“No, no, I just—”
“All I wanted was you tonight, you know.” His green eyes bored into hers, and he clutched her hands in his, the pads of his fingers softly stroking her palms. She could feel the heat of his skin, as though it was branding her. “Just you, it nearly drove me mad.”
“Really?” Elle loved hearing this, though she didn’t wholly believe it. Why had he spent twenty minutes talking to that agent Emma Butterworth, then flirted outrageously with Libby during most of the TV announcement if he was tormented by unquenchable lust for her, Elle?
“God, yes,” said Rory. “Seeing you with Tom Scott, talking away… he reminded me of that loser you went out with who used to turn up at the pub. I hated him.”
“Fred?” Elle laughed. “Rory, that was over three years ago. He turned up at the George MacRae once, by coincidence. Anyway, I was still your secretary then.”
“And I never laid a finger on you. Apart from once or twice. We knew there was something going on. But I waited till you were a woman. Like a dynastic marriage.”
That was one of their jokes—that what they were doing wasn’t wrong, because he’d waited until she’d been promoted before they’d actually slept together. Elle wasn’t often entirely sure if it was a joke or not.
“We snogged and then we barely discussed it, partly because both of us were so drunk we could hardly remember it,” Elle said, trying to sound reasonable. She smiled at him, feeling a flush of love spread over her. “Don’t romanticize it.”
They gazed at each other, still and silent.
“I like romanticizing it, Elby. Because one day it’s the story we’ll tell our grandchildren.” He lay down again, and she put her head back on his warm chest. “Anyway, I do remember it. Every little detail.” He picked up his book again while she lay with his other arm wrapped around her. “Doesn’t matter now, does it?” he said. “You’re all mine. All mine, for ever and ever, happily ever after, the end.” He squeezed her tight, and she smiled to herself, flushed with love. Everything was OK now. It always was, when she was alone with him.
It was always OK when she was alone with him. It was funny, really, how easy it all seemed, because when she thought of the ramifications of it all, it became rather scary, so she pushed that aside and just thought about how much she loved him. Other things were difficult, but when it was just
them it was simple, because it was just amazing, because it was so right.
It was true that she barely remembered that kiss in the cab after the sales conference, two and a half long years ago. The next day she was mortified, and nearly hadn’t come into work, but Rory had made it all right. He’d caught up with her on the way out to lunch, and they’d laughed quietly about it as they both walked towards Tottenham Court Road, agreed it was silly and embarrassing but hey, no harm done. They joked about their respective hangovers and parted, smiling, and when they returned to their desks, they grinned and it was all OK. Elle liked him all the more for that, the way he could make it into a joke between them, and at the same time not make her feel stupid.
That July they kissed again. It was after a drinking session in the George MacRae following the annual Bluebird summer day trip to Eastbourne. In hindsight, Elle thought they’d both known it was going to happen—they’d gone outside ostensibly for a cigarette, and snogged in one of the side streets off the British Museum, unseen by anyone except tourists and students. Then again the following January, in a booth at Kettner’s after a dinner with some Ottakar’s booksellers.
It was strange in that it didn’t feel strange. It felt like a totally separate part of their relationship. They’d see each other at work the next day and it was as if nothing had happened, but she kept it inside her, a secret that sometimes made her smile at her desk.
The sales conference was Thursday 12 March 1998.
The trip to Eastbourne was Friday 24 July 1998.
The evening at Kettner’s was Wednesday 20 January 1999.
Oh, Elle remembered every date, every single one. It was as if something had lit up inside her, a switch turned on; though months would go by and nothing would happen, it was OK,
it was in her head until the next time. Work was like a stage. People kept commenting on how good she looked, how thick her hair was, had she lost weight? Elle, who paid such great lip service to swearing she didn’t believe in true love that lasted forever; Elle, who liked the fantasy of romance novels because they were between two covers, and nothing like real life—when she looked back now, she realized she had been ripe for the picking. She should have seen it coming. Because when she fell, she fell hard.
