The Best Of Times

by Penny Vincenzi

“I want a solicitor,” she wailed to her friends. “I want a bank manager; I want an accountant.” And they would tell her that she wanted no such thing, and of course they were right in one way and quite wrong in another, for what were accountants and bank managers and solicitors but synonyms for reliable and sensible and loyal?

  The fact was, she no longer felt free; she felt lonely, no longer self-sufficient, but insecure. What was the matter with her? Was it such a big thing to ask? Not just to fall but to be in love. Wholeheartedly, wondrously thunderously, orgasmically in love. It did seem to be. She really couldn’t see how it was ever going to happen again.

  ***

  “Only five weeks to the wedding. I absolutely can’t believe it.”

  Barney Fraser looked at his fiancée, in all her absurd prettiness and sweetness, and sighed.

  “I think I can,” he said.

  “Barney! That doesn’t sound very… positive. Aren’t you looking forward to it?”

  “Yes,” he said quickly, “yes, of course I am.”

  “It’s the speech, isn’t it? But you’ll be fine; I know you will. It’s all going to be wonderful. If it stops raining, that is. Pity it’s not September; that’s usually more reliable, much better than the summer, actually. Wouldn’t you say?”

  “What? I mean, no. I mean-”

  “Barney, you’re not listening to me. Are you?”

  “Sorry, Amanda. I was… well, I was thinking about something else. I’m very sorry.”

  Actually he wasn’t. He was thinking about the wedding; he thought about it more and more. Well, not the wedding. More the marriage.

  “What?”

  “Oh-just work. Sorry. More wine?”

  “Yes, please.”

  He grinned at her and refilled her glass; there was nothing he could really say about his misgivings over the wedding. It was too late and it wouldn’t help. It wasn’t his wedding, for God’s sake, that he had misgivings about; it was Toby’s, and Toby was old enough to look after himself.

  And Amanda was so thrilled at being maid of honour, and the bride was one of her very best friends. And when she and Barney got married the following spring, Tamara would be her maid of honour. And Toby would be Barney’s best man.

  Toby wasn’t just one of Barney’s best friends; he was absolutely his best friend, had been ever since prep school, when they had lain in their small beds the first night, side by side, smiling gallantly, refusing to admit either of them felt remotely homesick. And the friendship had never faltered, intensified, Barney always thought, by the fact that they were both only children, and were soon spending time with each other over the holidays as well as the term. They had stayed cheerfully together right through prep school and Harrow; then after the separation of universities, Toby at Durham, Barney at Bristol, the delight of discovering that they were both applying for jobs in the city and managed to end up not at the same investment bank-that would have been too much of a cliché-but at closely neighbouring establishments either side of Bishopsgate.

  Toby was just the best: clever, funny, cool, and just plain old-fashioned nice. Barney didn’t like to think of their friendship in terms of love-these days if you said you were terribly fond of another bloke, people presumed you were gay. But he did love him, and admired him and enjoyed his company more than that of anyone else in the world-except Amanda, obviously. Not that you could compare how you felt for your best friend and your fiancée: it was totally different. What was great was that despite their both being engaged and setting up home and all that sort of thing, they were still able to see an enormous amount of each other.

  And the two girls were great friends; both worked in the city as well. It was very neat: Amanda in human resources at Toby’s bank, Tamara on the French desk at Barney’s. There was no reason they should all not remain friends for the rest of their lives.

  Barney didn’t just think that Tamara wasn’t good enough for Toby-no, he knew. OK, she was gorgeous and sexy and clever, and their flat in Limehouse was absolutely sensational, more to Barney’s taste, if he was honest, than the house he and Amanda had bought in Clapham. It was a bit… well, a bit too fussy, full of clever ideas that Amanda had found in the house magazines and copied, without considering whether it all worked together properly. But still, she was great and he loved her, of course, and not having much of a visual sense himself, he just accepted it all. There were more important things in life than decor.

