Another Way

by Frankie McGowan

  Ellie was sorely tempted. Amanda, with her prosperous husband, wanting nothing more than to raise children, ride horses and flirt with the best looking men in the county, made it sound like bliss. But that would be running away. And Ellie had vowed never to run away from anything again in her life. Ever.

  At the end of the first week, however, she didn’t know which she found more difficult to cope with: the unremitting, if strained, cheerfulness of those who believed optimism in the face of harsh reality was priority, or those who avoided her altogether.

  Jed was a constant visitor and a consistent source of new ideas, names to ring, suggestions to make. Rosie, she knew, was always on the other end of a phone.

  ‘Honestly, El,’ she groaned. ‘If you were in fashion I’d snap you up. But to be honest, it’s just as bad in my neck of the woods.’

  The promised lunch with Liz had never materialized. She had cancelled at the last minute, leaving a message to say she would resurrect the date soon. She still hadn’t phoned.

  But it was Polly’s defection which was the most humiliating. That she had allowed such a shallow woman to boss her into so many unwanted meetings, made her squirm. An uneasy lunchtime meeting which Polly had ‘squeezed into’ her hectic schedule a week after Ellie had left Focus had been brief and left Ellie feeling a wave of anger and stupidity that she had allowed herself to be so mistaken in this silly, artificial woman. A woman so keen on feminine solidarity, so insistent on calling Ellie a friend.

  ‘Throw me out at two, won’t you?’ was how she greeted Ellie shortly after one o’clock on the appointed day, along with a quick kiss and a hug. She flopped into the seat opposite at the stylish Italian trattoria she had chosen round the corner from her office. ‘Client meeting at two fifteen. Ghastly little jerk he is, but the account is a good one. Really, if he gets more of a pain than he is, I might have to let him go.’

  Polly gasped, her hand flying to her mouth.

  ‘Oh, Ellie,’ she said, squeezing her companion’s arm. ‘You know I didn’t mean that. Oh Lord, what a clumsy thing to say.’

  Ellie sipped the glass of champagne Polly had ordered for her and shrugged.

  ‘Why? It’s what’s happened. Could happen to anyone.’

  Polly looked relieved and picked up the menu. ‘Now, my treat, of course, so have something delicious. I think I’ll just have a salad, anything heavier slows me down and I shall need my wits about me this afternoon.’

  Faced with Polly’s evident haste, and in truth feeling no appetite at all, Ellie ordered the same.

  ‘Now, tell me all,’ said Polly, her eyes flicking around the restaurant to see who she could see. ‘Right from the beginning.’

  So Ellie told her. Not all, not even right from the beginning. But she did tell her that she was job hunting, that while it wasn’t desperate to work this week, she would start to get twitchy if things went on like this.

  ‘Hasn’t anyone offered you anything?’ Polly sounded incredulous. ‘Well, you have shocked me. I thought you would be snapped up. Have you tried Tony Travers? Yes? Well, what about Roland — can’t he do anything?’

  Ellie didn’t miss the quick flash Polly gave to her watch and wondered if it was worth explaining anything more to her. She tried.

  ‘It isn’t that there aren’t any jobs at all to be had, it’s just that there aren’t any on my level...’

  Polly cut across her with an admonishing tone that left Ellie itching to smack her.

  ‘Well, you know, Ellie, in those straitened times you can’t afford to be proud. Surely anything just to keep you in the swim of things...’

  As insensitive remarks went, it was only marginally more offensive than betraying how little she knew about Ellie’s character.

  As though Polly hadn’t interrupted, Ellie continued carefully.

  ‘... and no-one wants to recruit someone like me for those jobs because they can get someone with less experience for less money. Pride doesn’t come into it. Economics does.’

  Polly, whose grasp on economics was marginally weaker than her acquaintance with integrity, looked blank and swivelled away to greet a silver-haired man making his way to a corner table.

  ‘Ian!’ she exclaimed, her arm shooting out to grab him as he passed. ‘How marvellous to see you.’

