One Summer

Chapter One

One

Larks

‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in possession of good foresight must never be surprised by a kiss.’

‘Rubbish,’ I say, frowning, because, well, I’d quite like to be surprised by a kiss. I’ve begun to suspect that Max only kisses me when he remembers to – like an unpleasant chore that he has to tick off a to-do list.

‘You only think that because you’re loved up and have forgotten what it’s like to be out there in the dating jungle,’ she says, with an annoying ‘here speaketh the voice of experience’ wave of her hand. She’s wearing a cool ensemble of streetwear, purple lipstick and elaborate pearl necklaces and, on her, it somehow works.

‘Surely an unexpected kiss is romantic, especially if you’re single?’

‘No, it isn’t. I was having a nice time dancing and thinking about what kind of takeaway to get on the way home. Then bam.’

‘That’s romantic!’

‘It was wet lips locked to my face. If you’re not expecting a kiss, it means the chemistry, the body language, is all off. You have to long for that kiss, yearn for it with every fibre of your being, stop to lean against a wall in a dark alleyway and hope the other person will seize the moment and go in for a deep snog with the stars all twinkling above you.’

‘And the stench of urine all around you, presumably,’ I remark. ‘If, in this hypothetical situation, we’re in a dark alleyway.’

‘All you’ll smell is the musk of your lover’s body,’ Henny tells me resolutely, crossing her arms over her chest.

‘Their armpits.’

‘Their pheromones.’

This is our classic morning routine: Henny at her desk, telling me about her latest dating disaster – which seems to have involved a kiss at a tango lesson – while we both pretend to be doing work.

A glass of frogspawn appears on her desk, and I wrinkle my nose as she takes a genteel sip.

‘What is that?’ I say, pointing at the foulness in her glass.

‘It’s great for the gut, is what it is,’ she says, patting her stomach.

‘Amphibian eggs are “good for the gut”?’ I say, raising my eyebrows in extreme scepticism.

‘I don’t know, they probably are – all that protein. But these little beauties are chia seeds soaked in water. They’ve done wonders for my energy levels. Nowadays, I barely even bother with my morning snifter of cocaine.’

I don’t know if she’s joking about the cocaine, and I don’t want to know. Henny operates by different rules.

‘It looks a bit… specialist,’ I say, eyes flicking back to my emails, where another three have just pinged through.

‘Whereas your breakfast is perfectly acceptable,’ she snaps.

‘Yep,’ I say, taking a huge bite out of a yum-yum and following it with a glug of cherry Coke.

I check my phone to see if Max has replied to the message I sent him earlier, but he hasn’t. He’s left me on ‘Read’. Which is unusual for Max. He’s typically a very diligent responder and always insists on having the last message. It’s almost pathological.

Henny eyes my drink suspiciously. ‘Coke is brown water. Whoever marketed that and got it to be the biggest company in the world deserves a medal.’

‘I think your favourite illegal pick-me-upper probably had something to do with it.’

‘What?’ she says. ‘I thought that was a myth?’

‘Nope,’ I say, consulting Google for proof and holding up my can. ‘Invented in 1886. Originally contained cocaine through an extract of the coca leaf.’

‘Let me look at that,’ she says, and I hold my phone screen up to her face. This is a thing I do: proving people wrong, especially when they’re so sure of themselves, and smug about being right. I’m not proud of this trait – I suspect it’s a serious personality flaw – but I haven’t been able to train myself out of it and I don’t have the money for therapy. Even if I did have the money for therapy, I’d probably spend it on something else. Something harmful to my spiritual improvement and cholesterol.

‘Cocaine was perfectly legal then,’ she reads off my screen. ‘Hmm. Well, clearly I’d drink Coke if it actually contained coke – especially if you could get a two-litre bottle for ￡1.95.’

I hear my name. My boss is calling me, at maximum volume, which is never a good sign.

I pause outside his office door and look at his nameplate. Scotty Sandlington-Loveband.

What even is a ‘loveband’? It sounds… euphemistic, to say the least.

And not ‘Scott’, no: Scotty. Beam me the heck up already.

