Wishful Thinking (13 page)

‘Both,' Jarman responded instantly. ‘What writer doesn't? By the way, I've dealt with most of your lesser alterations: they're now back in their original form. Would you like to waste more space and time going over them again or shall we just clash over the big issues?'

I winced, but maintained my bravado. ‘I'm game,' I said. ‘Pistols at dawn?'

‘A little later in the day would suit me – if suiting me is important to you.'

‘Not really,' I said. ‘But you're one of our top writers, so I have to be polite.'

‘Fuck you, Miz Cook.'

Oddly, I ended the call with my stomach back in place and feeling strangely buoyant. Give Jarman his due, he hadn't pulled rank by complaining about me to Alistair – and as he's a bestseller, that would have done my career a power of no good – and no matter how sarcastic or insulting he might be, at least we quarrelled on an equal footing. It really was . . .
almost
fun.

During the afternoon I found myself speculating about how to practise my newfound sex-goddessness, and whether I too should go the Internet route. But it seemed an awful waste of a new haircut. Instead, I rang up one of those friends whom I like very much but don't see enough (this applies to almost any friend you don't work with) and we arranged a night out on the town. We met in a trendy Notting Hill bar, where she was gratifyingly stunned by my new look and insisted on a serious round of pubs and clubs to show it off. Amazingly, although admirers didn't exactly swoon and fall at my feet, I found myself resisting the advances of several men who could, in a bad light, be rated as attractive – even if one of them later proved to be gay. I hadn't been so sought-after since I was eleven years old and won a giant Easter Egg full of chocolate buttons at a children's raffle. I went home after three, subdued the urge to snack, and tumbled into sleep without pausing to dream of Nigel, or even Hugh Jackman.

Chapter 4

A single flow'r he sent me, since we met –

All tenderly his messenger he chose;

Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet –

One perfect rose . . .

Why is it no one ever sent me yet

One perfect limousine, do you suppose?

Ah no, it's always just my luck to get

One perfect rose.

DOROTHY PARKER:
One Perfect Rose

O'er the rugged mountain's brow

Clara threw the twins she nursed,

And remarked: ‘I wonder now

Which will reach the bottom first?'

HARRY GRAHAM:
Calculating Clara

Time to take up my pen again, except this is the twenty-first century and so what I actually do is switch on my PC and get back to the action. In a certain type of old-fashioned novel – the kind written in the Victorian age for readers who couldn't deal with too much suspense – there would be chapter headings which told you what was coming in advance. They always started
In Which
.
In Which Charles Fortescue Proposes to Miss Copeland, Freda Visits the Insane Asylum and Meets Horace's Wife, and Miss Morton Hears some Unexpected News.
That sort of thing. Anyhow, if this chapter had an
In Which
, without wishing to give too much away, it would go something like this:
In Which Georgina Meets a Selection of Millionaires, Lindsay Goes on a Date, and Emma Jane's Wish to Become a Sex Goddess Comes True.
And all I will add about
that
is that the fairy in the Bel Manoir Wyshing Well had a very nasty sense of humour.

Georgie's Cinderella X ad was producing phenomenal results, at least on screen. It occurred to me that we were all would-be Cinderellas really: that's what wishing is all about. Georgie wanted a wealthy prince, I wanted the transformation scene, and Lin just wanted to get out of the kitchen. ‘Another couple of dozen last weekend,' Georgie told us on Monday. ‘I can't possibly meet them all. I'm scrapping anyone who says they want a meaningful relationship or claims to have a gsoh.'

‘A what?' I said.

‘Good sense of humour, I think. The point is, how do they know? Everybody
thinks
they have a sense of humour, even people who haven't one –
especially
people who haven't one – but it might not be the same as mine. Anyway, I asked for dosh, not jokes. Gsohs get dumped.'

‘What about serial killers?'

‘Depends how rich they are,' said Georgie.

‘You will be careful, won't you?' Lin said anxiously. ‘If you're going to meet them . . .'

