It was an atmosphere that seemed to suit Matt as well. Here, at last, I am in my element, his elegantly tailored body seemed to cry as he glided effortlessly around the room, a quiet word here, a suitable nod there. Within a few minutes he was locked in deep conversation with a wealthy-looking older woman and her attractive daughter. Claire, meanwhile, had fallen in with her sister’s crowd. They laughed uproariously as Claire related some amusing vignette. Her sister’s dashing boss held her gaze for a little too long.
I was just warming up by talking to a nice waitress studying at my old drama school when I saw two alarming and highly unexpected sights approaching from opposite ends of the room. One was Christian Mary, accompanied by what could only be her parents; the other was Rosie, accompanied by what could only be a boyfriend.
I gawped at Rosie. I think everyone in the room gawped at Rosie. She was wearing an off-the-shoulder red dress that seemed to caress the ground as she walked. A diamond glistened at her throat. Her eyes danced with intelligence, her smile was a beam of celestial light, beatifying anyone it touched, her brown hair was piled high in the silky crown of the anointed one. No one that night would have said that her legs were a little bit too short or her hair a little bit too long. Tonight, she was perfect.
The short, ugly bloke accompanying her knew that, too. He steered her towards the canapés with all the confidence of someone who knows that every other caveman wants to club him and ravish his woman. This is why some men go for trophy wives, I thought, as I looked on enviously. It’s better than having a nice house or an expensive car. It says something about you that nothing else can quite articulate. Well, well, we think, if she sees something in him, then maybe… We might all have wanted to kill Rosie’s companion but, were we to be introduced, we would probably show him a great deal more respect than we would have if he had come to the party alone.
Not that there seemed to be any chance of getting the short ugly man away from Rosie. He stuck to her side, bristling like a suspicious bull terrier whenever a potential rival spoke to her. She might have given him confidence, but he clearly wasn’t confident enough to leave her alone for very long. I felt a tiny glimmer of hope. I just had to see Rosie again. Just had to see her alone. I had to get that bloody money to pay the invoice.
It was, I think, at that moment that I began to scrape the very bottom of my moral barrel. Much of what preceded that evening was unintentional, unscripted, unplanned. But as I looked again at the incomparable Rosie caught up on one side of the room, still unaware that I was there, and saw Mary approaching me, now sans parents, from the other, her eyes bright with recognition and forgiveness, I suddenly had a very clear plan. These two girls didn’t know each other… Returning my glass to the waitress and advising her that her current profession was a much better bet than the one she was training for, I turned and embraced Mary wholeheartedly.
‘Sam!’ she exclaimed, flinging her arms around me. ‘I was worried about you.’
‘I was worried about me, too,’ I said. ‘That church… ’
‘I’m sorry. I just felt so bad when you ran out.’
‘You felt bad?’ I took a deep breath. ‘You can’t have been feeling as bad as me. The weight of sin bearing down on me. The realisation of what a bad person I’ve been, how bad we all are, fundamentally.’
Mary nodded understandingly.
‘But I also felt this great love,’ I continued. ‘I felt that I was loved and cherished, understood and nurtured, no matter how bad I’d been. So I prayed. Man, did I pray. God, did I pray. That’s why I haven’t been in touch for ages. I’ve been praying non-stop. I’ve barely left my room for prayer. And I think I’ve seen the light. I really do. I think I now know the direction my life is going to take. And then you appear here tonight… Well, it must be a sign. It’s like a prayer answered.’
‘Oh, Sam!’ Mary looked up at me through tears of delight. ‘Would you like to come and meet my parents?’
‘Oh, Mary! I would like that very much indeed.’
Mary took me by the hand as if I were the prodigal son and led me off to meet Mr and Mrs Money-Barings. I was suddenly glad it was a white-tie function because if one of Mary’s creators had not been wearing a tailcoat and the other a dress, I could easily have got them mixed up. They were equally tall, square and masculine. Poor Mary. If I had been her, I would have hidden her mother away in Dorian Gray’s attic so as not to warn potential suitors of what she was going to turn into.
