‘How nice of you, but honestly, Liz, right now I just don’t have time. As a matter of fact,’ she confided with a guilty smile, ‘I shouldn’t be here, but I just had to try this perfume. Really is superb, isn’t it?’
With which she picked up the nearest flacon of perfume, tried not to scream aloud at the price and handed her credit card to a smiling assistant.
Liz eyed her carefully, noting the linen shift that had to be a Calvin Klein and the perfume that would leave little change out of fifty pounds, and began to feel irrationally annoyed. She had expected a small show of gratitude. A scenario of her confiding very discreetly to one or two chums how she had come across Ellie down and out had flashed into her head when she first spied Ellie through the crowd.
Her natural instinct had been to avoid her, but curiosity and the buzz that she would get from imparting some gossip had won. And here was her friendly gesture being treated with a casualness it simply didn’t deserve.
While the assistant carefully wrapped Ellie’s purchase, they talked of mutual friends, the one eager to get away and the other wondering if her bank manager had a merciful nature. Finally, outside the store they parted company, Liz to soothe her injured feelings by phoning as many of the WIN group she could for the rest of the afternoon, Ellie to face the prospect of eating cornflakes for a week.
It was Jed who insisted she went with him to Swan Lake at Covent Garden. And that she couldn’t resist. It made her feel better just to get dressed, as she slipped into a black crepe trouser suit with its gilt-buttoned double-breasted jacket. Six journalists had been invited to a special performance of the much loved ballet and to attend a reception afterwards. Ellie couldn’t recall exactly what Jed had said the reception was for, but it would certainly make a change from watching TV or totting up how much money she didn’t have left.
‘This is just brills, Jed,’ she told him as they strolled into the reception at the Opera Terrace high above the Piazza, and Ellie, relaxed by the beautiful production she had just witnessed, was pleased that she had made the effort to go with him.
The room was packed. Ellie, content to let Jed work the room, sat observing new arrivals, idly watching the live theatre being performed far below in the square.
It was difficult afterwards to recall exactly who saw whom first, but Jed, returning with drinks for them both, felt Ellie stiffen as she caught sight of the familiar back of Theo Stirling with Debra Carlisle clinging to his arm and his birdlike godmother Lady Broughton greeting everyone at the door.
‘Err... Jed,’ she said casually. ‘This reception is for what?’
‘Oh, usual stuff, rainforests, I did tell you.’ His gaze followed hers and he groaned. ‘Oh, hell. Sorry, Ellie, it hadn’t occurred to me that he would be here. Do you want to leave?’
‘Leave?’ she said briskly. ‘Certainly not. Anyway, it’s too late, they’ve seen us.’
A few more seconds and the handsome couple had reached them. If it killed her, Ellie was not going to be thrown off balance. She hadn’t seen Theo since the evening she had walked out of his office. Hadn’t wanted to. Nor did she want to now.
Debra also had Gavin Bellingham in tow and before she had even reached Jed, she was exclaiming.
‘Oh, you wicked man, isn’t he, darling? Darling, don’t you agree, all those indiscreet stories he keeps running.’
It occurred to Ellie that the recipient of her endearments was not over impressed with her description. He seemed to be focused on Ellie herself, who returned his gaze as calmly as a dry mouth and a calculated expression of indifference would allow.
‘How are you?’ Theo asked, ignoring Debra’s insistent questions. ‘What are you up to these days?’
‘Oh well, enough to keep me out of mischief,’ she replied, but her brain was racing. Did he know she was out of a job? He couldn’t know and the longer he didn’t the better. How he would relish finding she had been rendered powerless to hurt him? But even as she thought it, she had the strangest feeling that it would not have pleased him at all.
Jed was exchanging pleasantries with Gavin. Debra, her arm still firmly entwined in Theo’s, was giving a very unsubtle performance of joining in their conversation while tracking every word that was exchanged between Theo and Ellie.
‘I haven’t heard your name recently,’ he was saying pleasantly. ‘I suppose you must have been away.’
Tread carefully, Ellie warned herself. You might just pull this off.
