Who's Afraid of Mr Wolfe? (37 page)

That was it, a final killer blow delivered in front of everyone, her deepest secrets aired at the freak show.

The blonde woman leaned forward. ‘Face it, honey, you’re the type of girl that men cheat on.’

When Ellie felt a waiter’s hand on her arm, it was almost a relief. The torture was about to end. ‘I’m sorry, ma’am,’ he said, ‘you’re disturbing the other diners. I’m going to have to ask you to leave.’

She was aware of Jack sitting back down, of the blonde woman raising her hand to his cheek, and then she let the waiter lead her from the restaurant and out into the street. There was no parting, mind-changing wisecrack, no final romantic declaration that would melt Jack’s heart. The last look he had given her had been one of intense anger.

Down in the men’s room later, Jack splashed cold water on his face and then braced his arms against the back of the sink. It was pointless going back over every word he’d said. He knew he’d inflicted pain on her as effectively as if he’d punched her. Hell’s teeth, if he’d heard any other man talking to a woman like that, he would have gone over and decked him. No question.

What choice had he had? She had to stop thinking he was a good guy. When she got over the shock and sat and thought about it, she would definitely hate him. And that was good; hating him was good. She could move on from that, get over it and get on with her life.

Damn it, though, she’d come all the way out here to apologise. How much had that cost her? And she looked so sad, so ill. Jack turned on the cold tap again and rubbed his wet hand over his face. Why did she have to make it so hard? Why keep turning up and telling him how much she loved him? He took a big gulp of air and kept his head down until his throat stopped tightening.

Better to leave it like this. She’d get over him soon enough.

He ignored the pain that thought brought with it and stood back up straight and smoothed down his hair.

He’d got a free afternoon and piranha woman upstairs in the restaurant had already made it more than clear she was his for the asking. So he was going to ask and then he was going to bury himself in her and forget all about Eleanor Somerset.

Jack went back up into the restaurant, paid the bill and escorted the blonde woman to his apartment, where he had sex with her against a wall and tried not to compare her plastic hair and plastic conversation and plastic breasts to Ellie’s.

It didn’t work. He just felt like a cheap, dirty bastard and sadder than he had since Helen had died.

‘You and Jack Wolfe?’ Lesley said, her eyebrows doing a manic dance. ‘Jack Wolfe and you?’

She said it a few more times until Ellie put her hand on her arm and said, ‘Yes. Jack Wolfe and me.’

They were sitting on a bench in the park, eating lunch. Ellie had known it was the right time to tell Lesley about Jack, out in the open, without any flapping agency ears listening.

Lesley moved on to, ‘Jack was married and his wife died?’ which she repeated quite a lot while Ellie looked at the ducks and ate her prawn and avocado wrap.

Telling Lesley hadn’t been easy, but she couldn’t go on pretending everything was fine. She’d given Lesley the very edited highlights in the end, and hadn’t mentioned Helen’s fling. It didn’t seem relevant to the woman Helen had been or to her marriage. In some crazy way Ellie felt protective towards Helen and even more protective towards Jack.

Lesley finally ran out of astonishment and settled on, ‘Jeez, you should have told me earlier.’

‘I know,’ Ellie said, ‘but you had your own problems with Megan and her family back in Wales and well, it was too big to talk about.’ Ellie reached over and took hold of Lesley’s hand. ‘It wasn’t because I didn’t want to tell you. It was too painful. And I felt so stupid.’

Lesley shook her head. ‘Right under my nose and I couldn’t see it. No wonder you threw that sickie when he came back from New York.’

Ellie let go of Lesley’s hand and took another bite of her wrap, and they sat there looking at people walking their dogs and a group of small children kicking a football.

Lesley broke the silence with a self-mocking laugh. ‘I wish you’d told me before his leaving do. I made a right arse of myself telling him he was the best boss I’d ever had. And I put a tenner in his leaving collection. Bastard. If I’d have known, I’d have got even more drunk and kneed him in the groin.’

‘Thanks, Lesley, you’re a real friend.’ Ellie threw the last of her wrap on to the grass and watched the ducks start to run towards it. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter now. It’s over, finished. It was just sex for Jack and I built it up to be something more. He’s still in love with his wife as far as I can see.’ She brushed the crumbs from her skirt to cover up the fact that her eyes had started to
fill up. It was a little while before she felt composed enough to say, ‘Why can’t I be more sophisticated and slip in and out of relationships without getting so involved?’

