The Case of the Missing Boyfriend (42 page)

I watch their backs for a moment, and then shrug and step outside. It has started to rain.

Just as the door closes behind me, I hear the fat guy say, ‘
What?
You said . . .’ And unfortunately, I also hear the Colin Firth lookalike reply, ‘Not
her
, you prick. The
other
one. The brunette with the tits over there.’

The noise of the pub vanishes as if sucked out of an airlock as the door finally closes behind me. I stand and look at the newly wet streets and think that, yes,
this
is why we need Prozac. For whose ego could possibly stand up to this kind of battering without chemical help?

Office Minimalism

I never see or hear of Peter Faulks or Michael Faegan again. Which is a shame if only because I never get to find out if they did in fact end up taking a six-foot tranny back to their hotel.

I take Wednesday morning off to pack for Devon and phone a few estate agents, and in the afternoon I head down to easyCar and pick up another grey-and-orange Mondeo.

It’s another cold sunny day and as I head down the M4 and then onto the M25, I wonder, naughtily, whether global warming might mean that this is now what British winters will look like. I know that’s a bad thing to dream of, but I’m sure we would need far less Prozac as a nation if every day looked like today.

Unlike my mother, I love driving. It sends me into a meditative trance where I perhaps don’t think about driving as much as I possibly should, but where I find the space and time to drift around and sift through my thoughts in a way that doesn’t happen to me at any other time. And with four hours’ driving ahead of me, I don’t even need to schedule my thoughts . . . there’s room for everyone.

I think about Pete and Mike to start with. Both apparently married, both apparently determined to find some business-trip excitement. I wonder what their wives are like. I wonder if they could ever imagine their two husbands either side of a six foot blonde. And I wonder, almost jealously, what that might have felt like for her. Quite a result, I would imagine.

I remember the Colin Firth lookalike who fancied the ‘Brunette with the tits,’ and wonder again what that makes me. The brunette
without
the tits? I glance down at my chest. I’ve had some slap-downs in my time, but no one has ever implied I was lacking in the bust department.

It’s a tough assignment, but I’m determined not to reach the obvious conclusion that all men are cheating, sexist arseholes. Because that thought doesn’t do me any good; that thought removes hope. And life without hope leaves nothing but a basin of icy water.

I think about Darren too, of course, and for the first time I imagine the actual act of his suicide. And I realise that of course it won’t have been a single act. He will have got rid of his collection of porn, cleaned up or perhaps deleted his email account . . . He will have written the note, and visited his dealer for Ketamine. Maybe he cleaned the flat. Perhaps he thought about which room he preferred to be found in, in what position, by whom . . . I had imagined it as a sudden act of desperation, but I realise now that of course, it wasn’t. He had been planning this for years.

At Andover the sun begins to set. The twilight is tough on my eyes, so I pull over into a Little Chef and take a table at the window where I can watch as the sky flames red, and then glimmers and dims. Other than the big plate-glass window, there is not one feature of the Little Chef that pleases me, and I’m sure that any of the pubs I passed would have had better food and more comfortable chairs, but there’s something to do with the anonymity of the place that makes it less uncomfortable to eat alone . . . something to do with the fact that everyone here is like me, simply pausing on their way to somewhere else.

After a reasonable if somewhat predictable lasagne and a Diet Coke, I head on along the A303 towards Plymouth.

As I pass Salisbury I think about my shrink and admit to myself that it might be doing me some good. I couldn’t, for now, say exactly what form that good is taking, for other than raking over the past, I don’t seem to be achieving anything . . . But then maybe that’s it – maybe to rake over the past is the whole point. After all, the stuff I have been discussing – it’s actually more of a monologue than a discussion – is stuff I have simply never vocalised to anyone. For who else could I possibly have told? For anyone who knew Dad or Waiine it would be way too painful. And for anyone who didn’t, way too
personal
. And I suppose that in the end, that’s what a shrink is. A friend who is paid to listen to things that are too painful or too personal for anyone else.

Just as I park the car in the hotel car park, my phone rings but seeing that it’s Mum’s landline I decide to ignore the call and phone her back after check-in.

