by Celia Walden
‘Absolutely. We were only waiting for you.’
‘Well, here I am.’ Jill could hardly bear to look at him – she was still struggling to digest the letter she’d just read – and she certainly wasn’t going to apologise for being three minutes late. ‘Now, Harry, I know you’ve been sent the Minerva sales pack and made aware of a JLL sale to Westfield just over the river, just in case you had thoughts of doing anything similar with the site.’ Here she made sure to catch Jamie’s eye. ‘And I believe we’ve got some footage here that might help boost your imagination.’
‘Don’t have a problem with my imagination, last I checked,’ growled Harry. The cohort tittered in the way that they were required to whenever Harry said anything that qualified as ‘vintage Harry’.
‘Course you don’t.’ The words felt mealy in her mouth, her smile pasted on. ‘But you’ll give us the satisfaction of showing you what the clever folk in digital were able to dream up, won’t you? Jamie?’
Jill stared deep into Jamie’s big black pupils, and as he shifted in his seat, nervous and jerky in his movements in a way she’d never seen him before, it seemed impossible that he couldn’t read the questions she was silently asking him. You really did write that email to Paul, didn’t you, Jamie? And the letter – that letter? All these months, you’ve been trying to get me out. Why? Because you no longer had ‘confidence in my abilities’? Or is it because now that I’ve got you where you want to be, I’m just too much of a reminder of where you once were? You called what happened to Stan ‘tragic’, which is wrong. Because Stan didn’t die, did he? And thank Christ I’ve never really thought of you as a son, like my husband once said. Because to a mother, you wouldn’t just be a disappointment, you’d be heartbreaking.
‘Jamie.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Could you do the honours?’
Once the twenty-two-minute film began and Harry was guided room by room through five possible virtual structures, Jill took a breath and opened her Filofax on her lap, knowing before she started flicking back through her calendar to the first week of January what she would find.
Sure enough, there it was: J, Ivy – 7.30 p.m. Stan had been admitted to hospital with acute urinary retention two days earlier. The accompanying infection had been so virulent that when Jamie had visited him that afternoon, her husband had been in a state of delirium. And when Stan had mistaken Jill for a nurse, she’d been so upset she’d been forced to leave the room for a moment to compose herself.
Afterwards, Jamie had insisted on taking her out to supper. ‘I’m not having you sitting in that waiting room pestering the nurses all night for updates. You’re going to need to eat, to drink wine and to vent.’
He’d been right. At their corner table she’d talked and drunk for hours. And Jamie had listened, speaking only to say all the right things. No one who had ever seen Jamie playing to a crowd would guess that he was capable of that kind of intimacy, always probing deeper with another question. And maybe that was one of the reasons he had always been so appealing to women. Because if there was one thing women loved it was being asked questions. ‘How did that make you feel in the moment?’ ‘What about later?’ And although Jill had never considered herself typical of her sex, in that moment it had been exactly what she’d needed. Which may have been why she’d seen nothing odd in what she now saw were carefully planted questions around the idea of retirement.
‘Stan’s going to need you more than ever moving forward.’ ‘What’s important is that you’re there for him now, don’t you think?’ And: ‘You’ve given your life to BWL, Jill. You and Stan both have. Maybe it’s time now to concentrate on you? Take Lady J off somewhere and enjoy the spoils?’
But the question that really stood out now, months on, the one that made her wonder whether really, beneath it all, Jamie might not just be casually amoral but one of those ‘everyday psychopaths’ they talked about on daytime telly, was the one he’d asked as he helped her into a cab at the end of the night. ‘You know I’ll always be here for you, don’t you?’
The film was still playing, and Harry was propping his face up on his elbows, hands pulling his cheeks down into a bulldog mope. But Jamie was fidgeting in a slightly manic way that was beginning to draw looks from Harry’s cohorts as he stared out beyond the glass walls at something or someone. A twist of the neck revealed it to be Nicole, who was bent over the senior surveyor’s desk pointing at something on his screen. Her dress, a leaf-green sheath that showed off her defined legs and waist, was straining slightly at the hips with the movement, the curve of a flank clearly delineated beneath the fabric. ‘Because in the end women are either convenient to Jamie, or expendable,’ Nicole had said that night.
