The Next Best Thing

by Sarah Long

  He pressed his hand on his heart and Jane laughed.

  ‘It’s OK,’ she said, ‘I’ll spare, you the details. What is it then, your idea?’

  ‘I’m going to speak out against this shocking new fashion for educated women to give up work to stay home with their kids,’ he told her. ‘An appalling and reactionary trend. As one of the first male feminists, I can only condemn it. Next thing, they’ll be taking away a woman’s right to vote.’

  ‘I think people are getting fed up with the superwoman thing,’ said Jane. ‘You know, doing two jobs and only being paid for one.’ She picked up the halves of lime that Will had left on the chopping board and returned them to the fridge, then took out some green beans. ‘I think they’re starting to ask themselves, what’s the point?’ she went on, slicing the ends off the beans, ‘working their arses off at the office, then coming home and taking on the domestic shift.’

  ‘But surely you realise, Jane, that it’s just not fair on men!’ Will had jumped up and opened the fridge to take out the bottle of tequila. ‘Why should men have to go out to work all day while their lazy-cow wives play tennis and go on coffee mornings? I tell you one thing, I wouldn’t tolerate it, not any more! The last thing men need when they get in is to hear about how their wives have had a gorgeous day spending all their money.’

  Jane thought about how it might be if she had bottomless funds and no paid work to tie her to her computer. She could spend all day shopping, and having lunch, and could go to the French Institute cinema every day if she felt like it. ‘Sounds all right to me,’ she said, ‘a glamorous take on the 1950s housewife, what’s wrong with that?’

  ‘At least the 1950s housewife did housework. These new jumped-up stay-at-homers all have cleaners and au pair girls. They bring nothing to the household. They are an economic drain, and should be forced to reimburse the state for the money wasted on their education.’

  Jane said nothing and let Will rant on, rehearsing his argument for the compulsory employment for all mothers that he would later flesh out on the Apple in the galleria. She poured boiling water over a howl of tomatoes the better to release the skins. She would chop them and mix them into the beans along with some garlic. Will always said plain boiled vegetables seemed just too school dinners for words.

  After dinner, Jane cleared up and Will went upstairs to work for a bit, then they went to bed and had sex. It was like mowing the lawn, she thought; same motions, same frequency of once a week in the growing season. They weren’t yet at the fallow winter stage, where the machine could be locked up for months at a time. Afterwards, Will picked up Wittgenstein and Jane went back to reading about the architectural uses of roses in Hortus magazine. Alter a few years of bed-sharing you didn’t need to bother with post-coital intimacy. A comfortable fug of indifference replaced the probing conversations of the early clays.

  ‘I might go Christmas shopping again tomorrow,’ said Jane. She addressed the remark to her bedside lamp, her back still turned on Will, ‘if you wouldn’t mind looking after Liberty.’

  She twisted round to look at him.

  ‘Of course not,’ he said, after a pause. Me put in his earplugs, pulled the British Airways blindfold into place and turned off the light.

  ‘Preparing for lift-off?’ she asked.

  ‘You know I need my sleep,’ he said, ‘particularly now you’ve sprung a morning’s childcare on me. Never mind that I’ve got a deadline. Good night.’

  ‘Good night.’

  Jane switched off her light and lay on her back, making mental lists for tomorrow’s shopping. Already December, and she had barely started. What a bore. She thought enviously of Lydia going off to South America with stylish disregard for family obligations. Lydia was disdainful of what she termed the red poinsettia Christmas experience. Fat relatives watching telly in ripped paper hats while outside the rain drizzled down. Waitrose magazine said that Christmas dinner was ‘probably the most important meal of the year’, which struck a note of darkness in Jane’s soul.

  She turned her mind to happier thoughts. Her new friend at the French Institute. The word ‘friend’ sounded both coy and sinister when applied to an adult you barely knew. It carried dark overtones of an Internet chat room, a hairy man-sized version of a childhood playmate. She’d have to wait two weeks before seeing him again. But he was right, two weeks was no time. Not with everything else she had to get done. There was the Christmas dinner, still a while off but never too early to plan for. Mustn’t forget the mincemeat, and brandy butter, or should they go wild this year and ring the changes with rum butter? Bronze-feathered Kelly free-range turkey, or a tasty but fatty goose? And the fill-your-own empty Christmas crackers that she thought would make an amusing change; she and Liberty could make things out of card and glitter to put inside them: it would be a good arts and crafts project for a Sunday afternoon. Faintly boring, but heart-warming, a bit like Christmas itself.

