He affected the same look of deep concentration as before. ‘But I want you to finish it.’
She'd bared herself and in return he had disappointed her. Again. She got to her feet to harangue him. ‘Of course you do. And for what? So you can turn a profit. All you care about is your company.’
‘I've sold it,’ he said quietly.
‘What?’ said Darsie.
‘What?’ said Jane.
‘I've sold the company. Your new novel will be published by Tristesse Books, an imprint of Pandemic Media.’
Her mind whirled. ‘You can't have sold it! That stupid company is you. Get it back. You can't do this to me. I'm on the moral high ground here. I'm not getting off now.’ She let it sink in. He might as well have said that he'd sold a lung. No, he had two lungs, but only one Tristesse. ‘You sold it?’
He nodded. ‘And you can take all the time you need with the last chapter. I made it part of the deal.’
What had that cost him? Not financially. She knew he didn't care about that, but in every other way. She weighed the balance. He had hurt her with his high-handed attitude to her title and then the foolish scheme to beat her writer's block, but he had cared about her novel when no one else had. And still cared. He could have taken the new manuscript with the terrible final chapter she'd given him, published it and saved his company. Instead he had sacrificed the thing most dear to him to prove that there was something else more dear. Someone.
So, what happened next?
It was up to her. Real life so rarely presented moments like these. Life buffeted you from one conclusion to the next, open-ended until it ended. Life was a series of accidents, happy and unhappy. But at that moment she had become the protagonist of her own story, this ending in her hands. All she had to do was find the right words.
‘Tom. I didn't sign. With Klinsch and McLeish. I couldn't do it.’
She studied his face, trying to read his reaction—was he pleased to hear this news? He gave nothing away. Then after a pause that lasted forever he said:
‘You could stay.’ He took a step towards her. ‘With me.’
She could feel his breath on her face. ‘I could.’
He started to speak and she held up a finger to cut him off. ‘If I hear the words “sad”, “beautiful” or “music”, you're a dead man.’
She wanted to hear him say something else. Had been waiting since the night in the cottage when they'd got all Chapter 17 on each other. She relished the sequel—ached for it—but before they made love she wanted to hear him say it. Those three little words.
He gazed at her steadily. ‘I … block you.’
She held his stare. ‘And I block you too.’
He slipped an arm around her waist and pulled her to him. In the split second before their lips met she felt herself resist. She would never end one of her novels like this. It was unrealistic and smacked of wish-fulfilment. In her stories the universe turned a cold eye on the lives and loves of her characters. She felt his fingers gently stroking the nape of her neck. What was she saying again? Something about the harsh uncaring universe …
They kissed but then in the midst of the embrace she broke off. She stared past him, out of the corner of her eye aware of him regarding her with the dismal expression of a Frenchman thwarted mid-snog.
Darsie stood in front of the fireplace, smiling sadly. The fire was dying, the solitary log reduced to a thin layer of hot ash, its glow fading.
‘What?’ he complained. ‘What now? What could possibly be so important?’
She hadn't noticed until that moment but her head was filled with an endless, wearying hum. Only knew it now because for the first time since she'd become stuck on the final chapter the hum had stopped.
‘I know how it ends,’ she mouthed and turned for the door. She hadn't dragged her laptop to the cottage, but there was a notebook and pen in the kitchen. ‘And I just want to make a few notes …’
She felt Tom's fingers close around her arm, gentle but firm. ‘I don't care,’ he said.
She glanced towards the kitchen. Doors. Tricky things to get through. When she turned back Darsie had vanished. And this time she knew it was for good.
He kissed her again. A smirk slid across his face. She recognised that look. Had missed its promise. That was a Chapter 17 look. His hands were on her, unbuttoning, unzipping. She pulled his shirt over his head and as she did so brushed his forehead. It felt hot. Feverish.
‘You're on fire,’ she said, suddenly concerned.
