by Fiona Walker
Now Conrad was smiling wolfishly into her eyes, reminding her how sexy and carefree his road was through the deep dark woods.
‘Good girl.’ He held out the cake. ‘As long as that’s understood, we can trust one another. Now eat this up. I’m taking you shopping. You need a weekend wardrobe. Send Gordon an email telling him we’re trying a new approach.’
Quashing visions of Julie Ocean going deep undercover at the behest of her love-interest Superintendent, she did as she was told, sending the message as instructed and adding, Conrad attends the same Tai Chi class as myself in Hyde Park, hence we were able to discuss this today, in a vague attempt at protecting her personal life.
He replied as they were packing up the last of their picnic: Golden cock stands on one leg; white stork spreads wings. Draw bow to shoot tiger. GL
‘What’s that all about?’ Conrad read it over her shoulder in alarm.
‘I think they’re Tai Chi moves.’
He laughed, drawing her close and looking into her face in that way that once again made her bra feel set to ping open spontaneously. ‘Good girl. He likes you. He needs his daily Leg-Up.’
‘His PA keeps telling me off for distracting him.’
‘Kelly.’ His eyes sparkled. ‘Protects Gordon’s interests with admirable ferocity, don’t you find? We need a forthright character like that on the team.’
Professional and personal jealousy prickled at her temples. ‘Must be a saint to put up with a boss like him,’ she said begrudgingly, having admired Kelly’s clucky pragmatism, but still feeling that an attention-seeking, solitary genius like Gordon would thrive with more understanding, like Ptolemy, who had evolved from quarrelsome introvert to brave boy warrior through five books with the support of his amazing, intuitive sidekick Purple.
Conrad started to kiss cake crumbs from her lips. ‘And you should know all about putting up with a bastard of a boss.’ He still had the ability to melt her pelvis to softest putty and tie her intestines in knots.
The breeze had dropped, making the heat of the sun glow on her skin along with the sexual charge that now coursed through her, and she felt as though she was wearing a bodysuit spun from caressing fingers and electric kisses.
Soon Legs no longer cared about the impish, white-haired sorcerer and his reclusive creator. By the time Conrad found the biscuit fragments lodged by her collarbone, she had vanquished thoughts of Ptolemy Finch, Gordon Lapis and even Francis from her mind.
Sneaking into the basement flat past Ros with several bulging Browns bags wasn’t easy, especially as her sister had spotted that the wedding dress was missing and clearly suspected it was in the bags, possibly in several sections, like a dismembered corpse.
‘There’ve been three bids on it on eBay already,’ she reported from the balcony. ‘Is it still in your flat?’
‘Yes! I’ll bring it up later.’
‘Coming for supper?’
‘Sure! Just got to – er – check emails and stuff first. Make some calls. Have a bath.’ Fetch your wedding dress out of the garden shed, she added with silent trepidation.
Safely locked behind her front door, she hurried to turn on her laptop, and groaned as she saw that bidding for the dress had already reached several hundred pounds. Did people have no taste?
Gordon had left yet more research queries in her inbox about Julie Ocean’s character: Do you add salt to food? What do you watch on television? What are your secret vices? How would you react to being held hostage?
Legs sent cursory replies: No salt, reality rubbish, buying wedding dresses on eBay, I’d crack bad jokes for a week and then crack up. Then she turned her focus to rescuing the Ditchley dress.
There was no door directly linking the basement flat to the garden because its level was so much lower. Like an SAS commando, Legs unlocked the security grille and silently rolled it back before wriggling out through her bathroom window into the rosebed and shuffling around the garden out of sight until she reached the shed. Just a few feet away, Ros’s kitchen windows were wide open, wafts of frying onions and garlic accompanied by the soothing sound of vespers on Radio 3.
The dress already smelled of weedkiller and compost. Even in the dim light of the shed window, Legs could see that the hem was grubby and tattered from her run around Ealing, and the bodice lace ripped, with several pearl-encrusted embroidery flowers now missing. The secateurs had left the stays cut to tufty shreds. She swallowed guiltily and carefully bore it back across the garden like an army medic carrying a wounded soldier back from a battlefield.
