You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me (15 page)

It shouldn’t be about numbers and carefully worded dating profiles and messages specifically designed to sell a version of yourself that didn’t even remotely resemble the real thing. Even casual, no-strings affairs should be about romance, about connecting with someone, about eyes meeting in a crowded room, a shared smile across a dark club. But with the exception of poor, hapless Edward, there wasn’t a single man she’d met that week who seemed to be searching for the one girl that made his heart go pitter-pitter. They just wanted a girl who was easy on the eye, untaxing on their frontal lobes and who’d drop her knickers in exchange for a glass of white wine.

All Neve needed was a fairly normal man to have a fairly normal relationship with, and she’d only met one of them in the last few weeks.

Neve pulled out her phone as soon as she got out of Finsbury Park station. She was going to do it right here, right now, before she even started walking home, because she knew that in those fifteen minutes she’d start thinking of all the reasons why she shouldn’t and then she’d decide to sleep on it. Then by the morning, she’d have come up with a gargantuan number of obstacles and stumbling blocks and she’d prevaricate and procrastinate, then push it to the dusty corner of her mind where she put all the stuff that she didn’t want to deal with. That dusty corner was already bursting at the seams.

Yes, she was going to do it now because she still hadn’t got round to deleting Max’s number from her phone. As usual, her subconscious was far ahead of her regular, bumbling conscious.

Max answered on the third ring, which was just as well as Neve had a feeling that she’d have chickened out by the fifth. ‘Hello?’ he said warily, as if he didn’t like having an unknown number flash up on his screen.

‘Max? It’s Neve.’ She turned around so she was huddled against the London Underground map, just like she’d been that night when he’d kissed her, and willed herself to carry on. ‘Are you free to talk?’

‘What? Who? I can’t hear you,’ Max shouted over what sounded like the noise of a Mardi Gras parade. ‘Hang on!’

Neve hung on, counting silently in her head as she made a deal with herself that she’d hang up if she got to fifty.

‘Sorry, who is it?’ Max asked when she’d only got to thirty-seven.

‘It’s Neve,’ she said again. ‘Sorry for calling you this late on a Saturday night.’

‘Ah, the night has barely begun,’ Max drawled. ‘So, how the devil are you?’

‘Oh, I’m fine. Absolutely fine.’ Neve realised she didn’t know what to say. ‘Congratulations! You’ve been the successful candidate for the position of my pancake boyfriend,’ probably wasn’t the right way to go. ‘How are you?’

‘I’m fine too,’ Max said. ‘So … what’s up?’

You just have to construct one sentence of about ten words, Neve told herself. ‘I was wondering if you’d like to go out on a date. With me,’ she added, just in case Max wasn’t clear on that point. ‘If you’re free. In the next week or so.’

Twelve hours later, Neve was walking down Crouch Hill towards Crouch End Broadway because Max was there having brunch in the Italian Food Hall and she had an open invitation to join him, after he’d taken pity on her complete inability to think of a time, venue and day for their date.

She was nervous, that was a given, but she wasn’t coasting a tsunami of terror as she had before her other dates. At least with Max she knew what to expect, as much as she could with someone who was as mercurial as he was, and it was just one date. She was literally a veteran of ‘just one date’ by now and after she’d got that out of the way, she could get some organic olives from Waitrose and browse the shelves of the Oxfam bookshop and the stationery store, Neve told herself as she marched up to the Italian Food Hall at precisely five past twelve.

Neve peered through the window, trying to see beyond the deli counter to the seated area at the back. The damp air had smeared condensation on the window, making it hard to see, so Neve had no choice but to go in and wander through the tables and booths until she found Max – that is, if he’d actually turned up and hadn’t just been playing a cruel trick on her.

There was a moment of dithering before Neve marched purposefully to the entrance – and then she stopped. At the side of the building was a canopied seating area completely deserted apart from one solitary figure who looked up from his newspaper and waved at her.