Having worked out which Money-Barings was which, the next problem was trying to follow what they were saying. I’d studied Received Pronunciation, of course, at drama school – I had been using it the whole evening – but the dialect spoken by the Money-Baringses was something else altogether. At first I thought they were speaking in tongues. Then I wondered if they were both trying to clear something from the backs of their throats or had, perhaps, brought an ageing labrador with them that evening and were attempting to call it to heel. Finally, I managed to tune my ear into their wavelength and we had something approaching a conversation.
‘Like opera, do you?’ barked Mr Money-Barings. The trick to understanding him, I soon realised, was never to expect a full sentence.
‘Yes, sir,’ I lied.
‘Rubbish,’ shouted Mr Money-Barings. ‘Full of ponces.’
I laughed, despite myself. ‘Actually… ’ I said, in a voice I barely recognised. I think I may even have pronounced it ‘Ashley’. ‘Ashley, I hate opera. But you know, all for a good cause. Rugger. That’s my poison.’
Mr Money-Barings looked as if he wanted to hug me. ‘Mary,’ he cried. ‘Good egg you’ve got here. Meet recently, did you?’
‘At a wed – ’
‘At church, Daddy,’ interrupted Mary with a firm smile.
‘Church, eh? Excellent.’ He turned to me. ‘And what do you do, young man, when you’re not in church? City? Insurance? Stockbroking?’
‘Sam’s an actor,’ said Mary.
‘Yes, I’m afraid so,’ I said. ‘But I’m also starting a small business in the City.’
‘’Fraid so? Nonsense. Fine living. Very fine. As long as you’re not one of these opera ponces.’
As if on cue, a bell rang to announce that the opera ponces would start their poncy singing in ten minutes. Mr Money-Barings clapped me warmly on the back, ‘For whom the bell tolls, eh? Ponce alert. Great to meet you, Sam. Come and visit us in the country some time, if you’re passing.’
When have I ever passed the country, I thought ruefully as the Money-Baringses rummaged for their tickets. Still, I was confident of eliciting a proper invitation. ‘It was lovely to see you again,’ I said to Mary, kissing her dangerously close to her lips in front of her parents. ‘Will you be in church next Sunday, if I come back?’
‘Oh, Sam!’ said Mary, which I took to mean yes.
Another warning bell sounded. Mary rushed off to join her barking, homophobic father and mute, masculine mother, and I rummaged around in my pocket for my own ticket. Just as I’d started climbing the stairs to the gods, searching in vain for Rosie, I heard a familiar voice behind me.
‘Max,’ it whispered urgently.
I didn’t turn round at first. Who was Max?
‘Max,’ it whispered again, louder this time.
Oh, fuck. I was Max.
I turned to see Rosie, a vision in resplendent red, all alone on the stairs, her face flushed with champagne.
‘I thought I saw you across the room,’ said the vision.
‘Hello,’ I said, for I was tongue-tied and the only other thing I could think of to say was, Please come home with me now. In the circumstances, ‘hello’ seemed safer.
‘How is your friend?’ asked Rosie.
‘Oh, that’s just someone I met at – ’ I started to say before blushing and realising she was talking about Ed. I grinned, sheepishly. ‘Oh, he’s fine. Slept it off. Now he’s writing drivel for the newspapers as a means of public therapy.’
Rosie laughed. ‘Yep, I r
ead that. But it took me a while to recognise the photo from the tramp you’d introduced me to.’
‘And how is your, er, friend?’ I grimaced, involuntarily.
‘Oh, Kevin? He’s trying to grease up the Prince of Wales in the foyer. He’s our office accountant.’ She flashed a charmingly sheepish grin of her own. ‘Anyway, I only agreed to come with him because I’ve got a crush on Prince Harry.’
I laughed.
‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘Kevin doesn’t really like opera. He only came for the networking opportunities.’
‘Philistine.’
‘Philistine.’
‘Do you like opera?’
‘No. I hate it. You?’
‘No.’
‘Philistine.’
‘Shall we go somewhere else?’
‘Yes.’
