The Next Best Thing (30 page)

‘Don’t give me that
Burke’s Landed Gentry
bollocks,’ said Will. ‘Ghastly jumped-up types, most of those phoney crests were only invented in the 1960s, you
shouldn’t be taken in by the latin mottos and rampant demi-lions.’

‘His goes back to the seventeenth century, actually. But I’m not talking about that. I mean he’s a nice, considerate person.’

The words flopped damply onto the table. ‘Nice’ and ‘considerate’ were not big on sex appeal, bringing to mind bearded men who worked in the social services. She moved
swiftly on. ‘And, yes, he does give me a . . . certain lifestyle. And financial security.’

That marvellous euphemism. She loved it the same way she loved all those other words: cash, liquid assets, bonds, global macro returns. ‘Incubator funds’ was one of her favourites:
tiny, fragile bits of premature money, hot-housed to grow into full maturity. Thinking of Rupert’s vast sums of money never failed to perk her up and quell the doubts that occasionally reared
their ugly heads, whispering
was she sure about this marriage?
She sometimes wondered if he wasn’t a bit staid for her, a bit slower off the mark than she was, a little bit
boring,
even. Though the word only had to creep into her mind before it was immediately discarded. It was too easy to dismiss someone as boring, and anyway, what did that say about her?
Would Lydia Littlewood become engaged to someone who was a bit boring? Of course not.

‘So, to answer your question,’ she continued, ‘the reason I invited you and Jane to come on holiday with us was as friends, for intelligent company. Ft takes a suspicious mind
like yours to look for an ulterior motive.’

‘Not so much suspicious as hopeful.’

He wondered what it would be like to make love to her again. There was a particular pleasure in rediscovering an ex, a comforting mix of nostalgia for the good times and the fresh excitement of
a new conquest. It was like revisiting a city you hadn’t seen for a few years, familiar yet stamped by the passage of time. Lydia didn’t look as though she would disappoint; she
hadn’t yet reached the age when the damage kicked in for women.

‘I must come clean,’ she said, ‘and admit I completely forgot about your daughter when I invited you. I hope she won’t be bored, there’s nothing for her to do
there. Mind you, there’s nothing for adults to do either, apart from gaze at the hills and buy olives, it’s not exactly St Tropez. I would say bring the nanny to keep her entertained
except you haven’t got one.’

‘Don’t worry about Liberty,’ said Will, ‘she’ll be happy enough, and Jane’s a very hands-on mother. A bit too much, I sometimes think. Always a temptation for
women, to immerse themselves in their children and lose sight of themselves. I saw it happen with my ex-wife, and now I’m afraid Jane’s going rather the same way.’

He thought about Jane frowning behind her computer at the kitchen table, surrounded by piles of ironing and dictionaries, wearing her old cardigan as she toiled her way through the psychology
textbook she was currently translating. Quite different from the woman who was sitting opposite him now, chic and brightly dressed, with the sharp sexiness that comes with a healthy ego.

‘Liberty’s rather like me in many ways,’ he went on, ‘she has a very strong personality.’

Lydia pulled a face. ‘That’s one thing that really gets on my nerves about parents,’ she said. ‘They always claim their kids have got strong personalities. I’m
never really sure what it means, anyway, a strong personality.’

‘It means she knows her own mind and has an enquiring intelligence. As I said, she’s a chip off the old block!’ He smiled in acknowledgement of his own fabulousness.

‘You really think you’re something, don’t you?’ said Lydia. Seeing him sitting there so pleased with himself, she thought how unlike Rupert he was. Rupert hated to be the
centre of attention, and was almost dysfunctionally modest. It had seemed exotic when she’d first met him in New York. Compared to the American men who wasted no time in giving you their full
CV and list of selling points, he appeared to be an advertisement for bumbling English understatement. ‘Oh, I’m just a gorilla with a calculator,’ he had said when she asked him
what he did. The moment she’d got home she had run a Dun & Bradstreet check on his credit-rating and found out that he was doing extremely well for a gorilla. Even without taking into
account his family money.

Now they were back in the UK, his modesty seemed mundane, verging on defeatism. She missed that American confidence, that energising feeling that you could become whatever you wanted. Looking
across at Will, she got a sense of that energy.

