Chapter 1
Strange though it may sound coming from someone who sells for a living, I never expected to find myself deceiving people. As far as I was concerned my boyfriend was the one who did that. He’d been leading a double life since the day we met, was celebrated for it, defined by it, his methods and motives debated even by those who’d never laid eyes on him.
First, there was the Dulwich Charlie, the well-brought up boy who lived with his mother in the kind of grand, wisteria-wrapped houses that never finds its way out of the family – not while someone like Meredith Grainger defends the deeds, at any rate. This was the little prince who raised his breakfast cornflakes to his mouth using the same silver spoon he’d found there at birth, and who saw nothing peculiar in spending whole evenings with sixty-year-olds drinking sherry and discussing the new lectures programme at the Picture Gallery.
And then there was the Charlie for everyone else, the one who ate takeaways in front of the TV using only his fork (though he drew the line at eating straight from the carton), and took pains to keep up with the football scores, the album charts and other matters of civilian importance. Citizen Charlie, I thought of him, the Charlie with the common touch, the one who touched me.
But when I pointed all of this out to him, some months after we’d fallen in love, for I was busy at work and the full Meredith situation was slow to dawn on me, he said that everyone led different lives to a greater or lesser degree, sometimes more than two. There were those out there who were veritable chameleons.
‘Who do you know who acts exactly the same with everyone?’ he asked, reasonably. ‘Think how different you are with your colleagues from how you are with me.’ He always remembered to say different from, never different to (Meredith, I was to learn, did the same). We were lying in my bed at the time and a disused ashtray inspired an example. ‘What about the other night, when we were out with Caro? You were smoking again. And I can’t believe how much you swear when you’re with your work crowd. You’re ten times more cynical.’
All of this was true. While not Charlie’s pupil exactly (even I know a Svengali must be older than his protégée and Charlie is my junior by four years), I had certainly cultivated a gentler, more sensitive persona when I was with him. He called it my tender side, which I thought made me sound like a particularly choice cut of beef. Nonetheless, I enjoyed exploring this other me and I enjoyed Charlie exploring her too.
Yes, there were two Annas, one for work and one for him, but that wasn’t the same as leading two lives and it was important to me that he recognised the distinction. I pulled the duvet up and propped myself on one elbow to face him. ‘Of course we all adopt different behaviours…’ – the plural seemed to lend my argument a clinical flavour – ‘…depending on who we’re with. That’s just common sense. No, what’s the word…?’
‘Expediency?’
‘Exactly. But just because I don’t lie naked with my ad director when we’re discussing rates doesn’t mean I’m doing what you’re doing. No, you have people in one life who don’t even know the ones in the other exist!’
‘Well, you know Meredith exists,’ he pointed out, refusing to take me seriously.
‘Yes, but she doesn’t know about me.’ How patient I was then! ‘Do you realise that I still don’t know your home address, Charlie?’
‘Don’t you?’ He looked genuinely startled. ‘Three Park Crescent, Dulwich. Happy now?’
‘Hmm. I bet there’s no such place. And did you even open that birthday card I gave you? Did you actually put it up in the house? On display?’
His eyes, the colour of clay, widened with amusement. ‘On display? Yes, it’s on my desk, just for a limited period, mind you, before I donate it to the Tate.’
I tried not to giggle. ‘I suppose you’ve scribbled out all the kisses in case she looks inside?’
‘I prefer my kisses in physical form, if it’s all the same.’
Adept at denial though he was, he was leading a double life all right, there were no two ways about it (actually, there were). I even looked the term up in the dictionary when he’d gone, but reference materials were not especially well represented on my shelves and the only tool available, a pocket dictionary from my college years, listed nothing between ‘double knit’ and ‘double locked’.
Occasionally, now, I wonder if I shouldn’t have been content with what I had. Perhaps I should have sat tight and concentrated my famous charm offensive on him. He was still a one-in-a-million catch, even if I was only allowed half of him, and since love magnified his delightfulness at least a hundred-fold my stake was surely worth fifty non-Charlies.
He preferred his kisses in physical form. I remember the feeling so well it makes me tremble. Today is the day. It’s etched on the inside of my eyelids before I even realise I’m awake and when I pull up the bedroom blind it’s scrawled across the sky Red Arrows-style. Over and over and over: June 26th. The last Saturday in June; the day before Charlie leaves for San Francisco; the date I set when I finally lost my patience with him and said: ‘Tell her or I will.’