  Halted by her grip on his pocket, Ian paused and greeted Polly, his eyes sliding towards Ellie.

  ‘You know Ellie, don’t you? No? Goodness. I thought everyone did. Eleanor Carter, Ian Willoughby, editor of Profile,’ beamed Polly, clasping Ian’s hand with both of hers.

  Ellie smiled politely.

  ‘I didn’t say I had never heard of Miss Carter, just that I hadn’t met her,’ he corrected Polly and leaned over to shake Ellie’s hand. ‘I heard about your leaving Focus,’ he said pleasantly. ‘Tough times. Don’t give up, it could happen to any of us.’

  Ellie nodded, thankful that at least he had been honest, not even attempting to say the correct thing and inviting her to make a pointless phone call to his office.

  Undeterred, Polly simply looked pleased.

  ‘I thought you must have heard of each other. However, Ian, I would just love to show you our client list. It is so you, you must let me know when you’re free.’

  Ian Willoughby smiled courteously and promised to phone Polly soon. The opportunity for Polly was too enticing to miss. Get your man in your sights and don’t let him go till you’ve hooked him, is how she once described her working methods to Ellie.

  ‘Look, I’ll be back in the office around two fifteen and I’ve got a free hour, why don’t you call then?’

  Ellie felt a jolt of humiliation. There had been no client meeting to rush back for. No urgency at all. Just a desperate need not to get trapped by someone who could do Polly no real good for the moment.

  Silently she sat until Polly’s gushing exchanges had been made and Ian Willoughby had moved away to join his own lunch date.

  Polly leaned over the table with a flushed face.

  ‘That really was such a stroke of luck. Now what were we saying, Ellie?’

  Ellie hoped that Ian Willoughby never phoned Polly Lambton and if he did it was to say he hated all her clients. Instead, she spoke steadily in a chatty tone:

  ‘I was saying it isn’t a question of pride, not taking a job a rung or two down the ladder. It’s economics. It’s the same as if you were suddenly made redundant, Polly — and as you said it could happen to anyone — you would find in your business that the higher up the ladder you are, the more your prospects shrink. It wouldn’t bother me, going down a notch. But it would bother the company. So stalemate.’

  Polly agreed it was all very difficult and of course if there was anything she could do.

  ‘Well, yes, there is,’ Ellie said calmly, Polly’s sudden look of distress not lost on her. ‘You could mention my predicament at the next meeting of WIN, just in case I can’t get there. Put the word around. Who knows, you might even find a publicist or two who wants a decent copy writer. Now there’s something I could do.’

  A flash of alarm showed on Polly’s face and she shook her head vigorously.

  ‘Oh no, no, no. That would be impossible. I mean... well, you know how it is in the business at the moment, everyone cutting back and frankly, Ellie, with your talent you should be in a big job, you would frighten the life out of anyone you worked for. Such a threat to their own job having you around.’

  Ellie smiled sweetly at her.

  ‘Don’t worry, Polly, I was only joking. My goodness, is that the time? I really must fly. Got to see someone at two. Sorry, didn’t I mention it?’

  She swooped over Polly and kissed her cheek, almost choking with laughter at Polly’s startled face.

  ‘Lovely to see you, super lunch. Stay in touch, won’t you.’

  She swung her jacket around her shoulders, grabbed her bag, blew a kiss and a cheery wave at a PR she recognized on the other side of the restaurant and whirled out on to the street, where she strode bri
skly away and around the corner.

  Out of sight, her shoulders sagged, relief flooded over her. She couldn’t help smiling and as she glanced at her watch she saw it was still only ten to two. Bloody Polly. What was it she had said that night? ‘Women are friends, not just job titles.’ And what was it poor, benighted, sloshed Warren had said? ‘Bilge.’

  Bilge to you, Polly, Ellie said, and ran to jump on a number eleven bus that was just pulling away.

  Chapter Fourteen

  It was the middle of September. Ellie had delayed her visit to Delcourt since that day in July when she faced an uncertain future, but it was time to visit her brother. It wasn’t a visit she particularly looked forward to, but it was either that or Oliver turning up in London.

