Penny Smith - Summer Holiday

‘I think the likelihood of that is going to be about zero. But if you’d prefer a woman, I’ll see what I can do. I’ll send them round to the van, shall I?’

‘Ha-ha. The house will be finished in a week or so. Send them there or the flat in London. Is there going to be a code? Three short knocks, followed by a long one, a finger of banana slid through the letterbox and a cough?’

‘I can see this is going to be an endless source of amusement. I’ll let you have a list and you can make your own arrangements.’

Alex drove back to his house in the pretty village of Shillingford and had a quick chat with the decorators before going to London and getting ready for his dinner date. He chose a pair of Alexander McQueen trousers and a Paul Smith shirt. He slipped on a pair of tan boots he’d had made for him, and tied his dreadlocks back. He had shaved that morning and was sporting a rakish five o’clock shadow. With a cursory glance in the mirror, he left with a confident air.

There was a distinct lack of confidence going on with Miranda. She was having a crisis. Every item of clothing she tried on looked atrocious. She had decided that her body looked like an old potato. Her hair was a mess. She could only see wrinkles and could have sworn her skin was starting to ruche in places.

She was almost tempted to phone Alex and tell him she’d got flu. Or the plague. Boils. Frogs. Anything. She looked at her watch. How could it be that she was running out of time? She’d been getting ready since three.

The mobile rang. Lucy again. She pressed reject call. A text pinged. Alex, saying he was on his way and was really looking forward to dinner. He’d also given her the postcode in case she didn’t know where it was. As if. His text spurred her on. She decided to follow the tenets she had lived by since she was a teenager. One: if in doubt, get them out. Two: high heels good, higher heels better.

The woman who hailed the taxi on the main road in Notting Hill looked flushed but beautiful. She had tied her hair back loosely with a clip, and was wearing slim black trousers, towering stilettos, a stunning blue shimmering shirt unbuttoned dangerously low, and diamond drop earrings – a twentieth anniversary gift from Nigel when he was feeling guilty about the affair with his secretary.

Fashionably late, she arrived at Zuma and was directed to a table where Alex was perusing the wine list. He stood up and kissed her on one cheek, setting off a chain reaction through her sensory zones and making the hairs on the back of her neck tingle. It had been an age since anything this exciting had happened to her follicles.

She smiled flirtily. ‘Sorry I’m late. Have you been waiting long?’

‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘The temptation to say “all of my life” is quite strong.’

‘But luckily you resisted it because it was far too corny,’ she responded.

‘Exactly. I arrived about ten minutes ago, to make sure our table was okay.’

‘What would you have done if it wasn’t?’ she asked, opening the menu without looking at it.

‘Asked to be shown another, of course.’

‘Naturally,’ she said, ‘since you’re obviously a frequent customer.’

His bright green eyes crinkled attractively. ‘I can see I’m going to have to disabuse you of the notion that I live in a swamp, make my own clothes out of spinach and grow fungus under my fingernails.’

‘A fungi to be with,’ she quipped.

‘Well, I do hope so. Before we get into the story of my life and you tell me how you came to be so gorgeous, shall we order some wine?’

‘Thank you. Yes. White okay?’ He had called her gorgeous! She felt like a teenager.

Alex addressed himself to the wine list, giving Miranda time to study him more fully. The sage green shirt with small cream stars had a couple of buttons undone and highlighted his smooth brown skin. He was wearing stone-coloured trousers, and she could see a booted foot coming out from under the table.

As if he could feel her scrutiny, he glanced up and caught her eye. ‘All satisfactory, madam?’ he asked.

She blushed to the roots of her hair.

He smiled. ‘Hey, don’t think I haven’t been doing the same. You look beautiful. That blue shirt makes your eyes look the colour of cornflowers.’

Miranda was feeling too hot to make any intelligible response. He turned to the more innocuous subject of wine. ‘How do you feel about a sauvignon? Or a pinot grigio? Or chardonnay?’

‘Chardonnay, but not too oaky. If you fancy that?’ She was all of a dither, and her voice had gone up a notch. Calm yourself, she said slowly, in her head. You’re forty-three years old, for heaven’s sake.

He waved at the waiter and ordered a bottle of chenin blanc before opening the menu.

‘How do you square all this with your eco-credentials?’ queried Miranda, gesturing to the selection.

‘I do what I can where I can. And I ask before I decide. You don’t have to wear a hair shirt to want to do the decent thing by the planet. I do think we should eat a lot less meat, but I also accept that we wouldn’t have the meadows we do if there weren’t sheep roaming the hillsides chomping up the grass and leaving handy droppings for the plants. Has that helped you make any decisions on what you want to eat?’

‘A small pile of seaweed and an organic carrot?’ she suggested.

He grinned at her. ‘Honestly. I’m an eco-fan, not an eco-bore – I hope. And please, please, order what you want. My father is an out-and-out protein scoffer. He would eat a whole cow every day, hoofs cut off, arse wiped and on the plate – except that his doctor would have a go at him. My mother thinks food is only safe to eat if it’s covered with plastic. As I said, I do my best, but I accept that the world changes slowly.’

Miranda was quiet as she ran through the menu. She wasn’t going to risk it.

‘You ready?’

‘Yes, I think I am.’

His mouth twitched as she ordered a selection of vegetable dishes. He ordered some dishes that she hadn’t seen, explaining afterwards that he was a friend of the chef and had phoned ahead.

The restaurant was packed, with a hubbub coming from the bar area to the right of the entrance. Their table was one of the more discreet ones, but it still felt buzzy.

‘Where do your parents live, then?’ Miranda asked, after the waiter had left. He raised his eyebrows. ‘You said your dad eats cows and your mum eats plastic. Earlier,’ she explained.

‘Oh, yes, I did. Dad lives in Gloucestershire. Mum currently lives in Hampshire. The Isle of Wight. Just getting divorced for the second time and presumably working on a third husband.’

‘Not very good at being on her own, then?’

‘No. Although she does prefer the company of adults. She wasn’t around that much when I was growing up.’

‘Where was she?’

‘Charity stuff, I suppose,’ Alex said smoothly, not revealing that he had had a nanny for most of his childhood. ‘And then she divorced my father when I was ten and married a man who was an idiot. Luckily, I get on well with Dad most of the time, and he got custody of me.’

‘Only child?’ empathised Miranda.

He nodded. ‘You too?’

‘I spent my childhood wishing I was creative enough to have an imaginary friend.’

He laughed. ‘I spent my childhood roaming round the est–countryside,’ he stumbled slightly, ‘un-damming streams, saving chicks that had fallen out of the nest, foraging for mushrooms.’

‘How idyllic. And did you always have hair like that?’ she asked.

‘It was an act of rebellion when I was about twenty-five. It’s quite fun creating dreadlocks. You have to put special wax in your hair and eventually it does it itself. I’m considering chopping them off.’