I mean it, I said next, and then I marched back to the office and wrote a big red ‘M’ in my daybook, the one that holds every detail of every deal in current negotiation by the sales team. If it’s written in there then it’s definitely happening. Not that I’d be likely to forget a date of such import, of course, but you never know when you’ll be in need of that extra visual prompt. I might suffer some rogue blow to the head, for instance, followed by full-on Hollywood-style amnesia, and, lo and behold, Charlie would be free once more to bury his head in the sand – just where he likes to keep it.
Luckily, it is Saturday so I don’t have to share headspace for this personal crisis with the broader one of managing twelve developmentally-arrested newspaper sales reps, or, for that matter, their scarcely more sensible group heads. Only yesterday my number two Steve was found to be the brains behind a Friday afternoon frenzy that led to a waste paper basket being tipped over Ronnie’s head – cold coffee dregs and all. Nor must I wait six hours for a hangover to lift, because I left the bar after one glass of wine last night expressly to keep a clear head for today. Act with a sober head, repent with a sore one, that’s what my father always says. In his office fridge he has champagne for his clients and elderflower pressé for himself – they are almost exactly the same colour.
It is nine-thirty a.m. by the time the phone rings. I am up, dressed, drinking coffee and staring at the small triangle of river visible from my living room window. The water is pale and steely, and if I lean back on the sofa and narrow my eyes it looks like mercury is being slowly funnelled into the room. I don’t know whether to be soothed by this or frightened. And it hardly helps matters that I can no longer look at the Thames or any of its bridges, buildings or walkways without thinking of Charlie.
‘Is that you, Anna?’ It’s him, of course, but there is a flatness to his voice that makes me kill the smallest flare of hope that he’s calling to say he’s done the deed, he’s bringing her across town as we speak, they’re on Tower Bridge right now!
Foolish of me. Even if he had delivered, it would be I who must be presented to her. Any meeting between us would be on her turf.
‘Charlie, hi.’
‘That didn’t sound like you at all.’ He scrapes from the back of his throat that dry little chortle that’s as familiar to me as my own voice.
‘No? I assure you it is.’ I don’t chortle.
‘You sound weird.’
‘Weird?’
‘I don’t know, guarded.’ His voice is an absolute heartbreaker in its own right, gruff and tender at the same time, the kind that would make kittens roll onto their backs and submit – were kittens ever in evidence in the kind of bars and restaurants we tend to inhabit. Women, then. I’ve seen the effect that voice has when he speaks to them for the first time; they sort of swallow and put their fingers to their lips to cover their disarmament. On the phone, disembodied, it is intensified still, filling your head with intimacy before buckling away, leaving you to imagine all kinds of reasons why. Distress? Lust? An adolescence devoted to high-tar cigarettes?
‘I’m fine,’ I say, trying hard to sound it. ‘How come you’re up so early?’
‘Oh, I still haven’t finished this bloody paper, I’ll be mailing it off on my way to Heathrow at this rate. I’m seriously busting a gut here.’ If I sound guarded then he sounds unusually free, which can only mean that Meredith isn’t in the vicinity. He’s probably at the top of the house in his studio, where only a sheet of toughened glass separates him from the open sky. I haven’t seen his new workspace myself, refitted at Meredith’s expense when he enrolled at architecture school, but he tells me the views over Dulwich Park are an inspiration. He says he sometimes feels like he’s being cradled by the arms of the trees.
‘That’s cutting it fine.’ But I find it hard to sympathise with deadline junkies as I like to have important documents tweaked to within an inch of their lives at least forty-eight hours before presentation. ‘I suppose that means you’re calling to cancel lunch?’
‘No, not at all!’ There’s a pause while he considers how to handle this unyielding new me. Is it possible he’s been thinking my ultimatum was just another piece of posturing? A little residual busy-body office Anna sneaking mistakenly into the newly mellowed Charlie’s girl who usually speaks for her? Ever since I told him I’d decided that a year was long enough to sort things out he’s been buying time. ‘A year from the day we met or a year from now?’ That was his first question. ‘From the day we met,’ I decided. ‘Caro’s party, end of June.’ He didn’t argue, just nodded, calculating the damage.
