A Passionate Love Affair with a Total Stranger

by Lucy Robinson

  I sniggered, covering the mouthpiece with my hand. I could just imagine Bowes strolling in, whistling casually, and the surprise on his face as he was apprehended.

  ‘Er …’ I began, then had to laugh again. I pulled myself together, not without effort. ‘Yes, he’s my friend,’ I said. ‘And he’s not staying over. We’re just, um, dining.’

  There was a silence. ‘Very well,’ Catrina said. ‘Please feel free to call us to remove your empty wrappers so that you do not have to sleep in the smell of takeaway curry.’

  I winced to my very core and promised Catrina I’d do just that.

  ‘Bad times!’ Sam said merrily, as he arrived. ‘They think we’re chavs!’

  ‘We are, Bowes. We’re eating takeaway curry in the Mandarin Oriental.’ He got busy laying out boxes of beautiful-smelling curry on a shiny table, which he pulled over to the window so we could sit on the floor and eat while watching the horses on a floodlit Rotten Row. Sam was very relieved to see my wine. ‘Thank God, brother,’ he said. ‘I bought a bottle but it cost two ninety-nine. It’s probably just meths.’

  I poured us both a large glass.

  Thankfully, soon after, I began to relax properly and also to remember why I enjoyed Sam’s company so much. It was just so easy.

  Providing we kept things light.

  The conversation turned to my parents’ middle-aged backpacking adventure and Sam seemed enthralled by their tales. ‘They’re volunteering at a tiger sanctuary at the moment,’ I said. ‘Mum said in her last email that Dad keeps trying to take baby tigers home with him.’

  Sam chuckled. ‘Oh, Christian. I’m so glad he’s OK again. He’s a proper legend, your old man.’ He stuck his naan bread into my masala.

  I was pleased that Sam loved my mad dad. Dr Nathan Gillies had pointedly misunderstood Dad on the two occasions he’d deigned to meet my family. And even though I’d only been with John for five minutes I knew I’d have been uncomfortable taking him to the ramshackle madness of my childhood home.

  Later on Sam – as if reading my mind – asked how I was feeling about John. For a second my heart leaped. Yesssssss! I thought wildly. He’s jealous! But then I remembered that Sam was in the Most Beautiful Couple in Theatreland. He was asking about John because he was my friend. My friend, my friend, my friend, I chanted to myself.

  Maybe in a few months (years?) I’d start seeing Sam as my friend again. Because I certainly didn’t see him as a friend at the moment. What sound-of-mind woman wanted to passionately kiss her friend the way I wanted to passionately kiss Sam? I couldn’t bear how relaxed and beautiful he was, sprawled against a heavy armchair, one finger absently poking about in his ear, his eyes following the horses below us.

  ‘John,’ I said slowly, trying to work out how I felt. John was not in a great place, according to Cassie. When his wife had marched into the office and started screaming at him for sleeping with me (I still felt ill to think that I’d slept with a married man, knowingly or otherwise), Chambers had apparently gone completely insane and threatened to sack him. Had he not just lost his director of comms he probably would have done. Now, I heard, Washington were freezing him out and I presumed that his fat-cat plans were in serious jeopardy.

  ‘I almost feel sorry for him,’ I told Sam truthfully. ‘He’s messed up on a monumental scale.’

  ‘But you’d still do him,’ Sam stated confidently.

  ‘No. No way. Not even because he’s married. It’s just … that chapter is closed, I guess. He’s part of a life I don’t want any more.’

  ‘Wow,’ Sam said. He seemed genuinely surprised. ‘I never thought I’d hear you say that!’

  I smiled ruefully. ‘Me neither. But the longer I spend away from work, the more I realize how much I’d been wasting my life there. John, Salutech, everything. It was all wrong.’ I speared a piece of overcooked lamb on my plastic fork and munched contemplatively. ‘I’ve been quite a fool,’ I admitted. ‘A mad, suit-wearing fool.’

  ‘That’s my brother The Chasman you’re talking about. Go easy on her. She just needed to sort her shit out.’

  By the time we’d finished the food, Sam was obviously drunk because he opened the bottle of wine he’d got at the takeaway, which smelt – as predicted – like methylated spirits that had once had a brief fling with a few low-quality grapes. ‘Cheers,’ he said, whipping out two Curly Wurlys from his coat pocket for dessert. I shook my head despairingly – it was only ever with Sam that I ate stuff like this – but decided what the hell.

