And in her office she sat me down and said, in quite the most gentle of voices, that there had been a terrible accident, and that my mother had died.
I remember sitting on that hard chair and thinking that I really ought to be crying. I thought of a recent movie I’d seen in which a girl had been told that her horse had been shot, and how she’d dissolved into tears, had jumped up screaming “No! No!” I thought perhaps I should have done the same thing, but it didn’t feel real, and I couldn’t think of anything to say, or do, other than look at the floor.
I think my lack of reaction made Mrs. Dickinson more uncomfortable than she had ever made me. She waited for me to cry, wanting, I think, to be able to put her arms around me and offer some comfort, and when I didn’t, she found herself at a loss.
She filled the silence by telling me that sometimes terrible and tragic things happen, and that my father still loved me very much, and that my mother would always be watching me from heaven.
I often wished she’d never said that last bit. She said many other things, but that was the sentence that remained. My mother would always be watching me from heaven. I know she meant it to be a comfort, but for years afterward I only ever thought about it when I was having sex. I’d be lost in the throes of ecstasy with a lover, when all of a sudden I’d be filled with the horror of my mother watching me from heaven, and I’d hurriedly have to pull up the duvet and cover us both.
Even as I sat in her office, listening to Mrs. Dickinson continue her soliloquy on grief, I thought about my mother watching and almost shivered with the creepiness of it.
And then my father arrived to pick me up, and he put his arms around me and cried, and still I couldn’t express anything, still the numbness was too overwhelming.
My father tried very hard to continue a semblance of family life, but since we had never really had it, he didn’t quite know what he was supposed to be doing.
He’d attempt to make dinner during those early days, and we’d sit at the table awkwardly. He’d ask me the odd question about school; I’d answer as succinctly as possible, both of us acutely aware of the silence, the lack of shouting, the lack of tantrums and broken dishes.
After a while he gave up. He’d phone and say he was working late, or had a meeting, or had plans. He withdrew from me in much the same way that he had withdrawn from my mother, as unable to relate to me as he had been to my mother.
I can’t say I minded. Not then. I discovered boys, and dope, and parties. Not drink, though, not then. Alison would stay over every weekend, and we’d spend our Friday and Saturday nights hopping on and off buses, looking for parties to crash all over West London, getting home high and happy in the early hours of the morning, with no parents around to tell us what to do.
My father remarried when I was eighteen. I’ve met her a few times. Mary. Straitlaced. Reserved. Kind. And dull. Everything my mother wasn’t. She seemed nice, though, and my father seemed to be happy. By that time I felt much like an orphan anyway, and didn’t begrudge his remarrying in the slightest, not that I ever seemed to see him.
People laugh today when I tell them about my wild youth. Not the bit about my mother dying, not that, but when I tell them I was a dopehead, that I would regularly trash our house with parties, that my first two years at the university were spent sleeping with pretty much anyone who’d have me.
They’d laugh in disbelief, because looking at me now, with my sleek, chic conservative clothes, my understated makeup, my high, but not too high, elegant shoes, they can’t believe I ever did anything rebellious in my entire life. Dan always says that’s why he fell in love with me. Because I looked like a librarian, but dig a little deeper and naughty Ellie—as he called her—would come scrambling out.
We met just about the time I had decided that I wasn’t going to get married. Ever. I’d spent too many nights dreaming of a family, of a house filled with children, and laughter, and noise, of a home that was almost precisely the opposite of my own childhood home in every way. I’d spent too many nights dreaming of a future that never materialized, dreaming of men who never turned out to be the men I wanted them to be.
And so I’d decided to concentrate on work. At thirty-three I was the marketing director of a small chain of luxury boutique hotels—perhaps you know them, perhaps you’ve even stayed in them. Calden, they are called. Just Calden, as in, are you staying at Calden? Named after their founder, Robert Calden, they are Schrager style for about half the price, but don’t quote me on that.
I loved my job as marketing director. I loved writing the marketing briefs, coming up with our objectives, the tone, the deliverables, and seeing them come to fruition.
I loved the thrill of developing new image campaigns for our brand, of then taking that positioning statement and briefing the creatives at our advertising agency, and seeing them come back, a couple of weeks later, with their presentation on boards, most of which still, even to this day, blow my mind with their creativity and brilliance.
I loved the various promotions I put together to increase, as we say in marketing, RevPar—revenue per average room. Coming up with direct-mail promotions to entice our top 10 percent of customers to stay even longer, with the incentive of, say, an evening’s private shopping at Selfridges, or stay two nights, get the third night free.
Unsurprisingly, the kinds of people who stay at Calden—the high-end leisure and business travelers—usually jumped at these promotions, and I swiftly became the golden girl in the marketing department.
I was busy, my career was going well, and I was happy. Despite the fact that I had always thought of friendships as rather transient, I had managed to find myself good friends at work who had become even better friends outside of work, and my social life was a whirlwind.
