Well.

So.

I was gone for a while.

I got a job, I lost a job, I moved house, I, well, you’ll see. Last thing I remember, it was June, and I was in New York, closing down the house. That first Saturday morning in June, before I left America again, I double-locked the front door after the cleaners left. I remember that the place smelled like Pine-Sol and paint. I remember that a couple of days before, Tom and I had met, secret-agent style, one walking southwards and one walking north, in Union Square. We looked at each other and looked again, and it was good and familiar though we hadn’t seen each other in a year and a half. We sprawled on the lawn in Union Square, making up a year and a half, and ten o’clock of us a baby chased the pigeons. Fresh from Beirut, with a Penguin paperback in his bum pocket, Tom was telling me about the city later: “You’re in the street and people are yelling ‘IspeakArabicreallyfast! I speakArabicreallyfast!’”

I remember, also, that India threw a party Saturday night and that there was a great, stripey bowl of M&Ms. I sat next to them till I couldn’t anymore. Jeff and Stewart and I hogged the sofas till our yawns were bigger than our heads. The next day I flew back to London.

I remember that I arrived in England feeling good about it for the first time in a long time, and I remember that the sun was out that morning the plane touched down.



It’s been a curious summer, and one whose days have blown by on the wind. It’s been very rainy, and very grey, and very cold: Novemberish. This week, while it was rainy and grey and cold, I sat on the sofa with a relentless cough tight and tickly in my throat. I have been reading Siri Hustvedt’s What I Loved. I was swallowed by it, it swallowed me, it was enticing and all-consuming; I read and read and after I got to the last word on the last page I watched the grey drizzle on the grey streets for a while. Then I played David Bowie very loudly and sang along very loudly.



Singing along loudly to Bowie in the middle of the day is one of the great perks of unemployment. Oh, unemployment, how I have come to be familiar with you! Looking for publishing work in London has been like banging my head against a wall for the last two years. The last appointment was at the most dysfunctional of offices, where the boss regularly came in to yell at the number-two but refused to fire her; where the number-two sat at her desk in tears but refused to quit. “Do this,” the boss lady would say, and I’d do it. Two days later, she’d say, “Why’d you do this? You should’ve done that.” Sometimes the contradiction came within a half-day. Sometimes within an hour. Asking for help or direction was as effective as yelling into a deep and empty hole. “Show me how you want this done,” I’d say, and the number-two would tell me, “Just go and do it, and I’ll review it later.” I would later be told how I’d done it wrongly. The worst of it was that I was prepared to stay because I thought I might be able to figure my way around things if I kept my eyes open long enough. I worked eleven- and twelve-hour days and still wasn’t able to keep my eyes open long enough. It was no surprise when one week the boss lady said, “You’re doing just fine” and the next, well, in the morning I texted Olive: “I think I am going to get fired today.” In the afternoon, the number-two slid an envelope across the desk. There were two typos in the letter letting me go.

I am embracing unemployment, what with the singing and dancing to Bowie in the middle of the day, and the languid mid-morning breakfasts with the windows open, rain or no. One morning I fried an egg sunny-side up to go with an avocado, a slice of exquisite treacly pumperknickel, and the leftovers of the weekend newspaper. Another clear day I took the visiting parentals to Ottolenghi for a slap-up breakfast. At nine in the morning, the raspberry meringues were already piled high in the window. The white-clad waitstaff sat us by the toaster of my dreams and brought us a giant bread basket and a flight of spreads. “What’s that?” I said, pointing to one little pot, and the waiter man was pleased to be of assistance. “Orange jam,” he said, “strawberry jam, banana jam, chocolate butter, lemon butter, butter.”

The day after I walked out of the office with freedom in my hair, in my eyes, in my step, I had lunch with Nora on Cleveland Street. “What are you going to do now?” she said. “I think,” I said, “I need to blog.” “You haven’t blogged your whole life,” she said. “Your blog doesn’t know you’re getting married.”