‘You're pretty hot your—’
He pitched into her like a felled oak tree. Somehow she held onto him and manoeuvred his dead weight into the armchair, all the time calmly repeating his name. It would be OK. Everything would be OK. He slumped in the chair, unresponsive. They were eight miles from the nearest village. No working phone. She shook him, shouting his name now. Felt his neck for a pulse, her fingers desperately seeking the reassuring beat that would tell her everything was going to turn out all right in the end.
EPILOGUE
‘Singin’ in the Rain’, John Martyn, 1971, Island
ON A HILL above the city they gather in the breezy cemetery. Rain is forecast, but with callous disregard for the appropriate mood, for now the sun shines out of a blue sky. Solemn-faced men and women line the graveside, six deep. A decent turnout.
Roddy stands hand in hand with Nicola. Behind them his English class, smartly turned out in their school uniforms, most unsure how to behave at such a gathering. Benny Lockhart offers Anna LeFèvre a handkerchief. Donald MacDonald looks old. The only sound is the wind in the yew trees. Jane watches their branches sway, remembers reading somewhere that the funerary trees are traditionally planted in twos. The bitter irony doesn't escape her here, where couples inseparable in life are finally parted.
Her eyes fall on the dark wooden casket that rests in front of an empty podium. She can barely look at it; the sight offends her. She wants to blame him. In her head she has berated him often: how could he do this to her? But she didn't say it when she had the chance and now it's too late.
She walks slowly up to the podium as she has rehearsed, bends her head and begins to read. She hears the words issue from her mouth, hardly listening to them. She steals glances at the audience. Nicola comforts an inconsolable Roddy, openly weeping into a red handkerchief, the spot of colour popping against the wall of black. Her dad fights welling emotions but she can see his lip trembling with the effort to resist. Hard men don't cry. And then she's at the foot of the page and the final paragraph. She experiences an inrush of feeling, like air rapidly filling a vacuum. The world shrinks and the words telescope.
‘Why is it that the saddest endings seem the truest? In the stories I told myself I was always the heroine, always reaching for my happy ending. It didn't turn out that way. I won't get to spend the rest of my life with him. But I was loved, and that's enough.’
Her voice fades and all that remains is the breeze in the trees and the sound of quiet weeping.
And then another voice mutters behind her, the accent unmistakable: a wisp of French mixed with a few stray Scottish vowels. ‘I knew this would happen,’ says Tom.
She turns to see him staring regretfully up at the clear sky. ‘I was going to hire a rain machine, but you have no idea how expensive those things are. I think they must charge by the drop.’
He sidles up to join her at the podium, clears his throat and addresses the gathering in a loud, confident voice.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, fellow mourners, Jane Lockhart will now be signing copies of her new novel, You'll Catch Your Death.’
At his signal two men dressed as undertakers flip open the coffin lid. The white silk interior is lined with copies of Jane's latest book. On the cover the title and her name frame a stylised photograph of a beautiful but melancholy young woman sheltering beneath a red umbrella.
Months ago, as they'd edited the manuscript, working speedily towards publication, he'd presented options for the cover.
Annoyingly, this was the first design he had shown her. She loved it immediately, knew in her gut that it was the one. The figure was exactly how she'd pictured Darsie and the title worked beautifully with the image. So, naturally she had rejected it out of hand, making a giant fuss in the process, forcing him to mock up a dozen more designs before suggesting they revisit the first one. All in all she considered that he'd taken her shenanigans with surprising good grace.
The title had come to her in a flash, that night in the cottage when he'd suffered his little fainting fit. That's how she referred to it these days, just to wind him up, but for about thirty seconds she was sure he was dead. And during those moments of abject terror the title had popped into her head. You'll Catch Your Death. She was ashamed to say it, but even as she tried to rouse his inert body she experienced a momentary spike of pleasure. It was a great title. And hot on its heels another thought—she blushed that it should ever have crossed her mind—if he did die then he couldn't possibly change it.
