There’s a pause. Danny looks at the mound of gold silk in front of him as though he’s never seen it before in his life.
“Not yet, no,” he says at last.
“But it will be ready in time?”
“Of course! Absolutely.” He puts his foot down and the sewing machine starts whirring busily. “You know what?” he says over the noise. “I could really do with a glass of water.”
“Coming up!”
I hurry into the kitchen, turn on the tap, and wait for the cold to come through. The plumbing in this building is a little bit eccentric, and we’re always on at Mrs. Watts, the owner, to fix it. But she lives miles away in Florida, and doesn’t really seem interested. And other than that, the place is completely wonderful. Our apartment is huge by New York standards, with wooden floors and a fireplace, and enormous floor-to-ceiling windows.
(Of course, Mum and Dad weren’t at all impressed when they came over. First they couldn’t understand why we didn’t live in a house. Then they couldn’t understand why the kitchen was so small. Then they started saying wasn’t it a shame we didn’t have a garden, and did I know that Tom next door had moved into a house with a quarter of an acre? Honestly. If you had a quarter of an acre in New York, someone would just build ten office buildings on it.)
“OK! So how’s it—” I walk back into the living room and break off. The sewing machine has stopped, and Danny’s reading my copy of Vogue.
“Danny!” I wail. “What about my dress!”
“Did you see this?” says Danny, jabbing at the page. “‘Hamish Fargle’s collection demonstrated his customary flair and wit,” he reads aloud. “Give me a break! He has zero talent. Zero. You know, he was at school with me. Totally ripped off one of my ideas—” He looks up at me, eyes narrowed. “Is he stocked at Barneys?”
“Erm… I don’t know,” I lie.
Danny is completely obsessed with being stocked at Barneys. It’s the only thing he wants in the world. And just because I work there as a personal shopper, he seems to think I should be able to arrange meetings with the head buyer.
In fact, I have arranged meetings with the head buyer for him. The first time, he arrived a week late for the appointment and she’d gone to Milan. The second time, he was showing her a jacket and as she tried it on, all the buttons fell off.
Oh God. What was I thinking, asking him to make my dress?
“Danny, just tell me. Is my dress going to be ready?”
There’s a long pause.
“Does it actually have to be ready for today?” says Danny at last. “Like literally today?”
“I’m catching a plane in six hours!” My voice rises to a squeak. “I’ve got to walk down the aisle in less than…” I break off and shake my head. “Look, don’t worry. I’ll wear something else.”
“Something else?” Danny puts down Vogue and stares at me blankly. “What do you mean, something else?”
“Well…”
“Are you firing me?” He looks as though I’ve told him our ten-year marriage is over. “Just because I’ve run a tad over schedule?”
“I’m not firing you! But I mean, I can’t be a bridesmaid without a dress, can I?”
“But what else would you wear?”
“Well…” I twist my fingers awkwardly. “I do have this one little reserve dress in my wardrobe…”
I can’t tell him I’ve actually got three. And two on hold at Barneys.
“By whom?”
“Er… Donna Karan,” I say guiltily.
“Donna Karan?” His voice cracks with betrayal. “You prefer Donna Karan to me?”
“Of course not! But I mean, the seams are actually sewn…”
“Wear my dress.”
“Danny—”
“Wear my dress! Please!” He throws himself down on the floor and walks toward me on his knees. “It’ll be ready. I’ll work all day and all night.”
“We haven’t got all day and all night! We’ve got about… three hours!”
“Then I’ll work all three hours. I’ll do it!”
“You can really make a boned embroidered corset from scratch in three hours?” I say incredulously.
Danny looks abashed. “So… um… we may have to rethink the design very slightly…”
“In what way?”
He drums his fingers for a few moments, then looks up. “Do you have a plain white T-shirt?”
“A T-shirt?” I can’t hide my dismay.
“It’ll be great. I promise!” From outside comes the chugging sound of a van pulling up and Danny glances out of the window. “Hey, did you buy another antique?”
