Not Another Happy Ending (21 page)

‘Relax. I sent him out—to cool off.’

He glanced down, noticing her handbag open on the floor. ‘What's the capital of Ethiopia?’ Was not what he intended to say, but he'd been distracted by the book poking from the top of her bag. He took it out.

‘1001 Tricky Trivia Questions
? What's this for? Your dad hasn't …?’ He liked Benny Lockhart. He hadn't wanted to, knowing how he'd walked out on Jane, but Benny had turned out not to be the monster he'd built up in his head. He was a hard man who'd softened around the edges, and he carried a burden in the sacks beneath his eyes; a taciturn man, animated only when talking about Jane, or his beloved pub quiz. Next to his daughter it was the most important thing in the world to Benny. What
was
the capital of Ethiopia? That was going to niggle him. Tom looked into Jane's face. ‘
You're
on the team?’

‘We're in the finals, actually.’

Tom swayed in his seat still woozy from his battering. Jane reached out to steady him. He felt her hand touch him. It was a good feeling to be here with her like this.

‘Jane. There's something I need to tell you. Something I've never said before …’

He was finding it difficult to focus and currently there appeared to be two Janes, both of them annoyed. He knew he had a plan—something devious and clever he was sure—but at that moment he couldn't remember exactly what it involved. He didn't know what he was going to say next, which felt oddly freeing. And a little dangerous.

‘Ah, no. No I … what I meant to say was … is …
Happy Ending
… at the end, when things became … y'know … with us and the title and … I never told you … the book. It's good.’ This was going really well. He was fascinated to hear what he had to say next. ‘No, it's … better than that. It's like
la musique triste
. The saddest music I've ever heard.’

He could sense something in the air between them like a charge before a lightning storm. In that split second he felt connected. To everything. The world spun on a shifting axis, the poles flipped. The moment surged with possibility.

‘What the hell was that?’ Jane stood up abruptly. Her expression curdled, as if she'd swallowed something nasty. She took a wary step back into the aisle. ‘What are you up to, Duval?’

‘I'm not up to anything,’ he protested, just as it all flooded back to him. Kill Will. Ah,
oui
. So, yes, technically she was quite correct. He was up to something, had invited her here expressly in order to be up to something.
But not just then. What he'd said about her novel, he meant it.

‘All this “It's like sad music” crap, and trying to put doubts in my head about Willie.’

He could see she was reaching for something to unlock his odd behaviour.

‘Why would you do that …? Unless …’ A fog lifted. ‘Oh, wait a minute, I know why. I'm onto your little scheme.’

Oh, shit
. ‘You are?’

Her mouth coiled into a smirk as she delivered her brilliant deduction. ‘You want me back.’

He unclenched. She was off target.
Way off
target. But he could tell that she believed she'd scored a direct hit and ploughed on.

‘Well, if you can hear me through the obvious concussion, pay attention.’ She paused, winding up for a big finish. ‘It's. Never. Going. To. Happen.’

He laughed. Couldn't keep the derision out of his voice. The very idea!

Hang on.

‘I have a concussion?’

She flung out a finger pointing to the stairs. ‘Off. Get off this bus.’

He swayed to his feet and took an exploratory step into the aisle, testing his balance. The deck seemed to rock like a sailing ship in distress. He locked onto Jane's angry face, in part for a fixed point to steer by.

‘You really think I'd want you back …?’ he said. ‘Why? Why would I do that to myself? You're distant at the best of times and when you're writing you're utterly self-absorbed. Sometimes I thought your characters were more real to you than I was.’

Curiously, at that moment he saw Jane jump, then turn and direct a low whisper at an empty seat. The girl clearly needed help. Well, she could find it from someone else.

‘So, no, Jane,’ he said, walking away. ‘I do not want you back.’

‘It's Raining Again’, Supertramp, 1982, A&M

J
ANE COULDN
'
T CONCENTRATE
and it was all Tom's fault. Back at her desk early the following morning she kept replaying yesterday's events in her mind. All of those hurtful things he had said about Willie. She ought to be annoyed. She had a right to be angry.

