Playing James

by Sarah Mason

  “Fleur,” says James, “go back to the party. I’m fine, really.”

  She puts her head to one side in concern and I feel like giving her a good kick up the . . . It’s amazing how quickly your feelings can change toward a person when you know they’re about to marry the love of your life next Saturday.

  “And you, Callum. It’s not a police matter.” I raise my eyebrows at this. Maybe they get lunatics throwing punches at them all the time? Callum and Fleur quietly leave the room.

  Alastair draws himself up to his full height. James, by contrast, ignores him and flops down on the sofa opposite me. Alastair turns to Lizzie. “How long has this been going on for, eh? I’m no fool. The flowers, the phone calls. Holly introduced you to him, didn’t she? DIDN’T SHE?” I don’t know what he’s talking about but I’m taking it personally.

  “Alastair. I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lizzie cries. “The first time I met this man was with Holly in a hospital a few nights ago.”

  “Which time was that?” I ask James from the sofa.

  “The bottle on the toe incident,” he says from the other sofa.

  “Oh.” The whole conversation is above us in both a metaphorical and physical sense.

  “Who are you having an affair with?” demands Alastair.

  “No one. Am I, Holly?”

  “Not unless you count me. She’s practically moved into my flat,” I reply.

  “I thought you were staying with him.” He points in a dramatic, accusing fashion at James but luckily James is too busy checking his blood situation to notice.

  “No,” Lizzie explains patiently, “I’ve been at Holly’s. How do you know I haven’t been at home?”

  It’s Alastair’s turn to look a little sheepish and examine the fine stitchwork on the rug in front of him. “I’ve rung and I might have popped by a couple of times.”

  “Checking up on me?”

  His head snaps round. “Maybe you need checking up on.”

  “Well, I’m surprised you could spare the time away from your precious work,” Lizzie spits out.

  “I am trying to get a promotion, and did it ever cross your mind why?” Alastair is practically shouting now.

  From the relative safety of the sofa, James asks wearily, “Do Holly and I need to be here any more?”

  Lizzie glances down. “No, I think we need to work this out by ourselves. I’m sorry about your nose.”

  Alastair adds, “Er, so am I. I thought that . . .”

  James waves his explanation aside and says, “That’s OK,” but in a voice that clearly indicates it’s not. We heave ourselves up from our respective sofas and wander out into the hall.

  “Do you want to get some ice for that?” I ask as the blood still trickles. “I think it might stop the bleeding.” James nods and leads the way across the hall, down a set of stairs and through a door. Inside a large, airy kitchen five people are working, crudités and smoked salmon pinwheels almost literally coming out of their ears. The kitchen has an old-fashioned Aga in one corner and I could probably fit my entire flat inside this one room.

  James slumps down at a large oak table surrounded by chairs in the middle of the room. I bustle over to one of the people and ask for some ice. Call me a sad female (in fact, I might call myself that later), but I get a great deal of pleasure from doing this one simple thing for James. What is it with us women? Couldn’t they have beaten this nurturing instinct out of us at birth or something? I find a tea towel, wrap the ice up in it and place it over his nose. “Thanks,” comes the muffled response. We sit in silence for a few minutes, until he asks, “Was she having an affair?”

  “No!” I reply emphatically.

  “Then why was she getting flowers and phone calls?” Damn, I should have known his sharp little detective ears would pick that up.

  “Was she?” I ask innocently.

  “He said she was. This is nothing to do with you is it, Holly?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “I knew it,” he sighs. “Why does trouble seem so determined to dog your every step?”

  “I don’t know,” I say in a very small voice.

  Pause.

  “You only need one more bash in the face and then we’ll be quits!” I quip because I’m pretty eager to get off the subject of Lizzie and exactly what my role was in the whole debacle.

  “Your incidents were complete and utter accidents, whereas somehow you’re involved in this.”

  “Do you think it will bruise?”

  “At least we’d have matching injuries.”

  “But you and Fleur won’t next weekend. The color will probably clash horribly with her dress.”

  “Don’t worry. It won’t bruise.” This seems significant in a funny sort of way.

  Fleur arrives. “Darling, I’ve been looking all over! How is it now?” She looks a bit annoyed at finding us together so I make my excuses and leave them.

  My parents and I say our goodbyes to our hosts and, just like the musketeers, our number is down to three as we climb into the car and make our way back to my flat. Alastair and Lizzie were still locked in the study when we left and I presume he will give her a lift home. My mother mercilessly pumps me for information on the evening’s events and I gleefully relate them, thankful for something else to think about.

  The rest of the weekend drags by as though time is playing a sick joke. I go through simultaneous agonies of longing for the next week to be over and yet dreading the time when I won’t see James any more. My mother is fantastic. She refuses to let me mope around the flat and insists we go for a bracing walk by the sea and then for tea in a local hotel on Sunday. But everywhere I look I am reminded of him. It’s like a record going around in my head that can’t be turned off, and even I’m getting a bit sick of the tune. When we return home, I call Lizzie for the umpteenth time since the party. And for the umpteenth time since the party, the phone just rings.

