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The thought of Joe’s box made me feel a bit weak again.
‘I’m going to go back to bed actually, forget the tea.’
‘Okey-dokey, my petal, I’ll be quiet later. It’s only a first date, don’t want to scare the poor boy. And don’t worry about your boyfriend running off like that, happens to the best of us.’
‘Does it?’
He paused. ‘Well, not me, no.’
‘Great, that’s very helpful, thanks.’ I plodded back to my bed and put my earplugs in.
By 3 p.m., I’d had a bath, eaten seven pieces of toast and honey, drunk three cups of tea and I was lying on the sofa watching an old DVD of Three Men and a Little Lady. I’d also carefully stalked Callum on Instagram and spent two hours wondering idly whether I could follow him. Then my phone vibrated with a WhatsApp from Bill.
You get home safely?
I typed out my reply, unsure whether he knew anything about Callum. I could tell him tomorrow. Didn’t feel up to it now.
Yes! Thank you for dinner! How’s the office?
Alright. But listen, do you mind if I don’t come for lunch tomorrow? I’m seeing Willow for a drink.
COURSE, don’t be silly. Where you guys going?
Dunno. Southbank maybe. Good date place, right?
I sent back a row of thumbs-up emojis and then flicked back to Callum’s Instagram again. Mostly pictures of rugby games and foreign beaches. Bit boring, if I was honest. Why was I obsessing over it?
I woke the following day feeling human again after spending the evening horizontal on my sofa, spooning Thai green curry and sweet clumps of coconut rice into my mouth. Lex had changed our lunch date to brunch, which seemed unlike her because she wasn’t much of a morning person. Eggstacy was a café in Notting Hill which, as its ludicrous name suggested, specialized in breakfast. Great folds of buttery scrambled eggs with Gruyère cheese grated over the top, creamed mushrooms, ramekins of smoky beans, thick slabs of white bread. Butter by the bucketful. I made myself walk there from the flat in preparation, given my supper the night before. It had not been a good weekend for calories.
Lex and I had known one another since we were eleven, when Mum and I moved to London. That was the year I left my primary school in the country, where I’d been taught by a teacher like Miss Honey in Matilda, and went to a secondary school near Mum’s flat in Battersea. The same school as Lex. There were no Miss Honeys there. Instead, I found classmates who were already into boys and eyeshadow and something called Take That. Lex took pity on me in the way that you might take pity on a cowering stray on the street.
‘Do you want to look at my sticker book?’ she said one lunchtime, which is still the best pick-up line that anyone’s ever used on me. And so, in the sweetly uncomplicated way that children do, we became friends. And we stayed friends.
We went on to Leeds together, both reading English, as did Bill, to study Physics. We formed an unlikely trio. The science nerd (Bill), the short, sex-obsessed blonde (Lex) and me, the tall, frizzy-haired romantic who was fixated with Sense and Sensibility and on the lookout for my own Willoughby.
Lex was already at a table by the time I got to Eggstacy, sweating from the exertion of walking up Holland Park Avenue. I waved at her from the door and pushed my way through the clusters of tables to the back.
‘Hi, love,’ I said, as she stood to hug me. ‘Welcome home. How was it?’
‘It was…’ She smiled at me coyly.
‘What?’
‘It was… Well… This happened.’ She thrust her hand towards me.
‘Lex, oh my God!’ There was a diamond ring on her finger. I took her hand in mine and pulled it towards my face. A diamond the size of a broad bean in the middle of the ring, surrounded by lots of smaller diamonds. ‘Are you kidding?’
‘No! It would be quite a weird joke, wouldn’t it?’ she said, smiling at me.
‘You’re engaged? To Hamish?’
‘Yes! Again, it would be quite weird if I’d got engaged to anyone else since I’d last seen you.’
‘Right, yes, ’course. Bloody hell. You could blind someone with that thing,’ I said, looking at the ring again. ‘I mean, congratulations.’ We were still both standing up so I reached over the table to hug her again. It felt weird though. Not the hug. The news. Lex was engaged. To Hamish. To someone she’d only been going out with for, what, a year? To someone I wasn’t wholly sure about. And I mean what’s the deal in this situation? When your best friend gets engaged to someone you’re not sure about?
‘Could I have a coffee?’ I said to a nearby waitress. ‘A really strong Americano?’
She nodded and went off.