Neve waved back and now she was committed to clomping down the narrow walkway between the empty tables as Max got to his feet so he could lean forward and kiss her cheek when Neve reached his side. Neve bumped her nose against Max’s chin as she tried to return the favour, while Max was aiming for her other cheek. She always forgot that Celia and her fashion friends did the double kiss and now she was flustered as she sat down and fussed with her bags.

‘So, you and me on an actual date – who’d have thought it?’ Max said lightly.

Neve smiled vaguely in response as she watched Max slip his BlackBerry
and
an iPhone into an inner pocket. It was the first time Neve had seen him in daylight or what passed for a murky kind of daylight, and there was something decidedly exotic about him. Maybe it was the slant of his cheekbones or the honey tinge to his skin. His hair was so dark that it was almost black and had some serious product in it to try and kill the curl. She’d forgotten how handsome he was; only his bloodshot, puffy eyes made Neve feel slightly less intimidated.

Before Max caught her staring, Neve picked up the laminated menu, which was difficult when she was wearing woolly gloves. She was about to ask why they were sitting outside when it occurred to her that maybe Max didn’t want to be seen with her in a crowded public place.

‘Are you ready to order?’ Max asked, and Neve realised there was a waitress at her side.

She ordered a pot of tea and was going to send the waitress away when her stomach growled warningly. Normally she’d never dream of eating on a date or in front of anyone who wasn’t immediate family, but Max watching her eat scrambled eggs on granary toast didn’t even compare to their first half-clothed encounter.

The waitress left far too quickly for Neve’s liking, so there was just Max gazing steadily at her and she hadn’t said a single word to him since she sat down.

‘Have you had a good week?’ she asked shyly, painfully aware of how breathy and high-pitched her voice sounded and how she didn’t want to take off her stupid woolly hat with the ear-flaps because she knew she’d have really shocking hat hair.

Max nodded. ‘Been a bit of a nightmare, if you must know,’ he sniffed. ‘Trying to lock down the August cover. If there’s one thing worse than dealing with the talent, it’s dealing with the talent’s agent, manager and publicist. Complete mare.’

Neve nodded in what she hoped was a sympathetic manner. She’d got the general gist of the conversation, Max had had a hard week, but the specifics eluded her. ‘The talent? Is that someone’s nickname in the entertainment industry?’

‘No,’ Max said slowly and rather condescendingly. ‘It’s how I describe a celebrity when I can’t say their name because I’ve had to sign a confidentiality agreement.’

‘Oh. I see.’ Neve felt as if she’d been unfairly chastised for not knowing the machinations of the entertainment industry, but from the way Max winced as the clouds momentarily parted to allow a faint beam of sunlight through, she suspected he had a hangover and decided not to take it personally. ‘Why are you working on the August cover when it’s the beginning of March?’

‘Hasn’t Celia ever explained to you about lead times?’ Neve shook her head and Max groaned theatrically. ‘Well, get her to fill you in next time you see her. It’s really hard having to explain these things to civilians.’

At least she was picking up some media buzzwords. Celebrities were called ‘the talent’ and lowly peasants like Neve were known as ‘civilians’.

‘I’ll be sure to do that,’ Neve said crisply, folding her arms because she was annoyed and absolutely freezing but she was damned if she was going to let Max know that. ‘Silly old me, thinking that working on a fashion magazine was glamorous.’

‘It is glamorous,’ Max snapped. ‘And
Skirt
isn’t a fashion magazine. It’s actually a luxury lifestyle title.’ He paused as the waitress returned with a pot of tea for Neve and Max’s triple espresso. ‘Thank you, darling. I’m going to need another one of these in about ten minutes.’

Neve reluctantly removed a glove so she could pour herself a cup of tea and waited for Max to ask her how
her
week had been, but he was too busy knocking back his coffee in one swift gulp.

‘So what glamorous things have you done this week?’ she persisted and she didn’t even care, but hearing Max jaw on about a lot of vapid celebrities had to be better than sitting there in tense and resentful silence. She couldn’t believe that he’d agreed to go on a date with her, and had gone to all the trouble of actually turning up when he had zero interest in making even polite conversation.

