Second message.
“Elle? It’s your father. Hope you’re well… Uhm, yes. I wanted to know whether, since the wedding’s canceled, you’ll be able to request a refund for the flight to New York? Can you call me, please. Yes. Bye—bye then.”
Elle looked around for her wine mug, and headed towards the fridge. She heard her mother’s voice, her old cry of “Leave me ALONE!” She wished she could ring them back, all of them, and just this once, say the same thing to all of them.
TWO DAYS LATER
, Elle woke with a raging, deadening hangover to the sounds of Kilburn on a sweltering Saturday morning and the smell from the rancid greasy spoon across the road.
Her head was pounding. Her mouth tasted like the bottom of a rubbish bin. She lay there with her aching eyes half opened. Someone was playing “Life Is a Roller Coaster” extremely loudly nearby.
Elle rolled over, feeling a wave of nausea hit her. It was hot, the room was tiny, the purple blinds cast a lurid glow into the raspberry-colored room. She opened one eye and closed it again. The walls looked as if they would close in on her. She tried not to gag.
I have to get out of here,
she thought. She had spent the last two nights in by herself. She wanted to talk to someone, and everyone was away. Eventually she’d tried Karen, even though she knew she was on holiday with her boyfriend in Greece, but it was hard to have a chat with someone when they were on their mobile in a restaurant eating meze. All Elle wanted was someone to reel with. She was still reeling from it herself. That’s why she supposed she’d drunk so much. She hadn’t meant to.
Elle stumbled unwillingly from her bed, the vise-like grip on her head tightening as she stood up. She ran the shower till it was steaming hot, even though the weather outside almost equaled it. She’d found lately that a hot shower was the best cure for a hangover. That, and peppermint scrub from the Body Shop. As she stood under the wonky showerhead that bloomed with limescale, scrubbing her hair and trying not to taste the tang of sour wine at the back of her throat, she vowed not to drink today. It was having a bottle open, that was the trouble—it was there, it was cool, and the last forty-eight hours had been rough.
She’d spent the last two days fielding calls from irate bridesmaids, icy hoteliers, and alternately defensive and furious parents. The woman at Virgin almost laughed when Elle rang to ask if she could simply get her money back on the canceled flight to New York.
“Madam, that’s not our policy,” she’d said.
Elle couldn’t help feeling sad she wasn’t going to New York. She’d been so looking forward to it. She would never have told her, because Libby clearly didn’t think she cared about work anymore, but Elle was secretly quite jealous of her and her job swap to Bookprint US, though of course she was pleased for Libby. Libby was so on edge lately, so desperate for… something, the opposite of Elle, who these days was content to float along, like a pathetic piece of driftwood in a river. Perhaps it was the heat.
Her father was furious at the canceled flight, told her she should have tried to reschedule it for another time. “Four hundred and sixty pounds, Elle, I spent on your airfare. I’m not saying I shouldn’t have done it. I was glad to help. It’s just—well, what a waste. When I think about what we could have done…”
Elle tried to never feel resentful of Eliza, Jack, and Alice, her father’s new family. It was so different from her life with her father that she tried to separate it out. But there were times like now when she wanted to scream at him, to shout,
“I wish you’d never offered in the first place. I wish you had spent the money on Alice’s bloody skiing holiday or Jack’s sodding new clarinet that he’ll play once and give up like he did the violin and the frigging piano. It’s not my fault!”
“I know, Dad,” she’d said, biting her lip. “Hey, did you say you were thinking of coming up one Sunday to help me put up some shelves?”
“Yes, yes,” said John impatiently, then his voice softened.
“Yes, that could be good. I’ll have a look for some dates. We can discuss it all then.” He paused. “Have you spoken to your mother?”
Her mother denied all knowledge of it.
“I got the note too. Mad. I’ve no idea what they’re talking about,” she’d said, sounding astonished, when Elle finally rang her the night after she’d got the card. “I never liked her, you know. Always thought she was batty. Don’t tell anyone that.”
“When they came to stay, did anything…” Elle trailed off.
