Elle picked out
The Reluctant Widow
—her fingers lingered over
A Civil Contract,
but she moved away, she knew the rules were one a week, and one at a time, no more—and paid for the book. “You enjoyed that one?” Suresh said, nodding at
Frederica
.
“Brilliant,” Elle said happily. “A real good ’un.”
“See you next week then,” Suresh said, shaking his head, for he clearly thought Elle was a nutcase. Elle waved and walked back towards the office, clutching her bag happily to her side at the thought of another book to devour. There was absolutely no chance of Elle meeting a Max Ravenscar or a Lord Damerel, not at the Mecca Bingo on Kilburn High Road, and certainly not in the air-conditioned gulag of Bookprint Books Ltd, no, never there. She crossed Golden Square and the glass doors slid silently back for her.
“Elle?” a voice behind her called. “Hi, Elle?”
“Oh,” said Elle, snapping out of her reverie, and turning round with dread. “Hi, Celine. I’m sorry I didn’t—I was about to come and see you—I needed a sandwich—it’s—” She stopped, not sure why she was making up fifteen different excuses. “Hi,” she said, pretending she hadn’t spoken. “I was about to come and see you.”
“Good, good,” said Celine. “I’m glad to see you, Elle. Come with me?”
They walked through the light-filled Bookprint lobby together. Elle jabbed the button for the lift.
“Thank you,” Celine said. The tone of her voice was always the same: the slight accent, even and modulated, just friendly enough. “So. You have been here six months now?”
“Yes, I have.”
“You know that you come with such high praise.”
“Oh—thanks,” said Elle.
“Yes. Felicity, Posy, Rory, they all said you were someone to watch.”
You made two of them redundant.
Elle frowned, to hide her blush of confusion. “Oh—I don’t know about that.”
Celine didn’t get self-deprecation, Elle could tell.
“I don’t feel we’ve really spoken since you joined. Have you settled in?” she inquired, as if Elle were a guest at her B&B.
“Oh, yes,” Elle said, hiding the plastic bag swinging from her arm with the Georgette Heyers in it. “Life is… good. Just great. Really… great.”
“I am glad to hear it,” said Celine. “So, I wanted to talk to you because I have a project for you. I want you to look after Dora Zoffany’s backlist.”
Elle was genuinely flummoxed. She looked around, to see if Celine was actually talking to someone behind her. “Dora Zoffany? Me?”
Celine impatiently tapped her immaculate pointed kitten heel on the shiny marble floor. “Bof! These lifts. They are terrible, you don’t think? I will forward you the email when I get back to my desk. We have to reissue them. All of them.”
“I can’t believe her books were allowed to go out of print in the first place,” Elle said. Then she thought that might sound critical, so she added quickly, “So, that’s good then. Thank you!”
Celine crossed her arms and drummed her fingers on her
elbow. “Well, I don’t want to do it. I think it’s a waste. She sells… nothing. But Tobias Scott is a very important agent to us, three of our biggest authors are with him, you know. So we have to.” She said it
wee aff toooh.
Elle rather liked how slightly more French Celine became, the crosser she got. “I thought it would be a nice project for you, something to broaden your range. From all the romances. Do you mind?”
“Mind?” Elle said. “Honestly, that’d be brilliant. I really love Dora Zoffany.”
“Rory said you did. He said you should be the one.”
Rory said
. He knew she did. He knew she’d had hardly any room for books in her Ladbroke Grove flat, and yet they’d piled up against the wall unevenly like medieval towers, leaning precariously to the side, and that the space on her one small shelf had been reserved for everything by Dora Zoffany, old fifties Bookclub hardbacks, cheap and small, their clay-red or royal-blue cloth frayed at the corners. She hadn’t unpacked her books since she’d moved to Kilburn. She didn’t see the point. It was simpler to just keep buying Georgette Heyers.
“Rory?” she said, after a moment’s hesitation. “Well—I’m glad he did. It’s very kind of you, to think of me.”