‘It’s only three months, Anna,’ he says, now. ‘Not even that. It’ll go by in a flash.’ So his strategy is denial: no surprise there. OK, I’ll play along for a minute or two with the idea that I’m sulking about the San Francisco trip. In reality I think it’s an amazing opportunity for him; even I’ve heard of the architect Tomi Endo, who recently built an office block in the City that the press dubbed The Pinecone. If Charlie were to build up a relationship this summer that might lead to his returning to the Endo practice for the fourth year of his degree course, then his career will be made before it’s begun.
‘And of course I’m still on for lunch.’ He’s sounding bruised now and I snap on the TV to avoid succumbing. How can a voice be so seductive, still so seductive? Shouldn’t my desire have faded a little by now? Row upon row of frowning faces settles on the screen: Wimbledon. What’s in store for us on this middle Saturday, a smiling presenter in pearls is asking John McEnroe. Will the skies hold? Will a Brit battle into the second week?
‘What’s that?’ Charlie asks.
‘Just the TV. It’s the tennis.’
‘Look, I just wondered if we can make it one thirty?’ he says, daring to let his mind get back to work. Two critical deadlines in one day; in any other circumstances he’d have my sympathy.
‘Sure.’ I should end the conversation there, but instead I can’t help adding, ‘So where’s Mummy today?’
I hear the intake of breath, imagine him closing his eyes as he waits for me to finally do it, to call in the debt. I can’t believe this is actually happening; how did I get from precious new love who had kisses blown across the river when we parted to bailiff? ‘Don’t know,’ he says, finally. ‘Out with some friends, I think. We’re supposed to be having dinner tonight.’
I can’t fail to find it significant that she gets the dinner date and I the lesser lunch.
‘But what is it that makes that stroke such a winner?’ a female voice breaks in.
‘It’s her follow through,’ says John McEnroe straight off. ‘So many players are let down by their follow through.’
‘Where are you going?’ I ask Charlie. ‘For dinner?’
‘She’s deciding,’ he answers, all casual.
Of course she is.
For the record, ‘M’ stands for Meredith, or, equally, for Mother. The colour red denotes urgency. Or possibly danger.
Strange though it may sound coming from someone who sells for a living, I never expected to find myself deceiving people. As far as I was concerned my boyfriend was the one who did that. He’d been leading a double life since the day we met, was celebrated for it, defined by it, his methods and motives debated even by those who’d never laid eyes on him.
First, there was the Dulwich Charlie, the well-brought up boy who lived with his mother in the kind of grand, wisteria-wrapped houses that never finds its way out of the family – not while someone like Meredith Grainger defends the deeds, at any rate. This was the little prince who raised his breakfast cornflakes to his mouth using the same silver spoon he’d found there at birth, and who saw nothing peculiar in spending whole evenings with sixty-year-olds drinking sherry and discussing the new lectures programme at the Picture Gallery.
And then there was the Charlie for everyone else, the one who ate takeaways in front of the TV using only his fork (though he drew the line at eating straight from the carton), and took pains to keep up with the football scores, the album charts and other matters of civilian importance. Citizen Charlie, I thought of him, the Charlie with the common touch, the one who touched me.
But when I pointed all of this out to him, some months after we’d fallen in love, for I was busy at work and the full Meredith situation was slow to dawn on me, he said that everyone led different lives to a greater or lesser degree, sometimes more than two. There were those out there who were veritable chameleons.
‘Who do you know who acts exactly the same with everyone?’ he asked, reasonably. ‘Think how different you are with your colleagues from how you are with me.’ He always remembered to say different from, never different to (Meredith, I was to learn, did the same). We were lying in my bed at the time and a disused ashtray inspired an example. ‘What about the other night, when we were out with Caro? You were smoking again. And I can’t believe how much you swear when you’re with your work crowd. You’re ten times more cynical.’
All of this was true. While not Charlie’s pupil exactly (even I know a Svengali must be older than his protégée and Charlie is my junior by four years), I had certainly cultivated a gentler, more sensitive persona when I was with him. He called it my tender side, which I thought made me sound like a particularly choice cut of beef. Nonetheless, I enjoyed exploring this other me and I enjoyed Charlie exploring her too.
