The Next Best Thing

by Sarah Long

  In the downstairs bar of the French House, Will caught sight of himself in the mirror. With the benefit of low lighting and three gin and tonics, he had to admit he liked what he saw. He turned his head to get the best angle of his cheekbones, and found it incredible to think that he was pushing fifty. That was no age, though, these days. Fifty was the new forty, or more like thirty-five in his case. He smoothed some rogue hairs back into his ponytail and turned to his companion.

  ‘Another one before you go, Chas?’

  He wasn’t usually so profligate in buying rounds, but it was worth keeping his agent sweet. Chas had sounded pretty bullish about what he might get for Will’s next book. Anyway, he could probably push the drinks through on expenses.

  Chas looked at his watch. ‘Better not, I’m late already. I’m sorry about tonight, do apologise to Jane for me.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it, she’s cool. One thing about Jane, she doesn’t get uptight about a change in plan. Not like Carol, she wouldn’t have spoken to me for a week.’

  ‘How is the ex?’

  ‘I hardly know, all right I think. Best thing I ever did was walk out of that marriage. Tough at the time, but she’s grateful to me now. Freed her up to start a new life with that dismal travel agent.’

  ‘And left you free to set up home with the lovely Jane. You’re a lucky man.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Clever, good-looking woman who knows how to cook. And she earns her own money.’ Chas sighed as he thought of his own high-maintenance ex-wife. Lounging around at home between trips to the beauty salon. He had asked her once whether she ever thought about going back to work. Perfectly innocent question, you’d have thought, but her reaction had been savage. ‘What am I supposed to do?’ she’d snapped back at him. ‘Get a job in a shoe shop?’ That was the problem with well-educated women. A few child-rearing years out of the market and they became unemployable.

  ‘That’s the advantage of cohabitation over marriage,’ said Will. ‘Women understand it’s not a meal ticket for life.’

  ‘Rod Stewart said he wasn’t going to marry again,’ said Chas. ‘He’d just find a woman he didn’t like and give her a house instead.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  They sat in silence for a moment to consider this monumental statement.

  ‘I’ll be off then,’ said Chas.

  They left the pub and said their goodbyes on the pavement. Chas had been offered a ticket for the Donmar, and Will insisted he take it. If there was one thing life had taught him it was always to drop an engagement if something better came along. He wandered up Dean Street towards the tube, but then thought better of it. A man in his position shouldn’t have to slum it on the underground, even if he was financially crippled by years of alimony. He hailed a cab.

  ‘Shepherds Bush please.’

  Shepherds Bush, that was bad enough. It had been Notting Hill before the divorce, and for the purposes of his newspaper column, it still was. The Portobello Road was his beat, and every week he wrote of its delights to lighten the journey of his poor readers as they headed off to their god-awful suburban homes.

  The seductive smell of garlic cooking in olive oil greeted Will as he opened the front door.

  ‘Hey baby,’ he called out, taking off his coat.

  Jane came up from the basement, looking delicious in a soft pink sweater. She didn’t often wear make-up but he could see she’d made an effort tonight. Her hair was loosely pinned up, framing her heart-shaped face, and her delicate features were flattered by a pale lipstick.

  ‘Where’s Chas?’ she asked, looking round as if expecting him to be hiding behind Will.

  ‘Couldn’t make it unfortunately. Sends his apologies, though he knows the loss is all his. You look gorgeous.’

  Jane dropped her welcoming smile and frowned at him.

  ‘Well, thanks a lot!’ she said. ‘You could have rung. I’ve been charging around like a blue-arsed fly getting everything ready; it would have taken you two minutes to let me know.’

  She turned on her heel and Will followed her down the stairs. ‘Be nice to me,’ he said, ‘you lovely creature. I was only telling Chas what a marvel you were, how un-uptight, how free-wheeling . . .’

  The table had been set with three places, lit by candles and miraculously free of clutter. Will deftly removed one place setting.

  ‘There we are, all the more for you and me. Just the two of us, much more romantic ‘

  It was unusual for him to be currying favour like this, mostly it was the other way round. Jane looked at him with a mixture of exasperation and amusement. She still couldn’t resist him when he turned on the charm.