Lesley gave her an incredulous look. ‘Why should you? It’s a hideous way to be, believe me. I mean, great for a while, but, Jeez, in the end it’s like stuffing yourself stupid at some kind of all-you-can-eat people buffet and then making yourself feel sick. And …’

‘And what?’

‘Well, it’s no wonder you got confused with Jack. He isn’t meant to have sex with anybody he works with. It’s a Jack rule – everyone knows that.’

‘He knew he was going by then, so I didn’t count.’

‘He said that?’

‘More or less.’

Lesley shook her head. ‘I really, really wish I hadn’t put that tenner in now. What a git.’

They watched the ducks fighting over the wrap and Ellie waited for the one question that she knew Lesley was dying to ask.

‘Um …’ Lesley said.

Ellie wasn’t going to help her out.

‘Um …’ repeated Lesley with the addition of a querying look.

‘Um, what?’

Lesley shuffled her feet about a bit. ‘Well, we’ve
established that Jack was a bastard out of bed, but … uh … in bed?’

Ellie had formed some witty reply and was about to deliver it when a picture of Jack and her entwined on her bedroom carpet came into her mind. She saw Lesley’s face disintegrate into a watery blur as her tears came properly this time. ‘He was lovely, Lesley, completely lovely,’ she sobbed. ‘Filthy and tender both at the same time.’

‘Oh, Ellie,’ Lesley said, and scooted along the bench to put an arm round her.

Eventually Ellie got herself under control.

‘I’m really sorry, Lesley. I miss him so much and I got it so wrong and I don’t feel I can trust myself to understand anything any more.’ She scrabbled in her pocket for a tissue. ‘When it ended with Sam, when I got over the shock of the Barcelona thing, I realised there were loads of signs that we’d been on the skids. Loads. But with Jack, it seemed to be getting better and better. Just before the end I felt we’d got really close, crossed over some kind of line. He said such wonderful things to me.’ She blew her nose fiercely. ‘I was so trusting, such an idiot.’

‘C’mon, you’ve got to stop putting all the blame on yourself.’ Lesley gave her another hug. ‘Someone like Jack’s used to getting women to believe that they’re the centre of his world for a night, or a couple of nights.’

‘Or a couple of weeks.’

‘Yeah. Look, you’re talking to the queen of getting it wrong here. Till I met Megan.’

Ellie gave Lesley a waterlogged smile. ‘But I thought Jack was my Megan. Do you remember when you met Megan for the first time and you said you realised it was a face you’d been waiting for your whole life? Well, that’s how I felt about Jack. Everything I knew about him told me to run away, but I couldn’t. I fell deeper and deeper into liking him and then loving him. He was who I’d been waiting for.’

Lesley gave her shoulder a squeeze. ‘Poor, poor Ellie. You don’t deserve another swine, not after Sam.’

Ellie wiped her face dry and put the tissue back in her pocket. ‘We better get back. I’ve still got the copy for the Whispedge pack to polish up.’

They started to walk across the park, Ellie aware that people were looking at her blotchy face.

‘You’ve got to promise me, Lesley, hand on heart, that you won’t tell anyone anything about this. I couldn’t stand having it all raked over by Hugo and Rachel and the rest of them.’

‘’Course I won’t. Except … can I tell Megan?’

‘Yeah, you can tell Megan. But no one else. Tell anyone else and I’ll let Megan know about that sandwich-delivery girl last year and what you did to get that extra filling.’

Lesley made a ‘cross my heart’ sign and for good measure
a ‘zipping up my mouth’ sign too and then they went over the road and headed back to the agency.

That evening Ellie couldn’t think of another single word to make with the Scrabble tiles in front of her. Edith was playing to her usual high and bawdy standards, but so far Ellie had only managed ‘wig’ and ‘top’.

Ellie was aware that Edith was studying her. Up until now Edith had been extremely understanding about the whole Jack thing, not once saying, ‘I told you so.’ For her part, Ellie had tried her hardest to do her mourning for Jack in private and had worked on her bright and breezy act, the one that she had been perfecting at work. Even when Edith had caught her yesterday standing in the garden with tears streaming down her face, Ellie had tried to pass it off as hay fever.

