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Contents
Celia Brayfield
Epigraph
1. February 7–April 10
2. April 10–14
3. April 14
4. April 15
5. April 15–16
6. April 17–20
7. April 21–24
8. April 24
9. April 24–25
10. April 26
11. April 26–27
12. April 27
13. April 27–28
14. April 28
15. April 29
16. May 2–6
17. May 6–8
18. May 9
19. May 12–13
20. May 14–28
Celia Brayfield
Heartswap
Celia Brayfield
Celia Brayfield is a novelist and cultural commentator. She is the author of nine novels. The latest, Wild Weekend explores the tensions in a Suffolk village in homage to Oliver Goldmsith’s She Stoops to Conquer. To explore suburban living, she created the community of Westwick and explored mid-life manners in Mr Fabulous And Friends, and the environmental implications of urbanisation in Getting Home. She has often juxtaposed historical and contemporary settings, notably eighteenth century Spain in Sunset, pre-revolutionary St Petersburg in White Ice and Malaysia in the time of World War II in Pearls. Four of her novels have been optioned by major US, UK or French producers.
Her non-fiction titles include two standard works on the art of writing: Arts Reviews (Kamera Books, 2008) and Bestseller (Fourth Estate, 1996.) Her most recent is Deep France (Pan, 2004) a journal of a year she spent writing in south-west France.
She has served on the management committee of The Society of Authors and judged national literary awards including the Betty Trask Award and the Macmillan Silver PEN Prize. A former media columnist, she contributes to The Times, BBC Radio 4 and other national and international media.
Epigraph
Another one for Chloe
1. February 7–April 10
To: Georgina. Lambton@winsex. com
From: flora. [email protected]
Monday
Yes yes yes. I love this man. He is so totally the one. Loaded.
Mad for me. So, so cute. Why are you in Chicago when I
need you?
To: flora. [email protected]
From: Georgina. Lambton@winsex. com
Monday
Who is the one? And have you done it yet or are you twitching
the poor bloke’s chain? Every morning I ask myself why I am
in Chicago so don’t you start.
To: Georgina. Lambton@winsex. com
From: flora. [email protected]
Tuesday
Oh, please. Get off my case. Tonight is the night.
He doesn’t know that. So, so cute.
To: flora. [email protected]
From: Georgina. Lambton@winsex. com
Wednesday
And?
To: Georgina.Lambton@ winsex.com
From: [email protected]. uk
Wednesday
He wants to get married. Why are you in Chicago?
To: [email protected]. uk
From: Georgina.Lambton@ winsex.com
Wednesday
DON’T ASK. Way to go!!!!!!!! Omigod, omigod, omigod. You
ultrafox.
To: Georgina.Lambton@ winsex.com
From: [email protected]. uk
Wednesday
I said yes. Am I crazy?
To: [email protected]. uk
From: Georgina.Lambton@ winsex.com
Thursday
Not necessarily. I don’t believe this, so romantic. I may die of
jealousy. Wossisname, anyway?
To: Georgina.Lambton@ winsex.com
From: [email protected]. uk
Thursday
Dillon. Financial products design. 6ft 2in. Buns of custard but
will work on it. Do not die of jealousy, you’ve been with Felix
forever.
To:
From:
Friday
Hello?
Georgina.Lambton@ winsex.com
[email protected]. uk
To: flora. [email protected]
From: Georgina. Lambton@winsex. com
Friday
Pleeeeeease – Nikkei went mental last night or didn’t you
notice? I miss custard. No custard in Chicago. Not with Felix
forever, only two years this Sunday. Love him to bits, undo
jealousy. Are you really doing this?
To:
From:
Friday
Yesssssss.
Georgina. Lambton@winsex. com
flora. [email protected]
To: flora. [email protected]
From: Georgina. Lambton@winsex. com
Friday
Way to GO. Our anniversary Sunday. I left my old diary out
by juicer to remind him. Is that sad? 6–4 he still forgets?
To: Georgina. Lambton@winsex. com
From: flora. [email protected]
Friday
Evens. Don’t be pathetic. You too are ultrafox.
To: flora. [email protected]
From: Georgina. Lambton@winsex. com
Friday
TFI Friday. So have a brilliant romantic weekend. See if I care.
To: flora. [email protected]
From: Georgina. Lambton@winsex. com
Monday
Omigod. Felix has a grant from some London hospital to do
his research, we’re coming home and WE’RE GETTING
MARRIED.
To: Georgina.Lambton@ winsex.com
From: [email protected]. uk
Tuesday
How cool is this! Ultrafoxes RV lunch, I Lombard, day 1.
To: [email protected]. uk
From: Georgina.Lambton@ winsex.com
Tuesday
I’ll be there. Must go now, he wants to buy a ring.
To Flora Lovelace and Georgina Lambton, it seemed as if nothing that happened in their lives had really happened until they had told each other about it.
