by Pippa Wright
For Cath and Lisa,
my ideal readers
Contents
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
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
1
I’d only ever had one day off sick in my seven years working at Country House magazine, so I suppose it wasn’t surprising that my return to the office the day after I split up with my boyfriend of eleven years occasioned some notice. Although my boss, Amanda, knew why I’d been absent, to the rest of the staff my unexpected Wednesday no-show was a fascinating and intriguing mystery, which should tell you everything about what passed for excitement in the daily life of the magazine. I’m not some glowing paragon of health, believe me; I just have a superstitious conviction that if I take time off when I’m not actually near death, I am somehow inviting serious illness to strike me. The way I see it, to take a day off watching reruns of Come Dine with Me for a mere sniffle is practically begging the universe to hit you with the cancer stick: not worth it. My office-mate Ticky always complains that it is unfair of me to bring my germs to work, but since I don’t see her rushing to pick up the slack, as far as I’m concerned she can just keep on wearing that surgical mask and wiping down her desk with Dettol whenever I cough.
In another office, one with up-to-date technology and remote access, it might have been possible for me to have claimed to be ‘working from home’, even though everyone knows that is just a euphemism for hanging out in a cafe all day eating cake while occasionally remembering to glance at one’s emails. But at Country House (established 1886, read by approximately 1886 people, as the ancient office joke went) a blackberry was nothing more than the autumnal soft fruit that appeared in every September issue with a headline such as The Blackberry: Fact or Fiction? or Bramble Jelly: Your Mould Solutions.
The frisson of interest caused by my reappearance would no doubt have delighted someone like our contributing editor Noonoo von Humboldt, who took being the centre of attention as her long-legged, swishy-haired, Hello!-photographed due. She strode our office corridors as if they were a catwalk, tossing her head and flicking her pashmina over a shoulder with a nonchalance that must have taken years of practice. But I had always tried to keep my head down at Country House, both metaphorically and literally, and today I kept my eyes firmly fixed on the carpet as I hurried past my shared office straight to the staff kitchen. I hoped I might be able to hide there for a few restorative minutes before being interrogated by anyone, but I should have realized that any true gossip hound would have recognized this as prime stakeout territory. And so it proved. Leaping out from behind the fridge, her nostrils flaring as she bore down on me, was features assistant and self-appointed shoulder-to-cry-on-whether-you-like-it-or-not, the Honourable Ticky Lytton-Finch.
‘Aurora Carmichael, oh my Goouurd, what the faahrk is going on?’
‘Oh, hi, Ticky,’ I said resignedly, unwrapping my scarf from around my neck. There was little point in trying to escape. The most I could hope for was to get away without letting her goad me into complete hysterics. The way I felt right now, it wouldn’t take much.
‘Don’t “Oh, hi” me, Rory. Where were you? Don’t go saying you were sick, I know you’d never miss an opportunity to cough your vile germs all over my desk.’
‘No, I wasn’t sick,’ I conceded.
‘But you do look faahrking terrible,’ said Ticky, moving closer. ‘What’s going on?’
‘I had a fight with Martin,’ I said, feeling my throat constrict. I clamped my lips together so my chin didn’t wobble, determined not to cry in front of Ticky, the emotional vampire of the office. Other people’s misery and drama were her sustenance. Her beady brown eyes lit up at the very suggestion of tears and she could sniff out a sobbing assistant in the ladies’ from fifty paces. For the two years she’d worked here I’d watched her pump her unsuspecting victims for every detail of their emotional lives. Little did they know that her interest in every tiny incident had nothing to do with friendly concern and everything to do with her own vicarious thrills.
‘Martin the-youngest-board-director-at-the-accountancy-firm Martin?’ asked Ticky, moving still nearer as she detected the possibility of weeping. ‘Martin Mr Excel Spreadsheets Martin? Martin your-boyfriend-of-eleven-years Martin? Martin your-only-boyfriend-ever Martin?’
