A Hopeless Romantic (13 page)

“Let me help,” said Mr. Kenzo, and before Laura could protest he had gripped the box firmly under his arm, lifted up the lid of the bin, and tipped the contents into its black mouth.

Laura gazed helplessly as videos, books, letters all tumbled out of the box one after the other, disappearing into the dark. “Oh,” she said.

“Mistake?” said Mr. Kenzo. “Oh dear. That was rubbish, wasn’t it? You did want to throw it away? Yes?”

“Yes,” said Laura, finishing the peach and slinging the peach pit into the bin as well. She shut the bin lid. “Yes, I did. Thanks, Mr. Kenzo. See you later.”

And she turned and walked up the path and up the stairs back to the flat. Another thing to check off the list. She was doing well. It was like having a New Year’s resolution, she thought. I will get over Dan and I will sort out my life; also, I will go to the gym and have freshly squeezed fruit juice every morning. Well, little by little.

The phone was ringing as she came back into the flat, and though she’d been avoiding the phone, she instinctively picked it up.

“Hi, babe,” Jo said.

“Er, hi,” Laura said uncertainly.

“Look, I know it’s none of my business. But Yorky just rang me. He told me what’s happened.” Her voice reverberated down the line.

“Oh,” said Laura. “Right.” She twisted the phone cord around her finger and sat down on the chair by the hall table. “Go on, then,” she said, not really knowing what to say, not wanting to sound rude, but not wanting to get into it. She really couldn’t cope with Jo if she was going to be sanctimonious and say “I told you so.”

“Well…” Jo coughed. “I just wanted to say hi.”

“Thanks,” Laura said, fidgeting, feeling like a five-year-old.

There was a pause; then Jo said in a rush, “Look. It’s none of my business. I’m not going to judge. You know what I think about it all. But I’ve been a really bad friend to you lately, and I’m sorry.”

“You haven’t been a bad friend!” Laura cried. “My God! I’m the one who’s been bad! How can you say that?”

Jo’s voice was a bit muffled, but she chuckled and said, “Well, it’s over now, isn’t it? Hey.” She sniffed. “I really, really miss you, Laura. Can we—er, can we be friends again?”

“Of course!” said Laura. She hugged herself. “Oh, I’m so glad.”

“Me too,” said Jo, her voice quiet. “Look, I am really sorry. You poor thing. Are you okay?”

“Well…” Laura didn’t want to sound pathetic. Then she said honestly, “Actually, no, not really. But I will be.”

“Can I—can I pop round?”

Laura looked at her watch. It was only three o’clock. Jo should be at work. “Course,” she said. “Where are you?”

There was a knock on the door, three feet away, and Laura jumped. “Argh!” she cried.

“It’s me,” came Jo’s voice, down the phone and from outside. “Hello.”

Laura opened the door. There was her best friend standing in the doorway, her tiny frame dwarfed by her enormous backpack. She was holding some chocolates and a bottle of wine. She raised a hand in greeting and her eyes met Laura’s, and she smiled.

“Bunked off work,” she said, rolling her eyes in the direction of her backpack crammed with papers. “I—I wanted to see you.” And she came forward with her arms outstretched and gave Laura a hug. “Poor, poor baby,” she said soothingly into Laura’s hair, and both of them were crying, not just for Laura’s predicament but because girls are a bit pathetic like that. “Poor baby.”

“Yes,” sniffed Laura, wholly in agreement. “Thanks,” she added. “You must think I’m a complete idiot.”

“No, I don’t,” said Jo firmly. “Just—no, I don’t.
He’s
the idiot, isn’t he?”

“Yeah! But—well, I have been really stupid. And the worst of it is, you were right,” she said in a rush. “All along. You’re always saying it.”

“Saying what?”

“You know,” said Laura, looking at the floor.

Jo swung her backpack onto the ground and said nothing.

“Well,” Laura said after a while, “just—it’s not the first time. I should have learned my lesson by now. I have. Just so you know.”

“Sure, sure,” Jo crooned, putting her arm around her friend. “Yes, of course you have.”

“No, I mean it,” said Laura firmly. “You sound like Yorky. I have. Well, you’ll just have to see. I’m a changed person. Anyway. Forget it.” She eyed the bottle of wine. “Screw-top, yum. Come and get a glass.”

“Great,” said Jo. “So, tell me all about it. It happened on Friday, right?”

