Part 1 (1/2)

A Hopeless Romantic.

by Harriet Evans.

For the magnificent specimen, my mother, Linda. With all my love.

acknowledgments.

With many thanks to Kim Witherspoon, David Forner, Beth Davey, and all at Inkwell. No thanks to David for revealing the Desperate Housewives finale secret, though. And a huge thank-you to Louise Burke and all my friends at Pocket, especially Maggie Crawford.

How to understand it all! How to understand the deceptions she had been thus practicing on herself, and living under!-The blunders, the blindness of her own head and heart!-she sat still, she walked about, she tried her own room, she tried the shrubbery-in every place, every posture, she perceived that she had acted most weakly.

-Emma, Jane Austen.

part one.

chapter one.

L aura Foster was a hopeless romantic. Her best friend, Jo, said it was her greatest flaw, and at the same time her most endearing trait, because it was the thing that most frequently got her into trouble, and yet falling in love was like a drug to her. Having a crush, daydreaming about someone, feeling her heart race when she saw a certain man walk toward her-she thrived on all of it, and was disastrously, helplessly, hopelessly incapable of seeing when it was wrong. Everyone has a blind spot. With Laura, it was as if she had a blind heart.

Anyone with a less romantic upbringing would be hard to find. She wasn't a runaway nun, or the daughter of an Italian count, or a mysterious orphan. She was the daughter of George and Angela Foster, of Harrow, in the suburbs of London. She had one younger brother, Simon, who was perfectly normal, not a secret duke, or a spy, or a soldier. George was a computer engineer, and Angela was a part-time translator. As Jo once said to her, about a year after they met at university, ”Laura, why do you go around pretending to be Julie Andrews, when you're actually Hyacinth Bucket?”

But Laura never allowed reality to get in the way of fantasy. By the time she was eighteen, she had fallen for: a runny-nosed, milk-bottle-gla.s.seswearing, primary-school outcast called Kevin (in her mind, Indiana Jones with gla.s.ses); her oboe teacher, Mr. Wallace, a thin, spotty youth, over whom she developed a raging obsession and calluses on her fingers, so ferociously did she practice; and about fifteen different boys at the boys' school around the corner from hers in Harrow.

When she went to university, the scope was even greater, the potential for romance limitless. She wasn't interested in a random pickup at a club. No, Laura wanted someone to stand underneath her window and recite poetry to her. She was almost always disappointed. There was Gideon, the budding theater director who hadn't quite come out of the closet. Juan, the Colombian student who spoke no English. And the rowing captain who was much more obsessed with the treadmill at the gym than with her; her dentist, who charged her far too much and then made her pay for dinner; and the lecturer in her humanities seminar whom she never spoke to, and who didn't know her name, whom she wasted two terms staring at in a heartfelt manner.

For all of these, Laura followed the same pattern. She stopped eating, she mooned around, she was acutely conscious of where they were in any room, thought she saw them around every corner-was that the back of his curly head going into the newsagents? She became a big, dumb idiot whenever any of them spoke to her; so fairly often they walked away, bemused that this nice girl with dark blond hair, a sweet smile, and a dirty laugh who'd seemed to like them then behaved like a tourist in a strange land, eyes downcast, virtually mute. Or they'd ask her out-and then Laura, for her part, usually came tumbling down to earth with a bang when she realized they weren't perfect, weren't this demiG.o.d she'd turned them into in her mind. It wasn't that she was particularly picky, either. She was just a really bad picker.

She believed in The One. And every man she met, for the first five minutes, two weeks, four months, had the potential in her eyes to be The One-until she reluctantly realized he was gay (Gideon from the Drama Society), psychopathic (Adam, her boyfriend for several months, who eventually gave up on his MA in the Romantic poets and joined the Special Air Service to become a killing machine), against the law ( Juan, the illegal immigrant from Colombia), or Josh (her most recent boyfriend, whom she'd met at a volunteer reading program seminar at work-she worked for the local council-decided was The One after five minutes, and dated for over a year, before realizing that, really, all they had in common was a love of local council literacy initiatives).

