Happily Ever After

by Harriet Evans

  Elle found it hard to sleep with someone else in the bed; she always had done. She woke up several times as Tom snored lightly beside her, then fell back into a dream, where she was living the wedding in reverse, kissing Tom, talking to Rory, drinking at the bar with Felicity, dancing again. Soon after dawn broke, she fell into a heavy sleep, only to be woken by the sound of the bathroom door closing. She lay in bed staring up at the ceiling. Her head was pounding, and her mouth tasted sour. Through a gap in the heavy striped curtains the sun pierced the room. She could hear birds singing, the sound of pipes clanking, a conversation somewhere, with someone… where was it coming from?

  The door opened and Tom emerged. He scratched his head. Elle closed her eyes. He climbed back into bed with her, still naked, and put his arm around her. She turned over, so they were spooning, and he pulled her against him. She could feel his breath on her neck. His skin was warm. She was cold.

  “Are you awake?” Tom asked softly.

  “Mmm,” Elle said. “Sort of.”

  He rocked against her, and she could feel his erection. “Morning,” he said. “How’re you feeling?”

  “Not great.” Elle liked this, she could talk to him without having to look at him, because it was going to be embarrassing. She pushed against him a little more, feeling his chest against her spine.

  “Anything I can do?” Tom said. She didn’t answer, and he said, “It’s nearly nine o’clock, that’s all. If you—”

  Elle sat up immediately. “Oh, God. I didn’t let Mum know I wasn’t coming back,” she said. Nausea overwhelmed her; her head spun dangerously.

  Tom’s eyes flicked to her breasts. “Text her now,” he said. “Say you’ll be back in an hour or so, stay and have some breakfast.”

  “I can’t…” Elle scrambled out of bed.

  “Come on,” he said. “You’ll feel much better after some breakfast and a shower.”

  His voice was reasonable, as if they were discussing the weather, not how to exit this drunken shag situation into which she wasn’t quite sure how they’d got themselves. “OK,” she said. She called her mother’s mobile, but there was no answer, and so she called the landline, her fingers dialing the number as fast as she could.

  “Good morning,” came an old man’s voice.

  “Hello?” said Elle. “I’m looking for Mum, is she there?”

  “Mum?” said the voice. “My wife died several years ago, I’m afraid.”

  “Oh—” Elle clapped her hand to her mouth, suddenly realizing. “Mr. Franklin, I’m so sorry,” she said. “It’s Eleanor—Mandana’s daughter. I’ve—I’ve rung our old number.”

  “Ah!” said Mr. Franklin slowly. “I wondered who it was. Still remember your first phone number, eh? How strange. I could have sworn I saw your mother, you know, early this morning, outside the house. Looking up at the windows.” Elle smiled; Mandana hated the salmon pink roses the Franklins had planted outside Willow Cottage. “So fucking tacky. Like Margo in The Good Life,” she used to say, glaring at them whenever they happened to pass their old home. “I’m positive it was her,” Mr. Franklin said. “Is she well?”

  “Er—yes, she’s fine. I’m so sorry to bother you—”

  She said good-bye and rang off. “Mum’s out and about this morning already.”

  “Great,” Tom said reassuringly. “So you’ve got some time, anyway.”

  She turned to face him, suddenly aware she was still naked. “Er, yeah—thanks,” she said.

  She texted Mandana, quickly. “Come back to bed,” Tom said, pulling the duvet back. “Just for a minute.”

  “Um—OK,” Elle crawled back in next to him.

  He took her in his arms, but her shoulder hurt, pressed up against him, and it was cramped and uncomfortable, though she didn’t say anything. They lay there, blinking together, looking at the elaborate cornicing. Elle was suddenly restless, her mind alert and awake. She started remembering things. Caitlin. His daughter. What was she doing here? But if she asked, then it’d be a thing, and she was going back on Tuesday… It wasn’t a thing, it couldn’t be, she was here for two more days… She leaned against him, smelling his dry, warm skin, wishing she could just fall asleep against him, trying and failing to seem relaxed. After a minute, Tom gently stroked her arm.

