“No, no—I’ll talk to him about it when he gets back from school later.”
“Okay, well, you do that—and with a bit of luck we’ll have all your spare rooms occupied before you know it.”
“Good morning. I’m Sabine Neumann.” Ellen looked somewhat taken aback by the perfectly manicured hand that was extended toward her. Sabine Neumann was not at all what she had pictured. To her shame, she had expected the German businesswoman to be rather mannish, with short hair and a very firm manner, somewhere in her fifties. Her first impression could not have been more different.
Sabine was about Ellen’s age, with long, blond hair that spiraled over her shoulders in a natural corkscrew curl; she had a bright smile and blue eyes that seemed actually to sparkle. Instead of the dour business suit that Ellen had expected, she was wearing a white shirt over faded jeans, finished off with a pair of red Converse shoes. It was an outfit that Ellen could never picture herself in, not outlandish or over the top but confident, stylish.
“Welcome, Sabine,” Ellen said, feeling suddenly dowdy and mannish herself. “Please come in. I hope that everything here is to your liking. I’ve never had lodgers before, I’m not at all used to it. I don’t really know the etiquette, but I hope if there is something that I’m not getting right, you will tell me.”
“Okay, I will,” Sabine agreed, with barely a trace of an accent, looking around the sunlit hallway. “You house is lovely, it’s very Victorian—just how I pictured it.”
“Thank you,” Ellen said, casting an eye over the restored oak boards that glowed a deep gold in the morning sun, and the pale green and cream paints that Nick had chosen for this space, which made it such a warm and inviting entrance. They had spent an age touring reclamation yards to find the perfect lighting, settling eventually on a modest little crystal chandelier that Ellen noticed needing dusting as she glanced up at it. Immediately she pictured Nick on his stepladder, swearing as he wrangled with it, the beams of sunlight captured by its glass drops dancing on the floor and walls.
“And this is your family?” Sabine had wandered over to a photograph of Ellen, Nick, and Charlie that hung on the wall. It had been taken a few months before Nick’s accident, and it had been Nick’s idea. He had come home one day and told Ellen that they should make a record of their family, something permanent they would be able to look back on so that whatever might change in the future, they’d always remember how things had been. Ellen remembered feeling rather puzzled, and she’d asked him if there was anything wrong, anything he was worried about. But he’d just laughed and ruffled her hair in that way that he’d taken to doing and told her not to be so foolish, that real life was nothing like those books she was so obsessed with, stuffed with tragedy and intrigue. He’d found a photographer he liked and she had come to the house, shrouding their seldom-used living room with white sheets and throw cushions. Ellen remembered how Nick and Charlie had had to make her laugh to get her to loosen up after the photographer had shown them the first digital images on her laptop. Nick had joked that it was like having his photo taken with a maiden aunt. They had told her stupid jokes until finally Ellen had forgotten that the camera was there at all, and now there they were, the three of them. That single moment captured them lounging together, arms around necks, legs intertwined, laughing.
“You are very lucky to have such a wonderful family,” Sabine observed
“I, well—yes, I was—I am.” Ellen fought that familiar prick of tears behind her eyes. “Nick, my husband, died last year in a traffic accident. It’s just me and Charlie now—hence the lodgers.”
Sabine nodded. “I’m sorry. My husband is not dead,” she informed Ellen, her pretty mouth forming a thin line. “My husband is in Berlin; I’ve left him. I couldn’t stand looking at him for another second more, the lying, whoring piece of shit. It’s not fair, is it? If my husband was dead I wouldn’t mind, but you—you loved yours and now you’ve lost him. Life isn’t fair.” Sabine shrugged as if she’d just missed a bus she wasn’t especially bothered about catching and put one foot on the bottom stair. “So now, perhaps I might see the room?”
The phone was ringing as Ellen left Sabine unpacking her bag and she prayed that it was not Hannah with news of another enforced lodger.