And one December night I had a meeting in the top-floor conference room of Calden, Marylebone High Street, with a couple of executives from American Express with whom I’d been trying to link up for months. I’d put together a proposal for a promotion with their Platinum cardholders: book a weekend at Calden through American Express, and we’ll throw in dinner at a top London restaurant and a chauffeur-driven car.
The meeting went well, and afterward we all went down to the bar for a drink. Calden might not have been entirely to my taste—I tended to prefer hotels that were more traditional, more luxurious—but I did love the bar, and particularly the fact that it was currently one of the hottest places to see and be seen, and I—thank goodness—despite my boring black business suits, was never turned away by the doormen.
Votive candles were everywhere, dotted on low sleek tables, clustered on thick, modern shelving. Tall-stemmed glass vases held single stems of scarlet amaryllis, shocking splashes of color against the stark whiteness of the walls.
Instead of chairs there were sofas—huge squashy sofas. And a line of games tables along one wall—backgammon, chess, even Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit. These were some of the reasons why our bar was so hot: our weekly games night (my idea, if I do say so myself) had been written up in Time Out, followed by Metro and the Sunday Times Style section, and was now almost impossible to get into.
But tonight, a Tuesday, was a quiet night. We took a bank of sofas tucked into a quiet corner, close to one of the giant fireplaces with a gas fire that almost, almost felt real, and settled down with mojitos for the group, and a cranberry juice and soda with a splash of lime for me.
Small talk was being made, as the business pressures began to ease off our shoulders, when something made me turn around. It was that feeling that someone was staring at me, although I realized that only with hindsight. Behind me on another sofa was a man frowning at me. I looked at him questioningly, but he didn’t change his expression, so I looked away.
But even as I tried to join in the conversation, I kept feeling his frown fall upon the back of my head, and it was a struggle not to keep turning round. Eventually they left—wives and children to get home to—and when I got up to leave I saw the man was still t
here.
He came and stood over me, very tall, very serious.
“Why are you staring at me?” I said, uncharacteristically boldly.
“I’m sorry. It’s just that I’m sure I know you from somewhere.”
I rolled my eyes. “Aren’t I supposed to say I bet you say that to all the girls?” I wasn’t trying to be funny; I was almost sneering at the time. I was tired, I’d had a long day, and I was not in the mood for clichéd pickup lines.
“No, I’m serious. You look very familiar.”
I was about to come out with another line, but he did look serious, and slightly perplexed.
“What’s your name?” he said.
“Ellie Black.”
And his face lit up.
“I knew it! We did meet before. About four years ago at a barbecue at Alex and Rob’s house. Ellie Black! I remember you. You work in marketing at Emap, and you live in Queen’s Park!” He said this triumphantly, proving he wasn’t just coming out with a pickup line. Of course he was right; I had been at that party and did work for Emap at the time, and, despite not remembering him in the slightest, I shifted my features from exasperated to surprise with just a faint hint of pleasure.
“Of course!” I exclaimed. “And now I remember you. But I’m so sorry, I don’t remember your name.”
“That’s fine. It’s Dan Cooper. I was working for Channel Four, producing. We said we’d get together for lunch but, well…” He shrugged. “I suppose we never got around to it.”
And then I remembered. I was going out with Hamish, and we were still in the first flush when I was convinced he would be the father of my children, and we’d had a row because he’d decided to go back up to Scotland to see his family and hadn’t invited me.
I’d gone on my own to a barbecue at a neighbor’s house, friends of friends, and hadn’t known anyone there, but had walked in and immediately felt at home.
Dan had marched up to me with crinkly eyes and a large smile, and introduced himself, offering to get me a beer, and I remember thinking how nice he was, and what a shame I wasn’t single.
I’d flirted harmlessly with him for most of the evening, enjoying the attention, enjoying the sensation of being wanted, and when we left and he mentioned calling me about lunch, I said sure, that he could call me in the office any time.
I had gone to bed with a smile on my face, and had been woken up by an early morning phone call from Hamish, apologizing profusely and saying he missed me and couldn’t stop thinking about me, and of course all thoughts of Dan flew out the window.
By the time Dan called, a couple of weeks later, I had absolutely no idea who he was. We had an awkward conversation, at the end of which I said I had a really busy schedule at the moment, but that I’d call him when it eased off a bit.
And that was the last time I ever thought about him. But standing in the Calden bar, staring at his open, friendly face, I suddenly did remember him, and these were the things I remembered:
That when he smiled he smiled with his eyes.
That he was very tall. The sort of tall that makes you always feel protected and safe.
That he was a man who was at ease with himself and his place in the world.
That he once had a cat called Tetley.
Dan Cooper looked down at me, frowning again. “You don’t remember me,” he said.
“I do,” I replied, a smile starting to form.
“No, you don’t. Don’t worry. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”
“But I do remember you. Stop!” I reached out and took his arm to stop him from turning away. “I’ll prove it. When you were four years old, you had a cat called Tetley.”
And then it was his turn to smile, and soon we were sitting next to each other on a sofa, and by the time we left, three hours later, my face hurt from smiling all evening, from smiling, and talking, and laughing.
We walked out together and he hailed a taxi and put me inside.
