In Bed With Lord Byron

spiritual person, Lucy.’
    I was quite confounded, until, as I was pouring the tea, I noticed a copy of
Cosmo
lying open on the surface, with the article, ‘Have you been born again?’ face up. Very
clever, Byron, I thought. You’ve done your homework. You’re adapting to 2005 fast. You’ve already sussed out that rhyming couplets aren’t a good chat-up line around here and
you’ve moved on.
    ‘Look,’ I said to Mum, ‘I really need to be alone and have a bath, and Anthony’s coming over later. Maybe you could chat with Byron a bit longer and then let yourselves
out. I’m not being rude, I just . . .’
    My mum gave me a hug and said of course.
    As I made my way over to the bathroom, I saw Sally looking at Byron with big eyes, her knees brushing his, her hand curled in her hair as she said, ‘God, that’s just
so
manly
of you to practise fencing as a hobby. I mean, I know new men are all the rage, but it’s kind of refreshing to know a
real
man . . .’
    iii) The dreaded dinner
    This has to be temporary, I told myself. I mean, it’s not too horrible of me to break them up now. After all, they’ve only just
met
.
    Well, except for the fact that they dated two and a half years ago in New York. But that was a lifetime ago.
    I sat down on my sofa and ran down the corridors of my memory, flinging open doors frantically, desperate to recall every single minute detail.
    I remembered the night that Anthony had told me about Kerry. We’d been lying in bed together, sharing a postcoital chat about our exes. We were still fascinated by each other’s
histories then, by finding pieces of each other’s pasts and slotting them together to make full pictures. I remember teasing Anthony about his wild time in New York and then asking if there
had been anyone special. He’d sighed. I remembered that sigh now. It had left me feeling cold, and acid with jealousy. And then he’d told me about Kerry, his only serious relationship,
his mermaid in a sea of one-night stands. The brevity of detail had only made it worse: I’d felt there was something he was trying to hide. Eventually he’d confessed: ‘OK, I did
love her. I admit it. I couldn’t even admit it to myself at the time, let alone to her. I feel bad about the way I hurt her. I mean, she proposed to me, can you believe that?’ No, I
said, I couldn’t. Anthony had explained then that his commitment phobia had made him break up with her coldly and callously; it had been, in part, the reason he’d jumped at the chance
to come to London. But that had been the behaviour of the old Anthony, the Anthony who had been young and flighty and nervy. Now he had softened and matured and learnt to trust and love a lot
more.
    Shit, I thought. Shit times a trillion. Tonight I’m going to have to be amazing. Byron is going to have to be amazing. The dinner is going to have to be amazing.
    And then I remembered that I couldn’t even cook.
    Byron wasn’t much help. Whilst I scurried off to Waitrose and M&S for ingredients, he flipped through
The Guardian
and discovered our present-day Poet
Laureate. When I came back, laying out the ingredients on my worktop and desperately scouring Nigella and about six other cookery books, he kept making sarky remarks about Andrew Motion’s
poetry. I detected a hint of jealousy in his comments, but the main thing was that I couldn’t care less about his testosterone-fuelled rants.
    ‘Byron,’ I said, trying to be strong and firm, ‘you have to help me cook. If you don’t, I’m sending you back in that time machine.’
    ‘Only if you sleep with me,’ he said idly.
    ‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’ My jaw dropped. ‘Even after all I’ve told you about Germaine?’
    Byron shrugged, a smile flickering at his lips.
    ‘OK, thanks so much.’ I stormed into the kitchen, banging pots and sieves and plates. Then I stormed back into the living room. ‘And by the way, you have to behave tonight. You
have to pretend to be my boyfriend, which means I can’t introduce you as Lord Byron, OK?’
    ‘Why not? Your mother’s invited me to a WI meeting to make broccoli jam. She thinks I’m going to be a real hit with the ladies if I tell them my name.’
    ‘There is
nobody
to hit on tonight. It’s just going to be a nice dinner with Anthony and Kerry, his new girlfriend,’ I said pointedly, trying to stem the acid jealousy
flowing into my stomach. ‘So I can’t introduce you as Lord Byron.’
    ‘Why