Lucy Holliday - A Night In With Marilyn Monroe

‘… and I remind her of her late husband, apparently. And you remind her of herself. And they were blissfully happy for forty-six years. So really,’ he finishes, with a strained-sounding laugh, ‘what more evidence does anybody need that you and I ought to be together?’

This is mortifying.

I mean, yes, people are always accidentally mistaking me and Olly for a couple: I think both of us are pretty used to that now. But to have it coming from as stern and proper a figure as Grandmother feels, somehow, too real for comfort. It’s a bit like the moment we shared our one and only kiss, in Paris – the Mistaken Thing we’ve never talked about since, after far too much wine and far too intense a conversation about love. I can’t quite look Olly in the eye, and I’m certain, from the strain in his voice, that he’s just as embarrassed as I am.

‘Again,’ I say, sounding pretty strained myself, ‘I’m really sorry. She’s unstoppable when she gets the bit between her teeth. I had no idea she was going to latch on to you like that …’

His phone is going: ‘Auld Lang Syne’ again.

‘You really should get that this time,’ I say, grateful for the diversion. ‘Tell Nora to let Tash know she’ll have a companion for the road ahead.’

‘All right,’ says Olly, taking the phone out of his pocket. ‘And then I’ll just need five minutes online to pre-order a bike. Promise you’ll come and grab me the minute anyone starts speechifying, Lib?’

‘I promise.’

I watch him wander away from the noise of the jazz band, putting his phone to his ear as he goes. And then I take a deep, deep breath, and head for the trees, to see if I can persuade Grandmother, politely, to put a sock in it for the rest of the wedding. After all, if I can stand around here on Dad’s big day and bottle up all the things I might quite like to blurt out, Grandmother – a fully paid-up member of the Blitz generation – can surely do it too.

Like I say, it’s only been eight weeks. But I really think I might actually be falling in love with Adam already.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that a) I’m an incurable romantic and b) my standards are embarrassingly low. I mean, if you’re the sort of girl who’s constantly being showered in dozens of red roses just because it’s Tuesday, or whisked away to five-star luxury in the Italian lakes before being proposed to on a gondola, in Venice, at sunset, then my reason for suddenly realizing that Adam might be The One is going to seem a bit … silly.

But then, they do say that it’s the little things that make a relationship go the distance. The offer to dash to the shop at eight a.m. on a drizzly Sunday morning to pick up milk for a cup of tea. The random text message in the middle of a stressful day that tells you how great you make someone feel. The surprise scrawl, at the bottom of the tedious weekly shopping list, that simply announces Thinking about you.

My new boyfriend turning up to meet me outside my Very Important Meeting, bringing a Pret espresso and a packet of yogurt-covered raisins, is exactly this sort of ‘little thing’.

So yes, it’s not red roses, and it’s a long way from Venice at sunset, but it’s thoughtful, and lovely, and it matters.

‘You really, really shouldn’t have,’ I tell Adam, wrapping my arms round him and giving him a kiss. ‘You’re so busy. And your flight only got in two hours ago.’

‘I slept loads on the plane. I’m fresh as a daisy.’ The expression, in his Brooklyn accent, sounds as incongruous as it sounds sweet.

He’s probably not fibbing about this: he works for a swanky investment fund, and today’s flight, back to London from New York, is bound to have been one of the business-class variety. Unlike my mere hour’s flight back from Glasgow last night which, though brief, was of the Ryanair variety: cramped, hectic and a bit like finding yourself in a thirty-five-thousand-feet-high tin of sardines. And Adam does, in fact, look fresh as a daisy: impeccably dressed as ever in his crisp blue shirt and rumple-free grey suit, not a single dark hair out of place. To look at him now, lean and tanned and bright-eyed, you’d think that instead of just stepping off a seven-hour flight, he’d stepped out of a salon.

‘Anyway, it’s right around the corner from my office,’ he goes on.

‘Your office is in Mayfair. This –’ I gesture around at the slightly unlovely street we’re standing on – ‘is Clapham. Now, I know distance is nothing to you Americans, but I wouldn’t say this was just around the corner .’

‘So I’ll drop in on Olly while I’m over here. See how everything’s going at the restaurant.’

Even though Olly is very definitely the proprietor of his brand-new restaurant, most of the money is being supplied by Adam’s investment company. It’s how I met Adam, in fact. He was at Olly’s brand-new premises, the day after the builders started a little over two months ago, and I dropped in with a bottle of champagne. We got to chatting, and then he walked me to the tube … and, eight weeks later, here we are. Proud owners of a fully functioning, mature, adult relationship.

‘Anyway,’ Adam goes on now, fondly pushing a stray lock of hair behind my ear. (At least, I think it’s fond. I can’t help harbouring the suspicion that my hair, the opposite of his own neat, never-a-strand-out-of-place locks, drives him slightly nuts.) ‘I know what a big deal this meeting is for you, Libby. I just wanted you to realize that I’m cheering you on.’

‘You’re lovely. Thank you.’

‘Not to mention that I expect you were up until the small hours polishing up your business plan …’

He’s half right. I did stay up late after I got home last night after the wedding, but that wasn’t so much because I was polishing my business plan as panicking about it.

I mean, this is the first time I’ve ever done what I’m about to do – go into a meeting with a bank manager and ask him for a small business loan – and I’ve no idea if what I’ve produced is even remotely good enough. Professional enough.

But then, perhaps that’s the downside of ending up turning a hobby you love into a career you need to make a go of. I started my jewellery design business, Libby Goes To Hollywood, almost a year ago, but I still can’t quite shake the sense that it’s just a bit, well, rude to be walking into a meeting with a perfect stranger and announcing that you’d quite like him to stump up eight thousand pounds – ten if he’s feeling really generous – so that you can carry on living your dream of being a jewellery designer, just with a bit more all-important dosh around so that you can buy better equipment, and maybe even employ an intern to come and work for you so that you can keep up with all the orders.

‘I was up late,’ I tell Adam, lifting a hand to waggle the espresso and yogurt-covered raisins at him. ‘So these are absolutely perfect.’

Which, of course, they are.

I mean, it’s not Adam ’s fault that he thinks I drink espresso, or that I’m a person for whom yogurt-covered raisins are the very acme of pre-meeting treats. I might accidentally have implied, on our second or third date, that I was a go-getting, gym-hitting, green-juice-quaffing sort of girl. Just, you know, to keep up with his own go-getting, gym-hitting, green-juice-quaffing ways.

Obviously in an ideal world, it wouldn’t be an espresso, it’d be a cappuccino. And they might be chocolate -covered raisins instead.

OK: in a really, really ideal world, the snack Adam had so thoughtfully brought me wouldn’t have the faintest whiff of raisin about it at all. It’d be those big, chocolate-coated honeycomb bites I’ve recently developed a slightly worrying addiction to, or a good old Yorkie bar, or – seeing as he’s just got off a plane – a massive great Toblerone.