Happily Ever After Read online

  Elle scanned his face, his sweet, serious face, and squeezed his hand with both of hers. “I do too,” she said. “It’s my problem. I want to give you a get-out clause. While I’m back in England you might meet some hot Park Avenue Princess and stop wanting to slum it downtown with me. I’m just saying.”

  “Never,” Mike said. “I’ve met them all, and they’re all awful. I’m going to miss you.”

  “Don’t you actually know someone called Bitsy?” Elle said. “I thought people called Bitsy only existed in F. Scott Fitzgerald novels.”

  Mike’s gentle smile turned into a grin. “Elle, she’s eighty-four, I don’t think it counts. Anyway, don’t you know someone called Libby? Isn’t that the same?”

  “That cow? That’s entirely different and you know not to mention her name to me.” She grinned back at him, happily, because she loved it when he showed some spark, took the piss out of her. That was the thing she missed most, here. On the table, her month-old BlackBerry flashed red and her eyes flicked instantly towards it. “Oh—” she began, then stopped. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll check it later.”

  Mike said, shaking his head, “Wow. They sure do get a good day’s work out of you at that place. You put me to shame.”

  Mike was a hedge fund manager. Elle had never heard of them when she’d met him at a launch in February for a book about the economic miracle of Wall Street. He’d been at Yale with the author, and was the only one of the Brooks Brothers American Psycho frat-boy look-alikes to break free from the pack. He’d introduced himself to Elle and her boss Caryn, who were chatting in the corner about the latest drama with their biggest author, Elizabeth Forsyte, and when he’d appeared by their sides and said, “Ladies, may I join you?” Caryn had given him a swift appraisal, knocked back the rest of her martini, and said, “Hey, Prince Charming. You’re just in time. I’m off.”

  Only, because she was more Queens than Park Avenue Princess, she said “orrwff.”

  And Mike had stepped back and said, in his mild, polite way, “What a shame. May I see you to a cab?”

  “No, thank you,” Caryn had replied, looking at him suspiciously. “I think I can make it to the sidewalk from here. Tell you what, I’ll yell if I need assistance.”

  He’d smiled and nodded, and Elle had liked him even then, for the way he managed to be polite but not stuffy. Well, maybe a little stuffy, but his heart was in the right place.

  Mike had an apartment on the Upper East Side, with a view of Central Park: down a side street—he wasn’t Brooke Astor—but you could still see the park. Back in the mists of time his father had done something with whaling, Elle couldn’t work out what or whether it was a good or bad thing; she kept meaning to Google him and find out, because that was what you did now, Google what you wanted more information on, that hot new restaurant, that sudden bestselling author who’d come out of nowhere and of whom you should have heard, the bit of Americana you didn’t understand, and the source of the vast wealth of your date. The result of Mike’s vast wealth was that his family had a house in the Hamptons, a ski chalet in Telluride, an island in the Stockholm archipelago—and Mike had one of those jobs that would only make him richer. He was bright, he worked hard, and he deserved to do well, but Elle found it strange, the calm, scientific way in which the Nordstroms accumulated money, having never had much herself, even now. She supposed that, one day, it would be all be passed down to Mike, his wife, and their future pack of little Nordstroms. It was interesting that not once had she even vaguely considered that might be her. Married to a millionaire, just like a MyHeart heroine.

  She smiled at him now. “I’ll look at it later. I was waiting to hear from an author.”

  “Check the email,” Mike said patiently. “It’s fine.”

  “Sorry. Thanks a lot. I’ll be one second,” Elle said. She opened her messages. Sure enough, it was the email she’d been praying for, from Elizabeth Forsyte.

  My dearest Elle,

  My most heartfelt thanks to you for the care and attention you have taken over getting this cover right. The Lord of Misrule is to me a very special story, one that I hope will bring my readers even more pleasure. I have been so very worried by the turn of events the jacket was taking, but now that you have been so gracious—that British charm again!—and the heart above my name has been removed, I have no hesitation in saying that we should go to press with this version, and God Speed us all the way to #1 on the lists!