  ‘Oh . . . all right then,’ she relented. ‘At least we can have a normal conversation and I won’t have to listen to you and Chas talking shop.’

  She liked it when he courted her like this. It reminded her of when they first met, and he used to bombard her office with flowers. He knew how to treat a girl, of course, being that much older; she wouldn’t fall for it in quite the same way now she was in her thirties. She watched him pour himself a glass of vodka then hold the bottle out to her enquiringly. She nodded and he gave her his louche, lop-sided smile. She’d been mad for that smile back then, she’d thought he was James Dean and Dustin Hoffman rolled into one sexy bundle of charming sophistication.

  He handed her the glass. ‘Liberty in bed already?’

  ‘Yes, she was exhausted. Long day for her — ice-skating and French after school.’

  ‘You got the mushrooms I take it?’

  ‘But of course.’

  ‘Fresh and Wild?’

  ‘No, I got some button mushrooms on special offer at Safeway.’

  His eyes widened in disbelief.

  ‘Only joking,’ she said. ‘You know I wouldn’t risk offending Chas with anything from a supermarket. Just too bad he blew us out.’

  ‘Never mind, Nigella, we’ll just have to go it alone.’

  She didn’t mind the Nigella allusion. Posh and sexy, crashing greedily round a kitchen filled with giant cooking pots. She smiled her acknowledgement and took a long, objective look at him. He’d still got it, she thought, that confidence, the way he assumed the room. She’d still cross the party to talk to him, though if she was being brutally honest, she’d have to admit the last ten years had not been too kind to him. The beginnings of a soft belly hung over his belt, and his face had loosened. He should get rid of the ponytail, too, now he was thinning on top. She ought to have a word with him about it.

  ‘They came to fix the dishwasher,’ she said, ‘just happened to have someone in the area, luckily. That was the high point of my day, how about you?’

  ‘Oh, you know, another day, another dollar. Another crop of wise and witty insights for my grateful public.’

  ‘Lydia rang this morning,’ said Jane, emptying the bag of mushrooms into a colander and taking them over to the sink.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Will’s voice had become shrill with alarm.

  ‘Washing the mushrooms.’

  ‘You mustn’t do that!’

  ‘They’ve got clods of earth sticking to them.’

  ‘So wipe them off with a damp cloth, but you must never, never wash mushrooms. They’re like sponges, they soak up the water then it all comes out when you cook them and they lose all their flavour. I’m surprised you didn’t know that.’ He turned away to top up his glass, and while he was rummaging in the freezer for ice, Jane surreptitiously ran the cold tap over the colander. She was damned if she was going to have her dinner ruined by lumps of soil.

  Will turned back to face her. ‘What did Lydia want?’ he asked.

  ‘This and that. She wanted me to go to some sad old don’s memorial service. As if. You would have thought she had better things to do. She’s always going on about how busy she is. Busy, busy, busy, I hate that, don’t you? So self-important.’

  ‘“And yet, methinks, she semed hisier than she was”,’ said Will, in the actorly voic
e that he liked to adopt for quoting Chaucer.

  ‘It’s like what business people go through when fixing a meeting,’ said Jane. ‘You know, all that fawning about how I’m sure your diary’s fuller than mine — quite ridiculous.’

  ‘I agree,’ Will replied, reverting to his normal voice, a fashionable blend of public school and glottal stops. ‘It’s seriously uncool to bang on about being busy. Very second rank, and also suggests you’re not coping. Although Lydia’s always been a bit of a bustler though, hasn’t she?’

  He’d had a thing with Lydia a few years ago, a fact he’d never thought appropriate to share with Jane. It had fizzled out anyway and mercifully Lydia had never seen fit to spill the beans.

  ‘Is she still with that dull banker?’ he asked.

  ‘So it seems. How do you know he’s dull? We’ve never met him.’

  ‘He’s a banker, so he’s dull. I don’t need to meet him. I can just imagine.’

  You could never accuse Will of not knowing his mind.

  ‘You’re probably right,’ she said, ‘but you shouldn’t condemn people you’ve never met, just because you don’t like the sound of their job.’

