by Fiona Walker
Only when she was soaked through did she abandon the notion and run home. She was struggling to find her Francis quandary funny. It just made her want to cry.
The glow of the television through the tall first floor windows told her that Ros and Nico had made up and were snuggling in front of a movie, no doubt indulging in a fresh batch of organic pizza, homemade lemonade and baby talk.
Legs took a long shower before raiding her fridge, which was looking decidedly barren, but managed to yield an unopened tub of pesto which she was soon tipping into a huge bowl of fusilli, cooked al dente because she was so hungry.
She wolfed it all so fast that she felt sick immediately afterwards, all pleasure in satiation stolen from her. She guessed it was like kissing Francis on the cliffs that first day back at Farcombe, a greedy pleasure she hadn’t earned, which had merely left her feeling spoiled and over-indulged. A fresh wave of guilt mixed toxically with her indigestion, giving her cramp.
Another text came through. Any chance you could start thinking aloud? Just say the word … He was getting impatient.
Lying on the floor with her legs up on her coffee table to ease her bloated stomach, she rang him. But if she’d been worried that he was going to come on too amorously, he quickly dispelled her fears by demanding: ‘What did your mother have to say about the Hawkes adopting Kizzy?’
‘I don’t think she knows any more than we do,’ she told him, relieved he wasn’t talking about her running through his mind. For a man who could quote Shakespeare sonnets from memory, he had an alarmingly limited repertoire of chat up lines. ‘Have you found out where she went last night?’
‘No idea, but wherever it is I wish Jamie-go would bugger off there too. He tramped in here to see Poppy at teatime, smelling distinctly of horse, and they’ve been holed up in the green drawing room ever since. Édith suggested we puff ground almonds through the keyhole to flush him out.’
Legs chewed her lip, revolving thoughts of Byrne already so hardwired into her subconscious that her eyes seemed to project his face onto the ceiling.
‘They have a lot of talking to do.’ She carefully modulated her voice.
‘And sight-seeing, I gather. When Imee took cakes in there she overheard him trying to persuade Poppy to go somewhere with him tomorrow, but as we all know, she won’t budge from this house. Not that I blame her. There are press all over the place today, and a few diehard Ptolemy Finch fans have already started to turn up. I had to turf one lot off the parkland where they were erecting a tent. One of the press boys I was talking to said we could get as many as a hundred thousand here for Gordon Lapis’s first appearance. Surely that can’t be right?
‘His work is loved by millions worldwide.’
‘Good grief. I might let them camp here after all and charge twenty quid a night. I could buy you a Ferrari with the proceeds.’
‘No need. I love my car. I can’t tell you how much I love it.’
He laughed nervously. ‘I’m starting to worry that you’ve developed mechanophilia.’
‘What?’
‘Car fetishism.’
‘Is that what it’s called? I always thought it should be auto erotica.’
His voice softened affectionately. ‘Do you remember making out in my old Beetle that time you sat on the handbrake and we almost rolled off the cliffs at Gull Point?’
‘It happened more than once,’ she recalled, the memories suddenly so vivid that she could almost smell the car’s upholstery infused with the combined scents of Calvin Klein One, Marlboro Light and Juicy Fruit. ‘We called them our handbrake turns.’
‘You had a lot of funny turns in those days.’
‘Still do.’ She adjusted her indigestion-cramped stomach again, easing her fingers beneath her waistband to lift it away from the drum-skin tension beneath.
‘I’d like to see them some time.’
She had fallen into the trap, she realised suddenly. They were flirting.
Francis’s voice was laced with seduction. ‘I never understood why you always got so turned on by sex on the back seat when we had a thousand acres of estate to play on, but now I’m starting to see the light …’
‘I am definitely not a mechanophile,’ she protested. ‘As I recall, we used the car a lot to begin with because it was freezing outside, and I was technically still underage, so we were terrified one of the family would catch us at it anywhere else.’
‘What I wouldn’t give to be in a car with you now – even a Honda,’ he said in a low voice. He fell silent and there was a long pause before he breathed; ‘I want you to come back here.’
‘We need to talk properly, Francis.’
‘Not like this.’
‘Face to face.’
She closed her eyes gratefully. He saw the need to talk too.
‘I want to make love to you.’
She opened her eyes again. Perhaps not. Panic rose once more.
‘I need this week. My career’s at stake. The Gordon Lapis thing is a huge deal.’
‘What about Con-man?’
She felt sick again. ‘Him too.’
‘You have until Friday to say the word.’ He rang off.
He sounded like Conrad issuing an ultimatum, she realised in alarm. Her rock and her hard place were slamming together on her like walls closing in. Her bloated stomach let out a whine of indigestion.
She was still lying on her back with her legs up on the coffee table. Yawning tiredly, shifting her pot belly to alleviate her heartburn, she heard the beeps on the radio she’d left on in the bathroom. The news bulletins were still talking about Gordon Lapis’s identity; the media couldn’t get enough of the story. It was already nine o’clock; it was too late to go to see her father, she realised, twisting another guilty knife into her self-reproach.
