The One Before The One

CHAPTER SIX

After a bus ride, where Lexi goes on about how I am so much prettier than Polly and how Martin wanted me back, she could see it in his eyes, we end up in a Mexican on the King’s Road.

Lexi studies me over her menu, twiddling her fringe. ‘Are you all right?’ she asks.

‘Me? Fine.’

‘Are you upset about Polly?’

‘No. No,’ I say, totally unconvincingly. ‘It was going to happen sooner or later.’ Although I didn’t expect it quite so soon. We only split up last September. That’s nine months ago. Nine months to get over a fourteen-year relationship? I thought I might have made a little more impact than that.

‘Can I ask you a question, then?’

‘Fire away,’ I say, forcing a smile.

‘Was I right?’

I scour the menu, pretending to be making vital decisions between a burrito and a taco.

‘Right about what?’

‘The dress.’ She puts the menu down now and folds her slim, tanned arms. ‘The wedding dress? Look, I know it’s none of my business but I think the reason you were wearing your wedding dress when I turned up and that you were drunk …’

I wince at the drunk bit.

‘… and sh-mok-ing …’

‘Now you’re just rubbing it in.’

‘… was because you were upset about Martin, you know, and the fact –’ she cocks her head to the side sympathetically, which makes me feel even more terrible – ‘the wedding didn’t happen?’

‘If only it were that simple,’ I say, in a you-wouldn’t-understand-you’re-only-seventeen kind of a way.

But clearly she does understand, because then she says, ‘Caroline. How many times have you had that dress on?’

‘Why? What’s it to you?’

‘Come on, I just wanna know. How many times have you had it on in, say, the past six months?

I don’t know how the wedding dress thing happened, it just did, a self-indulgent little ritual that got out of control. It was a bit like how some people feel the need to get all their hair hacked off when a relationship ends, or go out and get drunk.

That dress was gorgeous, too, a vintage-style gown with silk sleeves sliced to the waist and a four foot train. I pictured myself walking down the aisle, smiling and radiant on my wedding day, arm in arm with Dad, who, for just that one day, would be there for me. Just me. I would be a success story. Because someone wanted me and loved me enough to marry me.

But, in the end, that dress, which was supposed to represent My Future, just smells faintly of cigarette smoke and regret and sits at the top of my wardrobe only to be brought out after another romance bites the dust, so I can wallow in could-have-beens.

Of course, Lexi’s right; the first time it came out was two months after Martin and I finished, which was one month after the wedding that never happened, which, like I say, was almost a year now and I’m still wracked with guilt …

‘Hello?’ Lexi says. She’s got her ‘computer generated’ voice on. ‘Calling Caroline Steele to planet Earth. Calling Caroline Marie Steele—’

‘Three times, okay? I’ve had the dress on three times.’

She raises an eyebrow.

‘Okay, possibly five. And, yes, if you must know, I did once put it on and get drunk and listen to Pat Benitar because I was upset about Martin – but that wasn’t really why I had it on when you arrived.’

‘Right, got yer,’ says Lexi. ‘So who were you crying about, then?’

Who was I crying about? It’s hard to tell. Since Martin and the first outing of the dress, there’s been a wake of casualties: Nathan – a Kiwi I met on a client do who I fancied like mad but who then asked me if I wanted to come and visit his mum in New Zealand three weeks after I started seeing him. I made a sharp exit in the opposite direction. There was Mark – I had hopes for him, could have really fallen for his green eyes and penchant for obscure French films, but then I realized he was just pretentious. In the end, I could no longer tolerate him calling me Carol-eeen (if he had actually been French that would have been fine, but he wasn’t, he was from Walsall). And of course there was Garf, lovely Garf, who I dumped at his sister’s wedding, which was held at Walthamstow Dogs Track (not that his family’s love of dog racing was a deal-breaker or anything). He was the sweetest of the lot and he could have really loved me, but I couldn’t love him, probably because I was already falling for someone else by then, I just didn’t know it yet.

