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In a huge airy room, fairy lights were strung from the high ceiling and a gang of people stood around, smoking furiously and drinking beer from bottles. The scent of marijuana was heady. Nobody took any notice of Sam. In her jeans, she fitted right in. All she needed was a beer and she’d have looked like the rest of them, except for the fact that she had to be up at six a.m. and needed to get some rest, Sam thought furiously as she searched through the throng for her quarry.
The noise was coming from another room. Sam pushed through into what was obviously the nerve centre of the party. It was barely recognizable as a kitchen because most of the units had been ripped out by builders but there was still an island unit piled high with bottles of booze, six packs of Coke and a half eaten loaf of tomato bread. Sam ignored the people in the kitchen and headed for the dining room.
There, behind a bespectacled youth with a pile of CDs, she found it. The stereo system.
‘Is there anything you want me to play?’ yelled the disc jockey eagerly.
‘Yes,’ hissed Sam. ‘Cards.’
With one expert movement, she wrenched the plug from the socket and all was quiet.
‘Why did you do that?’ asked the DJ in shock.
Everyone stared at Sam, bottles of beer held at half mast. They saw a small, slim woman with a blonde ponytail who wore ragged jeans and worn espadrilles and had what looked like newspaper smudges on one cheek. ‘I live next door and I don’t want to listen to this sort of crap late at night, do you understand?’ she yelled, not in the least perturbed to have at least twenty curious thirty-somethings staring at her. Sam had bawled people out in public before.
‘Sorry…’ said the DJ politely. ‘We just thought it wouldn’t matter because nobody was living here yet…’
‘Nobody may have been living here but there are eight people living in the house next door, an adjoining house,’ Sam pointed out, ‘where you can hear every bass thump.’
‘So you thought you’d come in here and pull the plug instead of calmly asking us to turn the volume down, did you?’ said an amused, low voice.
Wearing jeans that were astonishingly more torn and faded than hers, jeans that clung to a long, lean body, and a white creased shirt with most of the buttons undone to reveal a hard, muscled chest, was a man who made Sam’s breath suddenly catch.
He wasn’t handsome and he wasn’t a mere twenty-something either. His face was too long, his eyes too narrow and his nose was too hooked to be model material, yet he was somehow the most incredible looking man she’d ever seen. Around her age, she guessed. Sam, who spent hours looking at pictures of male singers who sent other women into paroxysms of joy and left her utterly unmoved, could only stare.
If he could sing, she’d bet her bonus she could sell millions of albums with his face and body on the cover. Even if he couldn’t sing, come to that. Still smiling, the corners of that fabulous mobile mouth twisted up into an ironic little smile, he ambled towards her. The tawny rumpled hair and the barely buttoned shirt made it look as if he’d just dragged himself out of some bed or other. Narrowed, treacly eyes surveyed her lazily as though he was eyeing her up with the intention of dragging her back to bed with him.
Sam objected to being surveyed. She was not some bimbo: she was a managing director, a woman who made subordinates flatten themselves against the walls in fear when she was angry. She drew herself up to her full five foot four inches and prepared for battle.
‘I live next door –’ she began fiercely in her killer boardroom voice.
‘Do you?’ he interrupted, still unhurried and unperturbed. ‘Is it a nice neighbourhood?’
He stopped right in front of her. Even though he was barefoot, he still towered above her. Sam hated that. It was why she liked wearing perilously high shoes for important meetings so only the tallest people ever got to look down on her.
‘It used to be,’ she hissed. Talk about invading her personal space, his body was only a few inches away from hers. Normally, she’d have slayed him with an icy word but feeling strangely vulnerable out of her normal habitat, Sam took a step back. The wall was behind her, she couldn’t go any further. Retreating was a mistake in business, it was now too. She stuck her chin out defiantly and the hand clenching the stereo plug tightened.
‘Is this your house?’ she said, trying to stay fearsome in the face of this Adonis invasion.
He ignored the question. ‘You have something of mine,’ he said, his voice almost a drawl. He reached long arms around her, and for a second Sam’s breath stilled. He wouldn’t, he couldn’t. The charismatic, mocking face was close to hers as he reached down and she felt her stomach contract. His mouth was laughing and it was getting close to hers, so close she could feel the heat of his breath and smell a sharp citrusy tang from his warm body. Without knowing why, she closed her eyes. Then she felt the plug being pulled from her hand.