She rang him instead, but the answerphone picked up in the Kew house. Her mother’s soft voice greeted her, apologising breathlessly that Dorian and Lucy could not take the call, then asking in muffled tones how one stopped this thing. The beep went abruptly. Legs found her voice choked with emotion, heat-burn raging more than ever. The only way she could speak was in falsetto bursts of forced jollity.
‘Dad! Me! Hope all OK! Lots to say! Speak soon!’
She hung up and scrunched her eyes closed.
Hearing her mother’s voice made the fractures in her life feel wider than ever. While Lucy’s warm tones welcomed messages in the family home, she was enjoying naked tea-parties listening to Gershwin in Devon. And Legs’ father was no doubt taking comfort wherever he could found it; she just prayed it didn’t involve car keys in an antique bowl on the coffee table in leafy Kew. For the Norths, perhaps the Adulteryhood years had never stopped.
She snapped her eyes open again, picked up her phone and went to her saved folder to find Gordon Lapis’s email, rereading every line.
Do not underestimate the past. It fashions our lives, and we wear what parts of it still suit us, forgetting the way we really looked and that so much recollection is the Emperor’s New Clothes.
Looking back at her parents’ marriage with the rose tint increasingly bleached away, Legs could see that she had dressed them both in Emperor’s New Clothes almost all her life.
As she reread the end of Gordon’s long, clever email, she felt an overwhelming urge to talk to him. She flipped online and eyed his icon – easy to spot because he was the only person she had ever chatted to – but he was offline. She hoped he was OK in his richly layered world of make-believe and white-haired young soothsayers.
Sleep tight, she emailed instead.
Later, in bed, Legs started to reread the first book in the Lapis series, Ptolemy Finch and the Topaz Eagle. At three in the morning, she was still reading, as totally engrossed as she had been the first time. Legs was like a bee to honey for the sting in Gordon’s tale.
Chapter 24
Having overslept, Legs ran to the bus stop only to double back in dismay as she noticed that Tolly the shiny silver car was clamped and ticketed. Her Ealin
g resident’s parking permit was still attached to the window of the long-cherished red rust bucket, she realised with dismay.
Frantic calls made on the bus to work got her nowhere. The local council insisted she must pay the fine to have the car released, and present the original permit at the council offices that day to get it changed, bringing a mountain of documents with her as proof of her ownership, residency and ability to drive. Failing to do so would result in hefty fines, they warned. The car would be towed if the clamping fee was not paid in twenty-four hours.
‘I have a permit! I am a resident!’ she railed and wailed to no avail, only serving to annoy those around her on the bus. Bureaucracy gave emotional outbursts short shrift, quoting rules and regulations straight back at her like Francis quoting classics.
She called him now. He was somewhere very windswept with bad reception, meaning she had to shout to be heard, irritating her fellow passengers even more.
‘Darling Legs! I knew you would ring to say the word!’ he yelled down the phone to her, unable to hear more than broken fragments.
‘I said I need the parking permit from my old car …’ she shouted back.
‘Barking hermit for your bra?’
She repeated herself at lung-bursting volume, causing her fellow bus passengers to cower away.
Francis finally understood. ‘Why call me?’
‘Can you get it for me?’
‘Obviously not. I’m in Devon.’
‘Well, where is it?’
‘How the hell should I know? You’re the mechanophile.’
They were cut off.
In near tears of frustration by now, Legs called the council hub again and finally got through to human lifeform with a soul in the form of a jolly Nigerian named Clancy who explained that lost or stolen permits could be replaced and transferred to new vehicles, but Legs would definitely have to come to the council offices in person, bringing even more documents. The offices closed at five.
Already stressed out and ragged, she got off the bus at Green Park over an hour late for work. She travelled up through the atrium in the space-pod glass lift to Fellows Howlett’s floor and slipped behind her desk keeping her head low. Beyond his smoked glass office wall, Conrad shot her a furious look, but he was trapped with the finance director so could do no more than point at his watch and raise his eyebrows questioningly.
Trying to convey the horror of her morning just with her eyes, Legs inadvertently treated him to a few Bela Lugosi expressions. He looked hurriedly away. Legs busied herself with the post, knowing that his mood was hardly likely to improve when she explained that she would need to leave work early to dash back to Ealing and rescue the car her ex-fiancé had given her yesterday.
Peering at him through the glassy divide, she fought to weigh up her feelings towards him, but it was like balancing a see-saw between past and future, and she couldn’t yet decide which side he was perched on. Here was her career, her present and her day-to-day normal. He’d seduced her with full-throttle testosterone charm and brio, and it had proved the ride of her life, at least at first. Seeing him now twisted her heart so tightly she got a stitch. His cheese plant needed watering again, she realised tearfully, spotting drooping leaves silhouetted against his windows. Who would look after it if she left? She’d tended it lovingly for eighteen months now, watching it grow from two-foot weakling to four-foot triffid, rather like Conrad’s ego.
