Life Swap

by Jane Green

  ‘So you’re the woman who’s going to be my wife for a month?’ He grins, much like the cat that got the cream. ‘Excellent. I understand you’ll be swapping clothes as well? I have to say I was rather dubious when Hope told me about writing to you, but now I’ve met you I’ll have to make sure Hope leaves behind her sexiest underwear.’

  ‘Oh please,’ Vicky attempts, ‘your wife’s tiny. I’m supposed to swap with someone the same size as me so we can wear one another’s clothes. I don’t think I’d even get her trousers past my ankles.’

  ‘Good. No reason for them to go any higher anyway. I’ve always liked a woman with a bottom,’ and he looks at Vicky admiringly as a shiver of horror goes through her.

  ‘You do realize,’ she says tartly, ‘that if I were to choose Hope, one of the requirements is not to sleep with the husband.’

  ‘Not a requirement, sure. But a possibility?’ He looks around to check the girls are out of earshot, then leans closer to Vicky and lowers his voice. ‘If two people are mutually attracted to one another, why not? If no one will ever know? What’s the harm? It’s only sex, for heaven’s sake.’

  Vicky shakes her head in disgust as Hope comes out of the house carrying the two-year-old, her face lighting up as she sees her husband.

  ‘Hello, darling,’ she says, proffering her cheek for him to kiss, and Adam obliges, winking surreptitiously at Vicky as he goes inside.

  ‘What did you think of Adam?’ Hope says, as Vicky prepares to leave.

  ‘He seems… charming,’ Vicky manages. A slimeball, she wants to say. Sleazy and a lech, and you deserve so very much better. So he’s good-looking. So he makes a huge amount of money to keep you in this lavish lifestyle. He cannot keep his penis in his pants, she wants to say. Look at you and look at me. Look at how gorgeous you are and how ordinary I am, and still he wants to sleep with me, just because I’m not you, just because he can, because weaker women than I, women less secure than I would be taken in by being flirted with by a man such as Adam.

  I wish you would leave him, she wants to say, but instead she gives Hope a hug and says, ‘Take care. I’ll be in touch,’ and she knows as she drives away that she couldn’t stand spending four weeks fighting off Adam’s advances, and that even the firmest of rebuffs would only inspire him more.

  No. Hope Nettleton, for all the wonderful things she has, is not the person with whom Vicky is going to swap. The grass is not greener here, she has seen. Is it possible that this whole experiment will fail? That the only people she has found to have grass that is greener will remain her brother and sister-in-law, and swapping with her sister-in-law, however innocent, is too bizarre to even contemplate.

  Oh well. There is still one more possibility, and Janelle Salinger’s first choice all along. Amber Winslow.

  Highfield, Connecticut, here I come…

  Chapter Fifteen

  Amber wakes up with a start. Oh my God, she realizes. Today’s the day. Today, 16 June, is the day Vicky Townsley flies in from London to see whether Amber is good enough to be the life swapee.

  Poor Amber. This is not, for her, about Vicky. About Vicky choosing the person whose life she most would want. This is about Amber’s life being good enough for someone else to choose, and she is filled with anxiety that somehow she won’t make the cut. Last night she even took an Ambien to sleep, and she lies in bed for a while as the Xanaxcalls her from the top drawer in the bathroom, but in the end she decides not to take anything – surely better to be fully conscious than off in LaLaLand on Xanax– besides, there’s an awful lot to do today.

  The house is spotless but she has to buy fresh flowers, fill each room with armfuls of wonderful-smelling blooms. Hazelnut-scented coffee must be freshly brewed, cinnamon buns baking in the oven – every realtor’s dream, except Amber isn’t selling her house, but using the same methods to sell her lifestyle, herself.

  Gracie has a new dress just for today. A smocked, pink cotton dress, little ankle socks and black patent Mary Janes. And Jared will be in a chambray shirt, navy chinos and loafers, just a touch of hair gel to slick his hair back, make him look ever so handsome. They will look as if they stepped right out of the pages of a catalogue. Amber stands in Gracie’s bedroom admiring the new dress. How could anyone resist children as adorable as this?