Yes, there were two Annas, one for work and one for him, but that wasn’t the same as leading two lives and it was important to me that he recognised the distinction. I pulled the duvet up and propped myself on one elbow to face him. ‘Of course we all adopt different behaviours…’ – the plural seemed to lend my argument a clinical flavour – ‘…depending on who we’re with. That’s just common sense. No, what’s the word…?’
‘Expediency?’
‘Exactly. But just because I don’t lie naked with my ad director when we’re discussing rates doesn’t mean I’m doing what you’re doing. No, you have people in one life who don’t even know the ones in the other exist!’
‘Well, you know Meredith exists,’ he pointed out, refusing to take me seriously.
‘Yes, but she doesn’t know about me.’ How patient I was then! ‘Do you realise that I still don’t know your home address, Charlie?’
‘Don’t you?’ He looked genuinely startled. ‘Three Park Crescent, Dulwich. Happy now?’
‘Hmm. I bet there’s no such place. And did you even open that birthday card I gave you? Did you actually put it up in the house? On display?’
His eyes, the colour of clay, widened with amusement. ‘On display? Yes, it’s on my desk, just for a limited period, mind you, before I donate it to the Tate.’
I tried not to giggle. ‘I suppose you’ve scribbled out all the kisses in case she looks inside?’
‘I prefer my kisses in physical form, if it’s all the same.’
Adept at denial though he was, he was leading a double life all right, there were no two ways about it (actually, there were). I even looked the term up in the dictionary when he’d gone, but reference materials were not especially well represented on my shelves and the only tool available, a pocket dictionary from my college years, listed nothing between ‘double knit’ and ‘double locked’.
Occasionally, now, I wonder if I shouldn’t have been content with what I had. Perhaps I should have sat tight and concentrated my famous charm offensive on him. He was still a one-in-a-million catch, even if I was only allowed half of him, and since love magnified his delightfulness at least a hundred-fold my stake was surely worth fifty non-Charlies.
He preferred his kisses in physical form. I remember the feeling so well it makes me tremble. Today is the day. It’s etched on the inside of my eyelids before I even realise I’m awake and when I pull up the bedroom blind it’s scrawled across the sky Red Arrows-style. Over and over and over: June 26th. The last Saturday in June; the day before Charlie leaves for San Francisco; the date I set when I finally lost my patience with him and said: ‘Tell her or I will.’
I mean it, I said next, and then I marched back to the office and wrote a big red ‘M’ in my daybook, the one that holds every detail of every deal in current negotiation by the sales team. If it’s written in there then it’s definitely happening. Not that I’d be likely to forget a date of such import, of course, but you never know when you’ll be in need of that extra visual prompt. I might suffer some rogue blow to the head, for instance, followed by full-on Hollywood-style amnesia, and, lo and behold, Charlie would be free once more to bury his head in the sand – just where he likes to keep it.
Luckily, it is Saturday so I don’t have to share headspace for this personal crisis with the broader one of managing twelve developmentally-arrested newspaper sales reps, or, for that matter, their scarcely more sensible group heads. Only yesterday my number two Steve was found to be the brains behind a Friday afternoon frenzy that led to a waste paper basket being tipped over Ronnie’s head – cold coffee dregs and all. Nor must I wait six hours for a hangover to lift, because I left the bar after one glass of wine last night expressly to keep a clear head for today. Act with a sober head, repent with a sore one, that’s what my father always says. In his office fridge he has champagne for his clients and elderflower pressé for himself – they are almost exactly the same colour.
It is nine-thirty a.m. by the time the phone rings. I am up, dressed, drinking coffee and staring at the small triangle of river visible from my living room window. The water is pale and steely, and if I lean back on the sofa and narrow my eyes it looks like mercury is being slowly funnelled into the room. I don’t know whether to be soothed by this or frightened. And it hardly helps matters that I can no longer look at the Thames or any of its bridges, buildings or walkways without thinking of Charlie.
‘Is that you, Anna?’ It’s him, of course, but there is a flatness to his voice that makes me kill the smallest flare of hope that he’s calling to say he’s done the deed, he’s bringing her across town as we speak, they’re on Tower Bridge right now!
Foolish of me. Even if he had delivered, it would be I who must be presented to her. Any meeting between us would be on her turf.
‘Charlie, hi.’
‘That didn’t sound like you at all.’ He scrapes from the back of his throat that dry little chortle that’s as familiar to me as my own voice.