“I’m not being kind,” Celine said flatly. “I have wanted to give you a project for a while. So I can talk to you about it more.”
Elle watched her. She wondered if Celine had a boyfriend, or if she lived alone like Elle. Not in a flat like Elle’s. A white and glass apartment like the Bookprint building, overlooking the river, filled with fresh flowers and modern art. An older boyfriend, a philosophy professor from Sciences Po. Was she different when she spoke French, did her eyes sparkle, did she glow when she smiled?
“Ah, here it is, the lift.” Celine stopped tapping her foot. “So, you will do this then? I’ll send you the information. Look
the covers over and talk to the art department, get the agent in. It’s not Tobias Scott you will deal with. It’s his son. His name is Tom. He is looking after this for his father.”
“Tom? I know Tom,” Elle said, relieved.
“Good. Just do it right. They are very important to us, let me know if there’s anything else.”
Celine nodded briskly. She got into the lift. “You are coming?”
One of the worst things about Bookprint was the torture of the lifts with your boss. Fifteen seconds of small talk—Libby was brilliant at it. “Morning, Bill! Saw Ian McEwan in Warren Street this morning, isn’t that weird?” Whereas every time Elle just stared at the floor wondering how fifteen seconds could seem to last hours, wishing the lift would plunge into the basement, killing them all.
“Er, no, I’m waiting for someone,” Elle said mysteriously. She was aware this sounded insane. Celine looked perplexed. “Thank you again,” Elle added, but the door had closed.
She waited a good few seconds to be sure, then called the lift again, chewing her lip and thinking. She still had five minutes left of her lunch break to finish
Frederica
and read the opening pages of
The Reluctant Widow
and she didn’t want to waste any more. It was boiling hot and there was no one around, but as she sat down, Rory appeared around the corner, and walked past her office. He looked in and stared, his eyes searching hers, and this time, Elle looked back at him. She found her heart was racing. He slowed down, and she thought he might stop, but he didn’t, and she was glad—at least she thought she was, she couldn’t tell.
THAT EVENING ELLE
wearily climbed the stairs, pushed open the door, and wiped her aching forehead. It was stifling. She dumped her bag on the floor and opened the windows. The tinny radio from the corner shop spurted sharp snatches of pop music. She drank a large mug of water from the tap, flopped down on the ragged old mustard-colored sofa, and stared into space.
Her new flat was not designed for the summer months, and as she’d lived there only since March she had no way of knowing if it was designed for the depths of winter either. The owner had been a stage manager in the West End who’d retired to Florida. The place was cheap enough for her to just afford it as it was tiny, had damp, and was on the fourth floor without a lift. It hadn’t been decorated for well over twenty years, and was covered in posters for seventies farces and signed photos of ancient actors: row after row of photos of people like Liza Goddard, Paul Nicholas, and Hannah Gordon signing heartfelt messages to Billy, her landlord. Next to the fridge, so that she saw it every morning and evening, was her favorite, a lurid seventies head shot of a woman with huge blond hair.
“Darling Billy boy always in my heart forever, your undying friend, Jilly! PS Remember sunlight and botty babies!”
the long-forgotten Jilly had scrawled underneath. Sunlight and botty babies, what did it mean? Darling!
Billy had rented the flat furnished. He’d said she was welcome to take the posters and photos down, but they’d been there for ten years or more and when Elle tried she was left with acres of dark squares on the walls, and she didn’t know what she’d rather have up there, so she hung them back up again, in the hope the posters gave the place more of a homely feel. Even if it was that of someone else’s home.
Her previous flat had been furnished too, but it also had cutlery, plates, and glasses. Here there was nothing. She kept meaning to buy stuff from the pound shop, so she could have people over, but she never got round to it. Sam had given her a mug when they’d moved out of the Ladbroke Grove flat. It said “Best Flatmate in the World” and it was that which Elle usually drank out of, either water or cheap Valpolicella from the Costcutter round the corner. She had a vase that she’d filled with flowers every now and again, but the smell when they went off—and they usually did so remarkably fast—was more potent than the fleeting satisfaction of having flowers in her flat, so she stopped bothering after a while. The thick green shagpile carpet and the boxes of books she’d never unpacked overwhelmed the room, anyway. She’d bought two cushions from Cath Kidston, one floral, one polka-dotted, and this was the sum total of her housewarming efforts in four months.