  Funnily enough it was only around Sam that I didn’t care so much about things like my figure.

  After dinner we hauled ourselves, tubby and drunk, on to the sofa where we sat staring out of the window at the night sky. I was pleased with how tonight had gone. Things had felt quite normal. There had been no flirting – and, sadly, no snogging – but some of the awkwardness that had crippled me earlier today had gone.

  So I was very unsettled when Sam suddenly announced that he was feeling weird.

  ‘Oh?’ I said, instantly on guard.

  ‘Don’t you?’ he asked. He was staring fixedly out of the window.

  I felt a bit cheated. Had I not just congratulated myself on managing to get through tonight without any awkward moments? I’ve been feeling weird enough! I wanted to shout. Don’t you dare throw any more weirdness into the mix!

  ‘Weird about what?’ I asked him. I tried to sound nonchalant in the hope that he’d take my lead.

  He didn’t. He just looked frustrated.

  ‘Chas, we bloody well kissed each other two weeks ago. Don’t you feel weirded out by that? I do.’

  I was floored. A million thoughts exploded. Weirded out in a bad way or a good way? Had Sam been thinking about our kiss? Oh, God! How much? How did he rate it? And how did he rate me, for that matter? Was it good or bad that he looked so uncomfortable he might have been giving birth to a marrow?

  I was frozen to the spot and needed to say something. Tell the truth? Lie? Respond in a different language? Arrgh!

  ‘A bit weird, I suppose,’ I said brightly, as if this were all a big silly joke. ‘I mean, it’s a bit odd to kiss someone to prove you don’t like them!’ Then I panicked. Was that too much? Did it sound like a hint? Oh God, oh God.

  ‘Very odd,’ Sam said. I poured all of the Scotch in my minibar into two glasses and shoved one at him. ‘But, as far as experiments go, it was pretty conclusive,’ he continued, putting down his glass of awful wine. ‘Don’t you think?’

  Damn you, Bowes, I thought darkly. Don’t you throw this back at me and make it my responsibility. ‘Myugh,’ I replied helpfully. It was as noncommittal a sound as I could make.

  Sam forced out a laugh. ‘Oh, God. Are we going to have to do it again?’

  What? Had he just said that? I looked at him, blood rushing to my face. ‘You said there was nothing there,’ I reminded him, in a very odd voice. ‘Why would you want to re-test now?’

  Sam started to blush too. ‘No, you said there was nothing.’

  ‘I was saying that for both of us! Don’t make it my fault!’

  Sam was now puce.

  FUCK! one side of my brain yelled. WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?

  There was a pause. I DON’T FUCKING KNOW! the other side replied.

  Then both sides of my brain ganged up and made me do something completely insane. ‘If you’re not convinced then I suppose I don’t mind re-testing,’ I heard myself say. My voice had gone distant and third-personish, as if I were hearing it back in an echo.

  Sam was now clutching his Scotch with both hands.

  Oh, Christ, I thought. I’ve pushed it too far. He knows how I feel. He’s disgusted. He wants to run. He thinks I’m insane. He –

  ‘Maybe we should, just to be sure,’ he said.

  I stopped short.

  And then my hands started shaking. Not just trembling a bit, but fully shaking. I forced them down between my knees in front of me, but my forearms were visibly shaking too. I lean
ed forward to cover up the shameful spectacle. But, as I did, Sam reached over and plucked one of my hands out. ‘Charley,’ he said gently. ‘It’s fine. We’ll be friends no matter what.’ My hand shook even more. It was like a pneumatic drill. STOP IT, I roared at myself. STOP SHAKING. STOP ACTING LIKE A WAZZOCK. But the shaking continued.

  ‘I’m not stressed!’ I said, as brightly as possible. But now my teeth were chattering and I sounded like a pneumatic drill too. Sam clamped my hand hard but it made no difference – it simply started shaking Sam’s hand up and down on top of it.

  Like the last time, we found ourselves suddenly immobile, and for a while we just looked at each other. But, as we did, I felt something shift inside me. I was in love with this man and I couldn’t go on pretending otherwise. My hands stopped shaking. I loved Sam. I was about to kiss him. What more was there? And so, without quite realizing that I was doing it, I leaned in and started to kiss him. For a split second, obviously surprised, he didn’t respond. But then he was kissing me back. It was very slow, very gentle. In fact, our lips were barely touching. His closed over my top lip, and then moved down to kiss my bottom lip. His hand slid lightly around my waist and a delicious warm tingling began. It filled every part of me.