‘Nothing I like more than a break in the country after a hectic summer. And you?’
‘New York. It got a bit hectic over there. Some business I thought had been tied up long ago suddenly reared up again. I was just a bit surprised and thought I should deal with it personally.’
Ellie swallowed hard. God Almighty, did he know about the phone call to Matt Harksey? Caroline?
‘And you have? I mean, dealt with it?’ she said evenly.
‘I always do,’ he said, turning to include his godmother in the group. ‘I thought you knew that. Sally, you remember Eleanor, don’t you?’
Lady Broughton did. Ellie was hugged, some general conversation took place in which Ellie played no part and for some reason neither did Theo. They stood silently side by side, not speaking, until the group broke up, Jed and Ellie to a quiet supper at Luigi’s and Theo and Debra to... well, who cares, she shrugged.
As they turned away, Theo stopped her by lightly catching her arm. ‘If you need to talk to me, about... well, anything. Just call, won’t you?’ and he was gone.
*
‘Hi, Terry, it’s Ellie. Yes, Ellie Carter. How are you? Oh fine, just fine. Listen, Terry, I’m freelancing... oh, you heard? Yes, tough, but it could be tougher.’
Holding the phone in one hand, Ellie paced up and down in her sitting room, the handset dangling in the other.
This was the call she had put off making for nearly three months. But it was now September. She hated it, but she hated the idea of no money to eat decently or for the mortgage even more.
A sheaf of bills lay within her line of vision, including the one from the building society. That hadn’t been pleasant. She kept them there in case her resolve perished and she told Terry Mulvaney that the very idea of going back to where she started, well, at least the Daily News, made her want to weep but what else could she do?
‘Terry, that would be great. Who did you say?’ Ellie reached for a pad and began scribbling. ‘Mickey Kerrigan. Right. Remind me, Terry, who does he play for? Oh, of course, sorry, I was thinking of the footballer. He’s in the soap “Beulah Hill”. Of course he is.’
It was a start and Terry had said easily: ‘Sure, Ellie, I understand. Call yourself anything you want... or I’ll think of a byline for you. Whatever.’
So she interviewed Mickey Kerrigan, the rising young soap star, and turned in the required piece two days later. The money was a relief.
In its way, going home to Oliver and Jill was a relief too. She had asked Paul to go with her, but he had a deadline to meet and elected to stay in London for the weekend.
Shrugging, Ellie saw him out of the flat. Unusually he had said he needed an early start and he would only disturb her leaving before dawn, so he would spend the night at his own flat.
‘Fine, no problem,’ she said, reaching up to kiss him. ‘Let’s have dinner before I go. Is that okay?’
Apparently not. Ellie did not even try to disguise her temper and within minutes they were locked in a fierce row, on her doorstep.
‘I can’t help it if I’m busy,’ he said defensively. ‘You’re a fine one to talk. Just because you’re out of a job, you expect everyone to come running. Well, I won’t.’
‘Won’t what, Paul?’ she said angrily. ‘Won’t or don’t want to?’
He threw his head back in exasperation.
‘Won’t what? I haven’t a clue what you mean.’
‘I think you do,’ she said, backing away from him and leaning against the opposite side of the door, her arms wrapp
ed around her waist. ‘Where were you, Paul, the night I was fired? Out. Where were you when I called at midnight, because I felt overwhelmed by it all? Too tired to come over. Why didn’t you show up, just to comfort me, put your arm around me, tell me it would be all right? Where were you Paul? Where have you been in the weeks since when I’ve needed you?’
Her voice was dangerously quiet and he shifted uneasily.
‘This is rubbish,’ he protested. ‘I care very much that you’ve been sacked...’
‘Made redundant,’ she corrected coldly.
‘Okay, redundant, sacked, out of a job, what difference does it make? I just thought you would prefer not to talk about it, I thought you would rather be on your own to sort things out. You’ve always been such a strong person, always known what to do, how could I possibly help you?’
