She's on a roll. A glamorous job at a glossy magazine. A home of her own. A cute live-in boyfriend. Annie Rafferty has worked damn hard for all of it. If demands are made, she delivers. If people need her, she's there. And if she suspects something is missing? Well, she ignores it. 

But cracks start to appear. Her boyfriend quits his job and leaves Annie paying the bills. Work descends into a handbags-at-dawn struggle for survival, and there's a new exec in the office - rude, unreconstructed, but strangely attractive - questioning exactly what she's trying to prove. 

As Annie discovers her true desires, her meticulously planned life begins to unravel and darker, unexpected forces pull things in a shocking new direction...

One

A mild Monday morning in September. Happily, it doesn’t feel like the kind of day when anything much is going to happen, not from where I am sitting, collapsed as I am in the comforting leather scoop of a hairdresser’s chair. Then, at 11.06 a.m., I get the call. I leap up from the chair, tugging at the overall’s tie belt with clumsy fingers as the confused styl- ist reluctantly uncoils a section of my hair from the barrel brush. I apologise profusely, explaining that yes, it is my day off, but I’ve been called back to the office. I can’t risk my career for a blow-dry, sorry. Outside the cloakroom I pull on my coat with one hand and use the other to call my younger sister Georgia and cancel lunch.

‘Boring,’ says Georgia. There is loud music in the back- ground. ‘Your office is like a bloody gulag. Can’t you just say you didn’t pick up the message or something? Or better still, can’t you just say no, just once? Go on, Annie. I dare you.’

‘I’ve got to go in,’ I say, cradling the phone uncomfortably under my chin as I stand at the reception desk, punching my pin number into the credit card machine. ‘I would much rather have lunch with you, believe me. It’s been ages. Is everything OK?’

‘Everything is amazing. Totally amazing. I just wanted to run through wedding stuff, that’s all. Never mind. I’ll just have to do what I do best and carry on shopping,’ Georgia says, in deliberate self-parody. Georgia is shopping for honeymoon lingerie in Selfridges. She can do this on a Monday because she doesn’t work. ‘Love you,’ she says. And the line goes dead.

On George Street I fling a hand up at the stampeding traffic to hail a cab. My coat flaps open, exposing clothes that I threw on this morning with the cover-up of a hairdresser’s overall in mind. My apple-green pillow-sized handbag pulls one side of my body pavement-wards so that I have the gait of a woman perilously askew, as if a little nudge might send me off balance. I get into the taxi with a loud exhalation.

‘Bad day, love?’ the driver asks.

I smile and nod and catch sight of my nodding reflection in the window. Oh. Do I look like a woman who has just stepped out of the salon? No. I do not. The taxi window reflects a forehead as shiny as a patent pump and half-blown- out hair that has already regressedback to its natural state of Billy Connolly frizz. My left eyelid twitches. My jaw is locked. This is what happens when I get stressed. This is what happens when I am called into the magazine offices for some kind of crisis management, without the right shoes (I’m in ancient trainers) or mental preparation. The transforma- tion of Annie Rafferty, eldest daughter of the Raffertys of Lower Dalton – ‘sensible, hard-working, like a good shire horse’, as my dad once memorably described me – to savvy, urbane glossy magazine journalist is not an effortless one.

Pressing my face closer to the window, I watch London stream past, a blur of feet, movement and urgency, a city that should have been somewhere else ten minutes ago. When we stop at the traffic lights, everything seems to freeze-frame. I text Nick: Back to office. Sigh. xxx

Nicholas Angus Colt, age thirty-six, hotel PR. My lovely boyfriend. I left him this morning in a bit of a state at the breakfast table, trussed up in a suit and talking about how he was mourning the loss of his self-respect. Nick, bless him, is having a career crisis. He has a lot of these. Over Marmite toast, I did my best to provide wise counsel about his PR job, reassuring him that a job is just a means to an end – grateful he didn’t press me as to what end exactly – and that it really doesn’t define you as a person.

‘How can you of all people say that?’ he said, swiping the last piece of toast off my plate and giving me a Marmitey kiss on the lips. ‘It don’t wash, babe.’

I guess he has a point. Three years ago, after a long stint working on the no-frills features pages of a tabloid news- paper, I got the job I’d always wanted, on a monthly. No matter that it was features editor of Glo, an understaffed mid-market glossy with cascading sales figures. No matter that my editor, Pippa Woodside, told me that she appointed me because I reeked of hard work. And Pippa was right: I’ve worked hard, very hard, to prove myself: long days, week- ends, phone calls from LA in the middle of the night, an endless stream of editorial ideas spewing out of me like a long document rolling out of a fax machine. And the slog has paid off. I recently got promoted to deputy editor, a move which has put me firmly on track to the apex of the mast- head.

As my responsibilities have grown, the job has burrowed itself into my subconscious, implanted itself in my DNA. I find it tricky to pass a newsagent without rearranging the shelves, hustling Glo to the prime selling pitch. I wake up in the night panicking about flat plans. I regularly dream in cover lines, so that the most surreal, delicate dreams, even the erotic and nightmarish, assume a kind of jingoistic quality, floating through my head like advertising flags dragged across the sky by small planes. Sometimes I think up free gift ideas during sex.