So, a pattern emerged. Every time a relationship ended, I would find myself getting sentimental and morose and drinking alone in my wedding dress. But really, I wasn’t upset about Nathan or Mark or Garf, I was just upset that, at thirty-two, I was no closer to finding The One, and asking myself whether I’d made a huge mistake letting Martin go. After all, I still loved him, even if he was a bit middle-aged, had over-bearing parents and could spend three hours making the perfect pesto. I just don’t know whether I was ever in love with him, that’s all, not after the first few years anyway. But the older I get and the more complicated life becomes, I am beginning to wonder whether I could settle for ‘love’ rather than ‘in love’, which everybody knows is the solid, reliable concrete that remains beneath your feet, when the sparkling snow has melted away.

Still, I reasoned, it could be worse. At least I had the book club …

CHAPTER SEVEN

Toby leans coolly against my bedroom window frame, takes a slow, deep drag on his cigarette, his eyebrows smouldering as he does. I swear he’s putting that on now.

‘God, you really look like James Dean doing that.’

‘Do I?’ he says.

‘Yes, except for maybe the socks.’ I squint at his feet. ‘Are they actually South Park socks?’

It’s a rare man that can pull off nudity avec South Park socks with all the style and nonchalance of a Hollywood sex god, but Toby Delaney manages to.

I sit up in bed and pull the sheet up so my nipples don’t escape. It’s 8.08 p.m., still broad daylight outside, the hum of traffic from Battersea Park Road just audible, and Toby is smoking a post-coital cigarette out of my bedroom window. It’s something he’s done every other Wednesday for the past five months, a ritual of the ‘book club’. Except, it isn’t a book club at all. It’s more, well, it’s more of a fuck club. With just the two members: Toby and me.

Rachel, Toby’s wife thinks it’s a book club. She thinks that every second Wednesday, Toby comes to my house in Battersea to discuss the naked prose of M. J. Hyland, when really, he’s just there to get naked with me.

I sink further down into the duvet and take a moment to savour his physical form. I never know when it might be my last chance, after all. When all this might implode. When he, or I, decide we can’t do this any more. His long, slim legs, which drive me crazy, his bum, possibly less firm than it could be but that’s because he spends so much time sitting on it. Lazy bugger. His … Yep, he’s got a very nice one. Surely it spells trouble if you’re starting to find their flaccid penis attractive?

My eyes move up his body to that flat, boyish belly of his, which he’s always stuffing but which never increases. It incites a sort of erotic envy in me. His chest, lean yet broad, that perfect smattering of darkish hair and then that bizarre, mutant third nipple, tiny like a baby’s, which apparently is very common and which I find thrilling because when he’s at work I know it’s there, under his shirt. Our little secret. And, finally, his face. The bit I crave the most when he’s not here: that gorgeous line from his Adam’s apple to his chin to his jaw, emphasized by a two-day shadow, which I know he’s kept for me because I’ve got a thing for facial hair. (A throwback from a crippling crush on Tom Selleck in Three Men and a Baby). The fine, distinguished nose and the sexy quiff of a fringe. Then the famous Delaney eyebrows, which I love and despise all at the same time because they give away all of his feelings. They frequently disappoint me.

Toby sucks hard on his Lucky Strike.

‘So what did you tell your sister again?’ he asks.

‘That I was hosting a book club. That it would be full of geeks reading War and Peace and that she’d hate it.’

Toby laughs.

‘Steele, you’re a genius. And did she buy it?’ He exhales the last of his cigarette and gets back into bed, slipping his cool, hard body next to mine.

‘Oh yeah, totally. She was like, “yawn” and other teenage expressions denoting boredom.’

Toby smiles, amused, snuggles under the duvet and grabs my bum.

‘Anyway, she said she was going swimming followed by some body combat class at the gym, thank God. Otherwise, I don’t know what I would have said to get her out of the house.’

‘Like I said, Steeley, perhaps we’ll have to de-camp.’ Toby puts one arm across my chest then pulls me on top of him.

‘Decamp what?’

‘The book club, of course.’ He cups my boobs in his hands and gives them a squeeze. ‘I can’t do without my book club, no way. I’d go crazy with lust.’

‘Really?’ I say, with more hope in my voice than I’d intended.

‘Er, yeah. Let’s see.’ He frowns up at the ceiling in mock concentration. ‘Firstly, with whom else would I get to discuss whether Pride and Prejudice is, in fact, the perfect novel?’

He gives one of his infectious schoolboy giggles and I kiss him on the lips.

