by Celia Walden
She fired off a one-line email to Jamie: How did you swing the Spiro deal?
His reply was immediate: Just did my thing, adding two flexed-muscle emojis. And although Jill knew this meant insufferable smugness for days to come, she couldn’t be churlish, and was bashing out a ‘congrats’ when another email pinged in.
[email protected].
Tentatively she clicked on it: another email thread. This time – as though someone had been looking over her shoulder – between Jamie … and Spiro.
The Greek billionaire’s English wasn’t great, and in any case the two men appeared to be speaking in a kind of code it took Jill a few seconds to decipher. The ‘carved oak staircase’ had been the problem, she remembered, having located the original file on the system. That staircase had become a developer’s nightmare the moment a potential building preservation notice had been mentioned.
FYI: the council won’t serve that notice for another ten days, Jamie had pointed out in an email responding to Spiro’s last-minute cold feet on the deal. And I know you had been planning to start work on the site early next week. Give us a bell when you get this?
The following email made no reference to any phone conversation, and was simply confirmation that Spiro had changed his mind, and was prepared to finalise the deal ‘asap’. Quite the U-turn.
Jill glanced up at the date the email was sent, then speed-dialled Paul.
‘On my way to a meeting with my lawyer, Jill. Olivia’s been playing up again. Can you believe she’s now saying she wants the Devon cottage thrown in? That’s on top of the extortionate maintenance payments she’s asking for and custody of Barnaby.’
‘Sorry … Barnaby?’
‘Our whippet.’
‘Right.’ Jill really didn’t have time for one of Paul’s divorce rage-athons right now. ‘Just a quick one: the Westbourne Grove place Spiro bought. I didn’t even realise the sale had gone through – and so fast. Do you happen to know when they started work on it?’
‘Earlier this week, I think.’ He sounded tense. ‘I take it the Telegraph have been in touch?’
‘What? No. Why?’
‘I was just going to call to see if you’d heard.’
‘Heard what?’
‘The staircase, that bloody Shakespearian—’
‘Jacobean.’
‘Yeah – well, anyway, the whole damn thing came down last night. Apparently the structure wasn’t as solid as the workers had hoped and after they started work …’
But once Paul had said the words ‘conservationists are getting into a right state’, she stopped listening.
‘Paul.’ She ran her finger over the three words at the top of the BWL letterhead – three words she and Stan had agonised over all those decades ago: history. heritage. preserved. ‘Once you’re done with your lawyer, I need a chat. Because we’re going to have to order an internal review into this – and into Jamie.’
Then she found the original email from [email protected] with the subject heading with friends like these? Just before she forwarded it on with three deft clicks, she added a single line at the top of her message: With friends like these, Jamie?
CHAPTER 19
NICOLE
‘You’ve got to be joking.’
She was standing with her back to the wall, trying to find the best angle from which to capture on her phone the ornamental pilasters around the stage when the lights went out. They’d tripped when she’d brought Rupert Jones back to the theatre for a second viewing, but the surveyor had managed to get them back on, and although Nicole was pretty sure she could remember where he’d eventually found the fuse box, trying to grope her way there in the dark was going to be a challenge.
It was early afternoon but with only a slice of natural light coming from the windows on either side of the main entrance, the domed auditorium was a mass of shadowy enclaves. That the place could be so silent, with only the occasional muffled siren or horn from Kilburn Lane permeating those crimson walls, was far from reassuring, and Nicole wished she’d brought someone along with her to fill in the missing details Rupert had asked to be supplied with. Nicole’s mind went from the ancient fire escapes that opened out onto the building site behind to the homeless men she’d seen lying in their piss-soaked sleeping bags down by the station. If they hadn’t already discovered the most spectacular doss house in north-west London, it was surely only a matter of time.
Using her phone to light the way, Nicole walked tentatively up the central aisle of the stalls past the rows of ugly Ambassador chair reproductions that must have been put in in the 1970s or early 80s. To the left of the stage, camouflaged by neoclassical mouldings, was the narrow door she remembered the surveyor pushing through, but where was the handle? Sliding her palm up and down the frame, Nicole found nothing.
