Chapter One

Life is a peppered steak, I muse, toying with the charred remains of cow on my plate. You think you want all the crap on top, all the garnish, but does it actually make the thing taste any better?

I look up, up and across at my fiancé Richard sitting opposite me.

He is talking down to the waiter.

Richard talks down to everybody, an excellent trick for someone who is such a small person. Small in stature, small-minded, and dare I say it small … Well, let’s just say small in other rather important departments.

Richard is my pepper sauce, my garnish, my piece of curling Lollo Rosso lounging on the side of the plate. Looks appetisingly good to the eyes, but tastes remarkably bitter. As a small person Richard likes to surround himself with large things. Large apartment (penthouse, of course), large car, large wallet, and large matching ego.

He is a prat, but my mother loves him. It has taken me exactly one year, eight months, six days to realise that I do not. I look at my watch. Make that one year, eight months, six days, three hours and thirteen minutes. I won’t go into seconds, I’ve wasted enough time already. I stand up, and reach for my handbag.

Richard looks away from the waiter and smiles briefly, anticipating another trip to the Ladies’ in order to titivate for his pleasure. He is what I would describe as an ego-hedonist, interested only in his own pleasure. A pleasure-seeker not a pleasure-giver, Richard’s main aim in life is …well, Richard.

He has dedicated a lifetime to pleasing himself, and expects those around him to follow his example and please him. Tonight, I do just that. He has decided that I am looking rather voluptuous.

Titivate: the word pleases him, arouses him. This whole scenario, the candlelit restaurant, the expensive wine, is the charade he believes is his key to the latter part of the evening, the important part of the evening, the sex part of the evening, his reward for enduring the rigmarole, the boredom, the tedious niceties of courtship.

I open my handbag. Amongst the flotsam of used tissues, loose change, keys, half-eaten lipsticks, and dried-up wands of mascara, lies a packet of condoms.

Ribbed.

My mind also moves forward to the latter part of the evening. The sex part of the evening, where I usually have to attempt to coax Richard’s small prick into being Richard’s slightly bigger prick while he lies back with the same smug look on his face, as though he is bestowing a great favour by allowing me to do this.

My resolve deepens. I take a deep breath, feel in my bag for the keys to Richard’s place, the keys to Richard’s life.

‘Richard,’ I rehearse in my head, ‘I don’t love you, and I’m leaving.’

I open my mouth.

‘Richard …’ I can hear myself speak, but my voice sounds somewhat detached. ‘I don’t … er … I don’t.’

‘You don’t what?’ he snaps at me, annoyed by my dithering interruption of his complaint about his meal.

I open my mouth but this time no words come out at all.

‘Well?’ he presses irritably, anxious to get back to berating the poor harassed little French waiter.

‘I don’t want any dessert, and I’m going to the Ladies’.’

The words come out in a breathless rush as I push back my chair and stride across the restaurant like my backside is on fire, although in reality the only cheeks burning are the ones on my face.

Inside the Ladies’, I press my hot forehead against the mirror, and watch my breath form warm pools on its smooth immaculately clean surface. Through the vaporous reflection I can see my face, familiar yet totally alien. Why does one never look as one imagines oneself to look? Sometimes I will walk past my own reflection and smile because the person looking back at me seems vaguely familiar. I stare at the strange dark eyes, which stare rather hazily back at me. Is that really my face? The only thing I recognise is my own fear. A fear of being single. As part of a couple one is regarded as a normal human being. As a single person one suddenly becomes a statistic.

What would life be like without Richard? Was there ever life without Richard? Sometimes it doesn’t feel as though there was. Is there life after Richard? Like life after death, this is an unknown phenomenon, although what I am certain of is the fact that I’m too young to die. There may well be life after Richard, but if I attempt to explore this unknown terrain, then my mother will kill me.

I think I have the standard disease of the decade.

I know I want something, but I don’t really know exactly what that something is. Something better? Something different?

I ponder for a moment. Somebody better, something different … definitely something bigger!

I snigger aloud at this thought.

The Ladies’ attendant, having replenished the loo roll in number two cubicle, is now sitting in her dainty paisley-upholstered Queen Anne replica chair, engrossed in her favourite Barbara Taylor-Bradford novel.