‘The usual. Launches, screenings, after-shows … Oh, and I went to the soft opening of Jamie Oliver’s new restaurant,’ Max said with markedly more enthusiasm than he’d shown up to now. ‘Nigella and Sophie were both there – Sophie Dahl, that is. She dared me to nick the salt and pepper pots but that wasn’t even the best thing that happened this week.’

It sounded pretty spectacular to Neve, who had a lot of time for Sophie Dahl and her struggles with her weight, though she was slightly shocked that she’d encourage Max in acts of petty larceny. ‘It wasn’t?’

‘Didn’t even come close,’ Max said, resting his elbows on the table and giving her a swift and wicked smile. ‘My publishers bought me a Mini Cooper, though Mandy sent hers back because she wanted them to paint it pink and put in a sunroof.’

‘That would be a car?’ Neve clarified because she wanted to make sure it wasn’t more obscure media slang.

‘Yup.
Penalties and Prada
was Tesco’s bestselling fiction title last year and we just hit quarter of a million copies sold.’ He smiled to himself. ‘Of course, that doesn’t include foreign sales.’

‘Quarter of a million?’ Neve echoed, and if she sounded appalled then she just couldn’t help it.

‘Why are you scrunching up your face like you’re standing downwind of a sewage pipe?’

‘Well, it’s great that you got a new car and, well, at least it means that people are buying books, I suppose,’ Neve hedged, but then she couldn’t rein in these indignant words that needed to be spoken out loud. ‘But really it says everything that’s wrong about the publishing industry, that a quarter of a million people bought
and read
a sex and shopping novel that wasn’t even written by one of those footballer girlfriends, and yet most of the shortlisted titles on the Orange Prize, which is an award for women writers, don’t even sell ten thousand copies. It’s just not right.’

‘Well, it’s probably because they’re crap and go on about how shit it is to be an oppressed woman in a burqa in Iran or they’re one of those worthy books about a young girl coming to terms with her burgeoning sexuality in a rural town some time in the past when it was all ration books and no TV,’ Max rapped back at her.

Neve choked on her tea. Really choked on it so she spat drops of it on the paper tablecloth. ‘Name me three books that were on the shortlist for last year’s prize?’ she hissed at him and didn’t even wait for Max to answer because it would be a bloody long wait. ‘You can’t. I’m guessing you can’t even name the winner.’

‘Yeah, well, have you even read one of my books?’

‘You mean one of Mandy McDonald’s books, don’t you?’ Neve corrected.

‘It’s Mandy McIntyre, sweetheart, which you’d know if you read anything that was printed in this century.’

Neve had read lots of books that had been written in the current century, though she was currently hard-pressed to think of a single one. ‘At least I read books,’ she sneered, and she thought it might have been the first time that she’d ever sneered at anyone, but really, Max was the most objectionable person she’d ever met – so full of himself and obsessed with the shallow and superficial.

‘It’s probably why you work in some dusty old library, full of elderly lesbians with their cardigans buttoned all the way up to their necks as they read Agatha Christie novels and leer at your arse when they ask you to get books down from the top shelf,’ Max announced scathingly as Neve spat tea over the tablecloth again.

‘It’s a literary archive and there’s nothing wrong with wearing cardigans,’ she all but shrieked, though that really was neither here nor there, but Neve never felt properly dressed without a cardigan, and yes, she usually did up all the buttons because she tended to feel the cold. ‘And there’s nothing wrong in being a lesbian, unless you’re completely homophobic.’

‘How dare you?’ Max gasped. He certainly looked angry though he sounded as if he was ramping up the outrage for comic effect. ‘I am not homophobic. Almost all of my male friends are gay and I love Lady Gaga.’

Neve snorted in derision and would have got up there and then, flouncing off to Waitrose, and maybe even swearing under her breath, but the waitress was back with a laden tray.

She was rewarded with a devastating smile from Max that made her flutter her eyelashes and shove her breasts in his face as she placed a full English breakfast, a basket of pastries and a pot of coffee in front of him. Almost as an afterthought, she put down Neve’s plate.