by Hazel Osmond
Ellie took in the multitude of little charms and pendants hanging from the rear-view mirror. She sat behind the partition and grille separating the driver from the backseat passengers and felt like she was in a tank.
‘Which way you wanna go?’ the driver said, not turning his head.
‘Um … the quick way?’ Ellie guessed.
The driver nodded and set off with a lurch. Then he started saying something and laughed uproariously.
‘I’m sorry,’ Ellie shouted, ‘I didn’t catch that.’
It was only after he carried on talking and laughing that she understood he was chatting to someone else on his radio. Feeling very naïve and very lost, she sat back in her seat. Of all the stupid ideas she’d ever had, this was perhaps the stupidest. What did she think she was doing? This wasn’t a Richard Curtis film. Jack wasn’t going to run towards her with his arms out when he saw her, touched by the fact she’d come all the way to New York to find him.
She decided to try to stop thinking for a while and let the sights and sounds wash over her.
Everything here was like London and nothing was like London. Except for the traffic jams. They came to a halt and then started to inch their way down the express-way. She looked out at the billboards and low wooden houses and frustration and anger welled up inside her. She just wanted to find Jack and try to put right the damage that her big mouth and her small brain had done. She didn’t need this.
She went back to thinking about her plan. It stank. Sure, she knew where the agency was, but it was already after 7 p.m. What if he’d gone home? She had no idea where he lived and trying to worm it out of anyone at work would have alerted them to why she wanted it in the first place. So then what? Spend a sleepless night in her hotel and try again tomorrow?
She realised she had been chewing the skin along the side of her thumbnail again. If she went on like this, she’d have eaten herself completely by Christmas.
She took her thumb away from her mouth but couldn’t get her mind off her plan, or lack of it. What if she couldn’t actually get into his office? What if he’d told people a madwoman called Ellie Somerset was never to be allowed in? She had one evening and one day to find him and then she had to go home. It was hopeless.
Then she thought of the look of pain on Jack’s face when she had said those things about Helen, and knew she had no choice. She had to find him.
A few more minutes and she had moved on to berating her own stupidity. How could she, Ellie Somerset, have cocked things up so badly? She had a reputation for researching the far end of a fart when it came to her work. It was unbelievable that she’d confronted Jack with only half of his story.
She thought back to him accusing her of acting like a sick cat when Sam had left her and felt deep, deep shame. Of course it had made him angry when he had been through such real pain.
She was gnawing her thumb again. She sat on her hands and then realised the driver was talking to her. ‘Rush-hour,’ he said in a tone that suggested she must be mad trying to get into New York at this time of day. He waved his hand at the road ahead. ‘This road is called the LIE, the Long Island Expressway, but it’s a lie because it’s not express at all.’ He started to laugh. ‘You get it? Lie because you can’t go fast … express lane … fast …’ He was slapping his thigh now with the hilarity of it.
Ellie ripped the boarding pass she was still holding into as many tiny pieces as she could.
When he’d stopped laughing, he turned his head slightly. ‘You should have come into LaGuardia Airport. You’d have been there one and one half, maybe two hours ago.’ He smiled at her in the rear-view mirror as if he had been incredibly helpful.
‘Thank you so much,’ she said politely. ‘I’ll make sure that I remember that for next time.’
Why couldn’t he shut up? Why did she have to wade through all this when the only thing she wanted was to find Jack?
Slowly, slowly they moved towards New York, along the Grand Central Parkway and then across the Triborough Bridge. Halfway across, there was a little sign saying, ‘Welcome to Manhattan.’
‘Are we really in Manhattan now?’ Ellie asked like a little girl, feeling excitement despite all the other emotions weighing her down. It looked so familiar, like a film set.
The driver caught her eye. ‘Good, eh? Anything you want, anything you want, it’s out there. The good and the bad. All there. You come here for something special?’