‘Of course I'm going to meet them. Once I've whittled the list down to the most likely prospects. What really shocks me is how many of them insist they're frightfully healthy. I mean, with the high incidence of heart disease in this country, you'd think a fair proportion would be cardiac cases. It's supposed to be very stressful becoming a millionaire.'

‘Not nearly as stressful as poverty,' Lin said.

‘Never mind,' I told Georgie in consoling tones. ‘If
you
can't give a man a coronary, no one can.'

She preened herself, not visibly, but in spirit. ‘I should hope so,' she murmured. ‘I tell you, this had better be worth it. Nobody mentions how time-consuming it is, doing an ad. I spent most of the weekend sorting my respondents into separate files, because otherwise I'm going to get them all mixed up. You send off so many answers, you forget what you've said to whom. I got so exhausted, one guy asked me what I
really really
wanted, and I couldn't be bothered to compose a proper reply, so I e-mailed one word: Diamonds.'

‘What did he say?' Lin demanded, intrigued.

‘He asked me what kind.'

‘He must be mad,' Lin said in awe. ‘I mean –
diamonds
. He doesn't even know you.'

‘Mad is good,' said Georgie. ‘Next to cardiac arrest, I'll take mad. I can have him looked after by a nice friendly nurse while I go out and spend all his money.'

‘Makes it awfully easy for his relatives to contest the Will,' I pointed out.

‘Some of my best friends are lawyers. Anyway, for the moment I want my millionaire alive. One thing at a time.'

‘Shouldn't you have told Cal by now?' Lin whispered as he appeared beyond the glass partition, obviously heading our way.

‘No,' Georgie hissed back. ‘Project Cinderella X is Top Secret. For your ears only.' And, as Cal came in: ‘Hi.'

The difficult part, I reflected, was that actually I rather liked him. In the past, having filed him under ‘Office Lech', I'd only thought of him as a guy with a dirty grin who would make suggestive remarks to any woman, even me, if there was no one else available. But as his relationship with Georgie developed his attitude changed, and I'd found out there was a nice man behind the mock-Casanova exterior. As Georgie's special friends, Lin and I acquired a new status in his eyes, and he treated us accordingly. Georgie came first, of course, but I didn't like to think of him being left high and dry while she absconded with some ageing Croesus. There were times when I had to remind myself pretty sharply that he was, after all, a married man cheating on his wife – whatever the state of his marriage might be.

I tried to greet him without constraint and left the office feeling uncomfortable. Lin, who had launched into an unnatural flow of chat, was evidently having the same reaction.

Later that week, Georgie made a start on her shortlist. She had a dinner-date at the Bel Manoir – ‘I thought it would be appropriate' – with a property tycoon who insisted he had never had time to meet Miss Right. She made an effort (Georgie always made an effort), wearing a tight black skirt split up the side, short black jacket, and a plunge blouse which frilled her cleavage like a ribbon round a wedding-cake. Her date looked duly appreciative. Hesitant and almost shy by e-mail, in the flesh he proved to be a stocky, blocky fifty-something with the kind of abrasive self-confidence that stumbles over its own feet every so often. His accent was Yorkshire, his face not so much lived-in as vandalised. Georgie gritted her teeth and determined to find him likeable.

‘And he was,' she concluded the next day, ‘in a blunt, northern sort of way. He talked about property all through the main course, which was boring, and his unhappy experiences with classifieds over dessert, which was sad. He kept telling me how wonderful and sympathetic I was, probably because no one had ever asked him about himself before. It won't do, though.'

‘Why not?' said Lin. ‘He sounds as if he might be nice. I mean, for a millionaire. He
is
a millionaire, isn't he?'

‘Think so.'

‘Did he have a ruddy complexion?' I said hopefully.

‘Yes – why?'

‘High blood pressure. Bound to be cardiac. He's the right age, too.'

‘I daresay, but it won't do.'

‘Why not?' Lin repeated.

‘He lives in Huddersfield.' There was a depressed silence. ‘What's the point of having lots of money, if you have to spend it in Huddersfield?'

‘I thought you were going to clear your credit card,' I said. ‘Not blue someone else's.'

