Happily Ever After Page 23

  “I wanted to go and see The Royal Tenenbaums sometime next week. You around, you fancy going?”

  “That’d be great,” he said.

  She looked at her watch. “I’d better go, I’ll miss the last train.”

  They walked side by side, in silence, towards the station. Black cab engines juddered in the rank next to them, and a train pulled in behind them.

  “Bye,” she said. “I should go. Thanks for today, Tom, it was brilliant.” She paused, realizing she meant it. She’d forgotten about her tedious, boring self for a good few hours.

  “Yes,” said Tom. “And Elle—look after yourself.”

  He drew her towards him and put his arms round her. Elle leaned against him for a moment, the familiar scent of him, the comfort of another person. He squeezed her tight. She could feel his fingers, splayed out on her back. Suddenly she wanted to sob.

  “Thanks for today,” she said. She cleared her throat. “And for trying to be nice, you know, warning me off Rory. And for kissing me.”

  “Thanks for warning me off Caitlin too, I can’t talk either,” he said, almost flippantly. “But—yes. I’ll see you soon.” He laughed, and she turned and walked towards the ticket barrier.

  On the train home, Elle took out her phone. She wasn’t going to ring Rory but she might just text him. She unlocked the phone and there was a text, but it was from Tom, she’d forgotten.

  We had loads in common but we just didn’t see the world in the same way.

  Even though it was after eleven, the night was hot and sticky as day. Elle sat on the rickety train staring at the screen, her head and heart pounding.

  AUGUST IS SUPPOSED to be a quiet month, when everyone is either away or using the fact that everyone else is away to do nothing. Elle was looking forward to a few weeks of gentle stupor, no wedding plans, getting on with some more Georgette, sunbathing outside, doing not that much, when all of a sudden, several bombshells exploded.

  The first—and second, really—was Libby. She burst into Elle’s office, a couple of weeks after Elle’s day in Richmond. Elle was chewing a pencil and supposedly editing a manuscript, though actually she was replying to an email from Tom about seeing Moulin Rouge. He wasn’t keen, and she was trying to persuade him, without much luck.

  OK. How about we go to that Japanese place on Kingly Street FIRST, then you can drink all the sake you want and be pleasantly drunk by the time we sit down to MR?

  Oh, by the way, some new rough covers for your mother’s books have come in and I think they’re a vast improvement on the pinky cartoons. Can I bring them—

  Elle was chewing her pencil because she and Tom had met up again, for a drink and a pizza, plus they were emailing and texting regularly. Now they were friends, it seemed weird to bring up work in an otherwise jokey email. It made her feel awkward, she didn’t know why.

  “Can you come outside with me?” Libby said dramatically.

  Elle looked at her watch. She didn’t want to cut into her Devil’s Cub reading time. It was obvious Vidal was about to realize he was in love with Mary Challoner, even though she’d shot him in the previous chapter—but then she saw Libby’s face, and stood up.

  “Sure, what’s happened?”

  Libby mimed a zip across her lips and nodded in Mary’s direction. They went outside, into the dusty street; Libby fumbled for a cigarette and lit it. Two Italian Goths walked past, chattering loudly, but otherwise the square was deserted. Everyone was away.

  “Are you OK?” Elle asked.

  “I can’t go to New York anymore,” Libby replied, inhaling smoke.

  “What?” Elle was surprised. “Why?”

  “Well… Look, there’s something I haven’t told you.” Libby inhaled again, shuddering in horror like a thirties stage actress in her boudoir confronted with a substandard bouquet. Elle waited patiently.

  “If I tell you, you mustn’t tell anyone. Anyone.”

  “Of course,” said Elle.

  “It’s Bill.”

  “Who?” said Elle stupidly.

  “Bill Lewis? Our boss?” Libby said furiously. “The head of the division?”

  “Oh, him. What about him?”

  “We’re having an affair.” Libby added, as if to confirm this, “It’s serious.”

  Elle dropped her security pass on the ground. “What the—what? But he’s married!” she blurted, picking it up. “He’s got kids!”

  Libby stared at Elle as if she’d just shot her. “Oh, thanks. Like I didn’t know that. You don’t understand. It’s serious. He’s going to leave her. Like, soon.”