She glances up upon hearing my snort of laughter, disturbed from her tale of street girl made good, and looks disapprovingly at the dark-haired girl loitering in her scrubbed and lemon-scented domain. The attendant has an inferiority complex longer and more structured than the Severn Valley Bridge. When somebody laughs, she automatically thinks they are laughing at her. Her world is in this tiled corner of this ladies’ loo in a smart restaurant in a smart part of town. If it weren’t for the row of four white cubicles upon the right-hand wall, you would think that you had wandered into someone’s private parlour by mistake.

She glares at me from behind a rather funereal arrangement of hedonistically creamy lilies. I rummage in my voluminous handbag for a lipstick as a ruse to appear unaware of the attendant’s disapproving gaze. Life is so restrictive, I muse as I run Beautiful around my mouth. You can’t even laugh out loud nowadays without someone looking at you like you’re mad. Perhaps you are mad, my reflection mocks me, mad to want to give up a comfortable secure future for the unknown, give up something familiar in the hope of finding something better. But then again, any future is unknown, even the anticipated one. I ostentatiously place a £5 note in the attendant’s small white saucer. For some reason, this makes us both feel a lot better.

I return to the table. My pepper sauce has cooled and congealed, just like my love life really. It’s now or never. I take another swig of Burgundy, steel myself, brace my back and open my mouth.

‘Richard …’ I begin again.

‘Richard? Richard Trevelyan!’

A sleek brunette dressed head to toe in Versace, in the process of being shown to her table by a waiter, stops mid-sashay and peers across the dimly lit room towards our table.

‘Why, it is, isn’t it?’ With a toss of her raven head, she pushes past the waiter, who steps backwards on to another diner’s foot, and practically stampedes across the restaurant towards us, dragging a rather goodlooking, obviously embarrassed man in her wake.

‘I thought it must be you. Didn’t I just say, that looks just like Richard Trevelyan, Alex, didn’t I?’ she gushes to her companion. ‘Well, long time no see …’

She swoops down upon Richard and kisses him firmly just to the left of his mouth, leaving a big red lip imprint. She’d have caught him full on the lips except for the fact that he moved his head slightly. I know he only did this because he’s been eating garlic. It’s OK to blow it all over me, but never another member of the female sex.

‘How are you, darling? Still a dangerous shark in the sea of corporate law?’

She laughs, one of those cultivated laughs that’s supposed to sound all light and melodious, like the tinkling of a glass bell, but is as false as the nails on her slender elegant hands. Richard laughs too. He also has a false laugh, a sort of boom, one of those deep, hearty, I’m-a-jolly-good-chap-really laughs, the kind that resonates around a room like a rubber ball, and has been known to break the odd glass on occasion with its velocity.

‘Well, I never, Katherine the Great – what a wonderful surprise. You look bloody marvellous, but then again you always did.’

Richard makes a show of getting to his feet and kissing her hand. (The garlic again, he’s not at all chivalrous usually.)

‘And, Alex. How are you, old man?’ Richard turns to her companion, taking his outstretched hand with both his own and pumping it vigorously, convinced as he is that the strength of one’s handshake reflects the strength of one’s personality.

‘So good to see you both. It’s been far too long.’

The man called Alex is smiling at me, waiting to be introduced, but Richard isn’t that polite. He’s been known to hold a lengthy conversation with an acquaintance with me standing right next to him, and not so much as mention my name.

Curiosity is obviously too much for Alex’s wife, however.

‘Who’s your little friend then, Ricky?’

Ricky! Despite the fact I’ve just been interrupted at a pretty important moment in my life, I only narrowly suppress an outburst of laughter.

‘This is Felicity,’ he says.

The woman’s elegant hand is extended graciously. I notice she has rings on all of her fingers. I once read that this is a sign that a woman wishes to be dominated by a man. There are so many diamonds on this hand she must be wearing a whole field full of carats. It gives the effect of an outrageously extravagant knuckle-duster, hardly an indication of a weak nature unless that nature includes a weakness for expensive jewellery.

‘My fiancée,’ Richard continues.

The hand immediately shoots back and, flustered, toys with her dark brown hair which is so glossy she could be on the vitamin pills my father feeds his Labrador.

I can see genuine shock on the girl’s far-too-perfect features, but it doesn’t take her long to regain her composure.

‘Why, you sly old dog,’ the affected lightness has returned, but the voice is noticeably strained, ‘and you always said matrimony wasn’t for you.’ She tries the laugh again, but it’s even more false than the first time. ‘But I knew you’d get caught sooner or later.’

