The Best of Times (2 page)

“And thank goodness for it,” she said. “Poor Serena is so dreading the holidays, keeping the boys amused all those weeks, well, months really …”

Jonathan said just slightly shortly that he had thought the Edwardses were off to some ten-star hotel in Nice, not to mention the week they would spend with the Gilliatts on the way down; Laura said, well, that was true, but it still added up to just over three weeks, and that left six or even seven in London.

Jonathan said that most of his NHS patients would not regard that as too much of a hardship, given the three and a half weeks of luxury sunshine; he was less fond of Mark and Serena Edwards than Laura was. Mark was a public relations consultant for a big city firm, oversmooth and charming, but Serena was Laura’s best friend and, in Jonathan’s view, made Laura the repository of just too many confidences and secrets.

Jonathan was not able, of course, to spend nine weeks in the Dordogne; he took as much of his annual leave as he could and, for the rest of the time, flew out each Friday afternoon to Toulouse and back each Monday.

And so, as she read reports of what appeared to be almost continuous rain in England, and indeed listened to friends in England complaining about it and telling her how lucky she was not to be there, Laura savoured the long golden days even more than usual, and even more than usual counted her own multiple blessings.

• • •

Linda Di-Marcello was aware that she also was fairly fortunate, which meant that, given her line of work, she was doing very well indeed. Linda ran a theatrical agency, and as she often said, her role was a complex one. She was, in almost equal parts, nanny, therapist, and hustler; it was both exhausting and stressful, and she threatened repeatedly to give it up and do something quite different. “Something really undemanding, like brain surgery,” she would say with a smile. But she knew she never would; she loved it all too much.

The agency’s name was actually Di-Marcello and Carr; Francis Carr was her nonsleeping partner, as he put it, a gay banker who adored her, had faith in her, and had put up the money for the agency, in return for “absolutely no involvement and forty per cent of the profits.”

So far it had worked very well.

She was thirty-six, an acknowledged beauty, with dark red hair, dark brown eyes, and a deep, Marlene Dietrich–style voice, and she had been to drama school herself before deciding she really couldn’t hack the long, long slog into nonstardom and that she rather liked the idea of agenting. She had had the agency for five years; before that she had worked for several of the established organisations before setting out on her own. And she had proved to have a talent for it; she could look at an apparently plain, shy girl and see her shining on the screen; at a charmless, ungracious lout and know he could play Noel Coward.

She didn’t have many big stars on her books—yet. She had Thea Campbell, who had just won a BAFTA for her Jo in the new BBC version of
Little Women
, and Dougal Marriott, who had just been cast as the grown-up Billy in the sequel to
Billy Elliot
, and three or four more who were almost as successful, but she had a big battery of middle-rankers, mostly picked out by her from the drama schools, almost all of whom were carving out good careers for themselves. But her younger clients particularly found it hard to face reality; they were inevitably disappointed with the slow progress, and while most of them did part-time jobs in bars and restaurants or worked as runners for the TV companies, a handful were emotionally needy, impatient, and at worst disparaging of the work Linda could get them.

“You know,” she said irritably to Francis Carr, “I long to tell these kids that thousands and thousands of young people can do what they can do and do it superbly well; they need an awful lot of luck and star quality to stand out. And most of them don’t have those things. They’re an ungrateful bunch on the whole, you know; nothing’s ever good enough for them.”

Francis said that the same could be said of his clients, who never felt their money was invested quite well enough or that he gave any of them quite enough of his attention. “It’s human nature, Linda, fact of working life.”

“I suppose so. I’m obviously making a big fuss about nothing. And when somebody does take off and I know I’ve been a key part of that, it’s a great feeling.”

“Well, exactly. Has anyone taken off recently?”

“Not exactly. It’s all been a bit run-of-the-mill this summer. If you can call it summer indeed … Probably that’s what’s getting to me.”

“I don’t think so,” he said with a grin. “You’re always complaining about it.”

“Am I? God, how depressing for you. Sorry, Francis. I’ll try to be a bit more positive in future.”

• • •

Linda lived in a mansion apartment just off Baker Street: large and luxurious, expensively furnished—in a mix of antique and contemporary—and absolutely immaculate. Her office—a sleek, modern suite near Charlotte Street—was equally so. Linda was a perfectionist in every aspect of her life. She was, by any standards, a hugely successful woman. And yet she quite often felt she was actually a failure.

She was lonely, and however much she told herself that she was lucky, that she had a far better life now, happily single rather than unhappily married, she didn’t really believe it. No amount of looking at the rows of designer clothes she was able to buy, at her collections of art deco figures and lamps, at her growing gallery of modern paintings properly made up for it. She would have given all of it—well, most of it, anyway—not to be alone, not to be lonely.

She
did have
a social life—by most people’s standards a glamorous one. But it wasn’t quite the sort she wanted. Of course,
Sex and the City
had made singledom fashionable, which helped. Nobody had to sit at home staring at the cat anymore; you could lift the phone, call girlfriends or man friends, propose any kind of outing. You could do what you liked, when you liked it. During the week it was fine: she often worked late, and there were theatres and film screenings to go to; and she made sure her weekends were fully booked weeks or even months ahead. She did a lot of quick trips—flips, as she called them—to Paris, Milan, Rome, usually with one of her single girlfriends to visit galleries and shop; she was a Friend of Covent Garden, of Sadler’s Wells and the RSC. It would certainly take a fairly remarkable man to deliver so indulgent a lifestyle.

But … it wasn’t actually what she wanted; it was cool and demanding, and somehow self-conscious, when she yearned for warmth and ease. She wondered if perhaps she should have given Mr. Di-Marcello another chance instead of throwing him out of the house at the first discovery of his first affair.

