This is not a straightforward story of romance. Which is not to say there are no happy ever afters, but that you ought not to open this book knowing that the Prince and Princess disappear hand in hand into a glorious sunset.
In many ways, the story I’m about to tell you is not about romance at all. If anything, it is a story of real life. Of how each of us may think we know exactly what we need to make us happy, what will be good for us, what will ensure we have our happy ending, but that life rarely works out in the way we expect, and that our happy ending may have all sorts of unexpected twists and turns, be shaped in all sorts of unexpected ways.
And our own personal paradise may be someone else’s version of hell. Or indeed vice versa…
Take Victoria Townsley, for instance. At thirty-five she is wonderfully, fantastically successful. She is features director of Poise! magazine—a magazine so stylish, so hip, so glossy and perfect, Victoria is, as she should be, the very embodiment of what the Poise! reader strives to be. Tall and on a good day slim-ish, she uses Aveda on her glossy hair, Eve Lom on her peachy skin, and Bliss lemon scrubs on her not-so-toned-except-you’d-only-know-that-if-you-saw-her-with-her-clothes-off body. In short, she uses exactly what the beauty director of Poise! prescribes as the latest and greatest of all beauty products, guaranteed to give you youth, dewiness, and to prolong your life by thirty years.
Victoria—Vicky to her colleagues and friends—lives in a beautiful flat off Marylebone High Street, decorated in Heal’s best neutral shades, accented by rich chocolate-brown leather accessories, Balinese bamboo bowls picked up on a travel junket last year, and a touch of oh-so-trendy chinoiserie in the form of Chinese dressers that were found one Saturday morning down at Portobello Road.
The fridge is stocked with bottles of white wine, two cans of Diet Coke, and a couple of low-fat yogurts. In the butter compartment is a half-eaten bar of Cadbury’s Milk Chocolate, but Vicky has forgotten it is there, and it is now three months past its sell-by date, although on Wednesday, two days before Vicky’s period starts, she won’t very much care about that.
Vicky’s cat, Eartha, is curled up on her bed, lazily rolling over to stretch a paw out to claim her domain, happily looking forward to Vicky’s arrival home from work, when she will jump on her lap purring, thrilled to be the most important person in Vicky’s life, thrilled, in fact, to be the only one to sleep in Vicky’s bed on a regular basis.
Because while you and I might look in awe at everything that Vicky has, at how she has built a career up from nothing to become one of the most successful female journalists in London, how she has no responsibilities, is able to go to glamorous parties and book launches and preview shows every night, and sleep in until nine in the morning, Vicky is not happy.
At thirty-five, Vicky is stunned that she is still single. Stunned that each of her friends has slowly been picked off, that she has been bridesmaid more times than she cares to think of, but that no one has ever chosen her.
And it’s not even as if she has come close. She never worried about it in her twenties, when her longest relationship was six months, when she was far too busy making a name for herself in journalism, jumping from the Liverpool Echo down to London as a staff writer on Cosmo, switching to Poise! a few years later. When she hit thirty she vaguely thought that now she ought to start thinking about settling down, but by the time she came up for air, at around thirty-two, she realized that all the good men had been taken, and all of a sudden her prospects didn’t look too good.
On her thirty-fifth birthday Vicky stayed home and got drunk. She replayed all the movies she’d loved when she was single and hopeful—An Officer and a Gentleman, Baby Boom, When Harry Met Sally—and she forced a few tears as she thought about how lonely she was and how much she wanted a husband and children, how much she wanted the life that her brother, Andy, had.
Andy, three years younger than her, had married his girlfriend from university, Kate. They had three children—Luke, Polly, and Sophie; two huge lurchers; and had moved out of central London a few years previously to bring up their children with fields and green and ponies.
It was, in short, everything that Vicky ever wanted. She adored Kate, always described herself as having the best sister-in-law in the world; in fact, she thought of Kate as the sister she always wanted, and she loved her nieces and nephew more than anyone in the whole world.