Richard is smirking. I don’t know why but I get the feeling there’s an exchange going on here that isn’t purely verbal.

‘Every dog has his wedding day,’ he says brightly, trying to be witty. ‘You know, it really is great to see you, Kat. It seems an age since we last met. We’ve a few years to catch up on, haven’t we? Tell you what,’ he rubs his hands together like Scrooge contemplating riches, ‘why don’t you join us?’

I groan inwardly. At this rate I’ll never pluck up the courage to call everything off; I can hardly announce I have no intention of marrying Richard before an audience.

To my horror, Katherine beams and begins to accept.

‘Oh, what a lovely idea …’

This time her husband steps in. He must be more intuitive than her; either that or he spotted the look of dismay on my face. He must think me so rude.

‘Thanks, Richard. It’s really very kind of you but perhaps on another occasion,’ he says. He has a nice voice, warm but not too hearty, educated but not clipped or false.

‘That would be nice,’ I say quickly, apologetically, smiling gratefully at him.

‘Yes, we really ought to get together sometime.’ Kat addresses Richard as she says this. I get the feeling the invitation doesn’t include me. ‘As you say, it’s been far too long.’ She says this with great emphasis, and a flash of incredibly small straight white teeth, to match her incredibly small straight nose.

‘That would be nice.’ Richard echoes my words, but the tone of his voice is very different. ‘We really must stay in touch now that we’ve met up again. In fact,’ he looks over at me, his smirk is now so wide that by rights his oh-so-chiselled jaw should begin to crack, ‘I’ve just had the most marvellous idea.’ He stretches his arm across the table and puts a hand over mine. I look down at it in shock, as though I’ve just discovered an unusual and very unexpected growth there.

‘Why don’t you come to the wedding?’

‘Wedding?’ The laser beam smile flashes on and off again.

‘Well, that’s what usually follows an engagement.’ Richard laughs.

If only you knew, I think to myself.

‘August the twenty-fifth – only seven weeks to go, eh, Fliss darling? Seven weeks tomorrow to be precise.’ He smiles at me affectionately. Now I know there is something very odd going on here.

‘You must come, I insist upon it. If you give Fliss your address she’ll send an invite through, won’t you, darling?’

Two darlings in the space of twenty seconds. This isn’t the Richard I know and loathe.

‘Alexander and Katherine Christian, 16 Belvoir … very nice address.’ I read the card a very disgruntled Katherine Christian presented to Richard with a whispered ‘Call me’ that could be heard by her husband, half the restaurant and myself.

‘Nice girl, don’t you think?’ says Richard, as soon as they are out of earshot.

I don’t think, but I’m not going to give him the opportunity to misinterpret my instant dislike of Katherine Christian as jealousy by saying so.

‘Who is she, Richard?’

‘An ex.’ He attacks his haricots vert with surgical precision.

Well, that much was pretty obvious.

‘How ex?’ I’m not bothered, just curious.

‘Oh, a few years ago now.’

‘What happened?’

‘She wanted more than I was prepared to give at the time.’ He looks up at me with clear brown eyes, his mouth full of beans and sole. ‘She was devastated when I finished the relationship,’ he adds.

He’s waiting for a reaction. I refuse to give him one and stay silent.

He tries again. ‘She used to worship me, you know.’

If you’re that wonderful then why did she marry someone else? I think furiously.

‘Of course she married on the rebound,’ he states smugly, unconsciously answering my unspoken question.

I look over towards their table; Alex Christian catches my gaze, and smiles. He has a very nice smile. He also has a very nice face, fit body – lean and muscled, and is wearing an impeccably cut dark grey Armani suit extremely well.

‘He looks very nice,’ I challenge, sneaking another look and deciding that I wouldn’t mind rebounding from Richard on to someone like Alex Christian. How on earth did Katherine manage it? Yes, she’s beautiful, but from what I can make of her in the short space of time I’ve known her that beauty is about as deep as the lightest of paper cuts. I may be wrong, of course, I suppose it’s not really fair to make snap judgements about people you barely know, but having been a teacher for the past four years, I’ve come to find that my first impressions of people are usually pretty spot on. Although I have been known to be wrong. A major example of this is currently sitting opposite me, of course, agreeing rather reluctantly it seems that Alex Christian is indeed a very nice man.