“Did anything what?” Her mother sounded sharp. “I didn’t do anything. I thought we had a lovely weekend. I was out with Bryan and Anita most of the time, discussing the textiles business. It’s very busy at the moment. You know we’re going to India in October.”
“Oh, right,” said Elle, struggling to remember what she was talking about and not wanting to ask when her mother was in a mood like this. “How’s that going?”
“Good, but I’m very busy with it. So I suppose I didn’t see much of them. Yes, we had a bit of rowdy conversation on Saturday night, but it wasn’t a row. It was just what you do, over supper, you know?”
“About what?” Elle said.
“Oh, do you know I can’t even remember? America, maybe. She was being so patronizing, telling me why America was so great. I think I put her straight on a few facts. Oh, maybe she didn’t like it.” Mandana sounded uncertain. “Elle, I don’t want you to think I did anything—I wouldn’t—Oh, dear. Oh, dear—I really think I must have upset her. And I don’t understand how.”
“I don’t know, Mum,” Elle said, realizing she sounded genuinely upset. She couldn’t bear to see her like that again, knitting her fingers together the way she did when Rhodes came up, desperately trying to please him, placate Melissa,
do the right thing, be the mother everyone wanted her to be. She pushed the sound of her mother’s drunk voice on the answering-machine message out of her head. It was a one-off, she was sure, perhaps she wasn’t even drunk anyway, Elle was just looking out for it. “Don’t worry, Mum. I’m sure it wasn’t that. I don’t know what she’s talking about.”
In fact, as she got dressed, she decided she had to put all of them out of her head. Let Rhodes and Melissa go off and do their own thing; she’d had enough of leaving multiple phone messages, sending emails, trying to track them down. Let her father rant down the phone at someone else. Let her mother hang out with bloody Bryan and Anita and drink herself stupid. She was sick of the lot of them.
Ten invigorating minutes later, Elle got out of the shower, and put on her new black long linen skirt, struggling to get the zip up—how could she have put on weight when she’d eaten virtually nothing but Pringles the last few days?—her duck-egg-blue vest top with lace trim—a triumph from the Whistles sale—and black flip-flops. She threw a thin black cardigan over her tanned shoulders—she’d been sunbathing a lot lately out on the kitchen roof of the flat. It was dangerous to climb onto but lovely once you were out there, hours of lying in the sun like a cat, drinking chilled rosé and reading whatever Georgette Heyer she’d got to. You could waste away a whole summer like that.
She slung her bag over one shoulder, shoved her book and her purse, her Walkman and her phone and keys into it, popped her sunglasses on, and headed out onto the street.
There is something about being on your own during boiling hot weather that is much worse than being alone on a cold winter’s evening, when you can be snuggled up on the sofa with a hot-water bottle, a glass of red, a gas fire, and some comforting
TV. When it’s 90 degrees out you should be lying in a park with all your friends or your boyfriend, drinking Pimm’s and eating snacks from Sainsbury’s. Elle walked down Kilburn High Road, feeling the oily, dirty heat soak into her freshly scrubbed skin. She wished she could inhale some sweet, clean air. The street was crowded with shoppers, piling into crap Primark and Peacocks, standing outside the pub laughing, pulling kids and shopping bags along. Everyone was with someone.
She bought a can of Coke and headed towards the train station. Without really thinking about it, when a train arrived she got on it. She sat on the sweltering, graffiti-laced carriage as it trundled through town, and when she got to Richmond she looked around her and realized she didn’t know where she was going. Perhaps she should get on the train again and go back. No. She got off the train and scanned a map.
Five minutes later, still trying to channel the casual “Yeah, I’ve just popped over here for a day out” feeling she’d persuaded herself into, she walked through the open door of a cool, dark shop. A young man was at the till, his dark head bent over, checking off a list.
“Hi,” said Elle. “Is Tom around?”
“Sorry?” The young man looked up and Elle saw it was a young woman, with a gamine, chic bobbed crop. Elle fidgeted with her own messy hair.
“Oh. Sorry—oh. I was just wondering where Tom was? I’m a—I’m a friend of his.”