  “What?” Elle was so surprised she barely knew what to say. “Really?”

  “Oh, my God, I wish I hadn’t told you,” Libby said furiously. “I knew you’d be all judgmental on me.” She inhaled again, and looked directly at her. Her eyes were red. “God, Elle. As if you didn’t do the same thing yourself.”

  “That’s different,” Elle said, and then wished she hadn’t.

  “It’s not different.”

  “He wasn’t married!” Elle shouted. “He didn’t have children! A baby!”

  “Right.” Libby blew smoke out, hissing maliciously, “Course. It was fine. You didn’t hurt anyone, did you? You didn’t, for example, get a job out of it while everyone else with years of experience got left to starve in the snow.”

  Elle swallowed, wishing for the umpteenth time that she’d never told Libby about Rory. She thought now that she’d been trying to draw Libby back to her, like a wife buying new underwear to thrill a straying husband. But their friendship had changed. She didn’t know when it had begun but she suddenly realized the change could be characterized by Libby’s reaction that night when she’d told her about Rory. An amused, almost annoyed detachment, as though she was trying to say, “You’re not the one who goes off with the MD, Elle. You’re the one in the background. Wait and see. I am.” Perhaps that was unfair. Elle remembered Tom’s dark, sympathetic face as she had told him, his anger on her behalf, and turned back to Libby, biting her lip.

  “Right,” she said. “Look, Libby—”

  Libby shook her head, her voice low. “God, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said. She pulled Elle towards her and hugged her. “That’s a horrible thing to say. It’s not true. I’m a bitch. I’m a bitch, I hate myself, it’s just it’s not…”

  She started crying and Elle hugged her back, trying not to sneeze at the cigarette smoke wafting up her nose. Libby was sobbing loudly, and Elle looked round instinctively, to make sure no one was watching. “Sshh,” she said.

  “I don’t want to sshh,” Libby wept, phlegm gurgling at the back of her throat. “Sometimes I think I hate him,” she added, and then she said, softly, as if to herself, “How did I get myself into this mess? How?”

  Elle felt a rush of sympathy for her; she’d never seen Libby this upset before, about anything. She was brutal with men; they were never good enough for her, right enough, important enough. And she’d always had a thing for men in power, men who were recognized at parties. They used to joke about it, when they were secretaries giggling opposite each other like idiots. Oh, Libby. I loved you so much. “How long?” asked Elle, patting her shoulder.

  “Eighteen months.” Elle tried not to look surprised. “Ages really. And oh, you won’t understand, but it’s amazing. We’re in love, properly in love, and it’s just so hard—”

  It was so familiar. “So what’s happened?” Elle asked, squeezing her shoulder. “Why can’t you go to New York?”

  “Because Celine’s found out about us.”

  “How? Who told her?”

  Libby bared her teeth. “I don’t know. If I find out, I’m going to kill them. She just called me in to see her.”

  “Wow. Scary.”

  “She was scary. She says Bill put me up for the job-exchange program because of our…” she hesitated, “relationship, and I said, no, that’s not true, we want to spend every minute together, so why would he do that? Anyway, she says I’v
e got to stay here, that I can’t go because it’s not been done through due process.” Libby snarled, showing her tiny white teeth. “She’s such a bitch. I could… I could strangle her. Due process. I mean, what does that even bloody well mean? I’m the best! Everyone knows that. I should go.”

  Elle nodded. “Celine loves due process, though. She’s a bit like Elspeth’s more glamorous French daughter.”

  Libby laughed, for the first time, and wiped her nose on the back of her hand. “You’re right. Only Elspeth didn’t reckon herself and march around in tiny Agnès B size six suits, the bitch. Elspeth, eh. I wonder where she is now. And Felicity. I miss her.” She smiled. “Gosh, Bluebird. It seems years ago, doesn’t it? You and me, reading out the rude bits in the Abigail Barrows.”

  Elle handed her a paper napkin from Pret she had in her pocket and Libby blew her nose, noisily. “He says he’s going to leave her,” Libby said. “I don’t know if I believe him anymore, though. But now Celine’s found out, he says it takes time, we have to handle it carefully…”

  Elle nodded sympathetically.

