab,” and we stood on Old Compton Street and waited and when a free cab appeared he opened the door and then he kissed me lightly on the lips and put a hand up to my cheek and said, “I think you're great, Pippa. Thanks for a lovely evening. I'll call you. Or you can call me. I don't play games,” and I said something suitably end-of-a-good-first-date-ish and got in the cab and I was still grinning by the time we'd got to Oxford Street, when I suddenly remembered I'd left my bag on the sofa in the club and realized I was a bit more pissed than I'd thought I was.