  Amanda was solid gold, through and through; Tamara, he felt, was composed of some rather questionable nickel under her lovely skin. She was selfish, she was spoilt-first by her doting parents, and now, of course, by Toby-extremely possessive, dismissive of Toby’s feelings, given to putting him down, albeit with her rather sparky humour, when it suited her. Toby really loved Tamara; he told Barney so repeatedly, almost too repeatedly, Barney thought sometimes. He had been an angel over the buildup to the wedding, agreeing to everything she wanted, even their honeymoon in the Maldives when Barney knew that sort of place bored him. But, “It’s her wedding,” he would say easily, apparently unaware of the irony of it: that it was his too.

  And with the stag do-a long weekend in New York -only a fortnight away, it was really much too late to do or say anything about it at all.

  Barney just remained uneasy about it, and couldn’t discuss it with anyone. Not even Amanda. Actually, least of all with Amanda. That was a bit worrying too.

  CHAPTER 2

  Well, she’d done it now; there could be no turning back. Mary took a deep breath, turned away from the letter box, and walked home through the pouring rain, hoping and praying that she had done the right thing. In four or five days, the letter would arrive in New York, at Russell Mackenzie’s undoubtedly grand apartment, bearing the news that yes, she thought it would be lovely if he came to England and they met once again, after all these long, long years.

  More than sixty years since they’d said good-bye, she and Russell; she’d stood in his arms at Liverpool Street station, surrounded by dozens of other couples, the girls all crying, the soldiers in their khaki uniforms holding them close. It was almost unbearable, and when finally she had to let him go, it was as if some part of her had been wrenched off, and she’d stood watching him walking down the platform, climbing into the train, waving to her one last time, and she’d gone home and run up to her room and cried all night and wanted to die. Literally. She had loved him so much, and he had loved her too. She knew he had; it wasn’t just that he’d told her so-he’d asked her to marry him, for goodness’ sake. But it had been too frightening, too unimaginable to go away, all those miles away from everyone she knew and loved. And anyway, she was spoken for, engaged, even if she didn’t have a ring on her finger: engaged to Donald, sweet, gentle Donald, who was coming home to her to make her his wife.

  She had been wonderfully surprised when Russell continued to write to her; he had done so almost as soon as he arrived back in the States.

  “I want us still to be friends, Mary,” he had said. “I can’t face life totally without you, even if I can’t be with you.”

  She had agreed to that, of course: what harm in letters? Nobody could object to that, think it was wrong. And the letters had flown back and forth across the Atlantic ever since.

  He had sent pictures: first of himself and his very grand-looking parents and their very grand-looking house, and later, as time passed and wounds healed and lives inevitably progressed, of his bride, Nancy; and she had written of her marriage to Donald and sent pictures of the two of them on their wedding day, and of the little house they had bought in Croydon. And later still, they exchanged news and photographs of their babies, her two and Russell’s three, and sent Christmas and birthday cards to each other. Donald had never known; she had seen no reason to tell him. He wouldn’t have believed that Russell had been only a friend, and he would have been quite right not to believe it either.

  The letters arrived about once a month, usually after Donald had gone to work. If one did hap
pen to arrive on a Saturday, and he saw it, she would say it was from her American pen-friend. Which was true, she told herself. He was. In a way.

  Russell’s stories of splendid houses and Cadillacs and swimming pools were clearly true; his parents were rich, with an apartment in New York and a house somewhere called Southampton, full of big houses, and people played polo there and sailed on the ocean in their yachts. He and Nancy spent every weekend at the Southampton house.

  It had been a happy marriage, as far as Mary could make out; as hers to Donald had been. But Nancy had died when she was only fifty-two, of cancer, and Russell had married again, to a woman called Margaret. Mary had been absurdly comforted when Russell told her it was only so the family had a mother figure.

  Donald had died on his seventy-fifth birthday, had had a heart attack while the house was full of his beloved family. He had been a wonderful husband; he had never made much money, had worked away perfectly happily at his job in an insurance company, and had no ambitions to change it.