  Your friend,

  Elizabeth Forsyte

  Post script: Euphemia and Brunswick send you their thanks and love too, for releasing their story to the world.

  Elle blinked: all Elizabeth Forsyte’s emails were sent in tiny calligraphic script, on a lurid pink background decorated with Georgian pillars and other architectural features. It was so high-res that her emails frequently crashed the computer of whomever at Bookprint US she’d contacted, but no one would ever have dared to point this out to her. No one said no to Elizabeth Forsyte. When you sold 600,000 hardbacks, and twice as many paperbacks, you could send child porn or videos of animal torture over the Internet to your publishers and they’d think very carefully before raising it as an issue.

  “What’s up?”

  “Nothing, it’s great news,” Elle said. Quickly she forwarded the email on to Caryn and Sidney, the overall MD.

  We are GO, she wrote. We can print tomorrow.

  “Done. I promise.” Elle put the BlackBerry in her bag and leaned back in her chair. Mike sighed.

  “That woman,” Mike said. “I sometimes think if she said, ‘I want you to eat fifteen raw eggs and ride the roller coaster at Coney Island,’ you’d do it.”

  “Yes, I would,” Elle said simply. “You know what it’s like. It’s business, and she’s my biggest client. I wouldn’t still be here if it weren’t for her.”

  “She’s lucky to have you work with her,” Mike said loyally.

  Elle shook her head. “No, absolutely not. Without her I’d be a nobody back in London.”

  “I know that’s not true,” Mike said, smiling at her. “You crazy girl.”

  She closed her eyes briefly, as outside the new leaves juddered lightly in the breeze. She knew she’d never get him to understand. The waiter arrived, with a green salad for her and a soup for him. “Cheers,” Elle said, exhilaration sweeping over her; she couldn’t wait to be in work tomorrow to discuss it with Caryn, hear if Sidney was pleased. “Hurrah, this is a great evening.”

  “Have a wonderful trip back to England,” Mike said, clinking his glass against hers. “Don’t stay there. Come back soon.”

  “Believe me, I will,” she said fervently, taking only another small sip of champagne. “It’s in, out. Wham, bam. It’s Wedding Supper, Wedding, Stay with Mother, Plane Back. No deviation, nothing. I’ll be back before you can miss me.”

  Mike nodded, pleased, and Elle realized this conversation could sound misleading. But she didn’t care. Two days ago it had looked as though Elizabeth Forsyte wasn’t going to let them publish with that jacket, and now it was sorted, and half a million copies could be printed, and they were all safe again, safe till the next crisis. While a small, very small part of her wanted to scream, It was one tiny pink heart, you monstrous woman, get over it, do you realize how much time and effort has been wasted on this? the other part knew it had Elizabeth Forsyte to thank for nearly everything. All because of Grammy Napper’s brooch.

  If Elle had known what the result of her innocent remark to someone in a Ladies’ bathroom three years ago come November would have been, she would have been amazed.

  It had been her lucky day, she knew it now. She had complimented the rotund, mulberry-haired lady by the sinks on her pretty brooch—a tiny gold figure carrying a bunch of glass blue and red flowers—and the lady had turned around, with joy on her face.

  “Brooch? What in the world is a brooch?”

  Elle had explained.

  “What a beautiful accent, mah dear. This pin was mah grammy�
�s. How kind you are. I’m Elizabeth Forsyte.”

  Elle had shaken her hand and said, shyly, how much she’d enjoyed the multimillion-seller Ladies Dance.

  This was good luck for several reasons: Elle really had enjoyed it. Elizabeth Forsyte could write, and she knew how to tell a story. It wasn’t another slim, derivative Regency romance, it was a big old-fashioned family saga, with lots of sex and intrigue; and the formula of a big fat beach read but with a tasteful jacket so the literati could devour it on vacation worked: it worked well enough that the book was on its way to selling a million copies in paperback, and ushering in a slew of rip-offs.

  Secondly, little though Elle knew it, Elizabeth Forsyte and her agent were in that fateful day for a crisis meeting: they’d just told everyone at Jane Street that they were taking her next book to either Viking or Pocket, so badly, they said, was the publication of the follow-up to Ladies Dance being handled.

