by Celia Walden
CHAPTER 11
JILL
‘I don’t know how much clearer I can be on this.’
Jamie was speaking slowly, elongating the vowels and punctuating each clause with a nod, and Jill was tempted to point out that she was neither his child nor his PA. ‘I honestly don’t know how this happened. I had the site plan right there on my tablet and I’d been through the Minerva presentation file the day before. It must have been misnamed. Or maybe even some kind of bug?’
‘It must have been’ was a favourite phrase of Jamie’s, his default reaction to any oversight or bungle. But this time Jill suspected his wide-eyed wonderment might be genuine. Was this Nicole’s doing? Alex’s? Or both of them putting into action a plan she’d dismissed as drunken bravado?
‘Listen, we’ve been over and over this. We’re all clear I’m to blame, right? Do you see me disputing that?’
Cocking her head to one side, Jill scrutinised her colleague. His body language was still languorous, entitled: long legs outstretched, hands interlinked behind his neck. And Jill wished they were having this conversation in her office, where the power dynamic would be weighted in her favour. She also wished Jamie were being more sheepish and less combative.
‘It’s not about blame, Jamie.’ Glancing at her watch, she sighed. ‘It’s about making sure that when the O’Ceallaigh brothers are shown up in less than two hours’ time we really are ready.’
‘I am,’ he insisted. ‘I’m going to go in there, level with them about every single weakness on Minerva, explain that the reason I didn’t mention the sale of the JLL site nearby was because I wasn’t convinced it would actually go through …’
‘Lie, you mean.’
‘… and then sell it to them all over again. Tell them having a Westfield just over the bridge would bring more business, not less, yada, yada.’ He leaned forward. ‘You think I don’t know how important this is? I’m a big boy, Jill.’
‘So you’re sure you don’t want me to sit in?’
‘Yes.’
‘Just that it’s taken a lot of convincing to get them back in.’
‘I’m aware of that – largely because I’m the one who has spent the past week making it happen.’
‘A week in which we could have been showing Minerva to other people, Jamie. But you insisted we hold off.’ She shrugged. ‘For all we know, the O’Ceallaighs have given up on us and already started sniffing around JLL, our more “transparent” counterparts.’
‘Jill! I can fix this. Weren’t you the one always telling me, way back when, not to go running to people when you’ve made a mistake: “Just fix it”?’
‘I was.’ She was pleased he’d remembered. ‘And the vintage Glenlochy was a masterful touch.’
‘Thank you. It’s almost as though I know what I’m doing.’
‘Christ, you’re so defensive.
Jamie took a deep breath, swallowing whatever it was he’d been about to say. ‘I just need you to stop micro-managing. I’ve got this sorted.’
‘OK.’ She smoothed her skirt. ‘That a new picture of little Elsa?’
Jamie swivelled his chair around to take the framed family photograph off the shelf behind his desk.
‘Isn’t she gorgeous?’ Running a thumb across three bright white smiles and the blinking bundle at the centre of them all, he passed the photograph to Jill.
‘Lovely.’ She’d got good at those tenderised tones over the years, even if she never felt that squeeze in her gut, the way she imagined a mother would. ‘Maya thinking of going back to work at some point? She mentioned something about it a while back.’
‘Oh, I don’t think so. It’s not realistic right now. We’ve got help, but I’m not having my kids brought up by some stranger.’
Jamie put the photo back on the shelf, beside an old one of his wife looking trophy-tastic on a beach somewhere equally trophy-tastic. And although Jill had seen the picture a million times and taken in the cut-offs, sheer shirt and row of bangles glinting white in the sun, although she was well aware that in terms of male desirability, this woman was basically a blueprint, the word that popped, unwelcome, into her head as she headed back towards her office was ‘fuckable’.
‘You look fuckable today.’ Wasn’t that what Nicole claimed Jamie had said? Banishing the memory with a shake of the head, she picked up the phone to make the first client callback on the list the new PA had left on her desk, dismayed if not surprised to see that Kellie with an ‘ie’ had the writing of a primary schoolgirl.