  SEVEN

  On the morning of her party, Lydia woke up early. Rupert was already dressed for work, and was performing the male equivalent of loading a handbag, sweeping the coins and keys from the top of the chest of drawers into his hand and then into his trouser pocket. It would he easier to have one of those Latin-style men’s clutch hags, but he would look ridiculous, a large man like him, mincing out of the door with one of those under his arm.

  Lydia stretched luxuriously into Rupert’s side of the bed. ‘Big night tonight,’ she said, ‘the day we tell the world that we are to be an item. Oh my God, that’s just broken my dream!’

  ‘What was it?’ asked Rupert, rather hoping she’d say she’d learned in a blinding flash that getting married was a bad idea.

  ‘I dreamed you took me to live in a horrid little house near Milton Keynes with Dralon furniture.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  She curled up on her side and pulled the covers over her head. ‘And now I’m awake too early and won’t he able to get back to sleep,’ she said, her voice muffled through the goose down. ‘I’ll have bags under my eyes and look hideous tonight.’

  Rupert’s heart sank. After tonight there would be no going back. The door would be firmly closed, and he would go from being an anonymous single person who happens to have a sort of live-in girlfriend, to being Lydia’s fiance, with everything that entailed. He would never know romance again, he would never sleep with anyone else ever again. It was a terrifying thought.

  ‘I’ll see you later, then.’ He jangled his pocket, now filled with a ludicrous amount of loose change, and made for the door.

  ‘Remember, darling, not too late,’ said Lydia, blowing him a kiss from beneath the duvet, ‘don’t forget the caterers are coming at six.’

  Climbing into his cab, Rupert thought about Lydia’s dream and what it said about her. He was only averagely romantic, but even he knew that when you were in love with someone, you didn’t care where you lived. When you loved someone and got engaged, the material details were immaterial, weren’t they? They weren’t living in the dark ages, after all, when marriage was a crude form of financial barter.

  For instance, if things were different and he and Jane were to go off together, he knew for a fact that she wouldn’t care where they ended up. She would show no interest in bathroom taps or kitchen flooring, or living within spitting distance of Sloane Square. And this he knew without ever having discussed it with her. He knew she didn’t care about things that didn’t matter.

  But there was no point in thinking like this. He was forty years old and this was the real world, and Lydia was a fine match for him. For three years he had been proud to call her his girlfriend, and getting engaged was the natural next step. His fantasy about Jane was just another symptom of his mid-life malaise. Perhaps he should swallow his stiff upper lip and see someone about it. His aversion to therapy was making him feel unfashionable. Sadness and disappointment used to be accepted as part of life, but now you were supposed to label it depression and get cured by taking drugs or talking to a qual
ified person. There was a shrink who lived in the apartment below him who seemed to have a lot of men Rupert’s age coming and going. He was gay and outrageously handsome, but most of his clients looked straight enough. Stiffs in suits, most of them, just like Rupert. It couldn’t do any harm to have a trial session.

  Lydia heard the taxi purring in the street below, then the door slammed and off it went, carrying her lover away. Recently she had been finding him sexier than usual, a little aloof, less easy to please. There was no denying that although one didn’t want to marry a bastard, a little bit of bastard-like behaviour did wonders for a man’s sex-appeal. No-one wanted an over-eager dog, wagging his tail and drooling over you with idiotic, unconditional love.

  She dozed on and off for another half hour, then thought she might as well get up. She had lots to get on with, though obviously she wouldn’t be working today. Lucky for her that she was editor-at-large, roaming free and expansive through the wide ocean of life, unlike those poor full-timers chained to their desks at the magazine like rats in a cage.

  After a leisurely hath and breakfast, Lydia slipped on a pair of jeans and a low-cut sweater and lay on the ugly beige sofa watching Trisha on telly while she painted her nails. A hard-faced teenage mother was going to find out whether or not her pimply ex-boyfriend was the father of her baby. When it was revealed that he was not, the girl leaped up from her chair and punched the air in triumph while the youth sank back deflated, a useless cuckold already at the tender age of sixteen.

