The Next Best Thing (3 page)

He’d had a thing with Lydia a few years ago, a fact he’d never thought appropriate to share with Jane. It had fizzled out anyway and mercifully Lydia had never seen fit to spill the
beans.

‘Is she still with that dull banker?’ he asked.

‘So it seems. How do you know he’s dull? We’ve never met him.’

‘He’s a banker, so he’s dull. I don’t need to meet him. I can just imagine.’

You could never accuse Will of not knowing his mind.

‘You’re probably right,’ she said, ‘but you shouldn’t condemn people you’ve never met, just because you don’t like the sound of their job.’

‘Anyway, he’s bound to be loaded,’ said Will. ‘Lydia wouldn’t bother wasting time on him otherwise.’

‘That’s true,’ Jane agreed. It made her feel better to think of Lydia as a gold-digger, just as it made Will feel better to think of her boyfriend as a yawnsville banker.
‘You’ll be able to judge for yourself soon,’ she continued. ‘We’re invited for drinks at his place.’

‘How unspeakable, do we have to? Where does he live?’

‘Chelsea.’

‘Of course, like all bankers. You know I try to avoid Chelsea, for ideological reasons.’ On Will’s map of moral correctness, there were certain no-go areas. Jane had long since
given up trying to fathom his logic.

‘I think it’s charming,’ she said. ‘I’d love to live there.’

‘You wouldn’t! It’s full of ghastly braying dimwits and people like Lydia’s boyfriend!’

‘Whom you have yet to meet.’

‘Whom I have no intention of meeting.’

‘Anyway, I know the real reason you don’t like Chelsea, you told me once. It’s because everyone there is so tall, and you feel like a short-arse in comparison.’

It was a cheap shot and Will responded with a chilly smile of disdain.

‘It’s only drinks,’ she said in appeasement, ‘we won’t have to stay long.’

It was certainly true, thought Will, that drinks was better than dinner. He would stand aloof in his brocade jacket, a raffish bohemian in a sea of clean-cut city suits. And it was certainly
better than Sunday lunch with other young families, which was what Jane liked to organise. Couples drinking wine to ease the boredom of family life while the children wreaked havoc around them.
Followed by the obligatory walk to the park, where Will had once been mistaken for the grandfather of his young daughter. The memory stuck with him still. He had been remonstrating with a boy who
was climbing the wrong way up the slide, leaving dirty footprints on the smooth silver surface, while Liberty waited patiently on the top step. ‘That your granddad?’ the boy had asked
Liberty. She had glared at him, indignant and defensive: ‘It’s my dad, stupid.’

That was the problem with second families. Small humiliations waiting to trip you up at every turn. It was the price you paid for starting over. Although, as Will watched Jane ladling hot stock
into the pan and smelt the rosemary and garlic, he had to admit it was worth it. To find himself with this woman looking slim in her jeans and with a wild mane of hair that did not yet need to be
dyed. She could be a black and white photo from a fashionable guide to Italian cooking, whereas his ex-wife was a hangover from the
Hamlyn All Colour Cookbook.

‘Lydia said she’d been down at Highgrove,’ Jane told him, ‘inspecting the royal cows.’

That would be right up her street,’ said Will, ‘hobnobbing with the old ruling classes.’

He preferred to hobnob with the new ruling classes. Writers, film people, opinion formers who had won their position through their own endeavours and not through an accident of birth. What the
French would call
les intellectuals,
though the British were too damn philistine to use the word except as a term of abuse.

‘Do you want your salad before or after the risotto?’ asked Jane.

‘I think after.’ He picked up Liberty’s drawing of a tall princess with big hair and tiny feet, decorated with this week’s leitmotif: a big yellow cartoon sun wearing
dark glasses. ‘How’s my monkey?’ he asked.

‘She’s fine. Miss Evans doesn’t think she’s dyspraxic after all. She thinks she might just be clumsy.’

‘Well, I could have told you that. People are so neurotic these days, always trying to find something wrong with their children.’

It wasn’t like that with his first batch of offspring, they had surged into adolescence with very little fuss. Not that he’d been around much to notice, his wife had taken care of
all that, as wives did back then. It was only recently that fathers had become such hands-on nincompoops.

‘Do you mind?’ he said after dinner. ‘I really need to get on upstairs.’

