Name & Address Withheld (27 page)

Lizzie thanked the powers that be that she was British and that no one in Kensington was allowed to carry a gun to parties. Had she been in America she feared that she would currently be sliding down the designer-papered walls of the Ladies’ leaving a dark red trail of her own blood behind her. Rachel was certainly angry enough.

They say that you never know how you will react to a crisis until you are knee-deep in one. Curiously, Lizzie’s brain seemed to have closed down. Before it did, though, it had chosen to flag up its most relevant saying from deep in its recesses. The archivist had obviously been busy. ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’ was currently playing on a loop in Lizzie’s head.

Lizzie could well believe it, but right now she needed to be paying attention. Hell also hath no fury like a woman who isn’t being listened to in the heat of the moment. It might have been a less well-known epithet but it was just as true and, faced with Rachel Baker on the brink of eruption, Lizzie went into automatic pacifying mode. She’d never really understood why two people couldn’t just sit down and talk things through. The trouble being that if you tried to quieten down someone who liked a good old shout you were in danger of making things worse than they had been at the outset. From her current dis
play Lizzie suspected that Rachel was a shouter. Still, it was worth a try.

‘Listen, Rachel. I’m sorry you’re so upset, and I’m sorry if it’s my fault, but I think there’s been a misunderstanding.’ Too many sorrys, perhaps? Too late now.

‘Please, calm down and I’ll try and explain. It’s not as bad as you think.’ Unfortunately in order for Lizzie the Pacifier to be successful she had also become Lizzie the Liar.
Not as bad as you think.
Who was she trying to kid? It couldn’t get much worse.

Rachel folded her arms. ‘Go on, then.’

The truth beckoned, and it wasn’t going to sound any better in ten minutes’ time when her current flight of fancy fell flat on its face. Lizzie blinked hard and took a deep breath before punching her next few sentences out as fast as she could.

‘Look—it’s been over for a long time, and I didn’t know he was married at the time we met. And I certainly didn’t know he was married to you. I know it all sounds a little too convenient, but I can explain.’ It was all true, even if Lizzie had to admit it did sound pathetic out loud. She waited to see what happened next. She was never doing this again. No orgasm was worth what she was going through right now.

‘What’s the extent of the “it” we’re talking about here?’

Lizzie was floored. What she really needed to do was confer with Matt quickly, just to get their stories straight, but Rachel obviously wasn’t going anywhere until she had more information.

‘Look, Rachel, as I said earlier, Matt and I have met before. Several times. Well, we’ve more than met. It all sounds so calculated now, but believe me nothing could have been planned any worse. It’s true…’ Lizzie looked crestfallen ‘…we had a brief liaison.’ In this situation Lizzie didn’t feel the need to be one hundred per cent honest about the duration or the intensity of their three-month relationship. ‘But it’s been over for a long time. I made a mistake. He made a mistake. I’m so sorry. If it’s any consolation—and I doubt it is—my life will never be the same again. I hate myself for what’s happened. I only hope that there’ll come a time when you’ll be able to see things
from my point of view and forgive me.’ Lizzie knew it was a tall order, but right now she had nothing left to lose.

Rachel was quiet—too quiet, for too many seconds. Lizzie was praying that someone would interrupt them. There must be a few hundred people drinking out there. One of them must have a bladder that needed emptying. The suspense was too much to bear. Lizzie was almost relieved when Rachel started to scream and shout.

‘Too right your life will never be the same again,’ Rachel exploded. Lizzie couldn’t blame her, but it didn’t stop her from promptly bursting into tears. It made no difference to Rachel, who had apparently stockpiled a battery of expletives, threats, rhetorical questions and insults during Lizzie’s last speech.

Rachel couldn’t believe it. Less than two hours earlier she’d been applying lipstick. Now she was involved in a showdown with her guest of honour in the ladies’ loo. It was too unbelievably downmarket for words. Not the sort of thing she did. But she couldn’t help herself; she had to finish her off. No one was going to break her marriage up.

‘How can you hold your head up high and have the audacity to call yourself an agony aunt? How can you believe that you’re helping people when you’re probably causing as many problems as you solve? Did you really think you’d be able to get away with this? Did you?’

