Confessions of a Reluctant Recessionista (28 page)

‘In December?’ I asked.

‘No, we’re not going until March,’ Mum said, ‘but we just thought we’d mention it. There’s a lot of preparation goes into these things.’ Despite myself, I cringed. Anyone would have thought they were going trekking in the Himalayas.

‘I love the Lake District,’ Jake said. ‘I took some great pictures there last summer.’

‘You and Cassie should join us,’ Mum said.

‘Not sure caravanning’s really Cassie’s cup of tea,’ my sister chirped up. ‘She’s more the five-star-hotel type, aren’t you, Cass?’

Everyone laughed, including Jake. I got up to clear away the plates.

‘Actually,’ Jake said, ‘I was thinking of going a bit farther afield next year, after my course ends. I did a trip to East Africa a couple of years ago, which I really enjoyed. I’m thinking of West Africa next – Senegal, perhaps, or the Ivory Coast.’

‘Not much in the way of five-star hotels there, I shouldn’t imagine,’ Celia said with a sly little smile.

‘Oh, I’m sure Cassie’s capable of roughing it,’ Jake replied, as he got up to give me a hand with the dishes. Although Celia was annoying me, it struck me in that moment that she knew me a little better than Jake did. Roughing it, particularly in a tropical country with an abundance of large insects, was not my idea of a great time.

Later, as my parents pored over the images on Jake’s digital camera, Celia joined me in the kitchen to make coffee.

‘Well, Mum and Dad are smitten with him,’ she said.

‘That’s good, because I am too.’

‘He is very nice. Although I wouldn’t necessarily have put you two together. I mean, he doesn’t really seem like your type? All that talk about dropping everything to run off to dangerous places, I can’t really see you doing anything like that.’

I slammed the cafetière down on the counter, slightly harder than I’d intended to.

‘Celia, I don’t have go everywhere he goes,’ I snapped. ‘There are plenty of couples who don’t do
everything together. We’re not all like you and Mike. Just look at Jude – she and Matt spend months apart, and they’re just fine.’

Celia retreated, wounded, to the living room. I immediately felt guilty. She did have a point. I also felt a little guilty about using Jude as my example. She was not ‘just fine’ all the months that Matt was away; I remembered quite clearly her watching news reports from foreign countries with mounting alarm. I knew it had been hard for her. I also knew that she’d been able to cope with it because:

a) they shared the same ideals, and

b) Jude knew Matt was the one.

Much as I adored him, I wasn’t entirely sure I could say the same about Jake.

For all my irritation with Celia, the evening was a success. My parents adored Jake and they were delighted with my attempts at domesticity, as well as my enthusiasm for my new job. And my job did have many fringe benefits. One of the myriad advantages of working for a wine company was that it made gift giving fairly simple. Everyone I knew (everyone over the age of eighteen, anyway) got Vintage Organics vouchers for Christmas. The kids were a little more challenging, but shopping for them was the most enjoyable retail experience I’d had in a long while. Tom got a drum kit (it was expensive, but the look on Celia’s face when he unwrapped it was priceless), Rosie got a bright pink tricycle and Monty got a Thomas the Tank Engine.

I spent Christmas Eve at Mum and Dad’s, Christmas Day at Celia’s and Boxing Day with Ali and her dad back in London. As she had predicted, although he was initially absolutely furious about the fact that she’d got herself ‘into trouble’ with ‘some bloody frog’, he was also incredibly excited about the prospect of becoming a grandfather.

New Year’s Eve, ordinarily spent in a champagne blur with City pals, was looking set to be a non-event this year. Everyone else had made alternative arrangements. Including Jake.

‘I’m really sorry, Cass,’ he said, ‘but I’m going to be in Manchester with my brother. We organised it a while ago – he and a bunch of his mates are going clubbing and they invited me along – he’d be really disappointed if I backed out now.’ I was completely gutted, but determined not to show it.

