The Sweet Second Life of Darrell Kincaid Read online

  In any case, after we’d had children and sorted out the dog, I thought I might have a go at becoming a fully-fledged ‘proper’ author. Tom said that if I did manage to crack the bestseller list big-time, he’d go back to university and do a degree in sports coaching, because what he had always wanted to do was teach people how to run …

  Do you see? It was all out there, waiting for us. The rest of our life together. It was as real to me as if I could already see and smell and touch it. And now it had gone. My perfect life had stopped the moment Tom died. It was like watching a genie disappearing back into its bottle with a petulant swoosh because you were too slow in making your wish. You are left staring at the stopper, your first reaction one of shock and surprise. But then it dawns on you that the genie will never re-emerge, that your wish will never be heard. You have lost your chance forever. And the regret that follows is almost unbearable.

  I’d kept on. Kept on living in our house, writing my books and avoiding my parents. But I was going nowhere. My half-brother Simon gave me a book by a man who looks like one of those toads Australians like to stamp on but who is apparently a guru. The book was all about living in the now. I know Simon meant well; I know he was trying to help. But without a future, there is no now. It’s hollow, empty. When Tom’s heart stopped beating, so did the heart of my life, the vital centre that held everything together. Everything that brought my life alive – all the joy and affection and laughter and connection – had been plucked out and stripped away. Everything that kept my life in motion – hopes, dreams, the loving creation of our shared future – had frozen in mid-stride.

  Last night, I woke at three in the morning and sat bolt upright in bed. But there was no punching the air with joy. There was only my breath coming in gasps, my heart hammering as if a freight train had thundered past, inches from my head. That’s because instead of imaginary conversations between book characters, it was my own life that I was clutching for, desperate to grasp and to hold.

  I realised that with nowhere to go, I was in fact going backwards. I was slipping – back to the place I was before I met Tom. Back to when I let myself be bumped along by circumstance because I was never present, never in charge. I realised that if I stayed on this track, I was in danger of waking up one day and finding myself aged seventy-nine, and about to share a tin of pilchards with a cat named Mr Tiddles.

  I needed to do something – go somewhere – and quickly, before it was too late. Trouble was, I hadn’t the first, foggiest idea where to start.

  The following is a transcript of what everyone else in the world is able to call Chat, but because Tom changed my language settings to Pirate English, I was forced to call Parlay. The Pirate setting renamed my Like button as Arr! and turned all my friends into Wenches and Scurvy Dogs, which I can only assume Tom found hilarious. I would have changed it back, but I had no idea how he did it. And then it was too late to ask him …

  LADY MO: No, no! Spent six months at Catchpole London before begging for a transfer to the Charlotte office! London is as grey and depressing as my mother’s latest perm! Why not pick somewhere romantic? Like Paris? Surely one cannot bypass the home of Fabrice?

  DARRELL: All French I know comes from the song ‘Lady Marmalade’. Do not want to ask for bread and end up with an unidentifiable bit of cattle beast. Besides, London is home of 1930s fabulousness! Debutantes! Gentlemen’s clubs! (Mean like Whites, not like Stringfellows.) Tea at the Ritz! In Miss Marple, they are always going up to town to buy glass cloths and meet at Lyons Corner House. And anyhow, Fabrice was a regular visitor to London, remember? Though he probably wasn’t there to buy glass cloths …

  LADY MO: Are you aware Lyons Corner House once owned by Nigella Lawson’s family?

  DARRELL: Nigella aka Lucky Bitch? (Now that major life tragedies are behind her, of course.)

  LADY MO: Same. And speaking of behind, have you seen breadth of her hips lately? Comme le Massif Central. Which is a French mountain range to you, you sad monoglot.

  DARRELL: If I knew what a monoglot was I might be insulted. And Nigella is still a Lucky Bitch, despite giant bum. Back to London. Where did you live whilst there?

  LADY MO: (suppressing shudder) Walthamstow. Dodgy part. Flat was the size of a raisin box and smelled like the inside of a rubber boot recently occupied by a farmer’s damp woollen sock. Surely there are other options? Prague, for instance? Looks like fairyland on Living Channel travel shows.

