A Funny Thing About Love Read online

  rebecca

  farnworth

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Also By Rebecca Farnworth

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781407071503

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Arrow Books in 2010

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Copyright © Rebecca Farnworth 2010

  Rebecca Farnworth has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Arrow Books The Random House Group Limited 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London, SW1V 2SA

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  Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm

  The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 0 099 52718 3

  The Random House Group Limited supports The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), the leading international forest certification organisation. All our titles that are printed on Greenpeace approved FSC certified paper carry the FSC logo. Our paper procurement policy can be found at www.rbooks.co.uk/environment

  Typeset in Baskerville by Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk, Stirlingshire

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Cox & Wyman, Reading, RG1 8EX

  For J

  Also by Rebecca Farnworth

  Valentine

  Rebecca Farnworth has worked as a celebrity ghost-writer. She lives in Brighton with her husband and three children. A Funny Thing About Love is her second novel.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to everyone at Random House, particularly my editor Gillian Holmes and Kate Elton for all their input and enthusiasm for the book. And thanks to Amelia Harvell and all in publicity, marketing and sales.

  Thank you to my wonderful agent, Maggie Hanbury, clever, witty and wise and always to be relied on and of course to her team Stuart and Henry (Wobbly Worms and Peanut Grigiot all round!).

  Thank you to my family for keeping my feet well and truly on the ground and for making me realise what’s important.

  And thank you to Brighton, a brilliant city.

  1

  Carmen Miller was horribly late for work. Late and hungover. She’d been up until two the night before getting outrageously drunk with Sadie, one of her closest friends. She should have known that ending the night on sambucas would be a major mistake. She was thirty-three for goodness’ sake! She didn’t even like sambuca! Where were reason and common sense when the decision was made to crack open the bottle? On a mini break together apparently, leaving Carmen free to throw caution to the wind and enter that state of drunkenness where you feel invincible. That king-of-the-world, Leonardo di Caprio standing-behind-you, emotive-music-playing feeling. She certainly didn’t feel invincible right now. She had hit the iceberg and gone down.

  She adjusted her sunglasses. It was a breezeblock-grey cloudy day with no hint of sun at the end of September, but Carmen needed the cover-up. She crossed Oxford Street, narrowly avoiding being squished by a bendy bus, and headed up Great Portland Street W1, towards Fox Nicholson where she worked as a comedy agent. According to their kick-ass blurb, Fox Nicholson were one of the ‘cutting-edge agencies, specialising in representing talent in comedy and drama’. There was nothing kick-ass or cutting-edge about Carmen today. Her mind was a woolly fog with only three thoughts bleating in it: coffee, can of coke and croissant.

  She stumbled into her favourite Italian café which had been run by the same family for donkey’s years. As soon as Rico, the shiny black-haired, good-looking-and-he-knew-it eldest son, clocked her staggering through the door he started firing up the chrome coffee machine for her skinny latte. Not that she was a creature of habit or anything. Well, not much. She’d been coming to the café for the last four years and always had the exact same thing – skinny latte and a croissant. No doubt the croissant cancelled out any benefit of the skinny latte, but Carmen loathed cereal and figured that if slim-hipped French women lived off croissants and coffee then it couldn’t do that much harm. She neglected to recall that they probably didn’t eat anything else for the rest of the day, whereas she would be back at Rico’s at lunchtime ordering a jacket potato and cheese.

  ‘Ciao, bella!’ Rico called out. Rico carried something of a torch for Carmen, which at times threatened to burst into a towering inferno, but then again as he flirted with all his female customers she didn’t take it personally. She certainly did not feel terribly bella at this moment. What was the Italian for raddled old hag with seriously dehydrated skin? Hagissima?

  ‘Ciao,’ she mumbled, then opened the fridge and grabbed a can of coke and put it on top of the glass counter, trying to avoid looking at the array of sandwich fillings. The sight of the lurid yellow egg mayonnaise next to the tuna and sweetcorn was turning her stomach quicker than a ride on a waltzer.

  ‘Rough night?’ Rico asked. God, even her sandwich man could read her like a book! And she’d spent bloody ages doing her make-up, piling on practically every single product she owned to conceal the dark shadows, brighten her eyes and put some colour into her pallid complexion in an attempt to look more girl-about-town and less night-of-the-living-dead.

  ‘I did get a bit carried away,’ Carmen admitted, handing over the money.

  ‘Lucky him,’ Rico replied wistfully. Ever since he had found out that Carmen was separated from her husband he had become blatantly inquisitive about her love life.

  ‘There is no lucky him, Rico,’ Carmen corrected. ‘Just single, embittered me and my mad friend.’

