Rescue Me: An uplifting romantic comedy perfect for dog-lovers

  Sarra Manning has been a voracious reader for over forty years and a prolific author and journalist for twenty-five.

  Her seven novels, which have been translated into fifteen different languages include Unsticky, You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me, The House Of Secrets and her latest, The Rise And Fall Of Becky Sharp, published in 2018. Sarra has also written over fifteen YA novels, and light-hearted romantic comedies under a pseudonym.

  She started her writing career on Melody Maker and Just Seventeen, has been editor of ElleGirl and What To Wear and has also contributed to the Guardian, ELLE, Grazia, Stylist, Fabulous, Stella, You Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar and is currently the Literary Editor of Red magazine.

  Sarra has also been a Costa Book Awards judge and has been nominated for various writing awards herself.

  She lives in London surrounded by piles and piles of books.

  Rescue Me

  Sarra Manning

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Sarra Manning 2021

  The right of Sarra Manning to be identified as the Author of the

  Work has been asserted by her in accordance with

  the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Cover illustration © Abby Lossing

  Cover design by Jo Myler © Hodder & Stoughton

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any

  means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be

  otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that

  in which it is published and without a similar condition being

  imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance

  to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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

  eBook ISBN 978 1 529 33656 6

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.hodder.co.uk

  Dedication

  Eric the singing Pugalier, Monty and Marley, Ginger and Snoopy, Chubs, Scooby and Luna, Ambrose and Gertie, Ollie, Tag, Huxley, Oreo, Truffle, George, Mabel and Barksley, Bob, Lola, Henry, Lucy, Reggie, Harry and Mr Bingley, Bella 1, Bella 2, Bella 3, Milo 1, Milo 2, Shepsy, Spike, Doris, Gaia, Benji, Cracker, Lorenzo, Ralph, Woody, Biscuit, Rosie, Leo, Smithy, Freya, Denby, Rufus and all the other dogs of Muswell Hill past and present. But especially the lovely and gentle Oscar, now crossed over to the Rainbow Bridge, who was the original dog-share.

  ‘My little dog, a heartbeat at my feet.’ Edith Wharton

  Contents

  1 Margot

  2 Will

  3 Margot

  4 Will

  5 Margot

  6 Will

  7 Margot

  8 Will

  9 Margot

  10 Will

  11 Margot

  12 Will

  13 Margot

  14 Will

  15 Margot

  16 Will

  17 Margot

  18 Will

  19 Margot

  20 Will

  21 Margot

  22 Will

  23 Margot

  24 Will

  25 Margot

  26 Will

  27 Margot

  28 Will

  29 Margot

  30 Will

  31 Margot

  32 Will

  33 Margot

  34 Will

  35 Margot

  36 Will

  37 Margot

  38 Will

  39 Margot

  40 Will

  41 Margot

  42 Will

  43 Margot

  44 A year and a bit later

  Thanks

  In Memoriam

  1

  Margot

  Margot Millwood was a cat person. Unfortunately, no one had explained this to Percy, her cat.

  It also seemed that no one had explained to Margot’s ex-boyfriend George that after two months apart, they were getting back together.

  George had asked to meet for early drinks after work. Margot had imagined that early drinks would lead to dinner then a declaration that, like her, George had seen what was on offer on the dating apps and realised that what they’d had together hadn’t been so bad.

  Wrong!

  ‘I found a few of your things knocking about my place,’ George said, handing over a bulging bag for life, before Margot could take even one sip of her gin and tonic. ‘I can only stay for a quick drink. I have plans.’

  ‘Plans?’ Margot echoed as she cast a cursory glance inside the bag and saw an almost empty tube of bb cream and a pair of red lacy knickers that absolutely did not belong to her. She was tempted to hand them back to George with a scathing remark, but she didn’t know if they’d been washed or not. ‘These knic—’

  ‘Yeah, sorry this is so rushed, but I’m sure neither of us want to rehash the details of why we broke up,’ George continued, then downed half his bottle of fancy, locally brewed lager with almost indecent haste.

  Margot could never back down from a challenge. ‘We broke up because, after two years together, you decided that you weren’t ready to even have a conversation about when we were going to start a family and you decided to break this to me on my thirty- sixth birthday.’ Nope, she still wasn’t over it.

  ‘Only because when I took you out for your birthday meal, you told me, no, demanded, that we start trying for a baby that very night. I hadn’t even looked at the menu,’ George recalled with an aggrieved tone as Margot’s phone rang. She ignored it.

  ‘I didn’t demand that you impregnate me that very night, I just pointed out that at thirty-six, I couldn’t continue to take my fertility for granted,’ Margot reminded George. Her phone beeped with a voicemail message at the same time as George sighed long and loud.

  ‘Anyway, it’s water under the bridge now. We’ve both moved on,’ he said. ‘Really, there’s no use in holding a post-mortem, Margs.’

  There really wasn’t. Margot steepled her hands together so she wouldn’t make any threatening gestures. She didn’t want a post-mortem either, but still, George could benefit from a little advice.