‘We’re two of a kind, Lydia,’ he said, ‘which is why we could never live together. We’re both hungry for experience. I’m not cut out for a quiet life of
conjugal bliss any more than you are.’

Lydia pretended to be shocked. ‘That’s no way to talk to a girl on the verge of getting married.’

‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I know what that wedding’s about. You have a fine business head on those pretty shoulders. Which I seem to remember were always shown to
advantage above a décolletage.’

She obligingly slipped off her jacket to reveal a burgundy plunge neckline that made the most of her sculpted shoulder-blades. This holiday might prove to be more fun than she had expected.

In the Easyjet departure lounge of Gatwick airport, Will was acting snooty. So what if the tickets cost a fraction of what you’d pay for a decent flight? There were some
things in life that you didn’t stoop to, and that included no-frills airlines. He sipped his filthy coffee, piss-thin in a polystyrene cup, and glanced around him at the horrid evidence of
democratisation gone mad. Who on earth had decided that Joe Public should he able to travel to Marseille for £15.99? Where did that leave the mystery and romance of travel? The world was a
better place when only a tiny elite could think of boarding a plane, before mass tourism had opened up abroad to the great unwashed.

‘I don’t know why you didn’t book Air France,’ he complained to Jane. He liked the Air France hostesses, they were the only ones who understood service, all icy
politeness and expensive perfume. They knew how to keep their distance, unlike the girls on British Airways with their infuriating perky familiarity and sing-song voices. Though BA would be far
preferable to what he was enduring today. Easyjet: the very name was enough to make you heave, never mind the bilious orange logo.

‘I told you, if you want to pay the difference, that’s fine with me,’ said Jane.

He didn’t reply. Family holidays came out of her budget, and he wasn’t going to start forking out for that as well as everything else. He wasn’t made of money, not like bloody
Rupert with his rampant demi-lions and multiple homes.

‘You could have got a later flight at least,’ he said at last, ‘you know I’m not a morning person.’

‘The six forty was cheaper,’ said Jane crisply, hating him for making her sound like a prim penny-pincher, ‘and it makes the most of our holiday’

‘I want to go to the toilet,’ said Liberty, looking up from her comic.

Jane stood up to go with her, leaving Will to sulk over his newspaper. She looked back at him, cross and out of sorts, his battered briefcase lying on his lap like a badge of intellectual
superiority.

During take-off, Liberty stared out of the window in fascination at the receding landscape while Jane squeezed her daughter’s hand tightly and tried not to think about
air disasters. She had never heard of an Easyjet plane crashing, and there was no reason why that should change today. Once they were up above the clouds, Liberty plugged herself into her Discman
like a miniature teenager, and sat back with her eyes closed, quite at ease in this modern world that was constantly on the move.

The sight of her daughter made Jane happy. She stroked the back of Liberty’s hand, running her fingers over the thin white line above the wrist where she had been stitched after falling
from her bike. She had a parent’s intimate knowledge of her child, could identify the precise location of the chicken-pox scars behind her knees and the mole on her back, the way her second
toe grew longer than the first. But, in a few years, her daughter would grow tall and leave home. She would no longer require her mother’s cosseting, except perhaps when things went wrong,
when someone let her down, when she had her own child.

And then what? Would Jane settle down to a comfortable old age with Will, who at this moment was sitting beside her, writing in the leather-bound notebook that he never travelled without. She
found it impossible to imagine how it would be when they no longer had Liberty at home. Perhaps they might move house, to something smaller back in Notting Hill, or maybe to the country. If things
went well, they might be able to afford both. To be honest, she really didn’t care.

She closed her eyes to sleep and thought about Rupert. He would be waiting for them, having arrived last night with Lydia to open up the house. She couldn’t wait for him to show her the
garden, the kitchen, the view from the terrace as he had described it to her. She had a picture of it in her head that was already tinged with nostalgia, filled with regret for the life with him
she might have had if things had been different.

The plane touched down on time and in bright sunshine. Jane unfastened Liberty’s seat belt and gently shook her awake.