It was tricky conveying a farthingale, hooped petticoats and several acres of silk back to her basement undetected, especially when the dress kept catching on the rose bushes or trailing through the beds.
At last she fed it all through the window and clambered in with it.
On close inspection, the damage was fairly superficial, but there was no doubt that it wasn’t as described in the advert.
Hurriedly, Legs created a new Gmail account and eBay identity under a false name and bid on the dress herself, putting in far more than she thought it was worth to be safe. She was immediately outbid.
‘You what?’
She added another hundred pounds. Still it came back with the red cross. Another hundred, another red cross.
‘You are mad,’ she hissed to her rival bidders, and upped her stake by several hundred. At last a green tick. She slumped back in her chair and gazed at the dress spread across the sofa with its hoops in the air like a whale’s skeleton on a beach. She doubted she could do much to repair it with just a stick of Pritt and her small collection of sewing kits pilfered from hotels.
Gordon’s name was striped bold at the top of her email inbox again. Why do you buy wedding dresses on eBay?
You’re not the only one with an altar ego, she replied.
She began Googling dress-menders in west London, but soon found herself distracted and clicking her way onto the Farcombe Festival site, unable to resist a snoop. Guest speakers for the literary side of the arts festival had been confirmed, and Legs had heard of less than half of them, so guessed they must be very worthy and learned. A poet called Kizzy de la Mere seemed to be the feature act, and there were lots of photographs of a flame-haired wraith with big lips sitting on a rock looking moody. Legs looked at her thin, high-browed face and decided she’d suit the Ditchley dress perfectly.
The website made no direct mention of Francis, who remained as quietly behind the scenes as his father remained centre stage; there were endless photographs of Hector looking dashing with young Brit Art stars, experimental musicians and dancers, usually accompanied by wife Poppy in her customary smock and turban, a style she had first adopted almost a quarter of a century earlier in the belief that it made her seem more creative but, given her tanned and wizened slenderness, now made her look like a Moroccan Berber.
Legs forced herself to stop surfing and made a big mug of tea before composing an email to Francis, telling him in the simplest terms that she was planning to spend a few days in the cottage and thought it best to let him know. She hadn’t been to Farcombe since they’d split up. This was the first time she’d communicated since the day eleven months earlier that she’d crept out at dawn to post a hand-written six page letter baring her soul. She’d never received any reply. If that tearstained letter the previous year had elicited no response, Legs reasoned sadly, this brief missive was hardly likely to bear any more fruit.
She still had a first draft of that letter in her chest of keepsakes and photographs, a creased, ring-marked testament to her regret, full of misquoted Donne, but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to look at it since copying out its more poignant paragraphs between weeping fits and breaks to consult the Oxford Book of English Verse. Even now, as she briefly thought about taking it out of its Pandora’s box to revisit the moment and try to see it through Francis’s eyes, the idea made her shudder in horror, ashamed of her own outpouring.
Yet after she’d had her b
ath, she was amazed to find that he’d already sent an email in return.
I am very relieved. Call me when you get here. We must meet up ASAP.F.
Legs let out a little cry of shock and, she knew it, glee. She only just stopped herself dancing around the flat. This had to mean that she was going to be forgiven, surely?
To Legs’ relief, Ros swallowed her sister’s breezy line that she’d decided the dress was safest left in her flat. She was also surprisingly enthusiastic when she heard of the planned weekend in Devon: ‘It’s about time you started going to the cottage again, we all know how much you love it there. And you can drop Nicholas off on the way. It’s Will’s turn to have him. Save him coming here. He always complains so much.’ Her face was bursting with relief.
