Life Swap Page 10

  ‘Hey, Rich!’ A tall man in a baseball cap, cradling a Starbucks coffee, waves to Richard from across the playground. ‘How’s it going?’ He wanders up, shaking Richard by the hand.

  ‘Hey, Steve, how’s the world of Hedge Funds?’

  ‘Great. Beats the Street. No commuting, no hassle, and what a market. We’re up ten plus year-to-date. How ’bout that KKD trade?’

  ‘Not bad.’ Richard starts looking around for the kids.

  ‘Come on,’ Steve grins. ‘You guys must have made boatloads. What did you take on that – five bucks?’

  ‘Well…’ Richard shrugs.

  ‘More than that?’ Steve raises an eyebrow. ‘Come on, how much did they hit you for?’

  ‘I don’t kiss and tell,’ Richard says. ‘Listen, I’ve got to go find the kids,’ and with a wave he quickly leaves.

  Richard can’t stop worrying about money. Mostly, he tries to keep these worries to himself, but when he does mention his concerns to Amber, she teases him, tells him not to be so ridiculous, he is a Winslow after all, not to mention the most successful Winslow of this past generation.

  He’s trying to relax, but every month his Platinum American Express bills arrive, and every month he gives Amber a pep talk, explains that she has to curb her spending, that she can’t just buy everything she wants just because she wants it, and that next month he expects the bill to be lower, and the next month the bill is even higher.

  ‘But it’s the League gala coming up,’ she had crooned to him one night, after his anger had dispersed somewhat. ‘I can’t wear Gap to the gala. I’m on the committee. I have to look good,’ she’d said, kissing his neck in a way usually guaranteed to make him forget all his worries.

  ‘Several thousand dollars?’ he had gasped, attempting to push her away.

  ‘It’s Oscar de la Renta,’ she’d whispered, straddling his lap in a way she didn’t tend to do much these days. ‘It’s a classic,’ she’d whispered again, reaching down with her right hand, and soon he hadn’t thought about anything much at all.

  It had been so different when they met. In the beginning, those heady, early days, he had loved that Amber wasn’t a gold-digger. He was so used to the high-maintenance Manhattan socialites that Amber was a breath of fresh air. She may have looked high-maintenance, but he quickly discovered that she painted her own nails, dyed her own hair in the bathroom sink, and bought her exquisitely tailored clothes at huge discounts from Loehmanns.

  He’d never met anyone that resourceful before, never met anyone so seemingly uninterested in finding Mr Right, or Mr Rich, to keep them in a manner to which they had always been accustomed – Park Avenue and Prada.

  He would go to parties all the time and meet these gorgeous girls, each one thinner, blonder and prettier than the next, and at the mention of his name – Richard Winslow III – he would see their eyes widen slightly in recognition, notice that suddenly they were placing a hand on his arm rather more often than was altogether necessary, leaning in and laughing as they flicked their hair around, even if what he was saying wasn’t the slightest bit funny.

  Amber had been different. Where the others were flirtatious, she was cool. Where they were keen, she was diffident. Where they were eager, she was nonchalant. In the beginning she was a challenge. After all, who was this woman who didn’t want him? She wasn’t as thin, as blonde or as pretty as everyone else, and yet they all wanted him. She intrigued him, and part of that intrigue was her background, the fact that she didn’t come from money, didn’t need money, didn’t even seem to particularly want money.

  When they had started living together they lived like every other couple on the Upper West Side. Sunday brunches at Sarabeth’s, strolling through the park in sweats and sneakers, both of them in matching baseball caps.

  Jared had been born at Mount Sinai. They had subsequently turned their dining room in their one-bedroomed apartment into a makeshift nursery, then moved ten floors down to a two-bedroomed apartment in the same building, and then, when Amber discovered she was pregnant again, they had decided to look further afield.