Ten minutes later I open a beer from the mini-bar, kick off my shoes, and hurl myself onto the bed. I dial her number and lie back and close my eyes. They feel, after my night drive, as if they have been pickled in vinegar.

‘Hi, Mum, it’s me,’ I say, when she answers. ‘I was driving when you phoned, so . . .’

‘Driving?’

‘Yeah, I’m in Plymouth.’

‘What are you doing there?’

‘Oh, work stuff. I’m seeing a client tomorrow. So what’s up?’

‘Your father and I went to Plymouth once. Stayed in a very nice hotel.’

‘Well this is just your basic Premier Inn, I’m afraid. Cost- cutting measures and all that.’

‘What a shame.’

‘Oh it’s fine. I don’t really care to be honest, Mum. As long as it’s clean. And it is. Anyway, you called me on my mobile. What’s up?’

‘Nothing really. But I need to see you.’

‘OK. Why?’

‘I need some daughterly advice.’

‘Daughterly advice?’

‘Well yes. Don’t sound so surprised.’

‘Well . . . when did you ever ask my advice?’

‘If you’re going to be . . .’

‘Sorry, Mum, I won’t. What’s wrong?’

But she won’t tell me. It’s something, she says, to do with Saddam. It’s something we need to discuss face to face. Which means either that she and Saddam are having problems, or that they want to move forward with the marriage thing. I can only pray that it’s the former.

I click the phone off and glance out at the Victorian façade of the building opposite. And then I close my gritty eyes for a moment’s rest before heading out to explore Plymouth.

When I open them again the bedside clock says 00:02 and my first thought is that there has been a momentary power cut and that the clock has reverted to zero. But when I check my BlackBerry, it turns out that it’s my body-clock that has gone haywire. I have been asleep for four hours, not, as I’m convinced, ten minutes.

And so, too lazy even to remove my make-up or clean my teeth, I wriggle out of my clothes and slip between the crisp white sheets.

The meeting with Roger Niels at Cornish Cow is so low-key it’s an embarrassment. I’m just glad that no one is here to witness it.

I obviously didn’t expect (even if I secretly hoped) to meet Niels in the middle of a cowshed, but all the same . . . looking around the two spartan rooms they have rented in this serviced office complex it’s hard to spot a single visual clue that they are in the dairy business. Indeed Niels himself couldn’t be further from the ruddy-faced west-country bumpkin I had imagined. He’s a young (late thirties) wiry man wearing cords, brogues and a white open-necked shirt. He looks like a banker on his day off.

It quickly becomes evident that not only has he not given much thought to marketing, but he’s not quite sure who I am or why I am here either.

All of this I explain patiently between multiple phone calls he seems unable to resist answering.

When I produce a folder of roughs that the boys in Creative have knocked up, he seems more confused than impressed. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘But do we have a contract with you people? Because I haven’t seen a single budget entry for any of this work.’

I explain that we don’t yet have a signed contract but that because we see Cornish Cow as a strategic diversification of our agency portfolio we have decided to stun them with our enthusiasm.

But Niels is having none of my silver tongued ad-speak. ‘Yes, I’m sure,’ he says. ‘The slowdown is hurting everyone.’ He flicks through the mock-ups and comments coldly that none of it looks ‘very organic.’

‘I didn’t know Cornish Cow
was
organic,’ I say, making him laugh out loud.

‘That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t
look
organic,’ he says.

The only other comment he makes before flipping the portfolio closed and handing it back is that the cartoon cow drinking from a straw on the final sheet is ‘cute.’

‘Yes, Darren did that,’ I say. ‘He’s good isn’t he . . .’ And then I frown, and think about reformulating the phrase with a past tense, and then decide that it’s best not to go there. Not for sales purposes, and not for myself.

Within forty minutes of meeting him, I’m back on the street, the folder under my arm.

