“Well…” I twist my fingers awkwardly. “I do have this one little reserve dress in my wardrobe…”
I can’t tell him I’ve actually got three. And two on hold at Barneys.
“By whom?”
“Er… Donna Karan,” I say guiltily.
“Donna Karan?” His voice cracks with betrayal. “You prefer Donna Karan to me?”
“Of course not! But I mean, the seams are actually sewn…”
“Wear my dress.”
“Danny—”
“Wear my dress! Please!” He throws himself down on the floor and walks toward me on his knees. “It’ll be ready. I’ll work all day and all night.”
“We haven’t got all day and all night! We’ve got about… three hours!”
“Then I’ll work all three hours. I’ll do it!”
“You can really make a boned embroidered corset from scratch in three hours?” I say incredulously.
Danny looks abashed. “So… um… we may have to rethink the design very slightly…”
“In what way?”
He drums his fingers for a few moments, then looks up. “Do you have a plain white T-shirt?”
“A T-shirt?” I can’t hide my dismay.
“It’ll be great. I promise!” From outside comes the chugging sound of a van pulling up and Danny glances out of the window. “Hey, did you buy another antique?”
An hour later I stare at myself in the mirror. I’m wearing a full sweeping skirt made of gold silk — topped by my white T-shirt, which is now completely unrecognizable. Danny’s ripped off the sleeves, sewn on sequins, gathered hems, created lines where there were none — and basically turned it into the most fantastic top I’ve ever seen.
“I love it.” I beam at Danny. “I love it! I’ll be the coolest bridesmaid in the world!”
“It’s pretty good, isn’t it?” Danny gives a casual shrug, but I can see he’s pleased with himself.
I take another gulp of my cocktail, draining the glass. “Delicious. Shall we have another one?”
“What was in that?”
“Erm…” I squint vaguely at the bottles lined up in the cocktail cabinet. “I’m not sure.”
It took a while to get the cocktail cabinet up the stairs and into our apartment. To be honest, it’s a bit bigger than I remembered, and I’m not sure it’ll fit into that little alcove behind the sofa where I’d planned to put it. But still, it looks fantastic! It’s standing proudly in the middle of the room, and we’ve already put it to good use. As soon as it arrived, Danny went upstairs and raided his brother Randall’s drinks cupboard, and I got all the booze I could find in the kitchen. We’ve had a margarita each and a gimlet, and my invention called the Bloomwood, which consists of vodka, orange, and M&M’s, which you scoop out with a spoon.
“Give me the top again. I want to pull in that shoulder tighter.”
I peel off the top, hand it to him, and reach for my jumper, not bothering to be modest. I mean, this is Danny. He threads a needle and starts expertly gathering along the hem of the T-shirt. “So, these weird cousin- marrying friends of yours,” he says. “What’s that about?”
“They’re not weird!” I hesitate for a moment. “Well, OK, Tarquin is a tiny bit weird. But Suze isn’t weird at all. She’s my best friend! You’ve met her!”
Danny raises an eyebrow. “So — couldn’t they find anyone else to marry except their own family? Was it like, ‘OK, Mom’s taken… my sister, too fat… the dog… mmm, don’t like the hair.’ ”
“Stop it!” I can’t help giggling. “They just suddenly realized they were meant for each other.”
“Like Harry Met Sally.” He puts on a film-trailer voice. “They were friends. They came from the same gene pool.”
“Danny…”
“OK.” He relents, and snips off the thread. “So, what about you and Luke?”
“What about us?”
“D’you think you’ll get married?”
“I… I have no idea!” I say, feeling a slight color coming to my cheeks. “I can’t say it’s ever crossed my mind.”
Which is completely true.
Well, OK. It’s not completely true. Maybe it has crossed my mind on the very odd occasion. Maybe just occasionally I’ve doodled “Becky Brandon” on my notepad to see what it looked like. And I might possibly have flicked through Martha Stewart Weddings once or twice. Just out of idle curiosity.
Perhaps, also, it’s occurred to me that Suze is getting married and she’s been going out with Tarquin for less time than me and Luke.
But you know. It’s not a big deal. I’m really not into weddings. In fact, if Luke asked me, I’d probably say no.
Well… OK. I’d probably say yes.
But the point is, it’s not going to happen. Luke doesn’t want to get married “for a very long time, if at all.” He said that in an interview in the Telegraph three years ago, which I found in his file of clippings. (I wasn’t poking about. I was looking for an elastic band.) The piece was mainly about his business, but they asked him about personal stuff too — and then they captioned his picture Brandon: marriage at the bottom of agenda.
Which is absolutely fine by me. It’s at the bottom of my agenda, too.
While Danny’s finishing off the dress, I do a little housework. Which is to say I tip the dirty breakfast dishes into the sink where they can soak, dab at a spot on the counter — and then spend some time rearranging the spice jars in the spice rack, according to color. That’s such a satisfying job. Almost as good as organizing my felt- tip pens used to be.
“So do you guys find it hard living together?” says Danny, coming to the door and watching me.
“No.” I look at him in surprise. “Why?”
“My friend Kirsty just tried living with her boyfriend. Disaster. All they did was fight. She said she doesn’t know how anyone does it.”
I slot the cumin jar next to fenugreek (what is fenugreek?), feeling rather smug. The truth is, Luke and I have had hardly any problems since living together. Except maybe the incident when I repainted the bathroom and got gold glitter paint on his new suit. But that doesn’t count, because, as Luke admitted afterward, he completely overreacted, and anybody with sense would have seen that the paint was wet.
Now that I think about it, perhaps we’ve had the odd teeny little dispute about how many clothes I buy. Perhaps Luke has on occasion opened the wardrobe door and said in exasperation, “Are you ever going to wear any of these?”
Perhaps we’ve also had the odd argu-frank discussion about how many hours Luke works. He runs his own very successful financial PR company, Brandon Communications, which has branches in London and New York and is expanding all the time. He loves his work, and maybe once or twice I’ve accused him of loving work more than me.
But the point is, we’re a mature, flexible couple who are able to talk things through. We went out to lunch not long ago and had a long talk, during which I sincerely promised I would try to shop a bit less and Luke sincerely promised he would try to work a bit less. And I reckon we’re both making a pretty good effort.
“Living together has to be worked at,” I say wisely. “You have to be flexible. You have to give as well as take.”
“Really?”
“Oh yes. Luke and I share our finances, we share the chores… it’s all a matter of teamwork. The point is, you can’t expect everything to stay as it was before. You have to accommodate.”
“Really?” Danny looks interested. “So who do you think accommodates more? You or Luke?”
I’m thoughtful for a moment.
“It’s difficult to say, really,” I say at last. “I expect it’s about equal on both sides.”
“So, like… all this stuff.” Danny gestures around the cluttered apartment. “Is it mostly yours or mostly
