SOPHIA MONEY-COUTTS is a 32-year-old journalist who spent five years studying the British aristocracy while working as features director at Tatler. Prior to that she worked as a writer and an editor for the Evening Standard and the Daily Mail in London, and The National in Abu Dhabi. She writes a weekly column called ‘Modern Manners’ for the Sunday Telegraph and has appeared on various radio and television channels talking about topics like Prince Harry’s wedding and the etiquette of the threesome. The Plus One is her debut novel.
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First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2018
Copyright © Sophia Money-Coutts 2018
Sophia Money-Coutts asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
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This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Ebook Edition © August 2018 ISBN: 9780008288488
Version: 2018-10-29
To my family, who are madder than any
of the characters in this book.
But that’s why I love you all so much.
Contents
I BLAME SENSE AND SENSIBILITY. I saw the film when I was twelve. A very impressionable age. And more specifically, I blame Kate Winslet. She, Marianne, the second sister, nearly dies for love. That bit where she goes walking in a storm to look at Willoughby’s house and is rescued by Colonel Brandon but spends the next few days sweating with a life-threatening fever? That, I decided, was the appropriate level of drama in a relationship.
I consequently set about trying to be as like Marianne as I could. She was into poetry, which seemed a sign because I also liked reading. I bought a little book of Shakespeare’s sonnets in homage, which I carried in my school bag at all times in case I had a moment between lessons when I could whip it out and whisper lines to myself in a suitably dramatic manner. I also learned Sonnet 116, Marianne and Willoughby’s favourite, off by heart.
‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. Love is not love, which alters when it alteration finds…’
Imagine a tubby 12-year-old wandering the streets of Battersea in rainbow-coloured leggings muttering that to herself. I was ripe for a kicking. So, yes, I blame Sense and Sensibility for making me think I had to find someone. It set me on the wrong path entirely.
IF I’D KNOWN THAT the week was going to end in such disaster, I might not have bothered with it. I might just have stayed in bed and slept like some sort of hibernating bear for the rest of the winter.
Not that it started terribly well either. It was Tuesday, 2 January, the most depressing day of the year, when everyone trudges back to work feeling depressed, overweight and broke. It also just happened to be my birthday. My thirtieth birthday. So, I was gloomier than anyone else that morning. Not only had I turned a decade older overnight, but I was still single, living with Joe, a gay oboist, in a damp flat in Shepherd’s Bush and starting to think