  Libby’s voice was soft. “And he says… I know it’s hard for him… but it’s hard for me too, you know? And they’re not happy, I know they’re not. I just feel my life’s on hold. New York was going to be a sort of fresh start. A chance for him to miss me.” She stared fiercely at Elle. “He’s got to miss me, then he’ll realize that he can’t live without me. He was going to come out and stay with me in my place, it’d have been the first time we were together properly… And that bitch has stopped it. I want to kill her.”

  Elle felt so sad, though she knew that was hypocritical. It struck her again that’s what had happened with her and Rory; she’d put her life on hold, and it was still going on. We had loads in common but we just didn’t see the world in the same way.

  Libby took a long drag on her cigarette. “I wasn’t even that desperate to go, you know,” she said unconvincingly. “But it’s just the way she said it: ‘Yoo arrr not sue-tihbull for zis progrrammuh,’” Libby drawled, with an exaggerated accent. “In such a nasty way, like I was an unclean woman and that if I went to New York I’d bring down the whole US operation with my foul cheating British ways. Screw her. It’s for the best. Yeah.” She threw the cigarette on the pavement, and ground it with her Topshop flat that they’d bought together last week.

  “That’s the spirit,” Elle said.

  “Right.” Libby rallied. Her shoulders rose. “Like I say, actually it’s probably a good thing. And Bill and I can work out what’s going on.” She kissed Elle’s cheek. “Thanks, Elle. You’re a good lass.”

  An idea occurred to Elle. “Libs—is the space free again? To go to New York?”

  “Why, do you want to go?” Libby smiled. It wasn’t a full smirk, but a sort of half-smile.

  “Er, yeah,” said Elle, who hadn’t really given it serious thought up to this point. “Would you mind?”

  “Of course not!” Libby said, but Elle didn’t entirely believe her. It was probably a stupid idea. In any case, now wasn’t the time to have asked. She nodded thanks and then gave her a hug.

  “Wow, Libby. What a—good grief.”

  “Do you hate me?” Libby said tentatively. “I hate me. I—oh, it’s all so awful. And I’m twenty-eight next week…” She sniffed, tears coming into her eyes. “I feel so old, oh, God, so bloody old .”

  Elle hid a smile; she didn’t want Libby to think she was laughing at her. “You’re not old,” she said. “Don’t be insane.”

  “Will you come for drinks next week? Promise? Because I was going to do something at the Crown and Bill said I shouldn’t, and now I think I should. You know. Show Bill, Celine, all of them. ‘Tell them, Julian, all, I am not doomed to wear / Year after year—’”

  “‘In gloom and desolate despair,’” Elle finished for her. “No, that’s not the best bit. The best bit is ‘And visions rise and change, that kill me with desire / Desire for nothing known in my maturer years—’”

  Libby joined in, clutching her hands to her chest. “‘When Joy grew mad with awe, at counting future tears,’” they chorused.

  “Oh, Emily!” Libby said, leaning against the building. “My favorite Brontë, my favorite. I’d forgotten that one. You know, my mum’s from Haworth,” she mused. “I sometimes think, perhaps her great-great-great-grandad—”

  “Saw Emily and Charlotte playing in the vicarage,” Elle finished. “Yes, I know.”

  “Or—”

  “Had a sneaky tobacco chew with Bramwell,” Elle parroted. “Yes, yes. I still prefer Charlotte, you know. She wasn’t so intense. What about poor Anne?”

  “You know I don’t care about poor Anne,” Libby said, and sniffed. “Aw, thanks, Elle.” She put her arm round her and gave a big, trembling sigh. “I feel much better.”

  Elle stroked her hair, remembering how much she missed Libby, how much she had once loved her.

  “It’ll be OK,” she said. “You poor thing. I know it feels like it won’t, but it will, one day. He’s not the man for you.”

  “He is,” Libby said weakly. “Honestly he is.”

  “OK, OK,” Elle said softly. “Maybe he is. But I bet there’s someone else just as wonderful out there for you. Don’t let this flatten you, Libs.”

  “Who, then?” Libby said.

