“… because it doesn’t do itself, you know…” he was saying,
as he hung onto my elbow and followed me outside.
“Yes yes I understand. Thank you. Thanks very much, that’s
great.” I continued to try to repel him until I spotted Elenor halfway down the
park taking snaps of a couple of elderly holidaymakers.
I caught her attention with a wave and pointed to my watch
to ask her how much more she had to do but Elenor just came bounding over with
girlish enthusiasm. I wondered if she’d still be bounding after another seventy
of these park reviews.
“I was just talking to those people,” she informed me,
cutting right across Chris’s diatribe as if he wasn’t even there. “They’ve been
coming here for sixteen years. They must be mad.”
Something had changed and it took me a moment to realise
what. Chris had stopped talking. I turned around to double-check he hadn’t
fallen into one of his drainage sink holes and saw that he’d completely clammed
up in the presence of my vibrant young colleague. I took the opportunity to
thank him once more in order to draw a line under our acquaintance but Chris
just mumbled something about it all being part of the job as he tasted Elenor
with his eyes.
“One thing I haven’t got is any interiors. The old lady
didn’t want to invite me in because her caravan was a bit of a mess and I can’t
seem to find anyone else at home,” Elenor explained.
I asked Chris if he had any vacant caravans we could look
inside and he sorted us out with a set of keys. “Pitch 38, half way down near
the wash hut,” he said, barely able to look up in case he accidentally caught
Elenor’s eye. “I have to get on, just bring them back when you’re finished.”
“God, what a weirdo!” Elenor remarked, before we were barely
out of Chris’s office. I wondered if she’d deliberately wanted him to hear or
if she’d simply not cared before deciding it amounted to pretty much the same
thing. She continued to run Chris down as we made our way over to pitch 38 and
let ourselves in to look around.
The caravan was a standard four-berth job with kitchen, main
bedroom and fold-down fixtures and fittings and I took the camera from Elenor
and took over the snapping, seeing as I knew what needed to be snapped.
I’d just folded back the little bathroom door and was taking
a photograph of the chemical toilet when Elenor called me from the bedroom.
“Andrew, come in here a moment. Bring the camera.”
“Hold on a sec,” I replied, filling the bathroom with
flashes before pulling closed the door again and making my way through to the
bedroom.
When I got there, I could scarcely believe my eyes.
Elenor had stripped down to just her bra and thong and was
lying on the bed, trailing her fingers up and down the length of her body.
“Want to take a couple of pictures of me?” she giggled,
pulling down one of her cups to flash me a nipple. “Or do you just want to join
in right away?”
Some people probably get these sorts of invitations every
day; rock stars, film stars, important politicians and casting directors, but
for me this was a first and it struck me momentarily dumb. Not because I was
considering it, please understand, but simply because my reactions had no
precedent to go to and were left fumbling in the dark as to the proper
etiquette of such a situation.
Elenor must’ve taken my hesitation as deliberation because
she spooned an extra layer on where it wasn’t needed and told me no one would
ever know, although I was fairly confident the news would somehow filter its
way back to Godfrey.
“Put your clothes on Elenor and stop mucking around,” I
finally replied, gifting her a get-out to preserve her feelings.
But Elenor didn’t want to take it. Much like Chris, she
seemed to think if she pressed hard enough she could bring me around and leapt
from the bed and stood in front of the door to bar my exit.
“Oh no you don’t. I know what you want and I’m not going to
let you leave until you’ve had it,” she smouldered. “Now kiss me.” She
presented me with a pair of pre-puckered lips and closed one of her eyes, but
the two-dimensional version of Andrew Nolan didn’t fancy her any more than the
three-dimensional version had.
“Elenor seriously, we haven’t got time for this,” I replied,
and inserted another get-out for her. “So wind me up when we’re back at the
office, but let’s just get this done and go home, shall we?”
“This is no wind up,” she smiled, before attempting to melt
around my waist, but I jumped back out of her arms and told her to pack it in.
“No Elenor, no. I don’t want to,” I insisted, sharpening
Elenor’s eye and tightening her lips.
