One small victory was that what was left of Ellison and Coles resisted the pressure to move into the modern offices by the Thames and we were still based in those ancient offices in Covent Garden, a Dickensian building on four floors, with tiny offices and uneven floors and a charm that reminded me every day of why I’d chosen to stay on in London.
“So you’re here for good, in love with the quaint world of British publishing?”
I realized I’d been talking at length. Somehow he’d just set me off. I took a long sip at my wine. “Not for good,” I said. “Not necessarily. I don’t plan that far ahead.”
“What if you meet someone?”
“It’s not all about meeting someone,” I said. I remembered now how Eleanor had vowed to obey Ethan at their wedding. Will’s family clearly had a very different view of a woman’s place to anything I would subscribe to.
He raised his hands, briefly. Best behavior.
He seemed different today. More relaxed. Less intense. More ready to smile and laugh.
I know I’d been stressy at the wedding: family tensions, lost ground to make up with Ethan. Maybe it had been something like that for Will, too.
You think you might have been a little harsh with him, Trude?
We talked some more, about Ellison and Coles, about how I’d come to England to visit Ethan and just happened to stay.
“It’s that kind of place,” said Will. “My family did exactly the same thing, about four hundred years ago.” I think he was making a joke at his family’s expense, but I wasn’t sure. It could easily have been a simple passing comment. His family had such a long history, it could be easy to take for granted.
“So are you going to tell me if I ever met you at Cambridge?” I asked him. “If you, Charlie and Ethan were buddies it’s hard to think I didn’t.”
He shook his head. “I’d have remembered,” he said, skirting that fine line between best behavior and flirting once again.
I looked at him with one eyebrow raised for a second or two, then relented.
“No,” he went on. “We were close early on, me, Charlie and Ethan. A band of brothers. Always destined for great things, or so we believed. But you know how it is. People drift.”
I thought of me and Ethan. I’d come to England to visit him, stayed here, and when our parents died we were suddenly the only family we had. But even then, over the last year we had drifted. Sometimes you just don’t value what’s right under your nose.
“Yes,” I said. “It happens, doesn’t it? People drift.”
We ate on in silence for a time. I think we were both lost in thoughts, memories, regrets maybe.
“I really mean it,” he said eventually. “The apology. All the emotion of the wedding, and all that. And I was tired. So tired. I was tired and emotional and I never should have behaved the way I did.”
“You certainly looked tired.” Damn. I’d said that out loud.
Briefly, he looked pissed with me, then he relaxed again. “I was,” he said. “I’d been up all night. Hadn’t slept in 48 hours or so.”
I remembered thinking he looked like he’d come from an all-nighter. He could at least have shaved.
Maybe he read the disapproval on my face, because he went on: “It was unavoidable. I was in Oran. Algeria. Heavy negotiations. Dull, but vital. It may sound a little melodramatic, but people’s lives really did depend on it. I flew back that morning. Only just made it. I looked like shit, I know.”
He shrugged, smiled, and all of a sudden I felt guilty that I should ever have questioned him, that I should have been pissed with him for slipping away to make important calls on his cell phone.
“I did my best, but I really should have done better, for Eleanor.”
I shook my head and felt like a bitch, and only then did I start to wonder if he was still gaming me, if this was all some elaborate story concocted to get me into bed.
And then... I felt guilty again for even thinking such a thing.
I drank more wine, grappling with my confusion.
“So...” he said. “Apology accepted?”
I shrugged, then nodded, then reached across the table to solemnly shake his hand, trying not to be distracted by his touch, his firm grip.
“Apology accepted,” I said, even if I wasn’t entirely convinced that it was.
11.
“I had a postcard from them yesterday,” I said.
I looked at Charlie over the rim of my cup of Lapsang Souchong.
There is no ‘us’.
We were in Grey’s, a little boutique coffee shop just off Long Acre where I was due to meet one of my writers to talk about a book proposal. Small talk. Nothing more than small talk.
There is no ‘us’.
“They sound very happy.” God, I was acting like a complete moron. How could Ethan and Eleanor ‘sound very happy’ from a two-liner postcard? They were just married, honeymooning in a cabin on stilts over the sea in the Maldives. Who wouldn’t be happy? But still...
“Good good,” said Charlie. He was enjoying this. He was milking it.
I opened my mouth to speak, but then stopped. No good denying it with him, no point stressing the no ‘us’ thing. Look where that had gotten me last time.
I glanced at the clock on the wall behind the counter. Twenty minutes until Julie would get here to rescue me with talk of her proposed book about her time as a working class Belfast girl studying at one of Oxford’s most exclusive colleges. It was a no-brainer. Julie was an insightful and funny writer, and the first volume of her memoirs had already been reprinted eight times and was being filmed by the BBC. Of course we would publish it. But no harm in meeting for coffee and cocktails to discuss the details and have her at least go through the motions of pitching the book.
“So what happened between the three of you, then? You, Ethan and Eleanor’s brother.”
Charlie shrugged and gave that easy smile. “Too many evenings at the Baron of Beef,” he said. “Too many pints of Greene King IPA.”
“There’s such a thing?”