  “Hey.” He kissed the back of her neck. “How about some breakfast?”

  While Elle showered, Tom ordered room service and a cab for her and they ate bacon and eggs together, in fluffy dressing gowns by the window overlooking the park. It was a glorious May day, the sky a deep blue. But Elle couldn’t eat; she’d thought she was starving, but her hangover kept changing, so that when the breakfast arrived the eggs were horrifically gloopy and the bacon rancid and fatty to her. She chewed on some toast, trying not to stare at Tom. They heard voices along the corridor from time to time, breaking into the silence of their room, as they tried to make polite conversation; the weather in New York in May, the age of Sanditon Hall, the best route for Tom to take back to London. It was awkward. It’s a one-night thing, don’t worry about it, you’re going back on Tuesday, and you’ll probably never see him again.

  When the call came that the cab was here she was relieved. “I’d better go,” she said, standing up and pulling on her clothes. He watched her.

  “Last night was fun,” he said. “You were amazing.”

  “Oh. OK, thanks,” said Elle. “You—you too.”

  “Thanks,” said Tom. He carried on eating his eggs. She wanted to hit him, for having the appetite.

  “I’m just prolonging an awkward moment,” Tom said. “Just pulling it out for as long as possible, to maximize the awkwardness.”

  Elle put her BlackBerry into her bag and pulled on her shoes. “Job done,” she said, smiling at him. “I’m sorry to rush off—”

  “It’s totally fine.” Tom stood up. “Look, are we OK?”

  “We’re—yeah, we’re great,” said Elle. She stopped, one hand holding her shoe. “Yes,” she said, more calmly. “It’s all good.”

  “I’ll email you,” he said. He swallowed and scratched his chin, rough with dark stubble. She thought how sexy he looked, how unconscious he was of it. “Elle, it was great, maybe we could—”

  “I really have to go,” she said. “I’m sorry, Tom—I need to get back to Mum, you understand, don’t you? And you need to get back to—” She added it casually. “Is it Yorkshire Road, where you live?”

  He nodded, looking slightly puzzled. “Yorkshire Road, Richmond? Yes, what a good memory you’ve got.” Then he took her hand. “Don’t worry. Speak soon, yes? Or—sometime. This is—I’m glad, anyway. Have a good trip.”

  “You have a good—yeah, thanks,” she said, unable to articulate what she was feeling, and she shut the door, her last image of him standing there in the fluffy white dressing gown, black stubble on his chin and a worried expression in his dark gray eyes.

  THE TAXI DRIVER was local, and knew the lanes well, so though he went too fast for her delicate head, it was quick, and the journey back through roads heavy with blossom and bursting with life was almost pleasant.

  When she arrived back at the barn and paid the driver, she stared up at the old building, sunshine warming its old stones. A window was open; the geraniums in pots by the door looked bright and welcoming.

  But then Elle heard something, a rocking, tilting sound, mixed with something dripping. She strained her ears as she walked to the front door. There was no answer when she knocked, again and again. She checked her text and her mother hadn’t replied. And so she went over and peered through the kitchen window.

  The old record player was on but it had finished playing and was looping round and round. A tap was half-running, dripping loudly into the sink. Mandana was at the kitchen table almost exactly as she had been before, only there was stuff all over the table, red and orange, and it stank, it stank, and when Elle shouted at her, screamed through the window, she didn’t hear her.

  And when she finally hitched her
dress about her hips again and climbed through the window, and shook her mother, soaked in wine and blood and vomit, she still didn’t hear her, and she didn’t move, not at all. It was only when the ambulance came and they moved the bottles out of the way that she saw the large piece of paper on the table with two words written on it, in looping, italic writing:

  Sorry Ellie

  EVEN WHEN SHE was very old, Elle could always recall in perfect detail the days after she found Mandana. The drive to the hospital every morning that began to feel like a routine, as though she’d started a new job and that was the way her life was going to be from now on. It was a lovely drive, too, through the countryside. That was partly when she started to realize she really couldn’t come home again. Forever in her mind, early summer would be associated with that time. The cow parsley in the hedgerows, the early flowering honeysuckle, the heavenly scent of wild garlic everywhere. Then parking in the vast, empty car park, going in through the massive portico stuck onto the eighties building. It was of fake marble, and it always made her wonder why it was there. To reassure people? We’ve got a marble portico. It’s OK, your mother / husband / child isn’t going to die. The feet squeaking on the rubber floor, the huge metal lifts, the way women always clutched their handbags to their sides and looked down, at the floor. Then Mum’s room, just her in there and another lady. The other lady left after two days, Elle didn’t know where she went.