“I would suggest lunch but I know what happened last time,” he said, and I did something that is so out of character I sometimes still can’t believe I had the temerity to do it.
I leaned forward and kissed him. A long, soft kiss on the lips, and delightedly my stomach fluttered in excitement.
And when I pulled away and saw his face I winked. “You’ll never know unless you try,” I laughed, palmed a business card into his hand and sat back as the taxi took off.
He phoned the next morning and met me for lunch that day. Ordinarily I would have been put off, would have thought he was too keen, but I wasn’t a fickle twentysomething any longer. I was thirty-three and had been around the block enough times to know a good thing when I saw it.
There were many things I grew to love about Dan very quickly, not least of which was that I could see, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he couldn’t wait for children, would be, in fact, the sort of father that I had always wanted for myself.
But I also loved his smell. How he always smelled of lemons. That he knew everything about Arsenal and would happily while away hours with his friends in the pub, discussing the finer merits of a match in 1984.
I loved that he had a wardrobe full of beautiful clothes that he never wore, spending most of the time in rugby shirts, or huge sloppy sweaters that were soft and cuddly, clothes that always felt wonderful to me.
I took him to meet my father, when things were clearly growing serious. We drove up to Potters Bar and had an awkward pub lunch with Dad and Mary, and I was saddened to see that my father and I had grown so far apart there was no way to bridge the gap. But I was pleased we had done the right thing, and the next step was meeting his family.
I almost felt as if I already knew them from the many stories, the pictures dotted around Dan’s flat, hearing his mother’s voice on his answering machine.
I loved hearing him talk about his childhood, about his brother and sister, about coming from what I considered to be such a large family.
“Are you sure they’ll like me?” I said from time to time in the days before my first Cooper family lunch.
“Of course!” Dan kissed me and gave me a reassuring squeeze. “They’re going to love you.”
“But your mother didn’t like your last girlfriend. How do you know?”
“Trust me, I know. And anyway, she turned out to be right about my last girlfriend, didn’t she?” The last girlfriend had run off with an actor, and apparently Dan’s mother had said the minute she met her that she knew she couldn’t trust her. But of course she only said this after the fact.
“She’s going to love you and you’re going to love her. If I didn’t know better, I’d say this was a match made in heaven.”
“Ha bloody ha,” I said, but it made me smile, and even as I suffered wardrobe crisis after wardrobe crisis, planning for the big day itself, I found myself looking forward to it. Wasn’t this, after all, the family I had always wanted?
3
Dan’s parents live in a large Victorian house on a quiet leafy street on the borders of Hampstead and Belsize Park. It is the house Dan grew up in, and he loves that his bedroom is still his bedroom, that the house is filled with memories of his youth.
He drove me past one day, wanted to pop in and say hello to his parents, but I wasn’t ready to meet them yet. I needed to spend far more time preparing myself.
Not that I was frightened, I just wanted them to like me. In truth, I wanted them to love me. Particularly given Dan’s mother’s disapproval of previous girlfriends, I wanted her to meet me and think I was perfect for him, to know that I was The One.
Dan and I already knew that we had a future together, and Dan had told his family how serious it was. And although it shouldn’t have mattered as much as it did, I yearned for his family’s approval, needed so desperately to be welcomed, to be treated as one of their own.
And just looking at the outside of the house made me long to be part of it, part of them. It was the type of house I had always dreamed of. Large but not too lar
ge, imposing without being excessively grand, ivy trailed up the red brick, reaching almost as high as the three gables.
The windows were leaded lights, and the driveway a huge sweep of gravel complete with a huge old oak tree in the middle and a few weeds pushing through, weeds that presumably the gardener would be dealing with soon.
Linda and Michael Cooper. He is a barrister, QC actually, and, having Googled him, I know he has a reputation as one of the best. He works in commercial law, has his own chambers somewhere in Middle Temple, and in photographs looks far less imposing and grand than his reputation would lead you to believe.
Handsome in a faded, grayish sort of way, he is, in every photograph I have seen of him in Dan’s flat, eclipsed by his wife. The lovely Linda.
Linda Cooper, née Campbell. Born and bred in Hampstead; survivor of South Hampstead High School for Girls, no less; dropout of Oxford University, where, unusually for girls of her generation, she was studying history.
Dan’s version of the story is this: His mother and father met at the university, where Linda’s Biba-inspired clothes and Twiggy-inspired figure made her the talk of the town. That she was bright, and strong, and opinionated didn’t hurt either. Not with legs like that.
She was the girl everyone wanted to be seen with, the girl who always had her head thrown back with laughter, who seemed oblivious to the attention she generated everywhere she went.
Michael was the star of the rowing team, and as such had something of a strong following himself. Linda in fact had spotted him at the annual Oxford-Cambridge boat race, and decided there and then that she would get him.
Of course getting him wasn’t the problem, but falling pregnant, nearly eleven months later, proved to be somewhat more difficult.
They were young, they were in love, and they were quite certain that they were meant to be together. So what if they had to make a few changes?