Ellen was still trying to adjust to having one stranger move into her house and her life. Sabine was right, it wasn’t fair. If Nick hadn’t decided on a whim to borrow his friend’s Lotus and take it for a spin down some quiet country roads after a late pub lunch, if he hadn’t exceeded the speed limit by nearly double, if he’d thought just for one second about… Ellen halted that train of thought before it could develop any further, consumed with guilt that she could allow herself even to begin to feel angry with her husband. Nick would never have left her and Charlie in this kind of mess on purpose. He hadn’t set out on that summer morning to kill himself, purely to inconvenience her. He had loved her like no other man ever had or ever would again. And Nick had been an adventurer, an explorer—the kind of man to seize the day and ring every ounce of life out of it, reluctant to waste any precious seconds on sleep. That was what Ellen had loved about him first, his drive, his passion. That and the fact that when she was around him, for the first time in her life she felt vibrant, a three-dimensional being of flesh and blood who was finally present in the world that Nick embraced so readily—she felt alive. It was a feeling that she hadn’t been able to re-create since the moment she had discovered that Nick was dead.
Biting her lip, Ellen quieted the circle of thoughts that constantly ran around in her head and picked up the phone.
“Ellen, good, you’re in.” Simon’s voice sounded deep and melodious. Ellen breathed a sigh of relief. Her boss was one of the few people who would not demand that she take some kind of action, who would not persist in telling her where she was going wrong. If anything, with a little bit of luck he’d have something nice for her to work on—preferably the next installment of The Sword Erect, as she had almost finished the pages she already had.
“Hello, Simon.” Ellen’s voice was warm. “I’m in and I’ve just greeted my first lodger.”
“Ah yes, you told me about your new career as a landlady in your last email. In fact, in a roundabout way it’s sort of my reason for ringing today.”
“Really?” Ellen was puzzled. “Why, do you need a room?”
“No, no, my dear—I’ll get to that in a minute. First off, tell me all about your first lodger,” Simon said, deciding to put whatever urgent request he had for her on hold for a second. That was the other thing Ellen liked about Simon. While Hannah seemed to feel that it was her duty to talk at her and boss her around, Simon, a man she rarely spoke to and saw even less, actually seemed interested in her and how she was coping. He was one of the few people who ever asked her how she was. Sometimes Ellen didn’t want to answer. Sometimes she hated the fact that he asked, but at the same time she appreciated it, too.
“She’s nice, I think.” Ellen recalled the ten or so minutes that she had spent so far in Sabine’s company. “She seems it, anyway, and she is happy with the room as far as I can tell. It’s just strange, you know—different.”
“I know, Ellen, it must be hard for you,” Simon said, his voice softening. “I’d hate to share my flat with anyone but Tibalt.” Simon referred to his ancient and grizzled cocker spaniel, who accompanied him every day to the Cherished Desires offices on Fulham Palace Road and lay all day under his desk, emitting foul smells and loud snores. Simon was more devoted to him than to any human, at least that Ellen knew of.
“Oh well, no—not that hard. And it’s money, isn’t it, money to keep this house going and disrupt Charlie as little as possible—talking of which, do you have any more of the new Allegra Howard for me? It’s not like you to give me a book in dribs and drabs.”
“Not quite; I have something a little better.” Simon sounded hesitant. “Ellen, I have Allegra Howard herself for you, if you will have her, that is.”
“
I beg your pardon?” Ellen glanced up at the ceiling at the sound of furniture being dragged across the floor.
“Allegra—she’s in a pickle, and she needs a fair maid to come to her rescue. I immediately thought of you, the fairest maid I know.”
“Me—but how could I ever help Allegra Howard?”
“Well, you know those dreadful spring floods they had a while back in Gloucestershire?”
“Oh yes, they were awful,” Ellen said, thinking of the TV pictures on the news of houses half filled with water, a teddy bear floating down what once had been a quiet avenue. The whole of Tewkesbury was practically under water.
“Well, Allegra’s seventeenth-century manor house took the brunt of it. It’s going to take months to restore it, and apparently her insurance company isn’t keen to put her up in a five-star hotel for the duration. Allegra refuses to go anywhere near anything as unsavory as a trailer or a strange rental house, so I was thinking about what you said—how you mentioned that you were looking for tenants—and I wondered if you’d have Allegra as one.”