“Right,” said Laura, retreating into the kitchen. “So…”

Laura suffered a setback on Wednesday. She knew she’d been doing so well, but it was hard being good and kind
and
Mrs. Danvers–like all at the same time. She woke up with a vicious hangover ( Jo had stayed till eleven o’clock, and they’d got through a lot of wine together), and the dramatic avowals of friendship and cathartic chats of the previous night seemed a little empty the next day, when her tongue was furry again and she was tired and miserable and still jobless, penniless, Danless. She made herself a cup of tea and crawled back into bed, chewing her fingernails. What was she going to do with her life now? The practical side of her started to worry. How was she going to convince Rachel to give her another chance, trust her again? Future invented phantoms crowded into her mind; she couldn’t stop thinking everything over, over and over, and she cried again, huge, self-pitying sobs.

She was still lying there when her phone rang. Laura reached out and patted the bedside table without looking at it, feeling blindly and knocking over her lamp and book. She picked it up and brought it under the duvet to see who it was.

Amy Mobile.

Laura pressed
BUSY
, her fingers fumbling. She turned the phone off and put it down the side of the bed by the wall, terrified, and curled up into a ball and hugged herself. It was more than an hour before she moved again and put her hand gingerly down to the floor, squeezing her knuckles through the tight fit between the bed frame and the wall, to pick up the phone. She turned it on. It seemed to take hours. The screen lit up, the welcome message trinkled at her, and then the voicemail rang. Laura pressed answer, her jaw set. Perhaps…

“Laura. You know who it is.” She hadn’t seen Amy for so long, hearing her voice came as a huge shock. Sickly sweet, slightly rasping, scary. It didn’t sound violent, or overly emotional, or hormonal. It sounded in control. “Don’t hang up on me, you
bitch
,” she hissed. “You fat, spotty, spineless little
bitch
. Dan finally told me who he’s been screwing, like I couldn’t guess anyway. Okay? You’re too fucking coward to talk to me after what you’ve done, are you? Fine. Let me spell it out for you. I know what you did. If you ever go near him again, I’ll find you and I’ll make your life misery. Even more miserable than it must be now. You fat, stupid
dog
. He told me how you chased after him, how you begged him, just like the ugly dog you are. Like you were at school, always begging. You’re pathetic, Laura. You are
pathetic
.

“We’re going on holiday next week, dog-girl. Just so you know. We’re going to Florida. I would ask you along, but they don’t allow dogs in the hotel. So why don’t you just fuck off and think about what you’ve done. I hope it eats you alive. So long, dog-girl.”

Laura couldn’t feel her fingers, her hands, they were shaking so much, and the mobile fell onto the bed. She deleted the message and looked at the phone, terrified of its power all of a sudden, that something so nasty could come out of it. She turned it off again and slid it under her new duvet, feeling slightly sick. Would it always be like this? She could feel Amy’s presence nearby, coming out of the phone, coming in through the windows. She was close, too close; so was Dan. Laura wished she were anywhere but here. She closed her eyes, but she didn’t cry. She didn’t know how to.

It was her mother who finally sorted her out. She swept into Laura’s room on Thursday and drew back the curtains. Laura was watching a talk show on her TV, and her eyes bulged with amazement at her mother’s nerve.

“How—how dare you! Get out!” she screamed, waving her finger at Angela rather like a French aristocrat to a peasant caught wandering in his garden.

“Hello, dear,” said Angela, opening the window. “I spoke to your grandmother last night.”

“Oh,” said Laura, sinking down in the bed and chewing her little finger.

“She—well, she said she thought you’ve been having a hard time lately,” said Angela, who wasn’t half as insensible as her daughter thought she was. “Darling. Aren’t you…needed at work at the moment?”

“No,” said Laura, muffled.

Angela bit her lip. “And…are you still going on holiday next week?”

“No,” said Laura, with the sheet over her head. “Go away.”

Angela twisted her hands together and said, “Listen, dear. I have a suggestion. Why don’t you come to Norfolk with your father and me instead? And Granny, of course. How about it?”

“Absolutely no way, ever ever ever,” came the voice from under the duvet. “I’d rather eat…I’d rather eat—er—this duvet. No way!”

The next day—Friday—should have been Laura’s last day in the office before her holiday. She should have been getting ready to go to Florida, packing her gorgeous new print hot pants, her halter-neck bikini, her new digital camera, her cool cowboy hat.