‘Oh, he is,’ concedes Richard. ‘Decent chap really, quite successful, runs a small but rather good publishing company.’

He always measures a person’s worth by their status in life, but is usually reluctant to acknowledge anyone’s achievements but his own. A ‘quite successful’ from Richard would equate to ‘very successful’ in anyone else’s book.

‘Why on earth did you invite them to the wedding?’

‘Why not? They’re old friends after all. Come to think of it, I really should have put them on the guest list some time ago. What’s the matter, Felicity? Don’t you want one of my exes at our wedding? You’re not jealous, are you?’

Oh, he’d like that, I can tell you. A little jealousy always bolsters his self-esteem which is already unwarrantably high.

‘She’s a stunning girl, isn’t she?’ He’s really stirring now. ‘Quite a beauty.’

‘If you like that sort of thing,’ I murmur nonchalantly, running my finger along the blunt blade of my butter knife. ‘I actually thought she seemed a little bit plastic. A bit false. You know: false nails, false eyelashes, false laugh, false smile. It makes you wonder about other parts of her …’ I indicate my own very real cleavage.

‘Oh, I can assure you, they’re all her own.’ Richard smirks. ‘I know, I have prior knowledge.’

‘Carnal knowledge more like,’ I reply glaring at him, angry not because he’s provoking me but because he thinks he’s provoking me.

‘Ooh, we are jealous, aren’t we!’ he crows happily, then adds rather patronisingly, ‘Never mind, darling, you’ve just got to remember that it’s you I’m marrying.’

‘That’s what you think,’ I long to shout back at him, but my already wavering courage has gone as cold as my rejected peppered steak and the moment for revelations has therefore passed. I steadily drink my way through another bottle of wine as I wait for Richard to finish the rest of his meal. He always chews his food one hundred times before swallowing. He reminds me of a square-jawed bovine monotonously chewing cud. The waiter has sourly carried away my untouched food with the air of the much maligned. This is such a renowned restaurant it’s probably the grossest of insults to leave the majority of your meal on the side of your plate, but I’m so disappointed by my own cowardice that I’ve completely lost my appetite.

Finally, after pudding, which I didn’t have, and coffee, which I should have had considering the amount of wine I managed to consume waiting for Richard to finish eating, he signals for the bill. He hands the waiter his platinum card with a flourish, and then states that he’s just going to say goodbye to Katherine and Alex.

I can see him smoothing his very clean brown hair in the large gilt mirror on the far wall as he makes his way through the tables. towards them.

As far as I’m concerned Richard is the personification of vanity. He has a major league love affair with mirrors, and spends more time in the bathroom getting ready to go out than I ever do.

I can’t deny that he’s a very attractive man, as he walks across the room several female heads turn to look, the problem is I find him about as attractive as week-old cottage cheese. What are you doing with the man? I hear you say. How can a girl find herself engaged to someone who, instead of inducing undying love and devotion, simply makes her want to punch his stupid face in?

Well, apart from pointing out that we all make mistakes, what girl hasn’t got a few embarrassing exes in her closet, a few photographs she really ought to burn before anyone sees just what she managed to get involved with at one mad moment in her life? All I can say is it hasn’t always been this way.

When I first met Richard he really kind of swept me off my feet.

Richard is a barrister.

I’m a teacher.

I’m also a terrible driver.

He represented me when a minor car accident turned into a major lawsuit. By the final court hearing, he’d somehow managed not only to convince the judge that I was the innocent and injured party, but also to convince me that I should promptly fall into bed with him as a jolly good way of expressing my gratitude.

I have to admit he’s very impressive in court.

Shame he wasn’t so impressive in bed, but at the time I was so swept up by the whole knight-in-shining-armour thing, I was even prepared to overlook the fact that the first time we hit the mattress together he kept on not only his socks but his stupid curly white wig as well. Despite this, and the fact that his come-to-bed line was a pretty crass ‘the courts may have found you innocent, but I find you guilty of stealing my heart’, which at the time I thought was dreadfully romantic but now makes me cringe with embarrassment, I am ashamed to admit that I was a pretty easy lay.

The ease with which Richard lured me into bed might also have had something to do with the fact that I was always the girl at school who never got the boys. I had plenty of great mates, but definitely no hot dates.