“Have Allegra Howard staying here—Simon, I can’t possibly.” Ellen pressed the palm of her hand to her chest, feeling her heart rate accelerate; it was a curious sensation. She’d read so many of Allegra’s books over the years that she felt as if she knew the woman, and oddly as if Allegra knew her, too, more intimately than perhaps anyone else.
“Please, Ellen, she really needs somewhere nice and homey to stay while she tries to finish The Sword Erect. All of the drama has rather blocked her creative flow. She’s lost her confidence a little and she needs someone to boost her up. I can’t think of anyone better to take her in than you, the very person who loves and understands her books so much.”
“Allegra Howard in my third bedroom, Simon! She needs to stay somewhere much better than a shabby old house in Hammersmith. Besides, you said she wouldn’t touch a rental!”
“That’s where you’re wrong, my angel. And your house is anything but a strange and unwelcoming rental house. Your shabby, old, beautiful, much-loved home is exactly what she needs, the poor old duck. And you wouldn’t just be her landlady. As you know, the latest book is set during the English civil wars, and Allegra needs a bit of extra help—a research assistant, if you like. To find contemporary street maps, brush up on the history—that sort of thing. Allegra’s never been one to let facts get in the way of a good story, but the readers do like things to be at least a little accurate. Her last PA left because of… artistic differences, so the position is happily vacant. Besides, Allegra will only write in pen—lilac fountain pen to be precise. One of your jobs would be to type up her work into an electronic format. Just imagine—you’d be the first person in creation to read the new Allegra Howard. And she’d pay you—it wouldn’t be much but it would double your rental income, and I could top it up by a few quid—it would be worth it, you’d be saving my life.”
Ellen paused, feeling her heart pounding. In truth, there was nothing she could imagine enjoying more than helping the great Allegra Howard with her latest work of genius. But could she really do it?
She was certainly capable of helping research the background of the novel, after all, she had a degree in English history—even if the only thing she’d used it for in the last ten years was to subtly point out some of the more glaring historical errors in Allegra’s books. She was a competent typist and her job as a freelance copyeditor (might as well be a “free” lance, Hannah persisted in teasing her) meant she was well versed in punctuation and grammar—something else that Allegra seemed to find rather tiresome. But this was the Allegra Howard—the woman who had supplied Ellen with the alternate universe that she had so happily inhabited for the last few years, even before Nick had left her so suddenly. Allegra, who created the heroines that Ellen loved to transform into for the few precious hours she spent wrapped up among those sheets of paper. Allegra, who fashioned the kinds of manly, magnetic heroes Ellen was ashamed to admit she frequently imagined making love to her with the same fiery passion that they lavished upon the shapely young maidens who populated Allegra’s books. Quite often, on a quiet afternoon when Charlie was at school and Nick was safely at work, Ellen would find herself quite caught up in the moment as one of Allegra’s rakes urgently pinned some feisty young woman to, perhaps, a ship’s mast, or a tree trunk, or, in one of Ellen’s favorite books, The Stallion Rampant, a horse’s back. Unable to contain his desire for the heroine’s lovely body a second longer, he would rip her clothes from her, whipped into a frenzy by the exquisite sight of her naked breasts, whereupon he would take her, his manhood searching deep within her, finding that sweet, sacred spot, so that at last she would come to know the true delight of physical love and be prepared to fall in love with him. After reading a scene like that, sometimes while reading a scene like that, Ellen would feel compelled to find her own sweet, sacred spot and imagine that it was her full, pert breasts that the hero’s lips were so firmly latched on to, and her slender yet shapely hips that he gripped with his powerful hands as he entered her again. And again. And again.
