The Next Best Thing

by Sarah Long

  Alison had put Jane in the Green Room, though the name was redundant. You only had to open the door to be assaulted by every permutation of the colour, from the white with a hint of mint woodwork to the apple-patterned pillowcases and the emerald bedspread and heavy olive curtains that puddled onto the eau de nil carpet. The theme was tirelessly carried over to the en suite bathroom with a leaf border on the tiles and a set of verdant bath towels.

  Jane’s thoughts on going to bed were that she was grateful for Will. She wouldn’t want a namby-pamby husband who’d follow wherever she led. Will was right, he’d hate the country, and she would be asking for trouble to insist they left London. It was back to the smoke for her, and she was even looking forward to it. You can’t run away from yourself, after all, it was foolish to think that where you lived could change anything. And maybe it wouldn’t hurt to see Rupert again, now she’d calmed down a bit.

  She slept late, dreaming of Rupert. He had taken her to China and was leading her through a garden where mythical birds perched on rocky outcrops. They were both wearing embroidered silk robes and she was tottering along on bound feet encased in tiny pointed shoes.

  ‘OK, you win,’ said Jane. ‘I admit I had a hidden agenda but you can relax, we’re not moving to the country.’

  Will pretended to wipe the sweat off his brow. ‘Thank the Lord for that,’ he said, ‘you only need to look around to see you made the right decision.’

  They were out for lunch in Westbourne Village, Will’s favourite part of Notting Hill, and so far up itself that even the public toilet was disguised as an upmarket flower stall, manned by a handsome young man in artfully ripped jeans.

  The whole point of Westbourne Village was that you mustn’t be seen to be trying too hard, and this extended to naming the restaurants. Why bother to come up with something when you could lazily use the address? 202 was where they were going for lunch. Obviously, this stood for 202 Westbourne Grove, and if you needed to ask, you were in the wrong place. The restaurant was owned by that dream-team couple, Nicole Farhi and David Hare. The understated designer favoured by Cherie Blair, and her husband the left-wing playwright. What could be more perfect?

  The café was at the back of the shop, so Jane was able to admire the unstructured haute bohemian outfits on her way through. She was also rather taken by some attractive green and purple Italian rustic glassware, until she consulted the label. £55 per tumbler was a non-rustic price, but then nobody ever said it came cheap to be hip.

  They were seated at a small table, and Will looked around him with satisfaction. People certainly knew how to dress round here: combat trousers tucked into stilettos, floor-length coats and trainers, the studied eclectic mixing that marked out the cognoscenti from the plebs. His gaze suddenly froze on one table, where a middle-management type was sitting by himself in a navy blue suit and a tie! How the hell did he manage to sneak in past the style police? Surely they had been briefed on the first new rule of door policy, that ties were strictly for losers.

  ‘I’ll have the chicken, black bean and feta quesadilla with mango coriander and chilli salsa,’ he said to the waiter.

  Jane was still frowning at the card. ‘What is it about these places that they have to put “fish ‘n’ chips ‘n’ mushy peas” on the menu like we’re living in a Guy Ritchie faux-working-class ghetto?’ she said. ‘I don’t know why they don’t make us sing along to “Roll Out the Barrel” while they’re about it.’

  ‘It’s the fantastic melting pot of modern London,’ said Will. ‘All nations and classes, served up to Joe Public in a democratic cocktail.’

  ‘I don’t think many people here are on a Joe Public income,’ she said, ‘except for the waiters.’

  ‘Don’t be a bore,’ said Will. ‘What are you going to have?’

  ‘Grilled lamb kofte with tabbouleh and tzatziki please,’ she said, smiling at the waiter, ‘and Liberty can have the fish ‘n’ chips, but without the mushy peas.’

  She looked round the room, and admitted it was a relief to be back in town.

  ‘We didn’t see much evidence of cosmopolitan life in Rodmell,’ she said. ‘Alison made it sound really boring. Once you’ve done the house up, there’s nothing to do except Scottish dancing.’

  Now she’d changed her mind, she needed to bolster up her arguments.

  ‘Correction,’ said Will, ‘it’s Alison who’s really boring.’ ‘That’s not entirely fair . . .’