‘How would I get through the week without hearing what a genius – who’s that Japanese bloke you love?’

‘Murakami.’

‘Yeah, him. What a genius he is. Where would we be without having to make it through another fucking Joanna Trollope novel?’ We both burst out laughing. ‘Shit, I mean, seriously!’ We’re both snorting now. ‘Enough to make you want to open a vein. And then there’s that Houellebecq dude. What a barrel of laughs he was.’

He assumes a deep, pompous voice. ‘“I found Atomised very nihilistic text.”’

I bury my head in his chest and shake with laughter.

‘Don’t be mean! At least Charles was actually taking it seriously, unlike someone I know.’

‘Who was just there because he fancied the arse off a certain book club member? A member who, as well as exquisite taste in literature, also happens to have the best norks in London.’ He squeezes them again and we end up snogging.

I guess this is how I manage to square all this in my head (which most of the time I don’t, meaning I spend my waking hours swinging between ridiculous excitement at the prospect of the ‘book club’ and feeling like a wanton whore who is destined for hell). There once was an actual book club. Once upon a time, that wasn’t a lie. It was Marta’s idea, Marta being the office martyr, arranging countless, thankless, work-bonding events. We needed a venue, so I volunteered. It had been two months since Martin moved out and I liked the idea of the house being full once a fortnight. I imagined we’d sit around a roaring fire, sipping vintage Merlot and discussing so-and-so’s use of personification and whether we identified with such-and-such protagonist. What actually happened was that we’d discuss the book for ten minutes, get slaughtered on Blossom Hill. Then have a row.

What was supposed to be a bonding exercise ended up dividing the office. It was ‘us’: Me, Toby, Shona and Charles from marketing (‘The ones with degrees,’ Toby would comment with typical scathing humour) and ‘them’: Marta, Health and Safety Heather and Toupee Dom (‘the plebs’ – Toby, again). The plebs thought our book choices were pretentious. We thought theirs were lame. Everything came to a head when Toby said that Heather’s choice – admittedly it was Flowers in the Attic by Virginia Andrews – had less literary merit than a McDonald’s menu, and she fled from the club in tears.

And so, one by one, people fell away until it was just Toby and I who found ourselves in my lounge, books in hands. I knew immediately this was a bad idea. We were reading Intimacy by Hanif Kureishi (my choice). An account of the night before a man leaves his wife, charting the unravelling of a relationship; how you can look at someone you’ve known for ten years and feel nothing.

‘How can you be married to someone for ten years and feel nothing?’ I said. We were sitting at my dining table. I’d lit candles – something I’d never done when everybody else was here.

‘Oh, it’s possible, believe me,’ said Toby, those eyebrows smouldering, fixing me with his hypnotic blue eyes ‘And it doesn’t have to take ten years.’

I read a passage aloud. The drunker we got, the more seriously we were taking it. Or perhaps it was because discussing the book meant we didn’t have to acknowledge the strangling sexual tension in the room. I could feel Toby’s eyes burn my eyelids as I read. I looked up from the book and he was still holding my gaze. I read on, my heart thumping. Then there was a line where the narrator says how he never found a way to be ‘pleasurably idle’ with his wife; how she was always so busy, wanted too much out of life.

‘I know that feeling,’ said Toby. His gaze was intense, penetrating. Gone was the usual, puppy-dog Toby; he was serious. ‘Feeling neglected, unimportant.’

The room had gone deathly quiet and I pulled a face. No doubt wholly unattractive, but nerves do that to me.

Then Toby said: ‘You know what, Caroline (he never called me Caroline, only Steeley)? I think you may be one of the few women who does understand me.’

I downed a glass of red in one. Then Toby sat down next to me, moved his face millimetres from mine and kissed me, but I’d not had time to swallow the wine so a dribble ended up in his mouth.

‘Sorry!’ Another bit escaped down my chin, so I now resembled an incompetent vampire.

‘Don’t apologize,’ he said. ‘Red wine and Caroline Steele. Two of my favourite things.’

Things went from nought to sixty in about ten minutes. We abandoned the books and my top and started on the vodka (the beginning of the end). The next thing I know, I’m lying on the lounge floor smoking Lucky Strikes whilst Toby showers my belly with kisses (the end of the end) and he’s telling me he thinks I’m ‘enigmatic’ and I’m telling him I find it hard not to touch him at work, that I think he looks like James Dean. At which point, I imagine, I ceased to be enigmatic.