  Sam kissed my lips again, more firmly this time, and then pulled away a few inches to look at me. ‘Charley Lambert,’ he said softly. I looked back at him and almost immediately looked away. It was quite unbearable to be staring at each other from a gap of less than six inches.

  ‘That’s me,’ I whispered uncertainly.

  Then, to my dismay, Sam pulled away and slid his hand out from my waist. He kept my other hand in his, although it felt suddenly limp. ‘Well?’ he asked.

  And I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t tell him the truth: that I had enjoyed it probably more than any other kiss I’d ever tried; that I thought I was probably quite a bit in love with him. Because I knew that in spite of the loveliness of our kissing he didn’t feel the same. He was Sam Bowes, half of the Most Beautiful Couple in Theatreland.

  So I shrugged, as if to deflect the question back to him.

  Sam looked depressingly happy. ‘I think it’s as we thought before,’ he said firmly. ‘Nada.’

  ‘YEAH,’ I brayed woodenly. ‘I bet there’s tonnes more chemistry when you’re snogging Katia, right?’

  Sam nodded. ‘Yeah. Tonnes more chemistry. I love snogging Katia. She’s amazing! I could snog her all day! Well, I am doing, actually. Ha ha. Yeah, good. So, anyway, we repeated the experiment! And got our conclusion! Cheers!’ He chinked my tumbler of Scotch.

  I downed about four shots in one go.

  Chapter Twenty

  I stood back to admire the Christmas tree and beamed. It was a cracker! It was not a modern, spare tree with carefully distributed burnished gold baubles and white lights, it was everything Mum and Dad would want it to be: big, mad and bushy, covered from head to foot with strange baubles, multicoloured lights, chocolate hippos, little wooden boxes and all of the other strange things Dad had accumulated over the years. I laughed as I placed his favourite wooden gecko on the top where any normal person would plant a star.

  I could only imagine what crazy treasures Dad was going to dig out of his backpack when they returned next week. I was already bracing myself for the possibility of long grey dreadlocks and a beaded necklace.

  Malcolm, who was wearing a pair of festive antlers, avoided my eye as he removed a chocolate from one of the lower branches and carried it off to his bed. Nothing about this bloody house was normal! I’d decided to spend the week before Christmas at home so that I could liberate Malcolm from the Joneses, sort through some of Granny Helen’s stuff for Dad and generally make it festive and warm for their return, and I was enjoying being here immensely. I had yet to find anywhere in the world where I felt more at home than in my parents’ house.

  For the twentieth time today I drifted off into a fantasy about Sam spending Christmas at Lambert HQ.

  Far from dying slowly, my feelings towards Sam had become gradually more intense. Every time he emailed me about First Date Aid I felt like my heart was in my mouth, just in case this would be The Email. But it never was. This morning’s email, in fact, had been the final straw.

  Chasmonger! How’s my long-lost homie? I miss you. Can’t believe you’re not coming to the opening night tonight. Very bad behaviour, homes. Very bad.

  There was a very bloody good reason why I wasn’t coming. He was having a romance with Katia buggering Slagface and it would be an act of unforgivable self-harm to go to London and watch them snogging. Especially if they started up at the after-show party.

  Anyway, to work. First I think we should take on more freelance writers. I don’t think five is enough. These singles are just rolling in still. Shelley did us such a massive favour with that Sunday Times feature in Nov. Shall I put an ad up? Second, I have Big News. We are going to have our first marriage! Remember that dude Robert – the one in Belfast with the paddock full of llamas? He’s been dating Jemma pretty much non-stop and he popped the question last night. AWIIIGHT! AWOOOGA! BO! And, finally, we had lunch with William and Shelley yesterday and when Shelley went for a slash William told me he was off to Tiffany’s later. That can only mean one thing, Chas, my brother! Amusingly, Shelley still doesn’t seem to have any idea I was William’s ghost-writer. Very funny being around those two. She talked about you loads and was quite cross you weren’t coming tonight. As am I.

  Anyway, how are you dude? Happy? Sad? Talk to me. Stop emailing me about bloody work and tell me how you are.

  Speak soon.