‘Ellie, Ellie, Ellie,’ Edith said suddenly, real sadness in her voice. She got up and poured them both another gin and splashed the tiniest bit of tonic on top. Then she set the glasses back down, gave Ellie a little consoling pat on the hand and disappeared out of the room. A few minutes later she was back with a battered old biscuit tin. The lettering on the side revealed that it had once held custard creams costing one shilling and six old pence. Edith set it down on the Scrabble board with a flourish.

‘Now, Ellie,’ she said, taking a big gulp of her drink, ‘tell me exactly what happened with Jack.’

‘Oh, Edith, no, you don’t want to hear it. You warned me and I didn’t listen.’

‘Tell me. I want to help you. Come on, drink up and talk.’

So for the second time that day Ellie spilled out everything about Jack and how much she loved him. She even told Edith something that she had not told Lesley: that for a brief period of time she had felt that Jack understood her better than anybody, even her family.

Edith listened and nodded and drank some more, and when Ellie had finished, she reached across and took the lid off the biscuit tin.

‘Ellie, I know you feel dreadful, but … well, things will get better … if you let them. Sometimes you have to realise that somebody is not coming back and there will be no happy ending. You don’t get the prince, you get the frog. And sometimes after a while the frog doesn’t seem so bad and you realise that the prince was not in fact that much of a prince.’

Ellie was slightly concerned that Edith might not have taken all of her medication today and was steeling herself to move the gin a little further away from her when Edith put her hand into the tin and pulled out a black-and-white photograph.

‘Meet Flight Lieutenant Henry Simpson,’ Edith said, and handed her the photograph.

Ellie looked down at a young man, broad and blond, wearing an RAF uniform.

‘He looks handsome,’ was all Ellie could think to say, confused about what this had to do with her and Jack.

‘Oh, he was, Ellie, he was. Very handsome. Not only that, he was completely filthy and very tender.’

Ellie looked up sharply. She hadn’t mentioned those words to Edith when she’d described Jack; she’d only used them to Lesley. Before she could think any more about that, Edith dropped another bombshell.

‘He was the love of my life,’ she said, and took the photograph back.

Ellie tried to get her mind around the idea that Edith had a lover that she hadn’t known about.

‘So, Henry was before Great-Uncle George?’ she asked.

‘Before, during and, if I’d had my way, forever after too,’ Edith said, not looking at all embarrassed. She put down her glass and ran a finger tenderly over the photograph. ‘Henry was stationed in India during the war, that’s when I saw him first. I was a girl then, well, a teenager I suppose, and he was a good eight years older than me. Managed to persuade him to pose for this though.’ Edith continued to hold the photograph, smiling down at it. ‘He went back to England after the war, of course, and I thought about him from time to time, never really expecting to see him again and then, just after I’d turned twenty-one he strolled into a party in a friend’s house. Unbelievable. Liked India so much, he’d come back. Still flying, this time cargo planes.’ Edith paused. ‘I’d already started going out with
George by then, but it was awfully hot and Henry was awfully funny and he had a stomach on him like a washboard. He was hung like a donkey too,’ she added cheerfully, and Ellie almost choked on her gin and tonic.

‘I’m sorry to say that I started to go out with him as well as George.’ Edith giggled, a lovely throaty sound. ‘Actually we didn’t go out much at all. He was a marvellous, marvellous lover.’ She placed her hand in the tin and ran her fingers over the envelopes and notes there. ‘Wrote such beautiful love letters too. But he was a wild one. I suspected I wasn’t his only lady friend.’

By the look on Edith’s face she was currently back in Henry’s arms in India.

‘So …’ Ellie said.

‘So, I tried to give him up, especially when George proposed. I mean, I knew the thing with Henry wouldn’t come to anything – he wasn’t the marrying type. He told me that. So I accepted George’s proposal and determined never to see Henry again.’ Edith paused and rummaged around in the tin for another photograph. She handed it to Ellie. In this one Henry was older and stripped to the waist by the side of an aircraft. Edith was right about the washboard.

‘Then, one evening, not long after I got married, Henry came round to bring some papers to George. He wasn’t in and, well, it all started up again.’

Edith caught Ellie’s eye. ‘I never imagined I’d be an
adulterous wife … well, not so soon after getting married. And of course it was so stupid. I knew I could get found out. I knew I was hurting George. But I couldn’t stop myself. And by then Henry was telling me he loved me, wanted to look after me. He’d tried to stay away but he couldn’t.’