So, yes, I guess my job does kind of define me. But, as Nick likes to point out, my job does not always make me happy. I explain that happiness isn’t the point. It’s not, is it? Happiness comes inexplicably and unexpectedly when you’re busy doing other things, like organising tins of chickpeas in the kitchen cupboard according to their descending sell-by dates, or strid- ing along a London street, wind in the hair, rushing between appointments, and for no reason at all you get that elated feeling in the chest, exactly where the heart is and you prickle with aliveness. I think I am far more scared of being bored than I am of working hard, which is possibly why I have suitcases beneath my eyes. The thing is, I am on trial period and therefore have to prove myself worthy of the deputy editor role on a daily basis. So yes, I may be near the top of the masthead, but it feels like it’s swinging perilously in a mounting gale. Pippa can turn around in a few months and say, ‘Do you really feel this is working out, Annie?’ Subtext: ‘It’s not working out. You’re rubbish. Move over.’

This scenario is terrifying for many reasons – the shame, obviously, a lifetime’s ambition shattered around my feet, etc. – but also because the day after my promotion, flushed with my salary hike, Nick and I pulled out of buying a two- bedroom flat in Harlesden and snapped up the house we really wanted instead, the much more expensive three- bedroom cottage in Kensal Rise with the lovely leaf-green door. We moved in last month, feeling childishly grown-up, marvelling at how wonderful it felt to have a house with stairs, bullish about paying the fat mortgage on our new appreciating asset.

It’s noon now. I’m tipping the cabbie. I’m smiling hello to Jacqui behind the reception desk and swiping through the barriers, up, up, up in the juddering lift. I’m walking across the Starbucks-stained carpet tiles. I am at my desk. Now, for the crisis. Bring it on!

Seven hours later, I slam down the phone, muttering, ‘Make it stop!’ I try to work out how to launder the facts of their grubbiest bits before relaying them to Pippa. This is dif- ficult, very difficult. Despite spending most of the afternoon with my ear soldered to the telephone, I have not managed to negotiate a cover star for our December issue. We did have one booked – a young up-and-coming actress – but recent glowing reviews mean she’s now up, and consequently she’s dumped us for a more prestigious magazine. Our cover, which must go to the printers pretty soon, remains alarmingly empty, like an unpopular abdicated throne.

Most people have gone home now. The office is very quiet, melancholy, like an empty shop out of hours. I gaze out of the two enormous tinted windows – a perk: the more senior you are, the more window you get – which are at right angles to my kidney-shaped grey plastic desk. At eight floors up it’s a good view. The snake of the Thames. Waterloo Bridge. The Royal Festival Hall. And, my favourite, the London Eye, which turns so slowly it always strikes me as a rather good symbol of life’s important stuff – faces, relationships – that changes imperceptibly but surely by the moment. Good days, up here, I feel on top of the world. On bad days, like today, I feel more like a specimen in a grubby glass box, breathing in the air-conditioned cocktail of other people’s autumn viruses. (I suspect that they emanate from the great unwashed work- ing at Quad-Bike Digest on the third floor.) The moon is already visible, white, cut like a fingernail. It is late. It is time to admit defeat and wrap the day.

I knock on Pippa’s door. No response. Pushing it slightly ajar, I see the HQ is empty. It is a square space about the size of two large walk-in wardrobes, with sparkling floor- to-ceiling windows on one side, framing London like a postcard, opaque glass walls on the other. The back wall is stamped with black-and-white photographs of cover stars. Pippa’s desk is large and glacier-white. Her high-backed black leather ergonomic chair dominates one side of it. On the other side of the desk is a small low-backed orange fabric chair, designed to foster feelings of inferiority and discomfort. The desk itself has a neat, ordered, end-of-the-day landscape: one Yellow Pages-sized diary; a square glass vase of antique- pink roses; a stack of invitations to parties and PR events; a photograph of Pippa’s husband Martin, a man in his late fifties, Big In Telly, salt-and-pepper-haired, wearing jeans and an open-necked shirt in the freshly pressed way of a man who spends most of his life in a Kilgour suit.

One day that should be my name on this door, and if not this door, another door. That’s always been the plan. I bite my lip. It tastes coppery, like a two-pence piece. A ceiling vent shudders a refrigerated wind down upon my head. Shit. Where is Pippa?

‘Hi, Annie,’ says Belle, suddenly appearing at my side. Belle is Pippa’s PA, a gentle twenty-two-year-old with a head of chestnut Klimt curls and the longest, thinnest legs. She walks with the uncertain gait of a newly born faun.

‘Hi there. I’m looking for the boss,’ I say.

‘She’s gone already, I’m afraid. Power Plate session,’ Belle explains. ‘Then she’s got the hairdresser.’ She winces apolo- getically. ‘She said you’d understand.’

Yes, I understand. Pippa is successful because she dele- gates. Mostly to me. ‘Shit.’

‘She’s back in tomorrow, late morning, after breakfast at the Wolseley,’ says Belle. ‘Shall I book you in?’

‘Thanks, Belle.’

I return to my desk and swipe my life into my bag: Carmex lip salve, gnarled notebook, mobile, a bag of raw almonds, address book with G and H come loose and an assortment of biscuit crumbs squashed between its pages. I turn off the computer. But rather than shutting down the screen, which displays my email inbox, it freezes and flickers. The hard drive starts to hiss malevolently beneath my desk. Cursing the new IT system put into the offices at great expense and with much pedantry last month, I fiddle with the computer, hitting random buttons in vain.

