Rules for Dating a Romantic Hero

by Evans, Harriet

  She turned to him with tears in her eyes. ‘Thank you, dear Charles.’ She leaned over and kissed his cheek.

  ‘What was that for?’ Charles said, amused.

  ‘Nothing.’ For never making me feel like an outsider, she wanted to add, but she was sick of herself by now, and bitterly regretting not having parted from Nick on a warmer note. Already she was sure they had both overreacted, her especially. She was tired, the run-up to the opening of the shop had taken it out of her. They’d both said too much.

  Laura climbed onto the near-empty train and stared out of the window. She watched as they pulled away, rolling through the flat, empty Fens, the sky above vast and flecked now with red. Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight. She knew that, she thought, with a little chuckle. Perhaps she could turn into the kind of girl Nick seemed to need, an all-purpose country wife, well bred, good with kids, animals, old ladies, extremes of weather, expensive plates and vast houses?

  Her phone buzzed and she leapt for it, realising how eager she was to hear from him, how little she wanted it to end like this.

  Coming to London. Laura doesn’t know. Can we meet? I need to see you. Can’t stop thinking about what you said. I’ve made a big mistake. Want you to move to Chartley with me ASAP now. All my love, Nick x

  Rule Seven:

  If it goes wrong, just tell yourself it was all ridiculous anyway and it’s nice to be back in the real world.

  ‘Paddy, it’s a terrible idea.’ Laura took another sip of coffee and shovelled some more muesli into her mouth.

  ‘It’s not.’ Her flatmate put his hands on his hips. ‘I’m going to walk down the stairs casually, right? Then I’ll sort of crumple to the ground and kick her door with my foot, and make an “Ahhh! Oww!” sound. Kirsty will come running to the door, she’ll see me there and she’ll invite me in and then …’ he rubbed his hands together. ‘Bingo. Bin. Go.’

  Laura sighed. She’d known Paddy for nearly all her life and lived with him on and off for five years or more. She had also lived with Paddy through the Becky years, and she still couldn’t understand why his lovely girlfriend, who’d seemed perfect for him, had finished with him. Then sometimes she’d come into the kitchen and see him in his pants, squatting earnestly in front of the washing machine, waiting for his one pair of trousers to finish drying, and she’d understand why a bit more.

  She speared a piece of toast with her fork and began slathering it with Marmite. She was eating a lot of Marmite at the moment. ‘Paddy! You always do this, stop it! This is why girls keep telling you to curl up and – what was it that girl said to you last week?’

  ‘“Curl up and die, pube-head.” Why?’ Paddy looked surprised. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’re way too full-on! Stop being weird. She’s said no to you three times. I don’t understand how you think throwing yourself down the stairs is going to change anything. Other than land you in hospital with a broken leg.’ She looked at her watch. ‘I’m going to be late.’

  ‘Too full-on? I don’t think so. I say if you like someone, give yourself up to them. Just be really open about it.’

  ‘But look where that’s got you, Pads.’

  ‘You’ve got to be prepared, not scared. That’s my motto.’ Paddy put his mug on the draining board and looked round the small, scruffy kitchen. ‘Have you seen my other sock? It’s orange. So, is it work work today, or posh people work?’

  Laura frowned and stood up. ‘Hey, they’re both work. Leave it.’ She opened the fridge. ‘I’ll get more milk.’

  ‘I know.’ Paddy followed her into the hallway. ‘But you know what I mean.’

  ‘Work work,’ Laura said, trying to make a mental shopping list. Without really thinking she added, ‘The bookshop’s all off for the moment.’

  ‘What?’ Paddy froze in the middle of plucking his other orange sock from behind a dead rosemary plant on the hall shelf. ‘It’s all off?’

  Laura flushed and bit her lip. ‘I didn’t mean that. I only mean Casey wants to work there full time for the summer because her kids are away with their dad, and she’s trained up Brian, too – he’s the vicar’s husband.’

  Paddy chuckled with relief. ‘Wow. It’s another world up there. Where’s the Belgian detective and the butler in the library with the drainpipe? And the society beauty with a dark secret?’