  By the time Lydia got out onto the Kings Road, the boutiques were just starting to open. Shop girls were crouching down or reaching up at the glass doors, frowning as they negotiated large bunches of keys. Friday morning was a fine time to cruise the shops since you got none of the trippers who came up at the weekend. Sundays were the worst, it was the only time you could park for free, which meant the streets were all blocked solid.

  Lydia was glad to count herself among the rich and leisured locals who could shop at hours to suit themselves. She was following one now, a classic Chelsea blonde wearing a full-length sheepskin coat over a baby-blue cashmere sweater, talking on her mobile phone.

  ‘Yuh,’ she was saying, in a loud, confident voice, ‘there are some jeans that I’d raahly like you to look at. Yuh, eighty-four pounds but the length is perfect.’

  Mobile phones could have been invented for girls like that. Girls like that were born without embarrassment, born to loudly bore everyone to death with the details of some purchase they were thinking of making. They never whispered into their phones like lesser-born types, never muttered an ingratiating apology, ‘Hallo, it’s only me, sorry I’m a bit late, I’m on the 6.16, shall I get the bread or will you?’

  The blonde stepped into Karen Millen and Lydia continued on her course. Past Kenneth Cole, which she liked for its New York chic, past LK Bennett, which she disliked for its prissy assumption that modern girls wanted to look like little old ladies in two-piece suits and neat matching shoes. She crossed the road and glanced in the Jigsaw window, not bad but frankly a hit too high-street for her these days. She then slipped down a side road, where the pretty row of different coloured cottages made you think you were in a quaint fishing port, until you remembered that a two-up two-down worker’s hovel round here would cost you well over a million.

  Lydia’s hairdresser was situated at the end of one of these falsely modest terraces. Not so much a salon as an artist’s studio, it had an easel set up in the middle of the room, displaying a large, cheerful canvas. Klaus laid down his paintbrush as Lydia came in — he liked to add the finishing touches to his work-in-progress in between customers. Big and Austrian, he wore long leather shorts even in winter, and had his grey hair tied up in a ponytail. He greeted Lydia warmly and sat her down in front of a mirror while he rubbed the paint off his hands with a rag soaked in turps.

  It was no coincidence that Lydia came to Klaus for her hair. He was expensive and off-beat, which was a plus, but the real attraction for her was the long list of famous ex-clients he could reel off for her benefit. Like a London taxi driver boasting about who he’s had in the back of his cab, Klaus peppered his conversation with allusions to the stars who had passed through his hands. Most of these clients used to come in the Seventies, before he had downsized to make time for his painting, but Lydia loved it nonetheless.

  Klaus brushed out Lydia’s hair in his usual, blissfully unhurried way, pausing between strokes to shout at her in the mirror. She assumed he must be slightly deaf, or maybe Austrians always spoke in very loud voices.

  ‘But did you know,’ he boomed, ‘that the Chelsea Pensioners are considered a very good catch as husbands?’ ‘What, those dear old veterans in red jackets, get out of here!’ said Lydia. She loved seeing them cruising the Kings Road, often in electric wheelchairs, but didn’t buy the idea of them as marriage material.

  ‘I swear it’s true.’ He shook the brush at her in the mirror to make his point. ‘The mothers from the council estate encourage their daughters to marry them. Then they die very soon and the girl gets the Chelsea pension, it’s a well-known scam.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Honestly. How much, one inch? Did I ever tell you that I had Sacha Distel when I was still in Knightsbridge? And Catherine Deneuve. Dear Jenny Agutter still comes, and Jud I of course, Charlotte Rampling and Meryl, she likes a good haircut . . .’

  And he was back on the star trail, occasionally breaking off to bend down and take a snip off the end of Lydia’s long auburn tresses.

  ‘Would you like some apple-cider vinegar on your hair?’ he asked as she lay back with her head in the basin, feet resting on a high stool.

  ‘Not really. Why would I?’

  ‘Makes it nice and shiny,’ Klaus bellowed, as though she were at the far end of the street instead of right there between his hands.

  ‘I’m having a party tonight, I don’t want to smell of chips.’