‘Mine, I think,’ said the man. With one graceful movement, he reached down, brushing against her leg, and plugged the stereo in again. He flicked a switch and loud music pumped into the room.
‘You bastard!’ screeched Sam, shocked and embarrassed. ‘You absolute bastard.’ She had to really yell now to make sure he heard her. ‘How dare you…’
‘I think you’re the one who dared,’ he said, faintly amused. ‘If you wanted us to turn the noise down, you should have asked me. I wouldn’t have refused you.’
Impotent rage surged through her and for one terrible moment, Sam forgot all about good business, about how revenge was a dish best served cold and how any corporate raider needed a cool, calm mind.
He was using his physical presence to intimidate her and she reacted in the age-old, instinctive way of a woman confronted by a larger predator. She kicked him. In the shin as hard as she could, the blunt end of her espadrille connecting with hard bone and sinew.
‘Ouch!’ His yelp of pain could only be heard by her as the current song was at an eardrum-splitting decibel level.
That got rid of the mocking smile. Sam smirked. It had hurt her toe too, mind you, but now was no time to think of her own personal pain. Those years of ballet meant she had tough little feet.
‘Who the hell do you think you are shoving your face in my personal space, you asshole!’
At that precise moment, the DJ unaccountably turned the music down. Sam’s roar reached the entire room and provoked some giggles.
What the hell was the sound down for? Sam wondered blindly before she spotted the one soberly-dressed person on the premises.
The policeman stood in the doorway and hovering behind were the couple from the basement apartment in Sam’s building, who were watching the proceedings anxiously.
‘We’ve had a complaint about a party and loud noise,’ said the policeman in a calm voice.
Sam shot her opponent a triumphant look and was enraged when, instead of looking worried or ashamed, he smiled lazily back at her.
‘Yes officer, I’m afraid we turned the music up a bit high, I’m sorry,’ he said and led the way into the kitchen.
Sam sniffed and held her head high as she marched out of the house and back into her own, followed by her downstairs neighbours. That bloody man. How dare he make so much noise. How dare he humiliate her like that. And her foot hurt…ouch.
‘Are you OK, Sam?’ asked the wife from downstairs as Sam hobbled up the stairs.
‘Fine,’ she said breezily.
In the hall mirror, she caught sight of her face. She looked as if she’d been slapped. Both cheeks were as rosy as bramley apples. As she thought of the scene next door, her cheeks blazed some more in sheer embarrassment. She grabbed the wine from the fridge and poured more into the glass. You moron. Imagine turning into some cretinous, violent bimbo just because some he-man sticks his hairy chest in your face?
Anyway, you’re hardly a bimbo, she groaned inwardly. You’re staring into the abyss of forty.
Sam took a large gulp of wine. How could she have let herself down like that? She should have fixed him with a steely glare and told him exactly what forces of the law she’d use to make him stop his horrible party. When she’d suitably reprimanded herself, Sam went to bed. But sleep evaded her.
It was like being fifteen again, fifteen and horribly embarrassed because the boy in chemistry class had overheard her saying she fancied him like mad. Even twenty-four years later, that memory could still make her burn with shame. Now she’d done it again.
Finally, Sam got up and took one of the sleeping tablets she kept for emergencies. This certainly qualified. She slept eventually but her hot fevered dreams were full of a tall, laughing man in a soft, loose white shirt, a man who laughed at her for behaving like a petulant, hormonal fifteen year old.
When Sam left for work the next morning, she waited to check her mobile for messages until she was outside. She wanted to be doing something when she passed the house next door, she didn’t want to be vulnerable and on her own in case she met him.
‘You have no messages,’ taunted the impersonal voice on her phone almost before she’d got to the front gate. Instead of hanging up, Sam was forced to listen to all her old, undeleted messages in order to keep up the pretence of being a busy, high-octane career woman who wasn’t interested in men. Suddenly she noticed the dilapidated house’s front door swinging open. Quickly averting her eyes in case she saw him again, she began talking into the phone.
‘I’ll be there soon, we’ll have the meeting if you’ve got all the documents lined up from New York,’ she blathered. A taxi sailed up the road and Sam stuck out her hand to hail it.
‘Bye, talk soon,’ called a female voice behind her.
Sam automatically turned to see a beautiful dark-haired girl leaving the house, smiling at the man in denims and bare feet who was holding the door. Bare chested too, Sam noticed with a jolt, and blowing kisses at the girl who looked around twenty-two at most, a stunning doe-eyed twenty-two who’d clearly stayed away from home all night if the silvery dress she was wearing under a big, man’s coat was anything to go by.