It had been a long-running point of contention since the divorce that Ros flatly refused to take her son even a part of the way to Somerset for his weekends and holiday visits with his father, not even as far as the M25, meaning that Will was forced to make the six-hour round trip twice each visiting weekend, unless Legs or one of the grandparents stepped in to help. It was Ros and Legs’ mother Lucy who most often lightened his load by transporting her grandson en route to or from the family’s holiday cottage when she escaped to paint and frolic naked in her garden, but this summer, her watercolour sabbatical at Spywood had already stretched from late May to high summer without interruption.
‘Mum can’t stay there much longer,’ Ros said disapprovingly. ‘She said something about finishing those watercolours of Eascombe Harbour last time I spoke to her, but the reception was awful. You know what it’s like there. Best to text that you’re coming so she makes space.’ She carefully avoided mentioning the likelihood of finding Lucy naked among the shrubbery, although both sisters knew that was a distinct possibility, ‘Dad’s run out of freezer food, so she must be coming home any day. Can you pick Nicholas up on your way back as well?’
‘I don’t see why not; I love the drive to Inkpot, it’s so pretty.’
Ros let out a long-suffering sigh.
Just as Lucy’s unconventional nudity was never mentioned, the sisters kept schtum about another awkward truth. They both knew that Legs was still close to her old friend Daisy, currently six months pregnant with Will’s third child, but sisterly loyalty stopped the emotive subject being raised. As far as Ros was concerned, Daisy (or ‘that woman’) was never mentioned in conversation, and she and Will’s children did not exist in Ros and Legs’ day-to-day consciousness in Ealing. It was simpler that way.
No such silent diplomacy applied to Legs’ personal life; Ros fixed her with a beady look as they sat down to eat. ‘Do you think you’ll see Francis at all when you’re at Farcombe?’
She nodded. ‘He wants to meet up.’
Ros picked up her fork and stared at the prongs. ‘He’ll never take you back, you know.’
‘That’s not what this is about.’ She tried not to think again about that long letter she’d sent soon after the split, saying it had all been a horrible mistake, begging him to take her back. The fact that he had never even acknowledged it still ploughed stitches of humiliated pain between her ribs whenever she thought about it. For a long time she’d convinced herself that she’d forgotten to add a stamp.
‘We’ll see.’ Ros flashed that smug smile which had irritated Legs since childhood.
As she opened her mouth to protest more vociferously, Nico burst into the room at last and dived into his chair, breathless with excitement. ‘The bidding on your dress is already at over a thousand pounds, Mum! How cool is that?’
‘Very cool.’ Ros lay down her fork. ‘Now please don’t run in the house again, or be late to table. You may say grace – how much?’
Legs closed her eyes. It had already gone above her top bid again. As soon as she’d finished eating, she’d have to dash downstairs and pledge the rest of her savings on the tattered wedding dress.
Chapter 3
Throughout the week that followed, now linked by instant messaging as well as emails on her whizzy phone, Legs was surprised how much she looked forward to Gordon’s random, eclectic messages which came like machine-gun fire when he was seeking inspiration then stopped when he hit a productive vein. His questions were a welcome distraction as she grew increasingly nervous at the prospect of seeing Francis again.
Allegra,
How long could you personally hang off high scaffolding if gripping with only your bare hands?
GL
I have not tested my scaffolding-hanging abilities recently, but I can conduct an experiment in Piccadilly at lunchtime should you wish. A
There is no need to test scaffolding. Julie has climbed off and is now trapped in a lift with Jimmy Jimee. Warehouse is on fire around them. They could be forced to take off their clothes to create an escape rope. I may need you to research the scene. GL
As you know, I take my role as research assistant very seriously, but I should point out that our office lifts are glass. A
As well as bombarding her with hypothetical questions, Gordon forwarded a manuscript originally sent to him by a fan, The Girl Who Checked Out by Delia Meare. Do look beyond her abhorrent spelling and grammatical lapses. You will find out why when you read it. Of course, you are far better qualified than I am to judge if this is what you have been dreaming of or the stuff of nightmares. And before you ask, Delia is not my new pen name.
Touched that he valued her opinion, she printed it out ready to take with her to Devon.
