“Bleurgh,” Elle said, embarrassed, but he leaned forward and kissed her. Her cheeks were flushed and hot from crying, her lips swollen. He put his hands around her head, pulling her gently towards him, so that their lips touched, lightly at first and then hard against each other. His skin was cool on hers. She closed her eyes briefly, remembering the feel of him again;
it was so strange how years and oceans had separated them, but she could still remember how he tasted, what it felt like to kiss him. She put her hands on his shoulder, on the back of his neck, and something winked at her. She pulled away, hastily.
“I can’t,” she said. “I’m—I can’t, I’m engaged, Tom, I can’t do this.” She stood up. “Jesus, what am I thinking.” She wiped her eyes again, light-headed from the crying, and turned to the window, expecting to see the clouds parting, but the gray sky hung steadily over them, without a break. He pulled softly at the cuff of her coat.
“You can,” he said. “Do you love him?”
“Yes,” she said. “Only—oh, I can’t explain it. I shouldn’t be here. I should go,” she said, talking a gulp of her coffee.
“What happens if you stay, one more day?” Tom said. “Come to dinner with me.”
“I just can’t do things like that,” Elle said. She smiled. “I have to fly back tonight. I’ve got a board meeting tomorrow, and a presentation to an author, and we have to budget for next year, and negotiate the pay rise. I can’t just bunk off.”
She thought of Felicity’s email again, of the cool green of a London spring, of the dinners with Gray’s friends, of the way he wanted to fix her.
“What do you want?” Tom asked, insistent.
“To be happy. To make someone else happy. To do my job well, be a good person. And that means—” Elle shrugged, took a deep breath, shook her head. “It means—I don’t know. You tell me. I seem to spend my life telling people what to do, these days. What do you think I should do?”
“I can’t tell you that.” His hand closed on hers. “You have to decide what you want.”
“What do you want?” Elle asked him. “Do you even know?”
“I want you,” he said. “I want to be with you. I want Dora to be happy, I want to open another bookshop, and I want to
be with you.” He shrugged his shoulders. He’d been so lanky when she’d first met him, awkward and cross in his suits. Now he was still lanky, but it suited him. He was himself. “I know what I want, you see.”
They were standing, facing each other across the small round café table, and then suddenly the door was opened and someone was calling his name. “Tom—Tom—”
They turned around. The bookseller who’d sold Gray his book burst into the shop. “I knew you’d be here. Dora’s going mental, Tom, I don’t know what she wants but she keeps shouting ‘Cobweb,’” she panted. “The shop’s full and—”
“OK, OK,” Tom said. He turned back to Elle, and rubbed his face. “Can I meet you when I’ve finished work? Are you staying at the conference hotel?”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s horrible. And Tom—I have to go back tonight, I do.”
“
Tom
—look, she’s going mad, it’s not fair—”
“I’d better get back. You go for a walk. You need some fresh air, cooped up all day. Think it all over. Think about it. I’ll call you.”
He touched her arm, and then he was gone. She didn’t want him to leave. Outside was fresh air, and it was cool. Elle rubbed her eyes, rolled her head around her neck, and realized she felt a little lighter, somehow. She could feel the warmth of his skin on her hands, on her lips. She turned to walk back to the hotel, south, and then abruptly crossed the road and set off through Marylebone, going east, without much thinking about where she was going. She took out her phone and rang Courtney.
“Hi, Elle.” Courtney sounded a little nervous. “How’s it going? Celine’s assistant told me there was a problem with your schedule. Was everything OK?”
“Yes, it was fine,” Elle said. “Just me, being an idiot. I’m sorry if you worried about it. I got something wrong.”
“Oh, OK.” Courtney breathed out. “Wow. Phew.”
“How’s everything there? Any messages?”
“Sure.” Courtney rustled through some papers. “Caryn asked me to remind you again about the figures for tomorrow’s meeting. But I told her you’d done them already and they were printed and ready to be handed out. I hope that was OK.”
There was something so soothing about Courtney’s ultra-professional, neutral tone. “Yes, that’s perfect.” Elle sometimes wondered if Courtney could just do her job for her, operating the switches like the man behind the Wizard of Oz. “Anything else?”
“I have a car booked to pick you up at eleven tonight, but I wanted to remind you it’s Newark and not JFK.”
Elle hesitated. “Yep, got that,” she said. “I was wondering. How easy would it be to change my ticket? By a few hours? Or even a day or two?”
“Oh.” Courtney sounded confused. “You mean catch an earlier flight?”
“No,” Elle said. “A later one.”
“Do you want me to check flight times, find one that’d get you in for the board meeting?”
“I was thinking I might miss the board meeting. Maybe come back later instead.”
Courtney cleared her throat. “OK—um—I’ll, should I—” She tried again. “It’s just Caryn has asked me twice today, when does she get back, what time does she land, does she have the presentation ready. I think they’re expecting you here for the meeting, and—”
“Courtney, don’t worry,” Elle said, scratching her cheek. She didn’t want to alarm her. “I’ll let you know. It probably won’t happen. Just—there’s a few things to sort out.”
“Got it. Just let me know if there’s anything I can do.”
She sounded younger on the phone; Elle had to remind
herself she was, in fact, still only twenty-four. She was so efficient, like a robot, sometimes she forgot. “Thanks, Courtney. I’ll let you know, love,” she said, not sure why she’d called her love—you didn’t do that at Jane Street, drop terms of endearment into conversation. She rang off, and carried on walking.
Go for a walk.
Pounding the gray pavements, her black boots slick with the rain, Elle thought again about the previous month when Courtney had had a bad case of the flu. She’d sounded so miserable that Elle had left work a little early and taken her some chicken soup. Visiting her assistant’s bare but cute apartment had made her nostalgic: vintage lampshades and throws, a battered old bookcase full of Penguin classics and modern girl’s classics. There were Converse in the hallway, half-eaten bags of Goldfish crackers, and a copy of
People
magazine on the old oak trunk that was the coffee table.
