‘About, you know. The future. My career. It’s not what I expected.’
‘It never is, is it? The future. That’s what makes it so fucking EXCITING! Hey, come here you. I said come here! I’ve got a theory about you, mate. Do you want to hear it?’
‘Go on then.’
‘People love you, Dex, they really do. Problem is, they love you in an ironic, tongue-in-cheek, love-to-hate kind of way. What we need to do is get someone to love you sincerely . . .’
CHAPTER TWELVE
Saying ‘I Love You’
WEDNESDAY 15 JULY 1998
Chichester, Sussex
Then, without quite knowing how it happened, Dexter finds that he has fallen in love, and suddenly life is one long mini-break.
Sylvie Cope. Her name is Sylvie Cope, a beautiful name, and if you asked him what she is like he would shake his head and blow air through his mouth and say that she is great, just great, just . . . amazing! She is beautiful of course, but in a different way from the others – not lads-mag-bubbly like Suki Meadows, or trendy-beautiful like Naomi or Ingrid or Yolande, but serenely, classically beautiful; in an earlier TV presenter incarnation, he might have called her ‘classy’, or even ‘dead classy’. Long, straight fair hair, parted severely in the middle, small neat features set perfectly in a pale heart-shaped face, she reminds him of a woman in a painting that he can’t remember the name of, someone mediaeval with flowers in her hair. That is what Sylvie Cope is like; the kind of woman who would look perfectly at home with her arms draped around a unicorn. Tall and slim, a little austere, frequently quite stern, with a face that doesn’t move much except to frown or sometimes to roll her eyes at some stupid thing he’s said or done; Sylvie is perfect, and demands perfection.
Her ears stick out just a tiny, tiny bit so that they glow like coral with the light behind her, and in the same light you can see a fine downy hair on her cheeks and forehead. At other, more superficial times in his life Dexter might have found these qualities, the glowing ears, the hairy forehead, off-putting but as he looks at her now, seated at the table opposite him on an English lawn in high summer, her perfect little chin resting on her long-fingered hand, swallows overhead, candles lighting her face just like in those paintings by the candle-guy, he finds her completely hypnotic. She smiles at him across the table and he decides that tonight is the night that he will tell her that he loves her. He has never really said ‘I love you’ before, not sober and on purpose. He has said ‘I fucking love you’, but that’s different, and he feels that now is the time to use the words in their purest form. He is so taken with this plan that he is momentarily unable to concentrate on what is being said.
‘So what do you do exactly, Dexter?’ asks Sylvie’s mother, from the far end of the table; Helen Cope, birdlike and aloof in beige cashmere.
Unhearing, Dexter continues to gaze at Sylvie, who is raising her eyebrows now in warning. ‘Dexter?’
‘Hm?’
‘Mummy asked you a question?’
‘I’m sorry, miles away.’
‘He’s a TV presenter,’ says Sam, one of Sylvie’s twin brothers. Nineteen years old with a college rower’s back, Sam is a hulking, self-satisfied little Nazi, just like his twin brother Murray.
‘Is or was? Do you still do presenting these days?’ smirks Murray and they flick their blond fringes at each other. Sporty, clear-skinned, blue-eyed, they look like they were raised in a lab.
‘Mummy wasn’t asking you, Murray,’ snaps Sylvie.
‘Well, I still am a presenter, of sorts,’ says Dexter and thinks, I’ll get you yet, you little bastards. They’ve had run-ins before, Dexter and The Twins, in London. Through little smirks and twinkles they’ve revealed that they don’t think much of sis’s new boyfriend, think she can do better. The Cope family are Winners and will only tolerate Winners. Dexter’s just a charm-boy, a has-been, a poser on the way down. There is silence at the table. Was he meant to keep talking? ‘I’m sorry, what was the question?’ asks Dexter, momentarily lost but determined to get back on top of the game.
‘I wondered what you were up to these days, work-wise?’ she repeats patiently, making clear that this is a job interview for the post of Sylvie’s boyfriend.
‘Well, I’ve been working on a couple of new TV shows, actually. We’re waiting to find out what’s going to get commissioned.’
‘What are they about, these TV shows?’
‘Well one’s about London nightlife, a sort of what’s-on-in-the-capital thing, and the other’s a sports show. Extreme Sports.’