Vicky thought she was going to die when they all moved out of London, but she hops on the train down to Somerset at least twice a month, and spends happy weekends sitting around the scrubbed pine table in the Aga-heated kitchen, bemoaning her single status as Kate rolls her eyes, attempts to shake off a Polly who’s clinging to her leg and shrieking with glee as Kate drags her across the kitchen floor, and says she’d kill to be in Vicky’s shoes, that Vicky doesn’t know how wonderful her life is.
Vicky does know how wonderful her life is, it just isn’t the kind of wonderful she wants. She wants the kind of wonderful that Kate has. The kind of wonderful that involves children shrieking with laughter, giant dogs draped over squishy sofas. A kind, loving husband who worships your every move.
At that point Kate was the one shrieking with laughter. “Does Andy worship my every move, then?” she said.
“Well, no,” Vicky grunted. “But you know what I mean.”
“Actually, no. I don’t,” Kate said firmly. “Your problem is you’re a complete romantic. You keep thinking that marriage and children are going to come along and give you this wonderful life when first of all your life is pretty damn wonderful anyway, and second of all I don’t know where you got it into your head that a life with marriage and children is so great in the first place.”
Vicky looked at Kate in shock. “It’s not?”
“It’s not that it’s not.” Kate sighed. “It’s just that it’s not this perfect romantic idyll that you seem to think it is. Not that I’d expect much less from a girl whose favorite film is, what was it again? Pretty Woman?”
“No. Baby Boom,” Vicky said reluctantly. “But for God’s sake don’t tell anyone. It’s my secret shame. I’m always going on dates and telling them it’s a Louis Malle, or some fabulous French art-house movie that actually I found spectacularly boring.”
“Is Baby Boom the one with the vet?”
Vicky did a mock swoon. “Sam Shepard. You see? Why can’t I find a vet like that? Why doesn’t someone leave me a gorgeous cottage in the country?”
Kate rolled her eyes yet again. “If you think life is so wonderful in the country, why don’t you sell the flat and buy something? It doesn’t have to be Somerset. You could buy in Oxfordshire somewhere and commute.”
“Don’t be silly,” said Vicky. “Then I’d never find a man.”
“What about that Daniel?” Kate said. “Aren’t you still seeing him?”
“I’m not seeing him,” Vicky sighed. “It’s just an arrangement we have. He’s my neighborhood shag. As long as we’re both single and we live so close, we just get together from time to time.”
“Sounds very odd to me,” Kate said. “Couldn’t it develop into something more?”
“God, no.” Vicky shuddered. “He’s great in bed but not husband material in the slightest.”
On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean lives Amber Winslow. She too looks, on the surface, to have everything she’s ever wanted. Married to Richard, a trader at Godfrey Hamilton Saltz, a large Wall Street investment bank, they have much the life that Vicky craves, only with more money and less mess.
When Amber met Richard she had struggled up from her humble beginnings in Hoboken, New Jersey, joining a midtown law firm straight from college. She had worked her way up, met Richard, and was about to be made partner when she discovered she was pregnant.
Amber considered getting a full-time nanny and going back to work, but in the end she decided to go with the nanny and forget the work.
After a couple of years of squeezing Jared into a bedroom that was only slightly bigger than a cupboard in their apartment on West Sixty-eighth, they decided to take the plunge and move out of the city. Richard was doing better and better, and although they couldn’t afford much more than a badly decorated tiny sixties colonial in the much-coveted town of Highfield, Connecticut, it was on a plot of two acres, and after a couple of years they decided to build an addition.
There was only one architect in town to work with—Jackson Phillips—and although he was the most expensive—some might even call him a rip-off merchant—he was the one all the in people used, and Amber knew how important it was to impress her newfound friends in the Highfield League of Young Ladies, and so they duly signed contracts with Jackson Phillips and off to work they went.
