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Copyright
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London, SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in the UK by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020
Copyright © Mhairi McFarlane 2020
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020
Cover illustration © Abbey Lossing / Handsome Frank
Mhairi McFarlane asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008169480
Ebook Edition © January 2020 ISBN: 9780008169473
Version: 2019-11-04
Dedication
For my sister, Laura
the human Lisa Simpson
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Acknowledgements
A Q&A with Mhairi McFarlane
Keep Reading …
About the Author
Also by Mhairi McFarlane
About the Publisher
1
Dan
What time you think you’ll be back tonight? Roughly?
Laurie
Dunno. SOON I HOPE.
Dan
You hope?
Laurie
Everyone has raspberries in Proseccos
Dan
I thought you liked Prosecco. And raspberries
Laurie
I do! I’ve got one.
Dan
Your problem is other people like it too? Can’t imagine my criticism of a night out being ‘people ordered the same drink’
Laurie
… Except when you said you hate stag dos that ‘start with getting ten pints of wife beater in at 7am in Gatwick Spoons’.
Dan
You can’t take a moment off being a lawyer, can you?
Laurie
HAH. You misspelt ‘you got me bang to rights, Loz’
Dan is typing
…
Dan is typing
…
Last seen today at 9.18pm
Dan must’ve thought better of his reply. Laurie clicked her phone off and pushed it back into her bag.
Obviously she didn’t really mind the cliché, booze was booze, that was trying to be wittily acerbic bravado. It was a distress signal. Laurie was at sea and her phone felt like a connection back to shore. Tonight was an unwelcome flashback to the emotions of lunch breaks at secondary school, when you had a single-parent mum and no money and no cool.
So far, the girls had discussed the benefits of eyebrow microblading (‘Ashley from Stag Communications looks like Eddie Munster’) whether or not Marcus Fairbright-Page at KPMG was a bad arsehole who’d break hearts and bed frames (Laurie thought on what she’d gleaned, that was an emphatic yes, but also gathered that a verdict wasn’t desired). And how many burpees you could manage in HIIT class at Virgin Active (no idea there, none).
They were all so glamorous and feminine, so carefully groomed and produced for public display. Laurie felt like a dishwater-feathered pigeon in an enclosure full of chirruping tropical birds.
Emily really owed her. Tonight was the product of something that happened roughly once every three months – her best friend, and owner of a PR company, begged Laurie to join their team night out and make it ‘less bloody boring, or we’ll spend the whole time discussing the new accounts.’ Emily, as CEO and hostess, was at the head of the table putting everything on the company credit card and handing round the Nocellara olives and salted almonds. Laurie, late arrival, was at the far end.
‘Who was that, then?’ said Suzanne, to her right. Suzanne had a beautiful shoulder-length sheet of custard-coloured hair and the gaze of a customs officer.
Laurie turned and concealed her irritation with a ventriloquist’s dummy smile. ‘Who was what?’
‘On your phone! You looked well intense,’ Suzanne rolled her doe eyes upwards and mimed a sort of chimpanzee-like, vacant trance state, her hands moving across an imaginary handset. She whooped with girlish, alcohol-fuelled laughter, the sort that could sound cruel.
Laurie said: ‘My boyfriend.’
The word ‘boyfriend’ had started to sound a trifle silly, Laurie supposed, but ‘partner’ was so dry and stiff. She had a feeling her present company already thought she was those things.
‘Awww … is it early days?’ Suzanne combed her fairytale princess hair over her ears with her fingers, and put her flute to her lips.
‘Haha! Hardly. We’ve been going out since were eighteen. We met at university.’
‘Oh my GOD,’ Suzanne said, ‘And you’re how old?’
Laurie tensed her stomach muscles and said: ‘Thirty-six.’
‘Oh my GOD!’ Suzanne squawked again, loudly enough that they had the attention of a few others. ‘And you’ve been together all this time? No flings or breaks? Like, he’s your first boyfriend?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I could not have done that. Oh my God. Wow. Was he your …’ she lowered her voice, ‘First-first?’
Laurie cringed inwardly.
‘Bit personal after two drinks, hah?’
Suzanne was not to be deterred.
‘Oh my giddy aunt! Oh no!? Je-SUS!’ she said gaily, as if she was being fun and not judgemental and prurient and generally awful. ‘But you’re not married?’
‘No.’
‘Do you want to be?’
‘Not really,’ Laurie said, shrugging. ‘I’m not madly pro or anti marriage.’
