Summer Holiday

‘How long would we have to have these bodyguards?’ Alex asked, emphasising the final word.

‘Until the hotel is finished and at least in its first working year.’

‘Which would be about how long?’

‘Three years, to be on the safe side.’

‘Three years?’ Alex was aghast. ‘Three years of having someone—’

‘Or two,’ interjected David.

‘Of having someone,’ Alex reiterated, ‘following me around everywhere. For God’s sake, Dad. Talk about overkill.’

‘Alex, you are my heir. And they know that. Please don’t make me have to have you followed.’

Belinda knocked and came in with a pot of tea and a crystal glass of champagne. ‘It’s ethically sourced organic Assam tea,’ she said to Alex, who was now pacing the room. ‘Shall I pour?’

‘No, thanks, let it mash. How are the kids?’

‘Great,’ said Belinda, her bosom almost visibly swelling with pride. ‘One’s taking GCSEs, the other’s trying to decide whether to go in the army or do plumbing. I’d prefer him not to go into the army, what with Afghanistan and everything, but he’s got friends who love it.’

‘Yes, I can see that plumbing would be the marginally less dangerous option. Although I tell you what, there are some people whose pipes I would not like to riddle,’ he said, with a grimace.

‘Anything else I can get you?’ asked the housekeeper, addressing David.

‘A new van for my son, if you could. It’s making the front of the house look scruffy.’

Belinda looked affectionately at Alex and left the room.

‘I think she’s got the hots for you, Dad,’ Alex said, pouring the tea through the strainer into the bone china cup.

‘Hardly surprising,’ was David’s riposte. He was well used to his son’s ribbing. Belinda looked like a friendly dumpling. ‘Anyway. What’s it to be?’ he asked.

‘Let’s compromise. I’ll allow you to employ one minder. But can I have a right of veto? I don’t want one who looks like a bloody great big gorilla with balloons under his arms. And if he’s got to be around me all the time, I’d like him to have a reasonable personality.’

‘Or her,’ added David.

‘Or her,’ said Alex, perking up. ‘You know, that would actually be quite cool. Halle Berry in Die Another Day. Angelina Jolie in that shit film Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. Nice. Hey, I’m coming round to this idea.’

‘I think the likelihood of that is going to be about zero. But if you’d prefer a woman, I’ll see what I can do. I’ll send them round to the van, shall I?’

‘Ha-ha. The house will be finished in a week or so. Send them there or the flat in London. Is there going to be a code? Three short knocks, followed by a long one, a finger of banana slid through the letterbox and a cough?’

‘I can see this is going to be an endless source of amusement. I’ll let you have a list and you can make your own arrangements.’

Alex drove back to his house in the pretty village of Shillingford and had a quick chat with the decorators before going to London and getting ready for his dinner date. He chose a pair of Alexander McQueen trousers and a Paul Smith shirt. He slipped on a pair of tan boots he’d had made for him, and tied his dreadlocks back. He had shaved that morning and was sporting a rakish five o’clock shadow. With a cursory glance in the mirror, he left with a confident air.

There was a distinct lack of confidence going on with Miranda. She was having a crisis. Every item of clothing she tried on looked atrocious. She had decided that her body looked like an old potato. Her hair was a mess. She could only see wrinkles and could have sworn her skin was starting to ruche in places.

She was almost tempted to phone Alex and tell him she’d got flu. Or the plague. Boils. Frogs. Anything. She looked at her watch. How could it be that she was running out of time? She’d been getting ready since three.

The mobile rang. Lucy again. She pressed reject call. A text pinged. Alex, saying he was on his way and was really looking forward to dinner. He’d also given her the postcode in case she didn’t know where it was. As if. His text spurred her on. She decided to follow the tenets she had lived by since she was a teenager. One: if in doubt, get them out. Two: high heels good, higher heels better.