  ‘That woman could bore for England.’

  ‘She was a good friend to me when we were having our babies.’

  Will rolled his eyes up into his sockets and mimed a yawn.

  ‘But I don’t think it would suit us down there,’ she went on. ‘It reminded me of when my grandparents retired to the country, but then they had to move back because grandma said that grandpa was becoming a vegetable.’

  ‘He became one anyway.’

  ‘Not until much later. And that was caused by a degenerative illness, not by lack of urban stimulation.’ She twirled her glass and thought briefly about her grandpa on his deathbed, then pushed the thought away, not wanting to be troubled by intimations of mortality.

  ‘Anyway, I didn’t envy her, that’s all I’m saying.’

  ‘Of course you didn’t, Jane. It’s what I call the Rasselas effect. Setting off in hope of finding a better life, then realising you’re better off at home.’

  ‘Mmm,’ said Jane.

  She thought about her home life with Will, then opened a door of her imagination to think about a home life with Rupert. She remembered the touch of his hand on her knee under the table in the V&A, and imagined that table floating off somewhere, with the two of them, ending up who knows where: on a terrace of an Italian hillside café, overlooking slopes planted with vines; in an isolated pub on the North York Moors before a roaring fire; in the Chinese pavilion of a French garden with rambling roses climbing up the pillars and a thousand-bed dovecot next door. The rural fantasy might have been knocked on the head as far as living in the country with Will was concerned, but allow herself to imagine a change of partner and the dream was very much alive and kicking.

  ‘I’m feeling generous,’ said Will after lunch. ‘Let’s take you over to Emma Hope and see what she’s got in the sale.’

  They crossed the road where a couple of thin women in Ugg boots behind triangular pushchairs with fat wheels were looking in the Joseph window. For a quiet residential area it was very well served for clothes. You could easily nip out to buy a fluid range of separates from Agnes B or the concrete-facaded Laundry Industry that Jane at first had mistaken for a launderette. But it wouldn’t be so easy to buy a pint of milk.

  The young women who served in Emma Hope’s shoe shop were far too classy to be labelled shop girls. They greeted Jane inclusively, while still managing to convey through their patronising smiles that they knew she was someone who could only afford to shop there during the sales.

  Jane picked up a slim, purple shoe and turned it over in her hand, feeling the smooth leather against the tips of her fingers and admiring its gold buckle.

  ‘It’s like The Elves and the Shoemaker, Mum,’ whispered Liberty, in awe of the pretty princesses in charge of the shop, ‘when he leaves out the material every night, and they come in to sew up a beautiful pair of shoes.’

  ‘That’s right, Liberty,’ said Jane, ‘that’s exactly what it’s like.’

  She slipped the shoe on and felt how soft it was, how it fitted like a glove instead of having hard edges that cut into your feet like you got with normal shoes.

  ‘I’ll try the other one please,’ she said. So this was what all the fuss was about, why rich women paid hundreds of pounds for a pair of shoes that spoke of the rarified days of the bespoke shoemaker. They’d had a stab at democracy, at mass-produced footwear, but it just didn’t cut the mustard.

  ‘You’re just like Cinderella,’ said Liberty, proudly holding her mother’s hand as they left the shop, ‘and Daddy is your Prince Charming.
’

  ‘No need to romanticise,’ said Will, ‘I just get to pick up the tab. You deserve it,’ he said to Jane, ‘you work hard and, let’s face it, you’re not a self-indulgent creature, and you could pay a little more attention to the way you dress.’

  They wandered down to Tavola to pick up some barrel-aged feta and elderflower presse for supper. On the way, Will waved at the owner of the Café Mandola. It proved you were a local to be on familiar terms with the restaurateurs.

  ‘Sudanese cuisine in the heart of London,’ he said.

  ‘Do we need it?’ Jane asked.

  ‘Bang next door to yer regular old greasy-spoon caff,’ he went on, waving at some dressed-down toff he knew who was enjoying what he doubtless called a ‘cup of char’ in The Windmill, so simple and much treasured by the locals.

  ‘Can we go home now?’ asked Liberty.

  Just one more stop, Liberty,’ said Will. ‘I want to get some flowers for the galleria, I’ve got someone coming over for a meeting tomorrow and she strikes me as the type who knows about these things, so I’m going to get them from the address.’