As I smack the keys harder and harder, something bal- loons inside. A weird, foreign feeling locks in my throat, an exhausted, tearful heaviness. What on earth is wrong with me? Hormones. It must be hormones. Throwing myself back in the office chair, I swivel it around 180 degrees with my feet up like a petulant child, stopping to face the window. The traffic hoots. The London Eye turns. My stomach knots. Then, suddenly, a small fleet of starlings appear from nowhere, as if dislodged from the building itself, and arrow past the window, like uncaged office souls plunging to freedom.

For a moment, I allow myself to think the unthinkable. Is this it? Petty skirmishes with celebrity agents. The prospect of turning into Pippa. What if, after all my work, all my grafting, I’d actually be a happier person doing something else? Isn’t there something else at the heart of me, packed petals waiting to unfold, to flower?

Deep breath.

Eat half a Pret A Manger brownie.

I remind myself: I’m not trapped. I am not like my friend

Vicky, who, still single, has no one to split the bills with, no one to cushion her should she ever fall; that she is unlikely ever to fall is beside the point. Knowing that Nick is the net beneath me is immensely reassuring. Together we are strong, more than the sum of our parts. If I wanted to change lanes, I could. Thank goodness for Nick. The panic subsides. My breathing eases. The computer finally shuts down, inexplica- bly, as if it’s just got bored with being difficult. I slip out of the office. Outside, it is raining lightly. Kicking up the conkers scattered over the pavement like dropped chocolates, I make my way through the wet grey autumn evening, towards the comforts of home.

Back in Kensal Rise, Nick sits with his blue-socked feet up on the armchair, a beer in one hand, remote control in the other, channel-hopping to locate rugby scores. He’s already changed out of his suit. Seeing me, he grins, takes his feet off the chair. He is a different shape to the man who left for his office in such a hurry this morning, his body longer, relaxed, like a cat flexing in the sun. Nick’s sexiness – his tufty blond hair, the lazy curl of his wide smile, and his gentle eyes, hazel lined with calligrapher’s black – brings a bubble of love to the surface. It is good, very good, to be home. I throw myself towards him and land on his knee, all ten stone of me hitting him with the force of an emergency food parcel drop. I wrap my arms around his neck and smatter his cheek with kisses.

‘Ugh, you’re soggy!’ He laughs, pushing me away. ‘Wasn’t it meant to be your day off?’

‘Yup.’ I don’t need to say any more. This has happened many times before. I recently had to cut short a romantic long weekend in Venice. I stand up, take off my damp coat and hang it on a peg in the hall.

Nick rises to his gangly six foot, all elbows and long sandy eyelashes. ‘I’ve got something to tell you, Annie.’

‘Really?’ I say over my shoulder. ‘Can we talk over supper? I need to eat, Nick, or I shall start gnawing the sofa. I’m thinking Lebanese. In fact, I’ve been fantasising about those fatayer pastry things all the way home. Or Indian. I could do Indian actually. To fatayer or to korma, now that is the question.’

‘Come here. Please. I want to tell you this first. It’s impor- tant. I’ve made a decision.’ Nick holds my hands and pulls me down next to him on the sofa. ‘Do you remember we were talking this morning about me finding my . . .’ he puts on an American accent, ‘true vocation?’

I nod. We’ve had this conversation on and off for the whole three years we’ve been together. ‘Yes, sweetheart.’

‘Well. I’ve taken the first small step.’

‘Great!’ Fatayer. It’s got to be Lebanese. I slap his knee. ‘One small step for Nick, one huge step—’

‘I’m taking a little sabbatical,’ he interrupts.

‘Oh? OK.’ I sit up straight now, confused. A sabbatical? What a strange idea. ‘I’m not with you.’

Nick grins. ‘Well, it’s a bit more than a sabbatical.’

‘You’re taking a break from the PR agency? When did you—’

‘I’ve just taken voluntary redundancy, Annie.’ He brings my right hand to his mouth and kisses it. ‘I’m free!’

‘Sorry?’

‘I’ve taken voluntary redundancy!’

‘You’ve left your job?’ I ask, disbelieving.

‘I have!’ he says triumphantly. ‘I have indeed.’

We stare at each other for a few bewildered moments.

‘Why on earth . . .’

‘It’s all right, Annie. Don’t worry. I’ve got an extra two
months’ salary.’ He looks more uncertain now. ‘Tax free.’

‘Two months?’ I run my fingers through my hair. ‘Is that
all?’

‘Yes.’ Nick deflates, leaning forward, elbows on knees. ‘Shit. Man, I thought you’d be pleased.’

I fiddle with the fingers on his left hand, bending them at the knuckles, stroking up their slim freckled length. Panic is lapping at my supportive intentions. ‘Why didn’t you men- tion it before?’

‘I wanted to make this decision on my own. I needed to.’ He pulls his hand away. ‘It’s my life and—’

‘It’s our mortgage. We’ve just bought a house.’ This is not entirely accurate. Nick didn’t have any money to put towards the deposit, whereas I’d managed to save thirty thousand pounds. It was his suggestion that the house be in my name only. He said, ‘We’re in it for the long haul so it doesn’t matter.’ And most of the time it doesn’t matter. It makes sense: I wouldn’t have bought the house without him because the mortgage is too big. He wouldn’t have anywhere to live without me. We are symbiotic, interdependent, two creatures curled up in the same cosy nest, reliant on one another for our survival.

