He’s gone. Just like that.
For a few seconds I stare at the space where he used to be, then briskly turning my attention back to work, I peel off a Post-it note.
If only it was that easy to delete him from my heart.
Chapter 2
At four o’clock Sir Richard declares the office ‘officially closed’ and shoos me off home. ‘Haven’t you got a party to go to?’ he booms good-naturedly, smoothing down the errant piece of hair that flaps around on his head, like a restless bird threatening to take flight. Unfortunately yes, I feel like answering. But of course I don’t. Feeling depressed is one thing, letting your boss know you’re a heartbroken wreck who wants to go home and hide under the duvet until the year is over is quite another.
‘Um . . . yes,’ I nod, avoiding his gaze and shutting down my computer. Standing up, I grab my coat from the back of my chair.
‘Ah, to be young, footloose and fancy-free,’ sighs Sir Richard wistfully. Perching his large frame on the corner of my desk, he folds his arms and gazes at me with a faraway look in his eyes.
I force a smile. Bundled up in my duvet coat, with Seb firmly on my mind, and a New Year’s Eve party looming, there are many ways I can think of to describe how I’m feeling right now, and fancy-free is not one of them.
‘I remember when I was your age, the things I’d get up to on New Year’s Eve . . .’ He trails off with a chuckle. ‘You know, I once got arrested for dancing in the fountains at Trafalgar Square?’
‘You did?’ I look at my boss’s ill-fitting suit, the thick, oversized glasses teetering on the end of his ruddy nose, his sensible brown lace-up brogues that look a hundred years old. It’s hard to imagine.
‘Indeed I did,’ he nods, with more than a hint of pride in his voice. ‘Actually I streaked.’
‘You did?’ My voice comes out at a higher pitch. I suddenly have a vision of Sir Richard running through fountains. Naked.
Arggh. No. I bat the vision away furiously.
‘Oh yes,’ he nods gravely. ‘I was quite the rascal in my youth.’
I’m not quite sure where this trip down memory lane is heading, but I don’t want to stay and find out.
‘Well bye,’ I say briskly, pulling up my fur-trimmed hood as if in an attempt to protect my ears from any more naked streaking stories. ‘Happy New Year!’
‘Ah yes, indeed, indeed,’ he nods vigorously, snapping back and pushing his glasses up his nose. For a moment he remains there, perched on my desk, and for the first time I notice his suit is slightly more crumpled than usual, and if I’m not mistaken, he hasn’t shaved this morning. ‘Well, Happy New Year, Tess,’ he says, reverting back into boss mode. Straightening up, he stuffs his hands firmly in his pockets. ‘Have a wonderful evening.’
‘You too,’ I reply. He cuts a rather sad figure, standing by my cheese plant, alone in the office, and it suddenly strikes me that if I’ve escaped to the office, is Sir Richard escaping too? And if so, what from?
No sooner has the thought popped into my head than I dismiss it. Don’t be silly, he’s been happily married to Lady Blackstock for the past twenty years, what could he possibly be running away from? And, grabbing my bag, I give a little wave and walk towards the lift.
After the central-heated warmth of the office, outside is like stepping into a chiller cabinet. I set off briskly walking. It’s too cold to wait for a bus, even in my duvet coat, plus I only live twenty minutes away. Digging out my iPod, I untangle the earphones and, to the sounds of Paolo Nutini, head towards the river.
Two tracks later, I see the majestic arch of Hammersmith Bridge up ahead, the ornate gold detailing picked out of the darkness by the stream of car headlights. Icy blasts whip up from the river and around my frozen ears and, turning up my collar, I bury my face into my mohair scarf and keep walking. Below me the Thames is inky black, but dotted along the riverbank I can see pubs with their strings of coloured fairy lights and make out the shapes of people spilling out from the beery warmth, braving the cold to smoke cigarettes.
I turn off my iPod. I can hear the sounds of chatter and laughter carried on the gusts of wind and for a moment I pause to lean against the railings. I let my gaze drift outwards. There’s something magical about being suspended high above the river, looking down on London and life. A sense of freedom and quiet, even with the hum of the traffic behind me, that allows my mind the space to wander. To daydream. To think.
