Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (Bridget Jones 2)

After breakfast, I decided to escape and wandered round the water garden, which was quite pretty, with shallow rivulets between grassy banks and under little stone bridges, surrounded by a hedge with all the fields beyond. I sat down on a stone bridge, looking at the stream, and thinking how it all didn't matter because there would always be nature, and then I heard voices approaching behind the hedge.

"... Worst driver in the world ... Mother's constantly ... correct him but ... no concept ... of steering accuracy. He lost his no-claims bonus forty-five years ago and never got it back since." It was Mark. "If I was my mother I'd refuse to go in the car with him, but they won't be parted. It's rather endearing."

"Oh, I love that!" Rebecca. "If I were married to someone I really loved I would want to be with them constantly."

"Would you?" he said eagerly. Then he went on. "I think, as you get older, then ... the danger is if you've been single for a time, you get so locked into a network of friends - this is particularly true of women - that it hardly leaves room for a man in their lives, emotionally as much as anything because their friends and their views are their first point of reference."

"Oh, I quite agree. For me, of course I love my friends, but they're not top of my list of priorities."

You're telling me, I thought. There was silence, then Mark burst out again.

"This self-help book nonsense - all these mythical rules of conduct you're presumed to be following. And you just know every move you make is being dissected by a committee of girlfriends according to some breathtakingly arbitrary code made up of Buddhism Today, Venus and Buddha Have a Shag and the Koran. You end up feeling like some laboratory mouse with an ear on its back!"

I clutched my book, heart pounding. Surely this couldn't be how he saw what had happened with me?

But Rebecca was off on one again. "Oh, I quite agree," she gushed. "I have no time for all that stuff. If I decide I love someone then nothing will stand in my way. Nothing, Not friends, not theories. I just follow my instincts, follow my heart," she said in new simpery voice, like a flower girl-child of nature.

"I respect you for that," said Mark quietly. "A woman must know what she believes in, otherwise how can

you believe in her yourself?"

"And trust her man above all else," said Rebecca in yet another voice, resonant and breath-controlled, like an affected actress doing Shakespeare.

Then there was an excruciating silence. I was dying, dying frozen to the spot, assuming they were kissing.

"Of course I said all this to Jude," Rebecca started up again. "She was so concerned about everything Bridget and Sharon had told her about not marrying Richard - he's such a great guy - and I just said, 'Jude, follow your heart."'

I gawped, looking to a passing bee for reassurance. Surely Mark couldn't be slaveringly respectful of this?

"Ye-es," he said doubtfully. "Well I'm not sure ..."

"Giles seems to be very keen on Bridget!" Rebecca burst in, obviously sensing she had veered off course.

There was a pause. Then Mark said, in an unusually high-pitched voice, "Oh really. And is ... is this reciprocated?"

"Oh, you know Bridget," said Rebecca airily. "I mean Jude says she's got all these guys after her" - Good old Jude, I started to think - "but she's so screwed up she won't - well, as you say, she can't get it together with any of them."

"Really?" Mark jumped in. "So have there been ..."

"Oh, I think - you know - but she's so bogged down in her rules of dating or whatever it is that no one's good enough."

Could not work out what was going on. Maybe Rebecca was trying to make him stop feeling guilty about me.

"Really?" said Mark again. "So she isn't ..."

"Oh, look, there's a duckling! Oh, look, a whole brood of ducklings! And there's the mother and father. Oh, what a perfect, perfect moment! Oh, let's go look!"

And off they went, and I was left, breathless, mind racing.

After lunch, it was boiling hot and everyone decamped under a tree at the edge of the lake. It was an idyllic, pastoral scene: an ancient stone bridge over the water, willows overhanging the grassy banks. Rebecca was triumphant. "Oh, this is such fund! Isn't it, everyone? Isn't it fun?"

Fat Nigel from Mark's office was fooling about heading a football to one of the hoorays, huge stomach quivering in the bright sunlight. He made a lunge, missed and plunged head-first into the water, displacing a giant wave.

"Yesss!" said Mark, laughing. "Breathtaking incompetence."

"It's lovely, isn't it?" I said vaguely to Shaz. "You expect to see lions lying down with lambs."

"Lions, Bridget?" said Mark. I started. He was sitting right at the other side of the group, looking at me through a gap in the other people, raising one eyebrow.