  Mandana lay on her back, her face tipped up to the ceiling. She would have hated that, Elle knew. Her mother slept with three pillows, practically upright, always had done. She loved sitting up in bed, reading, listening to the radio, chatting to herself, to whoever was there. Not lying flat, as though she were already a corpse on a trolley. Elle had asked a nurse if they could put some pillows under her head, but they’d said no. Mandana’s face was yellow, her hair stuck to her forehead and neck, greasy and limp. Her hands were always in the same position, the left one clutched into a fist except for the index finger pointing, her right arm splayed out on the edge of the clean white sheets. It was virtually useless, the right arm; they told her the drink had cut off most of the circulation to it, over the years. She’d hidden that, too, using the left arm, asking other people to unscrew a jar, always keeping her right hand in her pocket, on her hip. Elle could see it, now it was too late.

  One day Elle came in and the index finger had curled up, like the others. “She moved,” Elle told the doctor. “Her hand wasn’t like that before, it was like this,” and she’d shown them.

  But they hadn’t listened, because it didn’t matter, and they were trying to get her to see that; none of it mattered.

  On the twelfth day, her breathing grew more ragged and her pulse got weaker. Rhodes had been in again to see her, and he was with Elle in the café, just inside the marble portico, when they called Elle back up again, but it was too late, and she’d gone.

  Elle was glad Rhodes was there. Then he went home, back to Melissa and Lauren, and Elle went back to the barn. It was still light, though it was after nine. She called some people, her father, Bryan, Mandana’s boss at the library, her best friend from school, but actually, there weren’t that many people to contact. She spoke to Caryn, and told her what had happened. Caryn asked when she’d be coming back. Elle never forgot that, even though she loved Caryn and owed her so much. She would always remember that, on the evening she rang to tell her that her mother had just died, Caryn said, “When do you think you might be back in the office? Only because I spoke to Elizabeth Forsyte today and she was wondering.”

  When Elle got off the phone, she’d looked round the big, lonely barn, at the blue-gray twilight outside, then she went to the kitchen, got some bin bags, and went upstairs to start clearing up. What else was she going to do? Sit there and cry? She’d tried to, and no tears would come. Better to be doing something, she had to do something. She couldn’t just stay still. She’d start to think about it then and she couldn’t. So she went through the house swiftly and methodically, sorting everything into piles—keep, charity, rubbish—and then went through the “keep” pile and divided it into three more piles—solicitor, Rhodes, me, sell. Two days later, she’d finished, and there was nothing left for her to do. By mid-June she was back in New York. Nearly a month to the day since she’d left. The BEA (BookExpo America) was just starting, and for three days she made the trip to the huge, faceless Jacob Javits Center on the edge of the city, walking past the stalls filled with publishers gossiping, greeting each other. Sorry Ellie Sorry Ellie Sorry Ellie. Three days there, and that, too, started to feel like a routine after a while, so she told herself, in the long, hot, sweaty nights in her tiny apartment, that she’d just replaced one routine with another, and that was the best way to function.

  Only later did she discover that grief doesn’t look like anything resembling sanity.

  On the last stroke of midnight, the carriage and horses, the coachman and footmen vanished. Cinderella found herself, in her old gray dress and wooden shoes, in the middle of a dark, lonely road.

  Vera Southgate, Well-Loved Tales: Cinderella

  September 2008

  “OH, BY THE way.” Elle poured herself some more coffee. “I have to go to London next month. For one of those Building Bridges conferences. I thought I’d see Rhodes and Melissa and Lauren, spend some time in the office.”

  Gray lowered the news section of The Times and looked at her. “When?”