‘Don’t go into one. I’ll get another job, Annie.’

I push into the pressure points on my temples. ‘But you had a job, Nick.’

We glare at each other for a few moments as we both struggle to absorb our wildly opposed reactions to the same event. I can’t believe he didn’t tell me. If I was considering something like this, he would be the first person I would want to discuss it with. I feel cut out and hurt.

‘Don’t look at me like that, Annie. I hate that look. Man, you don’t realise how lucky you are knowing what you want out of life.’ Nick sighs. ‘It was so impossible trying to get another job, the right job, when I was working at that soul- sucking vortex of a PR agency. I had no time, babe.’

‘You had time to watch Top Gear.’

There is a silence, a blank blue sky filling with falling bombs of mutual resentment. I chew the inside of my cheek. Is it so terrible to wish the person you love could be a little less like themselves sometimes?

Nick shakes his head. ‘You don’t get anywhere in life without taking risks.’ He speaks quietly, so I have to strain to hear him. His voice always becomes quieter and posher when he gets defensive, reclaiming the consonants he has shed since leaving public school. He reaches for my right hand and holds it tight. ‘Have some faith in me. I feel like you have no faith in me.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘Shhh.’ He gets off the sofa, kneels on the floor and slips off my socks and shoes. He kisses the sole of my left foot. ‘First a foot massage.’ He kisses the sole of my right foot. ‘Then I’ll cook you supper.’ He looks up, smiling. ‘And you know what? While I look for another job, I am going to make you, my darling Annie, a most excellent wife.’

Two

‘So how’s the job-hunting going, sweetheart?’ I ask carefully, as a boom of sunlight swings over the motorway and into our eyes.

Nick pulls down the sun visor, presses his foot on the accelerator and we roar faster down the A40, overtaking a juddering Tesco lorry. ‘I’ve not started the actual hunting yet.’ He glances at me. ‘You know I said I wanted a bit of time to kick back and, like, think.’

‘Of course,’ I say, trying to be understanding. I’ve been trying to be understanding for three weeks now. ‘I respect you for taking the plunge, I really do. But I do wonder . . .’

Nick grips the steering wheel harder, knuckles paling. ‘Fuck, it’s difficult,’ he sighs. ‘You know, one moment I want to make shitloads of money, become a property developer or something. The next I want to do something genuinely help- ful, become a fireman. Give something back. But most of the time . . .’ he grins boyishly, ‘I just want to DJ.’

The word DJ feels like a razor-edged twelve-inch record flung across the car and embedded in my stomach. The DJ- ing is a hobby that brings in the odd hundred quid here and there, if he is lucky. It is not a job. But I suspect that Nick, even at the age of thirty-six, still hopes he’ll become the next Mark Ronson. Maybe he will. Maybe I should have more faith. ‘OK.’

Nick frowns. ‘What do you mean, OK? I hate your OK.’

‘Nothing, Nick.’

‘I know you disapprove, Annie. I know you think I should have it all sussed by now. But I never promised I would, and I haven’t. Cut me some slack.’

‘I didn’t say anything!’

‘You don’t have to.’ He presses his foot on the gas. ‘I go against your Protestant work ethic. I’m a walking, talking, living embodiment of all your catastrophist fantasies.’

I smile, because there is a smidgen of truth in this.

Nick puts on a woman’s high voice. ‘The house will get repossessed! The house will burn down and we won’t have insurance! All my alphabetically arranged books will get muddled up! The sky is falling in!’

I whack him playfully on the side of the leg. ‘Shut up, you!’

Nick hits the gas harder. I shoot him a glance and think how attractive he is when he drives, when he speeds. Part of me is turned on seeing him at the wheel, focused, in control.

After a few moments the car slows and turns off the motorway towards the A road that leads through the damp green Cotswold countryside to my parents’ house. We park. Putting our differences aside, we interlace hands and walk across my parents’ short gravel driveway and up the path to their front door. Having not visited for a few weeks, I am struck by how rundown the house looks. The slate-tiled roof is sinking in the middle. The blue paint on the front door is chipped, as is the paintwork around the upper mullioned windows. Ivy and Virginia creeper drape over the buttery Cotswold stone walls and flare out along the ground like a skirt. The honeysuckle, gnarled and twiggy, is taking over the porch so I have to knock it back as I walk past and a shower of small insects falls into my hair. I ring the bell – one of those singsong ones from the eighties – and hear Mum amble down the hall with her tricky hip.

‘Annie! Nick!’ she exclaims, opening the front door. Her weatherbeaten face brightens at the sight of the pair of us, whom she always calls, just a little cringily, ‘my accomplished daughter and her lovely Nick’.

‘Sorry we’re late,’ I say. We are always late for my parents. It’s not intentional. It just kind of happens.

‘Oh, gosh, don’t worry. Georgia’s late too, of course. Wow, don’t you two look glamorous!’

