‘I have not been hibernating! You don’t see me sat here in tracksuit bottoms and unwashed hair sipping super-strength cider through a straw do you?’
‘Well, no, but you missed the last family Sunday roast, and that’s unheard of.’
The once-a-month family roast dinner was sacrosanct. It had had a strict compulsory attendance order slapped on it for as long as Leila could remember. Making the trek from her university in Bristol down to Dartmouth every month for a slap-up free feed was a welcome respite from her usual daily diet of Super Noodles and breakfast cereals, but now she lived in London, the journey, and the time away from her friends, and boyfriend, when she had one, was a bit annoying sometimes. Not that she needed to worry about having a boyfriend now. Or ever again.
She knew that it was a cop-out, but heading down to her parents’ hotel in Devon to be guest of honour at a pity-party just a couple of weeks after the Jaipur fiasco was not something Leila wanted to put herself through. Her mother Judy would no doubt have had her head on the side for her entire visit, while repeating the words ‘plenty of fish’ and her dad would simultaneously give her a smile and a wide berth should her emotions suddenly get the better of her. Her brother Marcus would have found it impossible not to make lots of barbed references to her disastrous love life, and while she normally would have batted these back quickly and effortlessly, this latest dating catastrophe had affected her more than any of the others. Not that she was able to say that out loud yet.
‘So are you here as Mum’s spy to report back on the state of my sanity then?’ Leila asked.
‘No! Not at all! Not really. No. Well, maybe a bit. But mainly I wanted to see my little sister and offer my shoulder, should you need it. It’s ok to show your emotions you know Leila, you don’t need to pretend everything’s alright, when it’s not.’
Later that afternoon, when the sun had disappeared for the day, two empty champagne bottles were upended in the ice bucket and Tasha had reluctantly left, Leila thought about what her sister had said. She was known amongst her friends as the Bounce Back Queen, never letting anything get her down, being ridiculously cheerful in the face of adversity, but she absolutely never wanted to feel as stupid as she did leaving that hotel in Jaipur again. It was mid-afternoon on Christmas Day in England when she had skyped her parents from India. Her mum, dad, sister, brother, nephew and nieces all squashed their faces onto the small screen, colourful cracker hats adorning each one of them. She should have been there. She should have been working her way through her dad’s wine cellar with them, playing silly board games and listening to Radio Devon’s festive party mix. But instead she spent the day alone, huddled on a grimy corner of the airport praying for a standby ticket to get her home.
She had stayed awake for every minute of the thirty-hour journey from Freddie’s hotel room in India to her own bed in London, where she slept for almost two days straight. She didn’t cry. She didn’t even drink herself into oblivion with the free booze on board the flight. She just felt numb. And foolish. And she knew that she didn’t want a man to make her feel like that ever again.
A few weeks later…
‘I reckon his photo was easily taken twenty years ago.’
‘No!’ Jayne cried. ‘Who would do that?’
‘What did he think?’ Amanda asked, blowing the froth off her cappuccino. ‘That you wouldn’t notice that he looked nothing like his advert?’
‘Profile,’ Shelley sniffed, looking affronted. ‘It’s not an advert, I’m not advertising for dates, like you would a car, it’s a profile. Anyway, thankfully he didn’t see me as I’d chosen a table behind a pillar – thanks to Leila’s suggestion – so I was able to leg it before having to spend an evening with him.’
Although this time it was her friend Shelley recounting this story of dating woe, it was a carbon copy of numerous blind date disasters Leila had suffered in her time. Brad Pitt morphing into Danny DeVito, Single Solvent Lawyer mutating into Married Bankrupt Loser.
‘Do you remember me telling you about that guy who, when the bill came, put down a coupon he’d cut out of the paper for his half of the meal?’ Leila added, to the shrieks of hilarity from her best friends. ‘And he didn’t even know why I didn’t want to see him again!’
Shelley picked up the baton, ‘What about those twins we met at that dating in the dark night, Leila, who said they were thirty-something bankers who lived in Canary Wharf and then at the end of the night we saw their mum picking them up?’
‘Are you sure you two don’t make some of these stories up to make me and Amanda a little bit envious of your exciting single lives?’ Jayne asked smiling. ‘I mean it puts my normal night of watching box sets in my pyjamas with Will a little in the shade.’
‘And me and Paul. The most excited we’ve been in months is when a new series of 24 was announced.’
‘Exciting single lives?’ Leila yelped. ‘Have you not been listening? Nothing about being a thirty-something, single woman in London is remotely exciting. Soul-destroying yes, exciting, no.’
‘Oh I don’t know, it has its moments.’ As Shelley was a statuesque redhead with measurements Marilyn would weep for, her experiences tended to sometimes be a tad different to Leila’s.
‘Honestly, you two don’t know how good you have it,’ Leila said, pointing the end of her croissant at Jayne and Amanda. What she wouldn’t give to spend evenings in her pyjamas with the love of her life rather than trundling down to a personality-less wine bar to speed date, or spending hours swiping left and right on Tinder. Trying to locate her future husband was more or less a full-time job, and she was sick of it.
‘You know what?’ Leila said, slamming her croissant down on the table. ‘I’m done. Finito. Caput. No more, I’m taking some time out from dating.’
‘You always say that. Every time you have a bad date, or your boyfriend turns out to be a dick, you say that that’s the last time,’ Amanda said. ‘You’re still in shock about careering halfway across the world for Freddie, you’ll be fine in a few weeks.’
To be fair, her friends had tried to warn her not to follow Freddie to India. ‘Men don’t like to be surprised,’ Amanda had said, ignorant of the irony in her statement seeing as she had proposed to Paul, and not the other way round. And Jayne didn’t understand either, with her perfect marriage to Will, Richmond’s very own Mr Darcy. It was only a matter of time before Shelley joined their cosy married club and Leila would have to fly the spinster flag alone.
***
As Leila walked the few streets back to her flat after their breakfast her phone vibrated in her bag. ‘Layles, flying back to London in a couple of weeks, let’s hook up and I can explain. Miss you XOXO’
Her stomach lurched and she didn’t know whether to hurl the phone into the nearest wall or hug it close to her body in relief. In the first few weeks after coming back from India she’d replayed the hotel room scene over and over in her mind constantly, even sometimes concluding that maybe, just maybe, she might have been too quick to flounce off in a huff. Perhaps the girl wasn’t completely naked, she could have been wearing one of those nude catsuits, so she was actually fully dressed, and possibly she worked at the hotel and had just delivered his room service and then was trying to fix his TV for him, which is why she was sat on his bed with the remote. Put like that, she occasionally felt a bit sorry for the short shrift she’d given him. She had even gone as far as to punch out a text to him that remained unsent, wondering if maybe she did owe him the opportunity to explain. But for him to suddenly get in touch now, a couple of weeks before his arrival in London, with his fancy bit thousands