Going to an all girls’ school didn’t really improve the odds, but considering I left when I was eighteen and at twenty-six Richard was really the first man ever to show more of a permanent interest in me than, say, the odd drink, or a drink with an Indian and a quick grope to follow on a second date if I got lucky, then maybe I couldn’t be blamed for thinking that there was something wrong with me (an opinion regularly voiced by my wedding groupie mother), and jumping at the chance of a relationship with someone who on the outside at least seems to have everything a girl wants.

For the first time in my life I was able to bask in the warm glow of maternal approval, an emotion never really radiated by my mother before. Not in my direction anyway.

Her overweight, under-achieving daughter had finally got herself a man. And not just any man, but one who could actually be boasted about to friends and family.

Unfortunately, although Richard seems to have everything a girl wants – looks, charm, wit, success, relatively good taste – none of it has ever really been aimed in my direction. He’s the kind of guy who will lead you on to the dance floor and pull you into his arms to smooch to a slow romantic record, then spend the entire song gazing over your shoulder at someone else.

I don’t suppose I can put all the blame on him. After all, as they say, it takes two to tango. Maybe I haven’t made him as happy as I could have done. Maybe I didn’t turn out to be quite the person he thought I was either.

Maybe it’s him, maybe it’s me. But there are no maybes any more when it comes to whether we should be together. That, my friends, is a definite no.

He takes half an hour to say his goodbyes. I’m getting crosser and drunker by the minute. You can hear the false tinkling laugh and the false hearty boom simultaneously at regular intervals.

Alex Christian is noticeably quiet, although it’s hard from where I’m sitting to tell if he’s excluded from the conversation by the other two’s ignorance, design, or his own choice. Finally Richard returns to our table, smiling like a Cheshire Cat.

‘Nice couple, shame we lost touch. Must have them round for dinner sometime.’ He picks up their address card, which is sitting by the side of my empty glass, and puts it in the breast pocket of his suit jacket.

I’d love to have Katherine and Alex Christian round for dinner.

I could pot roast her, and eat him.

Eradicating any trace of my own identity, I lie back and think of Richard Gere in a white uniform. He is carrying me into the bedroom, all ten stone of me, without a murmur. He lays me back upon the kingsized bed and admires my magnificent body (cellulite does not exist in celluloid). He bends to kiss me, and his features dim and pale. He becomes the familiar unknown stranger, with the invisible face and the passionate embrace. Is this fantasy figure the someone that I’m searching for? How can I recognise someone with no face? My eyes blink open, the real Richard trembles for a moment above me like a persistent Jack Russell mounting a Red Setter.

He tenses, sighs, and then falls away. He is asleep within seconds, leaving me gasping in frustration like a landed fish. It may be madness to give up something good, but it is utter stupidity to hold on to something bad.

I reach for the glass of wine beside my bed. I don’t smoke so I allow myself the vice of drinking too much on occasion. Tonight is one such occasion. I’m trying to build up that wonderful sense of bravado that normally appears after too many glasses. Two shared bottles of excellent Burgundy over dinner, and now halfway down a bottle of Sancerre, I am beginning to feel marvellously brave and liberated again, ready to throw off the shackles of boredom and compliance to convention, and head for freedom.

Richard-free freedom.

I look across at him, vulnerable in sleep. Whereas I used to feel tenderness, now I feel nothing but tedium. Richard is a bad habit I’m determined to break. I reach for my ever-present tardis of a handbag, which is at the side of the bed. I don’t have a pen or paper, but I manage with a credit card bill envelope and a dark pink lip liner.

I’m not sure what to write. After rehearsing my speech in my head for weeks my mind has now gone rather blank. The one and only thing in this whole mess that I am totally and utterly sure about is that Richard and I aren’t meant to share the rest of our lives together.

I’d made up this wonderful speech about different values and a better future for both of us if we went our separate ways, but that all sounds terribly trite at this particular moment in time. And far too kind.

Like a typical woman I usually take the blame for everything that has gone wrong and apologise profusely for any inconvenience. I’m a nicer person when I’m sober, but at the moment I’m far from sober and ready to ignore completely my own poorer qualities and blame the whole banality of our relationship on him, fair or not.

Richard, you are the weakest link. Goodbye.

The final message is short but satisfyingly sweet. I read it back aloud and snigger to myself, but not too loud, I don’t want to wake sleeping boorish. Getting quietly from the bed, I pad across the shag-pile carpet on my size five feet. Richard’s bedroom is opulent yet impersonal, dominated by the king-sized oval bed which sits in the centre of the room on the sort of dais you expect to see a pair of thrones mounted upon.

