Twenty years after the death of her best friend Tess, 44-year-old Margot – a busy Sydney restaurateur – receives a letter from beyond the grave.
“I’ve had an idea,” the letter says. “When I’m dead I’m going to send you a letter – this one – 20 years from now. Or 20 years from when I die.”
It’s a bombshell moment for the older Margot and an intriguing setup for this snappy, lighthearted novel from Australian writer Jessica Dettmann. Tess, the charismatic British backpacker who befriended Margot when they worked in the same Sydney pub in their early 20s – and who died of ovarian cancer – has unfinished business with her Australian bestie.
She’d like Margot to take an all-expenses-paid trip to London, to the city the pair had once planned to explore together. “When you arrive there’ll be more letters from me,” she writes. “And in the letters are some things I want you to do for me. There’s nothing dodgy or illegal, I promise. They’re just things I haven’t managed to do myself because of all the dying.”
For Margot, Tess’s ghostly summons is tantalising – she still hasn’t been to London – as well as sobering. She’d abandoned her travel plans with Tess all those years ago when she fell in love with Sydney chef Johnny, now her partner in life and business, and the father of their young adult son, Augie. Tess, disappointed by Margot’s choices, died in London not long after Augie’s birth, before the friends could reconnect. “Had she known how sick her friend was at the time?” Margot now wonders. “It was so difficult to remember.”
Dettmann is a slick writer, a master of the “disarmingly convivial tone” her protagonist Margot admires in Nigella Lawson’s popular books. She also has a tight grasp on this exploration of a classic middle-age dilemma: did Margot make the right decisions all those years ago? And can revisiting those choices offer something new for the future? Margot’s reservations – primarily whether flirtatious Johnny will behave himself while she’s away– are soon set aside.
The subsequent London adventures make for fun reading. Margot tackles the tasks outlined in Tess’s letters with mixed feelings, dealing with occasionally confronting discoveries. It seems she didn’t know her friend as well as she thought. Nor, more importantly, was she expecting Tess to have arranged an attractive companion for her – the quietly capable and recently divorced Leo, Tess’s childhood friend. “I’d always thought you’d like Leo,” Tess writes, almost with a wink. “He’s a sweetheart.”
Your Friend and Mine is ultimately a story about living rather than dying – and the tragedy of Tess’s too-short life becomes the backdrop to the more pressing issue of Margot’s next move. As a page-turner, it works – but even the lead characters seem aware of their manufactured situation.
“It’s a bit confronting,” Margot complains, “to have to look at your life like that stupid Sliding Doors movie.” And when she later tells Leo about her son’s suggestion that they film their adventures for social media, he agrees. “It would make brilliant content,” Leo says.
But it’s the young and still-alive Tess who best captures the novel’s once-over-lightly mood. “It’s so unsubtle here,” she says of Sydney’s weather. “It’s just hot and sunny and clear skies. Like a person with no mystery. What’s interesting about that?”
Your Friend and Mine, by Jessica Dettmann (Atlantic, $36.99), is out now.