‘Yes,’ Ellie said, lowering her head to try to see to the top of the buildings they were driving past. ‘I’ve come to find the man I love. I’m going to apologise for calling his dead wife a two-faced slapper and then explain that I understand why he keeps running away from commitment and that I want to make it all better for him for the rest of his life. And hopefully when I’ve done all that, he’ll say, “OK, Ellie,” and come home with me.’ She had started to laugh even before she saw the expression on the driver’s face. It was probably the start of jet lag or post-flight hysteria, but once she’d started, she couldn’t stop and she sat back in the seat and let it happen, watching the buildings flick by and wondering whether the driver would charge her extra for being a mad Englishwoman.
Later, after checking into her hotel, Ellie walked out into a hot, sticky Manhattan evening. She wandered along the street for a while and then stuck out her hand for a cab. Her little stash of ready cash was fast disappearing, but what the hell. She’d already cleared out her bank account to buy the plane ticket. Hard to believe she was actually standing on a New York street. Two days ago she had been in Scarsdove. No wonder her arms and legs felt like lead.
A yellow cab drew up and she went to open the door when another hand reached out for it too.
‘Oh,’ she said, and automatically stepped back. The other hand belonged to a man in a suit. A really attractive man in a suit.
‘Which way you goin’?’ he said, hauling open the door.
‘Um … Midtown?’
‘You wanna share?’
‘Share?’
‘Yeah, I’m goin’ that way too.’ He gave her a look. ‘Tourist, huh?’ He didn’t wait for her to nod. ‘It’s OK,’ he rattled on. ‘It’s a New York thing.’ He held up the hand that wasn’t carrying a briefcase. ‘See, I’m not armed … It’s just that it’s hard as hell to get a cab down here.’ He gave her a large smile. Good teeth.
‘You two gonna get in or dance on the sidewalk?’ the driver said.
‘After you,’ the man in the suit said, and so, against her better judgement, Ellie got in.
She studied the man as he settled himself next to her. He really was very good-looking. Psychopaths probably weren’t that handsome. The man stared right back.
‘So, you here on your own?’
‘No,’ Ellie said rather too quickly, ‘with a huge group. Judo experts. Well, all martial arts really.’
‘Oh yeah? Or you sayin’ that because you think I’m a psycho?’
‘Because I think you’re a psychopath.’
The man chuckled and held out his hand. ‘Steve Martin.’
‘But not the Steve Martin?’ she said, giving the hand a quick shake.
‘If I had a dollar for every time—’
‘Sorry. I’m Ellie, Ellie Somerset.’
‘Pleased to meet you, Ellie. So, here on vacation?’
‘Short trip,’ Ellie said, and felt Steve’s thigh connect with hers.
‘OK. Need someone to show you the sights?’
‘Um. No.’
‘Shame. I was gonna offer.’ His arm came along the back of the seat.
Ellie tried subtly to pull her dress down to cover her knees. ‘You’re quite direct, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘In fact, everyone here seems quite direct. I thought New York was meant to be …’ She was going to say ‘unfriendly’ and then thought better of it. She didn’t want to be rude and she didn’t want to give Steve an excuse to show her how friendly he could be.
He seemed unperturbed. ‘Hey, we’re all in a rush. Busy, busy. We got no t
ime for the slow build.’ He brought his thigh into even closer contact with hers. ‘This is only a short cab ride, so I gotta move fast. And it’s not every day you get to share it with a beautiful Englishwoman.’
Ellie felt herself blush. There wasn’t much room in the back of the cab and now there didn’t seem to be much air either.
‘Actually, I’m here to meet my boyfriend.’ It felt nice to describe Jack like that, even if it was a total lie.
Steve removed his arm from the back of the seat.
Ellie decided to change the subject, ‘So, you going home?’
‘Nah. Back into work. Need to check on somethin’.’
‘Right. And what do you do? As a job?’
‘Account director. Advertising firm – Schneider & Linklan. You know it?’
Ellie was wide-eyed. ‘No. But that’s amazing. I work in advertising too.’
‘Yeah? Cool coincidence. Well, we gotta pitch tomorrow and I’m goin’ back in to check on the creatives, lazy sons of bitches. If you don’t watch ’em, they’ll louse up and go off to the bar. Whaddya do? Account director too?’
‘I’m a copywriter,’ Ellie said, and watched with some satisfaction as Steve’s face crumpled in embarrassment.