  ‘Talking of moving on, can I just say that the next woman you get involved with . . . well, it would be better to tell her right from the start that you’re categorically not interested in having kids. Better to be up front than stringing her along for two years on false promises and maybes,’ Margot said coolly and not at all bitterly as, once more, her phone started to ring.

  Again, she ignored it, because she was far more interested in the way that suddenly George wouldn’t meet her gaze.

  ‘You’re already in another relationship.’ It wasn’t a question. Didn’t need to be.

  George nodded. ‘There’s no law says that I can’t be,’ he said a little defensively. ‘Are you going to answer your phone?’

  ‘Never mind my phone,’ Margot said. ‘Like I said, please don’t lead her on if you’re not serious. By the time a woman is thirty-five, her—’

  ‘ – fertility could be halved,’ George finished for her. ‘Yeah, you did mention that about a few hundred times when we were together.’

  But still, it hadn’t been enough to spur George into action apart f
rom vague platitudes about how Margot would make a great mother. Or how it would be best to wait a year or so and a couple of promotions down the line, so they could buy a house for this hypothetical family that it turned out George hadn’t really wanted.

  ‘I’m just saying. For the sake of your new girlfriend.’ No one could ever accuse Margot of being unsisterly.

  ‘Not something you need to worry about and neither does Cassie,’ George said, probably not even realising that he was puffing out his chest, proud as the plumpest pigeon.

  ‘I take it that Cassie isn’t in her thirties.’ It was obvious that she wasn’t, but George’s faux bashful smile confirmed it.

  ‘She’s twenty-six,’ George confirmed. He didn’t look even a little embarrassed to be dating a woman fifteen years younger than him. On the contrary, he looked pretty bloody chipper about it.

  Margot’s phone started ringing for the third time. By now it was a welcome relief. ‘I really must get this, it sounds like someone is trying to contact me urgently,’ Margot said, getting to her feet and quickly gathering up cardigan, handbag and the bag for life full of mouldy crap that probably wasn’t hers. ‘Lovely to catch up. Must go!’

  Of course her handbag strap was caught on the arm of her chair, so in the time it took to extricate herself, her phone stopped ringing and George had the chance to not only have the last word but deliver a pretty damning character assessment while he was at it.

  ‘The thing is, Margs, I always hoped we might go the distance, but you’re just too much.’

  Margot was completely blindsided. Also completely furious. A younger Margot might have sworn that in the future she wouldn’t be so much. But older Margot refused to make herself something less than she was.

  ‘No, you’re just too much,’ she hissed under her breath, as she fled the chichi little bar in King’s Cross, her hand digging into her bag for her phone, which was ringing and vibrating yet again. When Richard Burton had met Elizabeth Burton for the first time, he’d said that she was ‘just too bloody much’, but that was because Elizabeth Taylor was too much of all the good things that womanhood had to offer: wit, intelligence, killer curves and a pair of violet eyes. But when George, who had a very weak chin and a weak grasp of current affairs to match (there! She could finally admit it), said that Margot was too much he meant that she was needy, demanding and desperate. Margot didn’t think that she was any of those things, but she was thirty-six and time was marching on even if her prospects of being in a committed relationship weren’t.

  ‘Yes?’ she snapped as she answered the phone to a withheld number – probably someone in a call centre on another continent wanting to know if she’d recently been in an accident.

  ‘Hello?’ the caller, a woman, queried back uncertainly. ‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you for the last half hour. I’m calling about your cat. I believe you call him Percy.’

  ‘I call him Percy because that’s his name,’ Margot said evenly, though she felt very far from even. ‘Are you the person who’s stolen him?’

  Margot was used to Percy keeping his distance. In fact, he barely tolerated her presence. After a long night of catting, he’d come home and scream at Margot until she fed him. How she longed for an occasional dead bird or half-alive mouse – the tokens of love that her friends received from their cats. But just because loving someone, or a cat, was difficult, it didn’t mean that one should just give up. He was still her Percy. Though Margot’s friends called him Shitbag on account of his habit of luring Margot in with big eyes and floppy limbs as if he wanted to snuggle. He’d even begin to purr as she tickled him under his chin. Then, just as Margot dared to relax, he’d either scratch or bite her. If she were really unlucky, he’d do both. To love Percy was to always make sure that your tetanus shots were up to date.

  Over the last few months, Percy’s absences had been getting longer and longer and he was getting fatter and fatter. It was obvious that Percy was tarting himself around the neighbourhood, and Margot had had to resort to desperate measures. She’d been dripping with blood by the time she’d managed to secure a note around Percy’s collar.

  To whom it may concern,

  Percy is a very well loved, well-fed cat. Do NOT let him come into your house and do not feed him.

  My number is on his collar tag, if you need me to come and fetch him.

  ‘We haven’t stolen him, he happens to prefer it round here,’ the woman now said indignantly. Then she must have realised that technically she had catnapped him if he was on her premises, because she sighed. ‘Look, I don’t suppose you could come round?’