‘Mercifully short, at least,’ said Will, standing up and stretching his arms behind his head. ‘Do you realise you couldn’t get from Shepherds Bush to Soho in a taxi for
the price of that flight? It does make you wonder what’s wrong with the world.’ Half an hour later he stood apart, looking pained in his crumpled linen suit, while Jane and Liberty
queued at the car-hire desk.

Outside, it was warm, the kind of spring day that makes British people wonder why they don’t move to the South of France. The kind of spring day that makes so many decide to do that very
thing.

‘Not exactly Scott and Zelda, is it?’ Will said as they got into the Fiat Multipla, which was shaped like a frog, with three seats spread across the front row. ‘Bloody
ridiculous thing, what on earth made you choose this?’

‘It was on special offer.’

There was a brief tussle when Liberty was denied the extra front seat on safety grounds and strapped into the back, then Will was issued with a road map while Jane got behind the wheel.

‘We need to head for Aix on the A51, then the A8 going east,’ she said.

Will sighed. A Fiat Multipla on special offer from Avis rent-a-car, it wasn’t exactly poetry. He wished he was back in the 1920s, winding his way down through the mountains in a curvy
open-top sports car, catching glimpses of the Mediterranean, sparkling blue through the grey-green Cezanne landscape. That was before the Cote d’Azur was ruined. At least they were heading
inland and would be spared the excesses of coastal development.

He checked the map then shook his head in disapproval. ‘We should have flown to Nice instead of Marseille, it makes far more sense. We could have stayed for longer on the motorway, it
would have saved us at least an hour.’

‘It’s about the same, I checked on the map.’ She was sick of the way Will left all the planning to her and then criticised the end result. She would like to be the one relaxing
in the passenger scat, offering her opinion on his choice of route.

‘You need to take that turn-off,’ he said half an hour later, as they whizzed past the motorway exit.

‘You could give me a bit more notice!’ said Jane. ‘I’ll have to go on to the next one now.’

‘I thought you knew we wanted the D560 for Barjols. There’s no need to shoot the messenger, I’m merely pointing out that you appear to have missed the turning.’

Once they were off the motorway, the road began to twist and turn, heading up into the hills through a series of villages, backed by forests and rolling hills. It was surprisingly green, and
danced in the sunlight, which was coming through strongly now the morning mists had lifted. It was quite enchanting, and even Will didn’t find anything to complain about, in spite of his best
attempts to pick out evidence of tourist pollution.

The best he could manage was foreign numberplates. ‘Look at that,’ he said, as they drove through a particularly charming village. ‘Dutch cars, Belgian cars, and of course the
ubiquitous British. I don’t suppose there’s any such thing now as a real French village. Did you know the French call us
Les GBs
after our car stickers?’

‘Yes, I did actually,’ said Jane, irritated. ‘You may recall that I have a degree in modern languages and also work as a French translator.’

‘We don’t reciprocate, though, do we?’ he continued. ‘It’s not as if we call them “the Fs”. Though I suppose that’s because they never come to
England. When was the last time you saw a French car in Britain?’

For the rest of the journey, he entertained Jane with an analysis of the rise of the British motoring holiday, with a special mention for his particular pet hate, the touring caravan, which
clogged up the roads and defaced the countryside, the late-modern equivalent of Betjeman’s bungalow eczema. The Dutch were even worse offenders, he told her, and widely loathed by the French
for stocking up on their wretchedly bland cheese and ham before leaving home and spending the minimum in their host country. In some campsites, you even got a Dutch van selling the stuff
in
situ.

His tirade went uninterrupted until they drove past the entrance to a castellated restaurant high on a hill, at which point Will leaned across Jane to take a better look. ‘Now that is
Michelin two-star, and well worth a visit. I might see if I can get a free dinner, say I’ll review it for the paper.’

It was shortly after this and only a few kilometres away from their destination when Jane heard a bang and realised she must have driven over something. ‘Did you hear that?’ she
asked. ‘I hope I haven’t got a puncture.’

Her fears proved well-founded as she felt the car lurching to one side, but they managed to limp on to a lay-by, where she parked and got out to inspect the tyre which was deflating softly
before her eyes.