Happily Ever After (33 page)

Elle stroked her hair, remembering how much she missed Libby, how much she had once loved her.

“It’ll be OK,” she said. “You poor thing. I know it feels like it won’t, but it will, one day. He’s not the man for you.”

“He is,” Libby said weakly. “Honestly he is.”

“OK, OK,” Elle said softly. “Maybe he is. But I bet there’s someone else just as wonderful out there for you. Don’t let this flatten you, Libs.”

“Who, then?” Libby said.

“Don’t know, but he’s out there. You don’t go into publishing to meet eligible men, that’s the trouble.” She wondered about Tom for a second, whether he and Libby might work together? Could she see them as a couple? She shook her head, wishing she was the kind of person who could insouciantly bring people together over wine-splattered dinner parties from the
River Café Cookbook
with the Buena Vista Social Club in the background, and then dismissed the idea.

“Urgh.” Libby’s shoulders slumped. “I hate the fact that it
obsesses me so much,” she said, sounding normal again. “You know, I did my bloody MA on Elizabethan women who demanded to choose their husbands. It really annoys me, that it’s basically the same thing today. Who’re we going to end up with?”

“It’s not the same thing today,” said Elle, shocked. “Not at all.”

“It kind of is. It’s a race, and everyone else is on the tracks, and I’m at the wrong venue, with the wrong shoes on.”

She looked so sad, Elle said again, “That’s rubbish. He’s out there, I promise.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t,” said Elle firmly. “I just like to kid myself that he is. And if he’s not, well, there’s more to life than just hanging around ruining your life waiting for him.” Perhaps she was starting to believe this. “Much more.”

“WHAT ARE ALL
these posters up for?” Elle’s dad asked. “They’re not…
yours
, are they?”

He looked suspiciously at his daughter, as if she’d been hiding a thirty-year career in theater management from him.

“No, Dad,” Elle said patiently. “They’re Billy’s. My landlord.”

“They look awful,” said John.

“Oh.” Elle had stopped noticing them, for the most part. “Well, we could take some down for you to put up the shelves. As long as I store them properly Billy said he didn’t mind what I did with them.”

“Don’t you have any nice book posters you want to put up?” her dad asked, rolling his sleeves. Elle watched him, transfixed, as he meticulously turned the two-inch cuff over and over again, folding it neatly above his elbow.

“Er, no,” she said. She looked around at the debris of the tiny room in the sultry heat of the late Sunday morning as the two of them stood awkwardly together in the cramped room. She had so rarely had another person there. Two people made it much harder to move around. Three days’ worth of
Evening Standard,
two empty glasses and an empty packet of crisps, piles of books, a manuscript on the floor,
Heat
and
Hello!
and—oh, God, a brown apple core, how had she not seen that?

But this was what divorced fathers did for their single daughters, they came up to London and put up shelves in their flats and had awkward lunches afterwards. Still, she saw it all through her father’s eyes and was ashamed. He lived in Colefax and Fowler land, with an Aga in the basement kitchen of his elegant Georgian town house in Brighton and a black Labrador. When Alice and Jack, her half-sister and brother, were seven and five, only a couple of years ago, Elle had spent
Christmas with her father, and on Christmas Day they’d gone to church. Alice and Jack had worn gray wool coats with gray velvet collars, like Princes William and Harry. Elle didn’t know why, but somehow those coats summed up her dad’s new life for her.

“Maybe I’ll buy something new, after the shelves have gone up,” she said, trying to sound as though this was all part of a meticulous interior decoration scheme. “Although, if I get the New York placement it’ll have to go on hold.”

“Yes, New York,” said her father. “So, what’s that all about?”

“I don’t know,” said Elle. “The girl who was supposed to be going, my friend Libby?” she said, but he wouldn’t remember her. “Well, she’s had to—er, drop out.” She hesitated; she still wasn’t sure if Libby was OK with her applying for it. “I wasn’t going to do anything about it but they sent round an email saying they have to find someone else now, the person who’s coming to us from the States has already rented out her flat and booked her flight, and I’m the right level. I talked to my boss yesterday about it, and yeah, had a quick interview in the afternoon. It’s all quite fast.”