“Don’t want to! You don’t want to!” she steamed. “You wanted
to back at the Christmas party though didn’t you?”
I thought about lying but figured this would only stir the
pot some more so I told her that that was then, this was now.
“You’re just changing your mind? Well you can’t do that,”
she spat, taking a big step into my face.
“Elenor. Elenor, please calm down,” I implored her, rapidly
running out of room in which to retreat.
“Calm down? Calm down? You bastard! Call yourself a man?”
she growled, scrambling across the bed after me, while keeping herself between
me and the door at all time. “You’re not a man, you’re just like Godfrey.”
“Elenor, this is…”
“I don’t care. I don’t care at all. What are you going to
do? Are you going to run away and cry? ‘Boo-hoo-hoo, the little girl frightened
me’,” she mocked, snapping her bra clasp with one hand so that it fell to the
floor. “Or are you going to get me on that bed and show me what sort of a man
you really are.”
With this, she launched at me, pinned me to the wall and
tried to rape a kiss out of me. I did all I could to untangle myself from her
but she had more arms than Ganesh and a couple of them almost made it into my
trousers.
“NO!” I shouted, pushing her back onto the bed but falling
on top of her when she pulled me off my balance. “I’m married,” I told her, but
this cut little ice with Elenor.
“You were married back in January and your wife wouldn’t
have known then and she won’t know now, so come on, just fuck me. Fuck me, fuck
me! Do it now, I know you want to,” she bucked, wrapping her legs around my
waist and pounding back against my loins.
I was finally all out of get-outs and squeezed her wrist
until she squeaked with pain. Her hold loosened just long enough for me to rip
myself from her arms and once I was free I hurled myself through the door and
out of the caravan into daylight. I half-expected a witness or two to be
waiting for me, but there was no one to note the state of my appearance, so I
quickly pulled myself together and straightened my clothes before fat Chris
blundered by.
Once respectable, I sucked in a few deep breaths to try and
calm my jitters and took stock of what had just happened.
Elenor had lost it. Big time, as it turned out. That was the
long and the short of it. Elenor had lost it…
… and it had all been my fault.
I’d started this whole sorry saga and it had ballooned into
a nightmare. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t gone through with it at Christmas
or that it took two to tango or whatever other excuse I could think of. All
that mattered was that Elenor had believed I was there for the taking because
at some point I had led her to believe this. Everything else was immaterial.
What a mess!
Any second now she was going to come through that door
kicking and screaming all over again and I didn’t know what to do. I’d calm her
and I’d talk to her and I’d reason with her but there were going to be
consequences from this day’s work, of that I was in no doubt.
And this was the last thing Sally needed. All her incredible
progress and all her hard work could be undone in one foul and immensely
foolish swoop. And next to everything else that was running around in circles
inside my panic-stricken brain that was the one thing that really terrified me.
I had to make Elenor understand that this was no longer
about me. I had to go back in there and speak to her. I mean, I knew I had to
do that anyway. I couldn’t exactly just drive off and leave her in the middle
of Lincolnshire. No, I had to bite the bullet, grab the bull by the horns,
grasp the nettle, seize the day and…
Unfortunately, before I could do any of those things, a blur
of hair and colour came bursting out of the caravan and sprinted past me in the
direction of the woods. She left me for dead (much as I would’ve loved to have
done for her) and reached the trees before I got my feet moving.
“Elenor, wait!” I called after her, locking my sights onto
her red top and tracking her as she weaved her way through the shadows of the
trees. But Elenor didn’t wait. She just kept on running, through the bracken
and around the maze of leaves and branches, desperate to put as much distance
between herself and me as she could. “Elenor please,” I called again, but
Elenor only slowed when she couldn’t find a way through the thickening
undergrowth and only then to try another route.
At first, I thought she was just running away to
inconvenience me. You know, a kind of vindictive ploy to delay our departure
and make me even later home, but then I heard a sound that stopped me in my
tracks – it was the sound of Elenor crying. I faltered for one indecisive
moment then redoubled my efforts to catch up with her.
