‘Oh, no,
Miss Morley
, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t end our relationship and then expect some kind of special dispensation—’ It’s the voice he has used for months now, officious, sing-song and spiteful and she feels a fresh burst of anger at the traps she lays for herself. ‘If you want it to be purely professional, then we have to keep it purely professional! So! If you don’t mind, could you tell me why you’re not at this very important meeting today?’
‘Don’t do this, please, Phil? I’m not in the mood.’
‘Because I’d hate to have to make this a
disciplinary
issue, Emma …’
She takes the phone away from her ear while the headmaster drones on. Chunky and old-fashioned now, it’s the phone he bought her as a lover’s gift so that he could ‘hear her voice whenever he needed to’. My God, they had even had phone-sex on the thing. Or he had anyway—
‘You were expressly informed that the meeting was obligatory. Term’s not over yet, you know.’
—and for one moment she contemplates how pleasant it would feel to hurl the wretched thing into the Thames, watch the phone hit the water like half a brick. But she would have to
remove the SIM card first, which would deaden the symbolism somewhat, and such dramatic gestures are for films and TV. Besides, she can’t afford to buy another phone.
Not now that she has decided to resign.
‘Phil?’
‘Let’s stick to Mr Godalming, shall we?’
‘Okay – Mr Godalming?’
‘Yes, Miss Morley?’
‘I resign.’
He laughs, that maddening fake laugh of his. She can see him now, shaking his head slowly. ‘Emma, you can’t resign.’
‘I can and I have and here’s something else. Mr Godalming?’
‘Emma?’
The obscenity forms on her lips, but she can’t quite bring herself to say it. Instead she mouths the words with relish, hangs up, drops the phone into her bag and, dizzy with elation and fear of the future, she keeps on walking east along the River Thames.
‘So, sorry I can’t take you for lunch, I’m meeting another client …’
‘Okay. Thanks, Aaron.’
‘Maybe next time, Dexy. What’s up? You seem downhearted, mate.’
‘No, nothing. I’m just a little concerned, that’s all.’
‘What about?’
‘About, you know. The future. My career. It’s not what I expected.’
‘It never is, is it? The future. That’s what makes it so fucking EXCITING! Hey, come here you. I said come here! I’ve got a theory about you, mate. Do you want to hear it?’
‘Go on then.’
‘People love you, Dex, they really do. Problem is, they love you in an ironic, tongue-in-cheek, love-to-hate kind of way. What we need to do is get someone to love you
sincerely
…’
Chichester, Sussex
Then, without quite knowing how it happened, Dexter finds that he has fallen in love, and suddenly life is one long mini-break.
Sylvie Cope. Her name is Sylvie Cope, a beautiful name, and if you asked him what she is like he would shake his head and blow air through his mouth and say that she is great, just great, just … amazing! She is beautiful of course, but in a different way from the others – not lads-mag-bubbly like Suki Meadows, or trendy-beautiful like Naomi or Ingrid or Yolande, but serenely, classically beautiful; in an earlier TV presenter incarnation, he might have called her ‘classy’, or even ‘dead classy’. Long, straight fair hair, parted severely in the middle, small neat features set perfectly in a pale heart-shaped face, she reminds him of a woman in a painting that he can’t remember the name of, someone mediaeval with flowers in her hair. That is what Sylvie Cope is like; the kind of woman who would look perfectly at home with her arms draped around a unicorn. Tall and slim, a little austere, frequently quite stern, with a face that doesn’t move much except to frown or sometimes to roll her eyes at some stupid thing he’s said or done; Sylvie is perfect, and demands perfection.
Her ears stick out just a tiny, tiny bit so that they glow like coral with the light behind her, and in the same light you can see a fine downy hair on her cheeks and forehead. At other, more superficial times in his life Dexter might have found these
qualities, the glowing ears, the hairy forehead, off-putting but as he looks at her now, seated at the table opposite him on an English lawn in high summer, her perfect little chin resting on her long-fingered hand, swallows overhead, candles lighting her face just like in those paintings by the candle-guy, he finds her completely hypnotic. She smiles at him across the table and he decides that tonight is the night that he will tell her that he loves her. He has never really said ‘I love you’ before, not sober and on purpose. He has said ‘I fucking love you’, but that’s different, and he feels that now is the time to use the words in their purest form. He is so taken with this plan that he is momentarily unable to concentrate on what is being said.