  As long as he could come home every night to Mary and the children, he said, and knew he could pay all the bills, he was content.

  She had kept all Russell’s letters, and photographs, safely hidden in her underwear drawer, tucked into an empty packet of sanitary towels; Donald would no more look in there than fly to the moon. And every so often, she would get them out and relive it all, the wonderful, passionate romance that had led to a lifetime of secret happiness.

  And then last year, Russell had written to tell her that Margaret had died. “She was a very loving wife and mother and I hope I made her happy,” he wrote. “And now we are both alone, and I wonder how you would feel if at last we were reunited? I’ve been thinking of making a trip to England and we could meet.”

  He had been over occasionally on business-she knew that-but of course they had never met.

  Mary’s initial reaction had been panic; what would he actually think, confronted by the extremely ordinary old lady she had become? He was so clearly used to sophistication, to a great deal of money, to fine birds in very fine feathers; she was indeed his “Little London Sparrow,” the name he had given to her all those years ago. And all right, she lived in a very nice house on the outskirts of Bristol, where she and Donald had moved when he had retired, to be near their beloved daughter, Christine, and her family, and she had a few nice clothes, and she had kept her figure; she was still slim, so if she did get dressed up she looked all right. But her very best outfits came from Debenhams, the everyday ones from Marks & Spencer; her hair was grey, of course, and a rather dull grey at that, not the dazzling white she had hoped to inherit from her mother; and she had very little to talk about: her most exciting outings were to the cinema, or playing whist or canasta with her friends. And Russell spent a lot of his life at things called “benefits,” which seemed to cover all sorts of exciting events: theatrical, musical, even sporting. Whatever would they talk about?

  But he had rejected her argument that they might spoil everything if they met again now-“What’s to spoil? Only memories and no one can hurt them”-and gradually persuaded her that a rendezvous would be at worst very interesting and fun, and friendship “at best wonderful.”

  “I want to see you again, my very dear Little Sparrow. Fate has kept us apart; let’s see if we can’t cheat her while there is still time.”

  It hadn’t been fate at all, as far as Mary could see; it had been her own implacable resolve. But gradually she came round to feeling that she would greatly regret it for whatever was left of her life if she refused.

  And so she had written to tell him so, and that he should go ahead and make the arrangement for his visit-“ideally at the end of August.”

  Which was only a few weeks away.

  ***

  On that same morning, Linda received a phone call from an independent production company; they were casting a new six-parter for Channel Four, a family-based psychological thriller.

  “Very meaty, very raw. We need a young black girl. Obviously pretty, but cool as well, properly streetwise. First casting in three or four weeks’ time. If you’ve got anyone, e-mail a CV and some shots.”

  Linda did have someone, and she sent her details over straightaway.

  She’d had Georgia Linley on her books for just over a year, and she was beginning to think it was a year too many. OK, she was gorgeous and very, very talented; Linda had picked her out from a large cast at an end-of-year production at her drama school, put her through her paces, and taken her on. Since then it had been an uphill struggle. Georgia had not only been something of a star at college, and hated the crash down into bit parts and commercials; she was also extremely impatient and volatile. After every failed audition, she would turn up at the agency and weep endlessly, bewailing her own lack of talent combined with her bad luck, and Linda’s inability to help her or even understand the idiocy and blindness of the casting director she had just been to see. Linda was initially patient and was very fond of her, but a year on and she actually dreaded her phone calls.

  Of course, Georgia had problems-“issues,” as the dreadful expression went-about her colour, about the fact she was adopted, about her hugely successful, brilliant brother. But as Linda had tried to persuade her many times, none of those things were exactly professional drawbacks.

  “There are dozens of successful black actors these days-”

  “Oh, really? Like who?”

  And, of course, there weren’t. There was Adrian Lester and there was Sophie Okonedo and Chiwete Ejiofor… and after that the list tailed to a halt. Dancers, yes, singers, yes, but not actors. She had tried to persuade Georgia to go for some chorus parts in musicals, but she wouldn’t hear of it.