‘Shit.’
Wincing as a shard of wood slid beneath her skin, she raised her iPhone to inspect the damage. There it was: a tiny black dash just inside the curve of her lifeline. She would have squeezed the splinter out there in the half-light had something else, reflected in her phone screen, not caught her eye. A movement behind her left ear; then the wet white of an eye.
Before she could turn, Jamie had grabbed her by the arm, spinning her towards him.
‘What the hell were you playing at, sending Jill that email? You think I wouldn’t find out? You think I wouldn’t know it was you?’
‘Jamie! You scared me shitless.’ With a shake she tried to free herself. ‘What’s wrong with you?’
Something was: that much was obvious. His mouth was dry and scaled and his breath stale. He stared at her, pulling at a sliver of skin on his bottom lip with his teeth. ‘What do you think could be wrong, Nic?’
‘I haven’t got the faintest. Now can you get off me?’ His grip was still tight around her arm – too tight for her to shake off without losing her balance, and in an inelegant two-step the pair lurched backwards, slamming into the front seats.
‘Ow!’
‘You think you’re going to fuck things up for me with your little games?’ Jamie hissed, backing her so far into one of the Ambassador chairs that she was forced to steady herself on the arm rests to stay upright. ‘You think you’re going to turn my partners against me by sending them some crap I’m supposed to have written?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Nicole hated the wavering in her voice. ‘Let go of me.’
‘But that’s not really what you want, is it?’
Jamie was so close now that when he laughed softly in her face Nicole smelt something warm, bready and beer-like beneath the alcoholic top note. Then her skirt was being hitched up and her knickers pushed aside in a series of matter of fact, semi-custodial gestures.
‘Jamie, I’m not joking. Let me—’ But his hand had moved up to her throat, cutting off her windpipe, and the last word came out as something between a gurgle and a whimper.
Jamie’s laughter then was raucous, ringing out through the dark auditorium. ‘What was that? Couldn’t hear you.’
And unable to hold back any longer she began to laugh too, wild and hoarse, crushing her mouth into his and revelling, as she always did, in that moment of submission.
Deferring that moment heightened Nicole’s pleasure. She’d worked that out early on in their affair. But it was only towards the end of their eighteen-month relationship that she’d understood why: giving in too soon not only banalised what they were doing together but made it feel too similar to what she and Ben did twice a week – once always on Sunday mornings, before Chloe was awake. And there was something else. The darker they’d got, the deeper her feelings for Jamie had become: deep enough to be love – only a feral kind of love she’d never felt for her husband. The kind that over time had ceased to satisfy and left her craving her next hit before she’d even left Jamie’s side.
When she’d worked up the courage to voice that thought, five months ago, Jamie had admitted he’d felt the same, promising to leave hi
s wife and ‘make it work, whatever the fallout’. And maybe it was Nicole’s fault for believing him. But when he’d reneged on that promise, she had been left bitter, broken and sentenced to day after day in conference rooms with a man she now loathed.
That was why everyone cautioned against office affairs, wasn’t it? Not because of the risks she and Jamie had taken when they were together – the clinches in the BWL lifts and the frantic, angry sex they’d enjoyed in darkened boardrooms and, that one time, on the floor of the office gym changing room – but because of how impossible work life became once the affair was over.
That theirs had been so different to the average office fling, or any relationship Nicole had ever had, had only made it harder to forget. Unable to stop herself from replaying their savage sessions together whenever she’d found herself in the same room as Jamie, she’d felt as betrayed by her own body and the desire it continued to feel over the past few months as she had by him.
‘I meant what I said that night in Frankfurt.’
Jamie had raised himself up on an elbow, and she remembered that he always spoke too soon afterwards, whereas she liked to lie quiet and still, enjoying the aftershocks as they passed through her.