  Amber herself has decided to be low key. Chameleon that she is, today she is aiming for all-round good girl. Casual, warm, friendly. Nothing too intimidating, nothing that might put Vicky Townsley off. Stretchy khakis, a pink cable cashmere sweater, suede Tods on her feet, and her hair pulled back in a casual, girlish ponytail. She’s aiming for Hope and Michael from Thirty-something. The perfect people with perfect lives. The family that everyone hopes one day to have, particularly the thirty-something single girl from London.

  Richard, however, is the only fly in the ointment. Effortlessly charming, unfailingly well dressed, pleasant-enough-looking to still attract second glances that Amber notes with pride when they go out, he is still not happy, to put it mildly, about this journalist, about Amber writing in, about the increasingly real possibility that Amber will be disappearing for four weeks and a woman he doesn’t know will be taking her place.

  Richard has barely spoken to Amber since the night of the argument. They are communicating mostly through their children, and every time Amber tries to bring up the subject again, he refuses to speak about it.

  And so last night, after Richard had fallen fast asleep, his back turned towards Amber, she crept out of bed and went down to the desk in the kitchen, pulled out some notepaper and started writing Richard a letter.

  My darling Richard,

  I want you to know that I love you today as much as I loved you when we took our wedding vows. If anything, I love you more. When I talked about making changes I didn’t mean you, would never mean you, because you and the kids mean so much to me. I just meant that I have some questions, some issues in my life that I can’t seem to resolve. It just feels that there must be more to life than this, and if I get picked for the swap (which, by the way, may not even happen…), I wouldn’t be doing this because I want to get away from my family, I would be doing it just because I need to step out of my life for a bit to try and figure out what it is that’s missing. Maybe it’s that I need to be working again. Maybe we do need to think about moving somewhere other than Highfield. But right nowmy mind feels as if it’s filled with squirrels, and the only way to stop them running is to take a break. If there was a way to take you and the kids with me, I would, but then if I did I suspect I wouldn’t find the answers I’m looking for.

  I love you more than life itself. I promise you this isn’t about you, and it’s not about hurting you. The last thing in the world I want to do is hurt you, and that’s why I wrote in. To be honest, it was a spur of the moment thing, I never even dreamt I’d be one of the contenders. But the journalist, Vicky Townsley, is coming today. She’ll be here when you get home…

  I hate that we’ve hardly spoken the last few days. I hate that you turn away from me when we go to bed. I miss your laugh, your smile. I miss having a bath with you last thing at night when we tell one another about our days. I love you, love you, love you. Please try and understand!

  Me xxxxx

  As Amber polishes the stainless steel of the microwave for the fourth time that morning, Lavinia sailing past her with vases of flowers, Vicky presses the recline button on the plane seat and smiles to herself as she flicks through the movie channels waiting for the next film to start.

  Not that she can particularly concentrate on the movie, not with so much to think about. She hasn’t actually stopped smiling for the past week, has barely thought about this trip to meet Amber Winslow, because for the first time in her life Vicky thinks she may truly have found the one.

  Okay, not quite the first time. In fact if Vicky were to be entirely honest with herself she has said this many times before. Despite being thirty-five and single, despite telling people she has hardened herself, she is
strong, she thinks of herself as something of a ballbreaker, take a good-looking man with dimples in his cheeks, have him gaze into her eyes as he softly strokes her hair, allow him to sneak up behind her as she’s making coffee in the morning and put his arms around her waist, burying his face in her hair, and the ballbreaker will turn to jelly.

  Which is exactly what happened when Jamie Donnelly phoned.

  Vicky abandons the movie altogether and gives herself up to the movie in her head, which stars Vicky Townsley and Jamie Donnelly.

  He phones! And he doesn’t just phone, he phones whispering that he is desperate to see her. That the papers lie, they always do. That he and Denise Van Outen are old friends, that nothing happened, and that they phoned one another the next day and roared with laughter about the ridiculousness of the thought of them sleeping together.

  ‘Really?’ Vicky asks hopefully, because although a journalist, she is a magazine journalist, which is quite a different thing from being a gossip journalist on a tabloid. And she says it hopefully because she so wants to believe. She doesn’t want to be a cynic, to accuse him of lying, to ask why they aren’t suing the paper, or at the very least demanding a retraction if the paper printed lies.

