City Girl in Training

She managed to get through the day well enough, while he was at work. She saved up her attacks to coincide with any plans I had for Don. Which was why, on Friday, having waved my parents off on their great adventure, I had to haul my own case aboard the London train. He’d taken the afternoon off to drive me to the station, but his mother had had one of her ‘little turns’ just before we’d been due to leave.

I’d considered having a turn of my own. Flinging myself on the floor and drumming my heels on the hall carpet. But Don had looked so miserable that I’d told him to go back to his mother and wait for the doctor, while I called a taxi and put myself on the train.

As Maybridge disappeared into the icy rain of a November afternoon I settled down with a cheese and pickle sandwich and a comfortingly large hot chocolate drink and, since I had an hour to fill, I took out the magazine.

‘Are You a Tiger or a Kitten?’ screamed at me from a cover flash. I didn’t need a quiz to answer that one. I was nearly twenty-three years old, I had a mother who was still treating me like a child and a boyfriend who’d apparently mislaid his libido.

I was a kitten, right?

Wrong.

Having worked my way through the multiple-choice questions, I discovered that I’d been wildly optimistic.

I was a mouse. Or maybe an ostrich.

That, according to the quiz, was why I was sitting on a train for London when I wanted to stay in Maybridge.

That was why my boyfriend put his mother first. (And because he was sweet and kind and she was a manipulative old witch.) Why I was going to spend Christmas pulling crackers with Great-Aunt Alice instead of getting pulled by Don.

I was too easygoing. Too undemanding. My expectations were so low, they barely registered. I picked up my cheese sandwich and then put it down again quickly. Cheese. A mouse would choose a cheese sandwich.

I should have chosen the fashionable roast vegetables in sun dried tomato bread. But, mouse that I was, I loved cheese.

I should be wearing designer label jeans with high heels, instead of an old pair that had once belonged to the last of my brothers to leave home—shortened to fit my pathetically short legs—with a pair of cheap trainers I’d bought from the market. (I was saving up to get married, okay?)

I should have my nails professionally manicured. I should at least have painted them with something more exciting than the pale pink nail polish I’d borrowed from my mother.

I might never have wanted to be a tiger, but surely I should at least aspire to be a kitten?

Unfortunately any attempt to change my character would only raise a patronising smile in Maybridge. I’d lived there all my life. Who would take me seriously if I changed into a scarlet-nailed temptress overnight?

But it occurred to me that in London, where no one knew me, I could be whatever I chose. I had to face facts. Being mouse-like, I hadn’t been able to untie Don from his mother’s apron strings and fix him to mine.

Maybe my mother—tough though it was to admit this—was right. Maybe a break would do us both good. Don had six months to experience life without me at his side to hand him a wrench before he’d even asked for it.

And I had six months to put on some gloss, put an edge on my character, so that when I went back to Maybridge Don would be down that aisle before he—or his mother—knew what had hit him.

As the train arrived in Paddington I stuffed the magazine into my shoulder bag for further study and grabbed my bulging suitcase from the rack.

New job. New life. New clothes. I was in London and I was going to make the most of it.

I didn’t actually growl as I joined the crowds heading for the underground, but I was beginning to take to the idea of being a tiger.

CHAPTER TWO

It’s the rush hour and raining. You hail the same taxi as a tall, dark and handsome stranger and he suggests sharing. Do you:

a. think it’s your birthday, flirt like mad until you reach your destination, then as you leave the cab hand him your phone number with a look that says ‘Call me…’?

b. remind yourself that your mother would not approve, but it is raining and he doesn’t look like a serial killer. What could be the harm?

c. tell him to get lost and leave him standing on the pavement?

d. let him take the taxi and wait for another one?

e. walk?

HAVING battled with the intricacies of the underground system, only going in the wrong direction twice, I finally emerged into the light of day. When I say light of day, I’m using poetic licence. What actually confronted me was the dark of a wet November evening.

