What Might Have Been

by Holly Miller

  Three

  “You did the right thing,” Jools assures me, when I tell her I walked out of my job yesterday. “They’ve been stringing you along for long enough.”

  I’m still in bed, video-chatting with my oldest friend, the person who’s been by my side since primary school, who never fails to reassure me in times of uncertainty.

  “Thanks,” I say, biting my lip. “Feels a bit hasty in the cold light of day, though.” I’m not, as a rule, someone who makes rash decisions. I might occasionally drink coffee late at night, try a bold shade of lipstick, or pick an item at random off a takeaway menu, but that’s generally as risky as I get.

  Jools sips her tea. Like me, she’s not been awake long. Her hair is falling loose from its knot, and she pushes it away from her face. “So, what did Georgia say, when you told her you were quitting?”

  “Not much, actually. I think she was in shock.”

  When I first started at Figaro nine years ago, it seemed like luck I didn’t fully deserve—a role at Shoreley’s only creative agency mere months after dropping out of university. I originally applied for a writing job, but Georgia employed me as a planner, because she had a vague idea her fledgling agency wouldn’t get very far without one. I said yes straightaway—I was so grateful to be offered a job at all—and vowed I’d mention a writing role again once I was settled and had proved myself. There were just six of us at the start, and together we grew the business to the forty-strong outfit it is today. And for most of those years, it was good. Fulfilling on many levels. But deep down, I wasn’t a planner: I’d always wanted to write. It was in my blood. The whole time I was researching products and industries, liaising with clients or composing briefs, I knew my heart really lay in writing. I’d scribble down headlines, feed creative angles to the team, sometimes draft copy to help the writers out.

  It all came to a head yesterday afternoon, when I discovered Georgia had recruited an external copywriter. She’d promised the job to me on five separate occasions over the years, and now she’d given it to someone else.

  I stormed into her office to demand an explanation, whereupon she informed me weakly that the timing wasn’t right, that she couldn’t afford to lose me from planning. So—surprising myself as much as anyone else—I simply walked out.

  “So, what now?” Jools says, biting into a slice of toast. “Are you going to move to London?”

  “London?” I echo, like she’s just said the moon.

  “Yeah. Didn’t that big-time agency contact you a couple of weeks ago?”

  I nod. “Only because they’re looking for a planner.”

  As it happens, a recruiter for the crème de la crème of creative agencies, Supernova Agency of Soho, did message me a fortnight or so ago. Its staff is like a roll call of the industry’s hottest talent, and it regularly competes for the biggest accounts in the country, winning pitch after pitch, award after award. Famously ruthless, Supernova has a fierce reputation: for poaching staff, demanding regular all-nighters, and refusing to acknowledge weekends. But the pay is eye-watering and the office has its own bar, gym, and nail station. Plus there are the legendary all-expenses-paid staff away trips.

  I’ve received similar messages from various recruiters over the years, but they all seemed to coincide with reasons why I shouldn’t leave Figaro—another promise from Georgia about making me a writer, a pay rise, Shoreley being voted the best place to live in the UK, a Guardian article about Londoners fleeing the city in droves. And to be honest, I’ve been pretty happy in Shoreley, living with Tash and her husband and my nephew. I’ve never seriously considered moving to the capital.

  “This is perfect timing, Luce,” Jools is saying. “We’ve got a room going free. Literally, today. Cara’s moving out.”

  Jools left Shoreley for London nearly twelve years ago to study nursing, and never came home. For the past three years she’s lived in a house-share in Tooting. Like me, she’s been saving to buy her own place, and in the interim a house-share’s cheaper than a one-bed flat. Plus it’s just a street away from the hospital where she works.

  She’s had various housemates and flatmates over the years—all too often a source of amusement for us—but her current lot seem pretty decent. I’ve met them a handful of times. Cara in particular is warm and sharp-witted, with a guttural laugh and a penchant for making cheese on toast in the middle of the night.