‘Just trying to plan ahead.'

‘Anyhow, what's wrong with Huddersfield? Have you ever been there?'

‘I don't need to.' Georgie shuddered. ‘It's
up north
. It's cold and damp and the natives drink lots of beer and eat Yorkshire pudding and worship football.'

‘Sounds a lot like the south to me,' I said. ‘Bar the Yorkshire pud.' I like Yorkshire pudding, but I wasn't going to say so. It was against the spirit of my new diet.

‘Shut up . . .'

On the Saturday, Georgie went to the Pont de la Tour to meet a City fatcat who said he had never answered a classified ad before. (‘You wouldn't
believe
how many of them say that,' Georgie had remarked.) On arrival, the only unattended male she could see was a pink-faced young man of about twenty-five with fluffy blond hair and the beginnings of a gut framed rather unfortunately by a gaping bomber jacket. She requested James Wingrove with a feeling of trepidation which was fully justified. ‘I say,' said the young man, ‘you're a bit older than I expected.'

‘How
is
your heart condition?' Georgie retorted frigidly.

By the end of dinner, James was waxing enthusiastic on relationships with mature women. ‘I bet you know stuff the younger ones don't,' he said. ‘Experience tells, right? A mate of mine got off with his girlfriend's mother: he said it was the best night of his life. Apparently, she totally blew him away. She handcuffed him to the chandelier, stuffed a courgette up his—'

‘Courgettes are so yesterday,' said Georgie, who had decided to go with the flow. ‘They went out with the gerbil. Which public school did you go to?'

‘I didn't say I went to public school. How did you guess?'

On Sunday, she lunched with an Internet executive at a pub near Henley. ‘I'm worth seven million at the latest computation. Well, yes, that's on paper, but the crash has hardly affected us. Boohoo.com is rock solid. The future of business is on the web.'

‘Sounds like science fiction,' Georgie murmured unwarily, unable to think of anything else to say.

‘That's exactly it. Science fiction is becoming business fact. Did you catch the last series of
Babylon 5
? It was brilliant . . .'

He moved on to
Star Trek: The Next Generation
,
Farscape
, and something called
Mutant X
, dabbled in
Buffy
and
Roswell High
, and wound up with
Blade Runner
(the director's cut),
Alien
(all of them), and
Terminator II
(‘Far superior to
Terminator
, of course. The apocalyptic vision . . . the horror of the imagined holocaust . . . Linda Hamilton's outstanding performance . . .'). This, Georgie decided, is where I terminate. Time to return to Earth. And must make a note never to invest in the Internet – should I ever have something to invest.

Back at home, she collapsed in front of the TV, which was showing a nice soothing English country murder, and wondered if solvency was really worth all this trouble.

‘So he was a nerd,' I said to her in the morning. ‘We live in an age where nerds can make millions. Look at Bill Gates.'

‘Millionaires are supposed to be interested in the Dow Jones and the Footsy – whatever they are,' Georgie said. ‘Not Klingon foreign policy and Arnold Schwarzenegger's biceps. Or am I out-of-date?'

‘You said it,' I grinned.

On Tuesday, she got the serial killer.

She knew he was a serial killer the moment she set eyes on him. Fortunately they were in a suitable venue for such meetings (a public place with other people), in this case an old-fashioned pub on Duke Street St James, although it did seem to be little frequented and there were rather too many dark corners. Her respondent looked elderly, though he must have been under fifty; he was the type who had probably looked elderly from thirty on. He had pale eyes set slightly too close together, in the accepted manner of serial killers, and a mouth drawn tight like a miser's purse from much primming in disapproval. His smile, when it came, was sudden and toothy, full of secret hunger. His clothes were so nondescript as to render him all but invisible and Georgie sensed immediately that he had a mother complex. (They always do.) Inwardly, she thanked Providence that she had only committed herself to having a drink with him. She ordered vodka and Coke, specifying non-diet.

‘I'm glad you're not anorexic,' her companion said. ‘One woman I met asked for Diet Coke. She was very thin. I knew at once she was anorexic, of course.'