Far from being a bubble of insanity, that conversation – that plan – was turning out to be one of the most lucid Jill had had in years. And maybe while she’d eradicated thoughts of payback from her mind, Nicole and Alex had quietly followed through with it?
‘Is there any danger of this thing ending?’ Harry’s truculent tones snapped her out of it.
‘Quite something, am I right?’ Grinning nervously, Jamie launched into his sell – only this one wasn’t as fluent as usual. In fact, it was garbled. And broken up by pauses during which he ran his tongue back and forth over his teeth, ummed and ahhed, and generally seemed to lose his train of thought. Something wasn’t right – and Ainsley could see it. ‘Honestly, you could build yourself a whole luxury community on a site that size.’
Jamie always dropped a few Ts and a whole social class when talking to Harry. And although it had never bothered her before, today it seemed significant. Jamie could alter his persona to what was needed in the moment. Whatever it takes to make the sale – wasn’t that what she’d always told him? And he’d successfully sold himself to her for years.
‘Anyway, at least I hope that now gives you a full idea of what might be available to you,’ Jill chimed in. ‘And I know you and Jamie have a site visit planned. I’m happy to join if it would be helpful?’
‘We’re OK.’ Harry got to his feet, and Jill didn’t bother leaning in this time. ‘It’s all sorted.’
‘Well, good to see you, Harry.’
‘Always a pleasure, Jamie. My PA will be in touch to set up the viewing.’
‘Good stuff.’ There Jamie was with his tongue again. Was he … was he wired? ‘Now, what about that dinner? Let’s set something up, eh?’
Harry’s minions had already filed out, but Jamie had stopped to ask the question in the doorway, deliberately blocking Jill’s path. He wanted her to hear this. ‘We talked about Friday? Maya’s desperate to meet Trish.’
Jill tried to busy herself with the file in her hands; anything to hide the annoyance Jamie knew the conversation would prompt. Both she and Jamie had been trying to get Harry to come for dinner for years. If he could manage that, he’d be well on his way to wiping his slate clean in the supervisory board’s eyes.
‘Yeah. Christ knows how you landed that one, mate,’ Harry muttered. ‘Punching well above your weight there.’
‘Right now I think she’d agree,’ she heard Jamie chuckle as he slowly walked Ainsley out, one hand hovering proprietorially between his client’s shoulder blades. And was she imagining it, or was he talking too fast, moving too fast? ‘In the doghouse, I’m afraid.’ This part Jill wasn’t sure she was supposed to hear, so she sharpened her ears. ‘Actually, you’ll like this, Harry. I used to get her underwear from that place, you know Agent Whatever, on her birthday.’ He was sniggering like a schoolboy. ‘And I didn’t this year, ’cause of the new baby and what have you. But somehow the shop messes up and all this stuff arrives.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Mate, we’re talking bondage gear, right? We’re talking studded leather. So, understandably, Maya goes spare.’
Jill couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Once again here was Jamie trying to pretend his painful lack of sensitivity was someone else’s fault.
She could only now see Harry from the back, but he was a family man
, she knew, who adored his wife and observed Shabbat. Jamie had misjudged this, just as he’d misjudged Maya’s birthday present – and from the look on his face, he knew it. But he had to finish his anecdote now.
‘Anyway it was the shop’s mistake, as it turns out, a “misorder”, which was what was so funny …’
The two men fell out of earshot here, but Jill thought Harry looked even more nonplussed than usual as the elevator doors closed, and Jamie’s final holler, ‘Let’s make that dinner happen, eh?’ had more than a tinge of desperation to it.
The whole episode wasn’t just odd, but worrying. Jamie’s judgement and intuition were what had propelled him up the ranks, and it was as though everything that had once made him sharper, smoother and better at his job than others was eroding before her very eyes. Unless it had been an illusion all along? But Jill didn’t have time to ponder this further. Having grabbed his wallet from his desk, Jamie had left the building, doubtless for one of his sugar fixes, and that meant she didn’t have long.
‘This you?’ Jill thrust the letter before Nicole.
‘Sorry?’