As the weekend approached, Legs tried not to think about Francis, or the fact that securing a coup at Farcombe could make or break her heart as well as her career. Conrad was careful not to mention her ex by name, keeping her focus on Gordon and the agency’s duty to orchestrate his Reveal perfectly. Under increasing pressure from the slavering press and Gordon’s anxious publisher, he couldn’t be more delighted by the burgeoning friendship between his most lucrative and tricky client and his flirty assistant. ‘Keep him sweet’ was becoming his catchphrase. He didn’t even kick up a fuss when she accidentally blind-copied him into a message she sent to Gordon mentioning Julie and Jimmy. Julie Ocean could have been a codename for a rival agent for all he cared, as long as Gordon remained willing to reveal his true identity to the media and public that summer.
While seducing Legs in his Wandsworth house on the eve of her departure to the West Country, Conrad insisted she kept her phone on standby in case Gordon made contact. Having gone to considerable lengths to make her feel special by treating her to a night at the Proms followed by supper in The Ivy, he ruined it by handing her the iPhone halfway through a candlelit massage as her message alert chimed. ‘It’s bound to be him. You know how he hates being kept waiting.’
But it wasn’t Gordon; it was Francis: Please tell me you’re coming tomorrow?
She quickly replied I’m coming, and then cast the phone aside, turning jumpily to Conrad who had rolled off the bed to fetch more oil. The knots in her stomach suddenly seemed tied to her vocal cords and she could only nod when he asked her if all was well.
He was a consummate lover. Tonight, however, she found her body barely responding to those firm hands and expert moves that usually drove her wild with delight. In her head, she could hear her own voice repeating ‘I’m coming, I’m coming’, but she knew she wasn’t talking to Conrad.
Legs hesitated telling Gordon she was going to Farcombe on his behalf until the last minute. Despite their short and largely abstract acquaintance, she knew he would disapprove.
So Fellows Howlett is sending an unarmed sergeant to do the Chief Super’s job? he fumed through the ether.
I will wear short sleeves, she cracked back nervously, that way I have the right to bare arms. Julie Ocean has Tai Chi on her side. White stork spreads wings. Grasp bird’s tail.
Don’t fly too close to the sun.
‘The sun or the son?’ she wondered aloud, thinking about Francis. There was something about Gordon’s reaction that unnerved her, playing to her
fear. As soon as she sent the reply ‘pluck off’, she regretted it, knowing it was far too irreverent and coarse. If she could have leapt into cyberspace to halt the message as it crackled through the ether to his desk, she would. But it was too late.
Gordon immediately began communicating via his PA again: G will be unavailable until further notice. He requests that you update me regularly. Regards, Kelly. (P.s. You are one plucky bird.)
Chapter 4
It had become known as the Summer of Storms, to the ongoing excitement of the Met Office and the great British public, who were now never short of small-talk about the weather. Legs’ morning drive to Somerset was like journeying from day to night and beyond as she encountered a black-skied, thundery landscape beyond the Avonmouth Bridge and drove through a hammering downpour before emerging into bright sunshine again as they climbed into the Blackdown Hills, its wet lanes hissing like snakes against the tyres of her battered old Honda.
When the red car puttered and bounced along the pot-holed driveway to Inkpot Farm, Daisy appeared briefly at the front door, rotund and hassled with a milk jug in hand, making frantic signals for Legs to park around the back and stay hidden.
Puzzled, she executed some very dodgy rally driving manoeuvres as she performed tail-snakes and wheel-spins through the rain-slicked mud to the rear yard, where she parked behind a pole barn housing a huge stack of last year’s mouldering hay.
With his head lowered over a Shell garage shop bag Nico had been complaining of travel sickness since they left the A303, and now he groaned afresh. Normally, he would’ve jumped out and dashed off in search of his father, but this time nausea kept him in situ.
‘They’ve got a house viewing,’ Legs said, checking the messages from Daisy on her phone. ‘Daddy’s taken the girls out to a farm park, apparently. We were supposed to meet him there an hour ago. Oops.’