  “I’m a lousy dancer, Linda, and you know it.”

  “ Georgia, you’re not! Maybe not Covent Garden standards, but extremely good, and you’ve got an excellent singing voice, and it’d be great experience; you’d almost certainly have got a part in Chicago, or that revival of Hair, or-”

  “Which folded after about three days. Anyway, I don’t want to be a dancer. I want to act. OK?”

  She still lived at home, in Cardiff, with her adoptive parents. Her father was a lecturer at Cardiff University, her mother a social worker: charming, slightly hippie middle-class folk, unsure how to manage the ambitions of the beautiful and brilliant cuckoos in their nest. Their other child, Michael, also black, blacker than Georgia, who was actually mixed-race-a fact that added to her neuroses-was five years older than she was, a barrister, doing well in a London chambers; he had gone to Cambridge and was acknowledged as extraordinarily clever.

  Well, maybe this production would be Georgia ’s big chance, Linda thought; and much more likely it would not. She decided not to tell Georgia about it yet; she couldn’t face the unbearable disappointment if the production company never even wanted to see her.

  ***

  People-nonmedical people, that was-always reacted the same way when they heard what Emma did: “You don’t look like a doctor,” they said, in slightly accusatory tones, and she would ask them politely what they thought a doctor did look like; but of course she knew perfectly well what they meant. Most doctors didn’t look like her, blue eyed and blond and absurdly pretty, with long and extremely good legs. And she had learnt quite early on in her career that she might have been taken more seriously had her appearance been more on the… well, on the earnest side. Now that she was a houseman, she wore longer skirts-well, on the knee anyway-and tied her hair back in a ponytail, and obviously didn’t wear much makeup; but she still looked more like a nurse in a Carry On film than the consultant obstetrician she was planning to become.

  She was a senior houseman now, working at St. Marks Swindon, the new state-of-the-art hospital opened by the health secretary earlier that year. She knew she was very lucky to be there; it was not only superbly designed and multiple-disciplined, with extremely high-calibre and highly qualified staff; it was just near enough to London, where she had first
trained, for her to see her friends.

  She was really enjoying accidents and emergency-A &E; apart from obstetrics, it was her favourite department so far. It was so different every day; there was always something happening, and yes, you did have to cope with some awful things from time to time-major car accidents and heart attacks and terrible domestic accidents, burns and scalds-but a lot of the time it was quite mundane. And the whole A &E experience was very bonding; you shared so much, day after day; you worked together, sometimes under huge pressure, but it had a culture and a language all its own, and you made very good friends there, lasting relationships. And you felt you really were doing something, making people better, mending them there and then, which sounded a bit sentimental if you tried to put it into words, but it was the reason she had gone into medicine, for God’s sake, and it was far more satisfying than orthopaedics, for example, seeing people with terribly painful hips and backs and knowing it would be months before anyone could do anything for them at all, and then it wouldn’t be you.

  She had been three of the statutory four months now in A &E, as senior house officer, and she was really dreading moving on. Especially as her next department would be dermatology, which didn’t appeal to her at all. She had even considered, very briefly, becoming an A &E consultant, like Alex Pritchard, her present boss, but he had told her it was a mug’s game and that she’d never make any money.

  “Not many private patients come into A &E, and as we all know that’s where the money is.”

  “Money isn’t everything, though, is it?” Emma had said.

  “Perhaps you could try telling my wife that,” he’d said, and scowled; she never knew whether he was going to scowl or smile at her. He was a great untidy bear of a man, with a shock of black hair, and beetling eyebrows to match, and very deep-set brown eyes that peered lugubriously out at the world. Emma adored him, though there were more scowls than smiles at the moment-he was reputedly going through a very unpleasant divorce. But he was immensely supportive of her, praised her good work while not hesitating to criticise the bad, and when she removed a healthy appendix unnecessarily, having put down the symptoms of IBS to acute appendicitis, he told her he had done exactly the same thing when he had been a junior surgeon.