‘Edward, it’s Jill. I just wanted to see whether you had any thoughts about the Portland Road property?’
Edward Dinnigan liked a chat and after sticking him on speaker, Jill checked her mobile for messages from Stan before moving on to her emails. By the time she had answered all but the last three, Edward was still showing no signs of wrapping up a description of his week’s yachting trip in Èze.
‘Dammit,’ she cursed as she clicked too fast on a message that looked like spam.
‘What’s that?’
‘Nothing – you were saying you were glad you had the stabilisers.’
[email protected]; subject heading: WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE. This wasn’t good. She’d get Tara in IT to see if she’d gone and given herself a virus. But the message wasn’t asking her to click on a link – or do anything. No, it seemed to be the forwarded thread of a back and forth that had taken place in January between Jamie and Paul. The subject heading was CLARENDON CENTRE, a 150,000-square-foot retail property they’d reluctantly sold for far less than the asking price the following month, and the thrust of the exchange was the difficulty BWL were having in selling it. Only when she reached the third email, from Jamie, did Jill understand why the conversation had been forwarded.
Thinking we take care of this one ourselves? YKW pretty out of it these days. Senile sixties on top of it all? Could be … either way not sure she’s the kind of image we really want to be projecting right now. And anyway shouldn’t she be taking some time off to be home with Stan?
‘Edward?’
‘Sorry. I’m rabbiting. Now about Portland Road—’
‘Sorry,’ Jill could feel a wave of heat rising cartoon-like up her face. Only there was nothing comical about either that or the feeling that the room’s proportions had changed. ‘I’ve got someone on the other line who’s being most persistent.’ Her voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. ‘Can I give you a call back?’
Had it not been for the age reference, Jill thought, as she reread the email thread, slowly this time, noting and appreciating Paul’s refusal to engage with the worst parts of Jamie’s email – She’s had a tough time of it, but I get the feeling work has been a help, not a hindrance – she might have been able to convince herself that the email wasn’t about her. As it was, Jill could be in no doubt that she was ‘You Know Who’, and that if Jamie really had written these words, he wasn’t just the predator and opportunist revealed to her that night in the pub, but something far worse.
CHAPTER 12
NICOLE
‘Why didn’t you wake me?’
It was gone nine by the time Nicole padded downstairs to the kitchen. And although Ben always let her sleep in on a Saturday, it was rare that she managed to beyond eight.
‘You looked like you needed it.’ Her husband smiled and leaned in for a kiss.
‘You smell of coffee,’ she murmured blearily, because he did, she wanted some, and when he went to make it for her, which she knew he would, Ben would be forced to relax the grip he had on her shoulders. Nicole had always found her husband’s need for early morning contact slightly stifling.
‘Is it the nice stuff? From the Charleville Road place?’
‘Yup. I told Mama Anna you thought the other one was too weak.’
‘Not weak, too nutty … or something. Where’s Chlo?’
‘In there.’ Ben gestured with his chin towards the adjoining room, where the helium shrieks of SpongeBob could be heard. ‘Chlo,
come and say good morning to Mummy!’
‘I’ll go.’ Tucking a rogue strand of hair behind her ear, she rubbed her eyes. ‘Just give me a second. Who’s Mama Anna again?’
Ben laughed. That she couldn’t identify which of the genial Italian deli ladies was ‘Mama Anna’ might seem odd to her husband, who was on first name terms with most of the baristas in the area, but in Nicole’s mind it was Ben’s interest in these peripheral people’s existences that was weird.
‘The owner! The one whose husband, Rocco, died last year? Who always gives Chloe those Baci chocolates?’
‘The old bird who fancies you?’
‘They all fancy me,’ he threw back with a wink.