And when I say wet, I do mean wet. No poet needed. The rain, miserable icy drizzle that had perfectly matched my mood when I’d left home, had intensified to the consistency of stair-rods.

In the country it would have been quite dark. But this was London where the neon never set; excitingly opulent shop windows and the rainbow colours of a million Christmas lights were reflected in the wet street, cutting through the gathering gloom.

And there were people, hundreds and hundreds of people, all with somewhere to go and in a hurry to get there.

I stood in the entrance to the underground, A-Z in hand, trying to orientate myself as impatient travellers pushed past me. On paper, it didn’t seem far to Sophie and Kate Harrington’s flat, but I was well aware that distance, on paper, could be deceiving. And my problems with north and south on the underground system had seriously undermined any confidence in my ability to map read. A taxi seemed like a wise investment and as I glanced up I spotted the yellow light on a cruising black cab.

I’d never hailed a taxi before—in Maybridge taxis didn’t cruise for custom, you had to telephone for one—but I knew how to do it. In theory. I’d seen people do it on television often enough. You stood on the kerb, raised your hand and yelled ‘Taxi!’…

I’d never make it to the kerb before it passed so I raised my hand and waved hopefully, but, realising that my self-consciously ladylike rendition of ‘Taxi!’ didn’t stand a chance of being heard over the noise of traffic, I tried again, this time yelling loud enough to wake the dead. I didn’t care. It had worked! The driver was heading for the kerb, pulling up a few yards ahead of me.

Wow! Who was the mouse now? I thought smugly as I grabbed the handle of my suitcase and, towing it after me, I cut recklessly through the crowds who were charging along, heads collectively down against the rain. Before I got to the kerb, however, someone had already opened the taxi door and was closing his umbrella prior to boarding.

‘Hey, you! That’s mine!’ I declared, uncharacteristically tiger-like in my defence of my first London taxi, despite the fact that my adversary towered above me.

The black silk umbrella he was holding collapsed in a shower of rainwater, most of which went over me, and the taxi thief glanced at me with every indication of impatience.

‘On the contrary, I hailed it before you even saw it,’ he said, giving me the briefest of glances. Brief was apparently all it took. After a moment’s astonished gaze, he muttered something beneath his breath that I didn’t quite catch—but didn’t for a moment believe was complimentary—and, with a look of resignation that suggested he was being a fool to himself, he stood back and gestured at the open door. ‘Take it. Before you drown.’

Oh, no. This was bad. I could be mad at a man who nicked my cab, but I couldn’t take it if it was rightfully his, even if my need was clearly the greater.

He did, after all, have an umbrella.

But I was already so wet that no amount of rain would make any difference. As I dithered on the kerb, he was rapidly getting the same way. But it had only taken a moment’s reflection, a pause long enough for my brain to override my mouth, for me to realise that I had in fact seen him standing at the edge of the pavement in that moment when I’d looked up from the A-Z. That my own efforts to attract the driver’s attention from the back of the pavement had gone unheeded. Feeling very stupid, the tiger in me morphed back into mouse.

‘No, really,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry…’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake.’ He seized the handle of my suitcase, crammed with everything I might need for the next six months and weighing a ton, and tossed it into the cab without noticeable effort. ‘Stop wittering and get in.’

‘Would one of you get in?’ the driver demanded testily. ‘I’ve got a living to make.’

‘Maybe we could share,’ I said, scrambling in after my suitcase. My irritable knight errant paused in the act of closing the door behind me. ‘I’m not going far and you could…um…we could…’ He waited for me to finish. ‘At least you’d be in the dry.’

Oh, heck. This wasn’t like the quiz at all. I wasn’t supposed to do the asking. But then the quiz wasn’t real life.

In my real life I didn’t offer to share taxis with tall, dark and handsome strangers. In my real life Friday evenings were spent handing Don his spanners as he talked endlessly about the intricacies of the internal combustion engine; a well-drilled theatre nurse to his mechanical surgeon. Comfortable. Familiar. Safe. Nothing to get the heart racing. Not the way mine was racing now.

‘Where are you going?’