‘That’s fine, Jake. It’s absolutely fine,’ I said, breezily. ‘I’ll spend New Year with Ali and Jude.’ I didn’t tell him that Ali was going to be in the Maldives (her last opportunity for a real holiday before the baby came) and that Jude was going to be in Edinburgh with Matt (who was paying one of his flying visits to the UK) and a group of their friends. I didn’t want to make him feel bad.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Of course,’ I said, wondering whether spending New Year alone in my flat would be preferable to spending it with Celia and Michael, which was really my only other option this late in the day.

I decided that it would be a) a bit sad and b) not very kind to do nothing in preference to accepting my sister’s invitation, so on the thirtieth I packed some things and headed off to King’s Cross to get the train. Jake rang just as I was leaving the house.

‘You off to the station now?’ he asked.

‘Yeah,’ I said, not terribly enthusiastically. ‘Celia’s picking me up at the other end.’ I’d had to admit to him that I was spending New Year with my sister since Jude had told him she was out of London and Ali had announced her Maldives plans on Facebook.

‘Don’t sound so glum,’ he said. ‘I’m sure it’ll be fun.’

‘I’m sure it’ll be a hoot. I’ll give you a call when I get there, OK? Have a lovely time,’ I said, congratulating myself on being such an incredibly sweet and easygoing girlfriend.

Killing time while waiting for the train, I had just purchased a couple of magazines for the journey and was heading over to Starbucks to pick up a latte when someone grabbed me from behind. I shrieked and flung my elbow back, whacking my assailant in the face.

‘Bloody hell, Cassie!’ Jake yelped, clutching his bleeding nose.

‘Oh, my God! Oh, my God! I’m so sorry,’ I said, fishing around in my bag for something to stem the blood flow. ‘What the hell are you doing sneaking up on me like that? Oh, God, have I broken it?’

‘I don’t think so,’ he said, dabbing at it gingerly. ‘Christ, remind me never to piss you off.’

‘Are you all right, miss?’ A member of the British Transport Police had appeared at my elbow. ‘Is this man bothering you?’ I looked around – we’d attracted quite a crowd of onlookers.

‘No, I’m fine. It was a misunderstanding. This is my boyfriend,’ I explained. The policeman looked sceptical. ‘Honestly, he
is
my boyfriend. I didn’t actually mean to hit him like that. I mean, I meant to hit him, only I didn’t know it was him. If you see what I mean.’ The policeman looked confused, but apparently satisfied that Jake was under no immediate threat from this deranged woman, he let us go.

Having stopped the bleeding, Jake grabbed my hand.

‘Come on,’ he said, ‘we’ve got a train to catch!’

‘Have we?’ I asked, confused. ‘I can’t go to Manchester with you, Jake, I’ve promised Celia I’ll go to her place.’

‘I’ve spoken to Celia,’ he said, dragging me along. ‘It’s all sorted.’

‘We’re going to the wrong way, Jake. The trains to Manchester go from the other end of the station.’

‘So they do, but we’re not going to Manchester,’ he replied with a grin. I looked up. We were heading towards the Eurostar terminal.

Please tell me we’re not going to Brussels
.

We were not going to Brussels. On the train, over coffee and croque monsieurs, Jake told me he’d booked the trip the day after I surprised him at his flat.

‘You know, the day after the night you wrecked my living room,’ he said with a charmingly coy smile. He’d spoken to Jude and Ali, confirming that I hadn’t made plans with either of them, and arranged for Jude to deliver my passport to him before she left for Edinburgh. He’d also rung my sister to let her in on the plan.

He’d booked us a room at L’Hôtel, on the rue des Beaux-Arts on the Left Bank.

‘It’s where Oscar Wilde breathed his last,’ Jake told me cheerfully. Our room – thankfully not the one where poor Oscar checked out – was lavishly decorated in deep reds and gold, with an enormous green and gold mural depicting peacocks above the bed. The whole place was dark and opulent and smacked of decadence. Outside it was beautiful and sunny, albeit freezing cold, and we spent hours wandering along the Seine, occasionally popping into brasseries to drink café au lait or red wine we climbed the hill to the Sacre Coeur, we visited the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée Rodin, we ate at La Coupole, we spent hours and hours in bed. It was almost perfect (I say almost because I wasn’t allowed to go shopping – Jude had made Jake promise). It was the best New Year I’d ever had.