‘Maybe when you have kids?’ Suzanne supplied. Oh, subtle. Piss the piss off.
‘Are you married?’ Laurie said.
‘No!’ Suzanne shook her head and the lovely hair rippled. ‘I want to be married by thirty, for sure. I’ve got four years to find Mr Right.’
‘Why by thirty?’
‘I just kinda feel that I don’t want to be on the shelf.’ She paused. ‘No offence.’
‘Sure.’
Laurie briefly debated saying: you know that this is really rude, right? I mean you know you can’t stick ‘no offence’ on the end like it takes the curse off? And then made the usual British calculations about the ten seconds of triumph not being worth the hours of embarrassment and hostility afterwards.
‘Where are you from, Laurie?’ said Carly in the animal print top, sitting on the other side of Suzanne, and a familiar heavy lead settled in Laurie’s gut.
‘Yorkshire,’ she said, with a bright aw-hell-please-can-we-not smile, which she knew would be lost on the recipient. ‘You can probably tell from the accent.’
‘No, I meant where are you from?’ she said, vaguely gesturing at her own face. Of course you did.
The usual fork in the road opened up: answer the question she knew they were asking, or pretend not to understand and prolong the agony. If you didn’t pander to it you were being ungracious, chippy, making a thing of it. You were the problem.
‘Yorkshire, seriously. I was born at Huddersfield Royal.’
A moment ticked past and Suzanne, to no surprise whatsover, pitched in. ‘She means where are your mum and dad from?’
‘My dad’s from Oldham …’
A fresh tray of cocktails arrived, cucumbers curls inside like ribbons, and Laurie’s genealogy was abruptly demoted in interest.
‘… My Mum is from Martinique,’ she said, but a distracted Carly and Suzanne had already forgotten they’d asked.
‘Y’what?’
‘Martinique! My Mum is from Martinique!’ Laurie said shrilly, above the music, pointing at her face.
‘Your mum’s called MARTINE EEK?’
Fuck it.
‘I’m getting an Old Fashioned,’ Laurie said, standing up abruptly. Make of that name what you will.
Then she saw them, a chance glimpse through the shifting throng. Laurie involuntarily grinned at the ignoble thrill of unexpectedly seeing something she definitely wasn’t supposed to see, huddled in a banquette, twenty feet away.
Her colleague Jamie Carter was out with a gorgeous young woman. So far, so predictable. But, rather than an unknown lovely, Laurie was ninety-nine per cent sure that the woman he was cosying up to was the boss’s niece, Eve, who he was specifically warned off going anywhere near, the day before she arrived. Office gossip dynamite. Possibly employment contract terminating dynamite, depending on just how protective Mr Salter was.
The warning had been the source of much mirth at the office: Jamie really was a ‘Lock Up Your Daughters’ threat.
‘Might as well fit Carter with a GoPro, from what I heard,’ she’d guffawed, ‘The secret life of the neighbourhood tom.’
Laurie was picking at a bag of crimson seedless grapes at the time, and the office junior, Jasmine, unintentionally outed herself as yet another with a crush by blushing the same shade as the fruit.
Well, whatever had been said by his superiors, it obviously had a devastating impact. Jamie had the legal undergraduate and twenty-four-year-old babe out on her own after hours and sipping Havana Club within a week.
Laurie had to admire his balls. And no doubt she wouldn’t be the only one.
The risky choice of companion aside, The Refuge was exactly where she’d expect to see a man like Jamie on a Friday night. Chic’s ‘Good Times’ was blaring and an artwork directly above their heads, a factory chimney skyline picked out in black and white tiles, declared THE GLAMOUR OF MANCHESTER. He and Eve were suited to their subtitles.
A glittering cathedral of a bar inside a nineteenth-century hotel, it was only about fifteen minutes’ walk from their office on Deansgate. It wasn’t as if Jamie was in deep cover. Why take such a risk?
Perhaps he’d simply gambled he wouldn’t be caught here by any of the old sticks or suburban snipes among their colleagues. Yes, that would be it, as what little Laurie knew of Jamie suggested he’d enjoy playing the odds. It was unlikely he’d notice her, for more than one reason, in her vantage point among a gaggle of women at the other end of the room.
She could see Jamie was in his element, handsome face animated in storytelling, a palm theatrically clapped over forehead at one point to emphasise dismay or shame. Eve was visibly falling for him by another degree with each passing moment, her eyes practically star-shaped, like an emoji. (And didn’t he wear glasses, usually? Hah, the vanity.)