  They had looked at Westchester, but neither of them felt particularly at home there. The New York Times had recently run a piece saying Highfield, Connecticut, was the hottest place for young families and Wall Street hotshots, and both of them had immediately sped up there, had strolled down pretty Main Street for an ice cream at the old-fashioned ice-cream parlour, and had decided, by the time they reached the other end, that Highfield was home.

  At first glance Highfield appeared to have country charm galore, to be the quintessential New England town, with just a touch of city sophistication. There were art galleries dotted along Main Street, proving the old stories that Highfield had started as a small creative community of artists and writers.

  They had walked into a realtor’s office, Jared in his stroller, and before they knew it were looking at properties, and compared to Manhattan real estate prices this seemed to be a bargain.

  Within six months they had packed up their apartment and bought the house that was to become the house of their dreams. Richard’s bonus had been a small fortune that year, and they were able to build exactly what they wanted, no compromise.

  If only he’d known then what he knew now.

  At first it had felt that they had more of a simpler life, it had felt quieter, more peaceful, more real than Manhattan. Richard would commute on the train every day, and as they passed from New York into Connecticut he would feel able to breathe again, as if all the tensions and stresses of the day were leaving him as he crossed the state line.

  He had loved looking out of the window and seeing tree tops. Waking up in the morning to see a herd of deer grazing at the hostas in their front yard, which he knew would send Amber into a fury, but was nonetheless magical.

  And he had loved their house, both the sixties colonial they had torn down, and the huge house they had built from scratch in its place. Their huge, brand new house that a jealous person might describe as a ‘McMansion’, but which was exactly the sort of house Richard had always dreamt of living in.

  The house had everything Richard could possibly want. A cherry-panelled library, a gas Viking barbecue next to the swimming pool, room for a tennis court should he so desire, and a fully decked-out screening room in the basement.

  He had loved everything about their house, but particularly that everything was brand, spanking, new. And it had been so much fun, spending money! Walking into Rakers and dropping a few thousand on some suits, hitting Circuit City for the latest and greatest Plasma flat-screen television for the family room.

  Amber and Richard had spent and spent and spent – how different from the way Richard grew up, and how much fun to be able to see something you wanted, and just pull out a credit card and buy it without thinking twice.

  The Winslows had always been cautious about money, had felt the pressure to keep up appearances despite having nothing. Richard’s mother had a wardrobe of Chanel – albeit thirty years old. His father wore the same sports coat at seventy that he had been wearing for almost fifty years. The more the coat frayed, the more time he would spend cutting off the fraying edges.

  Richard had of course offered, if not to support them, then at least to buy his father a new coat, to treat his mother to some new clothes, but his parents were far too proud to accept a gift of money from their son, and this is the way they had always lived, it was far too late to change those habits now.

  The irony, Richard now realizes, is that growing up he and his siblings were always told they ought to pretend to have no money. Heaven forbid any of them would be so déclassé or nouveau as to display their wealth with ostentatious jewellery or the latest sports cars.

  Richard had thus assumed that they did have money, but that people like the Winslows just pretended not to have any. It didn’t occur to him that if they had actually had money, their home, Templeton Hill, might have been heated once in a while. That Richard wouldn’t have gone to sch
ool in all his older brother’s cast-offs, even when they were well past their sell-by date and flapping around his ankles, Richard being by far the tallest in the family.

  Through school – Exeter followed by Brown – the one indulgence paid for by Richard’s wealthy uncle – Richard had continued to assume that the Winslow family money was tied up somewhere, in trusts or funds or something, and it was only when he started working that he finally realized there wasn’t anything left.

  Nothing other than Templeton Hill, the vast, rambling, crumbling family estate on the shores of a pond in Brookline, Massachusetts, a house that required more maintenance than the Winslows had been able to provide since the 1930s, a house that was slowly rotting away.

  Templeton Hill, or Templeton, as the family referred to it, had been one of the great Eastern estates. Even now, if you should come across a book on famous American architecture, or great estates on the East coast, or perhaps in a bored moment if you should decide to google the subject, you will find Templeton foremost amongst all the houses listed.

