Sophia Money-Coutts - The Wish List

I spread my hands in mock innocence. ‘You said it was a wish list. So I thought, why not? If I can truly put down any bottom I wanted, why not go for his?’

The corners of Gwendolyn’s mouth tightened as she glanced back at the list. ‘What’s wrong with umbrellas?’

‘Not very manly,’ I said. I had a thing about this. Hugo never left the house without his umbrella. It seemed fussy and faint-hearted; you’d never catch Mr Rochester or Rhett Butler faffing about with an umbrella.

‘And you want someone who’s both ambitious and adventurous?’

I nodded. Ambition was to guard against the sort of man whose dreams stopped at ‘golf club membership’ and someone with a spirit of adventure might encourage me to be braver, to venture further afield than south London.

‘Fine,’ she went on, ‘but you could jot down a few more personality characteristics. What about kindness, or generosity? And does he want children?’

‘I don’t know,’ I replied, because I didn’t know. I had to find a boyfriend first and that seemed hard enough.

‘And what’s this about your counting?’

‘Nothing,’ I said quickly. ‘Just a… weird thing I do. Like a tick. I count things. In my head.’

‘Hmmmm,’ mused Gwendolyn, narrowing her eyes at me as if I was the oddball in the room. ‘Well, what I’d like you to do is some deeper work over the next week or so. Really think about this list and finesse it.’ She held the piece of paper back out.

‘All right,’ I replied, taking it from her. ‘And then what? Do I need to find some sort of cauldron and burn it?’

‘You are naughty!’ said Gwendolyn, grinning and clapping her hands to her thighs. ‘No, darling, just leave it somewhere safe so you can come back to it at our next appointment.’

‘What next appointment?’

‘Your stepmother booked a package. Did she not tell you? We have another three to go.’

I exhaled. Three more sessions in this Pepto-Bismol room. Three more interrogations with this giant fairy. But how to reply? I could hardly say, ‘Absolutely not, I’d rather skip naked through the streets of London.’

She reached into her dungaree pocket and pulled out her phone. ‘Let’s see… I always think it best to allow at least a week between the first and second appointment, to allow you enough time to think about your list. So what about two weeks’ today? Same time? There’s a new moon that night so it’s wonderful timing.’

I smiled back, my lips pressed in a straight line because otherwise I thought I might scream.

And then, once I was standing back on the Harley Street pavement, I folded the list and slid it into the side pocket of my rucksack. The manifesting power of the universe indeed. What a load of absolute, Grade-A nonsense.

LATER THAT WEEK, I was dealing with Mrs Delaney and didn’t notice the blond man loitering in the biography section. It was raining, which drove more people into the shop since it was a peaceful place to pass time until the clouds moved. Unhurried. Relaxed. No assistant ever approached you in a bookshop and said, ‘Would you like to try a pair of heels with that?’ Customers could browse undisturbed while their coats dripped quietly on the Turkish rugs.

Mrs Delaney had been visiting Frisbee Books for decades. She lived in a big house overlooking St Luke’s Church, a short wobble away on her walking stick, and liked to come in every week to discuss new gardening books. She was exceptionally keen on gardening (although she didn’t do it herself, she had a man called Cliff who did that), and Eugene and I took it in turns to deal with her. This morning it was my turn, so I was leafing Mrs Delaney through a new book about rewilded gardens. It wasn’t going well because she declared every photo of daisies and cow parsley ‘a disgrace’.

‘That’s even messier than the last!’ she said, as I reached the final page, a picture of a butterfly on a clump of grass. ‘Not for me,’ she said. ‘I’ll be off.’

Mrs Delaney waved her stick in the air as a goodbye before tottering out into the rain. I stepped under the wooden beam separating fiction and non-fiction to slide the rewilding book back onto its shelf.

‘I’m so sorry to trouble you,’ said the man.

I turned to help him, my automatic smile in place.

‘It’s only that I’m here to pick up a book my mother ordered.’

My mouth fell open like a trapdoor but no words came out. It was his old-fashioned clothes that struck me at first. Over a white shirt he was wearing a pair of blue braces which fastened with little buttons to the top of his trousers. Then I stared at his face and wondered whether his pale blue eyes and almost invisible blond eyelashes meant he was Scandinavian.

‘She said she got a message saying it’s in,’ he persisted. ‘If you wouldn’t mind…’

‘Yes, sure, sorry,’ I said, shaking my head as if to wake myself up. He didn’t sound Scandinavian. He sounded very English. ‘What’s she called?’

‘Elizabeth Dundee.’

‘OK, give me a second.’

I stepped behind the till into a small side room that led off from it and ran my finger up and down the shelves until I found the order slip that said Dundee.

‘Here you go,’ I said, carrying the book round to the front of the shop again. I held it out and only then saw what it was called: The Art of Arousal: A Celebration of Erotic Art Throughout History. There was a painting of a woman having sex with a swan on the cover.

‘Oh,’ I said.

‘Ah,’ said the man, in a low, clipped tone. ‘Yes. I might have known. It’s Zeus. He transformed himself into a swan and seduced Leda. Quite odd, those gods.’

‘Looks like it,’ I replied, and we both gazed at the book in silence for a few moments before he spoke again.

‘I’m also looking for something else.’

‘What is it?’ I asked, keen to alleviate the awkwardness of discussing bestiality with this handsome blond man.

‘A book called The Struggle. You don’t happen to have it, do you?’

‘Should have, but it’s a novel so it’ll be back through here.’

I waved him into the fiction area after me. The Struggle was a book as fat as a brick, one of the summer’s biggest sellers, partly because the Irish author had given a series of interviews in which he denounced anyone he was asked about. The Prime Minister? A gobshite. The English in general? A load of gobshites. The Queen? A rich gobshite.

I leant over to scan the table of hardback fiction to find a copy, suddenly very aware that the handsome man was behind me and I was wearing my biggest knickers, the ones with an elasticated waist that pulled up to my belly button and gave me a very obvious VPL. Mia had once insisted that I needed ‘to give thongs a chance’ and left a couple at the bottom of my stairs from one of her fashion clients. But when I’d carried them to the safety of my bedroom for further inspection, I couldn’t work out which bit to put my legs through, and when I finally got them on and glanced over my shoulder in the mirror, my bottom looked so exposed, so vast and white and wobbly, that I wondered why anyone wanted that effect anyway. I’d stashed them at the back of my underwear drawer where they’d remained ever since.

I found the book’s gold spine on the edge of the table. ‘Here you go,’ I said, sliding it free and handing it to him. ‘Have you read any of his others?’ I wanted to distract him from my enormous pants.

‘No,’ he replied. ‘Should I?’

‘I’ve only read his first one. This is better, but that was good too. A coming-of-age tale. Growing up in Dublin in the Seventies, trying to escape family politics, actual politics and then he…’ I stopped. ‘Well, I won’t give it away. But it’s good, yes,’ I said, blushing as he held my eye.