The woman who hailed the taxi on the main road in Notting Hill looked flushed but beautiful. She had tied her hair back loosely with a clip, and was wearing slim black trousers, towering stilettos, a stunning blue shimmering shirt unbuttoned dangerously low, and diamond drop earrings – a twentieth anniversary gift from Nigel when he was feeling guilty about the affair with his secretary.

Fashionably late, she arrived at Zuma and was directed to a table where Alex was perusing the wine list. He stood up and kissed her on one cheek, setting off a chain reaction through her sensory zones and making the hairs on the back of her neck tingle. It had been an age since anything this exciting had happened to her follicles.

She smiled flirtily. ‘Sorry I’m late. Have you been waiting long?’

‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘The temptation to say “all of my life” is quite strong.’

‘But luckily you resisted it because it was far too corny,’ she responded.

‘Exactly. I arrived about ten minutes ago, to make sure our table was okay.’

‘What would you have done if it wasn’t?’ she asked, opening the menu without looking at it.

‘Asked to be shown another, of course.’

‘Naturally,’ she said, ‘since you’re obviously a frequent customer.’

His bright green eyes crinkled attractively. ‘I can see I’m going to have to disabuse you of the notion that I live in a swamp, make my own clothes out of spinach and grow fungus under my fingernails.’

‘A fungi to be with,’ she quipped.

‘Well, I do hope so. Before we get into the story of my life and you tell me how you came to be so gorgeous, shall we order some wine?’

‘Thank you. Yes. White okay?’ He had called her gorgeous! She felt like a teenager.

Alex addressed himself to the wine list, giving Miranda time to study him more fully. The sage green shirt with small cream stars had a couple of buttons undone and highlighted his smooth brown skin. He was wearing stone-coloured trousers, and she could see a booted foot coming out from under the table.

As if he could feel her scrutiny, he glanced up and caught her eye. ‘All satisfactory, madam?’ he asked.

She blushed to the roots of her hair.

He smiled. ‘Hey, don’t think I haven’t been doing the same. You look beautiful. That blue shirt makes your eyes look the colour of cornflowers.’

Miranda was feeling too hot to make any intelligible response. He turned to the more innocuous subject of wine. ‘How do you feel about a sauvignon? Or a pinot grigio? Or chardonnay?’

‘Chardonnay, but not too oaky. If you fancy that?’ She was all of a dither, and her voice had gone up a notch. Calm yourself, she said slowly, in her head. You’re forty-three years old, for heaven’s sake.

He waved at the waiter and ordered a bottle of chenin blanc before opening the menu.

‘How do you square all this with your eco-credentials?’ queried Miranda, gesturing to the selection.

‘I do what I can where I can. And I ask before I decide. You don’t have to wear a hair shirt to want to do the decent thing by the planet. I do think we should eat a lot less meat, but I also accept that we wouldn’t have the meadows we do if there weren’t sheep roaming the hillsides chomping up the grass and leaving handy droppings for the plants. Has that helped you make any decisions on what you want to eat?’

‘A small pile of seaweed and an organic carrot?’ she suggested.

He grinned at her. ‘Honestly. I’m an eco-fan, not an eco-bore – I hope. And please, please, order what you want. My father is an out-and-out protein scoffer. He would eat a whole cow every day, hoofs cut off, arse wiped and on the plate – except that his doctor would have a go at him. My mother thinks food is only safe to eat if it’s covered with plastic. As I said, I do my best, but I accept that the world changes slowly.’

Miranda was quiet as she ran through the menu. She wasn’t going to risk it.

‘You ready?’

‘Yes, I think I am.’

His mouth twitched as she ordered a selection of vegetable dishes. He ordered some dishes that she hadn’t seen, explaining afterwards that he was a friend of the chef and had phoned ahead.

The restaurant was packed, with a hubbub coming from the bar area to the right of the entrance. Their table was one of the more discreet ones, but it still felt buzzy.

‘Where do your parents live, then?’ Miranda asked, after the waiter had left. He raised his eyebrows. ‘You said your dad eats cows and your mum eats plastic. Earlier,’ she explained.