They probably did. Six-foot-five, long-limbed and long-faced, with lashes Nicole would kill for and a smile that went all the way up to the slightly mournful diagonals of his eyebrows, Ben had always been a hit with the grannies and mums. Hell, even the babysitters seemed to linger a good twenty minutes too long at the end of the night, intent on asking her husband for advice on how to frame their Instagram posts.
Safe and kind and brought up in a house full of women, Ben wasn’t so much a grand seducer, however, as the guy you sought solace with when you were dumped – and ended up falling for. ‘Mr right in front of you’: that was her husband, and exactly how the two of them had got together, When Harry Met Sally-style, in their third year at Bristol.
‘Anyway this one’s fortissimo, according to Mama Anna, come tua moglie.’
Nicole raised an eyebrow.
‘Like your wife.’
‘Ah.’ She took a sip. It was strong and bitter and Nicole tried not to extend Mama Anna’s simile in her head. ‘Hello, sweetie.’
Pushing through the double doors that separated the kitchen from the playroom, repainted pink by Ben just the week before, Nicole set her coffee down on the floor and pulled Chloe onto her lap. The back of her four-year-old’s neck smelt of Burt’s Bees, and in that moment nothing else mattered.
‘What are you watching?’
‘SpongeBob. He’s fighting with an eel.’
‘Is he?’
‘Can you eat eels?’
‘You can. They’re not very nice. Bit slimy. These new PJs?’
Eyes glued to the screen, Chloe nodded, and Nicole didn’t much care that her daughter wasn’t in the mood to talk. She secretly liked it when Chloe was engrossed in something other than her. It was when she ran up to greet her mother as soon as she walked through the door on a weekday evening that Nicole found hard. Not being able to kick off her shoes, sit down for a minute and breathe as that hot little body wrapped itself around her.
Then there were the questions; so many questions. Not just from Chloe but Ben too: how was her day? Any sales? Where did she go and who did she see? Like she was a pigtailed schoolgirl who couldn’t wait to tell them both everything she’d learned about the Great Wall of China, but also, somehow, the great decider. Should we have the beef or the salmon? Did she have a chance to look at the school forms he emailed over? And by the way, how about an office shed at the bottom of the garden? She was in control at work, a kind of domestic CEO at home, and sometimes she fantasised about relinquishing all that control, having someone tell her what she wanted and needed, giving herself over to that.
Welded together, the weight of Chloe and Ben’s expectations was often enough to send Nicole straight off upstairs for a shower. The advice her mother had given her on her wedding day – ‘Just remember always to give Ben a drink, something to eat and half an hour’s quiet when he gets home from work’ – only seemed to apply to men. The implication was that working women were already getting their ‘me time’ at the office, that being allowed to work was their indulgence.
Pulling her daughter onto her lap, she whispered, ‘What do you want to do today?’
‘Playground! Daddy said! Daddy said!’
‘I did.’ Ben appeared at the door, faintly apologetic with a steaming cafetière in his hand. ‘But Mummy’s going to need caffeine if she’s going to brave the playground.’
Over Chloe’s glossy dark curls they locked eyes and Nicole felt a surge of guilt and love – the two so closely intertwined where Ben and Chloe were concerned as to be almost indistinguishable. She’d barely seen either all week and there was no reason they should be tiptoeing around her. ‘But it’s gorgeous out, I’ve got zero work to do and the playground would be fun, wouldn’t it, ladybird? Shall we go upstairs and get dressed? If we get there early maybe there won’t be too many of those big bully boys on the wobbly bridges?’
‘Actually the council took the bridges away last month,’ said Ben. ‘Some health and safety thing.’
‘They did?’
It wasn’t a slight – one of those pointed little reminders of moments she’d missed in her daughter’s life, from clothes she’d never seen before to fads Nicole sometimes only caught on to once they were over. But she always felt the sting, regardless.
‘You don’t think this room is too pink?’ she murmured as Chloe bounded up the stairs.
‘No,’ said Ben. ‘You do?’
