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The following is a transcript of what everyone else in the world is able to call Chat, but because Tom changed my language settings to Pirate English, I was forced to call Parlay. The Pirate setting renamed my Like button as Arr! and turned all my friends into Wenches and Scurvy Dogs, which I can only assume Tom found hilarious. I would have changed it back, but I had no idea how he did it. And then it was too late to ask him . . .
LADY MO: No, no! Spent six months at Catchpole London before begging for a transfer to the Charlotte office! London is as grey and depressing as my mother’s latest perm! Why not pick somewhere romantic? Like Paris? Surely one cannot bypass the home of Fabrice?
DARRELL: All French I know comes from the song Lady Marmalade. Do not want to ask for bread and end up with an unidentifiable bit of cattle beast. Besides, London is home of 1930s fabulousness! Debutantes! Gentlemen’s clubs! (like Whites, not like Stringfellows.) Tea at the Ritz! In Miss Marple, they are always going up to town to buy glass cloths and meet at Lyons Corner House. And anyhow, Fabrice was a regular visitor to London, remember? Though he probably wasn’t there to buy glass cloths.
LADY MO: Are you aware Lyons Corner House once owned by Nigella Lawson’s family?
DARRELL: Nigella aka Lucky Cow?
LADY MO: Same. Although name is Nigella, so...
DARRELL: Forgetting MY name? Anyway, back to London. Where did you live whilst there?
LADY MO: (suppressing shudder) Dalston. Dodgy part. Flat was the size of a raisin box and smelled like the inside of a rubber boot recently occupied by a farmer’s damp woollen sock. Surely there are other options? Prague, for instance? Looks like fairyland on Living Channel travel shows.
DARRELL: Prague? Wait. Googling now . . . All right. Prague is beautiful, I’ll give you that. However, weather stats indicate it also to be cold as buggery. Google also provided image of Vaclav Havel. Looks like a dying horse. If Vaclav a typical Czech man, then Prague is a no go.
LADY MO: Is a man a mandatory part of your new life?
DARRELL: Yes. Also children. Also a career as bestselling author. And a big woolly cream-coloured dog.
LADY MO: Could it benefit you to relax your parameters just a smidge?
DARRELL: Girl can dream, can’t she? (Hint: a good friend would not burst bubble.)
LADY MO: But British men are not the stuff of fantasy! British men are stunted! Weazened! Have teeth that look like joke ones you buy for Halloween!
DARRELL: Yes, but you say that in retrospect of being married to Chad, who looks as if he should be attracting small planetary systems into his orbit.
LADY MO: True. Chad not perfect, though.
DARRELL: ???!!
LADY MO: Harry is perfect. Chad is runner-up. Oo! Idea! Why not come here? Charlotte is a very cool city! Nowhere near backward as the rest of the US South!
DARRELL: You have scooped the perfect life there. With my luck, only suitors will be a man with no front teeth and a banjo wearing a singlet that says ‘When I die bury me upside down so the whole world can kiss my ass’ or a man sporting a navy blazer with gold buttons and a smile that can only be described using the word ‘glint’.
LADY MO: Chad has a navy blazer. But he only wears it when his mother makes him. How about New York? Only short plane trip away from me and my perfect life.
DARRELL: If Sarah Jessica struggled to find a man, what hope for me?
LADY MO: Aware that Sex and City is fiction?
DARRELL: Lines blurry.
LADY MO: Also aware that Fabrice lives only in the train station of the mind?
DARRELL: As I say. Blurry . . .
LADY MO: Sigh. Well. Let me know how it goes. And for God’s sake, don’t live in any part of Dalston.
Michelle Lawrence (née Horton) was my best friend at school. She got married three years ago to an American investment banker named Chad, and the pair now lived in Charlotte, North Carolina with their first child, Harry, an adorable eighteen-month-old blonde bruiser. Until taking maternity leave, Michelle had been climbing the ranks of a successful law firm called Catchpole, Laycock and Lobb, which managed to sound both faintly rude and entirely English, but which in fact was owned by loud, short Jewish New Yorkers. Despite her previous ambitions, Michelle didn’t seem to miss work at all. She was delighted to be a Mommy and quite happy to spend, it seemed to me, an inordinate amount of time watching Dr Phil.
She was convinced she had the perfect life, and let’s face it, who was I to doubt her? She’d married into old money, which enabled her to have a house that looked like Tara in the best part of Charlotte, a holiday house in Maine, and a mother-in-law whose neck veins bulged at the slightest breach of social protocol. Michelle became Lady Mo online purely to wind up Mrs Lawrence Senior, who thought any word ending with ‘o’ sounded like it came out of the mouths of rappers, a breed she placed slightly higher than feminists (but much lower than Democrats). Michelle was waiting for the moment her mother-in-law’s pearl choker stopped living on borrowed time and exploded into the four corners of the marble foyer.