The girl—who was very beautiful, and wearing a floral top, Elle saw now, how could she have thought she was a man, much less that a man could have shoulders as slim as that and be wearing gold earrings?—put two fingers in her mouth and whistled. “Tom!” she called. “Someone here to see you.” Elle stared at her, impressed. “Cheaper than an intercom,” she explained.
Tom appeared, framed in a doorway behind the till. He had a pencil behind his ear, and his sleeves were rolled up. “Elle!” he exclaimed, coming forward. “What a nice surprise. What are you doing here?” He kissed her. She noticed the freckles on his nose, slight sunburn on his face.
“It’s so hot, I thought I’d treat myself to a day out of Kilburn,” Elle explained, pleased at how normal this sounded, because now she was here she felt she’d made a mistake. “Work off a bit of the hangover, have a walk by the river, you know.”
“Well, I’m very glad you did,” he said.
There was an awkward pause. “I’ll just have a look round, shall I?” said Elle, now embarrassed. “Came to see the bookshop, get some books, it’s my mother’s birthday, you know.” In February. She shook her head. “Um—”
“OK,” said Tom. He glanced at her again, with a strange look in his eyes. “Well, that’s great. Do you want to get a drink afterwards? I’m off this afternoon, done my shift. We could—” He hesitated, looked swiftly back at the girl behind the till. “Look, let me know when you’ve finished.”
The girl said, “Tom, if you’re going to go, go now. Remember Mervyn Thacker’s coming in around lunch to talk about his event.”
Tom winced visibly. “Oh, my God, thanks, Caitlin.” He turned to Elle. “Shall we go?”
“Let’s,” said Elle gratefully. “Thanks,” she said to Caitlin.
“Elle, this is Caitlin. She runs the shop. She’s the reason we make any money at all.” He squeezed Caitlin’s shoulder. “Bye, C. See you later.”
As they left the shop, Elle turned to look at Caitlin once more, mesmerized by her dark, almond-shaped eyes, her low, husky voice. She was watching them leave.
“There was a lunatic author we published at Bluebird called Mervyn Thacker,” Elle said. “He wrote this book all about the
real message of the Rosetta Stone. He was mad. Kept ringing up Joseph Mile and telling him that there were runes on the Pyramids that reflected markings on the surface of Mars and why wouldn’t anyone listen to him.”
“Well, you’re bang on the money,” Tom said. “He lives in Richmond. He’s written a sequel to the book about the Pyramids and published it himself and he wants to have the launch party at Dora’s.”
“You called the bookshop Dora’s.” Elle had seen the sign outside. “That’s so nice.”
“Well, my mum loved reading, and it’s a good name.” He smiled, and rotated his head around his shoulders, as if he were tired. “Plus the publicity doesn’t hurt. That’s the terrible thing.”
“You’re a true salesman,” Elle said.
“I love it, it’s strange,” Tom said. “When I was an agent I hated trying to get people to buy books I wasn’t sure about. Even when my clients wrote books I actually liked I always assumed I must be wrong and they’d never find a publisher. It’s much easier when you’re selling books. You don’t feel as much pressure. I’ve read this book, I love it, I can hand-on-heart recommend it, promise, money back if you don’t agree with me.” He paused and gave her a curious look. “Elle, I hope you don’t mind me saying it, but you’re practically green. Are you all right?”
Elle coughed, and then laughed. “Thanks. I’m fine. I just need a hangover cure, that’s all. Or maybe another drink.”
“Oh-ho,” Tom said. “Big night last night?”
Elle shook her head. “Well… sort of.”
He chuckled. “So, tell me all. I stayed in last night and made some pasta. Make me jealous.”
“Um—there’s nothing to be jealous of.”
“I see.” His eyes gleamed. “You were out on the lash, what on earth did you get up to? Come on.”
She said, almost crossly, “I stayed in and drank a bottle of wine by myself, Tom. That’s what I did.”
“Oh, right,” said Tom.
Elle was annoyed, and she flushed. She added, “That’s partly why I came here, actually.”
“Oh, yes? Why?” Tom steered her down a side street.
“Well, I don’t know why, but I wanted to tell you, it’s probably boring, and—” It sounded so pathetic now. “All my friends are away, you see. And I kept thinking you’d get it. Don’t know why but that you would. After our chat about weddings.”