How dare he meddle in her life; she wasn't his girlfriend any more. Soon she wouldn't even be his author. She wasn't his anything. But truthfully it wasn't anger she was feeling it was—what was the word? Melancholy. And not because of Willie. So why did she feel like this? Why was Belle & Sebastian playing inside her head? It couldn't be because Tom said he didn't want her back. No, that was ridiculous. She pushed it from her mind.

Grudgingly, she'd taken a piece of his advice on breaking her block and had turned to the classics. Who better to inspire her than the finest author named Jane ever to put pen to paper? Jane Austen. She remembered reading somewhere that Austen spent seventeen years drafting
and redrafting
Pride and Prejudice
; but then she probably didn't have an angry French publisher breathing down her neck.

The wall clock showed seven o'clock. Willie didn't usually rise before half past. She took a deep breath and relaxed, enjoying the stillness.

‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that a young author in the midst of her sophomore novel must be in want of an ending.’

Darsie swept into the living room wearing a white Empire line shift dress, long silk evening gloves, her hair in a soft chignon exposing a flash of nape.

‘I see number nineteen has been let,’ she said, lowering herself demurely into a seat and folding her hands in her lap.

Jane frowned. ‘Number nineteen?’

Darsie inclined her head. ‘Opposite the chippy.’ She played with her gloves and added in a Heritage Drama accent, ‘We ought to pay a call.’

‘I'm sure there's a good reason why you're dressed like Elizabeth Bennet–’

‘Oh,’ interrupted Darsie, disappointed. ‘I was going for Kate Winslet as Marianne Dashwood.’

‘Of course you were.’ Jane leaned back in her chair. ‘OK, so what's the big idea?’

Darsie cleared her throat. ‘Jane Austen is the greatest writer in English, of all time, right?’

‘No argument from me.’

‘So, if you could write a book half as brilliant as one of hers, you'd be pleased.’

‘Half would be arrogant. I'd take an eighth. A sixteenth.’

A smile flickered across Darsie's lips and quickly vanished; Jane recognised it as the expression of someone who had just pulled off a clever conversational manoeuvre.

‘Well, all of the heroines in her novels have one thing in common.’

Jane guessed what was coming next half a second before Darsie said it.

‘They all have happy endings,’ Darsie declared triumphantly. ‘So, if it's good enough for Jane Austen then it should be good enough for Jane Lockhart.’

Jane suppressed a chuckle. On some level she was aware that this conversation existed entirely inside her deranged mind, but Darsie seemed so real. Large as life and twice as persuasive. Perhaps she was right; maybe her story would end up happily ever after. In all honesty, Jane didn't yet know.

She looked down at the open book she'd pulled from the shelf. It was
Persuasion
, her favourite of Austen's six novels. Anne Elliot breaks off her engagement to Captain Wentworth, then years later they meet again and, finally, are married. On the face of it a happy ending, except that it wasn't that simple. But for a terrible mistake the lovers could have been together years earlier, and the
shadow of that lost lifetime hangs over the ending. As does another loss. It was Austen's last complete novel before she died, aged forty-one, and for Jane Lockhart,
Persuasion
would always be suffused with unutterably sad endings.

She read a few more chapters and set the book aside. With dismay she realised that if Jane Austen couldn't help her she was screwed.

Willie bounced into the room, black coffee in hand, eyes shining with anticipation as he lowered himself into his chair and strapped himself in for blast-off, his relish for work undimmed by fisticuffs in bus depots. Abruptly, a fresh sheet of paper was led out like the accused, fastened to the platen, blindfolded with a ribbon and summarily dispatched in a fusillade of struck keys.

Jane's eye drifted back to the blinking cursor on her empty page. It was too early to make an excuse and leave the flat and she didn't feel like baking. The conversation with Tom came back to her like a bony finger poking her in the ribs.
The adaptation. He doesn't discuss it with you
. She was annoyed at herself for allowing him inside her head.

‘So, how's the screenplay coming along?’ she enquired gently.

Willie continued to type. ‘Hmm?’

‘Your screenplay? I was just thinking we haven't really discussed it much … at all … and since, well, I wrote the novel, maybe I could, y'know …’ She plucked one of her
editing pencils from its holder and underlined her suggestion in the air. ‘What I mean is, we should have more ebb and flow.’

