Perfect on Paper

by Gillian Harvey

  Praise for Gillian Harvey

  ‘Charming and relatable’

  Sophie Cousens

  ‘Totally uplifting, totally a must-read’

  Tracy Bloom

  ‘Brilliantly funny and engaging’

  Nicola Gill

  ‘The perfect escapist read’

  Emma Murray

  ‘Hilarious, uplifting and relatable’

  Jessica Ryn

  ‘Fabulously funny … a perfect escapist read’

  Anna Bell

  ‘Heartwarming, funny and completely relatable,

  I couldn’t put it down!’

  Lucy Vine

  ‘Funny and honest’

  Elizabeth Buchan

  ‘Just the escapism we need right now’

  Evening Standard

  ‘Hilarious and relatable’

  Woman

  ‘A perfect weekend read’

  Grazia

  ‘Funny and uplifting’

  Bella

  ‘Hilarious, heartwarming and relatable’

  New! Magazine

  Dedication

  To my gorgeous children Lily, Joe, Tim, Evie and Robbie

  Perfect on Paper

  GILLIAN HARVEY

  Contents

  Cover

  Praise for Gillian Harvey

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Acknowledgements

  Author Biography

  Credits

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  ‘And congratulations to Will for yet another win in court!’ Nigel concluded, the harsh light of the meeting room bouncing off the sheen on his bald head, giving him the appearance of a haloed monk. ‘Well done.’

  The four of them clapped obediently as Will stood and gave such a smug little bow that it was all Clare could do to stop herself from leaping over the table and smacking him in the chops. His epic court battle over Mrs Jones’s sprained ankle had netted the firm about two hundred pounds in costs – the sort of money her department made before breakfast. Yet for some reason, news of his win had bumped her presentation to the bottom of the meeting’s agenda.

  ‘So, I think that’s it!’ Nigel concluded. His leather chair let out a flatulent creak as he stood up, and he stared at it pointedly for a second to make sure everyone knew exactly where the sound had come from. Then, looking at his watch, he announced ‘time, two p.m.’ in such a formal way that she had to look around the table to make sure he wasn’t pronouncing someone dead.

  ‘Um,’ Clare raised her voice slightly. ‘Um, Nigel, I thought I was going to go through the last quarter’s figures from conveyancing.’ After all, my department does make about seventy-five per cent of our turnover.

  Nigel glanced at her as if noticing her for the first time. ‘Er, oh … yes, of course. So, all good?’

  ‘Yes, we’re, actually we’ve—’

  ‘Great, great,’ Nigel waved her away as if he was swatting a small fly, rather than dealing with one of his longest-serving members of staff. ‘Do you want to jot it all down in a memo and I’ll give it a proper look through?’

  ‘Of course,’ she replied, her knuckles whitening against the folder she was clutching.

  Because the fact they’d smashed their target for the third time running was absolutely not as important as the fact that Will had won Mrs Jones’s claim against the builder who’d left a plank of wood lying in the street for her to (lucratively) tumble over.

  ‘It’ll get better,’ Ann said, once Clare was back in her office, adopting an American accent that made her sound like a character from a US law drama, ‘when you start taking homeowners to court and suing their asses rather than helping them move from A to B.’

  ‘Yep,’ Clare grinned, ‘I guess actually coming into the office and slogging away just isn’t as sexy as strutting around the courtroom in a sharp suit.’ She tugged at the edge of her washed-out blouse, rather self-consciously.

  ‘Look, don’t worry about it. They’ll realise soon enough when they come to balance the books,’ her friend said, rubbing Clare’s shoulder briefly.

  Would they though? Clare wondered. She’d been ten years in the job, four years as associate, and still Nigel seemed to take her presence, her Saturday morning paperwork sessions, her endless evening phone calls, for granted.

  Will had joined the firm six months ago, newly qualified and over styled – a man-boy who clearly imagined life as a lawyer would be just like TV drama Legal Minds. Tailored suits, high-profile courtroom drama, glamorous women offering themselves up over tequilas in shady bars after work. Maybe in Hollywood, or even Chicago, Clare thought; but things are a little different in the Home Counties.

  Nigel, her boss, and a lover of litigation, had recently taken Will under his wing, evidently having earmarked him for greatness, or at least a future partnership in their small firm. ‘He told me he sees me as the son he never had,’ Will had remarked to her recently.

  ‘That’s lovely,’ she’d replied, not really knowing what was required of her in the conversation. Or whether she should mention that Nigel actually did have a son, who was a successful accountant.

  ‘It’s not as if Nigel’s even going to read my memo anyway,’ she griped later to her husband Toby, as they shared an after-work glass of red in their kitchen. ‘He’s too caught up in the whole courtroom thing – he goes to watch Will perform, you know. His rising star.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Her husband stared at his reflection in the glass-fronted oven and smoothed a stray strand of hair back into place. ‘Tricky.’