I drink a cappuccino in Starbucks to gather my thoughts, and consider phoning the office, but decide that in the interest of at least creating an illusion of a fruitful meeting it’s better to wait until this afternoon. Not that I think that this rudely summary meeting has been a wasted journey. I know from experience that business heads like Niels are famously difficult to impress with creative stuff. But at some point, a flick of his pen will send their marketing budget this way or that, and often an inauspicious meeting like today’s will end up being what influences in whose direction his pen will flick.

I walk briskly along the rather splendid seafront, inhaling the iodine air, and then, spotting clouds forming to the west, I double back to the hotel to drop off the folder and change into jeans and trainers.

Rather excited, if still unsure whether this will turn out to be the first act in a new chapter or a simple fantasy, I pull my list of properties from my suitcase and grab the car keys from the bedside table.

Body Double

I have worked out that my flat in Primrose Hill is worth the obscene sum of three-hundred and eighty thousand (though apparently in the process of plummeting because of the crisis) so I have listed only cottages below two-eighty (to give myself a little financial cushion) and with enough land to have at least a large kitchen garden if not cows or goats.

I have four properties on my list, though sadly, I have left the second page concerning property number four behind, so I have nothing but a photo and the name of the town to go on. Still, I’m hopeful that this will suffice. If the place looks anything like the picture I should be able to see it for miles around.

I haven’t booked viewings with any of the estate agents for the simple reason that I can’t even convince
myself
that I’m a serious buyer, let alone anyone else. I have a job and a life and a flat in London, and no realistic plan whatsoever how I might earn a living here. For the moment this is just about daydreams. But if I find the right kind of place at the right kind of price, well, who knows? Daydreams can sometimes become reality, right?

As I drive along the A38 I look out over the moors and start to smile. I wonder if it could really be this simple. Could human happiness be as basic as a glimpse of green? Could this sensation of focusing in the distance, focusing, for once, on infinity . . . could that be all I really need?

Finding the house in Liskeard should be easy. The address turns out to be on the main road into the town, and yet, when I reach the town centre, I realise that I have somehow missed it.

After a few repetitions of the roundabout at one end, and a few three-point turns at the other, I finally realise that it can only be the house behind the wall of thirty-foot Leylandii. I bump the car up the kerb, climb out, and surreptitiously edge towards the gate wondering if in addition to the trees-from-hell a clone of Mrs P is living next door.

The first surprise is that the place is so small, and so close to the road. Comparing it with the printout, I realise that my brain has assumed the windows to be of a certain size – about five-foot-square, whereas in fact then are more like three-by- three. The house around them is therefore correspondingly smaller – minute in fact. Still, it’s a pretty cottage – grey stone walls, a white painted outhouse, and it even has roses around the door, albeit straggly ones. But the main road is a whooshing, roaring presence that even an impenetrable wall of Leylandii can’t temper. And the lawn, in complete shade from the monster trees, is in the same, sorry, sun-starved state as my own.

I shrug and return to the car. I never expected to find my dream-house today anyway. At least looking is turning out to be fun.

The house in Bodmin is far harder to find, because each of the houses on the lane are set at the end of their own track, and half of these are entirely hidden by trees or hedgerows. This leaves me hugely optimistic though – clearly traffic noise isn’t going to be a problem here.

I park the car at the entrance to a farmer’s field and climb back out. Incredibly the temperature has dropped at least five degrees since Liskeard ten minutes ago, and I can see that the cloud cover is about to obscure the sun. The air smells like rain. I remember this smell from my childhood and I think how the air in London never really smells of anything except perhaps traffic pollution.

I edge as far down each of the tracks as I dare, enough to see that the house is not the one I’m looking for. They are all incredibly small though, as if built for a race of tiny people. I wonder what they would make of my mother’s cavernous house in Surrey.

After forty minutes I have only covered a third of the lane, so when I cross paths with an old man walking a dog I show him the sheet and ask him if he knows it.

He peers at the house and then says, in a Farmer-Jack voice worthy of children’s TV, ‘Arrr yes, tha’ll be ole Margaret’s place, tha’ll be. Come on, I’ll show you. I’m only walking Boris anyway, so . . .’

He walks incredibly fast for an oldie – the tempo apparently dictated by the dog. I myself am virtually jogging to keep up.