  DARRELL: Prague? Wait. Googling now … All right. Prague is beautiful, I’ll give you that. However, weather stats indicate it also to be cold as buggery. Google also provided image of Vaclav Havel. Looks like a dying horse. If Vaclav a typical Czech man, then Prague is a no go.

  LADY MO: Is a man a mandatory part of your new life?

  DARRELL: Yes. Also children. Also a career as bestselling author. And a big woolly cream-coloured dog.

  LADY MO: Could it benefit you to relax your parameters just a smidge?

  DARRELL: Girl can dream, can’t she? (Hint: a good friend would not burst bubble.)

  LADY MO: But British men are not the stuff of fantasy! British men are stunted! Weazened! Have teeth that look like joke ones you buy for Halloween!

  DARRELL: Yes, but you say that in retrospect of being married to Chad, who looks as if he should be attracting small planetary systems into his orbit.

  LADY MO: True. Chad not perfect, though.

  DARRELL:???!!

  LADY MO: Harry is perfect. Chad is runner-up. Oo! Idea! Why not come here? Charlotte is a very cool city! Nowhere near backward as the rest of the US South!

  DARRELL: You have scooped the perfect life there. With my luck, my only suitors will be a man with no front teeth and a banjo wearing a singlet that says ‘When I die bury me upside down so the whole world can kiss my ass’, or a man sporting a navy blazer with gold buttons and a smile that can only be described using the word ‘glint’.

  LADY MO: Chad has a navy blazer. But he only wears it when his mother makes him. How about New York? Only short plane trip away from me and my perfect life.

  DARRELL: If Sarah Jessica struggled to find a man, what hope for me?

  LADY MO: Aware that Sex and City is fiction?

  DARRELL: Lines blurry.

  LADY MO: Also aware that Fabrice lives only in the train station of the mind?

  LADY MO: Sigh. Well. Let me know how it goes. And for God’s sake, don’t live in any part of Walthamstow.

  Michelle Lawrence (née Horton) was my best friend at school. She got married three years ago to an American investment banker named Chad, and the pair now lived in Charlotte, North Carolina, with their first child, Harry, an adorable eighteen-month-old blond bruiser. Until taking maternity leave, Michelle had been climbing the ranks of a successful law firm called Catchpole, Laycock and Lobb, which managed to sound both faintly rude and entirely English, but which in fact was owned by loud, short, Jewish New Yorkers. Despite her previous ambitions, Michelle didn’t seem to miss work at all. She was delighted to be a mommy and quite happy to spend, it seemed to me, an inordinate amount of time watching Dr Phil.

  She was convinced she had the perfect life, and let’s face it, who was I to doubt her? She’d married into old money, which enabled her to have a house that looked like ‘Tara’ in the best part of Charlotte, a holiday house in Maine, and a mother-in-law whose neck veins bulged at the slightest breach of social protocol. In fact, Michelle became Lady Mo online purely to wind up Mrs Lawrence Senior, who thought any word ending with ‘o’ sounded as if it came out of the mouths of rappers, a breed she placed slightly lower than feminists (but not as low as Democrats). Michelle’s full email address was actually LadyMoShoSugar, which made no sense at all but wound up Mrs Lawrence like a top. Michelle was waiting for the moment her mother-in-law’s pearl choker stopped living on borrowed time and exploded into the four corners of the marble foyer.

  Despite his terrifying family and his sit-com joke name, Chad seemed a decent enough bloke, even though my
actual acquaintance with him had been limited to Michelle’s emails and a few fuzzy digital photos. He didn’t seem to be a shagger-arounder, he tolerated her obsession with Dr Phil, and he was entirely besotted with their son. He was handsome, too, in the way that you’d expect of a man named Chad. Blond. Square. Teeth. You know the type.

  I was a little surprised at her choice because our romantic ideal had always been a short, dark Frenchman. When Michelle and I met at age fourteen, I was in the classroom reading Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love. Michelle swooped upon me. ‘Fabrice,’ was all she said.

  My God, yes. Fabrice, Duc de Sauveterre. Fiction’s most perfect man.