“And what do you do there?”

“Basically just go to the sister company for four months, observe how they do everything, widen your horizons a bit, I don’t know.” Elle shrugged, trying to sound nonchalant. “Have a change. Get to know a new city.”

John looked doubtfully at the shelves, which he’d brought up from Robert Dyas. “Well, let’s get started with this then. Hold this for me. Do you think you’ll get it?”

“No idea. I gave it my best shot, so we’ll see.”

Elle tried to sound breezy, but in fact, the job swap was suddenly all she could think about. As she’d sat in Celine’s office that Friday, her hands crossed demurely in her lap, trying to think of what Celine would want to hear, she’d realized she
wanted to get out of here. She wanted to try, at the very least. This weekend had been almost unbearable, locked up here in the heat by herself, with nothing to do. She’d texted Tom on Friday, and he’d been out with Caitlin. She’d seen him only the day before, she knew she was pushing her luck, but he was the only one who’d understand—or was it just that he was the only one she felt like texting? It was pathetic, anyway, the hole she’d burrowed herself into. She’d finished
Devil’s Cub
and she didn’t know why, but all of a sudden she couldn’t face any more Georgette Heyer. It was as though she’d eaten too much chocolate.

As she watched her father marking the wall with a spirit level, Elle grimaced.

“How’s Rhodes?” she asked suddenly. “Have you spoken to him?”

“Yesterday, actually,” her father said. “I was going to talk to you about that. At lunch. They got married yesterday.”

Elle’s mouth fell open. “They got
married
?” she repeated. “Where?”

“They’re in New York for a few weeks. They went to City Hall. Just a couple of witnesses, her sister, her father, a quick lunch afterwards. They wanted to do it quietly. They asked me to tell you.”

Elle shut her mouth, then opened it. “They’re married,” she said, after a while. “Just like that.”

“Yes. They felt it was for the best, a quick, quiet ceremony, but they wanted me to tell you. And—ah, if you could tell your mother.”

Elle stared at him. “Why can’t they?”

Her father turned back to the wall. “I thought you’d be the best person,” he said, his voice cool.

“Can’t they ring her themselves?”

Her father’s jaw was set. He hated any disruption to his
proposals. “Like I say, they’re in New York, and—Melissa’s still very upset. I’m just going to drill a second.” He pressed the drill bit firmly into the plaster, and Elle watched his back, shaking her head in disbelief.
You’re drilling, and Rhodes and Melissa are married, and no one’s told Mum.
There was a
thud
as a chunk of wall fell out. “Oh sh—sugar,” he said. “Look at that.”

They both stared at the crumbling square of plaster on the green carpet. “Never mind,” said Elle.

“I do mind,” said John. He stood with the drill in his hand, gently tapping it against his palm. He looked at the wall, then out of the window, then down at the floor. “I should just use a smaller drill bit, that’s all. So, can you—”

“Dad,” Elle said. “You’re making me really paranoid. Was it something I did? Was it Mum?”

Her father turned to her. “I don’t think it’s for me to say. But all I will say is, they felt after the effort they’d gone to, to move the wedding from the States to accommodate her, and the care they were taking to include her, that Mandana had put them in an untenable position.” He turned back and drilled a small, neat hole in the wall. “I have to say I agree with them,” he said, and the tone of his voice chilled her through. “I wonder, to be honest, whether she’ll have anyone left, soon.”

“But what did she do?”

“Let me finish this wall first, please, Eleanor.”

She took him to a gastropub and they made polite conversation along the way. “So Alice is learning the flute, is she? That’s great.” After he’d squinted at the menu, chalked up on a board, Elle turned to him. “It’s so nice to see you, Dad,” she said impulsively. “It’s—” She didn’t want to sound as though she was moaning. “Sorry it’s been so long.”