‘The night you promised to leave Maya?’ She turned her face away from his, not wanting him to see the hurt in her eyes. ‘Ah, but you didn’t.’
Focusing on the numbers on the back of the chairs – 8A, 8B – Nicole found herself wondering who had sat in them over the years. Had they got everything they wanted in life, or had they made do?
‘Because look at you now,’ she went on, ‘still with the lovely Mrs Lawrence, and busy sharing your happy brood with a load of strangers on social media. So you can’t have, Jamie. You can’t have meant a word of it.’
A few months ago Nicole would have found it hard to keep her voice as level as it was. All those promises and plans made as they tore through mini-bar snacks in an overly air-conditioned Hilton hotel room: she’d taken them seriously. And maybe he hadn’t realised that? Maybe he had her down as the kind of woman who had affairs, just like everyone else at BWL seemed to after that first, stupid office fling became common knowledge. But for Nicole, those plans had been the promise of a new life. And when she and Jamie had made their pitch to the Zech Group the following morning, Nicole hadn’t pushed her leg against Jamie’s beneath the conference table as she usually would have, knowing that in a matter of weeks, days, hours, they would no longer need to snatch moments.
Yes, it would be painful before they got there, but Chloe was too young to fully understand or remember a split, and if she and Ben dealt with it well (which they would, her husband being a decent man), they could end up one of those divorced couples who remain close, even sharing the odd grumble about their respective new spouses over coffee.
To have gone from planning that new life and phone conversations with a divorce lawyer she’d found online to it all being over in a single hushed sentence – ‘Now’s just not the time’ – had floored Nicole so completely she hadn’t even bothered trying to hide it. The Tuesday before Christmas she’d gone straight to bed, complaining of a tummy bug, and for a week lain there in the same discoloured T-shirt. Then, one morning, Chloe had brought up her copy of Ant and Bee and the Doctor, making up the words she couldn’t yet read in an effort to cheer her mother up. Once the tears had finally stopped coursing down Nicole’s cheeks, she’d managed to say, ‘Will you go and get Daddy?’
When Ben had perched silently on the side of the bed, waiting for her to speak first, Nicole had been convinced that he knew. She was going to come clean about all of it, right down to her plan to leave him and start a new life with Jamie. Only before she could, her husband had started recounting the phone conversation he’d had earlier with a friend of a friend: a therapist who thought Nicole might be suffering from depression – ‘very possibly something hormonal’. So he’d gone ahead and booked her an appointment.
Her laughter had surprised them both.
‘Ben, if you think I’m in some sort of pre-menopausal funk,’ she’d croaked, once she’d dried her eyes, ‘you’re so wide of the mark it’s not even funny. I’m forty-one, not fifty-one.’
Hearing the laughter, Chloe had come back into the bedroom, and in a small voice said: ‘Daddy says you’re not yourself. Who are you then, Mum?’
Which had meant drying her eyes all over again. ‘I’m me, ladybird. I’m here. And I’m not going anywhere, I promise.’
That and the distraction of Christmas had galvanised her back into life. This time, Nicole had decided, she wasn’t just going to make do, but be the best mother and wife she could be. And apart from the TAG watch she’d kept as a keepsake beneath a pile of jeans in her bottom drawer after he’d left it on a hotel nightstand months ago, she’d successfully managed to eradicate Jamie from her life.
‘So all these months – you’ve hated me?’ Jamie was clearing the scattered hair, strand by dark strand, from her face. ‘I wouldn’t blame you if you had.’
‘Good. And yes, I have.’
It was obvious that he found this more flattering than upsetting, which annoyed her. ‘You stopped replying to my messages. You cut me dead.’
‘You told me it was over! What did you expect?’ And when he didn’t answer: ‘You really thought I’d be happy to carry on the way we were?’ Remembering the thousand and one reasons why she’d vowed never to give in to him again, Nicole sat up and began patting the floor beneath the seats for her missing phone. ‘Well, no. Sorry. No.’ How had she ended up here again? ‘I’m going to have to go.’