As she was sorting through some clothes in her wardrobe, Laura found the cowboy hat. She took it down from the shelf and looked at it wonderingly, as if it were something from another planet. She stood there, running her fingers around the rim, letting her mind drift aimlessly over the past few days, weeks, months. Yes, in another life, the cab would have been coming to collect her in an hour. If it actually arrived now with Dan inside, calling up to her, telling her he loved her, that it was all a big mistake, what would she do? She put the hat back in the wardrobe and closed the door. She knew what she would do.

A few minutes later, Laura rang up her mother.

“Mum,” she said. “I’ve…now that my plans have sort of changed, I was wondering…can I come to Norfolk with you?”

Angela knew her daughter far better than Laura realized. Laura could tell she was smiling into the phone as she said, “Yes, of course you can, darling. Oh, that’s wonderful. How nice. I’ll start on the packed lunch right now.”

Laura put the phone down. Sitting there on the polished wooden floor, she leaned against the armchair and gazed around the sitting room. It was early Friday afternoon, too early for anyone to have left work. The air was still, and out on the street not a leaf stirred on the trees. It was very quiet. She brought her knees up under her chin and hugged her legs, and she stayed like that, thinking, for a long time.

part two

chapter twelve

T
he Foster family had been going to Seavale for their summer holidays since before Laura was born. About thirty years ago, when Xan and Mary started spending less time living as nomadic Bedouins or traveling through South America on diplomatic missions and more time in the UK, they had bought the bungalow overlooking the sea. The house had been built in the 1920s, a pretty, if small, Arts and Crafts villa, crammed with books and cushions and dancing light from the water. Beside the sitting room was a terrace, partly sheltered, and on the other side of the terrace was a single-room structure of glass and wood—Xan’s studio, where he would spend the majority of the day in his smock, chewing his pipe and looking out to sea. It was now an extra bedroom, hung with his watercolors.

Mary’s eighty-fifth birthday party was to fall on the following Saturday, when the clan would gather for one day only. Because it was a momentous occasion, Angela and George were to be joined that day by Aunt Annabel, Uncle Robert, and Lulu, Fran, and Fran’s boyfriend, Ludo. Laura could only feel relief that she’d already said she had to be back in London that Saturday evening (some bollocks about a party somewhere, she’d told her mother), and would not be exposing herself to the Sandersons for longer than necessary. She could cope with the formidable Aunt Annabel, just about. Robert was a bore and a boor, but he was passable; he spent most of the time either drunk or asleep. It was Lulu and Fran whom Laura wanted to run in the opposite direction from. As with her mother’s rather strained relationship with her stepsister, Laura wanted to like her cousins. She just couldn’t bring herself to do it.

Lulu and Fran were famed throughout their teenage years for being creative, superintelligent, and well-behaved, always clearing up the tea trays, writing thank-you letters, and saying, “Oh! How lovely!” about things, rather than slouching grumpily around and grunting, thinking the world was against them, which was how Simon and Laura spent their teenage years. But Simon and Laura had
quite
liked them then, because they were naughty, too, and were up for things like the disco in the village next to Seavale, or having sneaky cigarettes in the sand dunes. But the years since had highlighted the gap between their respective families, and Laura now thought of them as snobbish, hyperartificial, and fake, and “creative” in the way that rich pointless people are, i.e., they become feature writers for
Posh Person’s Monthly
or open their houses once a month to sell expensive jewelry they bought for next to nothing in Morocco. Lulu lived in Notting Hill and was skeletally thin and unbearable; Fran, actually, was slightly more bearable, but had gone native in Lulu’s eyes. She lived in Putney with her boyfriend, Ludo, was a sports physiologist, had thick hair and thick ankles, and spent her life either running with Ludo or getting bladdered with him in an All Bar One–type pub on the river.

“Thank God they’re not related to us,” Simon and Laura would moan.

“I know,” Angela once answered in a rare display of solidarity.

They were just different from the Fosters, and Laura didn’t like the way she sensed the Sandersons looked down their collective noses at the Fosters, just because their house was a semidetached and they lived in Harrow, and only had one car. The Sandersons had two cars and lived in tony Holland Park; Lulu and Fran went to a super-exclusive school, and Annabel sat on several committees and cowrote cookbooks like
The Glorious Twelfth and Buffets for Debutantes,
or
Picnics for Countryside Alliance Marches,
which was ridiculous, since they lived practically in the heart of London and Annabel actually didn’t like meat that much.