  ‘Really,’ Jamie Donnelly confirms in his soft and oh-so-sexy Irish accent. ‘And I lost your phone number, and then I couldn’t remember the magazine you worked on and I phoned Cosmopolitan and Company, and no one there knew you, and I didn’t know how to find you.’

  Of course it is perfectly reasonable that he did lose her phone number. And possibly he did phone some other magazines. If he were that desperate it is perhaps slightly odd that he didn’t just get on the Internet – surely anyone can find anyone, or anything, these days, but not everyone is as savvy as Vicky, and perhaps it just didn’t occur to him.

  ‘Well that is flattering,’ Vicky says. Flattered.

  ‘I haven’t stopped thinking about you. About that night we spent together. And then today, when I walked in and saw you sitting with Hugh I couldn’t believe it. It feels like God was listening and he placed you there just for me.’

  And Vicky melts.

  ‘So…’ she says after recovering. ‘Do you want to get together?’ Oh shit, she thinks. Shut up. Isn’t it up to the man to suggest that?

  ‘You took the words right out of my mouth,’ he says. ‘What about tonight? What are you doing tonight?’

  Play hard to get, she thinks. Tell him you’re busy until next week. Don’t do it. Don’t say yes.

  ‘Not much,’ she says, her eagerness to see him overtaking any sane inclinations she may have had. And immediately her imagination starts working overtime – tonight. The Ivy, perhaps? Hakkasan? A romantic dinner for the two of them. She imagines them walking into the restaurant, everyone looking over at them for of course everyone knows who Jamie Donnelly is, and then looking at her, wondering who the lucky girl is who is holding Jamie Donnelly’s hand, who he is gently guiding through the tables.

  And perhaps the paparazzi will be waiting outside. She has seen them regularly at the restaurants she frequents for work. As she steps outside they are clustered around the doorway, looking up expectantly as soon as they hear the door, hoping for Kylie, or Elle, or Jordan to finish eating and step outside. They will undoubtedly snap a picture of her and Jamie, and tomorrow it will be in the paper.

  Oh how lovely if that happened. Think who might see it. That bastard Michael who dumped her for the brainless model. The other bastard Clive who professed to have fallen madly in love, then never called her again after she slept with him. And she didn’t even sleep with him for six weeks because she didn’t really fancy him. It took six weeks for her to decide she liked him so much as a friend that she’d sleep with him and see what happened, even though physically he wasn’t her type at all. The bastard never called again.

  And what about the gaggle of bitchy girls from school? Really, at thirty-five she ought not to have ever given them a second thought, but she recently googled Catherine Enderley, just out of curiosity, to find out what happened to the queen bitch, and Catherine Enderley now works at a boring old law firm in Brighton. Please God, she thought, let Catherine Enderley see me in the paper with Jamie Donnelly. Please let Catherine Enderley, Rachel Myerson and Tara Barking all see me looking thin, beautiful, and blissfully happy with the new love of my life, Jamie Donnelly.

  ‘Wonderful!’ Jamie says. ‘I’ll come over. Around nine? I have a meeting at seven in town, so I’ll probably make it over to you by nine.’

  ‘Do you remember my address?’ Vicky quickly covers her disappointment. So okay, no paparazzi. No public outings tonight, but that will come. Think romantic dinner instead. A roaring fire – although it’s not real, but gas which is almost as good and far less hot, given that it’s summer – a wonderful dinner – oh God, what to cook? Jamie, Nigella, come to my rescue, please, help me come up with a meal to make his mouth water, a meal to make him realize I could be a wonderful wife, he would never have to eat McDonald’s again – chocolate-covered strawberries perhaps for dessert. They would feed one another in front of the fire, kiss during the meal, be unable to keep their hands off one another.

  ‘I’ve been looking for you my whole life,’ Jamie Donnelly would say, and Vicky would just smile a secretive smile and not say anything at all, drive him wild with desire with just a cool gaze.

  Tonight, Matthew, she thinks wryly of Stars in Their Eyes, I will be Angelina Jolie. I will be sexy, seductive and super-cool. I will drive him wild with desire. I will make him fall in love with me.

  ‘I remember your address,’ Jamie says.

