over there, Laura said no. It would happen the way she wanted it to happen, she would say. 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 café 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 level-headed, realistic best friend.
Until one evening, about eighteen months ago, Jo came round to supper at Paddy and Laura’s flat. She was very quiet; Laura often worried Jo worked too hard. As Laura was attempting to digest a mouthful of chickpeas that Paddy had marvellously undercooked, and as she was 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 leant across the table and said,
‘I’ve met someone.’
‘Where?’ Paddy had asked stupidly. But Laura understood what that statement meant, of course she did, and she said,
‘Who is he?’
‘He’s called Chris,’ Jo replied, and she smiled, rather girlishly, which was even more unusual for her. ‘I met him at work.’ Jo was a conveyancing solicitor. ‘He was buying a house. He yelled at me.’
And then – and this was when Laura realised it was serious
– Jo twisted a tendril of her hair and put it in her mouth. Since this was a breach of social behaviour 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. They started planning a December wedding, a couple of weeks before Christmas, in a London hotel. Jo eschewed grown-up bridesmaids, saying they were deeply, humiliatingly naff, much to Laura’s disappointment – she was rather looking forward to donning a nice dress and sharing with her best friend on this, the happiest day of her life. Instead, she was going to be best woman, and Paddy was 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 slotted right in, with his North London pub ways, his personality so laidback and friendly, compared to Jo’s sometimes controlled outlook on life. He had friends who lived nearby – some lovely friends. They were all a gang now, him and Jo, his friends, Paddy 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 usually falling into bed with a complete stranger, usually by dint of lulling them into a false sense of security by telling them he worked for a charity). And there was Hilary too, also from university and christened Scary Hilary – because she was – and her brother Hamish, their other friends from work or university, and so on. And so Laura’s easy, 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 Paddy pointed out he was, in fact, just a prat who liked shouting a lot. Paddy grew a moustache for the autumn. Laura got a pay rise at work. They bought a Playstation to celebrate – games for him, karaoke for her. Yes, everything was well within its usual frame, except Laura began to feel, more and more, as she looked at Jo and Chris so in love, and as she 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.
Under these circumstances, it’s hardly surprising that the next time Laura fell, she fell badly. 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’s when everything started to go wrong.
Chris the groom coughed and stood up, looking rather nervous. Laura smiled at him, pretending to listen. She should have been paying attention but she was daydreaming, in a reverie of her own. She was thinking about her grandmother, Mary Fielding. Laura’s grandmother was the person Laura loved most in the world (apart from whoever 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, Guy, eight years before, and she lived on her own in a small but perfectly formed flat in Marylebone. There were various reasons why Laura idolised 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 Laura adored her grandmother was that Mary had found true love. Her husband, Guy, was the love of her life, to an extent Laura had never seen with anyone else. They had met when each was widowed, in Cairo after the Second World War. Mary already had a daughter, Angela, Laura’s mother. Guy also had a daughter, Annabel, whom Laura and Simon called aunt, even though she wasn’t really related to them.
Because of her mother’s natural reserve, it was Mary whom Laura told about her love life, her latest disasters, the person she was currently in love with. Because she lived in central London, and so not that far from Laura’s work, it was Mary whom Laura called in to see, to talk to, to listen to. And it was Mary that Laura learnt from, when it came to true love, in large part. She did not learn it from her own unemotional parents. No, she learnt that true love was epic stuff.
One of Laura’s favourite stories was how Mary and Guy had realised 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, Guy had turned to Mary, and said, ‘You know I can’t live without you, don’t you?’ And Mary had replied, ‘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,’ she heard a voice say. ‘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 colour. Sand whipped in 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 towards him.
‘Tell me again,’ Laura whispered in his ear. ‘Tell me again that you love me.’
And then, suddenly, a microphone crackled loudly, jerking Laura back to reality, as someone cleared their throat and said,
‘To my beautiful wife, Jo!’
‘Aah,’ the wedding guests murmured in approval, as Laura came back down to earth with a bump. There was some sniffing, especially from Jo’s mother up on the top table, as Chris raised a glass 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