Ellie felt sorry for him. Poor Paul, so terrified he might be asked to cope with failure. Had she really been so strong, so in control? How little he really knew her. But that wasn’t fair. She had let him believe it, because she had believed it too.
Wearily she closed her eyes. ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry,’ she whispered. ‘It’s just something I have to cope with. I’ll see you on Monday. I’ll call you over the weekend.’
She saw the relief on his face that the scene was over and he gave her a quick hug. ‘That’s my girl,’ he whispered.
‘Mmm.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘New aftershave? Haven’t smelt that one before.’
He laughed. ‘You haven’t been paying attention. I wear it a lot.’
*
Willetts Green was in darkness when she arrived the following evening. As she drove through the silent village and out along the country roads, she felt a sense of peace and was glad that Oliver had been firm about making her come for the weekend.
Jill was staunchly supportive and within minutes had pushed her into an armchair in front of a welcoming fire that was taking the edge off the first chilly autumn evenings, brought strong coffee and plonked herself down, saying she was all Ellie’s.
‘We’re here for you, you know that? It’s just such a bloody rat race, out there.’
Ellie closed her eyes, enjoying the warmth of the fire on her feet stretched out in front of her.
‘You’re wrong, Jill,’ she smiled. ‘The rat race is over. Didn’t anyone tell you? The rats won.’
Friday night was a particularly busy night at the hotel. Weekend guests arriving, local people having a leisurely, luxurious dinner, winding down after a working week, visitors en route to a more distant destination converged in greater numbers.
Not knowing whether Ellie would finally be persuaded to come down to Delcourt, Oliver and Jill had already invited their own guests for dinner. Ellie had declined the invitation to join them, saying with a straight face that much as she would love to give Jed an exclusive on the historian who was bringing his fourth, incredibly young wife along, she could do without the MP she had profiled the year before and who was still smarting from her unerringly accurate assessment of exactly what he hadn’t done for the area.
‘Join us for coffee, then,’ urged Oliver, knowing she was teasing about repeating details of his guests to Jed. ‘He’ll have exhausted all of us by then and your arrival might make him go.’
She threw a cushion at her brother and he departed, leaving her to phone Paul. For a moment she thought she had misdialled when a woman’s voice answered.
‘Is Paul there?’ Ellie asked carefully, not wanting to jump to conclusions.
‘He’s busy right now, can I give him a message?’
Ellie froze. She could hear a hasty hand being put over the receiver, an urgently whispered exchange.
Slowly she sat down on the edge of the armchair, her voice not quite steady. Was she imagining things? Had all the miseries of the last months made her paranoid?
She licked her lips and started again.
‘Can you tell him it’s Ellie?’
‘Actually,’ said the woman in a quite different voice, which Ellie knew she was deliberately trying to disguise, ‘I’ve just looked into the drawing room and I think he must have popped out. I’m helping him with his research. Can I get him to call you?’
Ellie knew that voice. It was Beth Wickham. Beth bloody Wickham. It hadn’t been aftershave but Beth’s overpowering perfume that she had detected on Paul that night. She could feel her face burning with anger, but it was contempt that Beth Wickham heard.
‘No, don’t bother. Just give him a message. Say Ellie rang to say goodbye,’ and she quietly replaced the phone and returned to the warmth of the kitchen.
A mixture of deep hurt and relief fought with each other as Ellie tried to digest the fact that she was now free of Paul. The last link with the life that was fast fading had been severed.
But Beth Wickham, she thought disgustedly as she poured herself a glass of wine and flopped in front of the fire. Couldn’t he have done any better than that?
*
The road from the hotel to Willetts Green village, a mile away, was a favourite walk of Ellie’s. The first leaves of autumn were beginning to carpet the hedgerows, the tourists were thinning out, the countryside was being reclaimed by its inhabitants and Ellie absently picked an armful of wild flowers as she went.
It was a habit she had acquired as a child, sent down to the village school, and she remembered Aunt Belle asking her exasperatedly where exactly was she going to put them all, when the same flowers were growing wild in her own back garden?