  Rico popped a croissant into a brown paper bag and snapped the lid down on Carmen’s coffee. ‘You know, I could take you out sometime,’ he said quietly, a hopeful edge to his voice. He shot an anxious look in the direction of his mother, a vast, fifty-something woman, perpetually dressed in black, who occupied the seat by the till and who was rumoured to be psychic.

  Carmen raised an eyebrow. ‘Yeah, right, I’m sure your wife w
ould love that.’

  ‘She wouldn’t mind,’ Rico persisted.

  Carmen picked up her coffee and stuffed the croissant and coke into her bag. ‘Yep, she would. Ciao.’

  ‘Quite right, Carmen, of course she would!’ came a booming voice. It was the Italian mamma, whom everyone unoriginally called Mamma Mia behind her back. Her real name was Carla. She must have hearing like a bat or else she really was psychic.

  Rico looked startled and his ‘Ciao’ had a slightly nervous ring.

  Carmen had loved working for Fox Nicholson when it had just been Nicholson, one of the smaller agencies representing comics and also a select number of actors. Carmen specialised in comics. She’d become a comedy agent completely by chance after meeting Matthew Nicholson, the owner of the agency, at the Edinburgh festival in the late nineties where her boyfriend Nick, later to be her husband, had been performing as a comic. Matthew had signed Nick up and offered Carmen a job as PA at his agency.

  Back then she’d had no real idea of what she wanted to do. After her English degree she’d done TEFL and the travelling thing, and had even appeared on stage with Nick in a comedy sketch show. Her secret ambition had always been to write her own comedy drama. She’d even written the first episode, but she’d never been confident enough to take time off paid work to complete it and somehow she had never got round to working on it in the evening – there was always a comedy gig to go to or a DVD to collapse in front of with a bottle of wine. God only knew how T.S. Eilliot had written The Waste Land while working in a bank. Sheer will power, no doubt, and being a better person with no addiction to DVD box sets. And while Nick had encouraged her writing, he had always seen it as a hobby and never really taken it seriously.

  After a couple of years as a PA Carmen worked her way to the position of agent. Once there, she discovered that she didn’t especially like it. She lacked the killer instinct and thick layer of skin that were the essential requisites of being a good agent. However, there were compensations. Matthew was a brilliantly witty bon viveur who was great fun to be around. He had always run the small agency as an eccentric extended family, and whenever Carmen was having a tough time negotiating fees, she could always rely on Matthew to step in for her, leaving her free to do the nicer, less stressful parts of the job, like spotting talent and reading scripts. But then the recession had changed everything. Matthew had been forced to accept a buyout from Fox, a much larger, more corporate-style management company, whose sole mantra seemed to be money.

  Since then Matthew had been sidelined and the company had grown from just five agents to twelve, who had to account for practically every minute of their day. The clients were given new terms and some of them left, including Nick, which was probably for the best as it had been more than slightly awkward since the break-up. Marcus Taylor, a comic Carmen had championed, had also left and gone on to be huge in TV. Now her boss was a scary, tiny, thirty-something Australian called Tiana, who was one of those passive-aggressive types who seem to be lovely on the surface but underneath have all the compassion of a great white shark smelling blood. She knew very little about performers. All she cared about was the bottom line.

  Wearily Carmen pushed open the heavy glass front door and walked into the minimalist lobby, which had recently been refurbished. Despite being the size of a small football pitch, it was furnished only with one blood-red leather sofa and a glass coffee table at one end for visitors and a white glass reception at the other. There was an enormous, stainless-steel light fitting, which resembled a series of knives radiating out from the ceiling. No doubt it was supposed to act as a visual metaphor for how cutting-edge the company was, but to Carmen it looked like a piece of rather dangerous scrap metal. She always avoided walking underneath it, fearing that it would fall and she would be impaled by one of the vicious-looking spikes. Tiana had been behind the design, which to Carmen said everything you needed to know about her new boss. She privately thought that if Tiana had deliberately set out to design an intimidating space for the lobby she could not have done a more effective job. Not that some of the comics who came to the agency didn’t deserve a bit of intimidating – in fact, many of them deserved a lot more. Mild torture, perhaps, if such a thing existed.

  ‘Hiya,’ she called out to Daisy, one of the girls on reception – her favourite, in fact – a pixie-haired blonde who always wore black and who hated the general public. Carmen knew for a fact that she had a card pinned to her computer screen that read, ‘Do I look like a fucking people person?’ Daisy did not. She did not look like a Daisy either. She had recently morphed from a goth to an emo. Carmen wasn’t entirely sure what the difference was, but as she had already asked Daisy twice to explain it to her and had forgotten the answer, she hardly felt able to ask her again. Daisy raised her hand in greeting but didn’t take her eyes off her computer screen, where she was most likely playing Grand Theft Auto.

