David Nicholls - One Day

‘Mummy wasn’t asking you, Murray,’ snaps Sylvie.

‘Well, I still am a presenter, of sorts,’ says Dexter and thinks, I’ll get you yet, you little bastards. They’ve had run-ins before, Dexter and The Twins, in London. Through little smirks and twinkles they’ve revealed that they don’t think much of sis’s new boyfriend, think she can do better. The Cope family are Winners and will only tolerate Winners. Dexter’s just a charm-boy, a has-been, a poser on the way down. There is silence at the table. Was he meant to keep talking? ‘I’m sorry, what was the question?’ asks Dexter, momentarily lost but determined to get back on top of the game.

‘I wondered what you were up to these days, work-wise?’ she repeats patiently, making clear that this is a job interview for the post of Sylvie’s boyfriend.

‘Well, I’ve been working on a couple of new TV shows, actually. We’re waiting to find out what’s going to get commissioned.’

‘What are they about, these TV shows?’

‘Well one’s about London nightlife, a sort of what’s-on-in-the-capital thing, and the other’s a sports show. Extreme Sports.’

‘Extreme Sports? What are “Extreme Sports”?’

‘Um, well mountain-biking, snow-boarding, skate-boarding—’

‘And do you do any “Extreme Sports” yourself?’ smirks Murray.

‘I skate-board a little,’ says Dexter, defensively, and he notices that at the other end of the table, Sam has stuffed his napkin into his mouth.

‘Will we have seen you on anything on the BBC?’ says Lionel, the father, handsome, plump, self-satisfied and still bizarrely blond in his late fifties.

‘Unlikely. It’s all rather late-night fare, I’m afraid.’ ‘ Rather late-night fare, I’m afraid’, ‘I skate-board a little ’. God, he thinks, what do you sound like? There’s something about being with the Cope family that makes him behave as if he’s in a costume drama. Perchance, ’tis rather late-night fare. Still, if that’s what it takes. .

Now Murray, the other twin — or is it actually Sam? — pipes up, his mouth full of salad, ‘We used to watch that late night show you were on, largin’ it . All swearing and dolly-birds dancing in cages. You didn’t like us watching it, remember Mum?’

‘God, that thing?’ Mrs Cope, Helen, frowns. ‘I do remember, vaguely.’

‘You used to really, really hate it,’ says Murray or Sam.

‘Turn it off! you used to shout,’ says the other one. ‘Turn it off! You’ll damage your brain!’

‘Funny, that’s exactly what my mother used to say too,’ says Dexter, but no-one picks up on the remark and he reaches for the wine bottle.

‘So that was you , was it?’ says Lionel, Sylvie’s father, his eyebrows raised, as if the gentleman at his table has revealed himself to be rather the cad.

‘Well, yes, but it wasn’t all like that. I tended just to interview the bands and the movie stars.’ He wonders if he sounds big-headed with this talk of bands and movie stars, but there’s no chance of that because the twins are there, ready to shoot him down.

‘So do you still hang out with a lot of movie stars then?’ says one of them, in mock awe, the jumped-up little Aryan freak-boy.

‘Not really. Not anymore.’ He decides to answer honestly, but without any regret or self-pity. ‘That has all sort of. . drifted away.’

‘Dexter’s being modest,’ says Sylvie. ‘He gets offers all the time. He’s just very picky about his on-screen work. What he really wants to do is produce. Dexter has his own media production company!’ she says proudly, and her parents nod approvingly. A businessman, an entrepreneur — that’s more like it.

Dexter smiles too, but the fact is life has become a great deal quieter recently. Mayhem TV plc has yet to earn a commission, or a meeting with a commissioner, and at the moment still exists only in the form of expensively headed paper. Aaron, his agent, has dropped him. There are no voiceovers, no promotional work, not quite so many premieres. He is no longer the voice of premium cider, has been quietly expelled from poker school, and even the guy who plays the congas in Jamiroquai doesn’t call him anymore. And yet despite all this, the downturn in professional fortunes, he’s fine now, because now he has fallen in love with Sylvie, beautiful Sylvie, and now they have their mini-breaks.

Weekends frequently begin and end at Stansted airport, where they fly off to Genoa or Bucharest, Rome or Reykjavik, trips that Sylvie pre-plans with the precision of an invading army. A startlingly attractive, metropolitan European couple, they stay in exclusive little boutique hotels and walk and shop and shop and walk and drink tiny cups of black coffee in street cafés, then lock themselves into their chic minimal taupe-coloured bedroom with the wet-room and the single stick of bamboo in the tall thin vase.

If they’re not exploring small independent shops in a major European city, then they’re spending time in West London with Sylvie’s friends: petite, pretty hard-faced girls and their pink-cheeked, large-bottomed boyfriends who, like Sylvie and her friends, work in marketing, or advertising or the City. In truth, they’re not really his sort, these hyper-confident über-boyfriends. They remind him of the prefects and head-boys he knew at school; not unpleasant, just not very cool. Never mind. You can’t build your life around what’s cool, and there are benefits to this less chaotic, more ordered lifestyle.

Serenity and drunkenness don’t really go together and save for the occasional glass of champagne or wine with dinner, Sylvie doesn’t drink alcohol. Neither does she smoke or take drugs or eat red meat or bread or refined sugar or potatoes. More significantly, she has no time for Dexter drunk. His abilities as a fabled mixologist mean nothing to her. She finds inebriation embarrassing and unmanly, and more than once he has found himself alone at the end of the evening because of that third martini. Though it has never been stated as such, he has been given a choice: clean up your act, sort out your life, or you will lose me. Consequently there are fewer hangovers these days, fewer nose-bleeds, fewer mornings spent writhing in shame and self-disgust. He no longer goes to bed with a bottle of red wine in case he gets thirsty in the night, and for this he is grateful. He feels like a new man.

But the single most striking thing about Sylvie is that he likes her so much more than she likes him. He likes her straightforwardness, her self-confidence and poise. He likes her ambition, which is ferocious and unapologetic, and her taste, which is expensive and immaculate. Of course he likes the way she looks, and the way they look together, but he also likes her lack of sentimentality; she is as hard, bright and desirable as a diamond and for the first time in his life, he has had to do the chasing. On their first date, a ruinously expensive French restaurant in Chelsea, he had wondered aloud if she was enjoying herself. She was having a wonderful time, she said, but she didn’t like to laugh in company because she didn’t like what laughter did to her face. And although a part of him felt a little chill at this, a part of him also had to admire her commitment.

This visit, his first to the parental home, is part of a long weekend, a stopover in Chichester before they continue down the M3 to a rented cottage in Cornwall, where Sylvie is going to teach him how to surf. Of course he shouldn’t really be taking all this time off, he should be working, or looking for work. But the prospect of Sylvie, stern and rosy-cheeked in a wetsuit with her hair tied back, is almost more than he can bear. He looks across at her now to check on how he is performing, and she smiles reassuringly in the candlelight. He’s doing fine so far, and he pours himself one last glass of wine. Mustn’t have too much. Got to keep your wits about you, with these people.