  Just when I was beginning to think it wouldn’t, thankfully Monday morning dawns. I dress with great zealousness and Tristan and I set off eagerly. The journey takes a short time and I soon find myself bounding up the steps to the police station.

  “Morning Dave!” I greet my new friend (formerly the-grumpy-git-desk-sergeant).

  “Good weekend, Holly?”

  “Yeah, fine,” I say brightly.

  “This is your last week with us, isn’t it?” I nod and smile in answer. “Bet you won’t know what to do with yourself afterward!” I grin again and think to myself that he doesn’t know just how true that is.

  As I arrive in the office, the night shift is finishing putting up a huge great banner across the office. It reads: “JAMES SABINE’S LAST WEEK OF FREEDOM! MARRIAGE IS NOT JUST A WORD, IT’S A SENTENCE!”

  I grin up at them all as they stand on top of the desks. “That’s great!” I exclaim.

  “Took us all night to make!” one of them tells me.

  “Quiet was it?”

  “Very.”

  I settle down at my desk and try to ignore the giant swatch of fabric hanging above me. I get out my laptop and collect my e-mails. There’s one from Joe asking me to come in tonight to discuss my “next assignment.” I sigh and wonder if the mayor’s dog has died and he wants me to cover it. The rest of the day shift filters in and gradually the office fills with noise and the smell of coffee. Phones start to ring and people begin to yell. A cheer breaks out from across the office and I look up. James has come in and is staring at the banner. I try to arrange my features into a suitable grin and watch him as he ambles across.

  “Morning,” he says.

  “Morning, how’s the nose?”

  “Sore. How’s your head?”

  “Fine.”

  “And the toe?”

  “Fine.”

  “Have we covered everything?”

  I pause for a second; “I think so.” I carry on tapping away as he gets us some coffee from the machine and then goes through his in-tray.

  “
Anything?” I ask after a while.

  “A rape, unfortunately. I just need to get hold of a WPC and then we can go and interview her.” He makes a few calls and then gets up. “Come on, Colshannon, time to go.”

  We meander down to the car pool, a journey we must have made at least fifty times over the last five weeks. I decide against calling Vince and asking him to join us on this one as I think the case might be too sensitive. The last thing this poor girl needs is Vince snapping away at her and saying, “Could you do the crying thing again, ducks?” We’re just going to have to use some library photos. Once in our familiar gray Vauxhall, we zoom round to the front of the building where a WPC is waiting on the steps. Conversation thus avoided between the two of us, I spend the twenty-minute journey talking to the young female officer about rape cases and dig up some fascinating facts for today’s diary edition. The morning passes quickly and I am horrified by the rape case, so much so that James repeatedly asks me if I’m all right. We all return to the station and I busy myself by writing up my notes. At about four o’clock I have finished for the day, so as James is still busy on the phone and with paperwork I decide to play devil’s advocate and wander down to see Robin.

  I pop my head around her door and she looks up from her desk.

  “Hi! Fancy a cup of something?” We meander down to the canteen. We chat about this and that on the way and it’s not until we are sitting down with our drinks that I ask, “Robin, do you remember you once said I didn’t know the whole story about you?” She looks at me hesitantly but I continue regardless. “Do you think you could tell me it now?”

  She looks at me a while longer and then nods. “I suppose if I can’t trust you by now,” she sighs. “It’s really hard to know where to start. But do you remember, when you first came to the station, I was quite new?” I nod. I remember it well. “Well . . .”

  Oh my God. Poor Robin. Poor, poor Robin. When I first met her, I wondered how on earth someone as glamorous as her had ended up working in the PR department of a police station. Well, all is revealed. Basically, she has been poo-ed on from a very great height. Possibly rivaling that of the Eiffel Tower. She came down from London to be with her boyfriend, Mark. Apparently he had been begging and pleading for her to join him here in Bristol for months.

  You know the stuff. He called her every day, told her of his plans for them, the great stuff they could do at weekends instead of commuting between here and London, blah, blah. And then one day she watched a program on old people and what they wished they had done with their lives and she said the whole thing was so poignant, so powerful, that she went back to her incredibly high-powered and successful job the next day and gave in her notice. Just like that. Apparently they were furious because they were in the middle of a campaign or something, but Robin said that she was afraid if she didn’t do it then, she would never do it at all. But when she arrived down here a day early to surprise Mark with her news, she found him in bed with another woman.

  Can you imagine that? Literally caught in the act! Practical old me instantly wondered what happens then. I mean, does he get dressed first and then the shouting starts? And what happens with the other woman? Do you address her or ignore her? Anyway, Robin then immediately (well, not immediately, obviously; the shouting bit came first) rang up her boss to ask for her old job back and he was so narked with her for leaving in the first place that he refused.

  “Why didn’t you go back to London and just get another job?” I queried.

  “It would have meant I had failed. Failed with Mark, failed with my big, bold move to Bristol. I’d already sublet my flat as well. I had nowhere to go.”

  “What about your friends? Couldn’t you have stayed with them?”