As usual I think about me and Seb. It’s getting to be a bit of a habit, replaying scenes and conversations in my head, imagining if I hadn’t said or done that, imagining if I’d reacted this way instead . . . It takes two people to make a relationship, and two people to break it, but there’s so many things I did wrong. Not great big things, just lots of little random things.
Like, for instance, that stupid argument about marriage. With a stab of regret my mind flicks back to the summer. We’d gone to a friend’s wedding and what began as jokey banter after I caught the bouquet about how ‘we’ll be next’, turned sour when he said he didn’t believe in marriage. I got all upset and took it personally, even though we’d only been dating for six months and I wasn’t in any rush to get a ring on my finger. But that’s what happens when you’re a hopeless romantic and drink too much champagne . . . God, I’m such an idiot.
I feel my heart tug. Staring out into the velvet darkness I wonder where he is. What he’s doing. If he’s thinking about me. Missing someone has to be one of the worst human emotions. All the other feelings like anger and fear and horror get so much more airplay, as if their intensity gives them more value, but whereas those emotions come in violent bursts and are gone again, the gnawing ache of loss has to be simply endured. It’s like background noise, it’s always there, it never goes away. You just have to try to block it out, distract yourself, hope that tomorrow the hole they left behind has grown a little smaller.
Suddenly aware of how cold my fingers are, I unwrap them from the frozen railings and, shoving my icicle fingers in my pockets, cut down from the bridge and head towards a large red block of Victorian mansion flats on the corner. Above the doorway a sign in stained glass reads Arminta Mansions.
From the outside it looks very grand, very moneyed and very posh, but in reality the communal stairwells are a bit shabby and some of the neighbours are a bit dodgy. Fiona bought her flat years ago, with some money she was left by an old aunt, and it’s up four flights of lung-bursting stairs, is in desperate need of a lick of paint and more than a little bit cramped.
Which, to be honest, is very Fiona.
Seriously, she’s just like her flat. Grand on the outside, and anything but on the inside. To the outside world she’s a successful health and beauty journalist, with a column in a national newspaper’s Saturday magazine, where she extols the benefits of exercise, three healthy organic meals a day and SPF45. To those on the inside – i.e. me – she freelances from our kitchen table in her pyjamas, smokes twenty a day and, when she’s not slathering herself in Hawaiian Tropic at the first glimmer of sunshine, she’s trying to lose weight on some crazy fad diet or other.
I’ve tried telling her she’s gorgeous just the way she is, but she’ll never listen. Last month it was nothing but Tom Yum soup. ‘It’s the cabbage soup diet for the millennium,’ she’d explained enthusiastically, ‘only without the flatulence’, and three times a week she’d walked to the Thai takeaway to collect huge vats of it. Still, I guess that’s regular exercise.
Fiona is my oldest and closest friend. We met at our local primary school when we were both eight years old, and by way of introduction she told me she could play the piano and that her parents had a holiday home in the south of France. Which they do.
Sort of.
If you can count towing a caravan across the Channel every year.
As for playing the piano, it was more ‘Chopsticks’ on a Yamaha keyboard.
But that’s Fiona. She’s always been like that. And yes, OK, it can be a bit embarrassing when she p
uts on her posh voice and tells people she went to Cambridge, but omits to mention it was actually the poly. Or like, for example, the other night when I heard her on the phone saying she must go as she ‘had Pilates’, when in actual fact, what she really meant was she has a Pilates DVD and it’s stuffed underneath the telly gathering dust along with all her other exercise DVDs. Not only that, but I’ve only ever seen her do it once and she switched it off halfway through to watch Dragon’s Den.
Yet, despite her affectations, underneath it all she’s one of the sweetest people you’ll ever meet. She’s got a huge heart and when the chips are down, I know she’ll always be there for me – I call her the fourth emergency service; but it’s as if she feels she has to put on this big act to the public. As if, for some reason, she’s ashamed of who she really is. To be honest, I think a lot of it has to do with her mum. She was one of those classic pushy mothers who nagged her about her puppy fat and had her doing all this extracurricular stuff.
Poor Fiona used to turn up at school every day nearly collapsing under the weight of about four musical instruments, a tennis racquet, hockey stick, ballet outfit and swimming gear. When she complained her mum told her, ‘Marilyn Monroe never got anywhere by being Norma Jean.’ Which was a bit confusing for an eleven year old. And a lot of pressure. I don’t think Fiona’s ever really got over it.