‘Sweetheart,’ said Felix to Georgina, moving aside a curl of her black hair so he could kiss her neck, ‘let me handle this. I’ll find us a place to live. I’ll take care of all this dreary moving shit, all the packing and the shipping and the paperwork and stuff. You don’t have to worry about anything. You can just keep going to work like you always do, one weekend we’ll, catch a plane, and then you’ll go to work in London.’
‘Would you really?’ she murmured. It was 5 a. m. They were in bed, in the warm damp afterglow of morning sex, Felix’s favourite. Dawn was happening. She imagined that the light skidded over the ice on the lake, shot into the city and ricocheted around the edge of the blind and into her bedroom.
‘’Course. I’d say it was the least I could do. You’re relocating for my sake, after all.’
�
�For both our sakes.’
‘For us, for me. You’re still doing it. I should pull my weight here. The hospital will let me out of a few weeks of my notice period. Just tell me where you want to live and what you’ll be making, and I’ll work out what we can afford, get on the Net and find us a place to live. Then I’ll start packing.’
‘Your hospital is in the west, my office is in the east. Everything in the middle’s too expensive. It’ll be down to transport. Find us something on the Central Line, that’s the shortest distance between two suburbs. Oh – they’re giving me a relocation package,’ she remembered, already wearied by thinking of her new job, her new desk, her new dealing room, and her new business cards. Even newness could not make these things exciting. The only fun in sight was her new car. It seemed that she now qualified for a motor that was almost sexy.
‘Well so they should,’ he congratulated her, squeezing a fond handful of her backside. ‘We can do better than suburbs. Leave it to me.’
Georgie felt a pulse of tension answering his squeeze. ‘You’re so wonderful,’ she sighed. ‘I don’t deserve you.’
The hospital where Felix worked was content that he was leaving them. Georgie registered that, but did not immediately see the significance of it.
Flora bared her pretty teeth and took a bite into one of Dillon’s buttocks. She clenched her delicate jaws. Playfully, she shook her head.
‘Argh!’ he protested. It was difficult to be more articulate when you were choking with pain and passion simultaneously.
Flora opened her mouth and let the flesh drop. The day was starting. She felt a dirty gleam rise from the surface of the Thames, trickle across the riverside roads and seep under her gauzy curtains.
Her teeth left a circle of red marks on his skin. ‘Look at that,’ she invited him.
‘I can’t look at it, how can I look at it?’ he mumbled into his pillow. Flora brushed his backbone with her fingertips, just over the fifth chakra, the seat of desire.
‘It’s disgusting,’ she told him. ‘It ripples like water. It’s pure fat.’
‘Mnrgh,’ was all he could say. It was hard to be more precise when you were having flash visions of your erection ripping a hole in the sheet.
‘Flobber. Blubber. Adipose tissue.’ She smacked the spot a little harder than was friendly with her adorably small hand. ‘I’m not walking down the aisle looking at that, for God’s sake. It’s got to go.’
‘How?’ he demanded. It was impossible to complain when you were unexpectedly shivering with the terror of being outed as a closet sado-masochist.
She gave the offensive flesh a jab with her silver-tipped finger. ‘You go to a gym, don’t you? Make them do something about it.’
‘Right,’ he promised, risking a roll over to kiss her.
‘Oh no you don’t,’ she said, sliding quickly off the bed. ‘You had yours last night. You’ll be moaning that you’re late for work in five minutes anyway.’
They converged from opposite sides of the Bank of England, two figures moving smoothly through the crowd like currents in water. Their black shoes glided economically over the paving, their matte black legs stepped silently. They were fluid, flexible, future-friendly, multi-skilled, relational, communicative, radiant with intelligence, swift with modesty, aware of their superiority and above competitiveness. Which is to say, they competed only over things that did not matter. It was simple, really: they were women. Tomorrow belonged to them.
As they moved through the ancient alleys they left the others behind, the men who strolled obliviously in twos and threes, men illogically uniformed in dark blue suits with pastel shirts and loud, busy ties, men who were rigid, bloated, wordless, incapable of evolving and stuck in eternal childhood. Tomorrow was a fugitive shadow that glanced back at them with a regretful face. They were loud because they were afraid but they had no words for their fear and so no one heard them. They looked about them but only a few of their neutones could register what was happening. Thus the dinosaurs blundered towards their last grazing grounds.
Time moves fast in the economic acropolis of London. Georgie Lambton crossed the jammed street to reach the restaurant, a deconsecrated temple of commerce whose grey pillars echoed the mercantile classicism of the Stock Exchange, which faced them across the traffic. The maître d’was casual and her blue fingernails would not have been appreciated in Chicago. She blanked on Georgie’s name. I’ve been away, Georgie told herself, and settled at their table under the glass-paned rotunda. Other diners were taking seats but she knew none of them.