She'd shared the title with him on the drive home sitting in the cab of the AA rescue truck. Your near-death experience inspired my new title—isn't that funny? Darkly amusing? Oh come on you grumpy Frenchman, that's funny.
The AA guy said he really liked it.
Jane closes her own copy of the book which is resting on the dais. She taps the cover image fondly and whispers to her heroine, ‘I'm sorry about your ending, but it was the right one.’
Tony Douglas had to die, as much as Tom Duval had to live. Darsie didn't get her happy ending after all, but Jane Lockhart did.
‘Are you actually talking to your book?’
Tom is at her shoulder. She surveys the funeral-themed launch party that he's proudly organised. She'd objected to it when he proposed the idea, but not strenuously enough. And since he'd graciously let her choose the cover and hadn't offered even a pipsqueak of objection to the title, she felt she had to give him something. On the other hand … books in a coffin.
‘I wish you hadn't done that,’ she says, gesturing to the casket from which Waterstones booksellers dispense copies of her new novel. ‘It's really offensive.’
A string quartet plays Beethoven's ‘Funeral March’ from the 3rd Symphony, Tom having rejected Chopin's effort as too mainstream.
‘You don't think it's all a bit tacky?’ she says.
‘Tacky?’ He sounds indignant. ‘We have canapés.’ A waiter dressed as a pallbearer wafts past carrying a tray laden with vols-au-vent baked in the shape of headstones. ‘Now get signing.’
Sophie Hamilton Findlay leads her to a signing table. The queue already stretches back past six rows of graves and a mausoleum. As she settles into the familiar rhythm of greeting eager readers and sending out Best Wishes she watches Tom at the edge of the crowd in deep conversation with Anna, his bank manager. She holds her breath, hoping it's not more bad news. He'd sold Tristesse to some faceless corporation. For her. And then she sees the two of them clink champagne-filled glasses and a grin split his handsome face. ‘Oh, thank fuck for that,’ she says aloud—and inadvertently to a mother and her young daughter waiting for their books to be signed. The mother's smile slips. Horrified, she apologises profusely.
She watches Roddy swing by, Nicola at his side, his class trooping behind them like ducklings. Ducklings with smartphones.
He motions towards the buffet table. ‘“The funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage table”? Anyone? Anyone? Come on 6b, it's a classic.’
‘Is it Avatar, sir?’
‘Yes, Gordon, it's Avatar.’
He exchanges a weary look with Nicola. Whispers something to her.
‘No,’ she says coyly. ‘I can't.’
‘Oh go on,’ he urges. ‘It's fun.’
He squeezes her hand and she relents with an indulgent sigh. Roddy swiftly gathers the class around him, directs them to the signing table. Jane feels thirty pairs of eyes study her minutely.
He claps his hands sharply. ‘Pay attention, class.’
Nicola clears her throat and addresses the children. ‘Jane Lockhart, of course, follows Charlotte Brontë as only the second writer in English to design and build her own hovercraft.’
‘Ho-ver-craft,’ repeats Roddy. ‘Write that down.’
A few of them assiduously copy the misinformation into their notebooks, but Jane is pleased to see that most ignore him in preference to filching a vol-au-vent from the table. Roddy nods approvingly at Nicola.
When Jane looks up, her dad is at the head of the queue.
‘We've got to stop meeting like this,’ she says lightly, then leans in to add confidentially, ‘You don't need to buy a book, y'know. I get a load of freebies.’
And then she sees that he's clutching a copy of her Happy Ending, or as it will always be known between them, The Endless Anguish of My Father. He kneads the book between callused fingers, his face twisted in concern, the vein in his temple bulging. ‘You read it then,’ she says, preparing herself for the inevitable outburst.
He nods slowly. ‘Her dad. He was a real shit to her, a right nasty piece of work.’