Cassie Cavanagh
feels very grown up

By early March, New Year’s Eve was a distant memory; it seemed like a different life. Since 3 January, the day I’d got back to work, I’d been under constant pressure. The initial cash injection we received in early December had been followed by another from a second group of investors in January, and the company was expanding its operations at breakneck speed. This was great news, of course, although it did have its drawbacks.

Peter and Fabio were almost never in the office, and Rupert and Olly decided to take a three-week trip to Australia and New Zealand to meet with potential new suppliers out there. With four of the VO’s seven employees out of the office for long stretches, those of us who remained were left with a crushing workload. I was having to take on more and more of the day-today running of the business and had less time to do the more tedious, menial tasks – but since there was no
one else to do them, it simply meant I was working longer and longer hours.

February had passed in a blur, the only highlight being Valentine’s Day, spent with Jake, a chilly picnic of wine and chocolates on Primrose Hill which was so much more romantic than the wallet-bustingly expensive dinner I’d had at Nobu with Dan last Valentine’s Day. And, unlike Dan, Jake didn’t send an ostentatious show of red roses on the day itself. He sent me irises the day before and bought me an orchid the day after.

‘
Everyone
gets flowers on Valentine’s Day,’ he explained. ‘You’re special.’

Outside work I spent almost every spare minute I had either with Jake or with Ali, whose state of mind seemed to be in a constant state of vacillation, from near-hysterical excitement to sheer terror. She was now just nine weeks away from her due date and had decided all of a sudden that there was no way she could stay in her smart, child-unfriendly apartment.

‘I have to buy a house,’ she announced over breakfast at Shoreditch House, where she still had her membership. ‘I can’t stay in my flat. It’s totally impractical for a child. He’ll fall off the balcony into the canal. I have to move. And I only have two months in which to do it.’

‘You do realise, Ali, that once the baby is born it will be quite some time before he’s moving about on his own? They don’t start crawling till they’re about eight or nine months old. And even then he’s
highly unlikely to be able to fling himself over the balcony.’

‘You never know,’ she said, tucking into her second helping of pancakes with blueberry compote. ‘In any case, I’m going to have to move sometime. It’ll be easier now than once he gets here, won’t it?’ I wasn’t sure that house hunting when seven months’ pregnant was likely to be easy, but once Ali gets an idea into her head she’s unlikely to be deterred. ‘In any case, I might not be working for a while after I have the baby, and that’s going to make it more difficult to get a mortgage, isn’t it? In any case, I was thinking of ringing round some agents this afternoon, just to see what’s available.’

‘I can help out if you like,’ I said, although I wasn’t sure when I was going to be able to help out, since I seemed to spend almost every waking hour at the office. ‘I could come along to viewings with you, that sort of thing.’

Three days later, she rang me at the office.

‘I’ve found a house!’ she said excitedly.

‘Bloody hell, that was quick.’

‘I know, and it’s absolutely perfect. I really, really want it.’

‘How much?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know.’

‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’

‘It’s up for auction next Friday. The guide price is two hundred and fifty grand, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. I’m off to see a broker now,
to get a mortgage agreed in principle. And I’m going to take a look at it this evening.’

‘You mean you haven’t actually seen it yet?’

‘No, but I can just tell it’s going to be perfect. Can you come with me tonight? It’s on St Mark’s Road. A stone’s throw from Notting Hill! Viewings start at six.’

St Mark’s Road was a stone’s throw from the dodgy end of Notting Hill, otherwise known as Ladbroke Grove. But I could see why Ali liked the place. It was a little Victorian house with three bedrooms and a garden out back. The interior was gorgeous: dark hardwood floors, sash windows, a brand new kitchen and a master bedroom in the converted loft which had enormous skylights in the roof.

‘I know we’re in a crummy market,’ I said to Ali as we tiptoed around the place, trying not to bump into other viewers, nor to convey to them any excitement or enthusiasm about the place whatsoever, ‘but why is this place selling at auction? You would have thought it would go quite easily through an agent.’