  ‘Anyway, he’s bound to be loaded,’ said Will. ‘Lydia wouldn’t bother wasting time on him otherwise.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Jane agreed. It made her feel better to think of Lydia as a gold-digger, just as it made Will feel better to think of her boyfriend as a yawnsville banker. ‘You’ll be able to judge for yourself soon,’ she continued. ‘We’re invited for drinks at his place.’

  ‘How unspeakable, do we have to? Where does he live?’

  ‘Chelsea.’

  ‘Of course, like all bankers. You know I try to avoid Chelsea, for ideological reasons.’ On Will’s map of moral correctness, there were certain no-go areas. Jane had long since given up trying to fathom his logic.

  ‘I think it’s charming,’ she said. ‘I’d love to live there.’

  ‘You wouldn’t! It’s full of ghastly braying dimwits and people like Lydia’s boyfriend!’

  ‘Whom you have yet to meet.’

  ‘Whom I have no intention of meeting.’

  ‘Anyway, I know the real reason you don’t like Chelsea, you told me once. It’s because everyone there is so tall, and you feel like a short-arse in comparison.’

  It was a cheap shot and Will responded with a chilly smile of disdain.

  ‘It’s only drinks,’ she said in appeasement, ‘we won’t have to stay long.’

  It was certainly true, thought Will, that drinks was better than dinner. He would stand aloof in his brocade jacket, a raffish bohemian in a sea of clean-cut city suits. And it was certainly better than Sunday lunch with other young families, which was what Jane liked to organise. Couples drinking wine to ease the boredom of family life while the children wreaked havoc around them. Followed by the obligatory walk to the park, where Will had once been mistaken for the grandfather of his young daughter. The memory stuck with him still. He had been remonstrating with a boy who was climbing the wrong way up the slide, leaving dirty footprints on the smooth silver surface, while Liberty waited patiently on the top step. ‘That your granddad?’ the boy had asked Liberty. She had glared at him, indignant and defensive: ‘It’s my dad, stupid.’

  That was the problem with second families. Small humiliations waiting to trip you up at every turn. It was the price you paid for starting over. Although, as Will watched Jane ladling hot stock into the pan and smelt the rosemary and garlic, he had to admit it was worth it. To find himself with this woman looking slim in her jeans and with a wild mane of hair that did not yet need to be dyed. She could be a black and white photo from a fashionable guide to Italian cooking, whereas his ex-wife was a hangover from the Hamlyn All Colour Cookbook.

  ‘Lydia said she’d been down at Highgrove,’ Jane told him, ‘inspecting the royal cows.’

  That would be right up her street,’ said Will, ‘hobnobbing with the old ruling classes.’

  He preferred to hobnob with the new ruling classes. Writers, film people, opinion formers who had won their position through their own endeavours and not through an accident of birth. What the French would call les intellectuals, though the British were too damn philistine to use the word except as a term of abuse.

  ‘Do you want your salad before or after the risotto?’ asked Jane.

  ‘I think after.’ He picked up Liberty’s drawing of a tall princess with big hair and tiny feet, decorated with this week’s leitmotif: a big yellow cartoon sun wearing dark glasses. ‘How’s my monkey?’ he asked.

  ‘She’s fine. Miss Evans doesn’t think she’s dyspraxic after all. She thinks she might just be clumsy.’

  ‘Well, I could have told you that. People are so neurotic these days, always trying to find something wrong with their children.’

  It wasn’t like that with his first batch of offspring, they had surged into adolescence with very little fuss. Not that he’d been around much to notice, his wife had taken care of all that, as wives did back then. It was only recently that fathers had become such hands-on nincompoops.

  ‘Do you mind?’ he said after dinner. ‘I really need to get on upstairs.’

  ‘Go ahead,’ Jane replied, ‘I’m going to work as well, once I’ve finished off in here.’

  Will squeezed her arm on his way out. ‘Catch you later,’ he said, ‘thanks for dinner.’