‘He's not y—’
He cuts across her objection. ‘But in the end, she forgives him.’
And she sees that he gets it. Finally.
‘Monsieur L!’
Tom sweeps in, buoyed up by whatever news Anna LeFèvre has just imparted, and points at the copy of Happy Ending in Benny's hands, grinning as he says, ‘If you think that was bad, wait till you see what she's done with you in the new one.’
Jane sees her dad blench, starts to explain that Tom is joking. Aren't you, Tom? But Benny's OK with it—whatever she's written. After all, it's just a story.
‘Mr Lockhart, Benny—excuse us, would you?’
Tom steers her past the queuing readers, apologising that there will be a slight delay in proceedings, but that Jane will be back signing momentarily. Feel free to have another canapé.
‘I thought the Pandemic Media people were coming today,’ she says as he hustles her across the cemetery.
‘Uh-huh. They're here.’
She scans the gathering, looking for someone who might be a malevolent financier, though she's not sure what's de rigueur for the soulless investor these days.
‘It's Anna.’
‘Your bank manager?’
‘Not any longer. Pandemic hired her to look after Tristesse. Apparently, they want someone in the company who won't let me get away with my usual extravagance. I feel that's a harsh characterisation.’
‘This from the man who insisted on six different vols-au-vent and a string quartet.’
They stand facing one another at the edge of the cemetery on the hill, the roofs and spires of the East End spread out below them. The sandstone city glows in the afternoon sunshine, but for the first time that day she notices a stray cloud wander across the sky.
She studies Tom. The Scottish weather had almost done for him, but the sallowness in his skin has long gone, revitalised by the recent spell of sunshine. Riviera-blue eyes, well, they sparkle. What else could they do? As much as he tries to turn his back on it, he is a child of the sun. In a moment of abandon he'd promised to take her to meet his parents. Not to meet them, not like that. Apparently they run a bijou literary festival from their house in the south of France. Roddy had Googled it. More of a château, he informed her. Y'know, towers, parkland, visible from space. Seems the Duvals are descended from nobility, which means she's dating a prince. So much for her indie cred. The writer of gritty urban miserablism has turned into fucking Cinderella.
‘What are you thinking?’
‘Something dark and depressing. I'm definitely not having pink and sparkly thoughts. Right?’ she insists.
‘OK, OK.’ He holds up his hands in surrender. ‘You're inconsolably wretched and gloomy. Happy?’
More clouds straggle after the first. The wind picks up, blowing her hair and she smooths it back into place.
‘So, you've fulfilled your contract,’
he announces, sounding all business. ‘We're done.’
‘Yes. I suppose we are.’ Not sure where this is going. She contemplates this set of affairs, sees him struggle with some great inner difficulty.
‘Unless …’ he begins.
‘Yes?’
‘It's been a long, hard journey, and you are, frankly, about the most infuriating person I've ever met, which considering I work in Scottish publishing is saying something.’
‘Thank you.’
‘But we couldn't have got here without each other. So … Jane, what I'm saying is … will you …’
The first drops of rain start to fall. The guests at the book launch scamper for cover. The ‘Funeral March’ ceases as the string quartet put up their instruments and follow suit. The undertakers quickly shut the casket lid.
Tom dips a hand into his jacket and pulls out a rolled up document.
She eyes it suspiciously. ‘Is that … a contract?’
‘Two more books and an option for a third.’
‘Exclusive?’
‘Naturally, we'd have to work very closely.’
‘With lots of notes?’
‘An excessive amount of notes.’
‘OK. I do,’ she says quickly. Too quickly. ‘I mean—I will. Oh just give it here …’
And she is uncapping her pen and he is unfolding the contract at the signature page, and suddenly, almost by accident, they are kissing in the rain.
All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author, and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all the incidents are pure invention.
All Rights Reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Enterprises II B.V./S.à.r.l. The text of this publication or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, storage in an information retrieval system, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.
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