Although at work I am one of the least glamorous people in the office, at home it’s as if I’ve just stepped off the red carpet. It doesn’t take much to be glamorous in Lower Dalton. As we walk inside, the reassuring smell of home – cleaning products, digestive biscuits and peaty country dust – hits me. The hall leads to the kitchen; in fact the whole house seems to lead to the kitchen, its domestic drumbeat of boiling kettles and firing boilers. As long as I can remember it’s always looked exactly the same: the walls are painted sunshine-yellow gloss, country- style pine units rim its edges, alongside a temperamental ivy-green Aga and an old oven that can be reliably counted on to overcook most meals. The cupboards are archaeological: I recently unearthed a congealed pot of Bovril with a sell-by date of April 1999. Grease-spattered family photos, Oxfam leaflets and local flyers for Indian restaurants flutter in the draughts that creep through the brickwork. Occasionally the leaflets loosen from their Blu-Tack and drop down on to the rectangular pine table, the centre of the room, where decades of family mealtimes ferment in its grooves and dips. Dad, the grumpy beast answering to the name Arnold Rafferty when the mood takes him, sits at the far end of the table, bent over The Cotswold Journal, his familiar bald head a pink disc among rogue grey wisps. He looks up and his eyes light like rooms. Dad loves a visit.

‘Hi, Dad,’ I say, kissing him on his bristly cheek, as famil- iar as my own. He smells faintly of whisky.

‘Cup of tea?’ interjects Mum, as if scared of Dad speaking and boring us before she’s had a chance to secure us firmly in the house with hospitality. She is the only person I know who offers tea before lunch.

‘We brought some wine.’ Nick hands over a tissue- wrapped bottle of red. It is from a garage, bought in a mad rush en route and, shamefully, not the kind of wine we’d take to a dinner party in London.

‘Oooh.’ Mum peels back the tissue carefully. ‘Very posh. You shouldn’t have. You do the honours, Arnold.’

Dad stands up. Has he shrunk? He looks shorter than I remember. He attacks the neck of the wine bottle with an ancient bottle-opener, pulls the cork out with a wild jerk of the elbow and looks up triumphantly at Nick, as if a small masculine ritual has been accomplished. Dad can be embar- rassingly competitive.

Mum stands at the cabinet to pull out some dishwasher- smeared wine glasses, the small ones that seem to fit only a thimble of wine, not like the large bowls on stems Nick and I use in London. I admire her great figure. Unlike most of my friends’ mothers she has not grown stodgy with age. When she’s not cooking for all the family – an occasion that usually means seventies food, chilli con carne, pasta bake – she lives on a diet reminiscent of post-war rations – new potatoes, unseasoned lamb chops, peas and cabbage from the garden – and this has kept her remarkably lithe. (My father is not so lithe; the pints of beer and decades of fried breakfasts in the work canteen have puddled around his middle.) I only wish Mum would realise she’s gorgeous. If she was a lady of the same age and figure living in Kensington, she’d probably be wearing skinny jeans and a tailored blazer and look thirty-five years old from behind. But Mum’s A-line knee-length skirts, neat little cardigans and floral blouses have remained more or less the same for as long as I can remember. They are not a young person’s clothes. (Judging from the family albums, Mum stopped being young – as in fashion-conscious and friv- olous – at about the age of thirty.) After a glass of wine she will sometimes joke, ‘I am above fashion.’ But what she really means, I guess, is that fashion isn’t relevant to a woman in her sixties called Marjorie living in a small village in the Cotswolds. Still, I admire the fact that she’s unashamedly much more interested in runner beans. And Dad, of course, doesn’t give two hoots what she wears. He loves her truly, madly, deeply, whatever. We all love her whatever.

Mum pours the wine carefully and sits down with a Sunday afternoon sigh. ‘Well,’ she says. ‘Well.’ She studies me in that particularly hawk-like maternal way, assessing the sheen on my hair, the clearness of my skin, looking for tell- tale signs of urban decay. ‘It’s lovely to see you both. I know how busy you get.’

‘Don’t be silly. This is a treat. We were gasping for fresh air,’ I reassure her. Unlike my more leisured sister, Georgia, I don’t visit as much as I should. Mum tries to understand and puts this down to my job, as if I were running the country rather than working on a floundering glossy magazine. I feel bad about not visiting more.

‘Fresh air. One thing you Londoners can’t buy,’ acknowl- edges Dad gruffly. He is suspicious of London, wary of its influence, as if we are living under the guardianship of a par- ticularly irresponsible and spoiling aunt.

‘How is the big city?’ Mum is convinced that knife-happy teenagers, jihadis and crack cocaine exist on every London street corner. ‘And your mortgage is manageable, is it? There’s talk of interest rates going up, you know.’

Nick shifts awkwardly in his seat. ‘Well . . .’

I strangle the stem of my wine glass with my index finger. I know that Nick is rearranging his thoughts to get it to sound OK. They’ll find out sooner or later, so he has decided to come out with it. Just as his mouth opens, he is inter- rupted by the doorbell.

‘That’ll be your sister! Always so late.’ Mum speeds to the door, tricky hip forgotten.

There is the sound of extravagant kissing and Georgia’s unmistakable public school accent, developed without ever going to public school.

‘Annie! Nick, gorgeous!’ Georgia skips over and throws her arms around Nick, then me. ‘At last we manage to actu- ally meet up this century.’

