Ellie's Return (12 page)

As it was he got a good price for some
commercial property and was able to pay the loan back in three months, but now
Lola was being cagey about giving up the Chair of the company, since she had
expected to be doing it for longer. Tom became very nervous about that and they
started to fight, and then the fights became more intense, until a sinister
discovery he made one afternoon. He had been thinking that perhaps he had been
worrying unnecessarily about the intentions of the woman who had after all come
to his aid. It was only because he was doing some background checking on the
man who had sold him the land that he found he was connected to several people
in the town, but most connected of all to Lola, who seemed to have encountered
him on at least half a dozen occasions even while Tom was looking at buying the
land. The pictures he saw of them in a business circulation magazine saw them
looking quite cosy, far too cosy for her to seriously claim that she did not
know him or to fail to mention that she knew him on any of the dozens of times
that Tom mentioned his name. He challenged her about it, but was left wishing
he had dug deeper first because she denied all knowledge and it would have
given her the opportunity to warn the unscrupulous seller and close any other
gaps he may find that connected them. He had never trusted Lola since, and the
more she knew that her control of the company gave her power over him, the more
despotic she had become. She had tried for a while to sidle up and get him on
side but he wasn’t having any of it, so there was no pretence now. Tom had held
on because to leave now would mean leaving with potentially nothing, not even
the means to begin again, while she would take everything he had built up. He
had stayed because he could not bear to be bowed to this monster and he had to
find a way back on top where he had worked so hard to get himself, but he knew
that he had to do it soon because otherwise she would bring forward the
marriage that she was forcing on him, and once that happened he had no doubt
its sole purpose was to have everything his father had built up too.

One thing he had managed to protect was
Ellie’s fathers house. Ellie’s parents had been divorced for years. Her mother
had bought a flat in South London very cheaply for no more complicated a reason
than that she needed somewhere to live, and it had exceeded her wildest dreams
in terms of investment value. Her father had clung on to the family home, more
from sentimentality than anything. The house had never been a good buy but it
was all they had been able to afford at the time. It was picturesque from the
outside but had been falling apart on the inside. Ellie’s father had been to
see Tom about buying the property because since an accident he had been unable
to do anything to renovate it in the way he had always intended and the
property had detiorated beyond manageable repair. He knew that it was not worth
very much but he could not afford to keep it, he needed some kind of income and
his house was his only asset. Tom had looked at the house and saw that it was
worth nothing to anybody, but he also knew that the older gentleman was in dire
need of assistance. He agreed to buy the house and let Ellie’s father live in
it, and because he was now the landlord he saw to updating some of the
features, like adding the central heating that the house had never had, new
windows and doors, kitchen and bathroom and he had it all re-papered and
carpeted. He spent more than the house was worth spending on because if he
stuck to a realistic budget the poor man would be living in a slum, but this
way he was able to see out his days in some dignity. The older man had said to
Tom that he knew he could not ask him not to tell Ellie that he had not been
able to look after himself but he hoped he would be kind about him. Tom thought
that he had every right to ask such a simple thing, and he had never told Ellie
that it was he who bought the house or spent so much renovating it for the old
man, but the father had died when they were still together and when Ellie left
not very long after that, he still wanted to know if she wanted the house. It
was quite liveable now and she might want to come back to it, she could even
renovate it. It was small but detached on its own plot, and they could have
extended it and lived there until they had a family. That was what he had
thought briefly before she was gone, but once she left he just wanted a yes or
no as to whether she still wanted it, and she had not even dignified that with
a response.

Nineteen

Charlotte was exhausted. She had long
adjusted to Lola’s ability to offer spiteful asides to her while being polite
to other people. Lola must have seen people look amused at it from time to
time, or at least interpreted the response to it as something akin to
admiration, because she tended to do it more when she was trying to impress
people, unaware that many people are simply embarrassed at talking to somebody
who is simultaneously being unpleasant to someone else. Lola tended to think of
people as mattering or not mattering, a socially inept division that she was
blissfully unaware was not admirable and which had so far been without repercussions,
except that it tended to put people off who witnessed it, whether the recipient
of her barbs was Charlotte, a waiter in a restaurant, or a PA to one of the
people she so aspired to being. Having hardly had time for a sandwich in what
was already the fifteenth working hour of the day and looked to extend into the
early hours, Charlotte had managed to bite her tongue at most of Lola’s attacks
this evening but was finding it harder and harder, and the only way to manage
the situation seemed to be to focus more and more on the job in hand until it
was time to go home.

She was offered some respite when an older
gentleman tried to engage her in conversation. She had seen him before when his
wife used to come into the shop. He used to wait outside, sometimes sticking
his head in the door impatiently as though he was not going in any further, and
would pace up and down outside. She had noticed that he never seemed to have
much to say to Lola, and that she tended to avoid him. On this occasion he had
started to talk to her while she was filling up the guests glasses, and given
Lola’s attitude she thought she had best keep going but she noticed that when
Lola approached her with a view to a verbal attack about a job not done she had
looked at the old gentleman and thought better of interrupting. He had turned
to Charlotte, winked and said he knew where the bodies were buried, before
taking a sip of his wine, turning to her again and saying: “enough of them,
anyway”.
 
Charlotte thought that she
would stay and enjoy his company for a few minutes, as with him she seemed safe
from Lola. She really needed a few minutes off and she had no idea how long
this evening was going on, but she knew she was expected to be in the next day
to oversee the end of one of the renovations, as she had the keys. She did not
know why Lola was in such a stinker of a mood but she was almost past caring.
That poor Tom had obviously decided to stay away and she didn’t blame him at
all.