‘Oh, yes, I did. Dad lives in Gloucestershire. Mum currently lives in Hampshire. The Isle of Wight. Just getting divorced for the second time and presumably working on a third husband.’

‘Not very good at being on her own, then?’

‘No. Although she does prefer the company of adults. She wasn’t around that much when I was growing up.’

‘Where was she?’

‘Charity stuff, I suppose,’ Alex said smoothly, not revealing that he had had a nanny for most of his childhood. ‘And then she divorced my father when I was ten and married a man who was an idiot. Luckily, I get on well with Dad most of the time, and he got custody of me.’

‘Only child?’ empathised Miranda.

He nodded. ‘You too?’

‘I spent my childhood wishing I was creative enough to have an imaginary friend.’

He laughed. ‘I spent my childhood roaming round the est–countryside,’ he stumbled slightly, ‘un-damming streams, saving chicks that had fallen out of the nest, foraging for mushrooms.’

‘How idyllic. And did you always have hair like that?’ she asked.

‘It was an act of rebellion when I was about twenty-five. It’s quite fun creating dreadlocks. You have to put special wax in your hair and eventually it does it itself. I’m considering chopping them off.’

‘That would be a shame if you have to put so much effort into it. It must be like a big, comfy pillow when you sleep on it. And if you cut it off, you might end up on litter-picking duties instead of being given the big, butch equipment.’

He looked confused for a second, then his brow cleared. ‘Oh, right. Samson and the hair. I get it. I do think it gives me an air of latent strength that would be sadly lacking if I had a short back and sides.’

‘You could have a long back and sides,’ she suggested.

‘Which would be what it is now.’

‘No,’ she corrected. ‘You’d have long back and sides and a short top. Which is an unusual look, but one you could possibly pull off.’

‘Hmm. Like a mad monk.’

‘And with the dreadlocks, do you have to avoid getting water on them?’

‘Only if you want to have scurf up to your ears and get a great itch going on. You wash your hair as often as most people. But unlike your lustrous locks, I merely let them dry naturally. And occasionally shape them into dogs, squirrels or swans.’

‘Nice,’ she said. ‘Like balloon animals. You could wake up of a morning and decide to go on safari.’

‘Is that how you’d like to wake up, an animal on your head?’

‘I could say I’m just “lion” here! I do look like a lion’s sat on my head sometimes. I have to get the water buffalo in to lick me into shape. It’s a jungle out there in Notting Hill.’

He laughed. ‘So, you’re divorced with two children and you live in Notting Hill?’

‘Correct.’

‘You do good deeds at weekends?’

‘Erm … correct?’ she essayed, with a slightly guilty expression.

‘You did a good deed last weekend?’

‘Correct.’

‘And your favourite colour is green?’

‘No, I don’t really have a favourite colour. Do people really have favourite colours?’

‘I have absolutely no idea. Particularly not when you’ve got to our age. I was sort of being ironic. I was saying you loved green as in ecologically.’

‘Oh,’ she said briefly. She had been startled by ‘our age’. Strictly speaking, they were the same generation, she supposed. And they were technically on a date, she supposed. So she should stop worrying about the age difference … she supposed.

‘What do you get up to, then, when you’re not tidying canals?’

‘I have endless lunches and go shopping. I have manicures, pedicures, massages and hair-dos. I do charity work with children and animals and, in my spare time, I dabble with world peace and global warming and make small soft moccasins for millipedes,’ she said gaily.

‘Phew,’ he said, taking a sip of the wine that had been poured. ‘I’m surprised you managed to find a hole in your busy schedule to have dinner with me.’

‘There’s a half-finished pile of slippers at home,’ she pronounced.

‘Is it a rush order?’

‘It’s imperative they’re finished by the weekend. There’s a hoe-down.’

‘Is that generally what you say when people ask you what you do?’

Miranda thought back through the evenings with the Nigel-clones. ‘If I do, they usually say’ – she put on a Queen Mother accent – ‘“No, but, really, what do you do?’’’