I laugh, starting a little at quite how beautiful she is. Her looks are genuinely impressive. They always have been. When we were growing up, I almost felt a sense of sibling pride about her beauty, as if it rubbed off on me in some way. Because there was such discrepancy in our looks and she was younger than me, jealousy wasn’t as much of an issue as it might perhaps have been, although as teenagers I did wish we could have shared a few more genes, obviously. But when we were little, little-girl little, strangers frequently stopped on the street to look at Georgia, just stop in their tracks and stare. I would stiffen when they reached out to touch her red curls, ready to snatch her back and fight them off. I was always protective of her, sensing even as a child that her beauty made her vulnerable, too easily the canvas on to which people projected their abstract dark desires. I remem- ber thinking that if a baddie were to steal one of us away, they’d take her. I would be safe.

My sister has grown into her beauty gracefully, accepting it without shyness or awkwardness, and built her personality around it, as you can build an entire wardrobe around one exquisite coat. Her hair, possibly the first thing you might notice about her, is thick, wavy and the colour of rich gin- gerbread. Her eyes are uncommonly far apart and a warm syrupy brown. Her upper lip is slightly swollen, like it’s been artfully banged. Put her in a shellsuit and she’d still look like she’d stepped off the pages of Vogue. Of course, Georgia doesn’t wear shellsuits. Even the North Face puffa jacket she’s wearing makes her look like a pretty child bundled up against the wind. (Puffa jackets make me look like a large piece of camping equipment come loose from its mooring.) Georgia shakes the coat off, and unwraps herself like a present to reveal a gamine navy A-line mini-dress, accessorised by slim bare legs and black ballet flats, a quilted gold-chained bag slung over one shoulder. She is the kind of woman all maga- zine editors desperately hope actually exists.

Mum strokes Georgia’s arm, concerned. ‘Darling, you look so thin.

‘Really?’ Georgia grins. She’s inherited Mum’s neat, petite ectomorph frame, unlike me, who has to battle genetic sym- pathy with a ‘big-boned’ Scottish great-grandmother. Mum might think that Georgia looks too thin, but the truth is she looks fabulous, still curvy, just teeny, without an inch of surplus flesh, like a Hollywood actress. She collapses into a breathy heap on a kitchen chair, pulling her slim legs beneath her, flashing the gusset of pink knickers with the carelessness of a little girl in a playground. ‘God,’ she says. ‘Olly sends huge apologies. He’s completely devastated that he can’t be here.’

Mum looks awkward, pours Georgia a glass of wine and puts a small earthenware bowl of green olives on the table. ‘It’s OK, dear. We understand.’ She doesn’t understand, nor does Dad. It is beyond them why a healthy thirty-five-year- old city banker poised to marry such a beautiful girl as Georgia is having ‘a bit of a life crisis’ and has chosen – and, paid – to spend a week in a mental health institution. My father can’t square this with Olly’s ability to earn vast sums of money: is he an alpha male or isn’t he?

‘He’s back from Tranquillity tomorrow,’ says Georgia, sip- ping her wine and wincing at its sour garage cheapness. ‘I’m hoping a nice rest will have sorted his head out.’

Georgia makes Tranquillity sound like a health spa holi- day. Being more from the ‘pull yourself together school’, like my father, I’m of the opinion that the people who really need treatment are the ones walking the London streets talking to cans of Special Brew, rather than city bankers who are func- tional enough to holiday in Miami days before they check in.

‘I read in the papers that that place costs thousands a week, or some such nonsense,’ huffs Dad, pulling at his beard. He flashes an amused glance in my direction. I smile. We both know he is playing to the house.

‘It does, yeah,’ says Georgia casually, nibbling an olive. When it came to finances, she is no longer her father’s daughter.

‘Good grief!’ exclaims Dad. ‘Maybe I should open my own bleeding loony bin.’

‘That really would be a case of the lunatics running the asylum,’ I joke.

Mum clears her throat. ‘Let’s all hope Olly’s feeling much more like his old self.’ Uncomfortable with the conversation, unsure what she can usefully add, she walks across the undu- lating terracotta floor with a slightly lopsided gait and puts garden vegetables in the plastic stack steamer.

‘So how’s tricks, Nick?’ asks Georgia. ‘I’m feeling like a stranger to you two right now. Annie blew me out for lunch again last week. How is a girl meant to keep up?’ Georgia bats her dark lashes. She flirts with Nick, always has done. She’s flirted with all my boyfriends. It is just the way she relates to men. All of them fall a little bit in love with her. There’s nothing I can do about it. Anyway, I figure if they want to be with a girl like Georgia, they wouldn’t be with me.

‘Well,’ says Nick slowly. We exchange glances. We both know it is time. I brace myself.

Nick looks around the kitchen, avoiding Dad’s eye. ‘Actually,’ he hesitates, scratching his stubble, ‘I’ve taken vol- untary redundancy to give myself a chance to find something more interesting.’

Georgia claps her hands. ‘Bingo! I’ve got a new cinema matinee partner! Well done! Working’s totally overrated.’ Georgia gave up paddling around what she calls the shal- lows of the publishing industry two years ago, after getting engaged to Olly. Her income was not needed and they decided her time would be much better spent decorating the house and, more recently, helping the wedding organiser organise their wedding.

‘George,’ I say, plucking an olive out of her fingers and putting it in my mouth, ‘if you try to turn Nick into a lunch- ing lady, I’ll have a tracking device attached to his ankle.’