  ‘As you like.’

  He wrapped a towel round her head and propelled her back to her seat, then spun her chair round to face the painting on the easel.

  ‘What do you think?’

  He always asked her, so she wasn’t unprepared.

  ‘A lot of verve.’

  ‘Thank you. Do you think you could use it in the magazine?’

  ‘We only use figurative I’m afraid.’

  He dried her hair and stopped talking for a while, staring out of the window instead at a homely, large-boned mother wearing an anorak and pushing a buggy up the street. He turned hack to face Lydia in the mirror and jerked his thumb in the direction of the retreating woman.

  ‘She came in once to ask how much it was for a haircut. It was too much for her, of course. If you have to ask, it will always he too much. She is from Switzerland, lives down the road, her husband works for a bank that pays the rent on the house. But she is just a simple sort of person. She is not for this area.’ He shook his head in a mixture of contempt and pity, then smiled broadly and shook his hand through Lydia’s glossy hair.

  ‘Not like you. You are perfect for this area.’

  ‘I’ll take that as a compliment,’ said Lydia, who thought she wouldn’t bother telling him that she actually came from Essex. She lived in the present, not the past, and anyway Klaus wouldn’t know where Essex was.

  After drying her hair, Klaus produced a hand-held circular vibrator that he applied to her back and shoulders. Lydia winced, it set her teeth right on edge. He then brought out a mirror and made her hold it herself so she could enjoy the rear view of his handiwork.

  He nodded with satisfaction. ‘Now that is a very good haircut.’

  ‘Though you say so yourself.’

  ‘Though I say so myself.’

  By the time Lydia came out, the pub across the road was filling up with the usual crew of hoorays, big and braying in beige slacks or jeans and rugby shirts. As a fashion person, Lydia was fascinated to see the rugby shirt still living on here in the heart of Chelsea. As far as she was co
ncerned, they belonged to the Seventies, when girls used to borrow them off their boyfriends and wear them with upturned collars and a string of pearls to look petite and vulnerable like Felicity Kendal in The Good Life. For the purposes of research, she went in and ordered a large glass of wine while she ran a thorough check.

  She sat down in a battered armchair and noticed one of the customers looked like a younger version of Rupert. He was giving her the eye now, leaning against the bar, pint glass in hand. He was talking to the man next to him, but his body language was for her benefit: broad hips tilted towards her, one foot crossed in front of the other. He had a wide forehead and fair hair that sprung up with patrician virility. She shook her newly groomed hair and made eye contact for a few seconds before looking away. It was nice to know she could still pull if she needed to, although that was all taken care of now. By the end of this evening she would officially be recognised as the fiancee of the Hon. Rupert Beauval-Tench. She drained her glass and left the pub, brushing past her admirer on her way out.

  ‘The Pont de Normandie resembles an elegant, powerful bird, soaring up in a gracious curve over the Seine estuary. Comparable to Concorde, it bears witness to man’s capacity to scale the heights of technical brilliance, and stands, proud and erect, a lasting testament to the presidency of Jacques Chirac’

  Jane read back over the last sentence and pressed the back-space key. She couldn’t say proud and erect in the same breath as President Chirac, it made the book sound like a soft-porn mag instead of a hymn of praise to French engineers. On the other hand, what did it matter? She doubted anyone would go so far as to read the book. Americans might line it up on the coffee table to prove they were well-travelled Francophiles, but they would be unlikely to do more than Hick through the photos as they sipped that weak cinnamon-flavoured coffee they all raved about.

  She replaced the words with ‘magisterial’, one of her favourite adjectives for this kind of job. The art of Cellini, the oeuvre of Stendhal, the slopes of the Auvergne, all could be described as magisterial, which also served to flatter the reader with its assumption of a knowledge of Latin roots. Or ‘routs’, as Americans pronounced it. That always made her laugh, like the way they said ‘cribs’ for herbs. Not to mention those quirky differences in vocabulary she had to be aware of in her work: horse-back riding, eggplant, heavy cream, sidewalk: strange words that reminded us that a shared language in no way meant we spoke the same way. Except in the field of personal development where the Brits stood shoulder to shoulder with their American cousins, as they moved forward, resolved issues, drew a line under things and reassessed goals.