In October, Libby handed in her notice, to go to Bookprint. Felicity, Posy, and Rory tried to keep her—Libby was brilliant with authors, fantastic at copy, always coming up with new ideas, never ruffled. But she said no, she wanted to work at a more literary outfit, always had done and so, much to her surprise, Elle found herself promoted. She wasn’t exactly commissioning bestsellers and flying off to Frankfurt, but she wasn’t sending faxes and doing the filing anymore either. People asked her opinion, sometimes. Felicity, once, gave her the first few chapters of her precious Victoria Bishop to read, wanting to know if she thought it was pacy enough. Even Posy let her talk in the editorial meeting, about a new contract for Abigail Barrow.
And Rory… she felt Rory’s eyes on her, as the days went by, and as she grew in confidence, as she stopped wearing short skirts and started coming in earlier; she felt him smile with pleasure when other people agreed with her, praised her, noticed her. She knew he was watching. She knew it. And it wasn’t a surprise, therefore, to either of them when, after a drunken night at the George MacRae celebrating—oh, something or other, there was always some reason to decamp to the pub—Elle went back to Rory’s flat and slept with him for the first time. He lived just off Myddelton Square, in Clerkenwell, “only a five-minute cab ride away, come on.” It was almost
as if that was what they were supposed to do next. They even laughed about it the next day, as she was scrambling into her clothes, rushing home to change before work.
We’re such a cliché.
But Elle played it cool. It was as if he was willing her to, wanted her to be the sophisticated, together girl he knew she was about to be, not the prawn-sandwich-in-filing-cabinet, disastrous dye job she had been. So she grew up for him. She smiled at him briefly at work, and just went about her business, but that glow was there, the sparkle in her eyes, that… something.
She was glad Libby wasn’t there anymore. She couldn’t have hidden it from her.
At the Christmas party they slept together again, and this time it seemed to stick. Sam was staying at the conference hotel to clear up and Rory came back to Elle’s and somehow, letting him see her flat meant she was letting him into her life. He seemed to acknowledge that, too. They had sex that night, in Elle’s IKEA-furnished room, with old film prints Blu-Tacked onto the walls, and it was more intense than ever. It was intense because, in her tatty, homely flat, this thing now felt real. He was her boss, he was sleeping with her, and she had totally, utterly fallen for him. When he came, that first night, she cried.
They were glorious, those first few months. He made her laugh, he made her feel safe, she could ask him anything and he’d tell her, about how things worked, about books and book people, about life in general. She’d read more than he had, and he loved that. He was older and more experienced; she was the wise one, the one who’d calm him down, advise him not to ring up X and tell them to fuck off. They fitted together perfectly; she looked up to him, and she looked after him. He was so easy to be with, so charming and funny and moody
and silly, so gorgeous, with his kind eyes and handsome face, his sweet sticking-up hair. She couldn’t believe he was hers; he reminded her of Anthony Andrews in
Brideshead Revisited,
slightly aristocratic, languorous and handsome.
She adored him, and she couldn’t believe she was finally allowed to. At the start, she used to literally skip along Amwell Street, the morning after she’d spent the night with him, to catch the bus. How strange that it was possible to feel like this, like the sun was always shining on you, that you had been born to love someone, that the world only made sense when you were with them.
They met up once or twice a week, usually on Tuesdays and Thursdays, nearly always at his flat, when Sam would be staying with her new boyfriend (Dave having long disappeared), and Elle could be away without arousing suspicion. Elle found it funny sometimes that her love life was meticulously arranged around the fact that Sam’s boyfriend, Steve, had football practice on Mondays, the game on Wednesdays, and that he liked to go out with his mates on Fridays and was usually in Hertford on Saturdays and Sundays. It didn’t bother Rory, in fact he liked the compartmentalization. If she ever talked about the next stage, or moving things along, he freaked out.
We have to be careful. We have to find the right time to tell people. Not yet.