I’ve always been surprised that he doesn’t have a mirrored ceiling. He’s a mirrored-ceiling sort of person. He can’t walk past a shop window without having a look at his own reflection and smiling smugly, although he is also pretty orgasm-driven. I suppose having to stop every five seconds to gaze at his perfectly honed body in the mirrors above would put him off his stroke a bit too much.

A door pretending to be a cupboard door actually leads to a white en suite bathroom with a white-tiled floor and gold fittings. It’s very sparse. Safari for Men sits upon the glass shelf below the large bathroom mirror in various guises: aftershave, deodorant, body lotion, shower gel. These bottles and several thick white towels are the only proof of human existence within the room. There are no hairs blocking the plughole in the sink, no empty loo roll holders floating around the floor, no abandoned underwear bundled in a corner. The toilet seat lid is down, and the towels are folded neatly on the heated rail.

I splash cold water on my face, squirt my armpits with Richard’s aftershave, and rub a finger laced with toothpaste across my front teeth, then purely for the hell of it wipe my still plum-coloured lips – Richard rarely kisses – across the snow white of a virgin towel, a long red glare, the despoiled virgin now.

I have been seeing Richard this long yet there are still none of my possessions in his flat. Sorry, penthouse apartment. He’s never actually banned me from bringing my own touch to the place, but he’s never verbally invited it either. I know most people wouldn’t worry about being asked and would make sure they had at least enough stuff in situ for convenience and comfort, but for some reason I never have brought anything over. Not even a toothbrush. I go back into the bedroom and pull on my clothes. As I sit down on the bed to put on my shoes, Richard, disturbed in sleep, rolls over, pulling all of the duvet on to his side of the bed with an iron grip, and farts noisily.

It’s gone three in the morning. The streets of Oxford are practically deserted. The Indian taxi driver plays Bangra music all the way back to my place. My head throbs in time with the frenetic bass beat. The cab smells of stale sweat and cigarette smoke. Every time we round a corner an abandoned lager can rolls across my feet, spilling dregs and ash. I live just on the outskirts of oxford in what used to be a village but has now been swallowed up by urban sprawl – a small fish living in the belly of a whale. My flat, my home, is the total antithesis of Richard’s apartment; it is small yet very personal. The place is a mess. I don’t really like it that way, but after twenty-eight years of an oppressive mother-dominated life, untidiness is an easy way to assert one’s own independence.

Feeling guilty but liberated, I ignore my usual ritual of showering and religiously removing make-up, and collapse on to my bed fully clothed, eating a cold Mars Bar straight from the fridge. For some reason I’m always ravenous when I’m pissed.

I know I shall wake up in the morning looking like a panda with my mascara, my plum eye-shadow and black eyeliner streaked around my bloodshot eyes, but for once I don’t care. Sod the regime of trying to retain my looks for the sake of my love life and future, hopefully wrinkle-free, happiness – what I have of looks anyway.

Some kind soul once said to my mother, ‘Fliss could never be called pretty, but there are moments when she looks beautiful.’

Isn’t it funny how some comments, no matter how carelessly voiced in the first instance, can stick with you for a lifetime?

I’ve tried to capture one of these rare moments when I’m not looking pretty but could be described as beautiful, and re-create it at will, but it never works. You think I’d have had more luck recently what with all the pampering I’ve been subjecting myself to in preparation for the ‘Big Event’. All of the manicures, the cathiodermie, the anti-cellulite massages, the increasingly more intimate waxing, the pedicures, the sea-weed wraps, the agony that is tweezing … hell, my mother even tried to persuade me to go for a course of Botox injections a couple of weeks ago, although I suppose I was lucky she didn’t suggest full-blown plastic surgery.

She has been training me – well, attempting to train me more like – for the one moment when every girl is expected to look radiant, her wedding day – my wedding day – since birth. It was her idea to call me Felicity, a girly name if ever I heard one. It doesn’t really suit me, I’m not a girly girl.

I think this is probably one of the main reasons why we’ve never really got along.

She wanted a little doll she could dress in pink, with curls and an angelic smile. Someone she could show off, and be dreadfully proud of, and take to ballet lessons.