  Xxx

  I loved that he talked about Shelley going for ‘a slash’, that he still used Kriss Akabusi’s ‘awiiight’ after all these years; that he called me ‘brother’. In general, I just loved Sam. What I hated was the ‘we’ who had had lunch with William and Shelley. It was like a punch in the face.

  Our farewell that night in London back in November had been mercifully brief. Catrina from Reception at the Mandarin Oriental had obviously got so worried about ending up with a curry-scented room on her hands that she’d sent someone to remove the wrappers, which had provided me with an easy excuse to end the night and eject Sam from my boudoir. After he’d sloped off, I’d sat on the floor at the end of my enormous bed for nearly an hour with my head in my hands, trying to accept that I had to let him go.

  But I couldn’t. I’d been unable to eat my five-star breakfast the next morning and had mooned over him every day since.

  ‘Do you think Sam feels anything towards me?’ I asked Malcolm. Malcolm came over and plonked his nose on my lap, sighing deeply. I sighed back at him. ‘That’s not the response I was looking for, Malcolm.’

  My phone beeped with a text message and I was surprised to see Shelley Cartwright’s name on my screen. Since her investor had failed to show up that night she’d cut back on her foghorn-inspired phone calls. Presumably she felt she’d now repaid me for my help – and, having seen the bill on my departure from the Mandarin Oriental, I didn’t blame her.

  But here she was again, economical of word, generous of bite. I hear you are not coming to Sam’s opening night tonight, her text announced. Why?

  I smiled briefly, amused by Shelley’s distinctive approach to text-messaging. But the smile was short-lived, for Shelley’s question was a good one.

  I sighed, and Malcolm sighed back again. Things had really changed for me over the last few weeks. I was sleeping, I was forcing myself to maintain gentle working hours and I was even piecing together a manageable little social scene. It was a daily challenge not to do too much but things definitely felt different. My feelings for Sam, however, remained unchanged. I’d tried everything to get over him, ranging from two Internet dates of my own (very bad) to a chakra cleanse with Mad Tania. (Not much better: Mad Tania was a raven-haired healer, East Linton’s only hippie, and while her cleanse might have sorted out my chakras it had done bugger-all to dislodge Sam from my mind.)

 
‘I can’t see him tonight because it’ll kill me to see him with his girlfriend,’ I informed Malcolm. ‘I need to just keep on plodding on till it passes. Here in Scotland.’ Malcolm looked supportive.

  I made the same cock-and-bull excuse to Shelley that I’d made to Sam – that I had a prearranged christening dinner for my cousin’s baby (who hadn’t actually been born yet, but that was by-the-by) – then shoved my phone into the sofa, keen for something to do that would take my mind off the situation.

  I pulled over a box of Granny Helen’s stuff. Ness and I had been whittling away at her possessions over the last few weeks, using instructions that Dad had left us, but there was still work to be done.

  I turned the box over. ‘PHOTOS’ said Granny Helen’s snappy writing. I smiled. Granny Helen might not be here in body but she always would be in spirit. I imagined her now, poking my sloppy jumper (one of Dad’s cast-offs) with her walking stick and asking if I was having a breakdown.

  The box was filled with a bewildering array of envelopes, all stuffed with small sepia photos. Each had been marked with Granny Helen’s formidable scrawl and, thanks to her careful indexing, I found a cracker almost straight away. ‘CHRISTIAN’S FIRST DAY AT SCHOOL’ the envelope said. I pulled out the photos and immediately started laughing. Little four-year-old Dad was wearing tweed shorts and long socks. He stared at the camera in bewilderment in the first, but by the second he had become Dad again: a monkey. In this one he was hanging upside-down from the tree in their back garden, the contents of his satchel falling to the ground around him. In the third, he was back on the ground with a full satchel and a fearsome scowl on his face. I suspected that Granny Helen had given him a good smack on the bottom in the interim.

  I dug into the box, keen for more, and pulled out an envelope that felt rather different from the others.

  I turned it over. ‘JACK’ the envelope stated. I raised an eyebrow.

  Granddad Jack was the grandfather I’d never met. He had been a flight lieutenant in Malta during the Second World War and had been shot down and killed when Granny Helen had been six months’ pregnant with Dad. It was a tragedy of which Dad spoke little; he’d never known Granddad Jack, of course, and, given his unusually close relationship with his mother, it seemed clear that he had felt the absence of a father keenly.