  Laura ignored him. ‘It’s good for Casey if I leave her to get on with it a bit, find her feet. That’s what I mean by it’s all off. I … I don’t have to go there for a couple of weeks. Anyway.’ She sifted through the bowl of crap on the shelf. Spare change, a horrible troll doll with fluffy pink hair, a ChapStick, two cracked Oyster cards, a couple of boiled sweets in foil wrappers (Nick always picked them up for her because she often got blocked ears and sucking on sweets helped). Laura paused, staring at the crinkling foil wrappers. They’d taken them up at a service station on the way to Jo’s baby’s christening.

  She sells sea shells on the sea shore. She opened the door, but Paddy shut it.

  ‘Hang on. You’ve been like this ever since you got back on Sunday,’ he said. ‘What’s up, hmm?’

  ‘Nothing!’

  ‘How was that interview with the journalist – you were worried about it. Go OK?’ Paddy narrowed his eyes.

  ‘God, Paddy. Everything’s fine.’

  ‘Uh-oh. Trouble in paradise?’ Paddy leaned against the door. ‘Laura. I’ve known you since you were three, and don’t forget I’ve known you at your most insane. When you were so obsessed with … what was that clarinet teacher called?’

  ‘Oboe. Mr Wallace.’ Laura folded her arms. ‘I’m going to be late.’

  ‘OK, oboe. Well, you were so crazy obsessed with Mr Wallace you used to hide behind a car and watch him drive off, then try and run after him to follow him to his house. I was there. I saw it. I told you to get a life and did you listen to me? No. Or when you were so in denial about Gideon being gay that you bought him the cast album of Hello, Dolly! for his birthday and you were all, “It’s so great we’ve got so many things in common, like musicals and shopping.” And remember when you stayed in your room for three days after Dan dumped you, and only came out after that pigeon flew in and smashed up the window?’

  ‘What’s your point?’ Laura tried to push him against the wall, but Paddy patted her arm and said in a mournful voice,

  ‘Don’t try and shut me out, man, OK? I know you better than you think, Laura. What’s going on with you and Nick? You guys are great together. Don’t—’

  Laura shoved Paddy out of the way. ‘Let me go,’ she said roughly, surprised at the strength of her anger. ‘It’s none of your bloody business. Just get a life, Paddy. Worry about yourself, not me. I’m fine,’ she added, and she ran down the stairs so he couldn’t see her face.

  Rule Eight:

  Jane Austen heroines never had to use buses.

  Safely installed on the top deck of a bus, rumbling painfully slowly into town, Laura ignored her feelings of guilt and slid her phone out of her bag. She stared for the millionth time at Nick’s text, as if it might suddenly come to life and talk to her. Who was it for? Can we meet? I need to see you.

  She’d left Chartley three days ago and she hadn’t replied to the text. At first she’d been too angry, then she hadn’t known what to say. But she’d had enough of being passive. She rang him. If it was going to end, it had to happen some time, didn’t it?

  ‘This is Nick. Please leave a message.’

  ‘Hi. It’s me. Give me a call, can you? We should talk. I want to … talk. OK. OK, bye.’ She threw the phone back into her bag with a cry of frustration. It was Nick – Nick – and what the hell had happened to them that she couldn’t even leave him a normal message asking him to call her?

  ‘Please don’t let it be true,’ she whispered under her breath.

  But she could see, with a kind of weary acceptance, that it probably was. He was having an affair, and when you thought about it, with everything that had been going on lately,
it made sense.

  The bus juddered to a halt on the Edgware Road and Laura’s knees knocked against the seat in front. It was a hot day, especially hot on the top deck, and it wasn’t even nine o’clock. Her fellow commuters sat in silence, music blaring from their headphones. Already she felt sweaty and grimy, and a feeling of delayed anger, of queasiness that hadn’t left her since Sunday began to bubble within her.

  She looked at her phone. She tried to read, but couldn’t concentrate. She looked at her phone again. The bus remained static. A trickle of sweat ran down her armpit into her waistband.

  After a few minutes, Laura couldn’t stand it any longer. She went downstairs, into the fleshy pack of commuters. The next stop was less than ten metres away. She stood next to a slim, small man with a backpack who was humming under his breath.