‘I’m just … wary of the whole pink thing.’
‘So you’ve said.’
‘Seriously, though, there was a piece in the Guardian the other day about behavioural conditioning, and I just don’t want Chloe feeling she has to grow up according to some set of rules society laid out for her centuries ago.’
‘Is that how you feel when you come home to your house husband?’
‘Stop it.’ She gave Ben a play punch. ‘You’re not a house husband. It’s just been a dry period. The work’ll come in.’
‘Actually,’ he said with a smile, ‘it looks like it already has. Get dressed. I’ll tell you on the way.’
When he did, showing her an email on his phone from a renowned Notting Hill-based interior designer interested in getting Ben to shoot a brand film for use in the US, Nicole tried to sound upbeat. But she doubted that Oscar, who was famous and self-regarding enough to be known by his Christian name alone, would see the point of Ben’s discreet style. And there had been enough professional near misses over the past three years to make Nicole wary of getting her husband too excited.
‘Did you send them the promo you shot for Afshin?’
‘No, Chloe, not too close to the road please! You think I should?’
‘Well – yes.’ Why did her husband find it so hard to push himself forward? ‘That would have been the first thing I’d have shown him.’
They’d reached the park, and as Ben unlatched the gate, allowing Chloe to be pushed into the playground by a sudden influx of children behind her, she could see the tension in her husband’s face: a hardening of his top lip and refusal to meet her eye.
‘Anyway, do whatever you think,’ she soothed, relieved as she so often was that they both had Chloe to look at. ‘You know best.’
‘Apparently not. If I knew best I’d be getting the work, wouldn’t I?’
‘No Ben … God, that’s not what I meant. But don’t be, you know, worried to big yourself up – that’s all I’m saying. You’re so talented, and there’s so much shit out there. It’s just about making people see that.’
One of the only three much-coveted benches in the playground was empty and they sat in silence for a few minutes, Nicole angling her face away to tug on her e-cigarette.
‘Wish you wouldn’t.’
‘It’s better than fags.’
‘Nothing would be better still. Anyway it stinks.’
Reluctantly, she slipped it back into her bag.
‘Vanilla.’
Nothing.
‘I’ll help you put together a new portfolio tomorrow if you like? And we can make sure the Afshin promo film is right at the top?’
‘Yeah?’ He shot her a sideways glance.
‘Yeah. Let’s do it. The old one’s what … two years old?’
‘Three. Maybe four.’
‘Ben.’
‘I know …�
�
Nicole took Ben’s hand and gave it a squeeze, calling out ‘Stay to that side’ as Chloe worked her way nimbly around the rope climbing frame towards the posse of Adidas-clad older boys clambering up the other side.
‘She’s all right.’
‘It’s those little shits I’m worried about.’
‘They’re eight-year-old boys, Nic.’
‘Did you see them deliberately rocking the rope bridges last time we were here? Eight-year-old boys can be little shits.’ Nicole stood up.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I just want to keep an eye on them. I’m not having her bullied, Ben.’
‘For God’s sake.’ Grabbing Nicole’s hand, he pulled her back down.
‘They’re not bullying anyone. Look.’
He was right. The boys had parted to allow Chloe to climb up to the top of the frame.
‘Even the other day, they were just …’
‘Being boys?’
‘Yeah. Jeez – I wouldn’t have wanted to be on the same climbing frame as you as a boy.’
‘No, you wouldn’t have.’
She loved to picture her younger self through Ben’s admiring eyes. He would never have imagined that she hadn’t come into the world with the hard shell she prided herself on today. That it had taken years to stand up first to the three older brothers who discounted her from their games and derided her opinions at the dinner table as a child. That every casual misogynistic comment she’d forced herself to ignore in meetings over the years took her back to the teenage schoolboys who had tried to drown out her answers in class with heckles of ‘I can see Nicole’s bra strap!’ Because little shits grew up to be big shits.