‘Do you have that expression “puttin’ your foot in your mouth” in England?’ he asked.
Ellie reached out and patted him on the arm. ‘You are speaking to a master of the art.’
When the cab had dropped them both off, they walked a little way along the street together until they arrived at Steve’s building. Ellie could see it was only a few doors down from Bar Bootle. ‘So there are a lot of agencies round here?’ she said.
‘Yup. All sizes. Some on the way up, some on the way down.’
‘What about that one?’ Ellie indicated Bar Bootle.
Steve laughed. ‘Well, it was on the way down. Big time. But now, who knows? Been bought by some English agency and they’ve got some fierce bastard in. One of your fellow countrymen. British accent, but not like yours. Now he’s got them falling over themselves to show who can work the hardest.’
Ellie imagined Jack striding through the office sizing everyone up and picking off the weakest.
‘OK,’ Steve said, ‘I’m goin’. But, hey, take this.’ He handed her a card. ‘If you get bored with that boyfriend, gimme a call.’
Ellie watched him walk away. Why couldn’t the pigs in suits back home look anything like that? She put the card in her bag and walked along the street to peer through the smoked-glass window of Bar Bootle. She could see the receptionist’s desk and a wall of art, but nothing else. Even though she had expected it to be closed at this hour, it was still a crushing disappointment. The thought of having to wait another whole night with that apology burning in her brain was depressing and she turned away from the agency and began to walk. She could smell the excitement on the streets here, just like in London, but somehow more dangerous.
She walked for a couple of hours, clocking up the sights. She looked in the windows of the Fifth Avenue shops and chatted to a man outside St Patrick’s Cathedral who gave her a leaflet and tried to convince her that Charlemagne was the rightful king of America. She got moved on by a security guard when she tried to sit on a wall at the Rockefeller Center. As she explored, the conversations she overheard made her feel like she was in a Woody Allen film – ‘Well, I said to her, “You’re just gonna walk away from this. I’m the one with the therapy bills”’ – and sometimes like a Martin Scorsese one – ‘Yeah, he gave me that look, you know, the baseball-bat one.’ Everything was frantically alive.
An old man dressed in a tuxedo was doing a soft-shoe shuffle on the sidewalk, his dog barking along to the music. Ellie thought of Edith and how, if she had been with her, she would have walked forward and joined him. It made Ellie feel very alone and very far from home.
She pushed on to Times Square and burst out laughing. It was the naked cowboy, not quite naked but wearing a pair of pants and a cowboy hat and serenading people with his guitar. She’d travelled three thousand miles and here they were: the singing knickers.
The evening got hotter. She gawked at the advertising signs; she bought a huge pretzel and a soda; she ignored the couples walking together with arms entwined. Sirens wailed, and steam really did come up through the manhole covers.
Finally she headed for Grand Central Terminal, her feet throbbing, and worked her way into the middle of the concourse and stared up. There were constellations of stars on the ceiling and impulsively she made a wish on one of them. When she brought her gaze back down, everything had gone blurry.
Eventually she pushed through the milling people to find the passageway leading back to her hotel. She was alone in a big foreign city, but Jack was here too. Whoever he was with tonight, tomorrow she would see him. What happened after that would be down to fate.
And you had to have hope, didn’t you?
CHAPTER 36
‘Oh, what a shame, you’ve just missed him,’ the receptionist at Bar Bootle said, and Ellie tried not to show the disembowelling disappointment that she felt. ‘Mr Wolfe will be so sorry. We know all about you, Mrs MacEndry.’ The woman smiled a smile that was all perfect teeth and carefully applied lipstick. ‘Mr Wolfe always says he’s looking for another one of you over here to keep him organised.’
Ellie tried to look flattered.
‘Do you want to see Rosa? She’s normally on the desk here. You talked with her a couple of times on the phone, I think?’
Noooooooo.
‘No, no, don’t bother her—’
‘It’s funny,’ the girl cut in, frowning, ‘I had the idea you were much older. Mr Wolfe said you’d retired.’
