Second Chance

by Jane Green

  Isn’t everyone entitled to a little fantasy now and then?

  Across the pond Saffron is indulging in a little fantasy of her own. P’s wife is away filming, and he’s staying with Saffron while she’s away, at least for tonight.

  Saffron has ordered his favourite from Wolfgang Puck, currently being picked up by Samuel, to be dropped off at Saffron’s and heated up when P arrives. Alcohol-free beer is in the fridge, the logs have been stacked in the fireplace ready to be lit just before his arrival. Jack Jones is emanating softly from the Bose speakers – a gift from P when he realized all she had were tiny iPod speakers that made everything sound tinny.

  Her legs are newly waxed, her nails newly painted and her hair newly highlighted. She hasn’t seen P for two weeks and, as always, is almost dizzy with excitement at the prospect of seeing him, and not just for the evening but for the whole night.

  No make-up, though. P loves her natural. He tells her frequently he loves her best first thing in the morning when her hair is messed up and her face scrubbed clean. He loves her in old sweats, baseball caps and his oversized sweatshirts. That’s how she looked when he fell in love with her, he tells her, seeing her at meetings looking as if she had just fallen out of bed.

  She wonders sometimes whether their incredibly intense attraction for each other would wane if they were together all the time. She suspects it would not. They have shared so much together on such an intimate level in the meetings, how could it possibly wane when she knows him better than anyone else in the world, and he, her?

  Her fantasy tonight is much the same as it is every night. That he realizes the futility of staying in a marriage just for the sake of his career and finally decides to leave. That he moves into this little house – and it would be this little house; Saffron has no desire to step in and take over from his wife as lady of the manor – and that they fall asleep every night, wrapped around one another.

  The fire is lit, the food warming gently in the oven, the setting is perfect. When P rings the doorbell, Saffron runs down the stairs like an overexcited teenager, flinging her arms around him in the hallway and kissing him for hours.

  She cannot believe how much she loves kissing him. Her previous relationships, previous flings, have wanted to move straight on to the main course, but P, so starved of affection in his marriage, loves nothing more than lying in her arms on the sofa, just kissing, well into the small hours.

  He loves being loved. Of course, he is one of the most-loved stars of this generation, but that is not love. When he married his wife, he loved her and, naively he now thinks, he thought that she loved him.

  He married her because she made him feel safe, because he thought they would be a good team, and because wherever he was weak, she seemed to be strong.

  Where he could be, particularly in those drinking days, self-important and pompous, she seemed grounded and down-to-earth. She had an amazing perceptiveness and wisdom, and he loved taking her to business meetings with him, listening to what she thought afterwards, knowing that she invariably had insights that were spot on, that he would never have thought about.

  He loved her business mind. That she set up her own production company and immediately set about buying scripts. That she would lie in bed for hours, reading glasses perched on the end of her nose, pencil in hand as she made scrawling remarks on the manuscripts she would read endlessly.

  In those early days, he would often reach out for her, slide a hand up her thigh, and lean over and kiss her neck, but she would shake her head distractedly and move away from him, telling him she had to read this by tomorrow or she had to get up early or not tonight, darling, too much work.

  He doesn’t blame her for making him turn to alcohol, but certainly alcohol made the rejection easier to bear. It excused his bad behaviour when he started looking elsewhere for the love and affection he craved. It made him feel strong and invincible; that it didn’t matter that the one person in the world he wanted didn’t seem to want him in return.

  Now he thinks bitterly that it was a marriage orchestrated by their agents. He wishes he’d known it at the time. It would have saved him a lifetime of pain if he’d known she had always seen it as a business arrangement.

  So he turned to other women, but what he had never found before Saffron was love. He had never found intimacy and had never trusted that anyone loved him for him rather than for being a rich and famous actor.

  LA abounded with young gorgeous women who would drop their knickers at the bat of an eyelid and, for a while, that was enough, but when he found Saffron and got to know her slowly in the safety of their shared AA meetings, he knew what he had been missing.