  The photographs of Templeton you will see show the house in its former glory. Set far back from the road, at the end of driveway three-quarters of a mile long and lined with linden trees that are supposed to have been pruned to perfection but have long since become overgrown and diseased, lies the sprawling white clapboard prettiness of Templeton.

  Because Templeton is pretty. It alludes less to grandeur, and more to elegance. It is a gracious, low-slung Georgian clapboard house, perfectly symmetrical with two wings flanking a large gravel courtyard, now mostly green with the weeds pushing their way aggressively and persistently through the small sand-coloured stones.

  From a distance, as you round the driveway and see the house nestled at the end like a pearl in an oyster, she is breathtaking. And yet, drawing closer, you will see the paint peeling from the clapboard, the wooden balustrades that have almost rotted away, the window frames that are splintered and raw.

  Richard always thought that Templeton Hill was the most beautiful house he had ever seen, the most beautiful house he would ever see, but now, now that he lives in his palace of granite and marble and polished wooden floors, Templeton seems like Miss Havisham. Longing for better days, longing to be rescued and delivered back to her former glory, cloaked in tattered, decaying splendour that still manages to give the visitor a glimpse of what she once was.

  In her heyday Templeton Hill had been glorious, and the parties held there by Richard’s grandparents, and great-grandparents before that, were legendary. In summer the parties were held on the sweeping lawns that led down to the water, past the gazebo that always served as an illicit meeting place for secret liaisons between lovers.

  All of Boston’s high society, the crème de la crème, gathered on those lawns, the Forbes and Cabot families amongst them, resplendent in tuxedos and elegant ball gowns, all toasting one another their beauty, their riches, their very wonderfulness.

  Everything had been wonderful. Everyone who lived at Templeton led charmed lives until the stock market crash of 1929. Everything the Winslows had was there one day, and gone the next. Everything, that is, except for Templeton, which they managed to cling on to, despite not having the funds to maintain it.

  The staff had to go, most of the good furniture had to go. Richard’s grandfather became a salesman, travelling door to door selling cigarette boxes, making just enough money to feed his family and to hang on to Templeton until Richard’s father, Richard Winslow II, inherited it.

  Templeton had originally had 360 acres, but Richard II managed to hang on to it by gradually selling off the land. Now Templeton has a mere 15 acres, enough for the family to retain a vestige of the privacy they once had, to avoid seeing the new developments that have sprung up around them during the boom years of the eighties and nineties.

  In many ways, Richard’s childhood had been idyllic. He remembered always being outside with his brothers and sisters, canoeing down the river, crawling to the top of the dusty old barn during games of hide and seek.

  He wanted the same thing for his children. He had visions of taking Jared and Gracie boating, teaching them to fish, to sail. Playing baseball with Jared in a large green field. He wanted them to experience what he had experienced when he was a child: fields and green and trees. It was why they were so keen to move out of Manhattan; what he thought he was getting when he moved to Highfield.

  It’s only now that he realizes his mistake. Perhaps it’s just that Amber has fallen into the wrong crowd, but everywhere they go she knows people. They walk into restaurants and immaculately groomed women, women who he knows would not look the slightest bit out of place on Madison Avenue, look Amber up and down before deciding whether or not to say hello.

  Richard is strong enough in himself to resist this. He’s a Winslow after all, has generations of the family name to bolster his security, but he sees how Amber has changed, how she is trying to compete, how all this stuff she surrounds herself with is just Amber getting caught up in keeping up with the Joneses.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said to her, just last week, when they were sitting down to a quiet dinner in the kitchen after the kids had gone to bed. ‘None of this stuff matters,’ he said. ‘What’s important is family, and having each other. Who cares what they think? That isn’t why we moved here, and I hate the way you seem to change when you’re around them, how inadequate you seem to feel.’

  Amber puffed herself up. ‘I don’t feel inadequate,’ she protested. ‘You just don’t understand what it’s like. I have to look a certain way here.’