Nick laughs awkwardly. ‘I’m looking for other work. It’s not a permanent state of affairs.’

‘Shame,’ says Georgia.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Mum frozen with a slot- ted spoon raised in her hand, face loose with bewilderment. I want to turn around and reassure her, but fear this will undermine Nick.

‘So you’ve finally got on the property ladder and you’ve chosen to become unemployed?’ asks Dad. Unemployment and debt – even the smallest credit at the grocer – are things he’s avoided all his life. He has worked and saved, saved and worked. Volunteering for unemployment is as incomprehen- sible to him as volunteering for a mental health institution.

‘For the moment, Arnold,’ says Nick, struggling to main- tain a bright smile.

‘Blimey. I didn’t see that coming.’ Dad shakes his paper out and unplugs a piece of food from his incisors with his tongue. ‘Marj shouldn’t be inviting you down here for Sunday lunch. I’m sure you want to be getting on with the job hunt.’

‘There’s plenty of time, Dad,’ I say, loyally. Hell, I’ll embel- lish. ‘Nick’s got a very good redundancy package.’

Georgia laughs. ‘Yeah, he’s got you, Annie!’

Nick scuffs his trainers against the table leg. I roll my eyes at Georgia in an exaggerated fashion so that she knows there’s a line and she’s crossed it. Georgia mouths ‘sorry’ to me from behind her hand, but is smiling mischievously and doesn’t look very sorry at all. She is always cheekier, more alive somehow, more like my sister, without Olly in tow.

Dad looks sternly at Nick. ‘The problem . . .’ he drains his glass of wine, ‘the problem, my son, is pensions. That’s what you’ve got to keep in mind. You don’t want a big gap in your pension contributions when you and Annie are my age. You don’t want to be working when you’ve got a dicky ticker.’

‘Nope!’ Nick cocks his head to one side and smiles defer- entially. He understands Dad instinctively, his need to dominate, to play the silverback in his family of females. But he cannot imagine he’ll ever have a dicky ticker. He’s a DJ, after all. DJs don’t get dicky tickers. DJs don’t get old.

‘As you know, your dad officially retires next week,’ says Mum, banging some potato off the masher into the pan. ‘Which is just as well. I thought he was going to carry on working until he dropped.’

Dad shrugs, but I can tell that secretly he is pleased that Mum has brought his hard work to our attention. ‘Nothing falls into your lap,’ he always tells me. (For some reason he never feels the urge to offer the same advice to Georgia. Beauty is its own currency, perhaps.)

‘We’re going to have a bit of fun with it, aren’t we, Arnold?’ says Mum. ‘Do start, everyone, before it gets cold.’

‘Well, I don’t know about fun. But I’m looking forward to putting my feet up in the sun somewhere and getting out of this godforsaken country for the winter.’ Dad pushes his glasses up his nose.

‘I can see you on a Caribbean beach, Dad. Can’t you, George?’ I say. ‘Pina colada. Handkerchief on your head, tapping along to “No Woman No Cry”.’

Georgia puts her hands over her face. ‘Don’t! I’ve got visions of Dad on holiday. God, he’s going to be such an embarrassing retiree.’

‘Oh, I fully intend to be horribly embarrassing.’ Dad grins. ‘This smells bloody good, Marj.’ He turns to Georgia. ‘Olly’s got his pension sorted, I suppose?’

Georgia and I lock feet under the table. For some reason we start to get the giggles, as if we were teenagers. Visiting our parents always makes both of us regress about twenty years.

‘Arnold,’ says Mum. ‘Money talk is so very dull at Sunday lunch.’

‘Only because you make no effort to understand it,’ says Dad, who has long been gatekeeper to the household finances. Mum, being a woman, understands other things. Like his daughters. And how to cook a good Sunday roast. ‘Georgia?’

‘Daddy.’ (Georgia inexplicably started calling Dad ‘Daddy’ two years ago, which is kind of irritating.) ‘It is different when you’re earning as much as Olly.’ She tosses flames of red hair off her face. ‘He is probably going to retire next year. After our honeymoon.’

‘Next year!’ Dad clatters heavy cutlery to his plate. ‘Gordon Bennett! He’ll be thirty-six, won’t he? Has the world gone stark raving mad?’ He looks at me for collusion. I think he thinks I am the nearest he’s got to a son sometimes. This may have something to do with the fact that I refused to wear dresses when I was a girl. I liked trousers and shorts and Dad’s old boyhood train set. Whereas Georgia inhabited a pink planet orbited by sequins. These differences were toler- ated by my mother and indulged by my father – ‘Some girls will be boys,’ he’d chuckle – until about the age of twelve, when they decided that if left to my own devices I might be in danger of turning into Martina Green on Birch Close, a les- bian who wore hand-knitted rainbow-striped jumpers. So Mum took me shopping at Laura Ashley. Understandably, my parents were confused but delighted when I moved from tabloid newspapers into women’s magazines, and the fact that, after a long romantic drought, I met Nick soon after was put down to the more feminine career move.

‘Olly’s worked so hard, so very hard,’ continues Georgia, as if salary is directly related to effort, which, sadly, in my experience it isn’t. ‘He’s earned enough now, what with the boners—’ Georgia crushes her hand to her mouth and can’t meet my eye because she knows she’ll explode if she does. She jokes about them being boners because Olly’s always randy after landing one. ‘I mean bonuses.’