  Margot would have liked nothing more than to go home, change into her cosies and brood over what had gone wrong with George. She might even have cried. Not for George and his ripely fertile twenty-six-year-old new girlfriend, but because finding a man, just an average, ordinary man without commitment issues, continued to elude her.

  Not tonight, Satan. Tonight, Margot was only home long enough to grab Percy’s pet carrier, a pouch of Dreamies and a thick towel so she could retrieve her sociopathic cat from one of the beautiful big Victorian villas that Highgate was famous for.

  Margot was ushered into a double-aspect, open-plan living room with not one but two wood-burning stoves, a Warhol print of Chairman Mao on the wall above one of them, and a huge sectional sofa, which would have taken up her entire flat. On that sectional sofa were two little girls – they couldn’t be more than four and six and should absolutely have been in bed at eight o’clock on a school night – and nestled in between them, wearing a baby bonnet was Percy. He pointedly ignored her.

  ‘The thing is, you have to stop letting him in,’ Margot said to the harassed-looking woman who had answered the door and said her name was Fay and her equally harassed-looking husband, Benji. As Margot had entered, their nanny was just leaving for the day, so Margot didn’t know why either of them was quite so harassed looking. ‘He’s a cat. He’s an opportunist. But Percy is my cat and my opportunist.’

  ‘His name isn’t Percy, it’s Pudding,’ the smaller of the two girls piped up. Her chubby arm held Percy/Pudding round the neck in a vice-like grip. Soon there would be bloodshed.

  ‘If he was happy with you, then he wouldn’t keep coming here,’ her older sister said with an opaque stare, which was similar to the venomous expression on Percy’s face as he now gave Margot the full weight of his attention.

  Margot’s boss, Tansy, had told her not to get a tortoiseshell cat. ‘All cats have a tendency to be bastards but torties are the worst,’ she’d advised when Margot had been scanning cat rescue websites during kitten season a few years before. There were many times that Margot had wished that she’d listened to Tansy but now, she wasn’t giving up on her cat without a fight.

  There was bloodshed. Margot’s blood that Percy shed as she tried to herd him into his carrier, an exercise that necessitated throwing the thick towel over Percy to incapacitate him which also ensured that he couldn’t do much harm. Unfortunately, he managed to work a paw free and inflict considerable damage on Margot’s right hand, which already bore many Percy-inflicted scars.

  The little girls were crying. Fay had disappeared with the words, ‘God, I need a drink’ and Benji kept saying, ‘Are you sure he’s your cat?’

  Oh yes, he was Margot’s cat all right. The latest in a long line of men who thought that the grass was much, much greener somewhere else.

  ‘Fine,’ Margot said, when Fay returned with a first-aid box. ‘Fine. You know what? You can have him.’

  Fay and Benji were very gracious in victory and the youngest girl, Elise, came over to give Margot a consolatory hug as Fay carefully dabbed antiseptic cream on Margot’s hand while Benji wondered aloud if she needed stitches.

  They kept calling her Marge until at last Margot pointed out that it was ‘Margot, Mar-go. Marge is a butter substitute and I’m not a substitute’, even though her substitution status had been a recurring theme that evening.

  Benji gave M
argot a lift home, but that was only so he could pick up Percy’s things. The cat scratching tower, the countless toys, the very expensive cat food which was all he would eat. Margot boxed it all up, refused to take payment for any of it and came to a momentous decision after she’d shut the door.

  ‘That is it! From now on, I’m a dog person.’

  2

  Will

  Roland wore black turtlenecks, cream chinos and horn-rimmed glasses. Come winter, come summer, come the in-between seasons, his black turtlenecks, chinos and specs were absolute and his face impassive.

  For a whole year Will had been coming, once a week, to Roland’s consulting room just off Kilburn Park Road, and yet Will was sure that without the turtlenecks and the horn-rimmed glasses, he’d never be able to pick Roland out of a police line-up.

  Maybe that was the point.

  ‘So, you’re quite sure that you want to pause our sessions?’

  Will realised that while his own mind had been wandering, Roland’s gaze had been fixed on him.

  ‘Not pause, stop,’ Will said firmly, though there was always something about Roland’s expressionless expression that made him want to squirm. ‘I said right at the beginning that I was going to give myself a year of therapy to fix myself.’

  As soon as he said it, Will wished he hadn’t. Roland adjusted his spectacles so he could peer over the top of them. ‘Fix?’ he queried mildly. ‘I seem to recall that at the beginning of our very first session we also discussed that this wasn’t a fix but a process. An ongoing process.’

  ‘Yes, but I only wanted to ongo it for a year,’ Will reminded him. Thanks to Roland, he no longer felt uncomfortable about confrontation. ‘To favour a goal-orientated approach. Well, I’ve hit my targets, so now is a good time, a great time, to move on. When I lived in New York, there were people who’d been in therapy for years, decades, with no end in sight.’