“I just got it last weekend, in Brooklyn,” Courtney had told her with pride, running her hands along the warm wood of the trunk and sneezing. “Saw it a couple of months ago and I’ve been saving for it ever since. Isn’t it beautiful.” She’d tucked her feet underneath her and sunk even further into her comforter. Elle had looked at her, suddenly longing to kick off her shoes and stay here with Courtney and Sarah, her roommate, who’d just arrived home. They were about to embark on a
Golden Girls
marathon; there were chips and dips, ice cream, and Gatorade for Courtney, as well as the beautifully packaged, small tub of chicken soup from her boss.
But just then she’d glanced at the two of them and realized they were waiting for her to leave. It was strange for her to be here. She was the boss lady in heels, not their friend who lounged on the couch with them. She had walked down the stairs, feeling chastened, not a little embarrassed, and gone back to Gray’s apartment, reminding herself as she put her keys
down on the smooth marble countertop that this was much better, this was what she worked for.
The afternoon light was already fading. The white stucco buildings broke apart in places, the gaps revealing mews streets, pubs with golden light streaming from them. Elle carried on walking east, knowing this was the wrong direction, but somehow unable to change her path. It struck her then that she was worse off than Courtney, in fact. She had nothing to show for her hard work, except an engagement ring and a flashy apartment that someone else had bought. Courtney had the wooden trunk, she’d saved for it and lugged it up four flights of stairs. Elle had a car to meet her at the airport, an assistant, a fiancé, a career, and yet she didn’t have anything that was really hers.
She realized then she wasn’t quite sure where she was. She’d lost her way in London, in the streets she used to know so well. She walked down Cleveland Street, past the ancient chemists, the George and Dragon and the irate sign on the front door of a house that said firmly T
HIS IS
NOT
A BROTHEL
!! next to a house that was, unmistakably, a brothel: broken windows boarded up with cardboard, weeds growing out of cracks on the bricks, naked light bulbs in each room visible from the street, a skinny, chapped-lipped woman sitting in the bare front room, a cigarette in one long hand. She glared at Elle, and Elle stared back at her, then shook herself out of her reverie and hurried along.
The traffic along Tottenham Court Road was heavy, the road was wide, engines and drills from roadworks thundering in her ears. Elle scurried along the pavements, suddenly realizing why she’d come here, and crossed the road, almost running down the street. She turned off and she was there. She walked across Bedford Square, looking up at the houses, till she found the one she wanted.
Panting slightly, Elle stood at the bottom of the steps, just as she’d done on her first day over eleven years ago, and stared up at the front door. Her phone started ringing. It was Caryn. Elle shut it off, still looking up at the old Bluebird building. There was no trace of Bluebird there, though; the sign had gone with Felicity on that freezing cold day before Christmas, and the windows on the top two floors had thick white blinds. There was a new brass plaque where the old buzzer had been, with three different buttons. She climbed up the front steps to peer at it.
G
ROUND
F
LOOR
: B
RIGHTSTAR
M
EDIA
P
ROPERTY
L
TD
F
IRST
F
LOOR
: A
DEX
D
IGITAL
R
ESOURCES
S
ECOND
F
LOOR
: P
AUL
H
URRIDGE
Elle stepped back, smiling. What had she been expecting? A bookbinder’s and archivist’s with a workshop full of elves making glass slippers in the basement? She remembered throwing coffee over Felicity, running down the steps in the evenings with Sam or Libby, hanging around the corner waiting for Rory, sitting in the square on a bench reading a book, any book, with her prized Pret sandwich and her Pied a Terre shoes, bought in the sale, worn till they fell apart.
But it wasn’t here anymore, it was in the past, and she wasn’t a girl anymore, she was a woman, standing on her own in the rain, looking for something she wouldn’t find.
It was time for her to go home.
“
HERE IS WHERE
we keep the tea and coffee. We contribute to the kitty, four pounds a month, but I provide the biscuits. And ah—your desk is here.”
“This is my desk?”
“Yes.”
“I thought I was getting an office.”
“Find a million-copy bestseller and you’ll get an office.”
Elle put her hands on her hips. She smiled and said firmly, “I need an office.”
“I was joking,” Felicity said. “Here is your office.”
She opened another door onto a tiny room with a view over Curzon Street. On the desk was a bunch of flowers, a computer, and a slim black package.
“That’s your e-reader,” Felicity said. “This is a new computer, and your assistant has your BlackBerry.” She smiled at Elle’s obvious surprise. “This isn’t the age of Caxton, you know. Move with the times, Elle.” She paused. “So, you’ve been back for over two months, what have you been up to?”
“Nothing really,” said Elle. “Seeing my family. Spending time with… people. Old friends.” She smiled quickly, looking down, because she wanted to keep it private, but then she remembered: Felicity wouldn’t pry. She wouldn’t be interested. To Elle, it was wonderful, the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to her. To Felicity, she saw now, love
was something that only really happened within the pages of a book. For long periods of Elle’s life, she’d thought that was true, too. But it wasn’t. It was you and him, the two of you, a team to face the world together, and that was what she’d been looking for all those years; not an idol, or someone to lust after, or someone to fix her. “I rented a flat near the river, and I put my mother’s sideboard in it, and bought a sofa, and lay on it and did nothing. I read, mainly.”
“How lovely,” said Felicity. She glanced quickly at Elle. “I’m very glad to hear it.”
She looked at her watch. “Now, shall I let you settle in? Our editorial meeting’s at eleven on Mondays. If we meet first thing after the weekend it gives us a jump-start on the opposition. I remember when—”