Ellie did her surprised face. ‘Did he? Well, he calls it retirement – it’s his little joke. No, I’m taking a break. I’ve worked for Jack … Mr Wolfe since leaving school and now he’s gone, it’s time for me to have a rethink.’
The woman nodded. ‘Constant reassessment is essential,’ she said earnestly.
‘Quite. Anyway, this New York trip, bit last minute. Thought while I was here, I’d drop in and surprise him.’ Ellie heard her own voice sounding clipped and upper class, like some pastiche of a frightfully posh British matron. She wasn’t certain how that had happened, but it appeared to be doing the trick: the receptionist seemed satisfied and the lovely smile came back. Ellie wondered how much it had cost or if all American people were born with perfect teeth.
‘So,’ she said, rushing on before Miss Colgate could ask her any more questions, ‘Mr Wolfe’s not here?’
‘No, I’m sorry. He was going back to his apartment and then he was meeting … well … he was …’ Ellie sensed the woman was reticent to discuss what else Jack was doing that day.
‘He’s out with some woman, I expect?’ Ellie said in a chortling ‘Isn’t he a lad?’ voice.
It seemed to be the prompt the receptionist needed. ‘Well, yes, yes, he is. One of the models from a catalogue shoot we’ve completed. I think Mr Wolfe is taking her out to lunch.’
‘Quite a one for the ladies, our Jack,’ Ellie said, laughing over the top of a black wave of despair seeping into her.
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Oh well, you better tell him he missed me.’ Ellie turned to go and then, as if she had just had a brainwave, she turned back. ‘Or … if I rush, I might catch him at that apartment of his. I’ve got the piece of paper with the address on somewhere here.’ She scrabbled in her bag, careful to keep her left hand out of sight and then dropped the bag deliberately on the floor. The receptionist was round the desk in a shot helping her scoop everything back up.
‘Sorry,’ Ellie said, ‘jet lag.’
The receptionist retrieved Ellie’s pen from where it had rolled under a chair and handed it back to her. ‘Oh, don’t worry, Mrs MacEndry. Here, let me write it down for you.’ She jotted the address on some paper and handed it to Ellie.
Ellie was out of the door calling her goodbyes over her shoulder before t
he receptionist got suspicious. She felt mean and shabby about the deceit and hoped the receptionist didn’t ring Jack and tip him off, but hell, all was fair in love and war, and fortune favoured the brave.
She was on her way.
Ellie arrived at Jack’s apartment block to find he wasn’t there. Or so the doorman told her. He was an old guy with medals on his chest and she guessed that he was used to protecting the residents in the building from unannounced callers. She tried to engage him in conversation, but he wasn’t having any of it. And the longer she stood there, the more attention she was getting from people passing through the lobby.
She made a move to go to the lift and he told her politely but firmly that she couldn’t go up. Mr Wolfe was not at home. He didn’t know when he was expected back. She could leave a message, but it was a waste of time remaining there.
And then Ellie felt the atmosphere in the lobby shift and she turned round to see Jack. She needed all of her self-control not to run across the marble floor and throw herself at him. Instead she waited for him to see her. Please God let him look pleased.
Jack looked utterly horrified. He stood completely still and stared at her before walking somewhat unsteadily over to the doorman.
‘It’s one of those Velcro women I told you about, Lou,’ she heard him say. ‘Hard to prise off, you know?’
Ellie felt physical pain at the words. ‘Jack,’ she said, ‘listen to me—’
‘No,’ he said. He didn’t look at her, but the doorman was watching her as if she were some kind of lunatic.
‘Can you deal with this?’ Jack asked him, placing a hand on his arm.
‘No problem,’ the doorman said, almost standing to attention. ‘You carry on, Mr Wolfe.’
Jack started to move towards the lifts and Ellie tried to get to him, but the doorman simply positioned himself in the way. Short of pushing him over, she couldn’t do anything.
‘Jack, please,’ she called, but the lift doors were already shutting.
There was quite a little scene after that where Ellie refused to go and the doorman told her what would happen to her if she didn’t. As it involved calling the police and being put on the first available flight back to London, Ellie slunk out of the building and went and stood round the corner.