  “Don’t know, but he’s out there. You don’t go into publishing to meet eligible men, that’s the trouble.” She wondered about Tom for a second, whether he and Libby might work together? Could she see them as a couple? She shook her head, wishing she was the kind of person who could insouciantly bring people together over wine-splattered dinner parties from the River Café Cookbook with the Buena Vista Social Club in the background, and then dismissed the idea.

  “Urgh.” Libby’s shoulders slumped. “I hate the fact that it obsesses me so much,” she said, sounding normal again. “You know, I did my bloody MA on Elizabethan women who demanded to choose their husbands. It really annoys me, that it’s basically the same thing today. Who’re we going to end up with?”

  “It’s not the same thing today,” said Elle, shocked. “Not at all.”

  “It kind of is. It’s a race, and everyone else is on the tracks, and I’m at the wrong venue, with the wrong shoes on.”

  She looked so sad, Elle said again, “That’s rubbish. He’s out there, I promise.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I don’t,” said Elle firmly. “I just like to kid myself that he is. And if he’s not, well, there’s more to life than just hanging around ruining your life waiting for him.” Perhaps she was starting to believe this. “Much more.”

  “WHAT ARE ALL these posters up for?” Elle’s dad asked. “They’re not… yours, are they?”

  He looked suspiciously at his daughter, as if she’d been hiding a thirty-year career in theater management from him.

  “No, Dad,” Elle said patiently. “They’re Billy’s. My landlord.”

  “They look awful,” said John.

  “Oh.” Elle had stopped noticing them, for the most part. “Well, we could take some down for you to put up the shelves. As long as I store them properly Billy said he didn’t mind what I did with them.”

  “Don’t you have any nice book posters you want to put up?” her dad asked, rolling his sleeves. Elle watched him, transfixed, as he meticulously turned the two-inch cuff over and over again, folding it neatly above his elbow.

  “Er, no,” she said. She looked around at the debris of the tiny room in the sultry heat of the late Sunday morning as the two of them stood awkwardly together in the cramped room. She had so rarely had another person there. Two people made it much harder to move around. Three days’ worth of Evening Standard, two empty glasses and an empty packet of crisps, piles of books, a manuscript on the floor, Heat and Hello! and—oh, God, a brown apple core, how had she not seen that?

  But this was what divorced fathers did for their single daughters, they came up to London and put up shelves in
their flats and had awkward lunches afterwards. Still, she saw it all through her father’s eyes and was ashamed. He lived in Colefax and Fowler land, with an Aga in the basement kitchen of his elegant Georgian town house in Brighton and a black Labrador. When Alice and Jack, her half-sister and brother, were seven and five, only a couple of years ago, Elle had spent Christmas with her father, and on Christmas Day they’d gone to church. Alice and Jack had worn gray wool coats with gray velvet collars, like Princes William and Harry. Elle didn’t know why, but somehow those coats summed up her dad’s new life for her.

  “Maybe I’ll buy something new, after the shelves have gone up,” she said, trying to sound as though this was all part of a meticulous interior decoration scheme. “Although, if I get the New York placement it’ll have to go on hold.”

  “Yes, New York,” said her father. “So, what’s that all about?”

  “I don’t know,” said Elle. “The girl who was supposed to be going, my friend Libby?” she said, but he wouldn’t remember her. “Well, she’s had to—er, drop out.” She hesitated; she still wasn’t sure if Libby was OK with her applying for it. “I wasn’t going to do anything about it but they sent round an email saying they have to find someone else now, the person who’s coming to us from the States has already rented out her flat and booked her flight, and I’m the right level. I talked to my boss yesterday about it, and yeah, had a quick interview in the afternoon. It’s all quite fast.”

  “And what do you do there?”

  “Basically just go to the sister company for four months, observe how they do everything, widen your horizons a bit, I don’t know.” Elle shrugged, trying to sound nonchalant. “Have a change. Get to know a new city.”

  John looked doubtfully at the shelves, which he’d brought up from Robert Dyas. “Well, let’s get started with this then. Hold this for me. Do you think you’ll get it?”

  “No idea. I gave it my best shot, so we’ll see.”