  He was based on a real-life lover of Nancy Mitford, and even though he clearly was the great love of her life, she had the awareness to make it an honest portrayal, infidelities and all. Trouble is, that’s what makes Fabrice such perfection. Although he conforms to many aspects of the Ultimate Romantic Hero – aristocratic, moneyed and a confident seducer – he is also a short arse. He is humorous but prone to pomposity. He is courageous but also vain. If Nancy had not made him so human, girls like Michelle and I would have confined him to fantasyland years ago. We wouldn’t have deluded ourselves that he could be there, on some railway station in Paris, waiting for us, if only we stepped off the right train …

  Other fictional things Michelle and I always wished were true:

  Magic. When I was fourteen, I wanted magic powers for two reasons only: instant beautification and exacting revenge on mean girls. The idea of using my powers to vanquish evil would have had no appeal, even if it had ever occurred to me. Twenty years later, I was slim enough. Well, let’s more accurately say I had an acceptable body mass index, helped by being reasonably tall and not coming from a family of fatties. I was pretty enough, too. Thick, dark curly hair, big grey eyes, good skin. Not as radiant as I was when I met Tom, but I didn’t feel a need to throw up my hands and shriek ‘Ai-eeee!’ whenever I looked in the mirror. So what would I do now with magical powers? Transform myself into a bestselling author? Chances are I would bungle the spell and end up as Barbara Cartland in her final days, being slowly crushed by the weight of four decades’ worth of turquoise eye shadow. Sigh.

  Time travel. For me, there is only one place you’d want to travel to: 1930s England, but in the mode of Nancy Mitford and PG Wodehouse and not, say, A Handful of Dust or even Brideshead Revisited (mainly because I never got over my disappointment that the book did not include the feverish, sweaty shag fest between Charles and Julia that was in the TV series). No, to me the 1930s is all about great clothes, hats and gloves, young men called Teddy who drive open-top Bugattis and say ‘What ho!’ Tennis and garden parties. Country house japes. Jaunts to Baghdad and Burma. But where would I travel to in my past? Could I have done anything to prevent what happened to Tom? Was that worth even thinking about? I wasn’t sure. On either count.

  Large, loving, eccentric families. Michelle and I bonded first over Fabrice and secondly over the astonishing dullness of our domestic circles. Michelle’s parents divorced when she was twelve and her father went to live in Canada. Michelle’s mother muttered bitterly but did nothing interesting, such as take to gin or teenage boys. Michelle and her mother lived in relative harmony in a nice house in a respectable suburb, supported by funds sent monthly from the Yukon or wherever Mr Horton had ended up. My own parents married in their forties, and did not intend to have me at all. My father had never married before; my mother was a widow. She already had one son, my half-brother, Simon, who was nineteen when I was born and had left home. That meant I, like Michelle, was effectively an only child, which is why one of our greatest fantasies was to be surrounded by the kind of families that seem to exist only in novels. The Radletts – Nancy Mitford’s thinly fictionalised portrait of her own large, rambunctious, adventurous and oh-so-posh family. The Honeychurches in A Room with a View – Lucy and her brother Freddy, that lovely mother, and all those people coming and going, all that humour and affection. Don’t get me wrong. My parents were kind, intelligent, good-hearted people. But they were not socially gregarious, adventurous or overtly affectionate. My father would never send his daughters out to be hunted by baying hounds, like Nancy Mitford’s ‘Farve’. He was a retired dentist alert to ubiquitous (in his opinion) crimes of grammar. My mother was mildly animated by only two things: Pringle cardigans and the correct way to prune a shrub. Eccentricity, to my parents, was not an appealing quality; it was the first sign of an inevitable slide towards exposing oneself to young women in public parks, or yelling incoherent abuse at passing cars on the way back to your home and fifty-three cats. My parents were careful people who had arranged their lives to suit, and who were not keen on disruption of any kind. Tom’s death was a disruption, but one they understood. Mum’s first husband had died of pancreatic cancer, rather slowly and awfully. I think, when Tom died, she wanted to give me more than a quick hug and the usual clichés of consolation, but found it beyond her. I didn’t mind. Sometimes what you know is unsaid says enough …

  Anyway – back to my big move. The idea had come to me, as you may have already guessed, at three in the morning. In the cold light of day it seemed nothing but terrifying. But after a mental struggle where I slapped myself several times in the manner of a 1930s hero calming a hysterical woman, I decided I’d do it. I mean, why not? There was nothing for me here. Nothing but memories that made me sad. If I were to make a new start, why not in a new place surrounded by all-new people? London was the place that popped immediately into my head, along with numerous images that I knew to be at least eighty years out of date, but which proved clinchingly seductive nonetheless.