  And Jools’s house is nice. Yes, it’s scruffy and well-worn, with peeling wallpaper and over-trodden carpets and a permanent symphony of drips and leaks. But there’s a warm and homely vibe there, too. And it’s always full of people. It’s a place I can imagine feeling safe.

  Jools tells me Cara’s going traveling. Southeast Asia, then Australia.

  My stomach swings as my gaze flicks to my bedroom window. An instinctive search for air, an escape route.

  I take a couple of steadying breaths, then look back at my phone. “Are you serious?”

  “Yes! Get that high-flying agency job and move in with me.”

  “But . . . I don’t think I want to be a planner in London any more than I do in Shoreley.”

  “Become a copywriter, then. I mean, you might have to start in a more junior role—but look at all the industry experience you’ve got.”

  And a portfolio, I think, cautiously. Ads I’ve sketched out in my spare time, copy I’ve written when the team has been up against it, scamps I’ve worked up with designers, just for fun.

  “Plus, you know who else lives in London,” says Jools, meaningfully.

  “Who?” I say innocently, even as my mind is whispering, Max.

  “Max.”

  * * *

  —

  Max?” my sister says a few minutes later as I’m downstairs getting breakfast, her eyes going wide as a deer’s in a torch beam.

  Tash has never been a Max fan, ever since he broke my heart.

  “I know, I know. But he was lovely, last night. He seemed . . . pleased to see me.”

  “What was he doing in Shoreley?”

  “Just passing. A work thing,” I say, opting not to fill her in on Max’s self-confessed trip down memory lane.

  Tash hands me a coffee. While I’m shoveling Coco Pops at her immaculate kitchen breakfast bar, she’s prepping for a gym session, head to toe in Sweaty Betty, a giant canister of water in one hand.

  I moved in with Tash and her husband Simon two years ago. It was part of a big idea—hers more than mine, at the start—to help me save money and eventually get on the property ladder. As it happens, I hate living on my own, and I was craving the company anyway after splitting up with my ex, so it worked out pretty well.

  It’s not as much of a sacrifice on Tash and Simon’s part as it sounds. Their converted farmhouse has six bedrooms and two actual wings, plus I’m a live-in unofficial babysitter. It’s about ten miles inland, surrounded by nothing but vast arable fields, with no near neighbors. The depth of the quietness here can sometimes feel eerie, making me crave the agitation of crashing waves or the commotion of enthusing tourists roaming Shoreley’s cobblestone streets.

  “Jools thinks I should move to London,” I say, through a mouthful of cereal while Tash bounces up and down from her ankles. “There’s a room going spare at her place.”

  The furrow on Tash’s forehead deepens. She stops bouncing. “Luce, just because you’ve bumped into Max, you can’t just up and—”

  “It’s not that,” I say, because really, it isn’t. I mean, yes—my horoscope did happen to mention bumping into my soulmate yesterday, and it does seem ridiculous to think it could have been referring to anyone other than Max. But it did also hint I was about to embark on a new career path. Jools has a free room, and I have had that message from the ad agency recruiter: maybe all the signs are pointing in the direction of London.

  “I’ve got a better idea,” says Tash.

 
“Go on,” I say, suspiciously, because—let’s face it—I am talking to a person who enjoys a prebreakfast workout.

  “Why don’t you use the opportunity to write? That’s always been your dream.”

  “Yeah, that’s sort of what I was thinking—trying to get a writing job at an ad agency.”

  “No, I meant . . .” Tash hesitates, then breaks into a smile. “Look what I came across at the deli yesterday.” She leans over to the fruit bowl, slides a flyer out from underneath it.

  WRITE THAT NOVEL! ALL LEVELS WELCOME.

  WEEKLY WORKSHOPS. £5 A SESSION.

  RUN BY PUBLISHED NOVELIST RYAN CARWELL.

  I look up at her. “Write a novel?”