  Carmen knew she ought to take the stairs as a token gesture to burn off some of the thousands of calories she must have consumed the night before. She had a vague, guilty recollection that she and Sadie had eaten two bumper bags of Doritos when they’d got the two a.m. munchies; Alas, she had the will power of a gnat, and so she found herself pressing the button to the lift. She would probably end up with the thighs of an elephant, but hey, at least she would have a good memory.

  As the lift door pinged open on the fourth floor she sneaked a look along the corridor. Please don’t let me be seen by Tiana. It was nearly midday and she had no explanation for her lateness. And she’d already been ticked off last week for turning up late and missing a management meeting. She should have been sitting at her desk beavering away from the dot of half past nine. To her left was the open-plan office occupied by the three PAs and Colin the accountant, who were all focused intently on their screens. Connor the postboy was doing his rounds and he caught sight of her and winked. Carmen pretended not to notice, not wishing to encourage him. Recently he’d acquired a tattoo of Johnny Depp’s face on his shoulder in homage to his favourite actor, which he kept threatening to show her. Carmen had no desire to see a half-naked, possibly pimply eighteen-year-old, even with the lure of Johnny. But apart from Connor, the coast was clear.

  Carmen turned right towards her office and careered along the corridor at high speed, past the succession of glass-fronted mini offices occupied by other agents. The cubicles offered no privacy whatsoever to the worker inside, unless you pulled down the blinds, and then it looked as if you were up to something you shouldn’t be. Which if you were Dirty Sam, you most likely were. She had nearly reached the safety of her office when Sexy Will, Tiana’s deputy and chief comedy agent, called out her name. Bugger! She was busted! She backtracked and leaned nonchalantly against his door frame.

  Will was mid-thirties with jet-black hair, stunning blue eyes and pale skin. It was a combination that hinted at Irish ancestry, and one that Carmen had always been partial to. He was only a little taller than she was, and at five foot seven herself she usually liked her men way taller, but his gorgeous eyes and sexy smile more than compensated. There was something undeniably compelling about him. He was totally ruthless as an agent and she shouldn’t fancy him, but he had a kind of knowing, sexy sleaziness that almost made her want to go there, plus he was clever and funny. Unfortunately he was just a bit too much into toeing the company line for Carmen’s liking.

  Will was putting on his Tom Cruise, show-me-the-money act now, his blue shirt cunningly making the blue eyes seem bluer, a hands-free headset clamped to his ear as he wound up a call, telling the person on the other end, likely to be some hapless BBC Radio producer with a tiny budget, that they had to offer way more money before he would even consider mentioning their project to his client. If it had been her, Carmen knew that she would have sounded apologetic, but Will was a much smoother operator.

  He pointed to his watch, and raised an eyebrow. ‘Half day, Miller? Very naughty. I might have to discipline you.’

  They’d been exchan
ging flirtatious banter along these lines since Will had joined the company three months before, but it had never gone further. Carmen was still too raw from the break-up of her marriage, and she could never quite make up her mind whether Will was more smarmy than sexy. Plus she had made a vow a long time ago never to have a relationship with anyone she worked with, not after what had happened with Nick. Plus too the fact that she never exactly knew what Will’s relationship status was. Carmen reached for a packet of M&S Wobbly Worms from her bag with studied insouciance. Once a week, or twice on a bad week, she treated herself to the wriggly wine gums, but as she loathed the green ones she always gave them to Will. She held the packet open for him now.

  He walked over and extracted five. ‘Do you think the worms are going to distract me from my mission to find out what you’ve been up to? And if this is meant to be a bribe, couldn’t you do better than confectionery? A drink, now that would be more like it.’ He returned to his desk, sat back in his chair and put his feet up.

  At the mere mention of alcohol Carmen’s stomach lurched. She would never drink that much again. No, in future it would be a couple of white wine spritzers and then she’d switch to water. As if.

  ‘You really should have more faith in me, Will. I’ve just been seeing a potential client. We met in North London at his house as he couldn’t come into town. He’s agoraphobic, but the meeting was very productive actually.’ She fervently hoped Will couldn’t smell alcohol on her. She had sprayed on liberal quantities of Tom Ford’s White Patchouli, which she usually reserved for special occasions, but this morning had been an emergency.

  ‘Could you actually see him through those shades?’

  No wonder everything had seemed so dark! She slid the glasses on to the top of her head, careful not to mess up her fringe. She might have the hangover from hell but at least her black bob looked immaculate.