And then he says, giving me the most gorgeous, stubbly kiss, ‘Well, if I’m going to live fast and die young I’d better get the snogs in now …’ And a small explosion took place in my groin.

Then we ended up in my bed.

‘We need condoms!’ I said as he pulled my tights off. ‘We need condoms and we need fags!’ That’s the last thing I remember. I woke up, with just my bra on, a Lucky Strike – you live, or you die, the in-joke of the evening – lodged between my cleavage.

In this case, I died. Of utter embarrassment. Talk about out of character. Toby, on the other hand, thought it was hysterical.

‘And I thought you were stuck up,’ he said, laughing and laughing in the office kitchen the next day, as I stood, face in hands.

‘This can never, ever happen again,’ I hissed. ‘You are bloody well married and I … I want to be single.’

He raised his James Dean eyebrows at me. My cheeks burned furiously.

‘Not that I was suggesting …’

‘Oh, Steeley,’ he said, with his sexy little lisp, taking my hand. ‘Take a chill pill. It’ll be our little secret.’ Then he sighed. ‘But yes, you’re right, we can’t do this again’. He grimaced in a way that told me he didn’t mean this at all. ‘You are, however, sexy as hell. Remember that.’

I did. Oh, I did.

I shuffled into work later after a horrifying, near-vomit experience on the tube where I heaved, but nothing came out, so that people on my carriage just parted, like a wave as I made a sound like a dying walrus. I was green and the heel of one shoe was missing. Last seen, rolling down the escalator of Marble Arch station.

As the day wore on and the alcohol wore off, the reality of what I’d done hit me. I’d slept with a married man. In the space of five months, I had dumped my fiancé, dumped a string of men and slept with someone else’s husband.

And it had all started off so well, too! For the first four years of working together, I was the only person out of twenty-two graduates on the Skidmore-Colt-Davis graduate trainee scheme who hadn’t had so much as a party kiss with Mr Delaney. This was my first grown-up, ‘proper’ job, after all, and I was in the thick of a ten year, very grown-up relationship with Martin Squire. So whilst all my new colleagues were out drinking till 3 a.m. and jumping into one another’s beds, I was batch-cooking risotto.

‘Two birds with one stone, Caro!’ Martin would proudly announce, like batch-cooking actually elevated him to a higher spiritual plain. ‘This will do us for tea and five days of lunches!’

It has come to light since – I know because he’s told me – that Toby was somewhat fascinated by me. He was the unmistakable heartthrob of the grad scheme. His unique blend of raw sexiness and little-boy-lost look had all the girls wanting to soothe his hangovers, then roger him senseless and bear his children, me included.

And yet I never stayed behind to get drunk, always went home to the boyfriend. That wasn’t to say I didn’t have the same filthy thoughts as everyone else, I was just a pro at self-control. On the few occasions that Martin and Toby met at work drinks, I would squirm, then feel terrible for squirming. They would talk about music – nobody is less sporty than Martin and it seems to be sport or music with men. I would be trying to concentrate on whatever conversation I was having whilst overhearing Martin going, ‘David Gray, Toby, he’s your man!’ whilst Toby raised his eyebrow at me over Martin’s shoulder and tried not to laugh.

Then, in 2004, four years after Toby and I met on the first day of the grad scheme, he was head-hunted and we didn’t see each other for another four years. But then, one day in the October of 2008, I heard a familiar voice in the office: loud, slightly husky, with an adorable lisp. My stomach turned upside down.

So now we’re here, with me snogging a married man in the living room of the house I used to share with my fiancé. Like I said, it was all going so well …

Perhaps, I reasoned, that now I was going to hell anyway, I may as well get the best seat there, because despite my resolve, come a fortnight later, when Toby kissed me outside the tube station, cocked his eyebrow and said, ‘Back to yours?’ I dissolved.

Well, that was it. I had lost face, dignity, any enigmatic qualities I might have ever possessed. I was damned if he thought he was just going to continue to get me drunk, then have his wicked way with me any time he wanted. I was damned if I was going to get involved. If we were going to play this game, then there were going to be some rules. The book club rules. My house, every other Wednesday. Out by 9.30 p.m.