A quick summary. Hamish was Lex’s boyfriend. Fiancé, I suppose I should call him now. He was a former rugby player-turned-banker with lumpy ears who Lex met in a pub in Kennington. I’d never been sure about him because he was the sort of man who made jokes about women staying in the kitchen. But whenever I asked why Lex put up with him, she’d smiled in a pathetic way and said that she liked him. After a couple of months of dating, she’d said that she loved him.
We sat down. ‘I mean, blimey,’ I went on. ‘Sorry. I’m just trying to process it. I had no idea,’ I said. ‘Did you?’
‘No, not really,’ she said, holding her hand out in front of her. The broad bean caught the bulb overhead and twinkled as if it was winking at me.
‘How did he do it?’
‘In bed in the hotel, classic Hammy.’
I nodded slowly. The way that Lex sometimes called Hamish ‘Hammy’ made me feel ill. Where was my coffee?
‘It was just after he tried to strangle me with my own hair actually,’ she went on.
‘What?’ I frowned at her.
‘Well, it was New Year’s Eve, in the morning. And we were in bed, just indulging a bit of harmless foreplay, when suddenly he grabbed a handful of hair and pulled it across my neck. I mean, what’s up with that?’
A man on the next-door table looked across at us.
‘What did you do?’ I whispered.
‘I kind of pretended to go along with it for a bit. Because you have to, right? And then he came and it was while we were lying there afterwards that he proposed.’ She had a sip of her tea and put the cup back down on its saucer. ‘Guys are so weird.’
‘Did you like it?’
‘The proposal?’
‘No! The hair thing. But yes, also the proposal.’
‘I didn’t not like it. It’s something a bit different, isn’t it, being throttled by your own highlights? And, yes to the proposal.’ She paused and looked directly across the table at me. ‘I know it’s quite quick. But, Pols, lying there, in that hotel room, it felt right. Honestly.’
I nodded again. I felt like there were a million questions I should be asking. Had they set a date? Had she told her parents? Had she thought about a dress? Were they having any sort of engagement party? But I wasn’t sure I could ask them genuinely enough. Convincingly enough. Was that bad? It was quite bad, wasn’t it? Unsupportive.
‘You’ll be my maid of honour, right?’ she said.
‘Yes, of course I will,’ I said, smiling back even though I felt alarmed at the prospect, worried that this meant traipsing down the aisle behind Lex like a giant 4-year-old in a hideous dress.
‘Great,’ she said. ‘I’m psyched about dress shopping. I’ll send you some dates because appointments get booked up.’ Lex works in fashion PR. I suspected she’d have ambitious ideas for her wedding dress.
‘Can’t wait!’ I said. There. Was that convincing? Did that sound enthusiastic? I wasn’t sure.
‘Anyway, let’s not do wedding stuff now, I can’t take it all in,’ she said, as if reading my mind. ‘How’s your weekend been?’
Finally, the waitress came back with my coffee. ‘Thanks,’ I said, as she put it down. ‘Well, no proposals,’ I said, pouring the thimble of milk into my coffee. ‘I went to Bill’s on Friday night for that dinner.’
‘Oh yeah, how was it? I missed you guys.’
‘Good,’ I said slowly. ‘I, er, I sort of kissed a friend of his actually.’
‘Oh excuse me,’ said Lex loudly, sitting forward in her seat.
‘What?’
‘Leaving it until now to drop the news that you got lucky. What’s he like? What does he look like? Did you touch his penis?’
‘Lex,’ I hissed, trying to quieten her.
‘Oh my God!’ she shrieked, ignoring me. ‘You might have a plus one for my wedding!’
The man on the table next to us shifted in his seat again, as if flinching.
‘Shhhhh! Lex, I don’t think we’re hearing wedding bells with this one. And “getting lucky” would be a generous description.’
‘Who is he?’
‘Just a friend of Bill’s. From business school. Called Callum.’
‘Aaaaand? Come on.’
‘And nothing. He came home with me and there was a bit of a disaster. That’s all.’
‘What do you mean, disaster?’
‘Not much.’ I glanced at the man next to us and lowered my voice again. ‘I gave him a blow job and then he went home.’
‘What do you mean home? Straight home? Straight after he came in your mouth?’
‘Shhhhh. Seriously. People can hear. And yes.’
‘You didn’t actually shag?’
‘No,’ I hissed.