He laughed. “He’s got to you, hasn’t he?”
I’d told Charlie about my apology from Will. Now, I shook my head, perhaps too strenuously. “No he hasn’t. Okay? I’m just curious. The three of you were buddies, but at the wedding there was clearly bad chemistry.”
Charlie shrugged again. “Shit happens, Trude. You know?”
I held his gaze, narrowing my eyes. “What kind of shit, Charlie?”
“Okay,” he said. “You say Will told you we drifted apart. That’s what happened. First year up at All Hallows we had rooms on the same corridor. Threw us together, you know? We did the things students do, we had the hangovers the next day. We were really close – people called us the Cabal. But then Ethan got in with the rowing crowd, and Will, well he always moved in different circles.”
“So you drifted apart? Why the dark looks, then?”
“There’s a bit of bad blood. Nothing serious. There was a girl.”
“There’s always a girl.”
“It all got a bit intense. Things were said. Handbags at dawn, that kind of thing.”
It was hard to think of Ethan getting involved in that kind of dispute. He was such a big sweetie. But then, how well did I really know him? A group of friends, a girl... it all made sense. “So who got the girl, then?”
“No one,” said Charlie. “It was a student thing. A bit of a fuss and then forgotten.”
“Not forgotten.”
“Well... no. Maybe not. The girl’s forgotten – can’t even remember her name, cad that I am – but the words can’t be unspoken. Student life in Cambridge is full of opportunities. Why waste time on fighting? I moved on. Will and Ethan moved on. No big deal. End of.”
I sipped at my tea.
“So,” said Charlie, a big grin suddenly plastered over that boyish face. “You busy this afternoon, Trude?”
“I am, and you know I am.”
“We could be at my place in ten.”
There is no ‘us’.
I reached across the table and put my hand on his. “Sorry, Charlie,” I told him, “but what happened... well, as you so aptly put it a minute ago, shit happens. We’re over, babe. You know that as well as I do.”
He did his best not to look like an abandoned puppy, he really did. He was just a bit crap at it.
“Are you saying it was shit?” he finally asked.
Trying to joke – that was good.
“I’m saying it happened, and it probably shouldn’t have happened, but I don’t regret it. But it isn’t going to happen again.”
Just then, the door went. I looked round, and it was Julie, looking pointedly at my hand on Charlie’s.
“Trudy,” she said, coming over and leaning down to kiss me on the cheek. “How grand to see you.” She turned to Charlie and went on, “And you are–”
“Just leaving,” Charlie said, standing, grinning. “No, no, please. I really was leaving. Work to do, and all that. You know.”
When he’d gone, Julie sat opposite me. “So, holding hands in Grey’s? Thank God you’ve found someone and I don’t have to worry about you dying a miserable old spinster.”
I laughed, shaking my head. “He’s my ex,” I said. “From a long, long time ago. There’s nothing there. You’re still going to have to worry about me, I’m afraid.”
Julie was a publisher’s dream. Photogenic, for starters, with her straight, ash-blonde hair, wide blue eyes and, not to put too fine a point on it, naturally pouting lips. A brilliant writer, too, and she talked as well as she wrote. Julie was a natural for TV chat shows. And over the last year or so she’d become a good friend, too.
“So, to business,” she said. “Are you going to do the book?”
“Yes, we’re going to do the book.”
And that was it: business done, all of it a foregone conclusion. We could work out the details later.
“So... your man?”
“He’s not my man. We lived together. Split up a year ago. He’s an old friend of Ethan’s. I ran into him again at the wedding.”
That got her sidetracked. “Ah,” she said. “The wedding. I’d forgotten. So how was it, then? Tell me all about it...”
And so I did, although I was selective. I told her about the awful drive to get there, about the quaint little chapel in the middle of nowhere, the grand family mansion, the Rembrandt hanging over the stairs. I skipped over the steamy, needy ex-sex in the churchyard; that would only complicate things.
“So this Will, you say? What does he do, then?”
“What, apart from turn up at his sister’s wedding looking like he’s been sleeping rough and then keep slipping away to talk on his cell phone, you mean? I don’t know. He said he’d been in Algeria, some kind of negotiations. Wheeling and dealing. Power-broking. I don’t know.”
“Hmm,” said Julie. “Some kind of upper-class fixer, do you think? Old power, new power. Do you think there might be a story in that somewhere?”
“What, you mean the kind of story that might interest a long-established and much-respected publisher of memoirs?”
As soon as Julie mentioned it, I saw that this was exactly the kind of thing we would do at Ellison and Coles: in Will Bentinck-Stanley there was a story just waiting to be written. "English tradition and politics," I said. "A human story with a backdrop of global and social change. Hell, you've even got me writing the cover blurb already! Maybe I need to take him for lunch to talk about it."
“Okay,” said Julie. “Now you’ve got me pitching a book I’m not even going to write. I should get a commission for this kind of thing. Consultancy fees. Do you really think there’s something in it, or is it just a flimsy excuse to go after this Will character?”
I opened my mouth. I hadn’t even thought of it like that. I wasn’t really serious about the book, was I? And even if I was, I certainly wasn’t doing this so that I could pursue Will.