Now, with the late September sun warm on her back, she pulled off her jersey and wrapped it around her waist, rolling back the short sleeves of her T-shirt.
There was a gap in Ellie’s life that had not been created solely by losing her job. It was a gap that required the comfort of someone who would just let her be a child again. Just for a while. Just to soothe her and pet her and tell her it would be all right. But then that gap had been there all her life.
Paul’s betrayal, his lies, his weakness, had disgusted more than hurt her. No better than Polly, no better than Liz or Tony Travers. Just there when she had something he wanted. The buzz of being with a strong woman, who would take responsibility for everything and let him stay a child forever emotionally. Well, he had Beth Wickham now, but who did Ellie have?
Well, for sure no-one immediately came to mind. Being a child was a luxury she had never been granted, and really what was the point now?
*
Terry Mulvaney had left a message on her machine which she picked up when she returned. Would she do a quick interview with the girl tipped to win the Miss England contest?
Grimacing, she rang to say sure, fine, brilliant Terry but she couldn’t believe her eyes when the next day the piece on the soap star Mickey Kerrigan finally appeared in the News, the most downmarket tabloid imaginable, and it had been completely rewritten.
That was it, that was finally it. Ellie sat down and rocked with laughter, helpless mirth engulfed her, a sound her flat had not heard in weeks. Out of work, scrabbling around for commissions and then she, Eleanor Carter of the Eleanor Carter Interview, had had her copy rewritten by a tabloid newspaper. Tears streamed down her face, her sides ached and she buried her face in the cushion and in the end she didn’t know whether she was laughing or crying, and she didn’t care much either.
Chapter Fifteen
What frightened Ellie was the way her days were slipping into a new pattern, taking on a permanence that she found alarming. She had managed to sell two interviews to the Sunday Courier that she had on file and which Jerome had not wanted for Focus, but it wasn’t enough to stop the slow, insidious descent into a new structure to her day that filled her with dismay.
Ellie suspected the decision to spike the last two interviews she had secured for Focus had its roots in Jerome trying to satisfy Bentley Goodman that his relinquishing of Ellie’s talents was justified, rather than a genuine disregard for their worth.
Jed agreed.
‘It’s pretty dreadful
there, El,’ he told her. ‘If it weren’t so awful being out of work, I’d say you were well off out of it.’
Looking at his grim face, the familiar incisive wit now absent, Ellie had no trouble in believing him. What she found hard to take was the fact that Roland had been offered and had accepted the role of managing editor of the group.
‘But I thought he was out?’ Ellie was incredulous.
‘Yeah, but apparently Ian Willoughby over at Profile did the deal with Bentley Goodman — he’s an old friend of Roland’s.’
‘But what does it mean?’ she asked, totally perplexed.
‘It means sod all. Just keeping Roland on board.’
Jobs for the bloody boys. Ellie was livid.
And at the end of the day for all their networking, for all their power to the girls, what power did WIN and all the other groups really have? As Jed put it, she thought savagely, sod bloody all.
However, Ian Willoughby had surprised her by writing a warm, encouraging letter, asking her to keep him posted of her whereabouts. But no offer of a job.
Ellie was frankly cynical. ‘Funny, that,’ she told Jed. ‘They found one for Roland which has to be next to useless. But nothing for someone who could actually do something for the company.’
The features editor of the Courier had commissioned an interview with a football hero which he greeted with rapture when she delivered it a week later. Although he said his hands were tied, preventing him from commissioning her more often, he fervently hoped they could come to some arrangement when things got better.
It was a phrase she had come to loathe, along with ‘positive’ and ‘be strong’. The people who urged her to be one or both, she came to realize, were people who had never really had their lives tested.
‘What the hell do they think I’m trying to be?’ she stormed at Rosie. ‘What exactly is "positive"? Being unremittingly cheerful when brown envelopes that you daren’t open flop through the letter box? Skipping merrily along the road to the supermarket at the thought of more spaghetti? What is "strong", being able to smile brightly when I hear that the mortgage company want to send someone round to discuss my plans for relinquishing my home to them?’
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