For most of that year, this was fine with Elle. She didn’t want to talk to anyone else about it. It was just the two of them, watching videos, making love, cooking together, dancing to the Stones on his old record player, sneaking into dark corners in restaurants. This was romance, a big, grown-up, full-on romance. One day, she told herself, we’ll look back and laugh at the time when we couldn’t tell anyone. She felt, by keeping this secret, she was paying for the relationship that meant more to her than anything else ever had. Sometimes, when she thought of Felicity’s face when she found out, or what people in the
office would say—Sam, or even Libby, how she could have hidden it from them for such a long time—she quailed at the thought. Anyone who has been through the same thing will know what it’s like. But then she told herself she knew he loved her. That certainty gave her strength, as summer faded into a cold, wintry autumn.
She didn’t realize that it would all have to change at some point, that it wasn’t in her nature to live like this. She didn’t notice what was going on around her, or the storm clouds gathering around the two of them.
THE MORNING AFTER
the Booker Prize, Elle was eating toast up at the breakfast bar as sunshine flooded through the large French windows of Rory’s sitting room. Rory was getting dressed in the other room, listening to Radio 4, where the news was all about the undecided result in the US election. Bush had been declared winner but that had been withdrawn and a recount announced in Florida.
“They’ll never elect Bush,” Elle said loudly. “There’s no way!”
Rory appeared in the doorway to the kitchen, fiddling with his tie. “Oh, come off it, of course they will. It’s a done deal. His brother’s governor of Florida, they’ve got the secretary of state in their pocket, saying the vote’s on their side. It’s terrible. This is a guy who’s been arrested twice. I mean, I don’t even know anyone who’s been arrested
once
, let alone twice.”
That’s because you still haven’t met my mother,
Elle wanted to say. Rory turned back to the bedroom, and Elle, suitably quashed, finished off her toast, wondering if it would be OK to turn the radio over to Capital FM. She was all for staying abreast of current affairs, but she didn’t see why she had to engage with those current affairs at 7 a.m. when her mind was waking up. She wanted cheery pop music and light banter at that hour of the morning, not John Humphys haranguing someone about Chechnya or rail safety or what was going to happen to the Dome.
Feeling brave, she got up and turned the radio over, just as someone said, “And now, back to the terrible floods that have wreaked havoc over the past two weeks. In Sussex—”
There had been bad flooding near her mum’s. Mandana had mentioned it last night at the Savoy, she remembered. Those drinks… Elle stood by the radio, gazing out of the window and reliving the previous evening. It wasn’t her mum’s
conviction that shocked her; that wasn’t a big deal. It was the atmosphere. The fact that Rhodes’s engagement had starkly exposed how the Bee family as she knew it simply didn’t exist anymore. They didn’t know how to be together, even in a civil way.
Little by little, she’d come to see how much her relationship with Rory had helped her to block out a lot of stuff. She didn’t get as upset about her mum and dad anymore, or wound up by her brother, or annoyed by Sam and her enthusiastic singing of Robbie Williams in the shower. And that was fine, except she increasingly wondered if, as with so many things, this curious half-life she led meant she just didn’t notice what was going on around her until she was confronted with it, like last night. Elle decided to call Mum and ask to come and visit this weekend. Yes, that was it—she’d go down, help her with the house, spend some time with her.
“Rory?” she called, going into the other room. “The weirdest thing happened with Mum and Dad last night… Wow! You do look smart.” She kissed him.
“Thanks,” he said. “Can you turn that racket off and put it back to Radio 4? In case there’s anything on the Booker.”
“Well, but we know who won, don’t we?” Elle was always amazed at Rory’s obsessive nature when it came to the World of Books. He could not stand to be out of the loop. Posy would say to Felicity, “Did you hear Sue MacGregor on the
Today
program interviewing Helen Fraser?” And Rory would be simply furious he hadn’t heard it, as if this meant he was a publishing outcast, a leper.