An hour later I stare at myself in the mirror. I’m wearing a full sweeping skirt made of gold silk — topped by my white T-shirt, which is now completely unrecognizable. Danny’s ripped off the sleeves, sewn on sequins, gathered hems, created lines where there were none — and basically turned it into the most fantastic top I’ve ever seen.
“I love it.” I beam at Danny. “I love it! I’ll be the coolest bridesmaid in the world!”
“It’s pretty good, isn’t it?” Danny gives a casual shrug, but I can see he’s pleased with himself.
I take another gulp of my cocktail, draining the glass. “Delicious. Shall we have another one?”
“What was in that?”
“Erm…” I squint vaguely at the bottles lined up in the cocktail cabinet. “I’m not sure.”
It took a while to get the cocktail cabinet up the stairs and into our apartment. To be honest, it’s a bit bigger than I remembered, and I’m not sure it’ll fit into that little alcove behind the sofa where I’d planned to put it. But still, it looks fantastic! It’s standing proudly in the middle of the room, and we’ve already put it to good use. As soon as it arrived, Danny went upstairs and raided his brother Randall’s drinks cupboard, and I got all the booze I could find in the kitchen. We’ve had a margarita each and a gimlet, and my invention called the Bloomwood, which consists of vodka, orange, and M&M’s, which you scoop out with a spoon.
“Give me the top again. I want to pull in that shoulder tighter.”
I peel off the top, hand it to him, and reach for my jumper, not bothering to be modest. I mean, this is Danny. He threads a needle and starts expertly gathering along the hem of the T-shirt. “So, these weird cousin-marrying friends of yours,” he says. “What’s that about?”
“They’re not weird!” I hesitate for a moment. “Well, OK, Tarquin is a tiny bit weird. But Suze isn’t weird at all. She’s my best friend! You’ve met her!”
Danny raises an eyebrow. “So — couldn’t they find anyone else to marry except their own family? Was it like, ‘OK, Mom’s taken… my sister, too fat… the dog… mmm, don’t like the hair.’ ”
“Stop it!” I can’t help giggling. “They just suddenly realized they were meant for each other.”
“Like Harry Met Sally.” He puts on a film-trailer voice. “They were friends. They came from the same gene pool.”
“Danny…”
“OK.” He relents, and snips off the thread. “So, what about you and Luke?”
“What about us?”
“D’you think you’ll get married?”
“I… I have no idea!” I say, feeling a slight color coming to my cheeks. “I can’t say it’s ever crossed my mind.”
Which is completely true.
Well, OK. It’s not completely true. Maybe it has crossed my mind on the very odd occasion. Maybe just occasionally I’ve doodled “Becky Brandon” on my notepad to see what it looked like. And I might possibly have flicked through Martha Stewart Weddings once or twice. Just out of idle curiosity.
Perhaps, also, it’s occurred to me that Suze is getting married and she’s been going out with Tarquin for less time than me and Luke.
But you know. It’s not a big deal. I’m really not into weddings. In fact, if Luke asked me, I’d probably say no.
Well… OK. I’d probably say yes.
But the point i
s, it’s not going to happen. Luke doesn’t want to get married “for a very long time, if at all.” He said that in an interview in the Telegraph three years ago, which I found in his file of clippings. (I wasn’t poking about. I was looking for an elastic band.) The piece was mainly about his business, but they asked him about personal stuff too — and then they captioned his picture Brandon: marriage at the bottom of agenda.
Which is absolutely fine by me. It’s at the bottom of my agenda, too.
While Danny’s finishing off the dress, I do a little housework. Which is to say I tip the dirty breakfast dishes into the sink where they can soak, dab at a spot on the counter — and then spend some time rearranging the spice jars in the spice rack, according to color. That’s such a satisfying job. Almost as good as organizing my felt-tip pens used to be.
“So do you guys find it hard living together?” says Danny, coming to the door and watching me.
“No.” I look at him in surprise. “Why?”
“My friend Kirsty just tried living with her boyfriend. Disaster. All they did was fight. She said she doesn’t know how anyone does it.”