  The reality, of course, was that I knew no one there. I had no idea where I should live, and no idea where to start looking. Normally, now that Tom wasn’t here to lend me a spine, I would have given up the task at once as too enormous. But, somewhat to my surprise, I didn’t. Instead, I emailed my friends overseas and asked them for advice.

  It wasn’t Michelle who answered first. It was Adam, who had studied English with me at university, and who now worked as a script editor in Los Angeles. Adam’s specialty was horror movies, mostly ones that went straight to video. He cared not a jot because he got paid the same, regardless. And he had a great life, surrounded as he was by buff, bronzed, aspiring actors. The only thing Adam had in common with them was that he was gay, but he was ‘in the business’, so despite being gangly, white and skinny, he got laid all the time.

  Adam’s email said he had a friend in London, who had recently got married to some ‘fabulously rich bloke’ but who hadn’t wanted to give up her independence entirely and still owned a house in North London that she would be prepared to rent out for the pitiful amount I had proposed. The catch was that she was having the place renovated.

  Clare says – continued Adam – that if you don’t mind men hammering around you, and I know I wouldn’t (please note that clichéd jokes like this are the mainstay of my writing career), then you’re welcome to take it. She’d just love to have someone in there, because she is very attached to the house, and can’t bear to see it empty and unloved. Note she is not actually crazy but five months’ pregnant and thus a seething tempest of hormones and resentment. If you are keen, here are her details …

  I have to say, I wasn’t keen. Hammers and flashes of builder’s butt were a far cry from tennis and Teddy. I waited until lunchtime to see if anyone else had any leads, but my inbox remained empty. So I gave in and emailed my half-brother, Simon. He did do a lot of travelling, though usually straight up a rock face.

  Simon, now fifty-three, was a scientist who studied waves and tides. He wasn’t as bad as that might make him seem. True, he had a stringy beard and a possibly pathological attachment to Birkenstock sandals, but he also liked to take off to Patagonia and suchlike places with the sole aim of clambering to the top of stark and inhospitable mountains. He could suspend himself from a rock ledge by one hand and knew how to survive an avalanche.
If the world was faced with disaster in the next few years, I would be bunking down with Simon and his sandals.

  Know anyone in London? said my email.

  He emailed me back. I know the Queen. Does that count? Of course, I’m not sure she’s all that familiar with me. May I ask why you want to know?

  No. He couldn’t. Because that would mean I’d have to tell my mother. Ours might not have been the closest family in the world, but I suspected it was easier for her nerves to have me nearby. I’d heard her complain often enough about Simon’s jaunts to Kathmandu and Machu Picchu and the like.

  No, that’s not true – she didn’t openly complain. Just came out with statements like, ‘Well, I assume he’s kept up with his vaccinations,’ or ‘Perhaps it’s a good thing after all that he never married.’

  Actually, to be honest, the reason I didn’t want to tell my mother wasn’t that I thought she would find it unsettling. The reason was that I was unsettled. To be completely frank, I was a wreck.

  My God! The money required to shift countries! In my books, all my heroines had to do to be whipped off around the world was to get a job as a billionaire’s PA. Right now, there didn’t seem to be any such vacancies currently available (and yes, tragically, I did look). So what I had to do was:

  Email my editor to check if payments would still be the same if moved to another country. Answer yes, i.e. in New Zealand dollars, as per contract.

  Research the average rental of a half-decent two-bedroom flat in a half-decent part of London (as judged via Google images and reference to Agatha Christie).

  Research what I could rent out my house for. Ring property management company, who suggest much lower figure, due to soft rental market.