It was the first time the two women had done more than exchange a few civilities since Joyce’s party, and certainly the first time Jill had ever come over to her desk. ‘The letter.’ She lowered her voice. ‘And the email. I know what you and Alex are trying to do, Nicole, and if this is about everything we spoke about that … that night – well, there’s no need: the scales have well and truly fallen. But I’m not sure this is the way—’
‘Jill,’ Nicole cut in. She’d only glanced at the letter, stabbing wildly on at her keyboard instead. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘I’m asking you to read this.’
The younger woman stared up at her, and it felt as though she were deliberating over something, although Jill couldn’t for the life of her work out what. Finally, having checked to see that nobody was watching, Nicole picked up the letter, swallowed hard and read it.
‘This isn’t … Jill I’ve got nothing to do with this.’ Jill nodded. That much was clear.
‘And I’m not convinced Jamie wrote it.’
‘You think …’ They both fell silent as the marketing director walked by with a client. ‘Then do you think,’ Jill whispered, ‘that it might be Alex, trying to ramp things up? Have you heard from her?’
Nicole swallowed again. ‘No. This is probably just some shit-stirrer. I swear I had nothing to do with it.’
‘Despite what he … ?’
Nicole looked so mortified that Jill felt guilty for bringing it up.
‘I’d rather we forgot I ever said anything about that.’
‘Sorry.’
‘No, no, I’m just … I’ve got an appointment with a client.’
‘Right. Sorry again. I just … I didn’t want you to think I’d stand for any more of that. You’d tell me, wouldn’t you? OK, OK, I’ll let you go.’
Picking the letter back up from Nicole’s desk, Jill saw that there was a picture of a dark-haired, light-eyed girl sitting on her father’s lap pinned to the desk partition. She didn’t know anything about Nicole, she realised. And yet because of what had been said that night at the pub, there was a strange familiarity there.
‘Your daughter?’
Nicole nodded. She was switching off her computer now and reaching down for her handbag. And with the two rosy sweeps that had appeared across her cheekbones while the two women were talking and her eyes as made up as they were, Jill didn’t think she’d ever seen Nicole look so beautiful.
‘I’ve really got to …’
‘Of course – go.’
Jill watched her as she rounded the corner towards the lift, pushing repeatedly on the button as she waited for it to arrive, and it took her a moment to realise that what she was feeling was disappointment. What if everything they’d said that night had been true? What if Jamie did need a helping hand?
CHAPTER 22
NICOLE
Bloody Jill. Trust her to be standing there when the message pinged in: Old Ship at 4?
Although Nicole didn’t think she’d seen; she was pretty sure she hadn’t.
How many times had she told Jamie not to write messages in the email subject line? Not to write emails full stop? But having always behaved with impunity, Jamie seemed to believe he was untouchable.
Jill she had no problem with. In fact Nicole had always quite liked the company founder, along with everything she stood for: no kids and yet apparently happy; ambitious and fulfilled by her job alone in a way women weren’t supposed or allowed to be. But after what she’d rashly told both her and – worse – Alex, Nicole had started something she now felt powerless to stop. And yet she hadn’t heard from Alex since her late-night visit. Maybe with the baby in her life – even after what Nicole had told her – she’d decided to leave Jamie alone?
As she hurried along King Street towards the river, torn between a desire to make Jamie wait and a need to find out what this assignation was about, Nicole wondered whether the letter Jill had shown her might actually be genuine. If so, wasn’t it possible Jamie had real grounds for concern? Jill had had a lot on her mind, after all. Then again, given the worrying way Alex had been talking when she’d seen her in that filthy flat, this might well have been her doing. Again, Nicole felt that lurch in her stomach, the lurch you got as a child seconds before the vase or window smashed, when the ball was still in motion. She’d set that ball in motion, first in the pub that night, and then that night at Alex’s flat.
It was the first day of what the papers were calling ‘our Honolulu heat wave’. School sports days were being cancelled, gardeners encouraged to ‘love their brown lawns’ in a bid to preserve water. And although it hadn’t yet reached the 40-degree temperatures predicted that weekend, the absence of any kind of breeze had imposed a curious stasis on the streets of Hammersmith, as though the whole neighbourhood were taking part in one of those mannequin challenges that had gone viral a couple of years back. Outside the empty vaping cafés and pound stores, staff leaned still and silent against their shopfronts, and even the schoolboys waiting at bus stops seemed unnaturally subdued.
