Perfect on Paper by Gillian Harvey (top 20 books to read txt) 📕

loud when he was making important decisions such as whether to wear daring red socks or stick to his habitual grey.

One day in three he might get a shot at doing a piece to camera. Last week, he’d interviewed a woman who believed she was in love with her pot plant.

‘Don’t you see?’ he’d said to Clare when she’d made a joke about it. ‘This is a foot in the door of serious TV journalism! There’s talk of me getting my own weekly section.’

‘Your fringe looks fine,’ she said now, impatiently, as he continued to fiddle with it.

‘Are you sure? It’s not too nineties?’

‘No! Anyway, what do you think I should do?’

There was a silence.

‘Lasagne?’ he said at last, his tone uncertain.

‘What?’

‘Lasagne.’

‘Toby! I wasn’t even talking about … I was talking about work for God’s sake!’

‘Sorry! Sorry,’ his hand returned to his fringe. ‘Look, I was listening. It’s just …’

‘But you weren’t, were you?’

‘Yes. You were worried about your, um, work problem. Well …’ he paused for so long she thought he might have fallen into a coma. ‘I think you should do what you feel deep inside, you know, what your gut tells you,’ he continued eventually, patting his lower stomach for emphasis.

‘Hmm,’ she said, wondering what would happen if she really let her gut speak for her. Irritable bowel syndrome – a side-effect of being a successful but busy solicitor – meant that she was always acutely aware of exactly what her gut wanted to say, and was often desperately trying to prevent it from expressing itself in the middle of the office.

‘Anyway,’ Toby continued, ‘try not to worry.’ He patted her leg and began rearranging his fringe again in the reflection. ‘It’s only work.’

What happened, she wondered briefly, to the attentive, mildly ambitious man she’d married fifteen years ago? The boy with a guitar who’d wooed her when they were at university? The man who, until he’d been catapulted into the realm of Z-list celebrity, had been her soulmate?

In six short months he’d started a regime of ‘self care’ that would befit a top model. Special shampoos, endless face creams – she’d even caught him plucking his nose hair with the tweezers she reserved for her eyebrows.

‘That’s disgusting!’ she’d said, grabbing them from his hand. ‘Get your own!’

He’d looked at her, tears in his eyes. ‘But I’m shooting tomorrow.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, you don’t have to cry about it!’

‘I’m not!’

Now he had clearly been thinking so much about his fringe that he’d forgotten to actually pay attention to what she was saying. She wasn’t even as important as a little bit of hair.

‘What I feel inside about what?’ she challenged.

‘About, you know … the work thing.’ His face – always an open book – registered almost pure panic.

‘Toby,’ she said, sitting forward slightly. ‘You haven’t been listening to anything, have you?’

‘I …’ he began indignantly.

Just then, the door slammed and Alfie arrived home from football practice. Looking taller than he ought to for his fourteen years, he loped into the room. ‘What’s for dinner?’ he asked.

It wasn’t even, Clare thought, as she furiously stirred the gravy, that she expected much of her family. Just vague acknowledgements from time to time that she was there, that she existed. Even their daughter Katie, who until she’d turned twelve six months ago had been Clare’s little sidekick, seemed recently to have been flooded with the kind of hormonal indifference towards her that ought by rights to be reserved for girls who at least had the good grace to be in their teens.

Looking up now, Clare caught a glimpse of her reflection in the chrome of the extractor. A blur of beige skin, slightly red nose – which always seemed to happen when she was stressed – and limp brown hair that she’d spend ages volumizing every morning with mousse and a hairdryer just to have it gradually reduce over the course of the day like a disappointing soufflé, or a cake that had been removed too soon from the oven.

Toby wasn’t the only one who needed to dial-up the self care. But she couldn’t afford the time to groom herself! Who could slap on face packs or get manicures when they were juggling hundreds of balls? She wasn’t Dynamo, or Houdini, or Angelina frickin’ Jolie.

‘Katie,’ she called. ‘Any chance of a hand with the cutlery?’

Silence.

Eventually Clare laid the table herself, flinging the knives and forks down with slightly more aggression than was probably necessary. As a small act of revenge, she gave Toby the dodgy fork; one of the prongs was bent after Alfie had tried to use it to press the reset button on an old mobile.

That’d teach him.

‘Dinner’s ready!’ she said at last, and suddenly it seemed the collective family deafness was cured as they all came to the table, carefully laying their phones next to their plates as a kind of shield in case they were actually expected to converse with one another.

‘Well, this looks nice,’ Toby said brightly as she plonked his plate of cottage pie and carrots down in front of him. ‘Only …’

‘Only what?’

Clearly Toby hadn’t sensed the tone, as he carried on talking.

‘Only … I’m sure you said you were going to make lasagne?’

Chapter Two

‘Come on, come on,’ Clare hissed and turned the key in the ignition again. Not even a flicker of life. She glanced at her watch and felt a wave of panic. She couldn’t be late today – she barely had enough time to get everything done as it was.

Two minutes earlier, Toby had purred out of their driveway in the new silver Mercedes he’d insisted he needed to keep up with the others in the studio. ‘They’ve given me my own parking space,’ he’d said when making his case for the purchase a few weeks ago. ‘It’s got my name on it. Well, my initials … I can’t park a Volvo next to Samantha’s Bentley!’

The cost of the finance had meant Clare had had to delay upgrading her