SOPHIA MONEY-COUTTS is a 32-year-old journalist who spent five years studying the British aristocracy while working as features director at Tatler. Prior to that she worked as a writer and an editor for the Evening Standard and the Daily Mail in London, and The National in Abu Dhabi. She writes a weekly column called ‘Modern Manners’ for the Sunday Telegraph and has appeared on various radio and television channels talking about topics like Prince Harry’s wedding and the etiquette of the threesome. The Plus One is her debut novel.
Twitter: @sophiamcoutts
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www.sophiamoneycoutts.com
Copyright
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2018
Copyright © Sophia Money-Coutts 2018
Sophia Money-Coutts asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook Edition © August 2018 ISBN: 9780008288488
To my family, who are madder than any
of the characters in this book.
But that’s why I love you all so much.
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
SIX MONTHS LATER …
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
About the Publisher
I BLAME SENSE AND SENSIBILITY. I saw the film when I was twelve. A very impressionable age. And more specifically, I blame Kate Winslet. She, Marianne, the second sister, nearly dies for love. That bit where she goes walking in a storm to look at Willoughby’s house and is rescued by Colonel Brandon but spends the next few days sweating with a life-threatening fever? That, I decided, was the appropriate level of drama in a relationship.
I consequently set about trying to be as like Marianne as I could. She was into poetry, which seemed a sign because I also liked reading. I bought a little book of Shakespeare’s sonnets in homage, which I carried in my school bag at all times in case I had a moment between lessons when I could whip it out and whisper lines to myself in a suitably dramatic manner. I also learned Sonnet 116, Marianne and Willoughby’s favourite, off by heart.
‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. Love is not love, which alters when it alteration finds…’
Imagine a tubby 12-year-old wandering the streets of Battersea in rainbow-coloured leggings muttering that to herself. I was ripe for a kicking. So, yes, I blame Sense and Sensibility for making me think I had to find someone. It set me on the wrong path entirely.
1
IF I’D KNOWN THAT the week was going to end in such disaster, I might not have bothered with it. I might just have stayed in bed and slept like some sort of hibernating bear for the rest of the winter.
Not that it started terribly well either. It was Tuesday, 2 January, the most depressing day of the year, when everyone trudges back to work feeling depressed, overweight and broke. It also just happened to be my birthday. My thirtieth birthday. So, I was gloomier than anyone else that morning. Not only had I turned a decade older overnight, but I was still single, living with Joe, a gay oboist, in a damp flat in Shepherd’s Bush and starting to think that those terrifying Daily Mail articles about dwindling fertility levels were aimed directly at me.
I cycled from my flat to the Posh! magazine offices in Notting Hill trying not to be sick. The hangover was entirely my own fault; I’d stayed up late the night before drinking red wine on the sofa with Joe. Dry January could get stuffed. Joe had called it an early birthday celebration; I’d called it a wake for my youth. Either way, we’d made our way through three bottles of wine from the corner shop underneath our flat and I’d woken up feeling like my brain had been replaced with jelly.
Wobbling along Notting Hill Gate, I locked my bike beside the Posh! office, then dipped into Pret to order: one white Americano, one egg and bacon breakfast baguette and one berry muffin. According to Pret’s nutritional page (bookmarked on my work computer), this came to 950 calories, but as I hadn’t actually eaten anything with Joe the night before I decided the calories could get stuffed too.
‘Morning, Enid,’ I said over my computer screen, putting the Pret bag on my desk. Enid was the PA to Peregrine Monmouth, the editor for Posh! magazine, and a woman as wide as she was tall. She was loved in the office on the basis that she put through everyone’s expenses and approved holidays.
‘Polly, my angel! Happy Birthday!’ She waddled around the desk and enveloped me in a hug. ‘And Happy New Year,’ she said, crushing my face to her gigantic bosom. Her breath smelled of coffee.
‘Happy New Year,’ I mumbled into Enid’s cardigan, before pulling back and standing up straight again, putting a hand to my forehead as it throbbed. I needed some painkillers.
‘Did you have a nice break?’ she asked.
‘Mmm,’ I replied vaguely, leaning to turn on my computer. What was my password again?
‘Were you with your mum then?’ Enid returned to her desk and started rustling in a bag beside it.
‘Mmmm.’ It was some variation of my mum’s dog name and a number. Bertie123? It didn’t work. Shit. I’d have to call that woman in IT whose name I could never remember.
‘And did you get any nice presents?’
Bertie19. That was it. Bingo.
Emails started spilling into my inbox and disappearing off the screen. I watched as the counter spiralled up to 632. They were mostly press releases about diets, I observed, scrolling through them. Sugar-free, gluten-free, dairy-free, fat-free. Something new designed by a Californian doctor called the ‘Raisin Diet’, on which you were only allowed to eat thirty raisins a day.
‘Sorry, Enid,’ I said, shaking my head and reaching for my baguette. ‘I’m concentrating. Any nice presents? You know, some books from Mum. How was your Christmas?’