‘Go ahead,’ Jane replied, ‘I’m going to work as well, once I’ve finished off in here.’

Will squeezed her arm on his way out. ‘Catch you later,’ he said, ‘thanks for dinner.’

He walked into the hall and up the dramatic concrete spiral staircase with its Perspex balustrade. The creation of a live/work space for Will had been central to the architect’s brief, and
the entire first floor had been made over to this purpose. Will called it his
galleria,
a magnificent open space that was his kingdom and his refuge. On the walls his art collection was an
eclectic statement of his ‘modern with a nod to the past’ philosophy, while books lining the shelves bore testament to a crushing intellect.

To pay for the galleria Will had sold one of his more controversial works of art, a dead fox pickled in formaldehyde as an ironic statement about the proposed ban on hunting. The artist had
given it to Will just before he became famous, and when Jane became pregnant, Will had found the perfect excuse to cash in on his unexpected windfall. The smell of the formaldehyde leaking from the
glass case was making her nauseous, so Will sold it to a New York dealer. He regretted it now, it would be worth at least ten times as much.

The size of the galleria meant they’d had to compromise on the rest of the house, but Jane and Liberty seemed quite happy holed up in the semi-basement where they could perform the eating
and telly-watching functions that were so disruptive to Will’s creative process.

He lit a cigar and thought about starting work on his book. It was an exploration of Native American culture, a follow-up to one he had published a few years back.
Flames of Youth
had
described the initiation rites endured by young Native Americans who leaped through fire to achieve maturity. It was a book about courage, a quality underestimated in modern Western society. He had
focused on this angle in his publicity, comparing the courage of these boys with the courage that he, Will Thacker, had demonstrated when he decided to leave his marriage. That had put the cat
among the pigeons in the ugly feminist camp, but it hadn’t harmed his sales. It irritated him the way people sided with the wife and kids when a marriage broke up. What about the lone
crusader, the man in all this, the one who was brave enough to say,
Enough! I will not compromise and spend my life crouched in the brackish shallows of a humdrum relationship.
It brought
tears to his eyes just thinking about it. Will Thacker, a big, bold, beautiful traveller.

Before starting work, he would just visit his website and look up the reviews for
Flames.
‘. . . brings a coruscating intelligence to a little-understood subject . . .’
‘Never before had I understood the searing pain and glory that rhymes with coming of age . . .’ Thacker wears his erudition lightly in this clear-eyed and deeply moving
tour de
force.’

He really was quite something.

Downstairs, Jane quickly cleared the plates and set off the dishwasher. It was all very well, this foodie business, but it did cut into her precious time. Of course she enjoyed
sitting down with Will for a civilised dinner, but sometimes she wished she could just open a can of beans and be done with it. She’d need to fit in a couple of hours tonight, so as not to
get behind.

First, though, there was the ironing to deal with. She took the ironing board from the kitchen cupboard and creaked it open, an unwieldy symbol of life below stairs, its shape unchanged since
Victorian days. No mob cap and floor-length pinny for her, though, she was a modern woman, doing it all, aided by many gadgets that freed her up to maintain her career. Career was pushing it, she
thought, pouring rose-scented water into the iron that claimed to bring the smell of the garden to your wardrobe. She had a job, not a career. It would only become a career if she gave it up. Women
who stopped working always referred wistfully to their abandoned careers, lending glamour to something that was, in most cases, pretty mundane.

Even so, she was glad to have her work. It kept her in the land of the cruel: the bright, brittle world of positive achievements. If you didn’t work, you were committed to life as a kindly
sponge, absorbing the worries of your children while flooding them with your own anxieties. Anyway, Will wouldn’t let her give up work, he’d made that perfectly clear.

She switched on the TV and took a small pink tee shirt from the basket. She always did Liberty’s things first; it was like playing with dolls’ clothes. There was a programme on about
a couple leaving England to set up a guest house in the Dordogne. Just as they were being waved off by teary-eyed neighbours, the phone rang.

‘Hallo,’ said Jane, one eye still on the screen.

‘Hi, it’s Marion.’

‘Marion!’

Lovely Marion, it was always a shot in the arm to hear from her. They’d met when they were temping at IPC, both hoping to move on to better things.