  ‘Could you open the door please?’ someone asked the driver. He ignored them.

  Someone else said, ‘Please, can you just let us out? We’re only a few yards from the stop.’

  Nothing. Laura could feel another trail of sweat sliding between her shoulder blades. Let us out, she wanted to scream. Her head, which was already aching, started to pound. Her inner London rage began to bubble. Give us a break. We’re ten metres away!

  The passengers hummed and harred, muttering to themselves, but no one did anything. Laura crossed her arms, trying to stay calm. She didn’t feel calm. She had a meeting at nine thirty.

  Someone started ringing the bell, a constant ding ding ding that wormed into Laura’s skull. The driver ignored it. A lairy-looking thickset man yelled at no one,

  ‘He can’t let us out. It’s not his job. Shut it.’

  ‘It’s ten metres away!’ a woman shouted, dangerously close to meltdown. ‘He’s being a total prick!’

  ‘Uh-oh,’ said the humming man next to Laura in a sing-song voice. ‘Uh-oh! Here we go!’

  Laura suddenly lost it. ‘This is ridiculous. Excuse me,’ she said, barging her way towards the exit. She reached up and pressed a red button above the doors with a tiny sign next to it which said, ‘FOR EMERGENCY USE ONLY’.

  ‘Hey! That’s illegal,’ yelled the bus driver, suddenly awake. ‘You’re in breach! Close that door.’

  With a Superman-like heaving sound, Laura shoved open the doors, then jumped off the bus and motioned for the other passengers to follow her. ‘Follow me please,’ she hissed, like Maria von Trapp in The Sound of Music, guiding the children away from the Nazis.

  Some looked horrified, as if she’d just committed murder. Others jumped off with her as the driver jammed the doors shut again, shouting, ‘Back on the bus! Everybody, back on the bus!’

  ‘No!’ shouted Laura, unneccessarily loudly. ‘I will not get back on your damn bus!’

  The other rebel passengers had dispersed, the doors had closed and the bus was now, miraculously, moving on. Laura realised she was just a crazy person standing alone on a pavement yelling. She turned on her heel and slipped off down a backstreet, too embarrassed to walk past the driver. Though she would never admit it to anyone else, sometimes she hated London.

  A light breeze soothed her nerves as Laura walked briskly through the quiet, pretty streets of Marylebone, chewing her lip. Laura’s granny, Mary, who had died a few years ago, had lived in a tiny flat off Baker Street and coming back this way always made Laura think of her. Mary wasn’t like a normal granny. She drove too fast, liked gin and played poker. She was wise and kind, and Laura had loved her, almost as much as her parents. Walking around here again made her realise how much her life had changed, and at the same time how little. She wondered what Mary would say to her if she were around now. She wished she could just turn the corner, trot up the steps of the apartment building and find her grandmother there, reading a book and half-watching the racing.

  She was so busy remembering her grandmother Laura didn’t notice that she’d turned into Manchester Square, where Nick’s family had a flat. The Needhams had once owned a whole house just round the corner from Claridge’s in Grosvenor Square, a huge, soulless place draped in greying net curtains and seventies silk wallpaper, but Nick had sold it to settle some of the estate’s debts and bought this instead, though he rarely used it, preferring to stay with her when he was in London instead. It had three bedrooms, a marble staircase, beautiful parquet flooring and a lovely roof terrace and was by far the nicest flat Laura had ever seen in her life, but she didn’t like staying there. Somehow it seemed fake, when her own homely, chaotic flat was a just couple of miles away.

  She stood at the corner of the square and checked her watch. It was after nine and she was now officially going to be late for her meeting.

  In her twenties she’d been prone to shuffling into work with bird’s nest hair and (only once) a pair of the previous day’s knickers caught up in her tights, but Laura was older and, she hoped, a little bit wiser now. Her dad had once told her that he’d never had a sick day in his life, and that had made her sit up. George Foster had left school at sixteen to help his dad, who was a grocer. He’d gone to night school, become an IT engineer and worked every day he could to provide for his family. Now she was older, Laura realised that money had been tight in their house while she was growing up. But her mum and dad had never let Laura or her brother know or made them feel as if they were lacking anything that really mattered.