  Yearning only for normality, her brother coming hot foot to town to take her away from it all would have been an admission of defeat, proof that the world had won, and Ellie just another loser in the big city. Of course it was an absurd image, but a month into a crash course of being pushed to the edge of everyone’s lives had left her convinced she should never have left home.

  In her more positive moments, and there were still some, she knew it was absurd. A small, well, smallish, oh all right, bugger it, a major reversal in an otherwise untroubled career, was no reason to regret the entire venture. The problem was, she knew, as she sat alone late at night, just staring into space, drinking just a little too much, eating just a fraction too little and ignoring the phone too often, that she was getting it all out of perspective.

  This was a job loss for Christ’s sake, not a terminal disease. But the day she knew that no-one was going to ring with the perfect job to put it right, was the day when common sense deserted her and a haunted paranoia set in.

  The flat no longer felt like home. It had become a restraining centre to stop Ellie spending money. To keep the world out. Bowls that once played host to armfuls of flowers remained empty. Magazines that had once been stacked carelessly on the coffee table were notable only because they were two or three months old.

  Three designer jackets that had cost her almost a month’s salary each found their way to a thrift shop, for fifty per cent of the original cost, twenty per cent of that to the shop and the right to return them within three months if they weren’t sold.

  Ellie had dived out of the shop like one who’d just pawned the family silver. Grief. Three months. All that time before she got anything for them, and meanwhile she had seriously depleted a wardrobe that was unlikely to be replenished for some time. Talk about being a novice at this game. It was so absurd, it even raised a ghost of a smile.

  The fridge, however, which once could be relied on to house a bottle or two of chilled Sancerre, underwent a change only in as much as the respectable and drinkable brands disappeared, and quantity replaced quality.

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ she exploded one afternoon to a silent flat. ‘I’m behaving as though there is no-one in the world who will employ me ever again. That I am bound to starve, sink or surrender to social services if I so much as buy a cheap bottle of wine.’

  All of which she knew was nonsense but, without any sign of a permanent job being offered to her, she had to tread warily. How much freelance would she continue to get? If any? Everywhere she turned people were retrenching; work that once was farmed out was being dealt with in house.

  Late one night at the end of her first month out of work, she sat at her kitchen table, wrestling with a set of figures and a bank statement that had frightened the life out of her. The salary on Focus had never been its most attractive quality. With a sinking heart, Ellie began to face just how much she had come to rely on the perks of her job to finance a lifestyle that on her freelance earnings could not be sustained.

  After a while, she threw down the pen, pushed back her chair, screwed the paper into a ball and hurled it into the sink. Roughly three months left before the mortgage would become a problem.

  Long ago at her interview, Roland had told her that she had a choice about which she ought to be very clear. Magazines like Focus, prestigious though they were, would earn her a respectable salary, not a fortune.

  ‘Make your mind up now, because writers tend to get locked into the world in which they start. Nothing wrong with that, but it happens. Not everyone was fortunate enough, as I was, to switch from tabloid journalism to this. But then I wasn’t far enough up the ladder for it to matter. I passed through Fleet Street without trace.’

  Ellie had found that difficult to believe, but she knew he was making her question herself too. At twenty-five, with a mortgage and no visible means of support except her salary, she could so easily have found herself forced back to the features desk of a middle-market newspaper. The job on Focus meant a salary cut, but she reckoned that with a little moonlighting until she got it all together, she could manage.

  If Roland ever suspected that his newest recruit was working into the small hours banging out show biz stories and nightclub gossip for the tabloid market using another name, he’d said nothing.

  Eventually, as Ellie’s career took off, most of her social life was being paid for by the magazine. The people who invited her to first nights, show biz parties, exhibitions and the occasional freebie in some exotic hot spot they were eager to promote, became her friends. The goodies they showered on her removed the need to finance a social life. Expenses were modest but it all helped.