And yes, again, perhaps I was protesting too much.
§
So what does a man like Willem Bentinck-Stanley do in this situation, when he’s pursuing a woman who, in turn, wants to talk to him about an idea for a book that she just can’t shake off? If he could somehow read my mind and learn that I wanted to contact him to talk about the book but didn't have any contact details for him that would be great.
So what does a man like Will do in that situation?
Not a lot, as it turned out.
Not enough, at any rate.
Coffee with Julie became a long cocktails-accompanied lunch, as I’d always known it would. I’d learnt early on that it was wise to book out the whole day for any meeting with Julie. She was my project, my first big success with Ellison and Coles, and one of the key reasons I’d been asked to switch from temp to permanent when the company was taken over. I’d spotted her manuscript in the slush pile, I’d worked closely with Julie on editing the book, and its publication had marked our departure from dry, literary and political memoirs to stories with a more human touch. In the acquisitions meeting I’d described it as not so much dumbing down as smarting up, and that had become something of a commissioning mantra for the imprint over the last year.
Back in the office, late afternoon, those narrow stairs lined with shelves full of first editions had seemed much steeper, more uneven, than ever before. At my desk, I sat back, catching my breath, and then almost immediately Ellie was tapping on my half-open door.
“Hnh?”
“Hey, Tee. These came for you. Flowers.”
I loved that about Ellie. Standing there in my doorway with a way over-the-top bunch of red roses resting in the crook of her arm and she still felt the need to say it out loud. The number of times she'd tapped at that door, poked her head around and said, "Only me: Ellie."
“Aw, thanks, Ellie. Were they delivered to the office for me?” She smiled and nodded, completely missing the joke. Such a sweetie.
“You want some water?”
“For the flowers, or me?” I asked.
“Both.”
She dropped the bouquet on my desk and skipped out of the room.
A card. I fumbled with it, but it was in a little parchment envelope tied to the wrapping. I pulled harder and it came away.
So what does a guy like Bentinck-Stanley do to woo a girl? Lunch, expensive flowers... what next?
The card...
hey babes
this evening?
C
A noise at the door – I looked up, and Ellie was back with a vase and a pint glass of water. She always looked after me when I came back from a meeting with Julie. Did I mention that she was a real sweetie?
“Nice flowers?” she asked.
She knew they were nice flowers. She was just waiting for me to tell her what the card said.
I just nodded, and said, “Lovely,” and laughed at her disappointed look when she realized I wasn’t going to tell her any more.
Charlie, God damn it.
There is no ‘us’, Charlie.
I checked my email, but there was nothing that couldn’t wait until morning.
I drank my water, my eyes drawn back to the roses. They really were good ones, the petals heavy like velvet; not a single flaw. Why hadn’t Charlie been like this before? Way back then... well, if there had been flowers they would have been from the Tesco Metro on the way back home. After-thought flowers. Limp carnations worth all of the £3.99 he’d paid for them.
‘This evening’.
Where had this new Charlie come from? This persistent, lavish, God-damned sensitive Charlie?
Was it really that it had taken him a year to work out that he’d missed out on a good thing? A year to finally grow up?
Or was this just Charlie in smooth operator mode, Charlie making a little bit of an effort so he could get me into bed. Again.
Regret isn’t a healthy thing, but when you’ve succumbed to ex-sex with a man you’d last seen ducking an ash tray it was probably going to be an inevitable th
ing to feel.
Regret and the aftermath of cocktails with Julie. That was my afternoon.
Regret and God-damned cocktail burn-out.
12.
A text message came through from Julie:
Lovely, lovely lunch. Thanks, hun. So are you going to do anything with that Will of yours, are you? ;) xx
Will? How did she know about Will? Then I remembered. I’d been discreet; I hadn’t told her too much. Not that there was really anything to tell: he’d tried to jump my bones, he’d apologized and bought me lunch. Nothing more. Nada.
Not even any flowers.
The book! Ah yes, we’d been talking about a book. New power and a family with ancient traditions, the power and influence of the English aristocracy in a brave new world. And not to forget the human angle that I was so good at: the hot young eligible heir and his jet-setting lifestyle.
Tipsy as I was, the professional part of my brain still managed to kick in. I knew a good idea when I saw one.
We’d need a writer, obviously. That would always be one of the basics.
I doubted that Will had either the talent or the inclination to spend the time required to write a book. There was a chance that Julie could be persuaded, a natural career move from memoir to biography, and I knew she’d do an excellent job. Even as I thought through the idea, the names of three more writers came to me, all with titles on our list and likely to be interested in a project like this.
If I really was serious, then the obvious next move was to find out more and gauge his willingness. For all I knew his ‘negotiations’ in Algeria might just have been over the price of a rug or a holiday apartment. Charlie had hinted that Will had what he called an ‘interesting’ lifestyle, but I didn’t really have anything substantial to go on. If Will turned out to be no more than a young heir trying to find ways to spend his family money then the project would be dead in the water.
Shades of Submission: Fifty by Fifty #1: Billionaire Romance Boxed Set Page 36