‘Well,’ said Lex, leaning back in her seat again. ‘He has incredibly bad manners. Now, shall we order some eggs?’
‘Do you think I can start following him on Instagram?’ I asked. I was still wondering if I could, but also worrying this seemed a bit desperate. A bit keen. And I didn’t even know if I liked him. I was just feeling a bit low on excitement and the thing was, even though Callum had left after the blow job, I’d still come within touching distance of a penis. And that was rare. For me.
‘Do you want to see him again? Do you actually like him?’ she said.
I pulled a face. ‘Dunno. Am I just being desperate?’
‘Because something’s happened with him?’
‘Well, kind of. I guess because he’s the first heterosexual man to be in my flat for several decades.’
‘But he left immediately afterwards. Like, straight afterwards? No quick cuddle? No “we should do this again”?’
‘Nope.’
She winced. ‘Up to you, love, but I’d probably leave it.’
I’d always been bad at playing it cool. When I was eleven I went to my first disco in a hessian dress that Mum gave me for Christmas. She plaited my hair for the occasion after I showed her a picture from Just 17 magazine. The result was more Little House on the Prairie, but I didn’t let that stop me, chubby, 11-year-old me, asking handsome Jack – the boy every girl in Year 7 worshipped – for a dance. It was a particularly bold move on my part because handsome Jack was already on the dance floor with his girlfriend (the school bitch, Jenny) when I chose to walk up to him.
‘Yeah, maybe I should leave it,’ I said.
I looked down at my menu and tried to concentrate on what kind of eggs I wanted, but what I was actually thinking was that my best friend was getting married, and I didn’t even have a boyfriend. Which meant I still had to find someone, go out with them long enough for them to fall in love with me – and this could be many years – before he’d even propose. And as I’d just turned thirty, I did a quick calculation in my head, this meant I might not be married for at least five or six more years. And I definitely read something the other day about getting pregnant before you turned thirty-five, otherwise you had, like, a 3 per cent chance of even having children.
‘What eggs are you having?’ asked Lex.
But I wasn’t listening. Because now I was getting really hysterical. Maybe I’d never get married? Maybe I’d just go to all my friends’ weddings alone. Maybe all the wedding invitations I’d ever get would have a solitary ‘Polly’ written at the top of them and I’d go along and people would say ‘How’s the love life?’ and I’d say ‘Haven’t found one yet!’ in a falsely cheery manner and they’d look at me sadly, as if I’d just told them I’d got a terminal disease. And then they’d be dancing in couples after dinner and I’d be dancing on my own and all my friends would have children and I’d just become the weird, asexual old woman – Auntie Polly – who’d come over for lunch every now and then smelling of dust and Rich Tea biscuits. ‘Poor old Polly,’ friends would say to one another. ‘Such a pity, she just never met anyone.’ And I’d die alone in my flat and it would be months before anyone found me. Although it probably wouldn’t even be my flat since I couldn’t afford to buy one and I didn’t even know what a pension was either and…
‘POLLY?’ said Lex.
I looked up. ‘Yes?’
‘What eggs are you going to have?’
‘Oh. Dunno. I was just thinking about pensions.’
‘You’re so weird,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I’m having scrambled with a side of avocado. And another cup of tea.’
I looked down at the menu again. Eggs, I thought. Ha! It was all very well for Lex to bang on about eggs. Her eggs were probably fine. It was mine I was worried about.
On Monday morning, I went through my usual routine: arrive at work, drop bag on desk, go to Pret for an Americano, come back to desk, check all forms of social media on phone and computer despite the fact I had been checking them constantly on the bus on the way in. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, repeat.
My finger hovered over the ‘Follow’ button again on Callum’s Instagram profile. I was still obsessing over it. Good idea? Bad idea? Should I? Shouldn’t I? In the unlikely event that I was ever the President of the United States, I would have to be more decisive than this with any nuclear buttons. I tapped on ‘Follow’ and quickly put my phone back on my desk again.
‘Polly, can you come into my office in ten minutes,’ shouted Peregrine from his office. ‘We need to be all over this story about Jasper Milton. Lala, too. Where is Lala?’
‘Not sure,’ I said slowly, frowning at the desk next to me where Lala should have been sitting. ‘I’ll text her.’
