The Next Best Thing (25 page)

They climbed into the taxi, Lydia taking care not to crush her souvenir collection of copper music pipes, and began the crawl into central London. She took out a small book and began making
notes of what she needed to complete her winter wardrobe.

Rupert gazed out of the window and let the waves of tiredness roll over him. He felt dizzy with the travelling. It seemed they had spent days in planes and cars, transported from one extreme
climate to another in the endless journey to satisfaction, punctuated by meals taken in luxury hotels. He had been like a heavy sledge, dragged along by Lydia through the blue-and-white granite
colours of the southern glaciers, then hauled up to the burned umber northern desert where they boasted they’d had no rain in four hundred years. The pressure to see remarkable sights was
endless and, in the end, self-defeating. You got wonder fatigue from everything being so extraordinary.

He thought of the message he’d left on Jane’s phone. ‘It’s me.’ That was a bit presumptuous of him, assuming she’d know who ‘me’ was. He should
have left his name, but that felt too incriminating, especially a damn stupid name like Rupert, and you never knew if Will might go around checking her messages. He might draw the wrong conclusion,
which would be unfortunate, because there was nothing wrong about their friendship, they had nothing to hide. A friendship was all it was.

Lydia’s voice broke into his thoughts. ‘You know, T think I’ll see if I can book Clive for that dinner on the fourteenth.’ dive ? Dinner? What was she on about?

‘Whatever,’ he said. It wasn’t a modern idiom that used to come naturally to him, but it was a useful way of replying to Lydia.

‘Only it does lend a greater sense of occasion,’ she went on, ‘and it’s not as if I want to spend my evening running in and out of the kitchen like a headless
chicken.’

‘Quite.’

He fell back into his reverie, trying to remember what it was he’d said afterwards, after ‘It’s me.’ Something corny like, ‘I’m back’, like he was
Arnold Schwarzenegger or something, as if she would give a damn. She’d probably not given him a thought, probably been caught up in her family Christmas: after all, what was he to her? It had
been a mistake to leave that message, he should have just hung up and let her call him if she wanted to.

‘Clive does come highly recommended,’ said Lydia, ‘and butlers are definitely in again. That’s going to be the next thing, you know, a return to formal dining; people are
sick of pigging it in the kitchen, surrounded by basalt work-tops and dangling pans. A separate dining room, that’s what we’ll be seeing, and let the servants get on with it in the
kitchen. It’s certainly a trend that gets my blessing.’

Rupert nodded and closed his eyes. She watched him rest his head on the back of the seat. He seemed quite exhausted by the holiday, whereas she had found it invigorating. Contrasts were
definitely what she would be looking for in the honeymoon, maybe, tropical paradise meets urban minimalism like on Cocoa Island. Rupert had seemed curiously reluctant to discuss it, kept saying
they should enjoy the one they were on now, and not keep worrying about what they should be doing next. It was the nearest they had come to a row. Lydia had said it was all very well for him to say
that, but things got booked up and you needed to get organised. And what task could be more enjoyable than planning the ultimate holiday that was your honeymoon?

He was sleeping now, which was probably a bad approach to the jet lag, but he needed to catch up before going back to work. Fortunately, there had been no more talk of him giving up his job, it
was probably just a bit of pre-Christmas fatigue. It wasn’t that she loved him for his money, but financial success was part of what he was. You couldn’t separate him from his wealth
any more than you could separate a peacock from his tail; it was one of his defining characteristics.

As for that ludicrous fantasy about becoming a gardener, that had really rattled her. A banker with his kind of earning potential must have mental problems to believe he’d be happier
pushing a wheelbarrow. Would the owner of a factory suddenly announce that what he really wanted to do was sit on the production line and stick bits of plastic together? She didn’t think so.
The Chile holiday had been mercifully short on gardens. Burning hot deserts up one end and icy wastes down the other, with no time to hang around in the garden-friendly moderate middle ground. That
had been more by luck than judgement, but thank God there weren’t any dangerous moments of him going misty-eyed in front of a hougainvillea or whatever it was they grew over there.