Their initial plans for a one-bedroom addition and family room swiftly became a two-bedroom addition and family room. While they were at it, Jackson suggested, why not turn the garage into a playroom, and build on a new garage? It wouldn’t be too much work.
Amber and Richard thought it was a wonderful idea. A couple of weeks later they thought, why not add a new master bedroom on top of the garage? And thus began the spiraling out of control.
Just as they had finished the initial ideas, were about to start construction drawings, and had already spent fortunes with Jackson Phillips, Amber realized what was bothering her all along about the work they were doing.
“It’s the roof,” she said to Richard. “As long as we have that shallow pitched roof everyone will know our house was a sixties colonial. All the new houses have steep roofs with dormers in them. We need to put a new roof on.”
Months later the sixties colonial, the house that Amber was adamant she didn’t want to knock down because she loved its charm, was knocked down, and Amber’s dream McMansion was built in its place.
It took twice as long as the builder had said, and cost them three times the price. Jackson Phillips’s bill was so huge they spent the next few years warning off anyone they spoke to who was looking to do the same thing, but at the end of two years Amber knew it was worth it.
She had the most beautiful house on her street. Possibly even in the town. A stone and clapboard colonial that impressed way before you opened the front door to take in the marble floors and sweeping curved staircase.
Amber had a house that begged her to host Highfield League of Young Ladies’ coffee mornings, ached for her to hold trunk shows displaying beautiful children’s clothes from a young designer she’d just discovered, insisted she invite the girls around for girls’ nights in, pretending it wasn’t just to show off her house.
Of course, what these girls don’t realize as they ooh and aah over her galleried great room, her huge marble bathroom with Victorian-style claw-footed tub, is that Amber, Amber resplendent in her Prada clothes and Hermès bags, Amber with the perfect husband and gorgeous children, with her golden retriever who had been sent off to doggy boot camp to learn how to be a dog, is not as to the manner born as she so desperately wants others to think.
Amber Collins, as she was before she met Richard, was a fighter. She was brought up in a run-down trailer park backing on to the railroad from which her father left to get cigarettes when she was two years old, and never returned. Her mother had a succession of boyfriends after that, men who would supply her with cigarettes and sometimes money to pay the rent, and Amber was left in the care of neighbors, becoming as self-sufficient as any child who doesn’t have parents around to take care of her.
Amber put herself through college. As a teenager she watched her friends get pregnant by loser boyfriends, saw them repeating the patterns of their parents, and she vowed her life would be different. She would make something of herself. She would leave all this behind.
She was lucky because she was clever. And luckier still because she was driven, had the motivation to work hard, to have a number of jobs throughout school, to save enough money to put herself through college.
At her state university, Amber was careful to study people from different backgrounds, the girls from the middle classes, the girls who had a confidence, a sense of entitlement that was entirely new to Amber.
She listened to the way they spoke, noted how their speech was far softer than her strong New Jersey accent, and she changed her voice accordingly. She watched how they dressed, not in the skimpy mini-skirts and revealing tops of her friends, but in pants and loafers, chic simple clothes, cable-knit sweaters and flat ballet pumps.
She grew out her perm, learned to wear her hair in a sleek shoulder-length bob, redid her makeup so it was natural and understated, and when she went home for the summer after her first year at the university, no one recognized her. She was delighted.
She met Richard at a dinner party hosted by some friends who were the perfect embodiment of the people Amber aspired to be. By this time Amber was a lawyer, and she and Richard immediately bonded over their professional aspirations.
But mostly she was drawn to Richard because he had grown up with everything she’d never had. Originally from Brookline, Massachusetts, close to Boston, he had been brought up in a house that looked like a palace from the outside, and inside appeared to be falling apart. Old, old patrician money. Money so old that it had in fact disappeared. There was still the family compound, and an ancient valet who looked after the family, there just wasn’t the money to maintain it.