I slot the cumin jar next to fenugreek (what is fenugreek?), feeling rather smug. The truth is, Luke and I have had hardly any problems since living together. Except maybe the incident when I repainted the bathroom and got gold glitter paint on his new suit. But that doesn’t count, because, as Luke admitted afterward, he completely overreacted, and anybody with sense would have seen that the paint was wet.
Now that I think about it, perhaps we’ve had the odd teeny little dispute about how many clothes I buy. Perhaps Luke has on occasion opened the wardrobe door and said in exasperation, “Are you ever going to wear any of these?”
Perhaps we’ve also had the odd argu-frank discussion about how many hours Luke works. He runs his own very successful financial PR company, Brandon Communications, which has branches in London and New York and is expanding all the time. He loves his work, and maybe once or twice I’ve accused him of loving work more than me.
But the point is, we’re a mature, flexible couple who are able to talk things through. We went out to lunch not long ago and had a long talk, during which I sincerely promised I would try to shop a bit less and Luke sincerely promised he would try to work a bit less. And I reckon we’re both making a pretty good effort.
“Living together has to be worked at,” I say wisely. “You have to be flexible. You have to give as well as take.”
“Really?”
“Oh yes. Luke and I share our finances, we share the chores… it’s all a matter of teamwork. The point is, you can’t expect everything to stay as it was before. You have to accommodate.”
“Really?” Danny looks interested. “So who do you think accommodates more? You or Luke?”
I’m thoughtful for a moment.
“It’s difficult to say, really,” I say at last. “I expect it’s about equal on both sides.”
“So, like… all this stuff.” Danny gestures around the cluttered apartment. “Is it mostly yours or mostly his?”
“Erm…” I look around, taking in all my aromatherapy candles, vintage lace cushions, and stacks of magazines. For an instant, my mind flicks back to the immaculate, minimalist apartment Luke had in London.
“You know…” I say at last. “A bit of both…”
Which is kind of true. I mean, Luke’s got his laptop in the bedroom.
“The point is, there’s no friction between us,” I continue. “We think as one. We’re like one unit.”
“That’s great,” says Danny, reaching for an apple from the fruit bowl. “You’re lucky.”
“I know we are.” I look at him confidingly. “You know, Luke and I are so in tune, sometimes there’s almost a… sixth sense between us.”
“Really?” Danny stares at me. “Are you serious?”
“Oh yes. I’ll know what he’s about to say, or I’ll kind of feel when he’s around…”
“Like The Force?”
“I suppose.” I give a nonchalant shrug. “It’s like a gift. I don’t question it too closely—”
“Greetings, Obi-Wan Kenobi,” says a deep voice behind us, and Danny and I both jump out of our skins. I swivel round — and there’s Luke, standing at the door with an amused grin. His face is flushed from the cold and there are snowflakes in his dark hair, and he’s so tall, the room suddenly seems a little smaller.
“Luke!” I exclaim. “You scared us!”
“Sorry,” he says. “I assumed you would feel my presence.”
“Yes. Well, I did kind of feel something…” I say, a little defiantly.
“Of course you did.” He gives me a kiss. “Hi, Danny.”
“Hi,” says Danny, watching as Luke takes off his navy cashmere coat, then loosens his cuffs while simultaneously unknotting his tie, with the same assured, deft movements he always makes.
Once, after a few too many cocktails, Danny asked me, “Does Luke make love the same way he opens a champagne bottle?” And although I shrieked and hit him, and said it was none of his business, I could kind of see what he meant. Luke never fumbles or hesitates or looks confused. He always seems to know exactly what he wants, and he pretty much gets it, whether it’s a champagne bottle opening smoothly or a new client for his company, or, in bed, for us to…
Well. Anyway. Let’s just say, since we’ve been living together, my horizons have been broadened.
Now he picks up the post and starts to leaf briskly through it. “So how are you, Danny?”
“Good, thanks,” says Danny, taking a bite of apple. “How’s the world of high finance? Did you see my brother today?” Danny’s brother Randall works in a financing company, and Luke’s had lunch with him a couple of times.