Lola slipped by a couple of times, she did
not speak but she was giving Charlotte the evil eye, which she decided to
ignore. The gentleman was telling Charlotte about some of his businesses and
how things had changed the last couple of years and you have to go out and find
business these days, it doesn’t just come to you any more. He asked what she
did for Lola and she told him she just worked in one of the shops. He knew that
she did not just do that, that she had probably managed this evening’s event
and was responsible for the renovation and smooth running of the shops. She had
to acknowledge that when you put it that way she did do a lot more. She managed
the staff rota’s, she ordered the stock, she had introduced a smart stock
ordering system and she had developed and maintained the website. As she was saying
that Lola skimmed past again and glared at her.

“She doesn’t appreciate you, does she,” he
asked her. Charlotte said that no, she would like to say it was a bad day but
she really did not.

“Good as a signed recommendation,” he
said, handing her a business card. “I can always find something for a woman of
many talents. If it means sticking one to that bitch, so much the better.”

Twenty

Tom had started to relax when he went from
thinking about Lola to thinking about Ellie, but then it hit him again, as it
did almost every day, that she was gone now and he was better off without her.
He prayed sometimes to forget about her, or to be less angry. His anger with
Lola he considered necessary, healthy even, a driving, motivating force but he
did not want to hate Ellie, he just wanted to forget her and move on.

He had arrived at the hotel and drove
round to the large car park at the rear of the building. When he got out of the
car he straight away smelt the freshness of the air and heard the sound of the
brook that ran close by the hotel. He would check in and take his bags up, and
head back down to the bar for a reviving glass of wine before deciding where to
have dinner. Now he felt better.

As he approached the reception the manager
himself was there and greeted him and said how good it was to see him back and
how sorry not to have seen him and his beautiful wife for so long. Tom thought
that was a bit insensitive. He wasn’t with anyone and it was surely better not
to make assumptions. He tried not to show that the comment had aggravated him,
as the manager checked him in without delay and insisted on accompanying him to
his room, handing him the card as they arrived at the door, and pointing out
that he remembered to give him his favourite room, though as it happened the
one room he had hoped he would not be given. He opened the door, and as Tom
walked in, closed it behind him. There was a familiar aroma about the room. He
knew he should have asked for a different one.
 
He had been familiar with that scent and
his senses were working overtime trying to figure out where it was from, where
he had smelt it that day. He dropped his bag and went to turn around, he would
go to reception and say thank you but he had never liked that room and could he
have another one, any other room would do. He was thinking this as he heard
something move in the ensuite. Were they still preparing the room? He called
out to ask who was there.

He heard a familiar voice, telling him his
bath was running.
 
He stood and
waited, as he heard the slow clack of heels on the tiled bathroom floor. She
appeared. Her high heels stepped onto the carpet, and she stood with a hand on
her hip, the other hand on the doorframe. Her legs were long and tanned and
smooth, and ran up to a short white maids apron, offsetting her full body tan
perfectly. Above that limited attire her torso rose up proudly, her browned
skin shining in the low right of the room’s only lamp, a warm glow to her right
side, enhancing the roundness of her breast with the small shining bar through
the nipple. He had never seen that on her before. She wore nothing else but the
heels and the apron, and lipstick that made her wide smiling lips more
voluptuous than they had ever been. She had in her hand a feather duster, with
which she stroked her breasts delicately and then dropped it, approaching him
slowly.

He was rising to the bait, slipping his
hand onto her back and sliding it down her silky skin until he reached the knot
of the apron. She stopped him, told him she remembered this was what she wanted
to wear the last time they were supposed to have come here together. He moved
his hand lower down, stroking the curve of her buttock and the top of her leg,
running his fingers again back up her spine so she threw her head back at the
pleasure of the touch.

“I thought you had plans tonight,” he
said, weakening, all his resolve now powerless against the sexual allure, the
sheer magnetic confidence of her attraction.

‘You are my only plan now,” said Ellie.

Twenty-One

They had woken again in the night, and
reaching out for each other had spent themselves again, the excitement of the
reunion being too intense to bear except where sheer exhaustion was setting in.
Ellie had told Tom that she had never had so many orgasms in one day. He seemed
pleased with that, so she decided not to mention that half of them were before
she had even left Claudia’s little house the previous morning. It would only
cause an unnecessarily confusing dimension to the situation so she let him go back
to sleep in that knowledge.

When she awoke again late in the morning she
was at last replenished. Tom had gone out somewhere, and left a note telling
her to order what room service she needed, he would return soon. She had a
shower and thought about what would happen next. It was Saturday morning and
she was due to leave on Monday, and though things were very much further along
than she had anticipated she did not want to leave with things in mid air. Tom
had been with Lola for three years now, which was longer than he had been with
Ellie in the first place. He was bound to have feelings for her, was surely
feeling guilty about what had occurred. Ellie had not exactly been subtle in
her approach but she thought it was better to be straightforward than to always
be wondering whether she should have gone the extra mile. It was the best time
to act because she knew that Lola would not disturb them as long as she had to
be somewhere she could not easily leave. Tom must have wanted this, or why
would he come back to this hotel, why did he ask for their favourite room? She
had followed him when he left the house, and felt that she knew early on by the
journey he was taking where he was most likely headed too. Claudia’s car was
small and nippy, and when Tom stopped at the motorway services she charged on.
She was not sure how to tackle finding him at the hotel but the manager was so
pleased to see her that he was already leading her to the room when she had
barely said a word. The apron was a last minute flourish, secured with a
ten-pound note from a hotel assistant who seemed to understand only too well the
hidden currency of her olde-world work wear.