“No, it’s my fault,” he said. “I tend to think you’re all right, you see. You always have been.”

Elle didn’t know how to respond to this. She and Rhodes had never complained about not seeing John; like most children of divorced parents, they had just accepted, after a period of time, that that was the way it was. Of course he thought she was all right—how would he know any different?

She looked at him now—serious face, neat, graying cowlick, newly ironed shirt—he wore a proper shirt, even in August, on a Sunday, to do DIY at his daughter’s, that’s how correct he was. Elle wondered again, for the millionth time, how on earth he and Mum had ever had anything in common.

“What was she like?” she asked suddenly. She wanted to pick up the thread of the conversation again. “When you first met her, Mum, I mean.” Her father’s jaw tightened; he looked up at the menu board, concentrating hard. “I’m sorry,” Elle whispered. “Probably I should just shut up, it’s ages ago, it’s just—”

It’s just I’m half you and half her. And that’s scary. Will I end up like her? Or you?

“She was very different then, your mother,” John said suddenly. “No,” he amended. “That’s wrong. She was the same in lots of ways. Just more carefree. She had a headscarf, and she used to have all this thick hair. After she had you two it was never the same. Very thin.”

Elle stared at him. John poured her some more wine. “I won’t have any more, I’m driving,” he said. “Well, she was enormous fun. I was a very staid, boring chap. Chorleywood, Boy Scouts, studying medicine, not a spare farthing to rub together. And she—she just burst into my life, like a—well, she was like color. Yes, an explosion of color. She wore these long dresses, printed all over with flowers, these billowing silly shirts, like she was a Shakespearean actor, and these headscarfs, yes. She had her own megaphone. Can you imagine!” His eyes crinkled and he smiled. “Your mother with a megaphone.
What a terrible combination. And she was alive, passionate, she believed in things. She made me believe in things. She got so angry at the world—”

“Like how?” Elle asked.

His eyes flew open, as if he’d forgotten she was there. “Oh—ban the bomb, the Tories, Mrs. Thatcher the milk snatcher, the anti-Nazi League. If there was a cause, she’d join it. We were so in love. It sounds like a cliché, but it’s true. We were wild about each other. Crazy. Moved in together. It wasn’t done in those days but we couldn’t be apart.” He said it simply, and nodded. “My mother said we should wait. But I wouldn’t wait. And then she… she was pregnant. It was all very quick. Very jolly, very good news, that was your brother,” he said. “And then you—” John reached out and touched Elle’s chin. “My little girl, you were then, and then, well…”

He put his hand on his chin and looked up. The clink of glasses, the banging of the door outside, the faint fumes from the High Road recalled Elle to where she was. She sat still and held her breath, hoping not to break the spell, that he would carry on talking.

“And then I really got to know her,” he said. “The drinking. The lying. The selfishness. The childishness. She blamed me for her pregnancy, when she said she was on the Pill, so how was it my fault? She blamed me when the boiler broke and when she didn’t get the jobs she wanted, when she got pregnant again, when people weren’t nice to her, and it was always…
always
someone else’s fault.” He sat up straight, clenching both fists on the table. “When it wasn’t. It was hers. Her, or the drink. The damn drink.”

“Mustard?” the waitress demanded brightly, springing up between them. John jumped. “No,” he said. “Er, no,” he repeated, blinking, as if remembering where he was, with whom, what he’d said.

“No, none for me, thanks,” Elle told her hurriedly, and she turned back to her father. “Dad—”

“Ignore me,” John said. His face was gray. “It was a long time ago. Everything happened too fast. And we’d never change it, because we have you two, so what’s the point of complaining about it?”

Every point, Elle wanted to say. She chewed the side of her finger. If they’d waited a few years, they’d have had different children. Perhaps a nicer, calmer boy, and a brighter, better girl than the ones they’d got. They wouldn’t have had to split up. Mum wouldn’t be so sad. Dad wouldn’t be so careful, so buttoned up. Everything would have been different if we hadn’t been born.
Everything
.