  She reaches across the breakfast bar, takes my hand. “You know, just before you went traveling, you read me that short story you’d written, and I was . . . blown away. Honestly, Luce. I’ve been thinking ever since that you should do something with your writing. Well, maybe this is your chance. To get back to doing what you really love. Didn’t you say you’d had an idea for a novel?”

  I swallow. In many ways, she’s right: writing fiction is what I love to do. It was born out of being a voracious childhood bookworm, I think: I would always turn to books in times of uncertainty or when I needed an escape, or to lose myself for a while—like when Dad got made redundant, or there was that spate of burglaries in our street, or our beloved grandmother eventually succumbed to stomach cancer. And the books I sought solace in were, almost without exception, stories about love. The kind of books my parents had always had lying around the house, timeless old romantics that they were. So during holidays and weekends, and on school nights by torchlight beneath my bedsheets, I lost myself in Wuthering Heights and Pride and Prejudice, Anna Karenina and Dr. Zhivago. The stories were not always cheerful, of course, and love didn’t always prevail. But I liked what they had in common: that they put love center stage, that universal, all-encompassing emotion with the power to either complete or destroy us.

  As I got older—and especially at moments of disappointment, heartache, or trauma—my passion for reading turned into a desire to write, a longing to see if I could make other people feel the way I felt when I read: moved to tears, inspired, comforted.

  So I began to write the kind of fiction I understood best: love stories. At uni, I joined a creative writing group, entered competitions, even had a couple of short stories published in the student magazine. Writing became my form of self-expression, a way to try to make sense of life. Even when I dropped out of my English literature degree, I told everyone it would be okay, because I was off to become a writer as I traveled the globe. And at that point, I’d had an idea for a novel—I had the premise, characters, and rough chapter plan sketched out, had filled half a notebook.

  But then came Australia, when the world stopped making sense to me entirely. And I no longer wanted to express how I felt. I simply shut down. Back then, merely glancing at my own words on the page was enough to bring bile to my throat.

  I’ve not so much as looked at that novel again since.

  My sister’s eyes are lighting up with possibility. “That was the plan when you left uni, Lucy, wasn’t it—to write a novel? But after you came back from traveling . . .” She trails off, and I know what she really wants to say: that on my return, I wasn’t quite the same person as I was before.

  “I need money,” I say. “I can’t just . . . not work.”

  “So get a part-time job, to tide you over. The cost of living’s so much cheaper here—you could get by on something casual.”

  I can’t deny I do have it easy, living in Shoreley. The outrageous cost of renting even a single room in Jools’s house-share has already given me mild palpitations.

  “Actually,” Tash says, blinking rapidly like she’s just had a lightbulb moment, “Ivan’s looking for someone to help run the shop.”

  I stare at her, blankly. “Who’s Ivan? What shop?”

  “You know Ivan. Luke’s dad.”

  “I don’t know Luke, or his dad.” Tash does this a lot—name-drop other kids and their parents from my nephew Dylan’s school, most of whom I’ve never met or heard of before.

  “Luke’s in Dylan’s class. His dad owns the gift shop in town. Pebbles & Paper.”

  “The place that sells candles for thirty quid a pop?”

  Tash smiles. “Come on—you’re into signs from the universe, or whatever. I pick up this flyer, Ivan’s looking for someone to help in the shop . . . This is an opportunity. To finish that novel and do what you’ve always dreamed of.”

  Once, at uni, a group of us were lounging about in my bedroom in halls when we started discussing our biggest fears. We agreed on the usual things—losing a loved one, or illness, or being in this much debt for the rest of our lives—but there was one thought that kept ringing through my mind like a bell: missing my calling. I couldn’t imagine anything worse than overlooking the chances—however big, or small—life might send my way. I still can’t, as it happens, even all these years later.

  I feel something stir in my stomach at the thought of reacquainting myself with the person I used to be.

  “So?” My sister, my best friend, my longtime confidante, is looking at me, her eyes alive with expectation. “What are you going to do, Luce? Stay, or go?”

  Four

  Stay

  “So, your sister said you’re a writer.”