Yah! It is true! You know what else my blog doesn’t know, is that I already am married. Done and done. Do you see me? I am dusting my hands off. The Emily Post website has a step-by-titillating-step timeline for brides- and grooms-to-be, counting down from 24 months before the big day. Don’t make me laugh: ha-ha-ha. June there was the engagement ring, a fuck-off emerald with diamonds dancing on either side. It is the kind of jewellery a girl has to live up to. When I wear it I expect the crowds to part in front of me. I expect coatmen in tails to bow low and call me Contessa. July there was the engagement party at Laureen’s, with a room full of well-wishers, Pimm’s for all, and more cupcakes than people. There was calling the town hall, watching the guest list grow from six to 39, booking a table at the restaurant, buying a dress the colour of champagne, and then, come August, there was the sunniest day all summer, with a sky blue like a perfect backdrop for fifteen cream roses and one for the groom.



Oh, lordy, everyone should get married all the time, it’s true, and the girl who runs from commitment says it with a silly smile and her feet up. “It’s going to be a small thing,” we said, “very small, no big deal,” so they came in from Paris and Berlin, from Singapore and Istanbul, from Kentish Town, from Bayswater, from Woolwich and Hankey Place, from King’s Cross and Angel and Shepherd’s Bush and Dolphin Square. My father arrived from Bangkok four hours before the ceremony. They came, and the boys were in suits and sneakers, and the girls were in dresses and a celebratory hat – “My friend makes them,” Nora had said. “She’s a milliner, and she does hats.” “A millionaire who does hats?” I’d said, “How can I hook up with that lifestyle?” “A milliner,” Nora said, “a milliner.” – and the family from Paris had crossed the Channel with 23 bottles of champagne.



Outside the Islington town hall, we shook the confetti and rice out of our ears, then we took an old-timey step-on-step-off bus to Saint James’s Park. Emily’d made cupcakes and Suz’d made tofu wontons, and Henny’d brought an extra blanket for the green. Maud unpacked her tote to reveal an entire Cantal cheese. We sat in the sun and we sat in the shade. We dragged over stripey deckchairs to loll about while the bubbly flowed. There were mothers and fathers and stepmothers and stepfathers and uncles and aunts and cousins and friends and friends and friends, we spoke English and French and of course we spoke Singlish vaaiiry loudly and when we couldn’t speak we laughed anyway because we were drunk on summer and nothing could touch us.



It was one of those days, you know?, with the canopy of leaves, and the breeze on bare arms, with sandwiches with the crusts cut off. We moistened scraps of paper with champagne to stick to our foreheads for idiot party games. “Am I a man?” Hector said. “Am I still alive?” “Do I blow fire out of my mouth?” Late into the lazy afternoon, the boys napped on the lawn while Maud and I leaned back in our deckchairs. “Shit,” we said, “life is good.”



Some days after the last family member left town, Olive was on the phone with his mum. She must have asked after me, for “La petite?” Olive said. “La petite is making the house look presentable, she buys boxes to organise things in, she decorates, she goes out for lunches with her friends, elle fait des trucs quoi.” “Hey!” I said in the background, but then I couldn’t disagree. It’s true, all of it, I don’t know how it happened but all of a sudden I have become that woman who gets married and quits her job. It could only be better if Olive had been my boss, too, before I stopped work.

Oh, stop, I imagine the work will happen, by and by, but I’m not too fussed about it yet. For the moment, the sun is finally out again. There are zucchini tarts or rosemary-lemon roast chickens for dinner, and banana cake in the morning. Saturdays we go to the market. Sundays we open the windows and listen to the folk band play in the bar downstairs.

Tomorrow morning Marc and Emily and Laureen are coming to pick us up, and we are driving to the beach for a prosecco picnic.

“Whitstable is a cute sea town, with several beaches that appear to all have quite different characters,” Emily e-mailed earlier today. This is gonna be great. There is nothing like a cute sea town with beach characters: tarty Eugenie Letter, who tends bar down at the Whelk and Lobster; Burgerman Bergerman, who sells hot dogs and salty chips; Our Fanny, who wanders up and down the shoreline in search of her lost-at-sea beau; Frank, a fighter crab; and cross-eyed Stephen Xavier, the unfortunately afflicted fisherman who sits on Pier 23 and sings songs his mother once taught him by the fire.