‘Take care,’ the man said in that caressing voice, but he was looking mockingly at Sam who stood there, mobile in hand and her mouth open.
‘Do you want a taxi or not, love?’ demanded the taxi driver.
‘Oh, er yes,’ stammered Sam, pulling open the door and half falling in, with her raincoat trailing after her.
‘Late night?’ inquired the driver with a smirk.
‘No,’ hissed Sam, reasserting herself. ‘Covent Garden please.’
What an asshole, she thought. Loud parties, having flings with women half his age. I mean, that girl was twenty and he has to be late thirties at least. Bloody playboy. Probably some trust fund moron who’d never had a job in his life but lived off inherited cash. Sam stared grimly out the cab window and simmered. She hated men like that.
CHAPTER THREE
‘I can’t believe you’re moving in a little over two weeks. I can see it now,’ sighed Betsey dreamily. ‘A summery little cottage in a beech glade, with a thatched roof and pretty sun-bleached rooms, gorgeous home grown food and quaint little pubs where you can sit outside and eat oysters and watch the world go by with the Riverdance music in the background.’
Hope glared at her over a plate of fisherman’s pie. ‘It’ll be November, not summer.’
‘I think that’s Hollywood’s version of rural Ireland,’ laughed Dan from his position beside three-year-old Opal where he was attempting to clean up the mess she’d made squelching the insides out of several packets of brown sauce. Despite his efforts, Opal managed to fling a few opened packets on the floor before he could tidy them all away.
‘No,’ joined in Matt, ‘it’s the tour operator’s version of Ireland when they’re trying to sell you a time share. You know, Dan, maidens at the crossroads, sheep in the middle of the road and a friendly local with no teeth, a pipe and a tweed cap welded to his head waving at you!’
‘Haven’t we made an ad like that already?’ Dan asked.
‘Don’t think so. But we will, we will. I love the originality of advertising,’ Matt joked.
Matt, Betsey and Dan all laughed merrily. Hope stabbed her fish pie. Hilarious. Trust them all to make a joke about it all. It was her life they were talking about, not a location shoot for a bloody commercial. She was the one who’d be transported into another country, away from her friends and Sam, so that Matt could live the advertising man’s dream. His dream, her sacrifice. A fortnight after her sister’s visit, her delight that her marriage wasn’t over had disappeared to be replaced by a gnawing fear of the unknown. Matt and Millie were thrilled with the idea of moving; Toby was thrilled because he was going up in an aeroplane; Hope was terrified.
‘It’s going to be great, love, isn’t it?’ Matt said, noticing the tautness around his wife’s jaw. ‘You’ll love Kerry, I promise you.’ He was about to reach over and hug her, but Millie, sitting between them, catapulted her plate of chips all over the table.
All four children started giggling.
Hope sighed, grabbed a handful of kitchen towels out of her bulging, ever-present toddler bag, and began cleaning up.
Sunday was family day in the local pubs and that meant a war zone of small children rampaging up and down the premises while their exhausted parents rocked irate babies in their pushchairs and mashed up food for toddlers who were straitjacketed into high chairs, in between trying to shovel some pub grub down their own throats.
Hope, Matt, Betsey and Dan had often shared Sunday lunch together but the birth of Millie, Toby, Ruby and Opal meant lunch no longer took the form of a civilized clinking of wine glasses over sea bass fillets in elegant restaurants. Now, Sunday lunch was a grab-while-you-can bean fest in whichever local child-friendly establishment wasn’t jammed by twelve thirty.
Today, they were in the Three Carpenters, a huge pub with an adventure playground outside. This was very useful for exhausting small children but it was raining today, so the kids had turned the inside of the pub into an adventure playground.
There was always one family, Hope thought crossly, who let their kids run riot and didn’t move a muscle to stop them. Millie and Toby weren’t saints but she wouldn’t dream of letting them behave like those brats who were now trying to dismantle a high chair in the corner after spending at least half an hour ripping up beer mats.
‘Seriously though,’ said Betsey, waving at the harassed young waitress in the hope of getting more wine, ‘I’ve always had a yen to live in the country. There’s something about the whole rustic life that appeals to me.’