And with that, I took Rosie’s hand and we hurtled down the stairs together, past a startled-looking Matt, who was now sitting with the mother/daughter combination he’d met earlier, past Claire, who was no longer flirting with her sister’s boss but perched grumpily in the corner with her BlackBerry, past the waitress I had befriended and out into the glorious autumn evening.
‘I feel like I can breathe at last,’ said Rosie, laughing. We linked arms and began to stroll aimlessly away from the Albert Hall.
‘Me, too.’
Rosie stopped, took both of my hands in hers and moved very close. ‘But look at us now, Max. All dressed up with nowhere to go.’
But we did have places to go. With the remaining £300 on my fifth credit card, we spent the best evening of my life, the evening to end all evenings, in which the only drink we drank was champagne, the only music we heard became our own, and the only person I cared about in the world was the girl on my arm. It ended, inevitably, in her bed, breathless, delirious, and with Rosie shouting out, at the top of her voice, the name of a man neither of us had ever met.
Chapter Fifteen
‘Love lasts a long time, but burning desire – two to three weeks,’ said Carla Bruni, who looks as if she knows a few things about both. Until Rosie, that had always been my experience, too. Even Lisa and I, who went out for eight months, only lasted so long because neither of us had the courage to finish it. But Rosie? Well, she was different – very different. After a month, there was even more burning desire and passion than there had been at two to three weeks. After two months, there was respect as well as affection. After three, I found it difficult to imagine life without her. And after four… Well, whisper it quietly, but I think I was actually in love with her. Not head-over-heels, over-in-a-month, get-bored-later infatuation, but proper, lasting, in-depth love. So this was what songwriters and poets had been banging on about for all these centuries.
Not that those four months after the Albert Hall were without their complications. For starters, I had to grow used to being Max, even as I tried to kill him off. The first step was to announce after a few weeks that I was shelving his business plan. ‘I just don’t think it will work in the current economic climate,’ I said one morning over breakfast in Rosie’s house in Parsons Green. ‘I think I’ll go back to banking.’
‘No worries,’ said Rosie, laughing. She was always saying ‘no worries’. ‘Although I’m afraid you’ll still owe Taylor Williams for the consultancy fee. My boss is getting a little concerned about it.’
If truth be told, I had been getting more than a little concerned about it myself. It wouldn’t be long before interest would start kicking in on the invoice, and I already had more than enough debts accruing interest without worrying about another one. That £5,000 would be the release fee: the point at which I no longer had to worry about the strange way in which we had met.
But however hard I tried, I realised how difficult it would be to kill off Max altogether. One night, when we were lying in bed, Rosie randomly said: ‘Lunch.’
‘What?’
‘Lunch. We never had that lunch you promised.’
‘Isn’t this more fun, though?’
Rosie giggled and pressed herself up close. ‘Yes, Max, it is.’
‘You know, Rosie, I’ve been thinking,’ I said, seizing the moment. If she was being post-coitally whimsical, this was as good a time as any. ‘I’ve been thinking about my name. Max. It’s a bit of stupid name, isn’t it? Max. Pepsi Max. Maxed out. To the Max. Ridiculous. I thought I might change it to something more sensible. Sam, maybe. That’s my middle name.’
Rosie looked at me strangely. ‘Why would you want to do that? No one changes their name in their twenties. Especially to something as stupid as Sam. Anyway, your name is one of the things I like most about you. It’s so… it’s so manly. Now come here, Max… Oh, Max, Max, MAX.’
For the first couple of weeks, I pretty much lived at Rosie’s, pretending I’d taken some old, accrued holiday from the banking job they’d kept open for me. But as time progressed, the deceptions inevitably became more and more complex. Any weekday evening spent at hers I had to remember to turn up in a suit and leave sufficiently early, and in the right direction, for Blackfriars in the morning. On one nerve-wracking occasion, she insisted on accompanying me right up to the door of Goldman Sachs – I cursed myself for not pretending I’d moved to a bank with offices in Canary Wharf, miles away from hers – before kissing me goodbye. Fortunately, her phone rang, and while she was distracted I bolted round the corner and back to Islington, spared the ignominy of Rosie watching me pretend that my swipe card for the bank’s doors had broken.