‘So what
do
you do exactly, Dexter?’ asks Sylvie’s mother, from the far end of the table; Helen Cope, birdlike and aloof in beige cashmere.
Unhearing, Dexter continues to gaze at Sylvie, who is raising her eyebrows now in warning. ‘Dexter?’
‘Hm?’
‘Mummy asked you a question?’
‘I’m sorry, miles away.’
‘He’s a
TV presenter,’
says Sam, one of Sylvie’s twin brothers. Nineteen years old with a college rower’s back, Sam is a hulking, self-satisfied little Nazi, just like his twin brother Murray.
‘Is or was? Do you still do presenting these days?’ smirks Murray and they flick their blond fringes at each other. Sporty, clear-skinned, blue-eyed, they look like they were raised in a lab.
‘Mummy wasn’t asking
you
, Murray,’ snaps Sylvie.
‘Well, I still am a presenter, of sorts,’ says Dexter and thinks, I’ll get you yet, you little bastards. They’ve had run-ins before, Dexter and The Twins, in London. Through little smirks and twinkles they’ve revealed that they don’t think much of sis’s new boyfriend, think she can do better. The Cope family are Winners and will only tolerate Winners. Dexter’s just a charm-boy, a has-been, a poser on the way down. There is silence at the table. Was he meant to keep talking? ‘I’m sorry, what was the question?’
asks Dexter, momentarily lost but determined to get back on top of the game.
‘I wondered what you were up to these days, work-wise?’ she repeats patiently, making clear that this is a job interview for the post of Sylvie’s boyfriend.
‘Well, I’ve been working on a couple of new TV shows, actually. We’re waiting to find out what’s going to get commissioned.’
‘What are they about, these TV shows?’
‘Well one’s about London nightlife, a sort of what’s-on-in-the-capital thing, and the other’s a sports show. Extreme Sports.’
‘Extreme Sports? What are “Extreme Sports”?’
‘Um, well mountain-biking, snow-boarding, skate-boarding—’
‘And do you do any “Extreme Sports” yourself?’ smirks Murray.
‘I skate-board a little,’ says Dexter, defensively, and he notices that at the other end of the table, Sam has stuffed his napkin into his mouth.
‘Will we have seen you on anything on the BBC?’ says Lionel, the father, handsome, plump, self-satisfied and still bizarrely blond in his late fifties.
‘Unlikely. It’s all rather late-night fare, I’m afraid.’
‘Rather late-night fare, I’m afraid’, ‘I skate-board a little’
. God, he thinks, what do you sound like? There’s something about being with the Cope family that makes him behave as if he’s in a costume drama. Perchance, ’tis rather late-night fare. Still, if that’s what it takes…
Now Murray, the other twin – or is it actually Sam? – pipes up, his mouth full of salad, ‘We used to watch that late night show you were on,
largin’ it
. All swearing and dolly-birds dancing in cages. You didn’t like us watching it, remember Mum?’
‘God, that thing?’ Mrs Cope, Helen, frowns. ‘I
do
remember, vaguely.’
‘You used to really, really
hate
it,’ says Murray or Sam.
‘Turn it off! you used to shout,’ says the other one. ‘Turn it off! You’ll damage your brain!’
‘Funny, that’s exactly what my mother used to say too,’ says
Dexter, but no-one picks up on the remark and he reaches for the wine bottle.
‘So that was
you
, was it?’ says Lionel, Sylvie’s father, his eyebrows raised, as if the gentleman at his table has revealed himself to be rather the cad.
‘Well, yes, but it wasn’t all like that. I tended just to interview the bands and the movie stars.’ He wonders if he sounds big-headed with this talk of bands and movie stars, but there’s no chance of that because the twins are there, ready to shoot him down.
‘So do you still hang out with a lot of
movie stars
then?’ says one of them, in mock awe, the jumped-up little Aryan freak-boy.
‘Not really. Not anymore.’ He decides to answer honestly, but without any regret or self-pity. ‘That has all sort of … drifted away.’
‘Dexter’s being modest,’ says Sylvie. ‘He gets offers all the time. He’s just very picky about his on-screen work. What he really wants to do is produce. Dexter has his own media production company!’ she says proudly, and her parents nod approvingly. A businessman, an entrepreneur – that’s more like it.