Jamie was clearly an expert at this, a completely practised hunter in his natural habitat. Whether Eve knew that she was this weekend’s antelope was another matter.
His hair was short and dark with a curl to it, his cheekbones like shoe moulds. They’d come straight from the office, him still in white shirt sleeves. And Eve … hmmm, Eve knew they’d be doing this, as she was in a navy pinstripe trouser suit, jacket discarded, with a red silk camisole, swinging earrings, matching spiky ketchup-coloured heels. No doubt her nine-to-five practical flats were crushed into that capacious bag (was that a Birkin? Oh to have rich uncles).
Laurie felt a shiver of awe at how well Jamie and Eve fitted in, amid the din and the crush of all these bright young things, their mating rituals, taut stomachs and brash confidence.
Imagine being single, she thought. Imagine being expected to go home and take your clothes off with someone you’d never met before. Horror. Doing it for a hobby, the way Jamie Carter did, felt alien to her. Thank God for Dan. Thank God for going home to someone who was home.
As Laurie waited in the four-person deep rabble at the bar, she pondered The Jamie Carter Phenomenon.
Jamie’s arrival had caused a stir from his first week at her law firm in the way conspicuously good-looking men were wont to do, and in the way anyone was wont to do in offices where people spent a lot of time in zoo captivity, feeding on distraction. The death of the fag break in the modern age, Laurie noticed, had been replaced by snouting round social media profiles for material for discussion. Laurie was constantly thankful her life was far too boring to make a sideshow.
At first there were excitable whispers at the water dispensers in Salter & Rowson solicitors that someone as fine as Jamie was single, wondering if he was an eligible bachelor, as if they were in an Austen novel. And, as Diana said, he was ‘without any baggage’, which Laurie always thought was a harsh way to refer to ex-spouses and children.
Then in time, the excitable whispers were about the fact he wasn’t apparently interested in dating anyone in particular, but that he’d disappeared off into the night with X or Y. (X or Y tended to be, like Eve, a beautiful intern, or a friend of an employee.) Laurie thought this was only a surprising turn of events if you’d never met a man with lots of options and nothing at stake before.
How old was he, thirty? And hungry for not just a plethora of dates but also professional advancement, if the second layer of whispers about him was to be believed.
The only unusual aspect to Jamie’s reputation as a stealth shagger was that he picked his targets cleverly. The interns had always finished their interning, the friend of a friend was never a close friend and what Russians called kompromat was scant. Therefore, while it was known he was a ladies’ man, he never got blamed for ladykilling, or suffered a poor testimonial about his sexual prowess from a scorned woman. Jamie Carter never got into any trouble. Until now, perhaps.
2
‘Hello?’ said a male voice at her elbow.
‘Hi,’ Laurie said, starting as the subject of her reverie appeared, as if she’d summoned him. She felt a stab of irrational guilt, having been thinking about Jamie, spying on him.
‘You out for the night?’ Jamie said. He disguised it well, but Laurie could see he was apprehensive. They’d never spoken at work, knew each other by sight only. He had no measure of her and no goodwill to exploit.
They were both lawyers: she could work backwards through his thought process in approaching her. He’d seen her, therefore there was a fair chance she’d seen him, with Eve. Better to brazen it out and act like he was doing nothing wrong than leave Laurie unattended with a tale to tell.
‘Yeah. Tagging along with my mate’s firm. You?’
‘Just a couple after work.’
Heh heh oh really. She toyed with asking ‘who with?’ but was a shade too drunk to judge whether it’d clang as obvious.
‘What’re you having? In case I get served first,’ he said.
Bribery now, was it.
‘Old Fashioned.’
‘That’s it? You’re queuing for one drink? Where are you sitting?’
Laurie pointed into the dining area.
‘There’s table service through there, you know?’
‘I wanted the change of scenery,’ Laurie said. ‘Where are you sitting?’
Yes, she could play mind games too. Knight to your Rook!
‘Same,’ Jamie said. ‘Last time, the waitress took too long. Mind you, this is carnage.’
Hmmm. He’d spotted her, panicked and made an excuse to follow her out here.
Laurie noticed when he spoke that his incisor teeth were tilted slightly inward, like an uncommitted vampire. She suspected this was the true secret of his incredible appeal, the deliberate flaw in the Navajo rug. Otherwise he was a little too wholesomely, straightforwardly good looking. Somehow, the teeth made you think carnal thoughts.
They suspended conversation to stake elbow space on the bar and catch the barman’s eye. Laurie got served first and volunteered to buy Jamie’s, but he wouldn’t let her.