‘Lovely, thanks. Just me and Dave and the kids at home. And Dave’s mum, who’s losing her marbles a bit, but we managed. I overdid it on the Baileys though so I’m on a new diet I read about.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘It’s called the Raisin Diet, it’s supposed to be ever so good. You eat ten raisins for breakfast, ten raisins for lunch and ten raisins for supper and they say you can lose a stone in a week.’
I watched over my computer screen as Enid counted out raisins from a little Tupperware box.
‘Morning, all, Happy New Year an
d all that nonsense. Meeting in my office in fifteen minutes please,’ boomed Peregrine’s voice, as he swept through the door in a navy overcoat and trilby.
Peregrine was a 55-year-old social climber who launched Posh! in the Nineties in an attempt to mix with the sort of people he thought should be his friends. Dukes, earls, lords, the odd Ukrainian oligarch. He applied the same principal to his wives. First, an Italian jewellery heiress. Second, the daughter of a Venezuelan oil baron. He was currently married to a French stick insect who was, as Peregrine told anyone he ever met, a distant relation to the Monaco Royals.
‘Where is everyone?’ he said, reappearing from his office, coat and hat now removed.
I looked around at the empty desks. ‘Not sure. It’s just me and Enid so far.’
‘Well, I want a meeting with you and Lala as soon as she’s in. I’ve got a major story we need to get going with.’
‘Sure. What is it?’
‘Top secret. Just us three in the meeting. Need-to-know basis,’ he said, glancing at Enid. ‘You all right?’ he added.
Enid was poking the inside of her mouth with a finger. ‘Just got a bit of raisin stuck,’ she replied.
Peregrine grimaced, then looked back at me. ‘Right. Well. Will you let me know as soon as Lala is in?’
I nodded.
‘Got it,’ said Enid, waving a finger.
An hour later, Lala, the magazine’s party editor, and I were sitting in Peregrine’s office. I’d drunk my coffee and eaten both the baguette and the muffin but still felt perilously close to death.
‘So, there’s yet another Royal baby on the way,’ said Peregrine, ‘the Countess of Hartlepool told me at lunch yesterday. They have the same gynaecologist, apparently.’
‘Due when?’ I asked.
‘July,’ he said. ‘So I want us to get cracking with a quick piece which we can squeeze into the next issue.’
I wondered if I’d live as far as July given how I felt today. Some birthday this was. ‘What about something on the Royal playmates?’ I said.
Peregrine nodded while scratching his belly, which rolled over his waistband and rested on the tops of his legs. ‘Yes. That sort of thing. The Fotheringham-Montagues are having their second too, I think.’
‘And my friend Octavia de Flamingo is having her first baby,’ said Lala, chewing on her pen. ‘They’ve already reserved a place at Eton in case it’s a boy.’
‘Well, we need at least ten others so can you both ask around and find more posh babies,’ said Peregrine. ‘I want it on my desk first thing on Friday, Polly. And can you get the pictures of them all too.’
‘Of the parents?’ I checked.
‘No, no, no!’ he roared. ‘Of the babies! I want all the women’s scan pictures. The sort of thing that no one else will have seen. You know, real, insidery stuff.’
I sighed as I walked back to my desk. Posh! was now so insidery it was going to print pictures of the aristocracy’s wombs.
My Tuesday evenings were traditionally spent having supper with my mum in her Battersea flat and tonight, as a birthday treat, I was doing exactly the same thing.
It was a chaotic and mummified flat. Mum had lived there for nearly twenty years, ever since Dad died and we’d moved to London from Surrey. She worked in a curtain shop nearby because her boss allowed her to bring her 9-year-old Jack Russell to the shop so long as he stayed behind the counter and didn’t wee on any of the damask that lay around the place in giant rolls. Bertie largely obliged, only cocking his leg discreetly on the very darkest rolls he could find if Mum got distracted by talking to a customer for too long.
It was the curtain shop that had landed me a job at Posh!. Peregrine’s second wife – the Venezuelan one – had come in to discuss pelmets for their new house in Chelsea while I was in there talking to Mum one Saturday. And even though Alejandra had all the charm and warmth of a South American despot, I plucked up the courage to mention that I wanted to be a journalist. So, because I was desperate and Peregrine was miserly, he offered me the job as his assistant a few months later. I started by replying to his party invitations and buying his coffees, but after a year or so I’d started writing small pieces for the magazine. Nothing serious. Short articles I mostly made up about the latest trend in fancy dress or the most fashionable canapé to serve at a drinks party. But I worked my way up from there until Peregrine let me write a few longer pieces and interviews with various mad members of the British aristocracy. It wasn’t the dream role. I was hardly Kate Adie reporting from the Gaza Strip in a flak jacket. But it was a writing job, and, even though back when I started I didn’t know anything about the upper classes (I thought a viscount was a type of biscuit), it seemed a good start.