‘Do you fancy meeting up one night?’ asked Marion. ‘It’s been ages.’

‘I’d love to,’ said Jane, ‘not this week, though, far too busy.’

‘You don’t sound that busy to me, sounds like you’re watching telly.’

‘Just while I do the ironing . . .’

‘You are so quaint.’

Marion had someone to take care of the ironing. Just as she had someone to take care of her children while she raced round town spending her husband’s money.

‘Not quaint, just poor.’

‘Come off it, Will can’t be doing that badly. Tell him to spend less money on clothes. And get him to do the ironing.’

Marion was one of the new breed of stay-at-home wives. Not so much a drab run-down housewife as a bumptious force of nature, out to milk the situation for all it was worth. Jane wished she had
her nerve.

‘Another time,’ she said.

‘Well, make it soon. You’re turning into Norma no-mates.’

‘OK, next week maybe.’

‘I’ll hold you to it. I’m not having you becoming one of those boring working-mother martyr types, huffing and puffing about having so much to do.’

‘All right, you spoilt old bag, I’ll call you.’

Jane replaced the receiver and turned her attention back to the TV, which was perched on a table alongside the computer, at the far end of the kitchen/dining/family room. A multi-function room
for a multi-functioning woman. She honestly didn’t mind the ironing, and so what if she did iron Will’s shirts? They both agreed the great cause of sexual equality should not be reduced
to a petty spat about the housework.

The couple on the programme had now arrived at the dilapidated
gentil hommière
in the French countryside: holding back the tears they contemplated the disastrous plumbing. This was
when the viewers’
Schadenfreude
really kicked in. Dear oh dear, went up the sigh from a million sofas, we could have told you it was a bad idea.

Jane moved on to the Egyptian-cotton duvet cover and wondered whether she really was turning into Norma no-mates. True, she saw less of her friends than she used to. But she had Will and Liberty
and her work and that was enough, most of the time.

Will appeared at the door, an elegant urban figure, his hand running through his boyishly long grey hair. ‘I’m making tea,’ he announced, as though this was of earth-shattering
importance, ‘would you like camomile or hibiscus?’

‘Camomile, please,’ said Jane, squirting some instant starch onto a pillowcase. Although he was used to roughing it on his travels, Will insisted on certain luxuries at home, and
crisply pressed bed linen helped him overcome his insomnia.

‘I see you’re indulging in your usual fix of escapist nonsense,’ said Will. ‘What is it this time, an olive farm in Italy for a couple of no-hopers?’

‘A guest house in France. I really admire them, getting up and making a go of it.’

Will switched on the kettle and turned a dismissive eye on the screen. ‘Christ, look at those matching bedspreads and pelmets, and that horrible fake stone floor! What’s the point of
going to France and staying with Brits? You might as well go to Surrey for your holidays.’

‘You must admit it’s brave of them, though,’ Jane countered. ‘They had an idea and they’ve followed it through. They have achieved their fantasy.’

But Will wasn’t having it. ‘I don’t think fantasy is the appropriate term for the aspirations of a suburban couple who’ve had a nice holiday abroad and think they can
extend it into some kind of bed and breakfast never-never land. I don’t buy it. Now
my
fantasy . . .’

‘Yes, yes, I know,’ Jane interrupted him. ‘Your fantasy is to live in London for the rest of your life.’ She had heard it once too often for her patience.
‘It’s all right for you,’ she added sharply, ‘you’re always hopping off abroad. Most people don’t get the chance to whizz off and live among Native Americans for
months at a time.’

He looked at her in surprise. It was unlike Jane to get all chippy, maybe she was going down with something. ‘That’s for work, Jane, and hardly luxurious. Damned uncomfortable for
much of the time.’

He brought her a cup of tea and set it down on the ironing board. ‘I only wish I had time to watch television,’ he said self-righteously, ‘but I’m afraid I’ll be at
least another couple of hours.’

It was churlish of her to snap at him like that, Jane thought, she hated sounding bitter. Thanks , Will,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry if I was a bit ratty, I’m tired,
that’s all, and worried about the deadline on that bridges book, you know what it’s like.’

Though of course he didn’t know what it was like. He never got in a state about his work. She was the one who flapped and panicked while he remained serenely in command. It was further
proof, as if she needed it, of his all-round superiority.