She peered into my eyes, which I knew were bloodshot and swollen enough to offer her ammunition for a full-on assault on my personal life, and I poured all my energy into not cracking in front of her. I just nodded a silent confirmation.
‘But, like, what kind of fight? A splitting-up kind of fight?’ she demanded.
‘Yes – no, I mean, I’m not sure,’ I stammered.
‘You’re not sure? How are you not sure? Either you have split up or you haven’t.’
‘I’ve moved out for a bit,’ I muttered. ‘It’s just temporary.’ Of course it was just temporary. This was a moment of madness from Martin. He hadn’t meant any of it, I was sure of that. In a few days, when he’d calmed down, I’d be moving straight back home where I belonged.
‘Moved out? Where?’ Ticky pressed. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d whipped out a sheaf of paper and started taking notes to pore over later, rubbing her hands together and cackling.
‘Just with my aunt,’ I said.
‘Your aunt in Clapham?’ said Ticky, with impressive recall. ‘Isn’t her house, like, some random hostel full of nutters?’
‘It’s a boarding house for actors. She’s had all sorts of famous people staying there over the years, actually,’ I said, stung into defending my aunt’s home. Although it is true that I had myself referred to it as a hostel full of nutters in the very recent past, I’d had to swiftly change my tune when I arrived there yesterday with my overnight bag.
‘Yah? Who’s staying there now, then?’ asked Ticky, her eyes narrowing with interest.
‘Well, no one especially,’ I admitted. ‘Half of the actors have had to move out because of some plumbing problems. That’s why there was a room free for me.’ I could see Ticky’s eyes begin to glaze over as soon as she realized I wasn’t about to reveal that George Clooney was hiding out in my aunt’s attic bedroom.
‘Like, whatever, Roars. Forget the plumbing, get back to Martin. This is totally totally major. Majorama. How does it make you feel?’ She clasped my forearm with both of her hands – you might think in sympathy, but I knew better. It was a well-practised restraining hold designed to stop me from moving away.
‘How do you think it makes me feel?’ I snapped, trying to pull away.
Ticky held firm. Protected by the thick skin of the supremely posh, she would not doubt for a moment that her interference was, if not wanted, then at the very least necessary.
‘Terrible, miserable, awful, dejected. Like your life has ended,’ she prompted.
‘Unable to eat, lying awake all night sobbing, vomiting at the thought of him with other women . . ’
‘This isn’t helping, Ticky,’ I said, wresting my arm out of her grasp. Trust Ticky to think the worst of Martin. She’d never held back from declaring him to be Mr Boring Spreadsheets Accountant in the past, but now we’d split up she somehow had reimagined him as a treacherous man-whore. ‘There is no other woman.’
‘Hmm, that’s what you think,’ she said, with an infuriating air of knowingness for someone who had met Martin once, six months ago, and seemed barely aware of his existence since.
I rolled my eyes. She didn’t understand the kind of stress Martin had been under since he’d been promoted to the board. He’d been working late nights and weekends, coming home exhausted and falling into bed without even uttering a word. Like he had time for another woman.
‘Don’t keep it all inside, Rory,’ Ticky urged, correctly divining that I was not sharing all of my thoughts with her. ‘It’s so unhealthy. You’ve got to, like, share it with people? Express yourself?’
‘To you?’ I asked. In the entire time we’d been working together Ticky and I had never so much as shared a KitKat from the corner shop, yet now she expected me to expose my deepest feelings to her?
‘I am, like, a raaahlly raaahlly good listener, actually,’ Ticky persisted. ‘And, I mean, you need to talk about it because this is maybe the biggest thing ever to happen to you. Isn’t it?’
She cocked her head to the side speculatively. I didn’t answer. I knew it wasn’t a rhetorical question. Ticky would have been utterly thrilled if I had chosen this moment to tell her that there had been a worse time in my life for her to dissect and pore over.