Willie paused for what seemed an age, pursing his lips in contemplation.

‘That's not a bad idea,’ he said at last, nodding.

Jane felt a weight lift, a sudden sense of vindication sweeping over her. Ha! Tom Duval. Ha! In your fuzzy face! Shows what you know. My screenwriter boyfriend and I are going to sit here and have a far-reaching discussion about his adaptation of my novel. We are together. We are
as one
.

‘You know that scene in the book where her father goes on a bender and doesn't show up for the mother's funeral?’ Willie shuffled the pages of his screenplay, finding the relevant section.

Of course she did. Jane lost herself in the awful memory of that day. ‘Yes. I remember,’ she said quietly.

Willie propped his spectacles on his forehead. ‘Would you miss it?’

Her mouth flapped. It was a key scene, a devastating moment in her life and her fiction. If he was messing with that, what the hell else was he doing to her book?

‘What? You can't—Willie, I think we need to talk this through.’

‘I know what this is about,’ he said in a voice of irritating calm.

‘I really don't think that–’

‘You haven't written a word in two weeks so you want to talk instead of dealing with your blockage.’

‘How many times, I am not blocked.’

He stroked his chin. ‘This writer I knew on
Rain Town
got stuck on a Long-Lost Sibling story arc. Thought it would end his career, but he beat it.’

She knew she should have pressed him on what other drastic changes he was making to her novel, but he was offering a potential cure. She cursed herself for asking. ‘How?’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘Wrote naked.’

‘Yeah, right.’

‘Seriously.’ He leaned in, resting his arms on the desk and fixing her with a meditative gaze. ‘Being naked you release yourself from the restrictions of the everyday so that you can express your ideas in an uninhibited fashion.’

She wasn't buying it. ‘Uh-huh. You just want to be able to sit there and write while you stare at my tits.’

He grinned. ‘They
are
great tits.’

The excitement began after lunch. Willie had insisted on taking her out to the Ubiquitous Chip for a quick bite of baked parmesan custard with anchovy toast; his way of apologising for the ‘crude remark about her tits’. The quick bite had turned into a lazy lunch. Jane's sclerotic progress with the last chapter ensured she was in no hurry to return to the flat, and Willie was on good form, displaying
his usual mix of crude humour and flashes of boyish vulnerability. She laughed a lot around him when he was like this; it reminded her why they were together in the first place. It was sometime after 3 o'clock, over cheese and tequila, that the call came in from his agent.

Willie examined the phone. He was an analogue guy and the touchscreen was his bane. In his eagerness to answer he stabbed at it, inadvertently putting the call on speaker.

‘I have Priscilla Hess for you,’ chirped an assistant at Clarion Creative Management.

There was the click of a connection being made during which Jane watched Willie straighten in his chair. His expression swung between hope and dread. He was like this every time she called. Priscilla brought tidings from the wide world of showbiz. It could be a request for a meeting from some hot director or a new screenplay commission. However, in the time she'd known him he hadn't received one of those calls. It was always the other side of the coin: a producer passing on one of his pitches, the heart-sickening thud of rejection.

‘Willie,’ said a clipped female voice from the phone. It sounded as if she was in traffic.

‘Priscilla,’ said Willie with forced bonhomie. Jane knew he just wanted her to deliver the news fast, and if it was bad that it not spoil his lunch. She felt stirrings of sympathy. ‘How ya doing?’

‘I'm in LA. Thought you were in town.’

Willie cleared his throat with an awkward cough. ‘Not for a while, Priscilla. I'm on the
Happy Ending
script, remember?’

There was a pause that might have been a transatlantic time delay, but which Jane had a feeling was Priscilla deciding whether or not to bother lying that she did recollect what her low-level client was working on.

‘You'll be getting a call today about a new project.’

‘Oh yeah?’ He adjusted his grip on the phone.

‘From Fox.’

He fumbled the handset, which fell into the dregs of an espresso granita. ‘Shit.’

‘Willie?’

He bellowed into the speaker as he retrieved the phone. ‘I'm here. Right here. Did you say Fox?’ He shook off the coffee drips. ‘
Twentieth Century
Fox?’

There was a sigh from the other end of the line. ‘One piece of advice,’ offered Priscilla.