Dexter smiles too, but the fact is life has become a great deal quieter recently. Mayhem TV plc has yet to earn a commission, or a meeting with a commissioner, and at the moment still exists only in the form of expensively headed paper. Aaron, his agent, has dropped him. There are no voiceovers, no promotional work, not quite so many premieres. He is no longer the voice of premium cider, has been quietly expelled from poker school, and even the guy who plays the congas in Jamiroquai doesn’t call him anymore. And yet despite all this, the downturn in professional fortunes, he’s fine now, because now he has fallen in love with Sylvie, beautiful Sylvie, and now they have their mini-breaks.
Weekends frequently begin and end at Stansted airport, where
they fly off to Genoa or Bucharest, Rome or Reykjavik, trips that Sylvie pre-plans with the precision of an invading army. A startlingly attractive, metropolitan European couple, they stay in exclusive little boutique hotels and walk and shop and shop and walk and drink tiny cups of black coffee in street cafés, then lock themselves into their chic minimal taupe-coloured bedroom with the wet-room and the single stick of bamboo in the tall thin vase.
If they’re not exploring small independent shops in a major European city, then they’re spending time in West London with Sylvie’s friends: petite, pretty hard-faced girls and their pink-cheeked, large-bottomed boyfriends who, like Sylvie and her friends, work in marketing, or advertising or the City. In truth, they’re not really his sort, these hyper-confident Über-boyfriends. They remind him of the prefects and head-boys he knew at school; not unpleasant, just not very cool. Never mind. You can’t build your life around what’s cool, and there are benefits to this less chaotic, more ordered lifestyle.
Serenity and drunkenness don’t really go together and save for the occasional glass of champagne or wine with dinner, Sylvie doesn’t drink alcohol. Neither does she smoke or take drugs or eat red meat or bread or refined sugar or potatoes. More significantly, she has no time for Dexter drunk. His abilities as a fabled mixologist mean nothing to her. She finds inebriation embarrassing and unmanly, and more than once he has found himself alone at the end of the evening because of that third martini. Though it has never been stated as such, he has been given a choice: clean up your act, sort out your life, or you will lose me. Consequently there are fewer hangovers these days, fewer nose-bleeds, fewer mornings spent writhing in shame and self-disgust. He no longer goes to bed with a bottle of red wine in case he gets thirsty in the night, and for this he is grateful. He feels like a new man.
But the single most striking thing about Sylvie is that he likes her so much more than she likes him. He likes her straightforwardness, her self-confidence and poise. He likes
her ambition, which is ferocious and unapologetic, and her taste, which is expensive and immaculate. Of course he likes the way she looks, and the way they look together, but he also likes her lack of sentimentality; she is as hard, bright and desirable as a diamond and for the first time in his life, he has had to do the chasing. On their first date, a ruinously expensive French restaurant in Chelsea, he had wondered aloud if she was enjoying herself. She was having a wonderful time, she said, but she didn’t like to laugh in company because she didn’t like what laughter did to her face. And although a part of him felt a little chill at this, a part of him also had to admire her commitment.
This visit, his first to the parental home, is part of a long weekend, a stopover in Chichester before they continue down the M3 to a rented cottage in Cornwall, where Sylvie is going to teach him how to surf. Of course he shouldn’t really be taking all this time off, he should be working, or looking for work. But the prospect of Sylvie, stern and rosy-cheeked in a wetsuit with her hair tied back, is almost more than he can bear. He looks across at her now to check on how he is performing, and she smiles reassuringly in the candlelight. He’s doing fine so far, and he pours himself one last glass of wine. Mustn’t have too much. Got to keep your wits about you, with these people.
After dessert – sorbet made from their very own strawberries, which he has praised excessively – Dexter helps Sylvie take the plates back into the house, a red-brick mansion like a high-end doll’s house. They stand in the Victorian country kitchen, loading the dishwasher.
‘I keep getting your brothers muddled up.’
‘A good way to remember it is Sam’s hateful and Murray’s foul.’
‘Don’t think they like me very much.’
‘They don’t like anyone apart from themselves.’
‘I think they think I’m a bit flash.’
She takes his hand across the cutlery basket. ‘Does it matter what my family think of you?’