“Not today, no,” says Luke.
“OK, well, when you do,” says Danny, “ask him if he’s put on weight. Really casually. Just say, ‘Why, Randall, you’re looking well-covered.’ And then maybe comment on his choice of entree. He is so paranoid that he’s getting fat. It’s hilarious.”
“Brotherly love,” says Luke. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” He comes to the end of the post and looks at me with a slight frown.
“Becky, has our joint account statement come yet?”
“Er… no. Not yet.” I give him a reassuring smile. “I expect it’ll come tomorrow!”
Our bank statement actually came yesterday, but I put it straight in my underwear drawer. I’m slightly concerned about some of the entries, so I’m just going to see if there’s anything I can do to rectify the situation. The truth is, despite what I said to Danny, I’ve been finding this whole joint account thing a bit tricky.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for sharing money. In fact, hand on heart, I love sharing Luke’s money. It gives me a real buzz! I just don’t love it when he suddenly asks, “What was this seventy dollars in Bloomingdale’s for?” and I can’t remember. So I’ve worked out a whole new tactical response — which is so simple, it’s brilliant.
It’s to spill something on the statement, so he can’t read it.
“I’m going to take a shower,” says Luke, gathering up the post. And he’s almost out of the room — when he stops. Very slowly he turns back and looks at the cocktail cabinet as though seeing it for the first time.
“What is that?” he says slowly.
“It’s a cocktail cabinet!” I say brightly.
“Where has it come from?”
“It… umm… actually, I bought it today.”
“Becky…” Luke closes his eyes. “I thought we said no more crap.”
“It’s not crap! It’s genuine 1930s! We can make amazing cocktails every night!” I’m feeling a bit nervous at his expression, so I start to gabble. “Look, I know we said no more furniture. But this is different. I mean, when you see a one-off like this, you have to grab it!”
I trail away and bite my lip. Luke silently walks toward the cabinet. He runs a hand along the top, then picks up a cocktail shaker, his mo
uth tight.
“Luke, I just thought it would be fun! I thought you’d like it. The guy in the shop said I’ve got a really good eye…”
“A really good eye,” echoes Luke as though in disbelief.
I gasp and scream as he throws the cocktail shaker in the air, and I’m wincing, waiting for it to land with a crash on the wooden floor — when Luke neatly catches it. Danny and I gape as he throws it again, twirls round, and rolls it down his arm.
I don’t believe it. I’m living with Tom Cruise.
“I worked as a barman for a summer,” says Luke, his face breaking into a smile.
I never knew that! Luke is so driven and businesslike and you think he doesn’t care about anything except work… and then all of a sudden, he surprises you.
“Teach me how to do it!” I cry excitedly. “I want to be able to do that!”
“And me!” says Danny. He picks up the other cocktail shaker, gives it an inexpert twirl, then tosses it at me. I make a grab, but it lands on the sofa.
“Butterfingers!” mocks Danny. “Come on, Becky. You need to get in practice for catching the bouquet at this wedding.”
“No, I don’t!”
“Sure you do. You wanna be next, don’t you?”
“Danny…” I try to give a lighthearted laugh.
“You two should definitely get married,” Danny continues, ignoring me. He picks up the cocktail shaker and begins tossing it from hand to hand. “It’s perfect. Look at you. You live together, you don’t want to kill each other, you’re not already related… I could make you a fabulous dress…” He puts down the shaker with a suddenly intent expression. “Hey, listen, Becky. Promise me, if you get married, I can make your dress.”
This is appalling. If he carries on like this, Luke will think I’m trying to pressure him. He might even think I told Danny to bring up the subject deliberately.
I’ve got to redress the balance somehow. Quickly.
“Actually, I don’t want to get married,” I hear myself saying. “Not for at least ten years.”
“Really?” Danny looks taken aback. “You don’t?”
“Is that so?” Luke looks up with an unreadable expression. “I wasn’t aware of that.”