Synopsis
One young man dying of cancer. One struggling journalist. Six single Londoners. One night that changes everything....
Dan is trying to conceal a stretch in jail, while time is running out for Sanjay, though his specialist can’t say how long he has left.
A 38-year old lawyer is desperate to rewrite her past but, for one single mum, sex is a distant memory she longs to relive. At speed-dating there’s a nice doctor. There’s also the kind of guy your mother warned you about.
Journalist Harriet needs a by-line not a boyfriend, but she soon becomes the focus of her own feature.
Is happiness possible when you’re trying to hide a whole carousel of baggage?
Excerpt
In her drawing-room, Dorottya looked past the flowers on the Osborne and Little curtains.
She let out a breath through pursed lips. He was mowing again. What was it with Englishmen and lawns? Roger was so obsessed with his precious expanse of grass that he had even designed a special mowing strip, as he called it, to make cutting easier and to prevent the children from wrecking the edges when they played cricket.
And another thing. Why had he decided to work from home? For years he’d had a perfectly good job in the City, which kept him from under her feet for the whole day, or even, if she was lucky, for days at a time. Now that he was self-employed, he irritated her much more. He was lucky she hadn’t thrown one of his best plates at him.
Still, he had his garden to occupy him while she used her laptop. Dorottya logged onto the site and evaluated her options. Since she never had much privacy these days, it was important to know whom to tick. Oh, she knew it was whom, not who, thanks to the classes she had attended years ago in Paradise Road. Hungarians were far better linguists than the silly English.
“Ah, there you are, sweetie.” Roger had appeared in the doorway without warning.
She snapped her notebook shut, breaking a nail. She would have to delete the history later, for sure. Last week he had spotted a credit card item listed as DMQ. When he queried it, she told him it was a shoe shop. He was visibly pleased that it had only been £30, which showed how stupid he was. What kind of man thinks you can get anything in a shoe shop for £30, except maybe a pair of laces?
“How is your lawn, dahlink?” As an accompaniment to calling him dahlink, a term she used whenever she wanted to charm anyone, she flashed her expensively veneered teeth. How bizarre that people from the UK went to Hungary for cosmetic dentistry when she had done the exact opposite.
“Coming along nicely. Don’t forget the flower show this afternoon.”
He loved plants with the same ferocity that he loved sex. Well, she would use the same tactic. “But I’ve got a headache. I must lie down.”
“It’ll do you good to get out, sweetie. Fresh air and all that. Much better than sitting in a stuffy room hunched over a laptop all the time. I don’t know why you spend so much time indoors. No wonder you have headaches.”
“But you wanted me to study, dahlink.” Fresh air was an idiot British idea. Hungarians never thought fresh air would help. They took patent medicines instead. If your brain needed a boost, you took a Cavinton tablet, not a walk in the country. “Roger dahlink, where did you put my Bensons?”
“You know I don’t like you smoking. It’s bad for the children.”
Over the years there’d been lots of things that were bad for the children, like creeping into the au pair’s room at night, but he had never shown much concern about that. “You can’t tell me what to do. You’re not my employer anymore.”
“Can’t I?” Now his face, normally smiling and a bit too pink, turned a touch nasty. Nobody would believe how ugly Roger was inside. People always thought he was a cuddly bear, a real medve. A jegesmedve at that, with his hair a premature white the exact shade of a polar bear at London Zoo. But he wasn’t that nice, as anyone on the receiving end of his little games soon discovered.
And he wasn’t that daft. The English were particularly good at that deception. Like the Scarlet Pimpernel, who played the fool but was really smart.
“You’re right, dahlink. I’m going to cut down,” she said, rising from the sofa. And she would go to the stupid flower show with him at the stupid village church where everyone wore tweeds and a halo.
Maybe if she showed enough enthusiasm for the displays she could dissuade him from carting her off to bed again before the children came home from school.