Alphabet Weekends - Elizabeth Noble [67]
Her companion on the roller-coaster of her life was Rose, whose own life was more of a steam train, which, thankfully, left her limitless energy to deal with Natalie. They’d met in French tutorials in the first term of the first year, shared a fridge shelf in the second, and an incredibly ropy apartment in Carcassonne in the third, during the obligatory six months’ living abroad. Rose worked in Reception at a beautiful old hotel. Natalie had an unhappy love affair with the bell-boy. She thought he looked like a young Richard Burton, which Rose let slide, and when she wasn’t lying happily in bed with him, or unhappily on the sofa without him, she worked on the travel and weather desk of a local radio station.
So, university had brought her half a dozen broken hearts and a best friend in the form of Rose. If she could tolerate all that wailing and gnashing of teeth squeezed into four years, the rest of life should have been a breeze. But she was no nearer a career.
She’d done different things for a while. She’d taught English as a foreign language to sullen European teenagers for a couple of years, and she, Bridget and Rose had gone travelling after Bridget had qualified as a nurse. Then Natalie had fallen back into radio. Which was okay. She didn’t love it, but Mike hadn’t joined the station back then; so she didn’t hate it either. She’d worked on the drivetime show, which meant she didn’t have to get up early, and the hosts were young and energetic. One, Georgie, did the breakfast show on a major London network now – she was the main presenter’s much funnier sidekick – and the other had moved into kids’ television. They’d had a lot of fun, and it didn’t really matter that Natalie wasn’t ‘getting anywhere’ fast.
And then she had met Simon again.
‘God, Tom. I was just waiting to give it all up and be Simon’s wife.’
‘Come on, you can’t be serious. This is the twenty-first century.’
‘I know. But I think I was. I think that’s what I thought would happen. That there was no real point in flogging myself silly trying to get on, or even trying to find something I was really good at, because I was waiting to stop.’
‘Natalie!’
Tears welled in her eyes. ‘My God. What a stupid, stupid woman. So now I’m sitting here, and I’m thirty-five bloody years old, and I hate my job, in which I am subservient to a complete prat, and the guy I waited years for has buggered off and left me. Great. All this time I was worrying about my love life and not noticing that my career was in the toilet too. My life has no meaning.’
‘But plenty of melodrama! Don’t be daft! Your life isn’t short of meaning – a lack of focus and momentum, maybe, but thirty-five isn’t old, you know.’
‘Depends what time frame you’re working to.’
‘And you’ve always been working to the wrong one, by the sound of it.’ He smiled at her.
‘Is that a patronising smile?’
‘No.’
‘You’d be entitled. I mean, look at you. You’re the same age as me, and you weren’t even as clever as me at school,’ Tom raised an eyebrow, ‘and yet here you are, with your own company and your own flat…’
‘You’ve got your own place.’
‘Yeah. The deposit was paid by my poor father, while Bridget – who works in the NHS, for God’s sake – and Susannah, with those bloody coffee ads she did after drama school, contribute to the mortgage.’
‘So do you!’
Natalie sat sulkily.
‘What did Simon think about all this?’
‘I don’t know. It wasn’t really about my career, was it?’
She had that right. Tom associated Simon with a lot of things, not many of them good, but pretty much all of them connected to his flourishing career as a surgeon.
He remembered