Jane Green: Bookends

Every New Year’s Eve Si and I make a deal. If neither of us is married by the age of thirty-five, we’ll marry each other. Actually, it used to be by the age of twenty-five. Then thirty. And doubtless by the time we hit thirty-five it will move to forty.

I suppose I am slightly in love with him, if only in a platonic way, although there are plenty of times when I wish it could be different. Put it like this. I’m fairly genuine about our New Year’s Eve promises. Si is everything I’ve ever looked for in a man. Apart from the being gay bit, of course. And he’d make a wonderful husband and father. I’d never have to lift a finger at home – he’d do all the cleaning and cook me wonderful gourmet meals every night.

We’d have a hell of a lot of fun, Si and I, if we were married. But I know Si would never marry me. I know he loves me more than anyone else in the world, but I also know that when Si goes to bed at night he closes his eyes and dreams of Brad Pitt, and he could never sacrifice that. Not even for me.

The phone rings again. My private line. Which means it’s one of three people. My mother. Si. Or Josh. I’m always amazed that Josh manages to call me quite so regularly, but then again I’m not entirely sure I know exactly what he does, money and finance having always been something of an anathema to me.

I do know that he works for one of the big banks in the City. That he is in charge of a team of ten people, and that the only reason he manages to get home every night by seven o’clock is because he’s in the office by six a.m. every day.

Other than that, I think he has something to do with Mergers and Acquisitions, or M & A, as I believe you’re meant to call it in the trade. I know he’s doing well enough not to have to worry about money, and I know that his public school background, minor though it was, has almost certainly helped him reach the position he now occupies.

‘You must work to live, not live to work,’ Josh always laughs, when Si and I tease him about having such an easy life at the age of thirty-two when he should, by rights, be working like a madman. But, although I am constantly surprised by his lack of ties to the office, I am also impressed, and I know that his family is so important to him that he would never sacrifice his life purely for money.

My line is still ringing, and it could very well be Josh on the phone now, so I pick up, taking my chances.

‘ Now what do you want, Si?’

‘Just to tell you that’ – he pauses dramatically – ‘Mr Gorgeous has phoned!’

‘Fantastic! So when’s he coming over to break your heart? Oops, I mean, coming over for dinner?’

‘And how do you know this one isn’t The One?’

‘I’m sorry, my darling. You’re quite right. He might be. So you haven’t invited him over, then? Let me guess, he’s taking you to some fantabulously swanky restaurant for dinner tomorrow night.’

‘Nearly,’ he says brightly. ‘ I’m cooking him a fantabulously swanky meal at my place tomorrow night.’

‘You’re hopeless,’ I say.

‘I know,’ he replies, but his voice is bubbling over with excitement.

‘No chocolate mousse, now,’ I warn sternly.

‘I know, I know. And I’ve buried the onion rings in the back garden.’

I get home at seven, cursing the fact that I haven’t got a parking space at work, and fantasizing about going freelance and never having to take the damn tube again. There are times when I really don’t mind it, when I actually quite enjoy it, but then there are times, like tonight, when there are no seats, and you’re all crushed together, and everyone is wet from the pouring rain so the carriage is filled with that awful damp smell.

I grab a towel from the bathroom and pull the elastic band out of my hair, rubbing the towel vigorously over my head, rolling my eyes as I catch sight of myself in the mirror. I should not have been born with this hair. It is just not fair, because my hair is barely human. It is a frizzy mess that used to circle my head rather like a fuzzy halo, and, now that I have tried to grow it, looks increasingly like Marsha Hunt’s on a very bad day. It would have looked fantastic in the early seventies, but it looks ridiculous now.

I have a bathroom cabinet stacked with various defrizzing, smoothing products that Si keeps accidentally-on-purpose leaving at my house, saying that he didn’t really need them and I should keep them, but I just can’t be bothered. Occasionally I read the labels, but invariably I forget to use them, and run out of the house with wet hair scraped back into a ponytail, which is the only way I can look halfway decent for work.

I used to make an effort. I used to wear make-up and have highlights and flirt with strange men in bars, but the older I get the less interested I am. I used to believe in love, in passion, but now I believe that the two cannot go hand in hand, because passion is not love, can never be love, and the one great passion of my life was someone I didn’t even like, although naturally I didn’t realize it at the time.

I was twenty-four when I met Martin. He really wasn’t anything special, not that first time I met him, at a marketing course in Luton. We were there for four days, executives from all over the country, and Martin was leading the course.

I remember he took the stage, bounding up to one of those flip charts, holding an electric-blue marker pen in his hand, and I mentally wrote him off as a boring marketing man. He was ordinary looking. Medium height. Nondescript clothes. Nothing, in short, to write home about.

But by the end of the day I thought he was, quite simply, the most incredible man I had ever met. We all did. Even though none of us had actually met him at that stage. That came later. Afterwards. At the drinks party where he singled me out, came over to talk to me. Looked deep into my eyes and told me I had interesting ideas. And all of a sudden the colours in the room became far brighter, the lines sharper, and I remember thinking that perhaps this was what it was like to fall in love.

Eventually we sat at a table in the corner, with other people who had paid fortunes to come on this course, and Martin fascinated all of us with his stories, his confidence, his charm. But I knew I was special. I knew that there was some sort of link between the two of us, something magical, something that would lead to more.

Our table-fellows gradually started to leave. ‘Got an early start tomorrow,’ they’d say with a wink at Martin, who would laugh politely. Each time he heard it. And eventually it was just the two of us, and Martin turned to me and tugged the elastic band out of my hair, which actually hurt terribly, but I winced in silence because I was aware it was supposed to be a romantic gesture.

‘You have beautiful hair,’ he said to me, while I blushed furiously and tried to think of something to say.

‘It’s a frizzy mess,’ I ended up muttering, instantly regretting spoiling the mood.

‘No, no,’ Martin murmured, ‘it’s quite lovely. Would you like to come up for a drink? It’s rather noisy down here, don’t you think? And I have a wonderful Scotch upstairs.’

Of course I knew that whisky meant sex, but I was somehow mesmerized by him, by the fact that the man to whom everyone in the room wanted to talk was giving me his undivided attention, and I meekly followed him upstairs.

We spent the next three nights together. I would sit in the front row during his lectures and feel a glow of warmth each time he looked at me, aware that the rumours had already started to circulate, but not caring. Only caring that Martin would look at me again by the time I counted to twelve, because that would mean he was going to fall in love with me. Even I wasn’t naïve enough to believe he might love me already.