‘Isn’t it? It’s got to be. I mean, wow, breaking up with your first love is hard when you’re, like, sixteen, but breaking up with him at twenty-nine? Preparing to turn thirty alone and unloved? Your biological clock going into overdrive? Ovaries shrivelling with every day that passes? That’s got to be majorly agonizing.’
I tried to move towards the door with my tea but Ticky barred the way, one hand on either side of the door frame.
‘What is agonizing, Ticky,’ I said through clenched teeth, ‘is this conversation. Could you please just leave me alone?’
She paused and looked down at the ground, shaking her head in apparent sympathy. When she looked up she said, as if it were entirely her own idea, ‘I think you probably just need to be left alone for a bit, Roars.’
‘Thanks so much for that.’
‘That’s okay. I like, totally understand your need for space right now. But when you’re ready to talk about it, I am here. Any time. For as long as you like. You can tell me everything.’
As I walked down the corridor to our shared office I saw the editor, Amanda Bonham Baillie, lean out of her office momentarily. Her eyebrows moved fractionally towards each other in a barely perceptible frown – Country House was officially anti-Botox, being more a publication read by hearty rural ladies of a certain age whose clothes were always covered in dog hair, but Amanda’s inability to express deep emotion on her face had long made me suspect that her cosmetic influences were more West London than West Country.
‘Everything all right now, Rory?’ she asked, as if it took a mere twenty-four hours to dismantle a long-term relationship, move out of one’s shared home, and get over a broken heart.
‘Yes, Amanda,’ I said dutifully, knowing that she, unlike Ticky, would be appalled if I were to break down and wet her Marni-jacketed shoulder with my tears.
‘So sorry about Matthew,’ she said kindly.
‘Martin. It’s Martin, Amanda.’
‘Martin, of course,’ she said. Her minuscule frown deepened by an atom. ‘And Rory, do please try to call me Maaahn.’
No matter how hard I tried, I had never been able to call Amanda ‘Maaahn’. The rest of the staff did, but somehow I just couldn’t manage it. Not because it felt disrespectful to my boss, but because I wasn’t sufficiently posh to get enough vowels into her name. I just ended up saying ‘Man’, to rhyme with ‘can’, which always made her wrinkle her nose in polite displeasure. To have tried at all would have felt like putting on a foreign accent, as if I was one of those horribly showy-offy types who calls Paris ‘Parrree’ and hoicks up the back of their throat when pronouncing any word in German. I simply couldn’t manage ‘Maaahn’ to rhyme with – God, what would it rhyme with? No word in English, that’s for sure.
It had taken me years to learn how to deal with the names that appeared on the Country House masthead. Who would have guessed that the seemingly innocuous last name Featherstone was not said as spelled, but rather ‘Fanshawe’? Or that Amanda’s PA, Catherine, insisted her name should be pronounced ‘Katrina’, just to fool plebs like me (everyone called her Hurricane anyway, obviously, since she was prone to dramatics). Felix Appleby was known as Flickers. Natalia von Humboldt would answer to nothing but Noonoo, and it took me several months to realize that my office-mate Ticky had actually been christened Victoria. There was always some apparently hilarious story behind such nicknames, usually unexplained as most of the staff had known each other socially since infancy. If you escaped a nickname, it would be only because you exulted in a moniker so grand that no one would dare shorten it, literary editor Lysander Honeywell being the prime example.
I had always suspected I’d got my first job here, straight out of university, because the former editor, Old Mr Betterton, whose family had owned the magazine for 150 years, mistakenly believed my unusual name marked me out as one of them. He would never have imagined that my mother chose to call me Aurora after the princess in Sleeping Beauty. And not the Grimm’s fairy tale either; Mum was strictly Disney-inspired. Since Mr Betterton was always quite happy to take people on surface appearance, he didn’t dig especially deep in our twenty-minute interview – much of which I suspected he couldn’t actually hear, as his hearing aid whistled alarmingly throughout. Nor did he, I surmised, actually read the CV which revealed that my education came courtesy of the state rather than a trust fund. It was only when I’d been working at the office for a year that I overheard him tell another member of staff that it was his belief Rory Carmichael might not be, after all, one of the Norfolk Carmichaels.