‘Happy birthday, darling, kick my boots out of the way,’ Mum shouted from upstairs when I pushed her front door open that night to the sound of Bertie barking. There was a pile of brown envelopes on the radiator grille in the hall, two marked ‘Urgent’.
‘Mums, do you ever open your post?’ I asked, walking upstairs and into the sitting room.
‘Oh yes, yes, yes, don’t fuss,’ she said, taking the envelopes and putting them down on her desk, where magazines and old papers covered every spare chink of surface. ‘I’ve made a cake for pudding,’ she went on, ‘but I’ve got some prawns in the fridge that need eating, so we’re having them first. I thought I might make a risotto?’
‘Mmm, lovely, thank you,’ I replied, wondering whether Peregrine would believe me if I called in sick because my mother had poisoned me with prawns so old they had tap-danced their way into the risotto.
‘Have you had a nice birthday?’ Mum asked. ‘How was work?’
‘Oh, you know, Peregrine’s Napoleonic tendencies are as rampant as ever. I’ve got to write a piece on Royal babies and their playmates.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Mum vaguely, as she walked towards the kitchen, opened the fridge and took out a bottle of wine. In the four years I’d worked at Posh!, I’d learned more about the upper classes than I’d ever expected to. A duke was higher than an earl in the pecking order and they were all obsessed with their Labradors. But Mum, a librarian’s daughter from Surrey, while supportive of my job, wasn’t much interested in the details.
She poured two glasses of white wine and handed me one. ‘Now, let’s sit down and then I can give you your present.’
I collapsed on the sofa whereupon Bertie instantly jumped on my lap and white wine sloshed over the rim of my glass and into my crotch.
‘Bertie, get down,’ said Mum, handing me a small jewellery box and sitting down beside me. She stared at Bertie and pointed at the floor, as he slowly and reluctantly climbed off the sofa. I opened the box. It was a ring. A thin, delicate gold band with a knot twisted into the metal.
‘Your dad gave it to me when you were born. So, I thought, to mark a big birthday, you should have it.’
‘Oh, Mum…’ I felt choked. She hardly ever mentioned Dad. He’d had a heart attack and died at forty-five when I was just ten years old. Our lives changed forever in that moment. We had to sell our pretty, Victorian house in Surrey and Mum and I moved to this flat in Battersea. We were both in shock. But we got on with our new life in London because there was no alternative. And we’d been a small, but intensely close, unit ever since. Just us two. And then Bertie, when I left for university and Mum decided she needed a small, hairy substitute child.
I slipped the ring on my finger. It was a bit tight over the knuckle, but it went on easily enough. ‘I love it,’ I said, looking at my hand, then looking up at Mum. ‘Thank you.’
‘Good, I’m glad it fits. And now, listen, I have something I need to chat to you about.’
‘Hmmm?’ I was trying to turn the ring on my finger. A bout of dysentery from prawn-related food poisoning might not be the worst thing, actually. I could probably lose half a stone.
‘Polly?’
‘Yes, yes, sorry, am listening.’ I stopped fiddling with the ring and sat back against the sofa.
‘So,’ started Mum. ‘I went to see Dr Young last week. You know this chest pain that’s been worrying me? Well, I’ve been taking my blood pressure pills but they haven’t been doing any good so I went back on Thursday. Terrible this week because the place was full of people sneezing everywhere. But I went back and, well, he wants me to have a scan.’
‘A scan?’ I frowned at her.
‘Yes. And he says it may be nothing but it’s just to be sure that it is nothing.’
‘OK… But what would it be if it wasn’t nothing?’
‘Well, you know, it could be a little something,’ said Mum, breezily. ‘But he wants me to have a scan to check.’
‘When is it?’ I felt sick. Panicky. Only two minutes ago I’d been worrying about the sell-by date on a packet of prawns. It suddenly seemed very silly.
‘I’m waiting for the letter to confirm the date. Dr Young said I’ll hear in the next couple of weeks but the post is so slow these days, so we’ll see.’
‘It might help if you looked at the pile of post downstairs every now and then, Mum,’ I said, as gently as I could. ‘You don’t want to miss it.’
‘No. No, I know.’
I’d always told myself that Mum and I had done all right on our own over the years. Better, even, than all right. We were way closer than some of my friends were with their parents. But every now and then I wished Mum had a husband to look after her. This was one of those moments. For support. For help. For another person to talk to. She could hardly discuss the appointment with Bertie.
‘Well, will you let me know when you get the letter and I’ll come with you? Where will it be?’ I asked.
‘Oh there’s no need, darling. You’ve got work. Don’t fuss.’
‘Don’t be silly, obviously I’m coming. I work for a magazine, not MI6. No one will mind if I take a few hours off.’
‘What about Peregrine?’
‘He’ll manage.’
‘OK. If you’re sure, that would be lovely. The appointment will be at St Thomas’.’
The Plus One Page 1