  He has spoken to his manager more times than he cares to think about of leaving his wife and being with Saffron. His manager, his agent, and his publicist all agree: it will be career death. He can’t do it. He doesn’t tell Saffron he thinks about this all the time, doesn’t want to give her false hope, but he thinks that, at some point in his career, he will be able to stop, buy a ranch in Montana, leave his old life behind and create a new one with Saffron.

  For Saffron is not the only one with fantasies. P has fantasies of family life. He has fantasies of a wife who loves him, who sleeps cuddled up to him at night, who supports him unequivocally in the choices he makes. He has dreams of children – a pack of kids running around laughing – and of his wife showering them all with kisses and fun. He dreams of wide-open spaces, of horses, of owning land. And he still can’t quite believe the choice he made when he married his wife.

  A good friend though she may be, she doesn’t want children. She doesn’t like animals. Her idea of a perfect house is the mansion they are currently in, in Bel Air, expertly decorated by the top decorators in town, beautiful to look at but nothing about it spells home.

  In the beginning, he vaguely recalls, they would talk about their vision for their lives. He remembers her saying she wanted a production company, but she also said she wanted kids. He told her of his vision of the ranch, and she said it sounded wonderful. She said a lot of things in those days, he realizes now. A lot of things he wanted to hear, very few of them true.

  When he first came into AA, he hated her. He resented her for trapping him in a loveless marriage, hated her for lying to him, could barely bring himself to talk to her. They would sit in limos on the way to premieres, arguing fiercely, then step into the flash of light bulbs with equal megawatt smiles on their faces, stopping for the film crews to demonstrate how much they loved one another.

  They gave interviews about the strength of their marriage, the things that they loved about each other, and with every one he believed he was giving the performance of his life, easily Oscar-winning, if faking undying affection were ever to be added as a category.

  The twelve-step programme gave him the gift of acceptance. He learnt to accept her rather than hate her because she wasn’t who he wanted her to be. It was never going to be the marriage he wanted, he realized, but he also realized he had a choice: he could stay in a slump of self-pity and resentment, and stay a victim for the rest of his life, or he could change the way he looked at his life and embrace it exactly as it was.

  And just as he had learnt to accept it, to accept that his marriage was a great friendship and a wonderful working arrangement, Saffron had walked into the meeting and captured his heart.

  There is no such thing as coincidence. There is no doubt in his mind that he and Saffron were in that particular meeting that particular day for a reason, and however much he tells his manager he is committed to perpetuating the lie of the golden couple that is his marriage, he knows that there is only so long that he can live not being true to himself, and the longer he stays in AA, this programme that demands nothing less than rigorous honesty, the harder it becomes.

  And so much harder on nights such as these when Saffron is so clearly everything his wife is not.

  ‘Confession time,’ Saffron says, as P helps her stack the dishes in the dishwasher. ‘But
first,’ she says, grinning, ‘can I just say how much I love that you, hottest sex god in America, are stacking dishes in a tiny kitchen in my little house? If your fans could see you now…’

  ‘What? You don’t think this is sexy?’ P places a hand on his hip and poses with a plate. ‘Isn’t this what every woman wants? A man who helps out?’

  ‘Sort of, but I think if they were with you they’d expect to be waited on hand and foot by a butler, no?’

  ‘They’d be waiting a very long time for that.’ P laughs. ‘So, back to confession time. What’s the confession?’

  Saffron blushes. ‘Okay. I lied.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘I didn’t cook this. I really want you to think I’m a great cook, so I lied.’

  P roars with laughter. ‘I know you lied. Only Wolfgang Puck makes this as well as this. Plus I was with Samuel when he picked it up. I’m not stupid, my darling.’

  Saffron breathes a sigh of relief. ‘I know you’re not stupid, but I wanted you to think I’m a great cook.’

  ‘Honey, cooking is the last thing I care about.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ She raises an eyebrow and P closes the dishwasher and puts his arms round her waist, pulling her in for a kiss.

  ‘Do you know something?’ He pulls back and gazes into her eyes as she smiles at him. ‘I love you, Saffron.’