It's fine for girls to grow up believing in something like The One; but the generally received wisdom by the time Laura was out of university, as she moved into her midtwenties, as her friends started to settle down, was that it didn't really exist-well, it did, but with variations. Not for Laura. She was going to wait till she found him. To her flatmate and childhood friend Yorky's complaints that he was sick of sharing his flat with a lovesick teenager all the time, as well as a succession of totally disparate, odd men, Laura said firmly that he was being mean and judgmental. To Jo's pragmatic suggestions that she should join a dating agency, or simply ask out that bloke over there, Laura said no. It would happen the way she wanted it to happen, she said-you couldn't force it. And that would be it-until five minutes later when a waiter in a restaurant would smile at her, and Laura would gaze happily up at him, imagining herself and him moving back to Italy, opening a small cafe in a market square, having lots of beautiful babies called Francesca and Giacomo. Jo could only shake her head at this, as Laura laughed with her, aware of how hopeless she was, compared to her pragmatic, realistic best friend.

Until, one evening about eighteen months ago, Jo came round to supper at Yorky and Laura's flat. She was very quiet; Laura often worried that Jo worked too hard. As Laura was trying to digest a mouthful of chickpeas that Yorky had marvelously undercooked, trying not to choke on them, Jo wiped her mouth with a piece of paper towel and looked up.

”Um...hey.”

Laura looked at her suspiciously. Jo's eyes were sparkling, her heart-shaped little face was flushed, and she leaned across the table and said, ”I've met someone.”

”Where?” Yorky had said stupidly.

But Laura understood what that statement meant, of course she did, and she said, ”Who is he?”

”He's called Chris,” Jo said, and she smiled, rather girlishly, which was even more unusual for her. ”I met him at work.” Jo was a real estate solicitor. ”He was buying a house. He yelled at me.”

And then-and this was when Laura realized it was serious-Jo twisted a tendril of her hair and then put it in her mouth. Since this was a breach of social behavior in Jo's eyes tantamount to not sending a thank-you card after a dinner party, Laura put her hand out across the table and said, ”Wow! How exciting.”

”I know,” said Jo, unable to stop herself smiling. ”I know!”

Laura knew, as she looked at Jo, she just knew, she didn't know why. Here was someone in love, who had found The One, and that was all there was to it.

Chris and Jo moved into the house she'd helped him buy after six months; four months after that, he proposed. The following December, a couple of weeks before Christmas, he and Jo were to be married, in a London hotel. Jo had eschewed grown-up bridesmaids, saying they were deeply, humiliatingly tacky, much to Laura's disappointment-she was rather looking forward to donning a nice dress, and sharing with her best friend the happiest day of her life. Instead, she was going to be best woman, and Yorky an usher.

It seemed as if Jo and Chris had been together forever, and Laura could barely remember when he hadn't been on the scene. He fitted right in, with his North London pub ways, his easy, uncomplicated personality, so laid-back and friendly compared to Jo's dry, rather controlled outlook on life. He had friends who lived nearby-some lovely friends. They were all a gang now, him and Jo, his friends, Yorky and Laura, sometimes Laura's brother, Simon, when he wasn't off somewhere being worthy and making girls swoon (where Laura was always falling in love, Simon was always falling into bed with a complete stranger, usually by dint of lulling her into a false sense of security by telling her he worked for a charity). And Hilary, also from university and christened Scary Hilary-because she was-and her brother, Hamish, their other friends from work or university, and so on. Laura's easy, happy, uncomplicated life went on its way. She had a brief, intense affair with a playwright she thought was very possibly the new John Osborne, until Yorky pointed out that he was, in fact, just an idiot who liked shouting a lot. Yorky grew a mustache for the autumn. Laura got a raise at work. They bought a PlayStation to celebrate-games for him, karaoke for her. Yes, everything was well within its usual frame, except that Laura began to feel, more and more, as she looked at Jo and Chris so in love and looked at the landscape of her own dull life, that she was taking the path of least resistance, that her world was small and pathetic compared to Jo's. That she was missing out on what she most wanted in the world.

Under these circ.u.mstances, it was hardly surprising that the next time Laura fell, she fell hard. Because one day, quite without meaning to, she woke up, got dressed, and went to work, and everything was normal, and by the next day, she had fallen in love again. But this time, she knew it was for real. And that was when everything started to go wrong.

chapter two.

L aura's grandmother, Mary Fielding, was the person Laura loved most in the world (apart from whomever it was she was in love with at that moment), even more so perhaps than her parents, than her brother. Mary was a widow. She had lost her husband, Xan, eight years before, and she lived on her own, in a small but perfectly formed flat in Marylebone. There were various reasons why Laura idolized Mary, wanted to be just like her, found her much more seductive than her own parents. Mary was stylish-even at eighty-four, she was always the best-dressed person in a room. Mary was funny-her face lit up when she was telling a joke, and she could make anyone roar with laughter, young or old. But the main reason was that Mary had found true love. Her husband, Xan, was the love of her life to an extent Laura had never seen before or since. They had met when each was widowed, in Cairo after the Second World War. Mary had a daughter, Angela, Laura's mother. Xan also had a daughter, Annabel, whom Laura and Simon called aunt, even though she wasn't really related to them, and neither was Xan.