Despite his terrifying family and his sit-com joke name, Chad seemed a decent enough bloke, even though my actual acquaintance with him had been limited to Michelle’s emails and a few fuzzy digital photos. He didn’t seem to be a shagger-arounder, he tolerated her obsession with Dr Phil and he was entirely besotted with their son. He was handsome, too, in the way that you’d expect of a man named Chad. Blonde. Square. Teeth. You know the type.
I was a little surprised at her choice because our romantic ideal had always been a short, dark Frenchman. When Michelle and I met at age fourteen, I was in the classroom reading Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love. Michelle swooped upon me. ‘Fabrice,’ was all she said.
My God, yes. Fabrice, Duc de Sauveterre. Fiction’s most perfect man.
He was based on a real-life lover of Nancy Mitford, and even though he clearly was the great love of her life, she had the awareness to make it an honest portrayal, infidelities and all. Trouble is, that’s what makes Fabrice such perfection. Although he conforms to many aspects of the Ultimate Romantic Hero — aristocratic, moneyed and a confident seducer — he is also a short-arse. He is humorous but prone to pomposity. He is courageous but also vain. If Nancy had not made him so human, girls like Michelle and I would have confined him to fantasyland years ago. We wouldn’t have deluded ourselves that he could be there, on some railway station in Paris, waiting for us, if only we stepped off the right train . . .
Other fictional things Michelle and I always wished were true:
Magic: When I was fourteen, I wanted magic powers for two reasons only: instant beautification and exacting revenge on mean girls. The idea of using my powers to vanquish evil would have had no appeal, even if it had ever occurred to me. Twenty years later, I was slim enough. Well, let’s more accurately say I had an acceptable body mass index, helped along by being reasonably tall. I was pretty enough, too. Thick, dark curly hair, big grey eyes, good skin. Not as radiant as I was when I met Tom, but I didn’t feel a need to shriek ‘Ai-eeee!’ whenever I looked in the mirror. So what would I do now with magical powers? Transform myself into a bestselling author? Chances are I would bungle the spell and end up as Barbara Cartland in her final days, being slowly crushed by the weight of four decades’ worth of turquoise eye shadow. Sigh.
Time travel: For me, there is only one place you’d want to travel to: 1930s England, but in the mode of Nancy Mitford and Poirot and not, say, A Handful of Dust or even Brideshead Revisited (mainly because I never got over my disappointment that the book did not include the feverish, sweaty shag-fest between Charles and Julia that was in the TV series). No, to me the 1930s is all about great clothes, hats and gloves, young men called Teddy who drive open-top Bugattis and say ‘What ho!’ Tennis and garden parties. Country house japes. Jaunts to Monaco and Cap d’Antibes. But where would I travel to in my past? Could I have done anything to prevent what happened to Tom? Was that worth even thinking about? I wasn’t sure on either count.
Large, loving, eccentric families: Michelle and I bonded first over Fabrice and secondly over the astonishing dullness of our domestic circles. Michelle’s parents divorced when she was twelve and her father went to live in Canada. Michelle’s mother muttered bitterly but did nothing interesting, such as take to gin or teenage boys. Michelle and her mother lived in relative harmony in a nice house in a respectable suburb, supported by funds sent monthly from the Yukon or wherever Mr Horton had ended up. My own parents married in their forties, and did not intend to have me at all. My father had never married before; my mother was a widow. She already had one son, my half-brother, Simon, who was nineteen when I was born and had left home. That meant I, like Michelle, was effectively an only child, which is why one of our greatest fantasies was to be surrounded by the kind of families that seem to exist only in novels. The Radletts: Nancy Mitford’s thinly fictionalised portrait of her own large, rambunctious, adventurous and oh-so-posh family. The Honeychurches in A Room with a View: Lucy and her brother Freddy, that lovely mother and all those people coming and going, all that humour and affection. Don’t get me wrong. My parents were kind, intelligent, good-hearted people. But they were not socially gregarious, adventurous or overtly affectionate. My father would never send his daughters out to be hunted by baying hounds, like Nancy Mitford’s ‘Farve’. He was a retired dentist alert to ubiquitous (in his opinion) crimes of grammar. My mother was mildly animated by only two things: Pringle cardigans and the correct way to prune a shrub. Eccentricity, to my parents, was not an appealing quality; it was the first sign of an inevitable slide towards exposing oneself to young women in public parks, or yelling incoherent abuse at passing cars on your way back to your home and your fifty-three cats. My parents were careful people who had arranged their lives to suit, and who were not keen on disruption of any kind. Tom’s death was a disruption, but one they understood. Mum’s first husband had died of pancreatic cancer, rather slowly and awfully. I think, when Tom died, she wanted to give me more than a quick hug and the usual clichés of consolation, but found it beyond her. I didn’t mind. Sometimes what you know is unsaid says enough . . .
