The Meet Cute I Swore I Would Never Use

I keep a list of meet cutes too ridiculous to use. Two strangers reaching for the last umbrella in a downpour. A wedding guest seated at the wrong table for an entire speech. A woman arriving somewhere new with her arms wrapped around the back end of a giant theatrical swan. That last one sat on the list for a long time, looking at me. Eventually I gave in, because it kept asking the question every good romantic comedy begins with: who is going to give way first?

That is how Nobody Ordered the Swan opens. Lena Vintle makes scenery, impossible animals and promises she does not have time to keep. She arrives at the Merewold Assembly Rooms pushing the swan she once built for an amateur show, and in the doorway stands Toby Marrick, hired to turn the hall's overflowing West Room into a useful space before it reopens. One wheel is stuck in the threshold. The golden beak is pointing at his shirt. He informs her that nobody ordered a swan. Then the beak lands on his pocket, and he says the line that told me exactly who he was.

"Usually," he said, looking down, "there's dinner first."

I loved the Assembly Rooms from the first page. It has survived dreadful singing, damp bunting and a performance in which a king lost his beard before losing his kingdom. The West Room is crowded with painted tree trunks, a false fireplace, a throne with a floral cushion and a velvet crown that falls out of the first cupboard anyone opens. Lena wants it to become a proper workshop, somewhere people can finally come to learn and make things. Toby wants a floor he can see. Ash, who manages the hall, asks them to work together and share a long table, and Lena lays a length of yellow ribbon down the middle of it until they can establish diplomatic relations.

Rival desks are my favourite kind of romance, because the banter has to do all the flirting while both people insist they are only working. Lena has an answer for everything. Toby is careful, reasonable and unfailingly polite, which she finds deeply irritating, especially once he turns out to be funny. Then the careful man laughs, the woman with an answer for everything runs out of words, and the ribbon starts to look rather thin. There is a publicity photograph that refuses to cooperate, a public meeting with far too many chairs, and a first date requiring absolutely no scenery, which is quite a challenge for a woman who builds scenery for a living.

But under every joke I write there has to be a real reason to be afraid, and this book has two. Lena is wonderful at saying yes. She comes when a backdrop tears or a chair cover somehow acquires an extra hole, everybody is delighted to see her arrive, and she goes on saying yes until there is nothing left for her. Toby is wonderful at leaving. He travels lightly, leaves politely and goes while everyone still thinks him useful. Put those two habits in a room and you get an excellent working partnership. Put them in love and you get trouble, because a clever apology will not be enough. They will have to ask for what they want and hear an answer that is thoroughly inconvenient.

That is the part I care about most. The swan is the joke, and I adore it, but the book is really about wanting someone for more than what they can do for you. So many of us are loved for being handy: the friend who always brings the extension lead, the colleague who never says no, the one who slips away before anyone has to say goodbye. I wanted Lena and Toby to find out what it feels like to be wanted simply for staying in the room.

They are not alone in it, either. Della, Lena's aunt, has made costumes for most of Merewold and would now like to go somewhere nobody requires an emergency hem. Bea, Lena's oldest friend, caters events, feeds the people who forget to eat and has reached the limit of what she will accept as an explanation. Every romantic comedy needs people who can see what the lovers cannot, and both of these women have opinions.

A word of warning: this is not a book for the bus if you mind strangers watching you laugh. If you do not mind, come and hold the neck while Lena brings the tail through the door. Nobody Ordered the Swan is waiting in the West Room, and nobody has decided about the swan yet.