Perfectly Ordinary People(26)

‘And then he asked me if Ruth and Jacob are really Jewish names.’

‘Oh, Dad . . .’ I said. ‘He really is clueless, isn’t he?’



So that’s how Dad’s latent anti-Semitism (not to mention his newly-hinted-at homophobia) became ‘a thing’. No one really discussed it – we simply saw less of each other. Actually, that’s not true. I saw a little less of everyone than usual. I’m pretty sure the primary members of the family nucleus – comprised of Mavaughn, my parents, and uncles Tom, Harry and Eirla – carried on living in each other’s pockets as before. But I definitely increased my distance for a while, and as far as Jake was concerned, I don’t think he saw anyone except me for about a year.

Because it went undiscussed, the issue was less present in everyone’s minds than it had been during The Great Falling Out but I couldn’t help but think the silence implied that the situation was in fact more serious this time around.

But selfishly, I didn’t care as much as I should have. Things were going well with Dan, and after decades of fraught, complicated love affairs, the joy of being in a stable relationship with a funny, sexy guy was just about all-consuming.

Still, I waited for the guillotine to fall. For months I lived with a feeling that ‘a terrible discovery’ was imminent – a discovery that would prove the whole thing had been a mirage. Dan was married, or mad, or an alcoholic. He was a drug addict, or dying, or a conman or – even though that seemed ever more unlikely the longer I knew him – gay. I didn’t know which direction the storm was coming from, but for a while I lived with a sense of certainty that the storm would most surely come, and it would probably come that day. But one sunrise after another, Dan continued to prove me wrong.

We both had full-on careers – Dan with his catering business, and me running around after Ellie Day and her many fans. So Dan and I didn’t always get to spend as much time together as we would have liked.

Between chaperoning Ellie in Manchester, Edinburgh and New York, while trying to fit everything else into the gaps in her schedule, and Dan’s constant crisis management at Meals on Wheels, which had him forever driving somewhere for last-minute fish, or somewhere else to deliver last-minute food, or putting on a tux to replace one of his waiters, the moments when we were available to spend quality time together were few and far between. In February, for example, I think we only got to see each other twice.

Though this lack of availability increased the excitement when we did finally get together, I was still feeling paranoid and thus was able to convince myself that absence was maybe the only reason for all that passion. After all, absence makes the heart grow fonder and familiarity breeds contempt. If we ever managed to spend a full week together, wasn’t it still possible that we’d realise how incompatible we’d been all along?

So it was with great excitement, and much trepidation, that I accepted Dan’s invitation to holiday together in Portugal.

He’d planned the ten-day break at his parents’ house long before we’d met, while I had almost a month of holiday I needed to take before the end of April. There was no way I could manage a month, but ten days seemed doable.

His parents’ house was in Faro, a stone’s throw from the beach, he said. They would be present for the first and last days of our stay while, for the other eight days, with the exception of Maximiano – the aged Labrador it was our duty to look after – we’d have the place to ourselves. It sounded like the perfect opportunity to get to know each other, didn’t it? A proposition that excited me but which also scared me witless.



We boarded our flight on the afternoon of the 17th of April at Luton. It had been raining for a month in London but Faro was forecast to be sunny. I had my bikini packed. I was excited!

I had no intention of expressing my fears; had, in fact, consciously decided not to express them. But as we sat and fidgeted beneath us for our seat belts, it just slipped out. ‘So are you scared that we’ll end up hating each other after a full ten days together?’

Dan laughed. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘We’re halfway there already.’

‘Halfway?’ I said flatly. ‘How so?’

‘Well, I already hate you. So all we need now is for you to start hating me back.’

He glanced at the tattered in-flight magazine from the seat pocket and then fiddled with the sticky-looking safety card. He tightened his seat belt and peered out of the window at the runway.

Finally he glanced sideways at me. ‘Oh shit!’ he said, performing a mock double-take. ‘She’s being serious! Are you? You can’t be?’

And because, in that moment, I realised how ridiculous I was being, I pretended it had been a joke after all. ‘Totally serious,’ I mugged, pulling a face and nodding. ‘And well on the way to hating you already.’ And then I rather convincingly slipped into a sexy grin instead.

Dan winked at me and then sighed.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘Do you think Blair’s actually going to win?’ Back home, everyone was talking about the election, but at a loss as to why Dan was mentioning him now, I glanced around the cabin until I found my answer – a man in the aisle seat had just picked up his copy of the Telegraph and the cover was splashed with an unflattering photo of Tony Blair.

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Everyone in publishing’s rooting for him anyway.’