Richard’s mother, Ethel, but known to everyone as Icy, was, as her nickname suggests, a cool blond in the Grace Kelly mold. Their Christmas cards were always family photos—the parents, five children, and three dogs—snapped unawares at their grandparents’ summer house on Martha’s Vineyard.
Richard didn’t have the money, but he had the background and he had the name. As soon as she heard it—Richard Winslow—she knew he was of the Winslows, and Amber was determined to make him fall in love with her.
It wasn’t easy. Despite her glossy hair and simple chic clothes, Amber knew that Richard had women falling at his feet. And so she played hard to get. She sat next to him at dinner and ignored him, professing to be fascinated by the terribly boring man on her left.
When he attempted to speak to her she was cool and uninterested, and the couple of times after dinner when she caught him looking at her with a puzzled expression, she just looked away.
She played it perfectly. Richard wasn’t used to women not responding to his charm and boy-next-door grin, wasn’t used to women not responding to the very fact that he was Richard Winslow of, yes, those Winslows.
So although Amber wasn’t quite his usual type—brainless models and bimbettes of varying hair colors and heights—he was intrigued, and when he got her phone number from the host of the party and phoned, and she acted as if she couldn’t remember meeting him, he was all the more interested.
It was the hardest thing Amber ever had to do. Harder even than reinventing herself and hiding her background. For this was something she wanted more than she had wanted anything in her life. This was her opportunity to be truly accepted. If she could get Richard to marry her she’d never have to worry about anything ever again.
When Richard phoned, Amber would pretend to be out. She’d sit in the living room biting her nails as her answering machine picked up. She only relaxed when she could see it was working, when caller ID showed that he kept phoning. One Saturday evening he phoned every ten minutes until one in the morning when she eventually picked up.
“Where have you been?” he asked in his little-boy-lost voice.
“Just out with a friend,” she said lightly. “No one you know.” When in fact she had eaten cold pizza alone in her apartment, worked a few hours, then watched a couple of videos.
Amber developed an air of mystery that Richard couldn’t penetrate.
“I don’t know what it is about her,” he said to Hal, his best friend, “but she’s different. I’ve never felt this way about anyone before.”
They were married at the family compound in Brookline, and it truly was the happiest day of Amber’s life. Before you think this was all too premeditated, too cold, know that Amber had fallen deeply in love with Richard. Yes, she had decided he would be hers, and for all the wrong reasons, but the more she saw him, the more he made her laugh and made her relax, the more she realized that she loved him.
In fact, when she wasn’t trying so hard to be something that she wasn’t, Amber found that she was able to relax with Richard in a way she hadn’t ever been able to before.
But those days, those early carefree days of their marriage, seem like a long time ago now. Richard’s career is going better and better—so well, in fact, that Amber hardly ever sees him—and although she loves their house in Highfield, adores her children, Jared and Grace, there is something about the old days that she misses.
Her house may be beautiful, but often it feels as if it’s not her own. There is the constant presence of Lavinia, the nanny, not to mention the cleaning team that comes in three times a week to thoroughly clean.
Sometimes she gets back from meeting friends for lunch and tries to enjoy a quiet coffee in the kitchen, then Lavinia will come in and start emptying the dishwasher, or Jared and Grace will get back from school and jump around her, climbing onto her lap, desperate for her attention regardless of whether she’s in the middle of something important.
And there’s the ever-present guilt. She knows she’s a better mother when she’s able to spend quality time with her children, when she’s able to give them to Lavinia when they’re tired and clingy and whining, and yet she always feels guilty about not spending enough time with them.
But her life is so busy. It’s not that she ever wishes she didn’t have children—God forbid that thought should even cross her mind—it’s just that sometimes she wishes life were a bit simpler. And mostly she wishes that Richard were home more, although she knows this isn’t likely to change, and after all, look at all she has, look at her beautiful house, beautiful clothes. If Richard didn’t work the hours he does she’d never be able to have all this.
Oh, how far she has come.