There were other pretences to keep up, too. Most painful was maintaining the illusion of living a banker’s lifestyle. Not only did I have debts up to my eyeballs, I also had very little income. The people at the temping agency that had got me the job at Taylor Williams were livid that I had apparently absconded from the placement and were unwilling to find me a job anywhere else. ‘Either you go back and work there and mend our relationship,’ they told me, ‘or we don’t find you another job ever again.’ I said it would have to be the latter; life was stressful enough without working in the same office as Rosie under a different name and a very different job title. Divine junior analyst Rosie had not fallen in love with Sam the temp.
Sam the temp, on the other hand, was in love with Rosie exactly as she was. None of her evident wealth or ambition mattered any more. It was her that I wanted, and damn the consequences. Over the next four months I fell so deeply for her that none of the obvious complications seemed to matter much either. Something would turn up. I would make everything okay again in the end. The deception itself became intoxicating. All my senses were heightened by the possibility of being found out and the determination not to become so.
Yet still the black cloud of money hung over me. I managed to get another couple of credit cards, but the limits became tighter and the demands for the existing ones more aggressive. I worked as many shifts as possible in the same old coffee bar in Camden during the day, but it only made tiny inroads into a debt that spiralled faster than I could pay off even the interest.
So I turned, in desperation, to my friends. But the truth was that I hadn’t been a very good friend of late. In fact, I had been spending most of my time with Rosie’s friends instead, surprising myself by how much I actually liked them. Normally, girlfriends’ friends are a nightmare. The girls are a lose-lose: either they’re attractive and you fancy them, or they’re ugly, jealous types who resent you for taking their friend away. The guys, on the other hand, simply can’t be trusted, for obvious reasons. Rosie, however, had a nice little group from university which I quickly became part of. Most of the time, I didn’t even care what we did, as long as we did it together.
After I’d started spending all my time at Rosie’s, Ed had apparently decided to return to the shoebox in Hackney that he and Tara still hadn’t sold. Apart from writing a slightly disparaging online comment at the end of his Guardian article, I hadn’t had any contact with him for ages. Alan seemed to have allowed Matt to stay on at his flat for a while, but Mat
t wasn’t around all that much, either. On the few occasions Rosie had come round to ‘mine’, I had asked him to go and stay somewhere else so I could put up a broken but presentable plasma television screen from the local tip and pretend that this two-bedroom flat was a banker’s bachelor pad and not a squalid bedsit shared by two unemployed people. Matt had readily agreed, not least because things seemed to be working out very well with the girl – Debbie – he had met at the opera.
Debbie was a north London Jewish princess who ran a successful kitchen business, selling over-priced interior decorations to other rich, successful north London women. Her only flaw was that she appeared to have fallen twice for men who were ‘not the family type’ and was bringing up two children under the age of five by herself. Matt, it seemed, exactly fitted the profile of the man she was looking for: a stay-at-home father-figure with excellent first-aid skills. Debbie’s widowed mother, who lived next door, had also taken quite a shine to him.
‘A doctor as a potential son-in-law?’ I prodded when we met up for lunch one day in the new year. ‘She must be very excited. It’s just a shame you’re not employed. Or Jewish.’
‘Who said I told her I wasn’t Jewish?’
‘Shit, Matt, you’re worse than me.’
‘Well, I didn’t exactly lie to her,’ he continued, grinning sheepishly. ‘Not at first. I just didn’t correct her when she started talking about Jewish things. And well, by then, it was too late. One day she told me she had some Jewish cousins in Norway, so I told her that my granddad was Norwegian, which is true, even though he isn’t Jewish, which I didn’t mention, and so any doubts she might have had about why my hair is so blond were probably cleared up. Also, in case you were wondering, I don’t have a, well, you know, thingy… Anyway, before I knew it, one thing led to another and I was swapping stories with her younger brother about our bar mitzvahs.’
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