But she knew, deep down, that she shouldn’t; it
would
have been only the first one; he was about as monogamous as a tomcat. But the
divorce had hurt horribly, and had been followed by a second bad relationship, with another charmer who had been seeing another girl almost before he had moved into Linda’s apartment. She had an eye for a rotter, Linda often thought gloomily.

She didn’t exactly want domesticity, she didn’t want children, and she certainly didn’t want to take on a man with a ready-made family, as so many of her friends seemed to be doing; but she did want someone to share things with, pleasures and anxieties, jokes and conversations—and, of course, her bed.

Nor did she meet that many men she fancied; the world she moved in contained an exceptionally large number of gay men, and still more addicts of one kind or another: “The London branch of the AA is incredibly A-list,” as a young actress had astutely remarked (and indeed the meetings were regarded as an excellent opportunity for networking).

“I want a solicitor,” she wailed to her friends. “I want a bank manager; I want an accountant.” And they would tell her that she wanted no such thing, and of course they were right in one way and quite wrong in another, for what were accountants and bank managers and solicitors but synonyms for reliable and sensible and loyal?

The fact was, she no longer felt free; she felt lonely, no longer self-sufficient, but insecure. What was the matter with her? Was it such a big thing to ask? Not just to fall but to be in love. Wholeheartedly, wondrously thunderously, orgasmically in love. It did seem to be. She really couldn’t see how it was ever going to happen again.

• • •

“Only five weeks to the wedding. I absolutely can’t believe it.”

Barney Fraser looked at his fiancée, in all her absurd prettiness and sweetness, and sighed.

“I think I can,” he said.

“Barney! That doesn’t sound very … positive. Aren’t you looking forward to it?”

“Yes,” he said quickly, “yes, of course I am.”

“It’s the speech, isn’t it? But you’ll be fine; I know you will. It’s all going to be wonderful. If it stops raining, that is. Pity it’s not September; that’s usually more reliable, much better than the summer, actually. Wouldn’t you say?”

“What? I mean, no. I mean—”

“Barney, you’re not listening to me. Are you?”

“Sorry, Amanda. I was … well, I was thinking about something else. I’m very sorry.”

Actually he wasn’t. He was thinking about the wedding; he thought about it more and more. Well, not the wedding. More the marriage.

“What?”

“Oh—just work. Sorry. More wine?”

“Yes, please.”

He grinned at her and refilled her glass; there was nothing he could really say about his misgivings over the wedding. It was too late and it wouldn’t help. It wasn’t his wedding, for God’s sake, that he had misgivings about; it was Toby’s, and Toby was old enough to look after himself.

And Amanda was so thrilled at being maid of honour, and the bride was one of her very best friends. And when she and Barney got married the following spring, Tamara would be
her
maid of honour. And Toby would be Barney’s best man.

Toby wasn’t just one of Barney’s best friends; he was absolutely his best friend, had been ever since prep school, when they had lain in their small beds the first night, side by side, smiling gallantly, refusing to admit either of them felt remotely homesick. And the friendship had never faltered, intensified, Barney always thought, by the fact that they were both only children, and were soon spending time with each other over the holidays as well as the term. They had stayed cheerfully together right through prep school and Harrow; then after the separation of universities, Toby at Durham, Barney at Bristol, the delight of discovering that they were both applying for jobs in the city and managed to end up not at the same investment bank—that would have
been too much of a cliché—but at closely neighbouring establishments either side of Bishopsgate.

Toby was just the best: clever, funny, cool, and just plain old-fashioned nice. Barney didn’t like to think of their friendship in terms of love—these days if you said you were terribly fond of another bloke, people presumed you were gay. But he
did
love him, and admired him and enjoyed his company more than that of anyone else in the world—except Amanda, obviously. Not that you could compare how you felt for your best friend and your fiancée: it was totally different. What was great was that despite their both being engaged and setting up home and all that sort of thing, they were still able to see an enormous amount of each other.

And the two girls were great friends; both worked in the city as well. It was very neat: Amanda in human resources at Toby’s bank, Tamara on the French desk at Barney’s. There was no reason they should all not remain friends for the rest of their lives.

Barney didn’t just think that Tamara wasn’t good enough for Toby—no, he
knew
. OK, she was gorgeous and sexy and clever, and their flat in Limehouse was absolutely sensational, more to Barney’s taste, if he was honest, than the house he and Amanda had bought in Clapham. It was a bit … well, a bit too fussy, full of clever ideas that Amanda had found in the house magazines and copied, without considering whether it all worked together properly. But still, she was great and he loved her, of course, and not having much of a visual sense himself, he just accepted it all. There were more important things in life than decor.

Amanda was solid gold, through and through; Tamara, he felt, was composed of some rather questionable nickel under her lovely skin. She was selfish, she was spoilt—first by her doting parents, and now, of course, by Toby—extremely possessive, dismissive of Toby’s feelings, given to putting him down, albeit with her rather sparky humour, when it suited her. Toby really loved Tamara; he told Barney so repeatedly, almost too repeatedly, Barney thought sometimes. He had been an angel over the buildup to the wedding, agreeing to everything
she wanted, even their honeymoon in the Maldives when Barney knew that sort of place bored him. But, “It’s her wedding,” he would say easily, apparently unaware of the irony of it: that it was his too.

And with the stag do—a long weekend in New York—only a fortnight away, it was really much too late to do or say anything about it at all.

Barney just remained uneasy about it, and couldn’t discuss it with anyone. Not even Amanda. Actually, least of all with Amanda. That was a bit worrying too.

CHAPTER 2