By the time Ticky returned to our shared office my computer was on and I didn’t even need to pretend to be buried in work to avoid her questions; there were 167 emails piled up from yesterday and Ticky, true to form, although cc’d on most, had not dealt with a single one of them. Technically, as features assistant, Ticky reported to me. But she spent much of her time ‘networking’ with Amanda’s tacit approval, taking long lunches, skipping off at five to meet ‘contacts’ (aka old schoolfriends) for cocktails, leaving the office every Friday lunchtime to head out to the country for the weekend or breakfasting at Simpson’s-in-the-Strand with aged and wealthy godfathers who Amanda believed might be useful to Country House if they might be persuaded to give us access to their rural residences. Ticky claimed this hectic schedule left her too exhausted to deal with the more mundane demands of her job and somehow, despite my being deputy features editor, most of these landed in my in tray.
I knew it wasn’t worth telling tales on Ticky’s workshy ways; she would be here at the magazine only until she found a chinless husband to whisk her off to her own country house. I’d seen it happen to both of her predecessors. The job was nothing but an interesting diversion for her, with a salary that just bumped up her generous monthly allowance from the bank of Mummy and Daddy.
I must have been looking in her direction because Ticky’s head suddenly twisted away from her computer screen.
‘Ready to talk yet, Roars?’ she asked. ‘Maybe a drink after work?’
‘No thanks,’ I said, turning back to my work.
‘Is it because you’re skint?’ asked Ticky. ‘Because I am, like, totes happy to stand you a drink. I mean, February’s depressing enough without not being able to afford to drown your sorrows.’<
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‘I can afford a glass of wine, thanks very much, Ticky,’ I said crossly.
I supposed I should have been grateful to her for offering, but the not-so-subtle implication that I was an impoverished prole was hard to take. Sometimes I felt like most of the staff at Country House regarded me as some kind of a charity project, like an African orphan they’d all adopted to give a chance at a better life. Meaning a life like theirs, of course; none of them could imagine that I might be perfectly contented with my own non-posh existence. Noonoo never understood that I turned down her offers of cast-off pashminas not out of pride, but because I wouldn’t be caught dead in one.
The truth was, while I was desperate for a glass of wine – even right now, first thing in the morning – I wasn’t ready to talk to anyone about Martin. I hadn’t even called my mum yet. I knew in the sitcom version of my life I should have been sitting on a pub sofa surrounded by my girlfriends, having the ‘All men are bastards’ conversation, but was it worth gathering together my far-flung university friends for what was probably a false alarm? It wasn’t like we were all as close as we had been when we were living in each others’ pockets in our mouse-infested student house in Warwick. I knew we were all still there for each other even if our meeting up had become a twice-yearly affair, but I hadn’t spoken to any of them in months. And, if I was completely honest, I’d always felt that the girls hadn’t quite taken Martin to their hearts. Telling them about our fight now might just prejudice them against him later.
Ticky interrupted, refusing to give up. ‘You, like, can’t keep it all inside for ever, Roars.’ Her facial expression suggested a selfless altruism that was belied by the impatient rapping of her pen on the desktop, as if she was marking out the seconds until I cracked.
‘You’ll be absolutely the first to know when I’m ready to talk about it, Ticky,’ I lied. She nodded in satisfaction. Right, I thought. It will be a cold hard day in hell when I find myself so short of friends that I need to confide in you, Ticky Lytton-Finch, you over-entitled emotional parasite.
But that was before the email arrived from Martin. My heart leapt into my throat. Had he reconsidered so soon? Did he want me to come home? My overnight bag sat, zipped and packed, in my room at Auntie Lyd’s, ready to return the moment he gave the word.