Instead she got an ungainly tomboy who sprouted faster than an undetected garden weed in the best spot in the garden, lived in jeans, was occasionally mistaken for a boy in her younger, more androgynous years, and was happy to motor along at an average scholastic level instead of attaining the heights her mother dreamed of.

A tomboy who rebelled at just the thought of pink, organza or gingham, singing lessons, piano lessons, deportment, and practically everything else that Mother thought the right ingredients for a proper girly childhood.

For quite a long time I wished fervently that I’d been born a boy so that I could go fishing, or get up to my armpits in mud in the garden with my father – his two favourite pastimes – without incurring any maternal wrath. Then at about fourteen I discovered boys in the form of a very uncontrolled crush on Bono from U2, and was suddenly very glad that I was a girl.

My mother is one of those women who just missed the sexual revolution. She was brought up in an era when women were expected to finish school then marry. That was it, no career, no choice, and no particular say in the future of the one life you had been given. It was drummed into her from a very young age – although I don’t think she ever quite believed it enough, hence the resentment – that women were only good for one thing.

Marriage.

Well, most women anyway. I’m a different story. My mother has always despaired of ever getting rid of me.

Unlike my younger sister, Sally-Anne, who is pretty, delicate and feminine in every way, and has had a string of male admirers since first learning to flutter her long black eyelashes at the tender age of three, I am slightly too tall to be fashionable, totally addicted to chocolate which I store in my fridge and on my hips, totally devoid of that wonderful gift feminine guile, and according to my mother a hopeless case.

That’s why she loves Richard so much. It’s like entering your daughter in a beauty contest expecting her to come in a dismal last, and then finding out she’s actually won first prize. That first prize being Richard Trevelyan.

When I met him my mother couldn’t believe her luck. He has everything she thinks a man should have. She loves him, my younger sister Sally loves him, my wonderfully sensible father thinks he’s an arsehole but since when has Dad’s opinion ever been taken into account? I think my mother would marry Richard herself if she could.

I can’t believe I ever thought I would marry him. Full white wedding, the works, done up like a raspberry Pavlova in some wonderful creation my mother picked. It’s hanging there now, there on the back of my door, mocking me like the ghost of Miss Havisham from Great Expectations.

Not that I ever had any Great Expectations about life with Richard. He is the easy option, the sensible choice, but what about happiness, that ecstatic sense of euphoria you should feel when you’re about to marry the man you love? The Mills & Boon factor? The beating hearts, the bursting bodices? I’m afraid it’s just not there.

When I think of Richard, I don’t feel the urge to write poetry or move mountains, I don’t want to bear his children, I don’t even want to launder his dirty underwear – a true test of love.

When I look at Richard, I don’t want to cover his face in kisses, I don’t want to throw him on the floor and rip off all of his clothes. In fact, what I really want to do is wipe the ever-present smug-git smile off his face with my fist.

Not surprisingly, I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t love him.

The only sense of euphoria I have felt in a long time is when I look at that dress and finally realise I won’t have to wear the bloody thing after all.

Just the sight of it used to fill me with foreboding. Sad, isn’t it? A wedding is something one normally looks forward to, especially one’s own. What was I doing agreeing to marry the man, I hear you ask, if just the thought of him breathing makes me want to punch his lights out?

I think part of it is my sense of self-esteem, or rather lack of it. I’d actually begun to believe that nobody would ever want me, my mother had drummed it into me for so long. So when Richard proposed – eligible, successful, short, dark and handsome – I grabbed the opportunity with both hands, and when you want so very much to be in love, it’s so very easy to convince yourself that you are.

And why the change of heart now? Selfpreservation has a lot to do with it. I’m like my little village being swallowed up by the whale of the town, losing its own individuality, or the steak being smothered by pepper sauce, congealing and covering, taking away its own identity. Only somebody threw me a life belt and hauled me to shore.

That somebody is Caro.

I’m a teacher at the local girls’ high school. I’ve been there for about four years now, tutoring, or should I call it torturing, a reluctant upper-fifth through their English GCSEs. Caro is the new drama teacher.

She is also a very old friend, last seen before our recent reunion as a skinny horse-mad eleven year old. I lost touch with her when her father, who’s something rather splendid in the diplomatic corps, took a posting to Hong Kong. She is four years older than me, and used to boss me around dreadfully, but I adored her with a reverent passion, and cried for weeks when she left. Things haven’t changed very much since our childhood, only now she is not so much bossy as emboldening.