Because of her mother's natural reserve, it was Mary whom Laura told about her love life, her latest disaster, the person she was in love with. Because she lived in central London, and so not far from Laura on her way into and out of work, it was Mary Laura called in to see, to talk to, to listen to. And it was Mary whom Laura learned from, when it came to true love. She did not learn it from her own unemotional parents. No, she learned that true love was epic stuff, as told by Mary.

One of Laura's favorite stories was how Mary and Xan had realized they were in love, on a trip out to the pyramids to see the sun rise. It had been pitch black as they rode out, crammed in a jeep with the other members of their club in Cairo. And as the sun rose, Xan had turned to Mary and said, ”You know I can't live without you, don't you?” And Mary had said, ”I know.”

And that was that. They were married six months later.

George and Angela, by contrast, had met at a choral society function off the Tottenham Court Road, when they were both at university. Somehow, Laura felt this wasn't quite the same.

”You are the love of my life. The woman I want to grow old with. I love you.”

He was staring at her intensely, his eyes boring into hers. Laura raised her hand to his chest and said breathlessly, ”I love you, too.”

Beyond them, the sun was rising, flooding the vast desert landscape with pink and orange color. Sand whipped her face, the silk of her headscarf caught in the breeze. She could feel the cold smoothness of the material of his dinner jacket against her skin as he caught her and pulled her toward him.

”Tell me again,” Laura whispered in his ear. ”Tell me again that you love me.”

Suddenly, a microphone crackled loudly, jerking Laura back to reality, as someone cleared his throat and said, ”To my beautiful wife, Jo!”

”Aah,” the wedding guests murmured in approval, as Laura came back down to earth with a b.u.mp. There was some sniffing, especially from Jo's mother up at the top table, as Chris raised a gla.s.s to his new bride, kissed her, and then sat down, to a welter of applause and chair shuffling.

”Aah,” Laura whispered to herself, leaving her daydream behind with a sigh. She looked at Jo, her best friend, so beautiful and happy-looking, and found tears were br.i.m.m.i.n.g in her eyes. She turned to her flatmate, Yorky, who was sitting next to her, and sniffed loudly.

”Look at her,” she said. ”Can you believe it?”

”No,” said Yorky, raising an eye at Chris's cousin Mia. Yorky had recently begun to teach himself how to raise one eyebrow, in a ”come to me, pretty laydee” way. This had involved several hours of grimacing into Laura's hand mirror in the sitting room of their flat, whilst Laura was trying to watch TV. She got very irritated when he did this, and frequently told him that being able to raise one eyebrow was not the key to scoring big with the ladies. Wearing matching socks was. As was having a tidy room. And not acting like a crazy stalker when some girl said no after you asked her out. These were the things that Laura frequently told Yorky he should be concentrating on; yet, much to her deep chagrin, he ignored her every time. For Yorky's retort was always that what Laura knew about dating was worthless.

What a perfect, happy day, Laura thought as she gazed around the room, clapping now that the speeches were over. She was gripping her gla.s.s, searching for someone she couldn't see. Suddenly her eye fell on Jo and she watched her for a moment, truly radiant, happy and serene in an antique lace dress, her hand resting lightly on her new husband's as they sat at the top table. Laura couldn't help but feel a tiny pang of something sad. It wasn't just any bride sitting there in the white dress with the flowers and the black suits around her. It was Jo, Jo with whom she had danced all night in various Greek nightclubs, with whom she had spent hours in Top-shop changing rooms, with whom she had stayed up all night when she sobbed her heart out after her last boyfriend, Noel, dumped her. It was her best friend, and it was weird.

She blinked and caught Jo's eye, suddenly overcome with emotion. Jo smiled at her, winked, and mouthed something. Laura couldn't tell what it was, but by the jerking of her head toward the best man, Chris's newly single brother, Jason, Laura thought she could guess what Jo meant. Laura followed her gaze, shaking herself out of her mood. Jason was nice, yes. Definitely. But he wasn't...d.a.m.n it, where was he?

”Who are you looking for?” said Yorky suspiciously, as Laura cast her eyes around the room.