  ‘Toby?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Can you maybe look at me when we’re talking?’

  ‘Sorry.’ He turned towards her, his blue eyes looking slightly panic-stricken. ‘It’s just … well, I’m having such trouble with my fringe. It’s hard to focus on anything else – you know?’


  She’d started to wonder whether her husband’s recent promotion was all it was cracked up to be. After a few comfortable years presenting a section of the breakfast show on regional TV, he’d recently been offered the chance to be a third wheel on the national programme.

  This meant two or three days a week he’d disappear to London in the early hours – sometimes picked up by a sleek black car, other times driving in himself to ‘beat the traffic’. He’d become obsessed with what he referred to as his ‘brand’ and begun to ask himself ‘what would Toby do?’ out loud when he was making important decisions such as whether to wear daring red socks or stick to his habitual grey.

  One day in three he might get a shot at doing a piece to camera. Last week, he’d interviewed a woman who believed she was in love with her pot plant.

  ‘Don’t you see?’ he’d said to Clare when she’d made a joke about it. ‘This is a foot in the door of serious TV journalism! There’s talk of me getting my own weekly section.’

  ‘Your fringe looks fine,’ she said now, impatiently, as he continued to fiddle with it.

  ‘Are you sure? It’s not too nineties?’

  ‘No! Anyway, what do you think I should do?’

  There was a silence.

  ‘Lasagne?’ he said at last, his tone uncertain.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Lasagne.’

  ‘Toby! I wasn’t even talking about … I was talking about work for God’s sake!’

  ‘Sorry! Sorry,’ his hand returned to his fringe. ‘Look, I was listening. It’s just …’

  ‘But you weren’t, were you?’

  ‘Yes. You were worried about your, um, work problem. Well …’ he paused for so long she thought he might have fallen into a coma. ‘I think you should do what you feel deep inside, you know, what your gut tells you,’ he continued eventually, patting his lower stomach for emphasis.

  ‘Hmm,’ she said, wondering what would happen if she really let her gut speak for her. Irritable bowel syndrome – a side-effect of being a successful but busy solicitor – meant that she was always acutely aware of exactly what her gut wanted to say, and was often desperately trying to prevent it from expressing itself in the middle of the office.

  ‘Anyway,’ Toby continued, ‘try not to worry.’ He patted her leg and began rearranging his fringe again in the reflection. ‘It’s only work.’

  What happened, she wondered briefly, to the attentive, mildly ambitious man she’d married fifteen years ago? The boy with a guitar who’d wooed her when they were at university? The man who, until he’d been catapulted into the realm of Z-list celebrity, had been her soulmate?

  In six short months he’d started a regime of ‘self care’ that would befit a top model. Special shampoos, endless face creams – she’d even caught him plucking his nose hair with the tweezers she reserved for her eyebrows.

  ‘That’s disgusting!’ she’d said, grabbing them from his hand. ‘Get your own!’

  He’d looked at her, tears in his eyes. ‘But I’m shooting tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, you don’t have to cry about it!’

  ‘I’m not!’

  Now he had clearly been thinking so much about his fringe that he’d forgotten to actually pay attention to what she was saying. She wasn’t even as important as a little bit of hair.

  ‘What I feel inside about what?’ she challenged.

  ‘About, you know … the work thing.’ His face – always an open book – registered almost pure panic.

  ‘Toby,’ she said, sitting forward slightly. ‘You haven’t been listening to anything, have you?’

  ‘I …’ he began indignantly.

  Just then, the door slammed and Alfie arrived home from football practice. Looking taller than he ought to for his fourteen years, he loped into the room. ‘What’s for dinner?’ he asked.

  It wasn’t even, Clare thought, as she furiously stirred the gravy, that she expected much of her family. Just vague acknowledgements from time to time that she was there, that she existed. Even their daughter Katie, who until she’d turned twelve six months ago had been Clare’s little sidekick, seemed recently to have been flooded with the kind of hormonal indifference towards her that ought by rights to be reserved for girls who at least had the good grace to be in their teens.

  Looking up now, Clare caught a glimpse of her reflection in the chrome of the extractor. A blur of beige skin, slightly red nose – which always seemed to happen when she was stressed – and limp brown hair that she’d spend ages volumizing every morning with mousse and a hairdryer just to have it gradually reduce over the course of the day like a disappointing soufflé, or a cake that had been removed too soon from the oven.

  Toby wasn’t the only one who needed to dial-up the self care. But she couldn’t afford the time to groom herself! Who could slap on face packs or get manicures when they were juggling hundreds of balls? She wasn’t Dynamo, or Houdini, or Angelina frickin’ Jolie.