  First of all she was brave enough to buy a small car, a Mini, and as she grew more successful and her bank account showed she was more often in credit than out, she switched to a Golf GTi. It wasn’t new, but she loved it, convertible, black leather seats, black leather steering wheel. She hadn’t even bothered to take it back to the flat, but had driven straight down to Wiltshire, dragging a startled Amanda out of her cottage. Shrieking with laughter, they had taken off into the countryside.

  Parked outside a country inn with wisteria climbing the walls and only the sound of birds overhead to break the silence, they sat on a wooden bench, soaking up the hot June sunshine and just gazed at Ellie’s pride and joy.

  Amanda sighed wistfully and said how different their lives would have been if they had only had the car when they lived together.

  ‘Just think how many of those creeps would have got the elbow, if we hadn’t needed them for a ride back to town.’

  Ellie gave a satisfied sigh.

  ‘Just think how more discerning I can be now. Fancy free and on the up.’

  ‘Ash.’ Amanda rose with a superior smile. ‘But then I have found a chauffeur for life.’

  Ellie tossed the keys to her new car in the air, catching them with a snap and sauntered away, saying: ‘But I at least can drive myself home. You will have to ask for a lift. Amanda, stop it... no... seriously... I’ll murder you if you throw that drink at me...’

  The memory of that brilliant, carefree summer came back to her as she replaced the phone a few days later after a sympathetic but realistic assessment of her finances from the bank manager. She hardly knew him, but it didn’t take him long to get a very vivid picture of her circumstances. If push came to shove a small, temporary loan? Of course. What, however, were her employment prospects?

  ‘Oh, not so bad,’ lied Ellie. ‘I would like to freelance for a bit, you know, not be tied down. Getting commissions isn’t a problem, I have a lot of contacts. I just thought I ought to let you know, in case some of them take a little time to pay. They often do. Hazard of the business.’

  She knew she was sounding positive, matter of fact. The bank manager was prepared to believe her, and said if she ran into difficulties to let him know.

  The car was insured and taxed for a year, so there wasn’t any point in rushing to sell it. Ellie hadn’t slipped so far down the path of pessimism that she had not seen how much she was going to need the car in the next few months.

  Twice she had supper with Rosie and left feeling cheered beyond measure.

  Once she spotted Polly leaving a restaurant with Anne Copley and Beth
Wickham and although they all exchanged delighted greetings, Ellie stepped swiftly back so that their proffered cheeks were hastily turned into handshakes.

  ‘Couldn’t be better,’ she beamed, as they enquired awkwardly and a shade too loudly after her. ‘Must dash, so much to do. Leaving for Paris on Friday night.’

  So what, she muttered, hailing a taxi she could ill afford and leaping in. So what if I lied. It’s what they’re used to. Thank God, she had worn her Armani jacket to have the promised drink with Denton Browne, when he rang for the third time, on hearing that she had lost her job as well, otherwise her uniform these days of jeans and a sweater might have made them less gullible.

  She didn’t care to dwell too much on how expensive a chance encounter with Liz Medley turned out to be. Bored, gloomy and feeling more than a little out of touch, she took off for Harvey Nichols. A stroll around a beautiful upmarket store might well give her spirits a lift, since sitting gazing at the wall of her patio garden or the local supermarket were not having a good effect.

  The store was nicely crowded mid-afternoon, as Ellie, in a cream linen shift, her hair loosely tied back with a silk scarf, wandered through the store enjoying herself. And then there was Liz Medley fussily pushing her way through the crowd. Ellie looked wildly around for escape and swiftly turned to examine a beautifully presented bottle of a new French perfume, praying that Liz would sweep past and not notice her.

  ‘Why, Ellie,’ crooned Liz’s voice. Ellie’s heart sank, but as she turned her face was wreathed in a surprised smile.

  ‘Liz...’ She stepped back to avoid a friendlier greeting.

  ‘Oh, Ellie, poor you. Still nothing? Look, let me buy you lunch sometime...’

  Ellie resisted a strong desire to tell Liz to fuck off; instead she frowned and looked apologetic.