At Cadogan Gardens, the usual mountain of post had piled up during Rupert’s absence. He sat with his mug of tea, looking on as Lydia dealt with it, ripping open the
envelopes and sorting the contents into piles. Junk post, catalogues, Christmas cards, many of them addressed to them both. Anything marked confidential she put to one side, then when she had
finished she casually waved the pile at him. ‘Shall I deal with this?’

He shrugged, so she opened them on his behalf. Bank statements, Christmas messages, invitations to sales openings, it was all the same to him. All of equal, zero interest.

He went into the living room and lay down on the sofa, closing his eyes and listening to Lydia bustling around, taking over his life. He’d have a couple of days to recover and then it
would be back to the office, back to feigning interest and fiddling around with notional figures on the computer. He couldn’t help thinking his job would be more fun if money was a physical
thing as it was in the old days. He could sit like a king in his counting house, making shiny towers of coins, bagging them up in velvet drawstring pouches. Or even if you had chips like at the
casino, where you piled them high on your chosen number, and your winnings were pushed towards to you by a sharp-eyed croupier in a low-cut silk dress. Where you could trade in your chips for wads
of cash, where at least the money smelt of something, had physical form. Whereas the money he dealt with was formless: grey flickering images on a flat screen.

If he were in his garden in France right now, he could take a heavy-duty fork and plunge it into the ground, feel where the stones lay and where the sandy soil allowed the prongs to pass.
Digging over the beds, he could reach down to remove the roots of weeds, anaemic as beansprouts. Afterwards, he would have a mug of steaming coffee and be glad to think that he had rescued his
garden from those intruders, that later on, in summer, the flowers would be all the more exquisite as a result of his labours.

‘Lovely card from Baz, thanking us for the party.’

Lydia’s voice reached him like an unwelcome, distant wake-up call.

‘You might take him out for lunch, see if he wants to invest in your fund. Now it seems we’re well and truly in the toy cupboard.’

Baz was the capricious chairman of Lydia’s magazine group, renowned for bullying his staff, who referred to themselves as being in or out of the toy cupboard according to whether they were
currently in favour. Lydia, being fearlessly self-confident, always assumed she was well in, and Baz’s note would seem to bear her out. Rupert considered him a nasty piece of work he would
rather have no dealings with.

‘You have lunch with him,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t touch that piece of shit’s money with a bargepole.’

‘Ooh, you’re so upright,’ she said, clattering round the kitchen. ‘I do love it when you make a stand, such a contrast to my own more fluid approach to people. Shall I
see if I can book Caraffini for tonight?’

‘Surely we can eat in, we’ve eaten out every night for the past three weeks.’

The thought of another evening in a restaurant listening to Lydia’s brittle talk was not appealing. This was hardly a good omen for their married life, but maybe he was just suffering from
the over-exposure of three weeks’ holiday.

‘You’re cooking, then, are you?’ she said.

‘Fine.’

‘Because you needn’t think I’m going to spend my first night back in London messing up the kitchen . . .’

‘I said I’ll cook.’

‘But you’re tired.’

‘Let’s get a takeaway then.’

‘Might just as well pop down the road to Caraffini in that case.’

‘OK, whatever.’

He closed his eyes again and returned to dreaming of his house in France. Jane would sit beside him and plan how to spend the rest of the day. Lunch might be a cassoulet that he would prepare in
the big rough-cast iron pot that always sat on top of the cooker. The cannellini beans would have been soaking all night. You had time to cook and garden and do the things that really mattered when
you were there. Not like in London where you were always rushing off to the office or catching a plane in search of the driest or hottest or coldest or most miraculous places on earth.

‘I’m definitely coming down in favour of the Scottish castle,’ said Lydia, calling out from the bedroom. ‘The weather can be dodgy anywhere in the UK, so unless we were
thinking of chartering a plane for everyone to go somewhere hot . . .’

There was a hint of a question in her voice, which Rupert was quick to answer.

‘No.’