‘All right,’ he said, ‘but, really, what do you do?’ he asked her, in an even higher voice.

‘Oh, you have disappointed me. I was hoping you were going to come up with something more interesting than that,’ she said, with a properly disappointed expression.

‘I’m genuinely interested in what Ms Miranda Blake gets up to,’ he said. ‘Like, what did you do today?’

‘Weeell,’ she said slowly, trying to decide whether to lie or not. ‘Actually I did go shopping, but couldn’t find what I was looking for. I organised a plumber because I’ve got a leak – that’s L-E-A-K, not L-E-E-K. Cleaned a bit at home. A rather boring day, all in all. You?’

‘Essentially spent the day talking to my dad and dealing with a few bits and pieces here and there.’ He was always a little cagey, having been targeted by gold-diggers for most of his life.

‘What a dull pair we are.’ She sighed, picking up some fried seaweed with her chopsticks. She wished it was the meat sizzling at the next table, which smelt heavenly.

‘Yes. It’s amazing we find anything to talk about, isn’t it?’ His smile belied the statement.

‘In reality, I do what many women in my position do when they suddenly find that, after years of being everyone’s skivvy, they’re beholden to no one. They run around trying to find something to do. Hence the canal. And I’m trying to sort out a job, or it’ll be out to the scullery after dinner for a spot of washing-up.’

‘Hopefully it won’t come to that,’ said Alex. ‘I’m sure I could sell some of your caterpillar carpet slippers. This area’s ripe for them.’

‘Moccasins for millipedes. They wouldn’t fit caterpillars,’ she corrected.

As successive dishes came, the conversation flitted from one topic to another until eventually Alex asked for the bill.

Miranda reached for her purse and took out her credit card.

‘Thanks, but I’ll do this,’ said Alex, handing his card to the waiter, without even checking the amount.

‘Tsk tsk. You should never do that,’ said Miranda. ‘They might have put somebody else’s food or drink on our bill. Or whatever.’

The waiter handed the console back to Alex for his PIN. ‘Well, that seems very reasonable,’ he said, looking at the amount.

Miranda had not managed to extract the information required to know whether it was all bravado on his side, and whether he would now have to live on scrumped vegetables for a month, but she accepted the comment at face value.

‘Would you like to have a drink at the bar?’ he asked.

She looked doubtfully at the packed area full of skinny women, with over-inflated beaks instead of mouths, and predatory men in sharp suits. ‘No, I don’t think so. But there must be somewhere else we can have a quiet drink,’ she said.

‘Hmm. A friend of mine has lent me his flat just around the corner. We could go there – if that doesn’t sound too whatever-the-word-is – forward for a first date?’

She flicked him a saucy look. ‘Oh, go on, then. And it’s certainly a better idea than the shark-infested pool over there.’

Her high shoes tapped as she walked alongside him. Morse code for ‘Ooo-er’.

Ten minutes later, he was letting her into an imposing building with a porter on the door, who nodded as they went past.

‘My God,’ she said, as they went into the first-floor flat. ‘Who is this friend? Can I have him as a friend too? This is incredible. What beautiful artwork.’

The flat was on one level with blond-wood floorboards, white walls and big sofas in thick beige cotton. A giant painting of two swimmers hung over one, while a turquoise and green statue loomed over the other.

‘He likes to support up-and-coming young artists,’ said Alex, standing behind her as she admired the painting. ‘What can I get you to drink?’

‘Vodka tonic, please, if you have it.’

‘Coming right up,’ he said, and went through to the kitchen. ‘Ice and lemon or olives?’

‘He keeps a very well-appointed kitchen. Olives, please.’

She could hear cupboards being opened, and continued to admire the art on show.

‘There you go,’ Alex said, handing her a heavy tumbler.

She sat down on one of the enormous sofas and kicked off her shoes, then tucked her feet underneath her. ‘Lovely,’ she exclaimed, taking a bigger gulp than she’d meant to, and coughing. ‘Sorry,’ she spluttered, eyes watering.

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