 Living
Dangerously
Polly Cameron is happy being thirty-five and celibate,
living in a small Cotswold town with a possessive cat for company
and a Rayburn for comfort. After all, a relationship would only
complicate things …
But Polly’s life is already complicated. In
addition to her job in the Whole Nut café and her part in
the ‘Save Our High Street’ campaign, there’s her
pottery career to get off the ground. Not to mention dodging the
efforts everyone to find her a husband …
‘Living Dangerously’ is a deliciously
funny look at rural life, with an array of hilariously depicted
characters and a heroine with more than her fair share of biting
wit and innocent charm
Chapter One
Denied even a spritzer’s worth of Dutch courage, Polly ran
her fingers despondently up the side of her glass. It was going
to be a dreadful evening.
She could see the man Melissa was dying for her to meet from the
corner of her eye, having had him discreetly pointed out as she
entered the room. And, really, she should tell Melissa outright
that there was no earthly chance of them hitting it off. He was
so tall, so well tailored, so thoroughly grown up.
Polly, aware that her just-washed, variegated hair would only defy
gravity for so long, wished she’d made the time to get it
cut. One comb had already slithered down her cleavage. Her large
greenish-brown eyes were her best feature, but, as she was a firm
believer in ‘putting on a happy face’ the kohl and mascara
had gone on with rather a heavy hand. The result was a sleazy sexiness
which matched her generous figure and low-cut, clinging velvet dress,
but not her wallflower, party-pooper mood. Melissa’s spare
man would take one look at Polly and run.
But Melissa had got her here under false pretences. This was no
‘cosy evening, just a few friends’ – there couldn’t
be fewer than ten couples at this gracious gathering. And if you
lay on a maid, even a small one, whose white cap keeps falling over
her eyes and whose English is more shattered than broken, the occasion
is definitely formal. Melissa deserved to see her matchmaking fail.
Polly tried to attend to the difficulties the woman opposite had
getting her child into the right kindergarten. The woman was supremely
elegant. Her bouclé suit had the clean lines and distinctive
buttons which, even Polly recognized, defined it as ‘designer’.
Her chunky gold jewellery may have been either Butler and Wilson
or Cartier, but it was perfectly placed and balanced. Every gleaming,
conditioned, dark brown hair on this woman’s head was impeccably
upswept and confined. Her make-up was subtle yet effective; she
had enormous style.
Yet when talking aobut her children she showed touching vulnerability.
According to her, child-rearing was a highly technical business,
fraught with difficulties. At any stage, the whole thing could go
horribly, irredeemably, wrong.
It wasn’t enough to love them, and keep them warm and fed,
and, eventually, send them to the local school. This primitive method
was far too haphazard – any offspring who wasn’t an
absolute genius would fail to emerge from the primeval slime, let
alone get into one of the professions. No, the way to have babies
nowadays was to consult the experts at every stage, from the selection
of your pre-pregnancy diet advisor through to the crammer who would
get your child into the right Oxbridge college. Without this expertise,
you might as well forget it. The wrong gynacologist, anaethetist,
nanny agency, and the little son and heir would never fulfil his
potential. And when you got into the business of the right school
– well …
Polly offered a brief prayer of gratitude that so far she’d
managed to suppress her maternal instincts. She’d never be
able to afford all that specialist help, or even get throught the
reading list.
Oh, why hadn’t she just told Melissa that she was ill and
couldn’t come to her awful dinner party? Because she knew
that Melissa would have gone on issuing invitations until Polly
caved in and accepted. Their friendship, left so happily behind
at shool, must be renewed. Melissa was no less daunting now than
she had been at fifteen. If anything, the intervening years had
added substance to her schoolgirl bossiness, and Melissa had always
had the ability to make Polly do as she was told.
Cover Illustration: Mary Claire Smith; Calligraphy:
Stephen Raw
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