‘Extreme Sports? What are “Extreme Sports”?’
‘Um, well mountain-biking, snow-boarding, skate-boarding—’
‘And do you do any “Extreme Sports” yourself?’ smirks Murray.
‘I skate-board a little,’ says Dexter, defensively, and he notices that at the other end of the table, Sam has stuffed his napkin into his mouth.
‘Will we have seen you on anything on the BBC?’ says Lionel, the father, handsome, plump, self-satisfied and still bizarrely blond in his late fifties.
‘Unlikely. It’s all rather late-night fare, I’m afraid.’ ‘Rather late-night fare, I’m afraid’, ‘I skate-board a little’. God, he thinks, what do you sound like? There’s something about being with the Cope family that makes him behave as if he’s in a costume drama. Perchance, ’tis rather late-night fare. Still, if that’s what it takes . . .
Now Murray, the other twin – or is it actually Sam? – pipes up, his mouth full of salad, ‘We used to watch that late night show you were on, largin’ it. All swearing and dolly-birds dancing in cages. You didn’t like us watching it, remember Mum?’
‘God, that thing?’ Mrs Cope, Helen, frowns. ‘I do remember, vaguely.’
‘You used to really, really hate it,’ says Murray or Sam.
‘Turn it off! you used to shout,’ says the other one. ‘Turn it off! You’ll damage your brain!’
‘Funny, that’s exactly what my mother used to say too,’ says Dexter, but no-one picks up on the remark and he reaches for the wine bottle.
‘So that was you, was it?’ says Lionel, Sylvie’s father, his eyebrows raised, as if the gentleman at his table has revealed himself to be rather the cad.
‘Well, yes, but it wasn’t all like that. I tended just to interview the bands and the movie stars.’ He wonders if he sounds big-headed with this talk of bands and movie stars, but there’s no chance of that because the twins are there, ready to shoot him down.
‘So do you still hang out with a lot of movie stars then?’ says one of them, in mock awe, the jumped-up little Aryan freak-boy.
‘Not really. Not anymore.’ He decides to answer honestly, but without any regret or self-pity. ‘That has all sort of . . . drifted away.’
‘Dexter’s being modest,’ says Sylvie. ‘He gets offers all the time. He’s just very picky about his on-screen work. What he really wants to do is produce. Dexter has his own media production company!’ she says proudly, and her parents nod approvingly. A businessman, an entrepreneur – that’s more like it.
Dexter smiles too, but the fact is life has become a great deal quieter recently. Mayhem TV plc has yet to earn a commission, or a meeting with a commissioner, and at the moment still exists only in the form of expensively headed paper. Aaron, his agent, has dropped him. There are no voiceovers, no promotional work, not quite so many premieres. He is no longer the voice of premium cider, has been quietly expelled from poker school, and even the guy who plays the congas in Jamiroquai doesn’t call him anymore. And yet despite all this, the downturn in professional fortunes, he’s fine now, because now he has fallen in love with Sylvie, beautiful Sylvie, and now they have their mini-breaks.
Weekends frequently begin and end at Stansted airport, where they fly off to Genoa or Bucharest, Rome or Reykjavik, trips that Sylvie pre-plans with the precision of an invading army. A startlingly attractive, metropolitan European couple, they stay in exclusive little boutique hotels and walk
and shop and shop and walk and drink tiny cups of black coffee in street cafés, then lock themselves into their chic minimal taupe-coloured bedroom with the wet-room and the single stick of bamboo in the tall thin vase.
If they’re not exploring small independent shops in a major European city, then they’re spending time in West London with Sylvie’s friends: petite, pretty hard-faced girls and their pink-cheeked, large-bottomed boyfriends who, like Sylvie and her friends, work in marketing, or advertising or the City. In truth, they’re not really his sort, these hyper-confident über-boyfriends. They remind him of the prefects and head-boys he knew at school; not unpleasant, just not very cool. Never mind. You can’t build your life around what’s cool, and there are benefits to this less chaotic, more ordered lifestyle.