  ‘Should I make dinner?’ Vicky says in a voice that she imagines Angelina would use.

  ‘Nah, don’t worry. I’ll eat earlier. See you later, Vicky,’ and he’s gone.

  At nine o’clock Vicky is sitting on her sofa, cradling a glass of red wine. The fire is blazing, Diana Krall is crooning from the stereo, the lights are dim and she is wearing a short blue linen dress, her favourite and sexiest lacy underwear underneath.

  At nine thirty she is pacing around the living room, worrying about where he might be, whether he might have forgotten or, worse, whether something might have happened to him.

  At ten thirty she is well and truly pissed off. And when a girl is well and truly pissed off because a man hasn’t done what he has said he is going to do, the very best thing is a revenge fuck.

  Not that the wrongdoer ever needs to know, but Vicky knows that sleep is no longer an option, that her body is so tense she feels ready to snap, and although she is now furious with Jamie Donnelly, she will phone Daniel, because he is round the corner, can be here in a heartbeat, and whilst he’s not and never will be Mr Right, he’s certainly a better candidate for Mr Right Now.

  ‘Daniel? It’s me. Vicky.’

  ‘Vixster! I haven’t heard from you for ages! What a lovely surprise!’ And it’s true, for Daniel it is a lovely surprise. His fling with Maya the gorgeous redhead ended just last week. She’d announced a couple of weeks earlier that she wanted to date him exclusively and although he agreed at the time – what’s a man to do when put on the spot like that? – he found that his passion started waning straight away, and soon he wasn’t calling, wasn’t returning her calls, and she did exactly what he hoped – phoned him up and tearfully told him she deserved better.

  ‘You’re quite right,’ he agreed, attempting to sound contrite. ‘You’re an amazing girl and you do deserve better. I’m sorry I’m not the one.’

  But Vicky? Now Vicky never demands anything more. There’s no pretence about Vicky. She’s just a bloody good neighbourhood shag who never requests a relationship or asks why he hasn’t invited her somewhere. Daniel looks at his watch. Ten forty-five. Couldn’t be better.

  ‘So Vixster,’ he says smoothly, smiling to himself, knowing there’s only one reason Vicky would call at this time of night. ‘Your place or mine?’

  Daniel rings the doorbell as a black cab pulls up and a tall man cli
mbs out, paying the driver, then turning to look up at the building outside which Daniel is standing.

  Jesus Christ, thinks Daniel. It’s Jamie Donnelly. For a minute the temptation is to say one of the Dodgy catchphrases, or at the very least tell him how much Daniel loves the show, but no, that would be too naff. But he has to say something, can’t let an opportunity like this pass him by.

  ‘All right, mate?’ Daniel says, nodding amiably just as Vicky buzzes him in. ‘Love the show,’ he finds the words involuntarily leaving his mouth. Damn.

  ‘All right,’ Jamie nods back. ‘Hold the door, will you?’ And they both walk in at the same time.

  ‘Have you got a friend who lives here?’ Daniel says, leading the way up the stairs.

  ‘Depends on the definition of friend.’ Jamie grins and winks, as Daniel laughs knowingly, walking down the corridor towards Vicky’s flat. How bizarre. Jamie Donnelly is following him. Must be the flat opposite Vicky’s, for there are only two flats at this end of the corridor, and yet, isn’t that a married couple with a baby? Maybe they moved. They must have moved.

  And then they both come to a stop outside Vicky’s door.

  ‘Oh shit,’ Daniel says, as the light dawns on him.

  Jamie grins and shrugs. Truth has always been stranger than fiction in his experience. ‘May the best man win,’ he says pleasantly, with the full knowledge that, given the choice between himself and pretty much any other man in London, he will win.

  Vicky opens the door, wrapped in her bathrobe, all make-up off, and her hands fly to her face as she stands in front of Daniel and Jamie Donnelly.

  ‘Oh my God!’ she hisses, slamming the door shut again. ‘Wait there,’ she yells, flying down to the bathroom to retrieve her dress from where it is draped over the bath, pulling on her underwear, slapping on some make-up. Oh shit, she keeps whispering, running back down the hall and panting as she opens the door again to find the two men standing there, Jamie with a wide grin on his face, and Daniel looking ever so slightly uncomfortable.