Gemma Townley - When in Rome...

“Good living?”

“Oh come on—the car, his clothes. He’s obviously doing well for himself,” I say, as airily as I can. I hope I don’t sound as bitter as I feel.

“Mike doing well for himself? More like doing well off of someone else,” says David evenly as he swirls the teapot.

“You think his girlfriend is rich then?”

I haven’t met or seen the girl Mike left me for. For all I know he could be on his fifth girlfriend since me, but I always picture him with the same person, and I generally imagine her to be incredibly annoying and rather stupid. All I know is that she is blond and thin. My neighbor saw her picking him up in a Mercedes when he walked out on me. He didn’t remember much about her—although he described the car in detail—but I could tell from what little he told me that she was your average nightmare. Pretty. Long legs. You know the sort.

“Girlfriend, parents, friends—anyone he can get money out of.” David brings over two mugs of tea and a packet of biscuits and sits down opposite me. I sometimes forget how good-looking David is—he’s got a really strong face and gorgeous blue eyes that twinkle when he smiles.

Maybe not quite in Mike territory, but pretty tasty all the same.

“But enough of Mike,” he says very slowly. “I think right now we should forget the stupid curtains and watch a good film instead.”

I sit down on the sofa with a hot cup of tea, and David walks over to the shelf to pick out a video. It’s only done for show, because we always end up watching the same one.

There are two films I know by heart and back to front. One of them isFootloose (owing to a teenage crush on Kevin Bacon), and the other isRoman Holiday . I don’t know exactly why, but David and I have watched it at least twenty times, and I never get bored of it—it’s so sad, so funny, it’s set in gorgeous Rome, and Audrey Hepburn looks just amazing. She plays a princess who has to spend all her time going round meeting people and making speeches; Gregory Peck is a cynical American journalist who’s trying to make enough money to get back home. She escapes from the embassy for one night and meets him, then they spend the day together before she goes back to being a princess—having fallen in love with him of course. Oh, and he realizes who she is and decides he could get a front-page story out of it, then doesn’t go through with it because he falls in love with her, too. Okay, so it’s not particularly realistic, but still. The first time we watched it, we were transfixed. And right afterward, David murmured in my ear “I’m going to take you to Rome, my darling. I’ve going to hire one of those scooters and I’m going to take you wherever you want to go.”

I mean, how romantic is that? I have that picture in my head a lot—me being like Audrey Hepburn, floating around in pretty dresses, and David being like Gregory Peck, all manly and hard but warm in the center.

Of course we haven’t actually been to Rome yet—David’s always really busy with work and stuff—but we’re going to go. Definitely. I actually bought some plane tickets to Rome about a year ago, as a surprise. I’d arranged with David’s PA for him to have a Friday off and I was going to turn up at his office on Thursday evening and whisk him off for a long weekend. But then on the Monday before there was a huge crisis at work and he had to go to New York on short notice. I didn’t actually tell him about the tickets to Rome because I didn’t want him to feel bad. Still, there’s always this year. David has promised me that he’s going to take a proper holiday this year, so nothing’s going to stop us.

I lean my head on David’s shoulder as the film begins. Already I’m a European princess and he’s my sexy bit of rough.

Except that David isn’t quite Gregory Peck, if you know what I mean. He is solid, dependable, respectable, and generous. He’s also an accountant—and I can’t imagine Gregory Peck spending hours looking at boring numbers, can you? Actually, David’s what you call a forensic accountant, which is perhaps a little bit nearer Gregory Peck territory. When he told me, I thought he meant he was going to be working for Scotland Yard, but he told me it isn’tthat sort of forensic. But it does sound better than numbers crunching; forensic accountants trace dodgy dealings and stuff. Like once he was working on the divorce settlement case of some really rich businessman, and his job was to track down the numerous offshore bank accounts where the husband had put all his money so he didn’t have to give any of it to his wife. And another time he was investigating this drug ring that had bought up a whole load of property in London. Last year his firm even started working for the Fraud Squad, and now he gets to work with the police and secret intelligence and people like that. But that’s about as much as I know. Somehow David makes exciting things like breaking drug rings sound really quite boring—lots of detailed investigations into balance sheets, and no breaking down doors and shouting “Hold it right there.” I guess he’s still an accountant; he just happens to be an accountant who works for the Fraud Squad and that’s just not the same, is it? Not that there’s anything wrong with being an accountant or anything, but they don’t tend to be cool and strong, silent types. Come to think of it, they don’t usually get invited to particularly good parties either. Unless you count the Accountancy Age Awards, that is, and I don’t.

Mike, on the other hand, is a bit nearer the mark. He never really had a job, as such, but he is a really good DJ and record promoter (I’ve only heard him DJ once and he was a bit drunk, but he told me about how he could have been more famous than Pete Tong if he’d wanted to), and he’s really well connected and stuff. Like, if you want to go to a gig, he can always get guest-list passes. And whenever you read an article on some new model or musician or actress, Mike always knows them. At least he did two years ago, but I can’t imagine he’s changed that much.

Sorry, I was talking about David, wasn’t I. Okay, so David is really nice. He’s “take home and meet the parents” nice. He earns quite a lot of money I think—we always go to nice restaurants and he never lets me pay unless we go to Pizza Express. He’s also got a really nice flat in Putney, on the river.

I first met him at a dinner party that my old school friend Candida had “thrown.” Candy is not like most of my friends—she has “chums” named Rupert or Julian and she has “soirees” instead of parties. Anyway, I was at a loose end and Candy thought a dinner party might be fun, so I dutifully bought a cheap bottle of wine, put on some lippy, and took the Tube to her Notting Hill flat.

I love going to Candy’s flat, not that I’ve been there for ages; I kind of fell out of touch with Candy a bit before I met David again. To be honest, we never had that much in common; we used to live near each other when I was younger and we kind of stayed in touch. But her flat is gorgeous—stucco-fronted, with a huge garden that’s shared with the other houses in her street.

And it’s huge: three bedrooms, a sitting room, and a separate dining room. I mean who has room for a dining room when they live in London? Not me, certainly. Which is probably why I don’t have dinner parties very often—or ever, actually.

As soon as I got to Candy’s I realized I’d made a huge mistake. She was all dressed up in this incredible backless number, and seemed to have half forgotten that she’d invited me when I arrived. And then, after she’d introduced me to all her boarding school “chums” and I was just beginning to relax, Bridget and Ralf, one of the couples there, announced that they had just done a wine tasting course at Christie’s and were going to deliver a verdict on all the wines on the table. Thinking that my ?2.99 Chateau de somewhere in Eastern Europe would not hold its own against the expensive-looking French wine already out, I made my way to the kitchen to hide my wine at the very back of the fridge, figuring that no one cares what wine tastes like when you’re on the eighth bottle. Except that someone stopped me before I could get there.