I slide my hand into my jacket pocket and my fingers find the trader’s token from the 1650s that Max gave me one Valentine’s Day. It’s weirdly comforting. This tiny coin, privately issued by the owner of a pub called the Blue Bell, near the terrible Newgate Prison, was made when small change issued by the government was in short supply and traders made their own tokens, for use in the local shops around their premises. Max plucked this little coin from the Thames mud – something that had been sitting there for hundreds of years until his sharp eye picked it out, and might have sat there for hundreds more. He told me afterwards that he’d discovered the Blue Bell pub was named after the blue-toned hand bell that tolled twelve times at the stroke of midnight, as a death knell, outside the cells of condemned prisoners who would be sent to the hangman’s noose the next day. We could actually go and see the infamous bell, Max told me, because it had been preserved and was on display in a local church. As he spoke, I could see in his eyes that he hadn’t realised the specialness of what he was giving me as a Valentine’s gift and that he longed to take it back, but when I offered to return the token, he wouldn’t accept – his sense of chivalry was too refined to allow it – and now that little coin makes me feel connected to him whenever we’re apart, and we seem to be apart a lot lately.

‘We have a problem, Lindy,’ Scotty says, not looking up from his computer monitor. His yellow hair is centre-parted with a liberal application of strong-hold gel and he’s munching his way through a tube of Pringles. He doesn’t offer me one. It’s this sort of self-centred, Pringle-hoarding meanness that I’ve come to expect from Scotty. Whenever I bring in food, I always offer it around to everyone, and Scotty always takes me up on a free crisp – a handful of crisps, in fact – but he never shares his own snacks, which fosters resentment in the office. At least in my corner of it.

‘I said we have a problem,’ he repeats, breaking my silent communion with his Pringles.

‘Oh dear. Another one?’ I say, faux cheerfully, but inwardly bracing for impact. I can tell by the tone of his voice that he’s going to give me a bollocking, most likely for some minor offence that wouldn’t bother him in the slightest if Henny did it. He likes Henny. She doesn’t grate on him the way I do. He finds her personality traits quirky and refreshing. Whereas every element of my character seems to leave him exasperated.

‘You’ve made another mistake, yes,’ he says, clicking his mouse button and sending off an email with a whoosh. ‘I know this is not your first choice of occupation, but this is the one you have, and it would be nice if you put some effort in.’

‘Not my first choice of occupation?’ I echo, trying to sound nonplussed, as if I have no idea what he could possibly be referring to.

I mean, he’s right: this isn’t my first choice of occupation, but how does he know that? Is he telepathic? Is that how he’s climbed his way up the greasy pole of publishing – reading everybody’s thoughts and blackmailing them?

‘Henny mentioned that you’ve been taking a jewellery-making course in the evenings with a view to starting your own business. Silversmithing and semi-precious gemstone-setting, correct?’

Bloody Henny. You just can’t tell her anything. A shameless blabber. This is exactly why I have to stop going for after-work drinks when she invites me. She’s just so fun, though, that I can’t resist her.

‘It’s a hobby,’ I say, trying to ignore his smirk. ‘It’s not like I’m going to make a career out of it, which Henny knows.’

She’ll just have said it to wind him up. He already thinks I’m flaky and this will tip him over the edge.

‘Well, until you’ve leased premises in Hatton Garden, perhaps you could pay more attention to your actual job instead of sexting your boyfriend and chatting to Henrietta about absolute drivel?’

He’s got a point about the drivel, but Henny starts it and it’s not like I can just ignore her. She’s my colleague. ‘If she tells me something, I have to respond. Sitting in silence would just be rude. And I never sext in work time,’ I say. ‘That would be unprofessional.’

He raises an eyebrow at me. Once, shortly after I first started, he caught sight of a slightly risqué selfie on my phone and he hasn’t stopped alluding to it since, which I think must be a breach of the employee handbook, but I can’t find the relevant paragraph, despite quite a lot of looking.

‘Your whole modus operandi is unprofessional,’ he says. ‘Hence the problem.’

‘What did I do this time?’ I ask, a touch of hauteur in my voice.

‘You’ve photocopied completely the wrong material.’

I try to work out how I’ve managed to achieve this particular cock-up, but come up blank, because he was the person who told me which material to photocopy.

‘You said in your email the pages to photocopy and that’s exactly what I did,’ I point out. ‘I checked the numbers at least three times.’

‘That’s what I said in the first email, yes, but I sent a follow-up email with different information. Did you even bother to read my second email?’

I didn’t, but only because Henny was appalling me with her frogspawn beverage and dating disasters.

‘Um…’

I look over his shoulder to a bird sitting on the window ledge. It seems to be a crow of some kind, but it has a mutation, because a few of its wing feathers are white.

‘Please tell me, Lindy,’ he says, ‘what are you looking at that’s so much more interesting than what I am saying to you right now?’

‘A sort of… mutant crow.’