Nicole, in contrast, felt more alive than she had in months, as though her whole system had been jump-started. An old Oasis song she had overplayed and killed at university blared out of a mobile phone shop, and as it climbed into its chorus she felt the beauty of the melody all over again. Maybe that was why people had affairs? That sense of life happening to you all over again, an injection of youth. All Nicole suddenly knew for sure as the echo of her heels against the tiled underpass quickened and she emerged blinking into the riverside light, was that she was no longer prepared to go back to feeling numb.
Swiping a finger beneath each eye, where her mascara would have worked its way into the creases, she adjusted her expression to one less eager. Outside the Old Ship the partially obscured back of a man’s head turned out not to be Jamie’s, and she tried in vain to remember what colour shirt he’d been wearing in the office earlier.
‘Nic!’
There he was, a little way off, back against the low river wall upon which his pint was perched, cigarette in one hand.
‘You’re smoking again?’ she said when they were close enough to touch.
‘Sort of. Maya found a pack that wasn’t even mine the other day – left by the boiler man or someone – and freaked. Ironically I hadn’t touched one in months, but if people are going to believe the worst of you anyway …’
Although her heart had dipped at the immediate mention of Maya, Nicole was pleased. There was clearly trouble at home, and Jamie smoking was Jamie off the wagon in every sense. Only one thing – the idea of her being something he did when he was playing up, a bad habit – riled her.
‘Why am I here?’
She plucked the cigarette from his hand and took a puff, the action awakening vague memories of teenage posturing: arrow-pierced biro hearts drawn on smooth thighs, bursts of laughte
r loud enough for boys to hear. And beneath it all that adolescent anguish.
‘Forgot how good the real thing tastes.’
‘You did?’ Jamie sucked the beer foam off his top lip and pulled her to him.
‘Hey.’ Shading her eyes with a hand, she looked around. ‘Anyone could see us.’
‘I’ve done a recce.’
‘You have?’
‘Relax.’
‘I will, as soon you get me a drink.’
‘Fuck the drink.’
‘Charming.’
Inches apart, they took each other in, and Nicole wondered what it would be like to get to know that face, with all its freckles, furrows and grooves, the way she knew Ben’s; to accept it would be a part of her daily life. To watch it age.
‘Jamie, why am I here?’
‘Why? Because I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you and me … in the theatre.’ Nicole felt a contraction in her lower abdomen. She hated the power he had over her body, even when there was no force, no contact, even – just words. ‘Because there has got to be a reason why we can’t let go of each other.’
Nicole looked out beyond him at the river. A fleet of rowers whooshed cleanly past to the commands of the cox.
‘I used to think that. But now …’
‘Now what?’
She shrugged. ‘Now I know that it’s just a game to you. Because it is, isn’t it?’
‘No!’ His fingers tightened on the green fabric of her dress, pulling her in closer between his legs. And when he was angry or defiant, Jamie looked so young. She’d forgotten that. ‘That’s not true.’
‘But you love your wife.’
Saying it out loud wasn’t as painful as she’d thought it would be. In fact it felt quite grown-up, civilised. Only she couldn’t be touching him as she said it. She couldn’t even be looking at him. Nicole moved to stand beside him at the wall where she stared out at the murky depths of the Thames.
‘I really do think you still love Maya. And I know you love your kids. I know that being apart from them … well, I can imagine what that would do to you. It’s not the same for me, for women. I get that. I could leave Ben and still have Chloe. Still wake up to her every day and put her to bed every single night.’ Even as she said it, she wondered how that would work, remembering her daughter’s crumpled face on the rare occasions when she had had to take her away from her father, and trying to imagine what it would feel like to tell her not to worry, you’ll see Daddy again next weekend. ‘I’ve been thinking since, well, since that afternoon at the Vale. And I thought I had you out of my system. I really did. But going back to the way we were – I can’t do that. Not after what happened last time.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s not what I want. I’m not angry any more, but …’