Technically, Lala’s job meant that she looked after the party pages in Posh!, the pages where terrifically fat, red-faced men danced with terrifically thin, plastic-surgeried women. In reality, it meant Lala emailed her friends every now and then asking if she could photograph their wedding. She was twenty-eight and ravishingly beautiful. Even on a bad day, Lala still looked like a messy Brigitte Bardot, blonde hair piled on top of her head, black eyeliner still on from the night before. The daughter of the fifteenth Earl of Oswestry, she could tell you the difference between a soup spoon and a dessert spoon. On the other hand, she couldn’t tell you who the prime minister was, or what one plus three amounted to, or much about anything else. Her love life was similarly chaotic. Men worshipped her for the first few dates, but the last three men she’d dated had all gone silent after she slept with them. ‘I think I’m maybe doing it wrong,’ Lala had said sadly at her desk a few months ago, before ordering The Joy of Sex from Amazon.
Morning, La, he’s on the rampage. When you getting in? X
I put my phone back on my desk. Next job: find out what Jasper Milton, the Marquess of Milton and notorious society heart-throb, had been up to now. Lala had once snogged him while at a shooting weekend in Gloucestershire, and they’d gone on a few dates afterwards. Lala’s mother was thrilled at the prospect of her daughter dating the country’s most eligible bachelor. But he’d ended things with Lala a couple of weeks later by failing to turn up to dinner with her, having spent the day in a Knightsbridge casino gambling on the Cheltenham Races.
‘I don’t want to go out with someone who prefers horses to me,’ Lala said tearfully in the office the next day. I hadn’t wanted to tell her that this counted out almost the entire British aristocracy.
Jasper, I knew from working at Posh!, was always photographed at parties, drink in one hand, fag in the other, women standing adoringly around him. But I hadn’t read any of the papers that weekend so I quickly googled him, to find out what Peregrine was banging on about. Ah, here we go. I clicked on the headline for the Mail on Sunday:
EXCLUSIVE: PLAYBOY SINGLE AGAIN!
A picture below showed a handsome blond figure falling through a nightclub door, shirt undone, feet bare. ‘Some say it was only a matter of time,’ started the story, ‘but the Mail on Sunday can confirm that Jasper, the Marquess of Milton, has ended his relationship with Lady Caroline Aspidistra after just three months.
‘Sources close to the Marquess, pictured here in Kensington on Friday evening, say the couple had an argument over his partying habits and his late-night return from The Potted Shrimp nightclub in Chelsea earlier last week proved the final straw for Lady Caroline.
‘It’s the latest in a steady stream of break-ups for the 32-year-old playboy, who last year alone was linked to Princess Clara of Denmark, Lady Gwendolyn Sponge and the actress, Ophelia Jenkins. Friends are said to be worrying that he still shows no inclination to settle down.’
Jasper himself was quoted towards the end of it. ‘Caz is a wonderful girl. Much too good for me if I’m honest. But we’ve gone our separate ways. And that’s all I’m going to say on the matter, I’m afraid. Now sod off and leave me to my hangover.’
Apart from Jasper’s reputation as a dangerous heartbreaker, I didn’t know much else about him. I clicked on to his Wikipedia page and scrolled down. He grew up in a castle in Yorkshire, was kicked out of Eton for seducing a matron then went into the Army and did a six-month stint serving in Iraq. It didn’t seem very clear what he was doing now, apart from falling out of nightclubs, but his lack of A-levels or job didn’t much matter because he was next in line to a whopping fortune.
His father was the Duke of Montgomery, an army sort who had won a military medal for bravery in the Falklands and was worth a rumoured £500 million. Rumour also had it he had an increasingly dicky heart, meaning Jasper would inherit a 120-room castle in Yorkshire, 15,000 acres of the countryside, another 20,000 acres of Scotland, a townhouse in South Kensington and all the art, furniture and silver that the family had accumulated over the centuries.
‘I’M HERE!’ screamed Lala, bursting through the door. ‘So sorry, what an awful morning. I had the most terrible dreams last night and then my hairdryer wouldn’t work and then I couldn’t find any clean knickers and…’
‘Don’t worry but you-know-who wants to talk to us about Jasper Milton. Have you heard?’
‘Oh dear, poor Jaz, what’s he done this time?’ said Lala, emptying her pockets onto her desk. Coins, chewing gum wrappers, lighters, lip balms and taxi receipts fluttered everywhere.