  ‘I love you too,’ she says, and taking him by the hand she leads him out of the kitchen and upstairs to bed.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Frauke looks up from where she’s scrubbing down the counter after Daisy’s lunch and whistles, low and slow. ‘Wow! You look fantastic!’

  ‘Really?’ Holly does a delighted twirl in the kitchen. ‘You don’t think it’s a bit… young?’

  ‘Holly, you are young. I am always telling my other au pair friends that I am lucky because I have such a young host mother. I even say that you should dress more like this. Younger. The clothes you wear are beautiful, but they make you look older. If I didn’t know I would think you were in your mid-forties.’

  ‘Frauke!’ Holly says indignantly, even as she laughs. ‘Talk about knowing how to ruin a good mood.’

  Frauke looks confused. ‘Why? Today, Holly, I think you look maybe thirty. No, twenty-eight.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, and I love your hair like this. It is very sexy. Where are you going?’

  ‘Oh just lunch with an old friend. Daisy!’ She shouts up the stairs. ‘Come and give Mummy a kiss goodbye!’

  Holly climbs into her car and takes the CD from her bag. She has made it herself, a series of songs that somehow speak to her, tell her about her life, fill her with optimism about what her future holds.

  She had forgotten music could be this powerful. As a teenager, her life was music. She would leave her mother’s house with her Walkman in hand, and spend hours traipsing, depressed, around Hampstead Heath, being the lonely misunderstood teenager who needed to be rescued by a knight in shining armour.

  She listens to the radio now, but hasn’t actually bought a CD for years unless it was something for the children. Two weeks ago, on Will’s advice, she went out and bought an iPod, bringing it home and spending the next two days uploading CDs, buying songs, creating playlists. This one she called ‘Happy’, filled with music that lifts her up.

  Van Morrison’s ‘Brown-Eyed Girl’; ‘I’ll Take You There’ by the Staples Singers; then Corinne Bailey Rae. Holly shakes her hair out, curls that she expertly worked in using the curling iron this morning, and she sings along at the top of her voice, feeling sixteen, feeling young and free and as if anything is possible.

  Which it is.

  She is first to arrive. Damn. She hates being first. She had deliberately timed it so she would be five minutes late, but when she walks into Nicole’s, she doesn’t see him.

  ‘How many?’ The maître d’ asks politely and leads her to a table at the back for two. Holly resists the temptation to run to the loo to check her make-up. She knows it’s fine – she checked it at every red light on the way here and several times while driving somewhat erratically along the winding London streets.

  She taps her boot impatiently on the floor and catches sight of herself in the mirror on the other side of the room. God, if she didn’t know better she’d never recognize herself. Skinny jeans tucked into knee-high, buttery-leather boots, high enough to be sexy as hell, not so high she can’t walk. A cotton shirt, classic, but slim and long, and a chunky wide belt.

  She realizes, as she gazes around at the rest of the clientele, that she looks as if she belongs. She looks no different from the other young mothers sipping cappuccinos with their strollers parked next to the tables, and even though she is childless today, stroller-less and child-accoutrement-less, she is what she is, and how funny, she thinks, that she has exchanged one uniform for another.

  Her uniform of cashmere and pearls, so befitting a lawyer’s wife, has today been swapped for a uniform of Notting Hill trendiness, and although still a uniform, Holly notices how much better she feels in what she is wearing today. She does feel young and, let’s face it, she is only thirty-nine. No need to pretend to be forty-five.

  ‘You look amazing!’ Will’s eyes widen in surprise and, she hopes, delight. No. She doesn’t hope that. No point in hoping that. Or is there? Isn’t it fine, surely, to want to be attractive to other men? Isn’t it fine to enjoy someone appreciating you? It doesn’t mean you’re going to have an affair, for heaven’s sake. Holly would never have an affair. She isn’t the type.

  You’re married, my darling. Not dead!