‘No? I assure you it is.’ I don’t chortle.
‘You sound weird.’
‘Weird?’
‘I don’t know, guarded.’ His voice is an absolute heartbreaker in its own right, gruff and tender at the same time, the kind that would make kittens roll onto their backs and submit – were kittens ever in evidence in the kind of bars and restaurants we tend to inhabit. Women, then. I’ve seen the effect that voice has when he speaks to them for the first time; they sort of swallow and put their fingers to their lips to cover their disarmament. On the phone, disembodied, it is intensified still, filling your head with intimacy before buckling away, leaving you to imagine all kinds of reasons why. Distress? Lust? An adolescence devoted to high-tar cigarettes?
‘I’m fine,’ I say, trying hard to sound it. ‘How come you’re up so early?’
‘Oh, I still haven’t finished this bloody paper, I’ll be mailing it off on my way to Heathrow at this rate. I’m seriously busting a gut here.’ If I sound guarded then he sounds unusually free, which can only mean that Meredith isn’t in the vicinity. He’s probably at the top of the house in his studio, where only a sheet of toughened glass separates him from the open sky. I haven’t seen his new workspace myself, refitted at Meredith’s expense when he enrolled at architecture school, but he tells me the views over Dulwich Park are an inspiration. He says he sometimes feels like he’s being cradled by the arms of the trees.
‘That’s cutting it fine.’ But I find it hard to sympathise with deadline junkies as I like to have important documents tweaked to within an inch of their lives at least forty-eight hours before presentation. ‘I suppose that means you’re calling to cancel lunch?’
‘No, not at all!’ There’s a pause while he considers how to handle this unyielding new me. Is it possible he’s been thinking my ultimatum was just another piece of posturing? A little residual busy-body office Anna sneaking mistakenly into the newly mellowed Charlie’s girl who usually speaks for her? Ever since I told him I’d decided that a year was long enough to sort things out he’s been buying time. ‘A year from the day we met or a year from now?’ That was his first question. ‘From the day we met,’ I decided. ‘Caro’s party, end of June.’ He didn’t argue, just nodded, calculating the damage.
‘It’s only three months, Anna,’ he says, now. ‘Not even that. It’ll go by in a flash.’ So his strategy is denial: no surprise there. OK, I’ll play along for a minute or two with the idea that I’m sulking about the San Francisco trip. In reality I think it’s an amazing opportunity for him; even I’ve heard of the architect Tomi Endo, who recently built an office block in the City that the press dubbed The Pinecone. If Charlie were to build up a relationship this summer that might lead to his returning to the Endo practice for the fourth year of his degree course, then his career will be made before it’s begun.
‘And of course I’m still on for lunch.’ He’s sounding bruised now and I snap on the TV to avoid succumbing. How can a voice be so seductive, still so seductive? Shouldn’t my desire have faded a little by now? Row upon row of frowning faces settles on the screen: Wimbledon. What’s in store for us on this middle Saturday, a smiling presenter in pearls is asking John McEnroe. Will the skies hold? Will a Brit battle into the second week?
‘What’s that?’ Charlie asks.
‘Just the TV. It’s the tennis.’
‘Look, I just wondered if we can make it one thirty?’ he says, daring to let his mind get back to work. Two critical deadlines in one day; in any other circumstances he’d have my sympathy.
‘Sure.’ I should end the conversation there, but instead I can’t help adding, ‘So where’s Mummy today?’
I hear the intake of breath, imagine him closing his eyes as he waits for me to finally do it, to call in the debt. I can’t believe this is actually happening; how did I get from precious new love who had kisses blown across the river when we parted to bailiff? ‘Don’t know,’ he says, finally. ‘Out with some friends, I think. We’re supposed to be having dinner tonight.’
I can’t fail to find it significant that she gets the dinner date and I the lesser lunch.
‘But what is it that makes that stroke such a winner?’ a female voice breaks in.
‘It’s her follow through,’ says John McEnroe straight off. ‘So many players are let down by their follow through.’
‘Where are you going?’ I ask Charlie. ‘For dinner?’
‘She’s deciding,’ he answers, all casual.
Of course she is.
For the record, ‘M’ stands for Meredith, or, equally, for Mother. The colour red denotes urgency. Or possibly danger.