‘Nic, wait.’ He pulled himself up to be level with her. ‘I need you to believe that I meant it, that night – every word. I’d even mapped out all this stuff in my head. The places you and I were going to go on holiday. Where we might live and how the kids would get on when they were a bit older.’
Nicole shook her head.
‘The whole time Maya was pregnant, I kept thinking that we couldn’t do anything until she had it, her. But then when Elsa was born … and I don’t know if it was because she was a girl or because she was so tiny, you know?’
‘Two weeks premature. I know.’ God, how she hated knowing those things. Maya’s due date, the feta cheese Jamie’s wife had craved in her final trimester and how jealous Christel had pinched her new sister’s thigh hard enough to make her howl when they first brought her home from the hospital. Knowing those things made her feel as though she were standing at a window peering into their life. A life that couldn’t be that enviable since Jamie was lying here with her. And although ‘What now?’ was the obvious question after all these months apart, Nicole loathed that implicit female plea after sex, and wasn’t sure she could bear the humiliation of asking it.
Ben was the only man she’d ever met who had made that plea – verbatim – after their first time. And although Nicole knew well before they married that what she and Ben had could never sate her, he was her best friend. So when he’d taken her to dinner at that awful floating restaurant in Bristol the day after their finals she’d stared out of the portholes at the olive-green Severn, waiting for him to produce the ring she’d found hidden in his desk drawer weeks before.
The night Nicole found the ring was the first time she’d ever cheated on Ben, and she’d genuinely believed it would be the last. She had no recollection of the man’s face but she remembered the damp vaulted ceilings of that basement club somewhere beneath Bristol city centre and the pounding on the door of the Ladies as they finished. She remembered the relief too, the sense of closure when it was over, as though now that curious twisted part of herself that longed to be dominated, overcome, could be retired with little to no resistance. Ben was going to ask her to marry him and she was going to say yes. Everything was going to be simpler from now on – above board. And it had been, until Ian. Stupid, meaningless Ian, the ‘gateway drug’ that had left her with an affair-shaped hole in her life – and led her on to the hard stuff.
‘I
never meant to hurt you,’ Jamie went on. ‘Just that Elsa was born and … I kept wondering who would protect her and Christel if their dad wasn’t there.’
Softening a little as she remembered having those same thoughts about Chloe when the idea of leaving Ben had begun to seem real, Nicole nodded.
‘And I knew that Maya would find someone else, like that –’ he clicked his fingers ‘– in a heartbeat.’
‘OK, I get your wife’s a real catch, Jamie.’ Nicole started looking for her shoes and buttoning up her blouse.
‘I’m not … it was just the idea of some other guy looking after my girls, when it should be me, you know, because my dad was always working …’
‘And look what a fuck-up you turned out to be.’
‘Exactly.’
Pausing, she ran her index finger down his cheek. ‘You’re not a fuck-up.’ And for a moment they both stopped buttoning and zipping and just stared at one another.
‘I fucked you up though, didn’t I?’
She wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of knowing how badly.
‘Come on.’ Reaching for Jamie, she pulled her lover to his feet. ‘I really have got to get back to the office. But not before I show you something.’ Was this why she hadn’t told Rupert about the lantern the other day? ‘You can’t see it from ground level, and on the plans it just looks like part of the roof. It’s bonkers: you won’t believe it.’
Feeling their way through the hidden passageway behind the stage they climbed a set of narrow, musty-smelling wooden stairs until they reached the heavens. There, rising up amongst a tangle of electric cables, was a Jacob’s ladder leading up to a trapdoor in the theatre roof.
‘Where are you taking me?’
‘Trust me,’ she threw back, climbing cautiously on above him, ‘it’s worth it. Watch your step.’
‘Too busy watching something else right now.’
From his perilous position behind her on the ladder, Jamie grinned up, and Nicole felt a twinge of the old excitement as she pushed the trapdoor open, clambering out as gracefully as she could into the domed glass structure on the roof of the building: a kind of bell jar, just large enough to accommodate two seated people.