‘So in that case, I think the castle. Entirely in keeping with your dour Scottish roots and relatively economical. I know we need to keep a bit of a lid on it, and we don’t want to
compromise on the honeymoon. Or the London home ‘

She appeared in the doorway, wearing a bathrobe, arms folded as she outlined their wedding plans. She was like his business partner, or his accountant, or one of those scary PAs who used to be
the power behind the corporate throne in the days before women had proper jobs.

‘I’m going for a shower,’ said Rupert. ‘I can’t be thinking about this right now.’

He patted her on the shoulder on his way out — he didn’t want to be unkind — and went into the bathroom, stripping out of his travel-stained clothes, turning on the shower and
standing under the powerful jet of hot water. It was no good, he was going to have to tell her he couldn’t go through with it. The only question was, how? How did you walk out on the wedding
you had just spent three weeks hearing about? How could you break off the engagement that you had only announced a month ago to a room full of approving friends?

His friend John had done it from the driving seat of his sports car after Sunday lunch with the future in-laws. Engine throbbing, he had dropped the bombshell, then it was foot down on the gas
and he was out of there. Rupert could never be so cruel. Maybe he should just suggest they continue as they were, backing down from the wedding but not going as far as ending the relationship. He
couldn’t bear to make a scene. But even as he was convincing himself, he knew this was impossible. You could live with someone for years without any talk of getting married, but once the idea
had been mooted and the deal agreed, there was no going back to the way things were.

He finished his shower and dressed and combed his hair. It was jet lag and exhaustion that was doing this to him, he needed to rest and come to his senses. It had hardly been a
spur-of-the-moment thing, his engagement to Lydia, and if he felt rather underwhelmed by the whole thing, it must simply be that you didn’t get that excited about things once you were forty.
By leaving it so late to get married, he had leapfrogged straight into discontented middle age, bypassing the young-love stage altogether.

By the time Lydia left to go shopping, Rupert had chased away his dark thoughts. He had found two crumpets in the freezer that he had toasted and spread with butter, and was
now lying on the sofa, watching football on the telly. For the first time in three weeks he was alone, and the silence reassured him. Outside, the grey sky was a comforting reminder that here was a
temperate land, unlike the violent climatic extremes he had just visited. He was a temperate, reasonable English person about to get married to a vivacious, clever, attractive woman. He wanted for
nothing materially, and if he was finding his job vexing, well, he was only like most people, and lucky to have the job in the first place.

When his phone rang he was still in the comatose state induced by watching sport on an English winter’s afternoon when it gets dark at four o’clock, his body still bridging the gap
between two continents.

‘Hallo,’ he said sleepily, eyes still fixed on the TV.

‘So you’re back?’

It was Jane. In a shot, he snapped back to life; all thoughts of football and illusions of contentment went straight out the window. He couldn’t marry Lydia when the mere sound of another
woman’s voice was enough to turn him to jelly. He sat up and swung his feet back onto the ground, turning down the sound on the remote. ‘You got my message,’ he said, idiotically,
getting to his feet and pacing towards the window, as if in hope of seeing her in the street outside.

‘Yes. I was unreasonably pleased to hear from you.’

‘Me too. I am pleased. Ecstatic, in fact. Above and beyond the call of reason. To hear from you, that is.’

‘How was your trip?’ she asked, after a moment.

How was his trip? Did she mean apart from the fact that he wasn’t travelling with her? Apart from the fact that every morning when he woke up he wished it was her lying beside him instead
of Lydia?

‘As you’d expect,’ he said. ‘Very cold, and then very hot. What about you?’

‘Neither hot nor cold, but something in between. Quite rainy.’

‘I see.

‘Do you think it’s a bit weird, us talking about the weather?’ she asked.

‘Not at all. I think it’s a fine topic. In the States they have an entire TV station devoted to it.’

‘I know, the Weather Channel, I love it.’

‘So there’s something else we have in common.’

‘Yes.’

‘We’ll be able to talk hurricanes and sleet showers when we next meet.’ He bunched his left hand up tight as he said it, pressing his nails into his palm, bracing himself for a
refusal, waiting for her to make her excuses, to say that she couldn’t meet him again, that she’d been thinking things over and there was no future for them.

Except she didn’t say that. Instead, she said, ‘Mow about next Friday?’