  He walked into the hall and up the dramatic concrete spiral staircase with its Perspex balustrade. The creation of a live/work space for Will had been central to the architect’s brief, and the entire first floor had been made over to this purpose. Will called it his galleria, a magnificent open space that was his kingdom and his refuge. On the walls his art collection was an eclectic statement of his ‘modern with a nod to the past’ philosophy, while books lining the shelves bore testament to a crushing intellect.

  To pay for the galleria Will had sold one of his more controversial works of art, a dead fox pickled in formaldehyde as an ironic statement about the proposed ban on hunting. The artist had given it to Will just before he became famous, and when Jane became pregnant, Will had found the perfect excuse to cash in on his unexpected windfall. The smell of the formaldehyde leaking from the glass case was making her nauseous, so Will sold it to a New York dealer. He regretted it now, it would be worth at least ten times as much.

  The size of the galleria meant they’d had to compromise on the rest of the house, but Jane and Liberty seemed quite happy holed up in the semi-basement where they could perform the eating and telly-watching functions that were so disruptive to Will’s creative process.

  He lit a cigar and thought about starting work on his book. It was an exploration of Native American culture, a follow-up to one he had published a few years back. Flames of Youth had described the initiation rites endured by young Native Americans who leaped through fire to achieve maturity. It was a book about courage, a quality underestimated in modern Western society. He had focused on this angle in his publicity, comparing the courage of these boys with the courage that he, Will Thacker, had demonstrated when he decided to leave his marriage. That had put the cat among the pigeons in the ugly feminist camp, but it hadn’t harmed his sales. It irritated him the way people sided with the wife and kids when a marriage broke up. What about the lone crusader, the man in all this, the one who was brave enough to say, Enough! I will not compromise and spend my life crouched in the brackish shallows of a humdrum relationship. It brought tears to his eyes just thinking about it. Will Thacker, a big, bold, beautiful traveller.

  Before starting work, he would just visit his website and look up the reviews for Flames. ‘. . . brings a coruscating intelligence to a little-understood subject . . .’ ‘Never before had I understood the searing pain and glory that rhymes with coming of age . . .’ Thacker wears his erudition lightly in this clear-eyed and deeply moving tour de force.’

  He really was quite something.

  Downstairs, Jane quickly cleared th
e plates and set off the dishwasher. It was all very well, this foodie business, but it did cut into her precious time. Of course she enjoyed sitting down with Will for a civilised dinner, but sometimes she wished she could just open a can of beans and be done with it. She’d need to fit in a couple of hours tonight, so as not to get behind.

  First, though, there was the ironing to deal with. She took the ironing board from the kitchen cupboard and creaked it open, an unwieldy symbol of life below stairs, its shape unchanged since Victorian days. No mob cap and floor-length pinny for her, though, she was a modern woman, doing it all, aided by many gadgets that freed her up to maintain her career. Career was pushing it, she thought, pouring rose-scented water into the iron that claimed to bring the smell of the garden to your wardrobe. She had a job, not a career. It would only become a career if she gave it up. Women who stopped working always referred wistfully to their abandoned careers, lending glamour to something that was, in most cases, pretty mundane.

  Even so, she was glad to have her work. It kept her in the land of the cruel: the bright, brittle world of positive achievements. If you didn’t work, you were committed to life as a kindly sponge, absorbing the worries of your children while flooding them with your own anxieties. Anyway, Will wouldn’t let her give up work, he’d made that perfectly clear.

  She switched on the TV and took a small pink tee shirt from the basket. She always did Liberty’s things first; it was like playing with dolls’ clothes. There was a programme on about a couple leaving England to set up a guest house in the Dordogne. Just as they were being waved off by teary-eyed neighbours, the phone rang.

  ‘Hallo,’ said Jane, one eye still on the screen.

  ‘Hi, it’s Marion.’

  ‘Marion!’

  Lovely Marion, it was always a shot in the arm to hear from her. They’d met when they were temping at IPC, both hoping to move on to better things.

  ‘Do you fancy meeting up one night?’ asked Marion. ‘It’s been ages.’

  ‘I’d love to,’ said Jane, ‘not this week, though, far too busy.’

  ‘You don’t sound that busy to me, sounds like you’re watching telly.’