  ‘Oh this? Wow. Thanks.’ Holly blushes slightly as she stands up to step into Will’s hug, to receive his air kisses on either cheek, except they are not air kisses, his lips land softly on each cheek, even as hers skim the air on either side of his. Stop it! she tells herself as her heart flutters ever so quickly, and she sits down hurriedly, spending rather more seconds than are altogether necessary smoothing the napkin on her lap in a bid to calm down.

  ‘Now you look like the Holly I remember.’ Will grins, and as he does, she thinks with a jolt how much like Tom he looks.

  ‘This is a bit weird, isn’t it?’ Holly finds herself saying.

  ‘What? You and I having lunch? Frankly I think it’s about time we took our email correspondence to a proper friendship, and you can’t be friends if you never see one another. As the dating service says, it’s only lunch.’

  ‘No, not that. You just looked exactly like Tom when you smiled.’ Holly picks up the napkin and holds it to her eyes. ‘I’m so sorry, Will,’ she says, attempting a smile. ‘So stupid that I’m the one sitting here with tears in my eyes when he’s your brother. I feel I don’t have a right to this display of emotion in front of you.’

  Will leans over and places a hand on Holly’s, squeezing it ever so gently. ‘Holly, you loved him too. Just for the record, you do have a right to display any emotion you want, and I know, God knows I know, how it reaches up and grabs you at the most unexpected times.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Holly says as a tear slides its way down her nose.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Will says, and he keeps holding her hand, not saying anything, and after a few seconds it is okay, and Holly smiles through her sniffs.

  ‘I’m pathetic,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘The only thing that’s pathetic is that you keep apologizing. Will you stop? Please?’

  ‘Okay.’ She smiles. ‘Sor… oh fuck off.’

  ‘That’s better!’ Will grins. ‘When was the last time you told a friend to fuck off?’

  ‘Probably yesterday,’ Holly says. ‘I think I may have told Saffron to fuck off over the phone.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ Will says in mock horror. ‘Can’t imagine why she’s friends with you.’

  ‘Because I’m kind and funny and loyal.’

  ‘And pretty damn sexy with that hair, if I may say so.’

  ‘I…’ Holly flushes bright red and Will starts
to laugh.

  ‘Are you going to turn scarlet every time I compliment you? Because if you are that’s fantastic. I can start pouring them on. Those jeans and boots make your arse…’

  ‘Will!’ Holly stops him, even as she’s laughing.

  ‘What? Can’t I say arse?’

  ‘No you bloody can’t. You don’t know me nearly well enough to make comments about my… well. You know.’

  Will leans back in his chair and crosses his arms, studying Holly with a smile. ‘Well, well, well,’ he says. ‘Holly Mac, a prude. Who knew?’

  ‘I am not a prude,’ she says indignantly.

  ‘Tell me you have a great arse, then.’

  ‘No! I absolutely do not have to tell you I have a great arse to prove to you that I’m not a prude.’

  ‘Go on. I won’t believe you unless you tell me.’

  ‘Fine. I have a great arse. Happy now?’

  ‘Very, thank you. And yes, I agree. So. Shall we get menus?’ The waiter appears immediately, and Holly hides her embarrassment – her secret thrill – behind choosing what to have for lunch.

  ‘You’re not used to being complimented, are you?’ Will muses, gazing at Holly over the rim of his cappuccino at the end of the meal, each of them reluctant to end what has been a lunch filled with laughter and teasing.

  ‘No,’ Holly says cautiously. ‘Although I don’t think that’s me, particularly. I can’t imagine being in a situation where I would be complimented these days. My life as a mother and freelance illustrator is very dull. You see the same people, and run around in the same clothes, so why would anyone compliment you on your looks? Surely it’s the same for you, no? When was the last time you were complimented?’

  ‘Well, I did get a compliment at Tom’s memorial service. Not particularly appropriate, but there was a girl who came up to me and told me she and her friends had always fancied me when we were young. Remember when I worked at the chemist’s for that summer? Apparently they’d watch me play football on the weekends, then make excuses to come into the chemist’s and buy stuff. They even had a name for me. The lustyleg man.’