The physical side of her life with Nick had been lovely; it had been tender and sweet and more than satisfying—he’d always been so gentle with her, as if she were made of cut glass and might shatter in his arms. Over the last year she had spent many a night muffling her tears in her pillow, grieving over the loss of the intimacy that they had shared. But the orgasms that Ellen had had with Allegra Howard’s heroes were more passionate and intense than any she had known even with Nick. And Ellen was not at all sure she could look in the eyes of the woman who had fueled her fantasy sex life for so long. The thought of meeting the woman who had occupied her imagination so entirely for so long seemed impossible, almost like meeting God and letting him know what you thought of creation.
“Look, Ellen.” Simon’s voice startled her out of her reverie. “I know that the idea of a lot of people you don’t know in your home tortures you. No one understands that better than me. God knows if I didn’t have bills to pay I’d live as a recluse, doing up my wreck of a cottage in Suffolk, and never talk to anyone again, except you and Tibalt. You’d be doing me a huge favor if you took Allegra in. To be honest, her name is one of the few on the list that is guaranteed to turn a profit for the company. Allegra’s sales carry a lot of our less-established authors, not to mention pay my mortgage and hers. In this climate, I need her to finish this latest book sooner rather than later. Her readers are used to three books a year and The Sword Erect is long overdue already. You love her work, you know exactly what her readers want from her books; I’ve long thought that you’ve got far more potential to develop your career than merely copyediting, and I know you’ll look after her like a seventy-three-year-old woman needs to be looked after—”
“She’s seventy-three!” Ellen interrupted. “She looks at least twenty years younger in her author photo.”
“That’s because she is twenty years younger in her author photo,” Simon told her. “Anyway, I can’t think of anyone better to help her through this dry patch.”
“So you’re saying you want me to get her back into a wet patch,” Ellen joked, quite uncharacteristically.
Simon chuckled. “Ellen! Have you been drinking during the day!”
“I don’t know, it must be Allegra’s latest book—this one is especially racy, Simon. I’ll just have to hope that working on it won’t corrupt me totally.”
“So are you saying you’ll do it?” Simon pressed. Ellen heard the anxiety in his voice. Clearly, she was his plan A and he didn’t have a plan B, and the idea of helping Simon out of a spot gave her unexpected pleasure.
“Okay, okay—I’ll do it!” Ellen exclaimed, feeling giddy with the rush of the unknown; it was a sensation she hadn’t experienced in the longest time. Meeting Allegra would be fine. As Simon had said, she was a homeless old lady, not some soothsayer with psychic powers to see inside a person’s brain.
“Ellen Woods—you are a magnificent woman,” Simon
told her warmly.
“Oh well…” Ellen found herself flushing with pleasure as she stood alone in her hallway. It was rare for anyone to compliment her these days.
“There’s just one more thing. Allegra will need a ground-floor room near a loo—is that a problem? She’s not too great with stairs, not that she will tell you that and nor should you mention it.”
“Well, there’s the dining room, we don’t really use it, and it’s got French doors that open out onto the garden. I could get Charlie and some of his pals to put the table in the garage. But what about a bed?”
“Oh, I’ll buy you a new one; Allegra is quite fussy about only sleeping on virgin mattresses, as she calls them,” Simon said. “Also, if you painted the room lilac, preferably with odorless paint, and got in some lilac furnishings so that it’s all ready for her grand entrance in around a week from now, then we’re all set.”
“Lilac?” Ellen questioned, pinning her whirl of confusion on that one word.
“Yes, and a chaise longue, she needs a chaise longue to recline on while she’s thinking up ideas. There’s this website that delivers them in any color you like. I’ll order it and pick up the bill and get it delivered to you, shall I? Plus, I’ll have to ship in her desk—it was one of the few things that survived the flood, she’s very attached to it. Don’t worry about the expense, just send all the receipts to me and I’ll settle them straightaway. Anyway, my dearest love, I must dash. I’ve got Bernadette Darcy due in for an editorial meeting. Apparently she’s having a problem with her country-house orgy—can’t think of enough positions for each chapter.”
Ellen set down the phone and looked at it for a moment, wondering if that conversation had really happened or if she had imagined it.
Allegra Howard in her house in a week’s time. Ellen wondered where she could get lilac paint delivered from, pronto.
The Home for Broken Hearts Page 4