‘Single again apparently. Split from Lady Caroline Whatshername. There are some photos of him falling out of a club that the Mail has.’
Lala peered over my shoulder at my screen. ‘Oh, I knew that wouldn’t last. Although…’ She stood up and counted on her fingers. ‘Three months. Not bad for him. Probably a record.’
‘CAN YOU BOTH GET INTO MY FUCKING OFFICE THIS FUCKING SECOND. THIS IS A MAJOR FUCKING STORY.’
‘Hang on, let me find a hair tie. Where are all my hair ties?’ said Lala, leaning over the desk and prodding at the pile of dirty wrappers.
‘Never mind your hair. Come on, let’s go through before we’re flayed.’
‘Right, you two,’ said Peregrine, not looking up from his computer as we walked in. ‘The most eligible chap in the country is up for grabs. Yet again. I want to go big on this so we’ve got to get a move on.’
‘What about a piece on the family as a whole?’ I ventured. ‘We talk to everyone we can think of who knows the family. How’s the Duke? What’s the feeling? What’s going on with the Duchess? That sort of stuff.’
I glanced at Lala for some input, but she was doodling a flower on her notepad.
‘A big profile on the whole family, basically,’ I pressed on.
‘No, no, no, the papers have all that already, they’ll already have people in the village now, trying to dig stuff up on the Duke’s health. I want more. I want to know what the Duke has for breakfast, what that bonkers Duchess does all day, what Jasper does all day, kicking about at home. Why can’t he find love? Why can’t he settle down? What’s he really looking for? We need to give our readers more than a few quotes from an unnamed source. I want a proper, insider look at this.’
‘I could always ask Jasper if we could have an interview?’ said Lala, looking up from her notepad.
‘Would he do it?’ asked Peregrine, scratching at his scalp. Dandruff floated to the floor like little snowflakes.
‘I don’t know, but I can ask him,’ Lala replied, lowering her head again to her flower.
Peregrine sighed. He struggled with Lala, with her lateness, with the Monday mornings when Lala only appeared in the office at midday. Her list of improbable excuses had previously included lack of sleep due to bed bugs and having to call a handyman round to get rid of a spider in her bath. But equally, the office needed Lala. Her random musings on British toffs – ‘Oh, by the way, I heard this weekend that the Duke of Anchovy is having an affair with his butler’ – were vital to the magazine.
‘OK, Lala, marvellous, thank you. Could you possibly get in touch with Jasper this morning and see what he says?’
‘’Course. Could I just go and get a coffee first? I’m desperate for a coffee, didn’t get much sleep last night.’
‘OK, go and get a coffee and then could you kindly find Jasper for us? If you can possibly manage that teeny-tiny one thing this morning?’
‘Yah, yah, I’ll track him down, Peregrine, don’t you worry. Poor old Jaz.’
‘In the meantime, Polly, I want you to be in charge of this. So can you make a start on research. Go through old issues; we did an interview with the Duke five years ago. I think that was when he trod on a gun and accidentally shot one of his Labradors.’
‘On it.’
I spent the rest of the day alternating between research on the Montgomerys and obsessively checking Instagram to see if Callum had followed me back. If, at any moment, I had to step away from my desk – to Peregrine’s office, to the loo, to Pret at lunchtime – I took my phone and obsessively checked that too. But by 5.30 p.m. Callum still hadn’t followed me back and my mood was hovering somewhere between high-risk depression and suicide.
‘So there’s good news,’ said Lala, the next morning in Peregrine’s office, twirling a strand of hair around her pen. ‘Jasper says he will do an interview, an exclusive one because he trusts us, but I don’t want to do it. It would be a bit strange, you know, given everything…’
‘Terrific, thank you, Lala. Congratulations on the most productive thing you’ve ever done. When can he do it?’
‘Well, he suggested the last weekend in January, at home. Montgomery Castle. They’re shooting so everyone’s at home, and he said whoever does the interview is very welcome to join them for Saturday, for the shoot, then stay for dinner on Saturday night. If that works?’
‘Why are they giving us so much access?’ I asked. I was suspicious. Normally, you were given half an hour with an interview subject, you had to email your entirely inoffensive list of questions over beforehand – What’s your favourite colour? What’s your star sign? What’s your favourite animal? – and then a minder would sit in on the interview, like a Rottweiler waiting to tear the journalist apart if they dared deviate from their questions.