“Elenor wait, Elenor!” I shouted, charging through the brush
and pleading with her to stop.
“Go away,” she cried back weakly.
“Please Elenor, wait.”
A branch whipped me in the face and I slipped on ditches,
tripped over roots and ran until my shoes were full of thorns, but still Elenor
wouldn’t stop. She’d had the foresight to wear trainers, so she was better
equipped for the terrain, but Elenor was running blind, which gave me the
tactical edge. This paid off when Elenor suddenly came across a rusty old
barbed wire fence. She turned and followed it along as far as she could go, but
then an enormous prickly shrub barred further progress so that I had her
cornered. That was when she decided to go through the fence.
I guess Elenor must’ve had about as much practice of going
through barbed wire fences as I’d had of fending off rampant nymphomaniacs
because she snared herself halfway through and her sobs quickly turned into
yelps as the spurs dug into her skin.
“Ow-uh-uh-uh,” I heard her hollering as I caught up.
She’d all but given up trying to yank herself free by the
time I reached her and was now crying with pain as she gored herself on rusty
wire.
“Help me,” she wept, her voice quaking with misery.
“Hold still, Elenor. Just hold still, I’m going to get you
out,” I told her. I took a moment to quickly assess where she was stuck, then
put my foot on the middle strand and pulled on the top strand.
“Ow! Ow! Ow!” Elenor blubbed as she rubbed against the
barbs.
Her top was still caught so that when she tried to back out,
she pulled herself into the spikes all over again. I told her to keep still and
picked her top free until she could safely extract herself, but then her hair
and her skirt got caught and it took a little bit more picking until Elenor was
finally free.
She stumbled back the moment she was able to and I thought
she was going to run off all over again, but instead she just stood there
shuddering and nursing her cuts, the picture of human misery.
“Elenor, I’m so so sorry,” I said, reluctant to approach her
in case I freaked her into bolting again. “Really I am, please, let’s just talk
a moment.”
I found some napkins in my pocket and offered them to her
and she took them and blew her nose and dabbed her cuts.
“This is all my fault,” I told her. “And I should never have
let it come to this, but…” I swallowed hard, “back around Christmas I really
thought I wanted you. And I allowed myself to get carried away with the idea.
So much so that for one insane moment I forgot I was married.”
I edged a little closer and Elenor held her ground.
“But that would’ve been wrong. So so very wrong, because I
love my wife very much and that would’ve destroyed everything. Please, I hope
you see. I was such an idiot. Such a dickhead.”
Elenor sniffed.
“I just feel really silly,” she warbled, her shoulders now
barely six inches apart.
“Don’t. God don’t. You have nothing to feel silly about,” I
reassured her, closing to within a couple of feet if her now. “If anyone should
feel silly, it’s me.”
“I’m embarrassed,” she sniffed, her mouth a perfect
down-turned crescent.
“Embarrassed? What about? I’m the one who’s embarrassed,” I
insisted. “I’m the one who chickened out and ran away if you remember. If
anyone should be embarrassed, it should be me. What a wally I am! How boring!”
I placed my hands on Elenor’s arms and she instantly fell
into my chest. I slipped my arms around her gently and tried not to fling her
back into the barbed wire when I felt a load of snot trickle down the back of
my neck.
“There there, let it all out,” I whispered.
“I’m so unhappy,” she suddenly blubbed. “Nobody likes me.”
“What are you talking about? Everybody likes you!” I
exclaimed.
“No they don’t. Nobody does; no one at work, my friends, my
mum and my dad? They all hate me,” she shook, gasping and wobbling into my ear.
“Oh Elenor, Elenor, Elenor,” I sympathised, squeezing her
tightly and carefully stroking her back. “Now that really is silly. You’re
without doubt the nicest, prettiest and loveliest girl I’ve ever met in my
life,” I lied, spreading it on perhaps thicker than she deserved, but this
wasn’t really the time for cold hard truths. “I can’t imagine anyone I’d rather
have as my editorial assistant. And if I wasn’t married and ten years younger,
I’d be chasing you all around these woods until you were mine.”