Serenity and drunkenness don’t really go together and save for the occasional glass of champagne or wine with dinner, Sylvie doesn’t drink alcohol. Neither does she smoke or take drugs or eat red meat or bread or refined sugar or potatoes. More significantly, she has no time for Dexter drunk. His abilities as a fabled mixologist mean nothing to her. She finds inebriation embarrassing and unmanly, and more than once he has found himself alone at the end of the evening because of that third martini. Though it has never been stated as such, he has been given a choice: clean up your act, sort out your life, or you will lose me. Consequently there are fewer hangovers these days, fewer nose-bleeds, fewer mornings spent writhing in shame and self-disgust. He no longer goes to bed with a bottle of red wine in case he gets thirsty in the night, and for this he is grateful. He feels like a new man.
But the single most striking thing about Sylvie is that he likes her so much more than she likes him. He likes her straightforwardness, her self-confidence and poise. He likes her ambition, which is ferocious and unapologetic, and her taste, which is expensive and immaculate. Of course he likes the way she looks, and the way they look together, but he also likes her lack of sentimentality; she is as hard, bright and desirable as a diamond and for the first time in his life, he has had to do the chasing. On their first date, a ruinously expensive French restaurant in Chelsea, he had wondered aloud if she was enjoying herself. She was having a wonderful time, she said, but she didn’t like to laugh in company because she didn’t like what laughter did to her face. And although a part of him felt a little chill at this, a part of him also had to admire her commitment.
This visit, his first to the parental home, is part of a long weekend, a stopover in Chichester before they continue down the M3 to a rented cottage in Cornwall, where Sylvie is going to teach him how to surf. Of course he shouldn’t really be taking all this time off, he should be working, or looking for work. But the prospect of Sylvie, stern and rosy-cheeked in a wetsuit with her hair tied back, is almost more than he can bear. He looks across at her now to check on how he is performing, and she smiles reassuringly in the candlelight. He’s doing fine so far, and he pours himself one last glass of wine. Mustn’t have too much. Got to keep your wits about you, with these people.
After dessert – sorbet made from their very own strawberries, which he has praised excessively – Dexter helps Sylvie take the plates back into the house, a red-brick mansion like a high-end doll’s house. They stand in the Victorian country kitchen, loading the dishwasher.
‘I keep getting your brothers muddled up.’
‘A good way to remember it is Sam’s hateful and Murray’s foul.’
‘Don’t think they like me very much.’
‘They don’t like anyone apart from themselves.’
‘I think they think I’m a bit flash.’
She takes his hand across the cutlery basket. ‘Does it matter what my family think of you?’
‘Depends. Does it matter to you, what your family think of me?’
‘A little, I suppose.’
‘Well then it matters to me too,’ he says, with great sincerity.
She stops loading the dishwasher, and looks at him intently. Like public laughter, Sylvie is not a big fan of ostentatious displays of affection, of cuddles and hugs. Sex with Sylvie is like a particularly demanding game of squash, leaving him aching and with a general sense that he has lost. Physical contact is rare and when it does come, tends to spring from nowhere, violently and swiftly. Now, suddenly, she puts her hand to the back of his head and kisses him hard, at the same time taking his other hand and jamming it between her legs. He looks into her eyes, wide and intent, and sets his own face to express desire, rather than discomfort at the dishwasher door chafing his shins. He can hear the family marching into the house, the twins’ boorish voices in the hallway. He tries to pull away, but his lower lip is gripped neatly between Sylvie’s teeth, stretching out comically like a Warner Brothers cartoon. He whimpers and she laughs then lets go of his lip so that it snaps back like a rollerblind.
‘Can’t wait for bed later,’ she breathes, as he checks for blood with the back of his hand.
‘What if your family hear?’
‘I don’t care. I’m a big girl now.’ He wonders if he should do it now, tell her that he loves her.
‘God, Dexter, you can’t just put the saucepans in the dishwasher, you have to rinse them first.’ She goes through to the living room, leaving him to rinse the pans.
Dexter is not easily intimidated by anyone, but there is something about this family, something self-sufficient and self-satisfied, that makes him feel defensive. It’s certainly not a matter of class; his own background is just as privileged, if a lot more liberal and bohemian than the High Tory Copes. What makes him anxious is this obligation to prove himself a winner. The Copes are early risers, mountain-walkers, lake-swimmers; hale, hearty, superior and he resolves not to let them get to him.