  And what did her dad have to show for all those years of hard work? Virtually nothing. The pension fund he’d paid into all his life had collapsed the previous year, when the owners fled to Cyprus and the money vanished. George had said it was a bit like a magic trick, only a really rubbish one. Laura thought he should have been angrier than that. She was angry about it, about the way it always seemed to be normal people who lost out and rich people, getting away with it again.

  Her parents had been down the week before the shop opened. They were still a little in awe of Chartley Hall and everything to do with Nick’s world, though not Nick himself, whom she knew – she couldn’t help but know – they adored. Nick and Laura, and Laura’s dad in particular, loved Robert Dyas, the hardware shop on the high street that sold absolutely everything you needed – and a lot of stuff you didn’t realise you needed. A trip to Harrow was never complete without a visit to Robert Dyas. Laura often felt Nick would have been much happier as a handyman or a farmer than a Marquis, cutting ribbons and wearing suits, standing with his hands behind his back, talking to strangers. He could spend hours in a hardware shop with Laura’s dad, comparing mulch, mouse poison, barbecue covers and patio umbrellas with crank handles. All the things he couldn’t buy for Chartley, where there was a gardener and a system for everything – and that didn’t involve discounted garden hoses or instant-lighting charcoal at ten pounds for two packs.

  Laura stared up at Nick’s flat, on the other side of the square. She noticed the clematis growing up the side of the building was a little out of control. She wondered if she should order Nick a set of garden equipment from Robert Dyas for the flat’s miniscule balcony as a peace-making gift, then she remembered the text again. Oh, no. As she gazed up at the french windows, something moved behind the glass and she jumped. She saw someone peering out, and then the curtains were closed, hurriedly.

  Laura stood, frozen to the spot, and after a minute or two the front door opened and Nick stood on the doorstep, holding the door open as he’d done the other day for her, with a smile on his face. Then Lara Montagu emerged, and Nick followed her down the front steps and put his arm around her.

  Rule Nine:

  Real life isn’t like the movies. Real life sucks.

  Lara Montagu sidestepped a scooter and crossed the road. Her long blonde hair glimmered like a sheet of golden silk, a big Mulberry satchel was slung across her slim frame. By her side walked Nick, his hands in his jeans’ pockets. He was relaxed and smiling. In fact, he looked happier than Laura had seen him for weeks.

  Despite everything, Laura was completely taken by surprise. She stood rooted to the spot, and only as they c
ame towards her at the other end of the square did she realise she had to hide. She scuttled up the steps and hid in one of the shadowy porches.

  As the pair drew closer she could hear Nick say, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’

  Laura peered out slowly, as Lara took Nick’s hand and kissed it. ‘Yes, of course, you idiot. I’ve been waiting for you to realise what a mistake you made last time—’

  ‘It wasn’t a mistake. It just wasn’t the right time for us,’ Nick said.

  ‘And it is now, you mean?’

  Lara Montagu laughed. She looked so glad to be with him, that was the thing. Laura could almost have been happy for her.

  As they passed by, Laura turned away slowly, rummaging in her bag as if looking for her keys, in case they should look up and see a strange girl on a neighbour’s doorstep. But as she slowly twisted back to watch them, she realised she might as well have been naked and playing the bongos for all they cared. They were totally absorbed in each other.

  Nick said, ‘Lara, you do realise what you’re taking on, don’t you? The whole thing?’

  Lara laughed. ‘Absolutely. She wasn’t right for you, Nick darling. She wasn’t.’ She kissed his hand again as they walked away, their voices growing fainter. ‘At last! You’re all mine. I can’t wait to tell everyone.’

  Laura stood motionless in the dark, grimy porch until she was sure they’d disappeared. For a moment she didn’t know what to do. She wondered if she should go home.

  Then she thought of her dad. She brushed something away from her cheek, squared her shoulders and walked down the steps, in the opposite direction to Nick and Lara.

  ‘Fine. It’s going to be fine,’ she whispered.