Lizzie shook her head, thankful for the veil of tears that now meant she couldn’t see Rachel clearly. The blurred version was scary enough.

‘Where was your precious “code of ethics” when you were humping my husband?’

Lizzie grimaced. Rachel made it sound like a cheap porn flick. Or, worse still,
Carry on Copywriter
. Lizzie was sure she could hear the ‘uck-uck-uck’ laugh of Sid James, sinisterly ricocheting off the inside off her skull.

Rachel was only just warming up. Nothing that Clare had said to her had prepared Lizzie for this level of hurt. Her feelings of guilt were only making the pain more acute.

‘I can’t believe it. You fucking bitch. After everything I’ve
told you. I confided in you. I opened up to you. I trusted you. There I am, worrying that my husband was having an affair, and it was you all along. To think that you get paid to advise people for a living when you can’t even organise your own life properly! It’s fucking ridiculous. Do you really think you deserve to get paid for screwing your readers’ husbands?’

Rachel, in Lizzie’s very humble opinion, was managing to make her sound a lot worse than she was. It wasn’t as if she made a habit of this. Plus, she kept reminding herself, as soon as she had known that Matt was married to Rachel she’d done the right thing. The trouble was, now she could see what Clare had meant. It shouldn’t have mattered who Matt’s wife was. She should have ended it after that night at the Atlantic. Not that it would have changed the way Rachel saw any of this at the moment. Sex was sex. Sex with someone else’s husband was an affair. Even if Lizzie didn’t know about the husband bit? Somehow it seemed a bit childish to bring it up again. She was in The Wrong, with a capital T and a capital W.

Rachel was still ranting, and now turned as if to address a crowd. Thankfully for Lizzie it was an imaginary one.

‘Ask Lizzie?’
Rachel scoffed. ‘What a joke. Why fucking bother? She lives her own life by a very different set of rules.’

Lizzie resisted the urge to retaliate. She figured it was probably better for Rachel to get it all out. At least she hadn’t confessed that she’d loved Matt, that he’d loved her, and that she’d made the ultimate sacrifice to save Rachel’s marriage. She didn’t think Rachel would appreciate her generosity of spirit at this juncture. ‘I know how it looks—’

‘You have no idea how it looks. You’ll live to regret this, I can assure you. You’re a two-faced, lying hypocrite and I’m sure all the other people who pin their hopes on you, who write in, who call up and who e-mail you, would love to know what you’re really like. And who was that charming woman I spoke to the other day? Susan? Yes, I’m sure Susan would love to know what you’ve been up to. I can see the front page of the tabloids now… “Agony aunt beds husband of heartbroken woman who writes in for advice because she suspects her husband is having an affair…” You haven’t just let me down, you’ve
let yourself down—and all the people you offer hope to. I had come to regard you as a friend—and I’m sure I’m not the first.’

‘I’m so sorry.’ It was all Lizzie could manage. And she was. Very, very sorry.

Rachel was pacing. Something about her movements was reminiscent of a caged animal. ‘It’s so humiliating. To think that I was pouring out my personal problems to you while you were probably still warm from your sex sessions with my husband.’

Sex sessions? Now, hang on. Lizzie was sure that she had never had a ‘sex session’ in her life. Interesting, too, that Rachel was humiliated rather than heartbroken. Lizzie was beginning to wonder whether Rachel wasn’t enjoying the drama of the whole situation just a little too much. But she stopped herself. She was the one who had been sleeping with someone else’s husband. Rachel was entitled to be livid. She was sure she’d do her crying later, behind a closed door somewhere, when the shock wore off.

‘I suggest you start at the beginning. I seem to have my dates all mixed up. Just remind me. When exactly did you sleep with my husband?’

Lizzie wished she would stop saying ‘my husband’. It sounded a lot worse than just ‘Matt’, and despite her height advantage she was feeling smaller and smaller. In her own mind she had practically reached Mrs Pepperpot dimensions. She only hoped that Matt was using this time to get a taxi to the airport. She would much rather have had a chance to explain all this to him.

Lizzie took a deep breath. ‘I first met Matt at the City FM Christmas party last year. We got chatting. That was all. I didn’t know he was married. He didn’t tell me. I didn’t ask. Nothing happened…that night anyway. We met up a couple of days later and then, what with him going skiing and everything, it all took off. At that point I hadn’t had your letter, and even if I had I wouldn’t have known that you two were linked in any way.’