  Only six short days since that morning in Tash’s kitchen, when I made my decision to stay in Shoreley, and she’s already telling the world that I write for a living, which really couldn’t be further from the truth.

  I’m meeting Dylan’s friend’s dad Ivan at Pebbles & Paper before it opens for the day. According to Ivan’s spiel, it’s an award-winning gift shop that’s featured in numerous magazines—though it’s unclear exactly what award a gift shop might win, and I don’t believe for one moment his claim that Kate Winslet stopped by last summer to buy fifty quid’s worth of vegan soap. His outfit is kind of setting the tone—he’s wearing off-white chinos, loafers, and a striped shirt of the kind most often seen at Henley Regatta.

  The shop’s interior is all very beach chic, making liberal use of bunting, seashells, and nautical stripes. I’ve popped in here just a couple of times before, only to balk at the prices before legging it empty-handed. I don’t tell Ivan this, of course, a man who’s spent the last five minutes bragging about his profit margins.

  “Sort of,” I say meekly, in reply to his half question, as I breathe in the fug of essential oils, scented candles, and handmade drawer fresheners. “I mean, that’s the plan.”

  Ivan frowns, like my life goals could do with some serious unpacking right here among the inspirational driftwood signs. “Well, anyway, we’re expanding next year,” he says. “Lining up a couple of little premises in Suffolk and West London.” He pushes his fringe out of his eyes. “So, look, we’d mainly need you to do weekday mornings. Me or my wife Clarissa will take over in the afternoons. But we would need you to work all day on alternate Saturdays.”

  “Perfect,” I say.

  “All right. Let’s go over how the till works, shall we?”

  I nod and follow him to the counter, where there’s a computer screen, a goldfish bowl full of artisan soap, and a complicated assortment of tissue paper and ribbons that I sincerely hope I won’t be expected to touch. It’s long been my opinion that gift bags were invented for a reason.

  “So, what’s your novel about?” Ivan says, logging in to the till on the touchscreen.

  I hesitate. “Well, it’s sort of . . . a love story, I suppose.”

  “Ah,” he says, knowingly. “One of those books, is it?”

  “One of what books?”

  I can tell he’s trying to resist waggling his eyebrows. “Racy.”

  I clear my throat. “Not exactly. It’s loosely based on my parents, actua
lly.”

  He looks faintly disappointed and not at all convinced. “So, what were you doing before this? Tash said something about advertising.”

  “Figaro,” I say, the word sticking unexpectedly in my throat as I try not to picture the expression on Georgia’s face as I told her I was leaving. No matter what had gone down between us, I’d always considered her a friend. “Do you know it?”

  “Sorry, never heard of it. Right. Punch in this code here to log in. And then we’ll do a few dummy scans using the alpaca-wool bedsocks.”

  * * *

  —

  When I get back to Tash’s around lunchtime, the house is empty and utterly still, shrouded in the type of silence I’ve only ever really encountered this deep in the countryside. If the house is full, I’m usually able to tune it out, but whenever I’m alone, it hits me like a waterfall. At new year, when Tash, Simon, and Dylan went skiing to Chamonix for a week, I had to turn the sound system on in every room—exactly as I’m doing now—just to feel a bit less like an apocalypse survivor. To drown out that all-too-familiar drumming in my chest.

  The job at Pebbles & Paper looks like it will work out. Ivan seems okay, if a bit ridiculous. He’s asked me to start a week from Saturday. But for the whole bus ride home, I couldn’t stop wondering if I’ve made the right decision, staying in Shoreley.

  I mean, really—who do I think I am? I’m actually nothing more than a wannabe writer who’s never even had so much as a paragraph of fiction published professionally. Maybe I should have gone to London, moved in with Jools, got a job at that Soho agency. Maybe I still can.

  But as I’m tipping Worcester sauce all over my cheese on toast, a message from Jools flashes up on my phone. She says Cara’s room has been taken by someone called Nigel, who works in financial auditing. Apparently, he brought an actual basket of muffins with him when he turned up to view it.