Surprise Me
Page 7

Twenty-five thousand breakfasts. Shit. How am I going to keep that interesting? We could start having kedgeree, maybe. Or spend a decade eating Japanese food. Tofu. Things like that.
‘Why are you wrinkling your nose?’ Dan stares at me.
‘No reason!’ I hastily brush down my pink floral skirt. I wear a lot of floral skirts to my office, because it’s that kind of place. Not that there’s an official dress code, but if I’m wearing anything spriggy or rosy or just pretty really, my boss Mrs Kendrick will exclaim, ‘How lovely! Oh, how lovely, Sylvie!’
When your boss is the owner of the business and has absolute power and has been known to fire people on the grounds that they ‘didn’t quite fit in’, you want to hear her saying ‘How lovely!’ So in the six years I’ve worked there, my wardrobe has become more and more colourful and girly.
Mrs Kendrick likes lemon yellow, periwinkle blue, Liberty print, frills, pearl buttons and pretty bow-clips decorating your shoes. (I found a website.)
She really doesn’t like black, shiny fabrics, low-cut tops, T-shirts or platform shoes. (‘Rather orthopaedic, dear, don’t you think?’) And as I say, she’s the boss. She may be an unorthodox boss … but she’s the boss. She likes things done her way.
‘Ha.’ Dan gives a snort of laughter. He’s been opening the post and is looking at an invitation.
‘What?’
‘You’ll love this.’ He gives me a sardonic look and turns the card round so I can read it. It’s a reception for some new medical charity being launched by an old friend of my father’s called David Whittall, and it’s taking place at the Sky Garden.
I know about the Sky Garden. It’s thirty-five floors above ground and it’s all glass and views over London. And just the thought of it makes me want to clutch at my chair and anchor myself safely to the ground.
‘Sounds just up my street,’ I say with an eye-roll.
‘That’s what I thought.’ Dan grins wryly, because he knows, only too well.
I’m so scared of heights, it’s not funny. I can’t go out on high balconies. I can’t go in a transparent lift. If I watch TV programmes where people skydive or venture out on wires, I get all panicky, even though I’m sitting safely on the sofa.
I wasn’t always like this. I used to ski, cross high bridges, no problem. But then I had the children and I don’t know what happened to my brain, but I started feeling dizzy even if I went up a stepladder. I thought it would pass in a few months, but it didn’t. When the girls were about eighteen months, one of Dan’s colleagues bought a new flat with a roof terrace, and when we went to the house-warming, I couldn’t go near the ledge to look at the view. My legs just froze. When we got home, Dan said, ‘What’s happened to you?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know!’
And I realize it’s something I should have sorted out by now. (Hypnosis? CBT? Exposure therapy? I do look it up on Google occasionally.) But it hasn’t exactly been a priority recently. I’ve had other, more pressing concerns to deal with. Like, for example …
Well. OK. So, a key fact about me: when my father died, two years ago, it was a bit of a thing. I ‘didn’t cope well’. That’s what people said. I heard them. They’d whisper it in the corner: ‘Sylvie’s not coping well.’ (My mum, Dan, that doctor character they brought in.) Which started to annoy me, actually. It begged the question: What’s ‘coping well’? How does anyone ‘cope well’ when their father, their hero, just suddenly dies in a car crash with no warning? I think people who ‘cope well’ are either deluding themselves or they didn’t have a father like mine, or perhaps they just don’t have feelings.
Maybe I didn’t want to cope well. Did they think of that?
Anyway, things went a bit haywire. I had to have some time off work. I did a couple of … stupid things. The doctor tried to put me on pills. (No, thanks.) And in the scheme of things, a fear of heights didn’t seem like such a major inconvenience.
I’m fine now, absolutely fine. Apart from the heights issue, obviously, which I will deal with, when I have time.
‘You should really go and see someone about your phobia,’ Dan says, reading my thoughts in that spooky way he has. ‘PS?’ he adds, when I don’t answer at once. ‘Did you hear me?’
‘PS’ is Dan’s occasional nickname for me. It stands for ‘Princess Sylvie’.
Dan’s whole riff is that when we met, I was the princess and he was the poor working guy. He called me ‘Princess Sylvie’ in his wedding speech and my father chimed in, ‘I guess that makes me the King!’ and everyone cheered, and Dan did a charming mock-bow to Daddy. The truth is, Daddy looked like a king, he was so distinguished and handsome. I can remember him now, his golden-grey hair burnished under the lights, his morning coat immaculate. Daddy was altogether the best-dressed man I’ve ever known. Then Daddy said to Dan, ‘Carry on, Prince Daniel!’ and twinkled in that charming way he had. And later on, the best man made a joke about this being a ‘royal wedding’. It was all really funny.
But as time has gone on – maybe because I’m a bit older now – I’ve got tired of being called ‘Princess Sylvie’. It rubs me up the wrong way; makes me flinch. I’m wary of saying anything to Dan though, because I have to be tactful. There’s a bit of history. A bit of awkwardness.
No, not ‘awkwardness’. That sounds too extreme. It’s just … Oh God. How do I put this, without …?
OK. Another key fact about me: I was brought up in a fairly privileged way. Not spoiled, definitely not spoiled, but … treated. I was Daddy’s girl. We had money. Daddy originally worked in the airline industry as an executive, then received some huge windfall of shares when his airline was taken over, and started his own consultancy. And it did brilliantly. Of course it did. Daddy had the kind of magnetic personality that attracted people and success. If he was travelling first class with a celebrity, by the end of that flight he’d have that celebrity’s card and an invitation to have drinks.
So we didn’t just have money, we had perks. Expensive flights. Special treatment. I have so many photos of me as a child, in the cockpit of some plane or other, wearing the captain’s hat. In my early childhood we owned a house in Los Bosques Antiguos, that gated development in Spain where famous golfers get married in Hello! We even hung out with a few of them. We had that kind of life.
Whereas Dan … didn’t. Dan’s family are lovely, really lovely, but they’re a sensible, modest family. Dan’s father was an accountant and he’s very big on saving. Very big. He started saving for his house deposit when he was eighteen. It took him twelve hard years, but he did it. (He told me that story the very first time I met him, and then asked if I had a pension.) He would never whisk the whole family off to Barbados on a whim, like my father did once, or go shopping at Harrods.
And don’t get me wrong: I don’t want trips to Barbados or shopping trips to Harrods. I’ve told Dan that a million times. But still, Dan is a bit … what’s the word? Prickly. That’s it. He’s prickly about my background.
What’s frustrating is that he wasn’t like that when we first got together. He and Daddy really got on. We’d go out sailing, all four of us, and have a great time. I mean, Daddy was obviously far better at sailing than Dan, who’d never done it before, but it was OK, because they respected each other. Daddy would joke that he could do with Dan’s eagle eye overlooking his accounts team – and he did genuinely ask Dan’s advice a few times. We were all relaxed and easy.