Elle drank some more water, the pounding in her head worse than ever. She knew what she had to do this evening—create some traffic, do something. Ring Karen or Matty or Hester, see what they were up to, fix up a date for drinks. Text Sam—she ought to arrange to see her, though the couple of times since March had been hard work. Or maybe unpack some books, try and settle in, stop pretending this flat was a temporary stopgap. But first, she should start by calling Melissa again. On Saturday, it would actually be two weeks since she’d heard from her. That was unprecedented.
She lay back and took out her phone and there was a text.
I need to speak to you. There’s something we need to discuss. Promise, this isn’t a ruse. Call me. X
No, Elle thought, staring at Rory’s name on the screen. There was an episode of
Sex and the City
that for some reason she
kept seeing on Channel 4, about the length of time it takes to get over someone. Half the amount of time you were with them, which was about ten months if you included the period of snogging and tension before they started sleeping together, which meant she still had till about September or October to get to before she’d stop feeling this rubbish. The trouble was, she didn’t know what she’d do after that. She clung to her misery, like a safety blanket.
Elle’s thumb hovered over his number. Perhaps she should. Perhaps…
No.
No.
Elle knew she was pathetic in every other aspect of her life at the moment, she had to hold firm on this. She took a deep breath, and called Melissa again. There was no answer so she got up, wearily, and padded through to the open-plan kitchen in her bare feet. She stared at Jilly and her sunlight and botty babies, and grabbed a bottle of white wine out of the fridge and some Pringles, trying to allay the feeling of loneliness that threatened to overwhelm her. She didn’t know what she’d do without a cool glass of wine to welcome her home at the end of the day, the feeling of fuzzy numbness she got after the first. How had she ended up here? It felt all wrong. It was wrong, wasn’t it?
Lately Elle thought she could hear the answer: the past few years were just a flicker of fun; this was how it was going to be.
She looked at her watch: just over an hour till
Big Brother.
She could read
The Reluctant Widow
till then. Right. A plan. She pulled the book out of her bag, along with the folder on Dora Zoffany’s backlist. At the top lay her email and the reply from Tom Scott she’d had that afternoon.
I’d be delighted to come in. Looking forward to seeing what you’ve done. And to catching up. Hope you’re enjoying Bookprint. See you next week. Best, Tom.
By the time
Big Brother
started Elle was two glasses of wine down, feeling a lot better about everything. Her headache had almost gone with the second glass. She poured herself another, and deleted Rory’s text.
The sky became streaked with pink, and soon the sitting room was half in light, half in black shadow. Elle looked around her in the gathering gloom, at the nearly empty wine bottle, the bent Pringles tube, the old posters silent on the walls. She didn’t feel sad. She felt—numb. It occurred to her then that perhaps this was just how it was going to be from now on, and in a way perhaps it was for the best, living alone with no annoyances, no one to hurt you.
“THESE JACKETS ARE
awful,” Tom Scott said brusquely, standing upright. He folded his arms. “I don’t understand what you’re trying to do with them. Are you trying to sell her to readers of classic English fiction? Or eight-year-old girls who like… Princess My Ponies, or whatever it’s called?”
Elle bit her lip. “Well,” she said. “I think they’re beautiful, and all perfectly tailored to the women’s fiction market. I think they—”
“But they’re all
pink,
” Tom said. A vein was pulsing on his right temple. He put his jacket down on the table and gazed at the offending covers on her desk. Elle hovered behind him. She’d forgotten how tall he was, and how abrupt he could be. Why had she thought this would be an easy meeting? Why? “Why?” he said, making her jump. “I mean, why the hell are they pink? Why? I’d never pick that up.”