‘A man needs to work,’ Dad mumbles through a mouthful of potato.

‘Goodness,’ says Mum, taking it all in. ‘Goodness.’ She takes a large swig of her wine. ‘Well, you’re a very lucky girl, Georgia. A very lucky girl indeed.’

Georgia smiles brightly. ‘I know I am.’ Her sugar-brown eyes flash with happiness. I feel a stab of tenderness for my younger sister. When she is conscious of her good fortune it is impossible to begrudge it. Some people have charmed lives, and Georgia is one of them, born not so much with a silver spoon in her mouth as a perfect open pout ready to accept one. ‘But money really doesn’t matter,’ she sighs, pulling on a Brora cashmere cardigan that must have cost little short of £200. ‘You know what? I’m just looking forward . . .’ She pauses. ‘And I know Annie, being scarily successful, will think I’m some kind of twenty-first-century anachronism . . .’ she smiles apologetically at me, ‘but I’m just looking forward to being a wife and having kids.’

Dad guffaws with approval.

Nick makes an annoying ‘ahh’ sound like this is the cutest thing he’s heard all year.

Dig beneath the surface and is this what all men want really? A beautiful girl with uncomplicated desires mostly concerning handbags and babies, as opposed to a tricksy career-driven thirtysomething with attitude (Dad’s words, not mine).

Mum, her pinked eyes betraying the effects of the wine, beams at the end of the table. She leans over and squeezes Dad’s hand. ‘A husband and kids made me very happy.’

I’m torn between finding this comment sweetly moving and, well, kind of irritating. Sometimes it’s hard not to wonder what the slog has all been for – the good grades, the work experience, the career, all the things my parents both encouraged – if at a certain point they then turn around and tell me that the most satisfaction a woman can get from life comes from a husband and children.

‘Nick, Annie. Have you . . .’ Mum’s voice drifts as she begins to question her tact. But it’s too late.

There is silence bar the sound of collective chewing on a particularly muscular organic fowl.

‘Sorry, have I said the wrong thing?’ asks Mum, making it all instantly more wrong.

‘Marjorie . . .’ Dad wipes his greasy fingers on an ironed ‘Sunday lunch’ napkin. He shoots Nick a sharp glance, as if Nick were a man taking advantage of his elder daughter, a daughter who, in his eyes, is getting on a bit and could do with taming with a wedding ring.

I stare at my plate. What neither of my parents realises is that me and Nick haven’t discussed marriage, not properly. It isn’t marked on life’s wall chart in red pen. Only in the last few months, partly because of our respective ages – me thirty- four, Nick thirty-six – but mostly because of Georgia’s imminent wedding, has the subject taken up residence in our bedroom at odd hours, squatting there watchfully during arguments or in tender pauses after lovemaking. I wonder what Nick thinks. I don’t want to have to ask him. I’m not one of those women who has kept a wedding file from the age of twenty-five, collecting ideas for flowers and napkin origami. (Georgia did.) But I always assumed that at some point the issue would just resolve itself organically. Part of the rationale for buying our house was that it had three bed- rooms, room for growth, in Nick’s words. I took it for granted that, with or without rings, when we wanted to start a family, firstly Nick would be the father, and secondly he’d be in a position to support the family. Call me old-fashioned.

‘Well, I know you are quite the modern woman, Annie,’ compounds Mum. ‘But . . .’

Dad coughs. His Adam’s apple lifts then descends omi- nously. I fear something tactless is brewing in his vocal cords.

‘Marj,’ he says, ‘Nick is hardly in a position to marry Annie right now when he’s got no darn prospects!’

(I feared right.)

Nick bends forward over the table on his elbows, his shoulders narrowing. He is blushing. He never blushes. ‘Arnold . . .’

‘Annie deserves—’ Dad just manages to stop himself.

Mum bats the words away with a serving spoon. ‘Oh Arnold, please. Don’t be so Victorian. Look, you’re embar- rassing them both.’ She coughs. ‘Now, anyone for seconds?’

Everyone declines. Our benign Sunday lunch has slammed against something awkward and immovable, like a swimmer gaily diving into too-shallow rocky waters. I feel an over- whelming urge to leave, to run from the crumbling old country house, from perfect Georgia and Nick’s embarrass- ment and everyone’s ideas about who I am and what I want, to run and run until I reach my office in central London, where I can tell myself that I don’t mind about Nick’s change of circumstances at all. I don’t mind supporting him for a bit. This is the twenty-first century. These things just don’t matter.

Like Sex and The City but set in London with a believable flesh and blood heroine

Red

Slickly written and very funny

The Times

Well observed and entertaining

Sunday Business Post

Impossible to put down

Company

This is the kind of book you'll devour in a handful of sittings

Glamour

Perfect with a cocktail on the sun lounger

Look

The characters are likeable and the pace snappy

The London Paper

Stylishly written...a touching picture of family life

Daily Telegraph

Book Club Questions 

Despite herself, Annie finds herself attracted to the alpha male in the office. Why do they have such a pull?

Do you think that women will always be in conflict about the kind of men they want and the kind of men they need?

Are nice men boring? 

I worked in magazines for years. Although this is all fiction - honest - my experiences informed it. Was there anything that surprised you about the glossy magazine life?

How does Stevie’s father’s death change her?

Buy