‘Tess, is that you?’
Breathless from the climb, I push open the door of the flat to be greeted by a loud holler coming from her bedroom. Strangely, when it’s just me, her voice is a lot less Made in Chelsea and a lot more The Only Way Is Essex.
‘Why? Who else are you expecting?’ I puff, dumping my bag on the table in the hallway. Flea, our ginger cat, appears and begins wrapping himself around my legs and purring loudly. Picking him up, I’m tickling him under his chin when a thought strikes: Oh no! Maybe she’s invited one of her recent dates to the party too.
Mentally I whiz through a Rolodex of men who’ve trooped through the flat in the past few months: there was Karl the diplomat who was six foot ten and nearly knocked himself unconscious on the kitchen doorframe; Gavin, who wrote poetry, and insisted on reciting it; Carlos the Spanish guy, who turned up to take her out to dinner, smoked a joint on the sofa, then promptly passed out . . .
To tell the truth, I can’t remember them all. After years of dating the old-fashioned way without much success, Fiona has recently discovered online dating and is going through men at an alarming rate of knots.
I listen out for her reply but there’s no answer.
Oh god, don’t tell me one of them’s here already. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve walked in and unexpectedly come face-to-boxer-shorts with a half-naked man in the kitchen.
‘Fi . . .’ I say cautiously. I cock my ear for the sounds of you-know-what coming from her bedroom. I can hear a lot of rustling; poking my head around the corner, I peer down the corridor. ‘Are you . . . um . . . decent?’
There’s a loud thud, then her door’s abruptly flung open.
‘Ta-daahh!’
Flea gives a high-pitched screech and jumps out of my arms in fright. But instead of a strange man in boxer shorts, there’s Fiona in a nurse’s uniform.
‘What do you think?’ She does a little twirl on her vertiginous heels. ‘It’s for the party tonight,’ she continues, fiddling with the white nurse’s cap. It’s perched on top of her blonde hair which has been highlighted, tonged and hairsprayed to within an inch of its life.
And to think she just wrote an article about hair and how it’s time to ‘throw out the colouring and styling products’ and go au naturel.
‘What’s your costume?’ She looks at me expectantly.
I stare at her for a moment, vague memories of her talking about the party trickling back: ‘huge roof terrace with amazing views . . . works for Moët so there’ll be tons of champagne . . . invite says to wear a costume . . .’
I get a really horrible sinking feeling.
‘You hadn’t forgotten it’s fancy dress, had you?’
‘Well no, not exactly—’ I begin, but she cuts me off excitedly.
‘So, come on, don’t keep me in suspense, what are you wearing?’ Turning to study her reflection in the built-in microwave, she applies another coat of lip gloss.
‘Well, that’s the thing you see, I was going to wear my jeans, I mean no one will ever notice—’ I reason, tugging off my coat and hanging it over the back of the chair.
‘Tess!’ She lets out a gasp and rounds on me. ‘You cannot go in your jeans! It’s New Year’s Eve!’
‘What’s wrong with wearing jeans on New Year’s Eve?’ I try arguing, but I’m met with a look. I know that look. It’s the one she gave the gas man last winter when he told us he couldn’t fix the boiler and, ‘Sorry luv, you’ll have to take cold showers until I order a new part.’ She didn’t say anything – she didn’t have to. Not with that look.
Suffice to say he spent all afternoon taking apart and rebuilding our ancient combi-boiler and she spent all evening soaking in a long hot bubble bath.
‘But you have to wear a costume,’ she says. ‘It’s a fancy-dress party.’
Suddenly seeing my opportunity, I grab it with both hands. ‘You’re absolutely right,’ I nod gravely, ‘Only, I don’t have one, so you know what, I probably shouldn’t go. I’m not really in the mood anyway . . .’
I feel almost giddy with relief at the thought of staying home in my pyjamas with Flea and the TV.
For like a second.
‘Nonsense. Of course you should go,’ she says, batting away my objections with her lip-gloss wand. ‘You’re depressed. A party will make you feel tons better.’ She flashes me an encouraging smile.
‘I’m not depressed, I’m heartbroken,’ I point out.