  He led them up a road until they came to a small shop-front called Wild Things. Jane was interested to see it at last, because Will was always going on about it. The shop floor was grubby, and curiously empty of flowers.

  ‘There’s not many flowers here, Daddy,’ said Liberty, staring at a stark handful of dull-coloured blooms on spindly stems.

  ‘Of course not, darling,’ said Will, ‘we’re not talking municipal park, we’re talking less is more; when you get older you’ll realise it’s better to have a few perfect blooms than a vulgar great mass of colour.’ His eye alighted on a plain white circular base which was supporting just four red roses. ‘There we are,’ he said, ‘that’s just what I need. Not so much a bunch of flowers as an installation. Jane, you’d better bring the car round, it’s going to be difficult to carry.’

  TEN

  Heathrow in the early morning is a strange and silent place. The staging post on the way hack to normal life, hut still the unreal world of airport corridors and climateless zones. It is also where you feel grateful to he hack on firm land and reassess your life as you return to it.

  After an eighteen-hour journey, Rupert knew he would he happy never to step foot on an aeroplane again. He switched on his phone as they went through passport control and listened to his messages. Nothing from Jane. Not that he had expected one, she knew he was going away. In front of him in the queue Lydia was also checking her messages, though in her case the process took much longer. Even at this ungodly hour she could turn in a good performance, frowning and smiling by turns as she flicked her hair and held the tiny phone to her ear.

  At the luggage carousel, Lydia went off to the ladies, leaving Rupert in charge of reclaiming their bags. As the conveyor belt started moving, passengers dazed by the long flight gathered round to stare at the hatch, as though waiting for an oracle.

  Rupert stroked his thumb over his phone, his Aladdin’s lamp. Just a light touch and he could be speaking to her, it was that easy. The bags were coming through now, and Lydia would be back soon, but he just had time, it was quick enough simply to summon her number and press the button. The phone rang and switched straight over to the voicemail. Of course, it was early, she would still be in bed, but it was enough to hear her voice, apologising softly for not being able to take your call. It had none of the strident harshness of Lydia’s voice which always reminded him of that jolly-hockey-sticks young woman on the Today programme. He hung up, then called the number again, to hear her once more. This time he left a message.

  ‘It’s me. I’m back.’

  He then replaced the phone in his pocket and set about hauling their bags onto the trolley.

  In the taxi queue, Lydia pulled on the llama-skin coat that she had acquired during the cold half of their holiday. ‘Thank God we’ve got the sales to come back to,’ she said. ‘January would be quite unbearable otherwise. I might take a walk up Sloane Street this afternoon, it’s better not to give in to jet lag otherwise you never adjust.’

  ‘You’re not seriously thinking of going shopping after that journey?’

  ‘A change is as good as a rest. And much as I adored the desert, I can’t wait to get back to some decent shops. Anyway, we can’t afford to miss out on the sales, we can save thousands.’

  ‘Only by spending thousands. The best way to save money is to stay home and watch telly, which is exactly how I intend to spend the day.’

  They climbed into the taxi, Lydia taking care not to crush her souvenir collection of copper music pipes, and began the crawl into central London. She took out a small book and began making notes of what she needed to complete her winter wardrobe.

  Rupert gazed out of the window and let the waves of tiredness roll over him. He felt dizzy with the travelling. It seemed they had spent days in planes and cars, transported from one extreme climate to another in the endless journey to satisfaction, punctuated by meals taken in luxury hotels. He had been like a heavy sledge, dragged along by Lydia through the blue-and-white granite colours of the southern glaciers, then hauled up to the burned umber northern desert where they boasted they’d had no rain in four hundred years. The pressure to see remarkable sights was endless and, in the end, self-defeating. You got wonder fatigue from everything being so extraordinary.

  He thought of the message he’d left on Jane’s phone. ‘It’s me.’ That was a bit presumptuous of him, assuming she’d know who ‘me’ was. He should have left his name, but that felt too incriminating, especially a damn stupid name like Rupert, and you never knew if Will might go around checking her messages. He might draw the wrong conclusion, which would be unfortunate, because there was nothing wrong about their friendship, they had nothing to hide. A friendship was all it was.