As he enters the living room the Axis powers turn to face him, and there’s a hasty hush as if they have just been discussing him. He smiles confidently, then flops into one of the low floral sofas. The living room has been done up to feel like a country house hotel, right down to the copies of Country Life, Private Eye and the Economist, fanned out on the coffee table. There’s a momentary silence. A clock ticks, and he is contemplating reaching for a copy of The Lady when:
‘I know, let’s play “Are You There, Moriarty?”,’ says Murray, and there’s general approval from the family, even Sylvie.
‘What’s “Are You There, Moriarty?”’ asks Dexter, and the Copes all shake their heads in unison at this interloper’s ignorance.
‘It’s a wonderful, wonderful parlour game!’ says Helen, more animated than she has been all evening. ‘We’ve been playing it for years!’ Sam, meanwhile, is already rolling up a copy of the Daily Telegraph into a long stiff rod. ‘Basically, one person is blindfolded, and they have this rolled-up newspaper and they sit kneeling opposite this other person . . .’
‘ . . . who’s also blindfolded.’ Murray takes over, at the same time digging in the drawers of the antique writing table for a roll of sellotape. ‘The one with the rolled-up newspaper says, “Are you there, Moriarty?”’ He tosses the tape to Sam.
‘And the other person has to sort of contort and duck out of the way and then answer Yes! or Here!’ Sam starts binding the newspaper into a tight baton. ‘And judging from where the voice comes from, he has to try and hit them with the rolled-up newspaper.’
‘You get three attempts, and if you miss all three you have to stay on and get hit by the next player,’ says Sylvie, elated at the prospect of a Victorian parlour game, ‘and if you hit the other person you get to choose your next contestant. That’s how we play it anyway.’
‘So—’ says Murray, tapping the palm of his hand with the paper truncheon. ‘Who’s for some Extreme Sports?’
It is decided that Sam will take on Dexter the intruder and that, surprise surprise, Sam will get the baton. The field of battle is the large faded rug in the middle of the room, and Sylvie leads him into position then stands behind him, tying a large white napkin over his eyes, a princess favouring her loyal knight. He gets one last gli
mpse of Sam kneeling opposite him, smirking from behind his blindfold as he taps the palm of his hand with the baton, and Dexter is suddenly overwhelmed by the need to win this game and show the family what he’s made of. ‘Show them how it’s done,’ whispers Sylvie, her breath hot in his ear, and he remembers the moment in the kitchen, his hand between her legs. Now she takes his elbow and helps him kneel, and the adversaries face each other in silence like gladiators in the arena of the Persian rug.
‘Let the games commence!’ says Lionel, like an emperor.
‘Are you there, Moriarty?’ says Sam with a snigger.
‘Here,’ says Dexter, then like a limbo dancer deftly leans backwards.
The first blow hits him just below the eye, making a satisfying slapping sound that echoes round the room. ‘Oooh!’ and ‘Ouch!’ say the Copes, laughing at his pain. ‘That’s gotta hurt,’ says Murray maddeningly, and Dexter feels a deep sting of humiliation while he laughs good-naturedly, a hearty, well-done-you laugh. ‘You got me!’ he concedes, rubbing his cheek, but Sam has smelt blood and is already asking—
‘Are you there, Moriarty?’
‘Ye . . .’
Before he can move, the second blow slaps against his buttock, causing him to flinch and stumble to the side, and again there is laughter from the family, and a low hissing ‘yessssss’ from Sam.
‘Nice one, Sammy,’ says the mother, proud of her boy, and Dexter suddenly has a deep hatred of this stupid fucking game, which seems to be some weird family ritual of humiliation . . .
‘Two out of two,’ guffaws Murray. ‘Nice one, bro.’
. . . and don’t say ‘bro’ either you little tit, thinks Dexter, fuming now because if there’s one thing that he hates it’s being laughed at, especially by this lot, who clearly think he’s a loser, all washed-up and not up to the job of being their precious Sylvie’s boyfriend. ‘I think I’ve got the hang of it now,’ he chortles, clinging to a sense of humour while at the same time wanting to pummel Sammy’s face with his fists—
‘Let’s get ready to rumble . . .’ says Murray, in that voice again.
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