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WEDNESDAY 15 JULY 1998

Chichester, Sussex

Then, without quite knowing how it happened, Dexter finds that he has fallen in love, and suddenly life is one long mini-break.

Sylvie Cope. Her name is Sylvie Cope, a beautiful name, and if you asked him what she is like he would shake his head and blow air through his mouth and say that she is great, just great, just. . amazing! She is beautiful of course, but in a different way from the others — not lads-mag-bubbly like Suki Meadows, or trendy-beautiful like Naomi or Ingrid or Yolande, but serenely, classically beautiful; in an earlier TV presenter incarnation, he might have called her ‘classy’, or even ‘dead classy’. Long, straight fair hair, parted severely in the middle, small neat features set perfectly in a pale heart-shaped face, she reminds him of a woman in a painting that he can’t remember the name of, someone mediaeval with flowers in her hair. That is what Sylvie Cope is like; the kind of woman who would look perfectly at home with her arms draped around a unicorn. Tall and slim, a little austere, frequently quite stern, with a face that doesn’t move much except to frown or sometimes to roll her eyes at some stupid thing he’s said or done; Sylvie is perfect, and demands perfection.

Her ears stick out just a tiny, tiny bit so that they glow like coral with the light behind her, and in the same light you can see a fine downy hair on her cheeks and forehead. At other, more superficial times in his life Dexter might have found these qualities, the glowing ears, the hairy forehead, off-putting but as he looks at her now, seated at the table opposite him on an English lawn in high summer, her perfect little chin resting on her long-fingered hand, swallows overhead, candles lighting her face just like in those paintings by the candle-guy, he finds her completely hypnotic. She smiles at him across the table and he decides that tonight is the night that he will tell her that he loves her. He has never really said ‘I love you’ before, not sober and on purpose. He has said ‘I fucking love you’, but that’s different, and he feels that now is the time to use the words in their purest form. He is so taken with this plan that he is momentarily unable to concentrate on what is being said.

‘So what doyou do exactly, Dexter?’ asks Sylvie’s mother, from the far end of the table; Helen Cope, birdlike and aloof in beige cashmere.

Unhearing, Dexter continues to gaze at Sylvie, who is raising her eyebrows now in warning. ‘Dexter?’

‘Hm?’

‘Mummy asked you a question?’

‘I’m sorry, miles away.’

‘He’s a TV presenter,’ says Sam, one of Sylvie’s twin brothers. Nineteen years old with a college rower’s back, Sam is a hulking, self-satisfied little Nazi, just like his twin brother Murray.

‘Is or was? Do you still do presenting these days?’ smirks Murray and they flick their blond fringes at each other. Sporty, clear-skinned, blue-eyed, they look like they were raised in a lab.

‘Mummy wasn’t asking you,Murray,’ snaps Sylvie.

‘Well, I still am a presenter, of sorts,’ says Dexter and thinks, I’ll get you yet, you little bastards. They’ve had run-ins before, Dexter and The Twins, in London. Through little smirks and twinkles they’ve revealed that they don’t think much of sis’s new boyfriend, think she can do better. The Cope family are Winners and will only tolerate Winners. Dexter’s just a charm-boy, a has-been, a poser on the way down. There is silence at the table. Was he meant to keep talking? ‘I’m sorry, what was the question?’ asks Dexter, momentarily lost but determined to get back on top of the game.

‘I wondered what you were up to these days, work-wise?’ she repeats patiently, making clear that this is a job interview for the post of Sylvie’s boyfriend.

‘Well, I’ve been working on a couple of new TV shows, actually. We’re waiting to find out what’s going to get commissioned.’

‘What are they about, these TV shows?’

‘Well one’s about London nightlife, a sort of what’s-on-in-the-capital thing, and the other’s a sports show. Extreme Sports.’

‘Extreme Sports? What are “Extreme Sports”?’

‘Um, well mountain-biking, snow-boarding, skate-boarding—’

‘And do you do any “Extreme Sports” yourself?’ smirks Murray.

‘I skate-board a little,’ says Dexter, defensively, and he notices that at the other end of the table, Sam has stuffed his napkin into his mouth.

‘Will we have seen you on anything on the BBC?’ says Lionel, the father, handsome, plump, self-satisfied and still bizarrely blond in his late fifties.

‘Unlikely. It’s all rather late-night fare, I’m afraid.’ ‘ Rather late-night fare, I’m afraid’, ‘I skate-board a little’. God, he thinks, what do you sound like? There’s something about being with the Cope family that makes him behave as if he’s in a costume drama. Perchance, ’tis rather late-night fare. Still, if that’s what it takes. .

Now Murray, the other twin — or is it actually Sam? — pipes up, his mouth full of salad, ‘We used to watch that late night show you were on, largin’ it. All swearing and dolly-birds dancing in cages. You didn’t like us watching it, remember Mum?’

‘God, that thing?’ Mrs Cope, Helen, frowns. ‘I doremember, vaguely.’

‘You used to really, really hateit,’ says Murray or Sam.

‘Turn it off! you used to shout,’ says the other one. ‘Turn it off! You’ll damage your brain!’

‘Funny, that’s exactly what my mother used to say too,’ says Dexter, but no-one picks up on the remark and he reaches for the wine bottle.

‘So that was you, was it?’ says Lionel, Sylvie’s father, his eyebrows raised, as if the gentleman at his table has revealed himself to be rather the cad.

‘Well, yes, but it wasn’t all like that. I tended just to interview the bands and the movie stars.’ He wonders if he sounds big-headed with this talk of bands and movie stars, but there’s no chance of that because the twins are there, ready to shoot him down.

‘So do you still hang out with a lot of movie starsthen?’ says one of them, in mock awe, the jumped-up little Aryan freak-boy.

‘Not really. Not anymore.’ He decides to answer honestly, but without any regret or self-pity. ‘That has all sort of. . drifted away.’

‘Dexter’s being modest,’ says Sylvie. ‘He gets offers all the time. He’s just very picky about his on-screen work. What he really wants to do is produce. Dexter has his own media production company!’ she says proudly, and her parents nod approvingly. A businessman, an entrepreneur — that’s more like it.

Dexter smiles too, but the fact is life has become a great deal quieter recently. Mayhem TV plc has yet to earn a commission, or a meeting with a commissioner, and at the moment still exists only in the form of expensively headed paper. Aaron, his agent, has dropped him. There are no voiceovers, no promotional work, not quite so many premieres. He is no longer the voice of premium cider, has been quietly expelled from poker school, and even the guy who plays the congas in Jamiroquai doesn’t call him anymore. And yet despite all this, the downturn in professional fortunes, he’s fine now, because now he has fallen in love with Sylvie, beautiful Sylvie, and now they have their mini-breaks.