‘Betsey, honey,’ Dan said affectionately, ‘you couldn’t survive without the buzz of traffic, a shop that sells the perfect cappuccino around the corner and your monthly waxing or whatever it is you do in that wildly expensive beautician’s emporium.’
Not to mention a hairdresser to transform her hair from brown to a glossy chestnut every six weeks, thought Hope with unusual bitchiness.
Betsey, with her perfectly styled short hair, tiny personal-trainer-honed body and predilection for weekly massages, was a high maintenance woman. Hope, who got her bikini line waxed when she went on beach holidays and who’d had one massage in her life when the girls in the building society had bought her a voucher as a birthday treat, felt like a no-maintenance woman.
‘Anti-ageing facials not waxing,’ Betsey said unperturbed. ‘You make me sound like a yeti. Anyway, I have sugaring done these days. It’s much better.’
The talk turned to business, with Matt and Dan discussing work before Betsey made them all laugh by telling them about an interview she’d done with a TV comedienne.
Hope half-listened because she was keeping an eye on the four children. The two men and Betsey seemed to think that as long as none of the children were actually choking to death, they were fine.
Beside Hope, Toby was half asleep in his high chair. Opal and Millie were, for once, playing together, and even Ruby, a four-year-old terror with her father’s innocent gaze and her mother’s devil-may-care attitude to life, was busy investigating something under the table. For once, Hope didn’t feel like checking what it was. Ruby was Betsey’s daughter: let her sort it out. Hope was fed up of being the designated babysitter at these get-togethers.
She ate the rest of her lunch, half-listened to the chat going on around her, and wished she felt more cheerful.
It was two weeks since Matt’s bombshell and he’d made startling progress for someone who’d spent a year promising to do something about bleeding the air from the bathroom radiator. He’d got Adam Judd to, reluctantly, give him a year’s sabbatical, although the sporty company Audi had to go back. The only caveat was that Matt had to promise to help on certain campaigns if necessary and he’d be paid on a contract basis, which suited Matt fine.
He’d also found an estate agent who assured them there’d be no problem letting the house for a year; he’d checked out transporting their belongings to Ireland; had told his uncle’s solicitor that he’d be flying over to take possession of the house shortly. In short, Matt was on a high, joyous that he’d made the move and was now on his way to making a long-cherished dream come true. Hope felt the way she had three days after Millie had been born: depressed and liable to burst into tears at the slightest provocation. When she’d mentioned the fact that Millie should be starting primary school the following September, Matt had merely nodded and said they’d be back. Probably.
Probably? thought Hope weakly.
It was after two when Dan went to get the bill and Matt went to the gents. Betsey turned to Hope.
‘You’re a bit down in the dumps,’ she said. ‘Is it the move to Ireland?’
Hope nodded, not wanting to say too much in front of the kids. Little pitchers had big ears.
‘It’s such a big step,’ Hope whispered to Betsey now. ‘I feel as if I’m being swept along on a tidal wave and I can’t stop it, do you know what I mean? It’s frightening. A new country, new people, a new home and I won’t have a job there. Matt knows what he’s doing but I don’t.’ She stopped miserably. She didn’t want to say too much but she was sure Betsey would understand. Betsey knew Matt and knew how much Hope adored him, but she’d surely see Hope’s side of things and would know how scary it felt to be swept along on somebody else’s dream. ‘I mean, imagine if you were expected to give up your job to travel with Dan? That would be tough.’
‘It’s a bit different, isn’t it?’ Betsey said. ‘It’s taken me a long time to get where I am on the magazine. I mean, I could work anywhere in the world, obviously, but I’ve got a great career here.’
‘And I’m only working in the building society,’ Hope said acidly. She was still steeling herself to hand in her notice. Mr Campbell would not be impressed.
‘Don’t be so touchy. I didn’t mean that at all but our situations are rather different after all. You’ve got to learn not to be so uptight about everything, Hope,’ she added. ‘Go with the flow.’ She waved one hand languidly. ‘Treat it as an adventure. You’ll have a ball. I’d adore a year off to have fun, play in the country and get out of the rat race.’
Hope looked Betsey straight in the eyes but Betsey had finished draining her wine glass and was looking around for her handbag. Had the other woman heard one word she’d said? She’d hoped for female bonding over how she was going to deal with this enormous upheaval in her life and instead, she’d been treated to Betsey’s views on how much she’d have liked a year in the country. And been told in no uncertain terms that Betsey did not consider working in the building society to be a career on a par with the fabulous world of magazine journalism.