  “Not sure.” Elle pulled her iPhone towards her. “It’s here—yeah. It’s Monday 20th to the Wednesday and I’m flying out on the Sunday, coming back Wednesday p.m., I think.”

  “So your flights are booked already?”

  The sun was streaming in through the huge open windows, another perfect September day. She blinked, thinking it through. “Yeah—sorry, honey. We got told about it ages ago, I just kept thinking it might not happen. Seems ridiculous when the world’s in freefall financial chaos to be jetting over to the UK to sit in a dimly lit room and talk about improving margins, but there you go.”

  “I’ll miss you,” Gray said. He took her hand and kissed it, his flat, nail-bitten thumb caressing the diamond that had only been on her finger for a couple of months; it still felt strange, too huge, to Elle. She kept catching it in things, her clothes, her hair. She had caught the side of Sidney’s cheek with it at his belated retirement party, and nearly taken his eye out.

  “I’ll miss you too, honey,” she said, smiling at him.

  “Are you used to it yet?” Gray said, reading her thoughts. “Being engaged? It suits you, you know.”

  “I don’t know if I’ll ever be used to it,” Elle said. This was one of the things she loved about him, that he always wanted honesty before flattery. “It’s such an unnatural state to be in, neither one thing nor the other. And I just—well, I never thought it’d happen to me.”

  Gray said drily, “Well, I’m glad to make all your dreams come true.”

  They were holding hands across the breakfast table; she laughed, and pulled hers away, picking up the manuscript she’d been reading again. “Oh, definitely,” she said. “You have, promise.”

  On Saturdays, Elle and Gray usually had a late brunch in the apartment, and while Gray caught up on The Times and the New Yorker, Elle skim-read manuscripts, and answered emails she hadn’t got to during the week. In the evening they often had dinner with friends—Gray’s friends, the academics, liberals and writers that made up his circle. Saturday morning was one of her favorite times of the week, sitting on the couch in the Soho loft, listening to the people below and the faint rumble of traffic on the cobbled streets, for though she was working, she was undisturbed by phone calls, office visits, her BlackBerry vibrating. She had time to herself, so she could start the following week ahead of the game. The Frankfurt Book Fair was a couple of weeks away, and though she wasn’t going, there was the usual rush of insanely hot scripts to read, the usual fevered brow to mop of the editor who wanted to bid millions of dollars, and the merry-go-round
of dinners, drinks, and meetings to endure. When you ran a division and had a team of twenty-five, and when you were (relatively) young and successful and engaged to one of New York’s most respected authors, you rarely spent time at home, which was why these Saturday mornings were precious to her. Dinner with Gray’s friends meant old Italian restaurants, discussions about European cities she’d never been to, and reminiscences of people she’d never met because they were dead. And, kind as they were to her face, she knew what they were thinking.

  This Saturday, curled up on the couch in her pajamas with her laptop on her knees, Elle was typing so furiously she didn’t hear Gray come in again from his shower. “I’m heading out to pick up some supplies,” he said. “Do you need anything?”

  She shook her head, blew him a kiss, and carried on typing. “I’m OK.”

  Gray paused by the door, then came over. He sat down slowly next to her on the sofa. Elle moved her legs, so that his body rested against her limbs. The lines on his handsome face were more noticeable in the bright morning light.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he began.

  “Always a dangerous sign. Go on,” said Elle.

  Gray’s eyes twinkled. His hand stole under the blanket and stroked her foot. “I might come with you, to London. My French publishers want me to go over to Paris before the election, in any case, to appear on a panel, and I’ve been putting them off. I could stay with you and then take the Eurostar. Would that be OK?”

  “Oh—” said Elle. She closed her laptop, put her hands on top of it. “That’s great. It’s just I won’t have much time for you, you know.” She silenced him, as he howled in outrage. “I’m serious! Those conferences are eighteen-hours-a-day things, we’re in a hotel all the time, and I’ll be busy, seeing people…” She paused. “I do want to go to London with you, it’s just now’s not the best time. I’m literally flying in and out again, there’s a board meeting back here and a big presentation, I have to be back for Thursday anyway.” She was babbling.