Anyway — back to my big move. The idea had come to me, as you may have already guessed, at three in the morning. In the cold light of day it seemed nothing but terrifying. But after a mental struggle where I reminded myself that Fabrice only found Linda because she ventured abroad, I decided I’d do it. I mean, why not? There was nothing for me here. Nothing but memories that made me sad. If I was to make a new start, why not in a new place surrounded by all-new people? London was the place that popped immediately into my head, along with numerous images that I knew to be at least ninety years out of date, but which proved clinchingly seductive nonetheless.
The reality, of course, was that I knew no one there. I had no idea where I should live and no idea where to start looking. Normally, now that Tom wasn’t here to lend me a spine, I would have given up the task at once as too enormous. But, somewhat to my surprise, I didn’t. Instead, I emailed my friends overseas and asked them for advice.
It wasn’t Michelle who answered first. It was Adam, who had studied English with me at university and now worked as a script editor in Los Angeles. Adam’s specialty was horror movies, mostly ones that went straight to video. He cared not a jot because he got paid the same, regardless. And he had a great life, surrounded as he was by buff, bronzed, gay aspiring actors. The only thing Adam had in common with them was that he was gay, but he was ‘in the business’, so despite being gangly, white and skinny, he got laid all the time.
Adam’s email said he had a friend in London, who had recently got married to some ‘fabulously rich bloke’ but who hadn’t wanted to give up her independence entirely and still owned a house in North London that she would be prepared to rent out for the pitiful amount I had proposed. The catch was that she was having the place renovated.
Clare says — continued Adam — that if you don’t mind men hammering around you, and I know I wouldn’t (please note that clichéd jokes like this are the mainstay of my writing career), then you’re welcome to take it. She’d just love to have someone in there because she is very attached to the house, and can’t bear to see it empty and unloved. Note she is not actually crazy but five months pregnant and thus a seething tempest of hormones. If you are keen, here are her details . . .
I have to say, I wasn’t keen. Hammers and flashes of builder butt were a far cry from tennis and Teddy. I waited until lunchtime to see if anyone else had any leads, but my inbox remained empty. So I gave in and emailed Simon. He did do a lot of traveling, even if it was usually straight up a rock face. Simon, now fifty-three, was a scientist who studied waves and tides. He isn’t as bad as that might make him seem. True, he has a stringy beard and a possibly pathological attachment to Birkenstock sandals, but he also likes to take off to Patagonia and suchlike places with the sole aim of clambering to the top of stark and inhospitable mountains. He can suspend himself from a rock ledge by one hand and knows how to survive an avalanche. If the world was faced with disaster in the next few years, I would be bunking down with Simon and his sandals.
Know anyone in London? said my email.
He emailed me back. I know the Queen. Does that count? Of course, I’m not sure she’s all that familiar with me. May I ask why you want to know?
No. He couldn’t. Because that would mean I’d have to tell my mother. Ours might not have been the closest family in the world, but I suspected it was easier for her nerves to have me nearby. I’d heard her complain often enough about Simon’s jaunts to Kathmandu and Machu Picchu and suchlike. No, that’s not true — she didn’t openly complain. Just came out with statements like, ‘Well, I assume he’s kept up with his vaccinations’ or ‘Perhaps it’s a good thing after all that he never married.’
Actually, to be honest, the reason I didn’t want to tell my mother wasn’t that I thought she would find it unsettling. The reason was that I was unsettled. To be completely frank, I was a wreck.
My God! The money required to shift countries! In my books, all my heroines had to do to be whipped off around the world was to get a job as a billionaire’s marketing manager. Right now, there didn’t seem to be any such vacancies currently available (and yes, tragically, I did look). So what I had to do was as follows:
And then, of course, I woke up again at three a.m. convinced that the move was impossible because I would run out of money, be kicked out of my rental and, friendless and penniless, end up starving on the street or dying of hypothermia or being stabbed by some drug-crazed homeless person, whose makeshift home I’d trespass on in my desperate search for food and shelter . . .
With all those mental gremlins clamouring for my attention, it took me a while to work out what I was really terrified of. And it was far worse than any fear of starvation or stabbing by a random loon. I was truly, deeply afraid that what Tom and I had was not to be repeated in my lifetime. I was afraid that it was true that there was someone for everyone, and my someone had been Tom and that was that. I was afraid Michelle was right and that my dream lover did, and always would, exist only in a dream.
I ate my breakfast in the kitchen that Tom and I had painted over a weekend. I’d wanted a brighter green, but Tom had said a softer colour would work better and he’d been right. I could see out the French doors to the small back garden. It was autumn and I knew that in a couple of months, all the flowers would be gone. But I also knew that in spring they’d all be back again, as they had every year since Tom and I bought this house.
I knew the routine of this life. I knew what I was in for. It would be so much easier to do nothing. I wouldn’t have to worry about money. I wouldn’t have to try to find someone new — and to risk discovering that there was no one. That Tom had been it . . .
So that was my choice. Leave and take all those risks. Stay and do — what? Slide inevitably towards old age and pilchards?
I checked the details Adam had sent me again. And emailed a woman I didn’t know about a house I really wasn’t sure I could afford.