  Lydia’s voice broke into his thoughts. ‘You know, T think I’ll see if I can book Clive for that dinner on the fourteenth.’ dive ? Dinner? What was she on about?

  ‘Whatever,’ he said. It wasn’t a modern idiom that used to come naturally to him, but it was a useful way of replying to Lydia.

  ‘Only it does lend a greater sense of occasion,’ she went on, ‘and it’s not as if I want to spend my evening running in and out of the kitchen like a headless chicken.’

  ‘Quite.’

  He fell back into his reverie, trying to remember what it was he’d said afterwards, after ‘It’s me.’ Something corny like, ‘I’m back’, like he was Arnold Schwarzenegger or something, as if she would give a damn. She’d probably not given him a thought, probably been caught up in her family Christmas: after all, what was he to her? It had been a mistake to leave that message, he should have just hung up and let her call him if she wanted to.

  ‘Clive does come highly recommended,’ said Lydia, ‘and butlers are definitely in again. That’s going to be the next thing, you know, a return to formal dining; people are sick of pigging it in the kitchen, surrounded by basalt work-tops and dangling pans. A separate dining room, that’s what we’ll be seeing, and let the servants get on with it in the kitchen. It’s certainly a trend that gets my blessing.’

  Rupert nodded and closed his eyes. She watched him rest his head on the back of the seat. He seemed quite exhausted by the holiday, whereas she had found it invigorating. Contrasts were definitely what she would be looking for in the honeymoon, maybe, tropical paradise meets urban minimalism like on Cocoa Island. Rupert had seemed curiously reluctant to discuss it, kept saying they should enjoy the one they were on now, and not keep worrying about what they should be doing next. It was the nearest they had come to a row. Lydia had said it was all very well for him to say that, but things got booked up and you needed to get organised. And what task could be more enjoyable than planning the ultimate holiday that was your honeymoon?

  He was sleeping now, which was probably a bad approach to the jet lag, but he needed to catch up before going back to work. Fortunately, there had been no more talk of him g
iving up his job, it was probably just a bit of pre-Christmas fatigue. It wasn’t that she loved him for his money, but financial success was part of what he was. You couldn’t separate him from his wealth any more than you could separate a peacock from his tail; it was one of his defining characteristics.

  As for that ludicrous fantasy about becoming a gardener, that had really rattled her. A banker with his kind of earning potential must have mental problems to believe he’d be happier pushing a wheelbarrow. Would the owner of a factory suddenly announce that what he really wanted to do was sit on the production line and stick bits of plastic together? She didn’t think so. The Chile holiday had been mercifully short on gardens. Burning hot deserts up one end and icy wastes down the other, with no time to hang around in the garden-friendly moderate middle ground. That had been more by luck than judgement, but thank God there weren’t any dangerous moments of him going misty-eyed in front of a hougainvillea or whatever it was they grew over there.

  At Cadogan Gardens, the usual mountain of post had piled up during Rupert’s absence. He sat with his mug of tea, looking on as Lydia dealt with it, ripping open the envelopes and sorting the contents into piles. Junk post, catalogues, Christmas cards, many of them addressed to them both. Anything marked confidential she put to one side, then when she had finished she casually waved the pile at him. ‘Shall I deal with this?’

  He shrugged, so she opened them on his behalf. Bank statements, Christmas messages, invitations to sales openings, it was all the same to him. All of equal, zero interest.

  He went into the living room and lay down on the sofa, closing his eyes and listening to Lydia bustling around, taking over his life. He’d have a couple of days to recover and then it would be back to the office, back to feigning interest and fiddling around with notional figures on the computer. He couldn’t help thinking his job would be more fun if money was a physical thing as it was in the old days. He could sit like a king in his counting house, making shiny towers of coins, bagging them up in velvet drawstring pouches. Or even if you had chips like at the casino, where you piled them high on your chosen number, and your winnings were pushed towards to you by a sharp-eyed croupier in a low-cut silk dress. Where you could trade in your chips for wads of cash, where at least the money smelt of something, had physical form. Whereas the money he dealt with was formless: grey flickering images on a flat screen.