  ‘Katie,’ she called. ‘Any chance of a hand with the cutlery?’

  Silence.

  Eventually Clare laid the table herself, flinging the knives and forks down with slightly more aggression than was probably necessary. As a small act of revenge, she gave Toby the dodgy fork; one of the prongs was bent after Alfie had tried to use it to press the reset button on an old mobile.

  That’d teach him.

  ‘Dinner’s ready!’ she said at last, and suddenly it seemed the collective family deafness was cured as they all came to the table, carefully laying their phones next to their plates as a kind of shield in case they were actually expected to converse with one another.

  ‘Well, this looks nice,’ Toby said brightly as she plonked his plate of cottage pie and carrots down in front of him. ‘Only …’

  ‘Only what?’

  Clearly Toby hadn’t sensed the tone, as he carried on talking.

  ‘Only … I’m sure you said you were going to make lasagne?’

  Chapter Two

  ‘Come on, come on,’ Clare hissed and turned the key in the ignition again. Not even a flicker of life. She glanced at her watch and felt a wave of panic. She couldn’t be late today – she barely had enough time to get everything done as it was.

  Two minutes earlier, Toby had purred out of their driveway in the new silver Mercedes he’d insisted he needed to keep up with the others in the studio. ‘They’ve given me my own parking space,’ he’d said when making his case for the purchase a few weeks ago. ‘It’s got my name on it. Well, my initials … I can’t park a Volvo next to Samantha’s Bentley!’

  The cost of the finance had meant Clare had had to delay upgrading her battered Scenic. (‘It’ll be fine,’ Toby had told her knowledgably. ‘There’s plenty of life in the old girl yet … And the car too! Eh!’)

  Which was, of course, exactly the kind of joke that goes down well when you’re trying to convince someone you need to sign up for forty grand’s worth of credit.

  While she was still reeling from the hit to their bank account, he’d then asked his PA at work to help him choose him an entirely new wardrobe from shops whose names Clare had never even heard of. ‘I just can’t wear my old stuff,’ he’d said. ‘It’s not current enough, not with it enough!’

  When she’d seen the receipt, Clare had nearly thrown up. She could have managed a reasonable second-hand car at least with the money he’d splashed out on what his PA had assured him were the ‘latest trends’.

  Clare wasn’t too sure what she made of the floral shirts and pointed shoes his twenty-five-year-old PA, Hayley, had picked out, but she’d had to admit Toby looked pretty hot in his new ensembles. He’d lost weight recently: the trousers hung flatteringly on his bum and the shirts, when tucked in, accentuated the fact that the paunch she’d used to tease him about had all but disappeared.

  In fact, although his head
was somewhere else, the rest of him had begun to resemble the Toby he’d been when they’d first met – young, toned, energetic – only with fewer band T-shirts and more floral cuffs.

  She’d probably have been flattered if any of it had been for her. But whenever she made a move, he seemed to almost jump away – as if she’d electrocuted him rather than pinched his bum. Yesterday she’d sidled up to him when he was pouring coffee and he’d nearly tipped the lot over his hand.

  ‘Hey!’ he’d said, a little too crossly for her liking. ‘Not in the kitchen!’

  For a man whose foreplay – back in the days when they’d used to have a normal amount of sex – had often involved coming over and dry-humping her bum when she was loading the dishwasher, this had seemed rather rich. She’d begun to get a little suspicious of Hayley, who seemed to have more say over Toby’s life than she did these days.

  The kids had left at eight this morning, both sloping off to the school bus. Both resisting a goodbye kiss. There had been a time, Clare thought grimly, when the little buggers could hardly be prised off her at the school gate. Suddenly the thought of even a quick peck on the cheek before they went off was not only undesirable but – as Katie had put it the other day when she’d actually managed to land one on her daughter before she’d left the house – ‘disgusting’.

  Clare counted to thirty and tried the key again. Still nothing.

  It was quarter to nine. She’d been cutting it fine to get in for half past as it was. Now she was definitely going to be late. She stepped out of the car into the freezing air and grabbed her battered tote bag full of papers from the passenger seat.

  One advantage of living on a main road, she thought as she walked along as best she could in her narrowest heels, was that there was at least a regular bus service into the town centre. The stop was only a five-minute walk, and if she was lucky there might be a bus along quickly enough for her to still make her meeting at ten.

  As she rounded the corner, she saw three others waiting by the stop. Two youngish studenty types of the sort that invaded the town in droves between October and June, and a chubby, grey-haired man in a raincoat, from which protruded (rather worryingly) a flash of bare leg followed by a pair of wellies.