  Thirdly, Elle had been in New York for two months. She had arrived in October, a month after September 11. The Stars and Stripes hung everywhere, 5th Avenue was a sea of them. Smoke from Ground Zero continued to rise; it hung in the air downtown. She was staying in Brooklyn, at the empty apartment of a friend of Karen’s; every evening in the early autumn sunshine little boys ran around in the yard outside, wearing Superman and Spider-Man costumes. A lady in her building had lost her daughter in the South Tower. She hadn’t even worked there, she’d gone in for a meeting. Morning and evening, Elle could hear the tramp of feet along the corridor to Mrs. Bilefsky’s apartment: friends, neighbors, reporters. The superintendent of the building brought her soup, even though the nights were still warm, long after Halloween.

  At Bookprint US, she was assigned to Jane Street Press, the imprint where Daria, with whom she was doing the exchange, worked. But everyone was still in a state of shock, striving to keep body and soul together for themselves, their families and friends. Daria was miserable in London and thought she might come back; every day she changed her mind, so Elle never knew whether she’d still be here the following week. People could not have been more welcoming but no one knew why she was there. She had no idea, either. They gave her some paranormal erotic romances to edit, she did a project on cover designs in the UK versus the US, but all the pent-up energy and good intentions with which she had arrived and which she was bursting to use were not appropriate, now.

  She spent hours walking around Midtown on her lunch break, around Brooklyn on the weekends. She buried herself in New York career-girl books, The Group, The Best of Everything, The Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing, even Valley of the Dolls. By December, she was actively looking forward to February, when her four months would be up and she could go back, though to what, she had no idea; she didn’t want to go back. She loved being here, loved everything about New York. But it wasn’t working out and she didn’t know how to change things for the better, and perhaps it was wrong to try.

  But then, one morning, Elle was sitting at her desk shuffling some submission letters around, when she saw Caryn storming towards her. Convinced she was after her for the cover copy she hadn’t yet filed, Elle cravenly fled to the bathroom and, once the door was closed, blushed with shame at how pathetic she was being. Perhaps it was relief that made her lean against the door, panting and glancing apologetically at the lady reapplying her lipstick in the mirror, perhaps it was a desire to talk to someone, anyone.

  “That’s a lovely brooch,” she’d said.

  The lady had put her lipstick down on the counter, turned around, and laughed. Yes, somehow, she’d had the nerve to start talking to Elizabeth Forsyte, called a pin a brooch, and on the basis of this five-minute conversation, Elizabeth Forsyte decided she and she alone was the editor with the English charm and know-how to guide The Marriage Game through its delicate gestation period, and suddenly that was it.

  For all that Elizabeth Forsyte was egotistical, demanding, passive-aggressive, she was a genius, in her way, and she had spotted something in Elle, and Elle never forgot that. Her work visa was magically extended; her salary was increased. Suddenly agents took her calls; in the great glass elevators in the mornings, colleagues nodded over their skinny lattes; when she had to present another book at the terrifying acquisitions meeting Sidney Levantine, the MD, peered over his half-moon spectacles at her and said, “Ah, Miss Eleanor Bee. How very good it is to have you with us.” And when The Marriage Game went in at Number One that summer, smashing all records for a hardback, and Elizabeth Forsyte took out a full-page ad in Publishers Weekly to thank “her friends at Jane Street Press,” Elle’s place at Jane Street was assured.

  Elle changed, too. She all but stopped drinking: though she had pushed to the back of her mind the memory of those bloated, lonely last months in London, she reminded herself of them whenever she considered buying a bottle of wine. It was all too easy to remember the endless lonely nights in the Kilburn flat, the walls closing in, the alcohol in the pores, coming into the office hungover again and trying to hide it. Tom had seen that, he’d told her… But it was another life, that time, and she’d been given a second chance.