‘Ruby, what are you doing under there? Is that my handbag?’ Betsey said sharply. A heavily-made up Ruby emerged from under the table, her face plastered with Clarins base, vampish dark Chanel eyeshadow and plenty of Paloma Picasso red lipstick. Betsey only used the very best cosmetics.
Her mother gasped with rage and pulled her neat little Prada handbag from Ruby’s red-lipsticked grasp. The bag was smeared with base and lipstick and had obviously been sitting in a pool of brown sauce left by Opal’s earlier game.
‘It’s ruined,’ Betsey shrieked. ‘Three hundred pounds worth of handbag ruined!’
Hope patted her arm. ‘Oh well,’ she said benignly, ‘you’ve got to go with the flow when you’ve got kids, haven’t you, Betsey?’
Matt sang along to the children’s tape they played on the drive home. Millie and Toby sang along too, making Hope feel like old prune-face in the passenger seat because she wasn’t deliriously happy too.
‘Dan told me he’s dead jealous about what we’re doing,’ Matt confided as they pulled up outside their house.
‘Why doesn’t he give up his job for a year, then?’ Hope demanded. ‘Betsey wouldn’t stand for it, that’s why. She’d have heart failure if Dan suggested upping sticks for a year in the country.’
‘Betsey was very enthusiastic,’ Matt pointed out helpfully. ‘What was it she said: she loved rustic things.’
‘Betsey doesn’t know the first thing about living in the country and would hate it,’ Hope hissed. ‘Her idea of rustic is jam pots with gingham covers on them. She thinks the country will be like Bath with livestock and handsome farmers in Range Rovers thrown in.’
Matt annoyed Hope by laughing heartily. ‘Oh darling, you’re so funny sometimes,’ he said. ‘You’re the one who should be in advertising and not me.’
Proving that she wasn’t quite as thick-skinned as a rhinoceros, Betsey phoned Hope at work the next day and apologized for upsetting her.
‘I’d hate you to think I didn’t value your career. I didn’t mean to imply that my career was worth more than yours,’ Betsey said, while Mr Campbell, Hope’s boss, looked on disapprovingly. Personal phone calls were a no-no unless the person at the other end was about to drop dead and was phoning with details of where they’d hidden their last will and testament. Despite having his own office, Mr Campbell never received any personal phone calls. Yvonne and Denise, the other woman who worked on the counter, had decided that he was secretly gay and too scared to come out publicly, so he ruthlessly instructed his lovers not to phone.
Hope thought it was because Mr Campbell was very keen on rules and regulations and wouldn’t dream of asking his staff to follow a dictum he wouldn’t follow himself.
‘I think we should meet for lunch,’ Betsey was saying, blithely oblivious to the fact that Hope couldn’t really talk. ‘I’m working from home today and I’ve got my eye on these fabulous kitten heels in that new shoe shop near Pulteney Bridge and I feel today’s the day to splash out. Do you fancy a trip up there?’
‘Betsey, I can’t talk at work,’ whispered Hope anxiously.
Betsey commuted to London a couple of times a week to work in an office where making personal phone calls was part and parcel of the day. She didn’t understand Hope’s office environment.
‘Outside Accessorise at one, then?’ said Betsey.
‘Yes,’ Hope answered. Anything to get her off the phone before Mr Campbell self-combusted with disapproval.
The morning flew past, giving her little time to think. So it was only when Hope was belting out of the office door buttoning her coat, that she realized she wasn’t in the mood to go shopping for extravagant shoes. And that she wasn’t really in the mood for Betsey either.
She liked Betsey, had considered her her best friend, really, but there were days when she wondered was their friendship one of those which existed purely because their husbands were best friends and therefore, the four of them spent a lot of time together. After that infamous holiday in France which Dan and Matt had arranged one day at work without asking, she and Betsey had been great pals. Mind you, Hope thought, it hadn’t bothered Betsey to go on holiday with someone she barely knew. Quite happy to relax from noon on with a bottle of Burgundy and a paperback while the children splashed about in the toddlers’ pool, Betsey was very laid back about holiday companions. Hope always felt that nothing much upset her, except when somebody else got a better assignment in the women’s magazine she wrote for. She was great fun and an amusing friend. But, Hope wondered, with Dan and Matt out of the picture, would she and Betsey ever meet up to have lunch or to trail around the shops together? Was Betsey really her best friend, either?