Since her return into my life Caro has given me a new outlook on life. She is now very happily married herself to a wonderful man called David who farms some beautiful land just on the border of the Chilterns. He is fifteen years older than Caroline. Together they have two teenagers from his previous marriage, one dog, a flock of geese in their back garden, and the most wonderfully idyllic partnership you could ever imagine. I have other friends who seem to be happily married, but Caro and David just have that extra something.

They are the best of friends. They tease, they talk, they complement each other – two very different people. Caro is outgoing, vivacious, artistic; David – solid and reliable yet sensitive and imaginative – a rare breed of man. They go together like pepper and salt. Just seeing them together made me realise I want more.

I want someone who will sit up with me until dawn discussing shared passions; someone who will cook an amazing dinner for his wife and her friend, and then sod off without enjoying any of it so that they have some privacy to talk; someone who will dance with me in the moonlight.

The last time I stayed with Caro and David it was a hot balmy summer’s night, the sort where you throw off your duvet at midnight and lie with the window wide open, just letting the softest of breezes caress your naked body, and listening to the gentle sounds of the night.

Well, that night the gentle sounds of the night were rudely but pleasantly interrupted by the sound of Sarah Vaughan playing on an old gramophone. When, enticed by the music, I padded barefoot across the polished floorboards and leaned out of the window, there they were, in each other’s arms, dancing in the orchard, illuminated by the light through the open French doors like a spotlight on the star couple in Come Dancing.

David was stroking Caro’s golden hair with one hand while his other hand rested gently but firmly on her backside. I could hear him singing ‘Misty’ to her, along with the record. The orchard was raining blossom on their heads like confetti at a wedding.

Corny? Maybe.

Appealing? Definitely.

It was at that moment I made my decision. I want someone who’ll dance with me at midnight to old songs, who’ll sing sweet words to me, who’ll treat me like a friend and a lover, the most precious object in their world. Am I asking too much? Perhaps, but I know now that Richard and I don’t have that, and that I’m worth more. More anyway than a no-hope relationship with someone whose idea of a balanced relationship is ninety-nine per cent to one.

Now I’ve made my decision, it’s as though a whole hundredweight has been lifted from my shoulders. My mother always nags me not to stoop – I’m used to compensating for Richard’s lack of inches – but I’m sure it was the weight of all my worries that made my shoulders bow. Do I stand taller now? I get up rather unsteadily from the bed and, stripping, stand naked in front of my full-length mirror, the one that swivels when you don’t want it to and almost concussed Sally when she posed in front of it in her pink bridesmaid’s dress.

Pink – yuk! I don’t even like pink.

I throw back my shoulders and my head. My long brown hair falls against my shoulder blades. My skin looks darker in the lamplight. Brown hair, brown eyes, brown skin … universally brown, like a gypsy. Slightly overweight but not unattractive: full boobs, plump arse, long legs. Not bad at all, I decide, pissed and in a low light.

I draw myself up, inducing the mirror to reflect not only myself but my new resolve.

Yes, I’m sure I’m a full inch taller now. I shall walk tall when I meet Mother tomorrow. I shall look her straight in her ice-blue eyes and tell her that the wedding is off. She will see a new Fliss, a strong Fliss, a Fliss who knows what she wants and grabs it with both hands, a Fliss who doesn’t give a damn whether her mother approves of what she does … a Fliss who is kidding herself and is at this very moment contemplating a quick hike back to Richard’s place to retrieve the hastily scribbled missive that will rocket her life on to a very different course.

The wonderful drunken abandon is beginning to wear off, and a horrible feeling of panic starts to set in. I’m torn between hiding away in sleep or opening another bottle of wine. Oh, sod it, I won’t be able to sleep now anyway. I head for the kitchen, and open a bottle of rather nice Australian Shiraz that I’d been saving for a special occasion.

Hastings the cat (so named because life with her is one long battle of wills), who is already disgusted that I got in late and could only offer a week-old tin of pilchards in tomato sauce for dinner, looks at me out of the corner of one sleepy green eye.

If she had eyebrows she’d raise them to heaven. If she had a voice, she’d chide ‘drunk again’. Instead, disturbed from her resting place between the wine rack and the toaster, she stalks off and takes revenge by throwing up said pilchards in my slippers, and then wiping her face on my bed linen.

Acknowledgements

Chapter One