  Besides, here, that wouldn’t be tolerated. She didn’t know how close she’d come to the tipping point, and she didn’t want to know. She wasn’t even sure if there was a tipping point, just that she’d walked away from whatever it was pulling her towards a dark abyss. She had to use this time to make a change, and so she did, and it was easier than she’d thought. She was walking everywhere and barely drank anymore, apart from the odd cocktail here and there; she lost a stone without trying to. It was only when she saw the photo on her old Bookprint security pass that she realized how heavy she’d been getting, anyway. It was wine and Pringle weight, and she was viciously glad to be rid of it.

  Like everyone else, she had a manicure each week, at the Korean walk-up next to the subway; her tights (pantyhose) were free of holes; she invested in a small, chic wardrobe from Banana Republic. She grew out her messy hair and had it cut into a glossy mane that hung behind her shoulders, light brown with buttery highlights. After a year, she rented a tiny apartment in the West Village, so small she had to go out, either to work or to dinner, and her possessions had to be organized, otherwise chaos would reign. But that was fine; it was small, but it was light and warm, cool in summer, with shelves already up for her books and besides, she liked being organized, now.

  And, since she felt as though she’d been given a lifeline, she worked. It was almost her religion. She read everything, stayed late, never left an email unanswered. Every night as she left the office she was alone in the city once again, and she loved it here, she never wanted to leave. She felt as if New York loved her back, even the man by the subway who picked scabs off his elbow and ate them, even the smelly, frizzy-haired blind lady whom she always seemed to have to help across the road, who told her every time that she hated the British. Even when her air-con packed up and she lay sweltering in the heat, even when the traffic was awful yet again and her colleagues were terrifying… she just had to put on her trainers and walk back home as the purple sunset flashed between black gleaming towers at each corner, as the sidewalks filled with people talking, eating, laughing, back to the Village to feel that nothing, really, was that bad. Because really, nothing was.

  She could barely remember her life in London now, didn’t recognize the girl she’d been there. Here, she felt, she was the person she’d always wanted to be.

  “SO, YOU’LL SPEND some time with your mom when you’re back,” Mike said.

  “Yes,” Elle replied. “The wedding’s in some plush stately home in Sussex, really near her. Sanditon Hall. It’s funny, that’s where Rhodes and Melissa’s original wedding was supposed to be.”

  “Is it going to be strange for you?”

  “What, going back to the UK?”

  They were walking up Bleecker Street, past yet another gaudy tattoo parlor, a divey, commercialized bar. Mike took her hand and squeezed it. “Everything, I guess.”

&nbs
p; She’d told him a lot, but not all. Elle watched a guy in a leather cap wrap his leg round a street lamp. “Suppose so. I’m not massively looking forward to it, that’s all.”

  “Have you spoken to—what’s her name? Melissa?—since those drinks last month?”

  “No,” said Elle. “I’ll have to, though.”

  “She sounds awful. I don’t like the way she spoke to you.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Elle said. She didn’t want to start talking about them now; it’d ruin the evening. They were reaching the nice part of Bleecker, with the Marc Jacobs and the Magnolia Bakery in the distance. People were eating out on the pavement, there was soft laughter from a nearby table, and Elle turned to look at two girls, around her age, with flowing blond hair, in skinny white jeans, drinking gingerly from wineglasses. They were gorgeous, a ridiculous tableau of beauty, and she stared at them. “Ah—do you want anything from London?” She didn’t know why she was asking—what could she bring him that he couldn’t get here? A biscuit tin with a picture of a soldier in a busby hat, a snow globe of St. Paul’s Cathedral?

  “No, thanks, Elle.” He smiled at her and took her hand. She held it tightly. “Will you go into the office?”

  “I might have to, but I don’t want to. I have a meeting with an author somewhere in town and that’s it. I’m glad. It’s kind of naff of me, but I don’t want to—I don’t like going back there much, I wasn’t that…” She trailed off, realizing she didn’t know how to carry on.

  “Naff? What’s naff?” Mike said, and she thought he was probably just breaking the silence. She leaned up and kissed him.

  “It means ridiculous and stupid and that’s what I’m being so forget about it.” Elle ran her thumb over the ball of his palm. They were at the turning for Perry Street. “Are you coming back with me?”