Flora appeared, to be first-named and waved across the clattery white floor towards her. Friendship instantly burst into flame. They exclaimed, they squealed, they kissed, and they sat down busily to command cucumber soup with caviar and nage of lobster and langoustines. Ten years earlier they had been eager schoolgirls, and the price of today’s lunch would have bought them each a complete new outfit for Saturday night. They were not counting the cost now. They were excited to be together and excited also by the passing of time.
‘Well,’ Flora said. ‘How about this?’
‘Yes. Takes some getting used to.’
‘Give it time, you’ve only been back two days. You’re still jet-lagged.’
‘I meant the getting married thing.’
‘Oh, I can get used to that. No problem.’
‘It’s great to be back.’
‘And with your Felix. I can’t wait to meet him. And you must meet Dillon.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Georgie agreed, but without urgency. Woman to woman was sweet. It was simple, logical, easy. With a man there were sulk attacks to deflect and an eggshell ego to be coddled, and those long, long fences of pretension to be patrolled. So exhausting. They savoured the luxury of keeping all their energy for their own enjoyment.
‘Wow.’ Flora suddenly seized Georgie’s hand and held it in the pool of light from the glass dome. ‘It’s beautiful. It’s so classic. It’s really subtle. It’s a ring, for God’s sake.’ A thick band of pale gold with a diamond buried at the top. Whenever Georgie moved her hand, which she did a lot because she was a hand talker, the sparkle burst out of the surface of the gold like microscopic searchlights.
‘Felix is crazy about design. He went off and got it made and never even told me.’
‘It was a total surprise?’
‘Total.’
‘So go on – what, when, how?’
‘Sunday morning. I’d just got up and I was putting the washing in. He made me stop and sit down at the table. And my heart hit the floor, you know, because he’d been acting weird for a few days and he was really not smiling. I mean, he isn’t smiley anyway. He works with families under stress all the time, he has such terrible choices to make, smiley wouldn’t be right. But he looked so grim I thought he was going to tell me we had to break up. But instead he said that finally, finally a hospital had offered to fund this research. And I knew he’d been hassling around everywhere, it’s something that’s only just been discovered, Lightoller’s Syndrome …’
‘Huh?’
‘Lightoller’s Syndrome.’
‘Lightoller?’
‘Some German in the twenties. He discovered it but nobody realised what it meant. Nobody before Felix. It’s a congenital biochemical deficiency which causes behavioural problems. Felix has shown that it may affect one in every five hundred babies. That’s a lot.’
‘OK, OK. So then what?’
‘Then he said the hospital was in London and then he said when he started thinking it through it’d made him realise that he – well, that he – well …’
‘Well?’
‘He couldn’t live without me.’
‘That’s so beautiful. He actually said that?’
‘Uh-huh. And then he put this little box on the table right by my fingers and he took this huge great gulp of air and he said, “Georgina, will you marry me?”’
‘You’re crying.’
‘Well, I’m really not ready for a
ll this, am I?’ Georgina groped in her bag for tissues but there were none.
The gesture alerted a waiter who sulked to their vicinity and demanded, ‘Ladies?’
‘We must have the pink champagne,’ Flora said.
‘Two glasses of pink champagne, please,’ ordered Georgie.
‘Tssssk. Do they wipe your memory at the city limits in Chicago? There is never any point ordering champagne by the glass. You end up having ten glasses for the price of two bottles. Bring us a bottle of the Billecart-Salmon Rosé. And some tissues for my friend. She’s just had a moving experience.’
The waiter had eyes like cold boiled eggs; he rolled them in Georgie’s direction and slouched away.
‘Nobody drinks in Chicago.’
‘I thought you didn’t want to get married,’ Flora teased her.
‘I thought Felix didn’t want to get married. He’s so vocational about his work.’
‘So you didn’t want to get married because you thought Felix didn’t want to? No, you never wanted to, I remember. Felix changed your mind.’
‘On this one street in Chicago there’s a sign telling people not to drive agricultural vehicles on the highway.’
‘Felix changed your mind, admit it.’
‘OK, he changed my mind.’
The old Georgie never cried that way, as if she was helpless to stop her feelings oozing out all over everywhere. The old Georgie had laughed, a deep, bosomy laugh which used to reverberate up and down the fund managers’desk at Ardent Holdings. The old Georgie had been able to do anything except find a skirt to fit. The old Georgie had surged through life like a raft on the Zambesi. This was not the old Georgie.
Perhaps, Flora speculated, the old Georgie had started to mutate on the night when The Scumbag Whose Name Shall Be Shit Forever told her he could no longer be seen with a girlfriend who didn’t have a trust fund and was still driving a 3-series BMW. Georgie had sat on the end of Flora’s bed and cried until she was sick, then dried her tears and rushed off to Chicago to wash that Scumbag right out of her hair.
Now Georgie had the slick, sorted, high-maintenance gloss of a world-beater and she was crying because she was happy. What was that about? Flora asked herself.
Heartswap Page 1