  Robin looked sheepishly into her coffee. “I haven’t actually told them yet.” She must have looked up and seen my horrified expression—I couldn’t go and buy a bagel without telling my friends—because she hastily added, “I just couldn’t. I mean, I’d given in my notice at my glamorous, highly paid job to be with the supposed love of my life, only to find out he had been cheating on me for God knows how long. And then I couldn’t even get my old job back! I felt stupid. I couldn’t return to London and say, ‘Hey everyone! You know that momentous, life-changing decision I made? Well, it was the wrong one. And you know that wonderful, gorgeous boyfriend I was always going on about? Well, he was shagging someone behind my back.’ My friends have always looked up to me and they thought everything had turned out perfectly for me. I didn’t want to drop in their opinion.” She shrugged. “So I stayed here and tried to make a go of it. I found the most challenging job I could. I knew that if I turned this place around, leaving London would just look like a diverse career move on paper.”

  She stared back down into her coffee. “And then I made the mistake of getting involved with someone from work.”

  “Did that start after Mark?”

  She nodded. “I was at a really low ebb. We went out with the rest of the department for drinks after work but we got on so well together that things progressed, well, to the bedroom, I suppose.” I felt my insides lurch. “It was just so nice to be with someone but then even he dumped me.”

  “So that’s why you want to go back to London?”

  “Yeah,” she shrugged again. “I’ve had enough of it down here. I want to go home.”

  “Are you coming to the wedding at the weekend?”

  “James insists.” I reached over and patted her hand and we both stared into our cups, lost in our own thoughts.

  At the end of the day, James and I say our respective goodbyes and I make my way over to the paper. Joe, for once, is the bearer of glad tidings!

  “Congratulations! Judging from the number of calls, e-mails and faxes we have had over the last few days, it seems your diary is a big hit! People are wanting to know what your next diary is going to be about! Any ideas?”

  “What for?”

  “Another diary, of course! I want to start trailing your new one by the end of the week!”

  “You’re not sending me back to covering pet funerals?” I say in surprise.

  “Of course not! Also”—he leaves a dramatic pause—“someone from the Express has called. Wants to serialize this diary in the national press.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “No!” A broad grin covers his face and he shakes his head from side to side. “And when I explained you had another diary idea up your sleeve they wanted an option on that too!”

  “Oh God!”

  “So you need to come up with an idea quickly! I’ll give you two weeks to set it up after this one has finished. Come up with some thoughts and pop over tomorrow after work to discuss them.”

  I smile all the way back to Tristan. Who would believe it? The Express, too! I can’t wait to tell my parents and Lizzie. I put Tristan into first gear and zoom off to do just that.

  twenty-seven

  I’ve been home less than twenty minutes when the intercom buzzes angrily. I pick it up.

  “Hello?”

  “Holly! It’s me!” Lizzie’s voice crackles. I buzz her up and wait at the top of the stairs. I don’t have to wait long until she bounds energetically into view. She exudes happiness and excitement. She grins widely at me and exclaims, “We’re engaged!”

  I give a gasp of excitement and lead her by the hand into the warmth of my flat, asking on the way, “So how did it happen?”

  “Lizzie’s engaged!” I announce to my parents before she even has time to answer. Amid the cries of congratulations, I go through to unearth a bottle of champagne I won in a raffle a few months ago. I stick it in the freezer to chill for a while and then eagerly run back into the sitting room to hear the story. Lizzie is half laughing and half crying.

  “You see, I concocted a little plan that I would send myself some flowers and pretend to receive calls from a suitor in order to make him a bit jealous!” she says by way of explanation to my parents. My father looks a little mystified at this ap
parent recipe for disaster but my mother nods understandingly. “We were going through a bit of a bad patch and I thought the relationship needed some help to move it along. The result being he was so jealous he refused to talk to me! He somehow got it into his head that I was seeing Holly’s detective! So he followed me that day we all went to the drinks party. He said he caught sight of James when he came into the room and just saw red, so he punched him! Anyway, he proposed last night. Said he never realized until then how much he loved me.” Lizzie has the grace to blush and together we go through to the kitchen to get the champagne and some glasses.

  “So it worked after all, Holly!” She is standing in the kitchen with me as I twist the foil off the bottle.

  “What worked?”

  “The plan. OPERATION ALTAR worked! He was mad with jealousy all along!”

  “He punched James, Lizzie. I don’t think that was part of the plan,” I protest.

  She airily sweeps James’ hemorrhaging nose aside with a brush of her hand. “He said he was trying to work out who I was seeing and the only person he kept coming back to was your detective. He said every time he walked into my office I was reading your paper!”

  “Did he not know James was engaged?”

  “Well, you never mentioned it in the diary.”

  “Why did he follow you that day we went to the party?”

  “He kept popping round to see if I was back at the flat and of course that was the one day I went home to change. So when he saw me emerge in my red dress he presumed I was on my way to meet someone and he trailed me!” She giggles to herself. “He had to wait ages at the front gate of Fleur’s house to follow someone in!”

  “Pity he didn’t have to wait longer. He might have cooled down a bit.”

  “You will say sorry to James, won’t you?”