She was less convinced this was chivalry than unwillingness for her to discover his order of a lager and a Prosecco with a raspberry bobbing in it, which made it clear he was on a date. She heard him tell the barman anyway. Her cocktail took long enough to make that they returned to their seats at the same time, having traded awkwardly shouted staccato remarks about how it was heaving in here. As they neared Laurie’s destination he stopped and leaned in to speak to her, over the Motown decibels.
‘Could I ask a favour?’
Laurie got a waft of light male sweat and classy aftershave. She fought to keep her face straight and look like she didn’t know what was coming.
‘What?’
‘Could you not mention – this – at work. Who I’m with?’ he gestured at Eve at their table, who was studying herself in a compact mirror. She had a feline sort of beauty, hair slicked into a long high ponytail. Like a sexy assassin. Laurie squinted and pretended it had dawned who it was.
‘Oh, why not?’ Laurie said, faux innocent.
‘It would be very much frowned upon by Statler and Waldorf.’
Statler and Waldorf was a longstanding nickname for Misters Salter and Rowson. Laurie knew why he was using matey we’re-in-this-together shop floor nicknames.
‘Why?’
‘I don’t think Salter wants his niece socialising with any of us.’
Laurie smiled. If she wasn’t miserable, wanting to further delay returning to Suzanne, and several drinks to the good, she might not wind him up. As it was …
‘By “socialising”, you mean shagging, and by “any of us”, you mean you?’
‘Well,’ Jamie shrugged, slightly taken aback and evidently at a momentary loss. ‘Who knows what goes through the old goat’s mind. You’d have to ask him.’
‘OK,’ Laurie said.
‘Thank you,’ Jamie exhaled.
‘… I’ll ask him!’
She waited for the punchline to land and enjoyed Jamie’s aghast expression when it did.
‘Hahaha!’
‘For fu—’ Jamie performed a mixture of bashful and still edgy. He was being winsome and acting vulnerable because right now she could choose to do him damage, of that she was sure.
‘I’m not a fan of the office gossip,’ Laurie said. ‘I won’t say anything. Don’t muck her around, OK?’
‘It’s not like that, I promise,’ Jamie said. ‘It’s career talk.’
‘Uh huh,’ Laurie said, casting her eyes back to where Eve was tilting her chin, pouting at her own reflection.
Laurie returned with heavy dread to her seat, only to see with joy that Emily was in it, and everyone else had clustered round the other side of the table to screech at something on one of the girl’s phones. Blessed release. Given the volume of the music, at this distance, they might as well have gone to Iran.
‘I am flying a humanitarian mission. Did you get Suzanne-ed?’ Emily said, as Laurie took Suzanne’s former position next to her.
‘Yep.’
‘She’s a complete fucking twat, isn’t she?’
Laurie’s Old Fashioned went down the wrong way as she coughed in delighted surprise and Emily slapped her heartily on the back.
When Laurie had her voice back, she said: ‘She let me know I was an old maid and weird nun for my uneventful romantic history.’
‘What a bleak cow. Last I heard she was hopping on Marcus from KPMG and he has a community dick, so no one’s taking her advice.’
Laurie coughed on her drink again. ‘A what?’
‘You know, used freely by everyone. Open access. A civic resource.’
Laurie managed to stop laughing long enough to add: ‘And she and Carly asked me where I was from.’
Emily did a grit-teeth face.
‘I said Yorkshire and they said …’
Emily put a hand on Laurie’s arm and tilted her head. ‘No, I meant where are you from?’
Emily had been spectator to this enough times to know how it went. In lairy younger years, it was usually Emily who jumped in with a: ‘First of all, how done you …’ while Laurie shushed her.
Oh Loz, I am sorry. Clients love them, so I’m scunnered. Why do bad people have to be good at their jobs?’
Laurie laughed, and remembered why she so often said yes to Emily. She thought there was a lot of truth in the closest friendships being unconsummated romances. Emily was a high-flying executive, Tinder adventuress and queen of the casual hook up, Laurie was serious and settled and steady, yet their differences only made them endlessly fascinated with the other.
They still had a sense of humour, and a bullshit detector, and priorities in common.
Emily opened a Rizla paper and put it on the table, dainty fingers sprinkling out a slim sausage of tobacco. Emily had smoked roll-ups ever since they met, when she hung out of Laurie’s bedroom window in halls, bottle of Smirnoff Moscow Mule in the other hand.
‘She asked me who did my work,’ Emily said.