Lizzie shook her head. ‘By the time I discovered that he was
married, and married to you, I was in up to my neck—and, believe me, I did everything in my power to make things better again. I thought we could all move on and put it behind us. I should have known better. I wish that none of this had happened. I just want my old stress-free life back.’

Lizzie’s voice sounded hollow. She was drained. It all sounded unconvincing now. Rachel had every reason to feel angry and hurt. Lizzie knew that. But she couldn’t ignore the fact that she’d fallen in love with Matt, and what made it even worse was that she honestly had believed that he’d been in love with her too. But did she wish that she’d never met him? Even now that was a tricky one.

Rachel was finding the line between fury, hysteria and tears incredibly fine. There was nothing she hated more than to be a made a fool of, and yet in a peculiar and irrational way, despite herself, she was jealous of Lizzie. Rachel knew her own control freak tendencies only too well, and it was true she did like to have the power to pull the strings, but Matt was hers. She’d always believed that he was hers unconditionally, and that as bad as things got he loved her enough to stand by her. She’d thought that even at her worst she’d made him happy. Apparently not. And instead of finding a clone replacement he’d gone for the archetypal leggy blonde. Jesus. She wasn’t about to give up on him. She might have been betrayed by the two people she’d trusted above all others, but she wasn’t about to let either of them get off lightly. No one fucked up Rachel Baker’s perfect life plan without asking first.

Lizzie sensed Rachel’s distress and, oblivious to the depth of her anger, allowed her professional persona to take over for a second. ‘Look, Matt and I weren’t together when things between you two started picking up. He’d obviously hit rock bottom when we met and he used me. I was an unwitting accomplice. But you two are back on track now. You told me that yourself.’

Lizzie knew that this would offer little consolation to a woman who’d been paranoid about infidelity since her childhood, but she had to try everything. It was her turn to be selfish. She could see the tabloids now. They’d have a field-day.
And her job was all she had left. Lizzie swore to herself that she would never have sex again, ever, if she got out of this party alive. She’d always wanted to travel. Maybe this was the perfect time for her to buy a herd of sheep, embrace a nomadic lifestyle and go and find herself—or better still lose herself—on the mountainsides of Peru.

Rachel had finally come to the end of this phase of her attack, and she wasn’t quite sure what to do next. She needed some time to plan her next move and she had to get out of the Ladies’. ‘This isn’t over yet. Once I’ve got the sordid details out of that low-life of a man I was once proud to call my husband, I’ll decide what to do next. I don’t need him. I don’t need you. I don’t need anyone.’ Rachel gathered her last ounce of composure and stormed out of the toilets and out of the launch.

Lizzie really had to hand it to Rachel. It was quite an exit. She bundled herself into the nearest stall where she could at least lock a door and lick her wounds in semi-private while trying to compose herself sufficiently to re-enter the arena. She shuddered as she recapped the last hour. She only hoped that their exchange hadn’t been audible in the main party area.

Lizzie remained in hiding until she’d heard a few flushes and a corresponding number of hand-washing and drying noises before making the unilateral decision that she couldn’t spend the rest of the evening in hiding.

She’d almost convinced herself that the crowd were going to part before her like the Red Sea as everyone stopped to catch a glimpse of tomorrow’s news headlines, but to Lizzie’s relief the DJs were now in full swing and she made it to the exit unscathed and unhindered, her publicity smile plastered somewhat unconvincingly across her face.

Melissa Matthews would just have to wait.

Lizzie barely breathed on her taxi ride home, much to the annoyance of her cab driver who was trying to get as much information and advice as possible out of his semi-celebrity passenger. She stuck with the gruff lip-biting approach all the way to SW15, before giving the bloke a generous tip and flashing him her best I’m-having-the-worst-day-of-my-life-but-know-I-can’t-afford-to-be-moody smile, hoping that he wouldn’t tell
all his future passengers that Lizzie Ford was ‘a right moody cow—all compassion on the radio, but very rude when I drove her home’. She knew never to underestimate the power of a black cabbie—so much more than just a ride home, and worth their weight in leather interiors and word-of-mouth publicity.