Her smile is replaced with a look of concern. ‘Oh Tess, you’ve got to stop mooning over Seb. You need to forget about him. Pretend like he doesn’t exist. It’s been months now—’
‘It hasn’t been months, it’s only been two months, one week and three days . . . or thereabouts,’ I add, trying to sound vague and failing, ‘and I’m not mooning over him. I just miss him, that’s all.’
‘Of course you do,’ she says, giving my arm a squeeze. ‘And I know how it feels, I’ve been there. Remember when Lawrence broke up with me?’
‘It’s hardly the same – you went on two dates.’
‘I was still heartbroken,’ she replies, looking hurt.
‘Fiona, the only time I’ve ever seen you heartbroken is when they didn’t have your size in the L. K. Bennett sale,’ I point out.
It’s not that Fiona doesn’t have feelings, but when it comes to failed romances, she only allows herself twenty-four hours to be depressed/delete all his texts/eat everything in the cupboards. At the end of which she does her Tracy Anderson DVD, changes her Facebook status back to Single and goes back online.
‘Love isn’t measured by time, you know Tess,’ she continues sagely, ignoring my last comment. ‘You can fall in love at first sight.’
‘You can fall in lust at first sight,’ I correct, thinking about those two dates of hers with Lawrence, which, if I remember rightly, were mostly spent sub-duvet.
‘I’ve got a spare costume you can borrow,’ she says, ignoring me. ‘It’s a bit too snug for me, as that Tom Yum diet didn’t work. I put on four pounds . . .’ She glances down at her stomach in dismay and tries to suck it in, expanding her ribcage so that her cleavage looks even bigger than before. ‘But it will fit you perfectly,’ she adds, looking back at me pointedly.
‘What costume?’ I ask cautiously.
‘You’ll love it! It’s a sexy kitten!’ she beams.
My heart plummets. ‘How can a kitten be sexy?’ I wail but, even as I’m asking, I’m not sure I want to find out.
But before she can answer, we’re interrupted by her BlackBerry ringing and she snatches it up from the table. ‘Pippa, sweetie,’ she squeals, switching into her posh voice. ‘How
are you?’
Pippa is one of Fiona’s posh new friends that she met at the Cartier International polo last summer. Fiona was there to write an article – apparently ‘polo is the new Pilates’ – and Pippa and her mates were there because they’re friends with the royals who were attending. Pippa used to date Prince Harry. Or knew someone who had dated Prince Harry. Whatever, it’s still a connection, however tenuous, and it’s brought out the Marilyn Monroe in Fiona’s Norma Jean.
‘Absolutely, I can’t wait for tonight. Are Tiggy and Rizzle coming too?’
That’s one of the things I’ve noticed about Fiona’s posh friends. No one’s got a normal name; they all sound as though they should be characters from a kid’s cartoon. Even Fiona isn’t plain old Fiona when she’s with them – instead she turns into ‘Fifi’. I know this as I once answered Fiona’s BlackBerry for her when she was in the bath and it was Pippa asking for someone called Fifi. At first I thought it was a wrong number.
‘Christmas?’ trills Fiona. ‘Oh, I spent the day at Mummy and Daddy’s.’
Mummy and Daddy? Since when did John and Liz, Fiona’s parents, go from being plain Mum and Dad to ‘Mummy and Daddy’?
Bemused, I listen as she starts flicking her blonde hair about and chattering on about ‘how wonderful it was to spend some time in the country’.
The country being her parents’ pebble-dashed semi in Kent, by the way.
I weave past her and start filling up the kettle. Forget champagne and canapés, I’m dying for a cup of tea and some Jaffa Cakes. I bought a fresh packet just the other day . . . Standing on tiptoe I begin rummaging in the cupboard, while she continues her conversation.
‘I know, I’m exactly the same! I just adore the long walks and fresh air.’
I try not to laugh. Fiona doesn’t do fresh air. She does scented candles and Marlboro Lights. And as for long walks . . .
I glance down at her teetering heels. Fiona is barely over five foot, but what she doesn’t have in stature, she makes up for in skyscraper stilettos. She’s the only person I know who sticks up for Victoria Beckham. She calls her a ‘kindred soul’. In fact, only the other weekend I caught her flicking through a copy of Hello!, and out of the corner of my eye I saw her looking at another photo of Posh in another pair of ridiculously high heels. Not realising I was listening, she let out a deep sigh and murmured, ‘I feel your pain, Victoria, I really do,’ and rubbed her bunions in solidarity.