  ‘But why? What’s wrong with dressing to please yourself? Do you really care so much about all these damn labels? You barely even knew what Prada was when we met, and now you can practically reel off this season’s collection.’

  Amber grimaced. ‘I know. It’s a bit disgusting, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is disgusting. These aren’t the things that matter. Why do they suddenly matter to you so much?’

  Amber sighed. ‘They don’t really. I suppose I just get caught up in it. I do look back at the days before we moved here and think that life would be so much easier if it were simpler, if we didn’t live in a place where everyone was so competitive.’

  ‘We could move,’ Richard said, hopefully.

  ‘But we love our house,’ Amber shrugged. ‘And the schools here are wonderful, and in some ways we have wonderful friends. Why rock the boat when most of what we have here is so good?’

  Richard didn’t say anything. Amber is right. In many ways they are very happy here, and the kids adore their schools. Why rock the boat indeed?

  After the playground Richard whisks the kids up to Borders, the fathers’ play destination of choice on the weekend if rain clouds threaten to strike. He plants the children firmly in the children’s section, then wanders over to the magazine rack to browse. He flicks through The Robb Report, Forbes and Newsweek, then idly picks up a selection for Amber. The women’s glossies are mixed in with imports, and he ends up with this week’s US Weekly, People magazine, American Marie Claire and the June edition of the UK import, Poise!.

  If only he knew, standing in line on this beautiful May day, waiting to pay, what he was doing, he would turn around and put Poise! back on those shelves in a heartbeat. Richard didn’t notice the cover strapline: LIFE SWAP!!! And even if he had, how on earth could a magazine cover make the slightest bit of difference to his life?

  Oh if only he knew.

  Chapter Ten

  ‘Are you completely mad?’ Kate’s voice is giggling on the end of the phone. ‘I was in the newsagent’s, and I picked up Poise!, and I’ve just finished reading your spread on Life Swap. I’m in shock. Are you seriously going to do this?’

  ‘I don’t know why you’re so surprised,’ Vicky says in a huff. ‘After all, it was your idea.’

  ‘What do you mean it was my idea?’

  ‘You said that thousands of women would love to swap lives with me, that the grass
was always greener.’

  ‘Well yes, but I didn’t expect you to actually go ahead and do it! Who do you think will respond anyway? I’d never do something like that. Would anyone normal do something like that?’

  ‘For God’s sake, Kate!’ Vicky practically shouts. ‘You were the one saying you’d give your eye teeth to have my life.’

  ‘Yes, but I was just saying it. I wasn’t actually planning on doing it! Although I have to give credit to myself – it is a brilliant idea. Unless of course you get complete nutcases answering, in which case it could be a bit dangerous. But I’m dying to find out what kind of women write in. Have you had any letters yet?’

  ‘Truth?’ Vicky smiles.

  ‘Truth.’

  ‘So far the issue’s been out a week and we’ve had two hundred and fourteen emails, and sixty-two letters.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘But who are they?’

  ‘Well that’s the interesting thing. Mostly they’re exactly what you’d expect. Regular women who are a bit bored, who are looking to shake their lives up a bit, or who feel there must be something more out there and who think this might give them the push they’ve been waiting for.’

  ‘So have you been in touch with any of them yet?’

  ‘You’re joking! We’re still sorting them out into the yes, no and maybe piles, and God knows how many more letters we’ll get.’

  ‘Any of them sound like nutcases yet?’

  ‘Yup. Hang on…’ Vicky clicks on her email, opening up the absolutely not folder. ‘Here, listen to this one: Dear Vicky Townsley, I was reading the current issue of Poise! when I came across your fascinating feature, and I thought you might be very interested in hearing about my current situation. Although I know you are looking to swap lives with a married woman with children, I am currently a man in the process of undergoing an operation to fully transform myself into a woman. I thought that following me through the process, particularly with regard to how it affects my wife and three teenage children, would make a fascinating story for Poise!. I look forward to hearing from you. Warmest regards, Elisabeth (Bert) Parkinson.’