So, in an effort to show Toby Delaney that I am not the sort of girl he can just get slaughtered then shag, I have become the sort of girl who makes a fortnightly appointment to sleep with someone’s husband. Which suits me fine, of course. Sex with someone who is already taken. I couldn’t get involved if I wanted to.

We’re dozing in bed now. Beside me I can see the red digits of my clock winking, menacingly: 8.16 p.m. Forty-four minutes until he has to go.

‘Would sex vixen of SW11 care for a glass of wine?’ asks Toby.

I roll on top of him and sigh. ‘Is it that time already?’

‘’Fraid so, treacle.’ He smacks my bottom. ‘Wine time, home time … Worst luck.’

I kiss his nose and get out of bed. ‘You don’t mean that,’ I say, turning towards the window so he can’t see my smile.

We get dressed and go down to the kitchen. Post-coital, ice-cold Sauvignon Blanc being one of the book club rituals.

‘Do you know what I love about you most, Steeley?’ says Toby, pouring me a glass.

‘No, go on, what do you love most about me?’

‘You’re like a bloke.’

‘Oh.’

‘Oh, baby!’ he says, seeing my face fall. This time his schoolboy snort is a little irritating. ‘I don’t mean in the way you look – you’re foxy as all hell, you know I think that – I just mean in the way you are.’ He pushes me gently against the worktop and kisses me. ‘You have a rare gift for a woman.’

Our noses are touching now; I’m staring right into his blue, blue eyes.

‘Really? And what’s that?’

‘You’re able to compartmentalize things. Get what you want, when you want. You’re in control of things. It’s ridiculously sexy …’ He puts his hand between my legs. I remove it.

‘Stop that! You’ll set me off.’

‘Like, take a look at this. This book club. This little fuck club of ours, young lady.’ He’s putting his hands through my hair piling it on top of my head.

I open my mouth to laugh but nothing comes out.

‘Don’t pretend you didn’t orchestrate all this. This suits you down to the ground, doesn’t it? You schedule me in on a fortnightly basis. Three hours. Your house. Nice and tidy.’

I prod his stomach, look at him saucily.

‘Now you’re making me out to be some sort of cold fish.’

‘I’m trying to give you a compliment, actually. All I’m saying is that you’re not governed by constant, irrational emotion like most women, are you, Caroline?’

‘Oh God no. No, no! Never been like that.’

‘Not like Rachel. Jesus! She’s such a woman, is Rachel.’

I lean against his chest. The mention of Rachel – which doesn’t happen often – incites a sort of fascinated fear in me. Like I want him to shut up and carry on all at the same time.

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘I just mean it’s constant, you know?’

‘Constant what?’

Don’t dig too much. Remain nonchalant. Nonchalant and not governed by constant, irrational emotion.

‘Constant woman-ness with her. It’s all about her, Steeley. If she’s not spending the whole bloody weekend counselling some boring friend about her drama, she’s having a drama herself. Or we’re going to yet another do with the boring Uni Girls, or yet another boring awards ceremony for her. Or she’s working, always working.’

I feel a stab of insecurity. Rachel is well-known in the industry for winning awards. When she first met Toby she was selling soft drinks and used to sweep the board at the Trade’s Awards, twice being named Sales Person of the Year.

‘Sex has gone completely off the radar, she’s not interested.’

‘How …’ I kiss him ‘… can that be possible when you’re such an irresistible sex god?’

He laughs.

‘She’s uptight. Doesn’t let herself go, like you. If we do have sex, it’s like something that’s got to be factored in to her tight schedule, something on her fucking endless To Do list, do you know what I mean?’

I shake my head. To Do list. Who would reduce their entire life to a To Do list?

‘To be honest, sometimes,’ he says, ‘I feel like an extra in the show that is Rachel’s life.’

‘Well,’ I say, slipping a hand under his shirt. (Must balance fine line between wanton sex goddess and only-woman-who-understands-him.) ‘We can’t have that.’

Toby cups my face in his hand.

‘Fuck me, I fancy you,’ he says. ‘What is it about you, Caroline Steele, that means that when I am around you, I just want to have sex with you?’