To add to her chagrin, Conrad was surprisingly understanding about her unpunctuality when he was finally released from his meeting. His rugby hero face almost softening as she blustered on about car compounds; ‘You go back home and release your car. We’ll reschedule. Besides, I’ve just looked in my diary and it’s the Hansel and Gretel Diet launch tonight,’ he placated. ‘I should look in.’ The diet’s author was one of the agency’s most lucrative non-fiction clients, who specialised in the sort of extreme regimens beloved of newspaper supplements. This one was being serialised in a national, and getting lots of press thanks to a celebrity wife who had lost five dress sizes and gained column inches on it. ‘We’ll do it later in the week. I do want to debrief you at lunchtime, however. Arrange that, if you will. Usual room.’
Not waiting for an answer, he turned back to his office to take a conference call about the Ptolemy Finch.
Thus Legs found herself taking her lunch break one block away from the agency’s offices, in the hotel where they had first got together, and which had long excited them both as they reinacted the white heat of those early unions in their favourite fifth floor room.
Leaving Devon, Legs had been determined to be morally unimpeachable and as celibate as a nun until she’d sorted out her priorities, laid her cards on the table with Conrad, spoken at greater length with Francis and considered her future. Now, overwhelmed by her need to feel protected, desired and wanted by a man as powerful as Conrad, her resolve crumbled.
‘This is very becoming.’ He pulled her electric blue dress over her head. ‘Is it new?’
It was one of the outfits he’d bought her from Browns less than a fortnight ago. Had he forgotten already?
‘It’s my blue period,’ she said without thinking, channelling dodgy subliminal thoughts as always because she was panicking that the curse was in its last throes and her hasty office douche might not suffice.
But Conrad didn’t appear to be listening as he pushed her down on the bed and lifted her legs so that her ankles rested on his shoulders as he plunged in.
‘How I love to part my Legs!’
She gasped at the thrill as always, turning towards the fake suede headboard and closing her eyes ecstatically, letting out little cries with Conrad’s regular thrusts. Then she opened her eyes again and squinted at the headboard. There were unpleasant greasy indents where guests had propped their heads, possibly staying up too late reading Ptolemy Finch.
‘Does that feel good, baby?’ Conrad growled, took a surreptitious glance as his watch and thrust faster, aware that he had a late lunch appointment in Chelsea to get to.
‘Ohhh sooo good,’ she said, looking quickly away from the headboard and smiling up at him, licking her lips.
Afterwards, back in the office, Legs felt too ashamed of herself to look up from her computer. Firstly she was ashamed for deceiving Conrad into thinking she’d enjoyed their lovemaking more – she hadn’t exactly faked an orgasm, but she had made a lot of squealing, panting noises to encourage him to hurry up, knowing he’d be in a sour mood if he was late for his lunch. And she was ashamed that she really hadn’t enjoyed it more. She’d hoped it would be diverting and sexy to feel desired by her confident, clever man, but she’d wanted it to be over almost as soon as it began. She didn’t dare think about Francis. She couldn’t help but think about Byrne, whose face now seemed to be tattooed on her inner eyelids, pillow and computer screen. Her guilt complex was escalating out of control.
She tried to concentrate on work, starting to write up a report recommending Conrad look at the dead redhead manuscript, then breaking off to check her emails. Still no word from Kelly.
She emailed the redhead murderer’s author, Delia Meare: Please could you send consecutive chapters, preferably the entire manuscript? It has an excellent beginning but to enable us to judge whether it has the narrative to grip readers, we need to read it as a whole. Many thanks.
Within minutes, she had the entire manuscript in her computer’s temporary directory, apparently sent three times, followed by twenty chasing emails to check that she had received it.
Scrolling it on screen, Legs read two or three more pages continuing from where she’d left off. They were so good that the back of her neck felt like it was plugged into the National Grid via every individual hair.
Knowing that Gordon had recommended the author in the first place, she seized upon the excuse to make something approaching normal contact, although Gordon’s out-of-office status meant she had to direct these through Kelly: Delia Meare?
Talented writer, but will
flood your inbox if left unloved. Get IT to block her email. Kelly
Done it. Thanks. How is Gordon?
Right here. He sends his best. Keep up the good work. K
It was the most conventional exchange they’d all had in days, and Conrad would no doubt be delighted to find his PA communicating with his top client with such coffee-morning politeness, but it left Legs feeling uneasy and dissatisfied. She sensed Gordon was in retreat. He hadn’t asked about Farcombe or the Protheroes at all. Kelly’s final reply read like a brush off, although with Gordon breathing down her neck, his PA could hardly report back on his mental state.
She started to print out Delia Meare’s manuscript, but, unable to concentrate as she watched the pages shunting out, she found herself wondering what Gordon Lapis thought about the Emperor’s New Clothes when it came to stripping them off seductively in front of her boss and his agent. She sensed he would disapprove enormously. For all Ptolemy and Purple’s flirtation and Gordon’s talk of erotic tension between Julie Ocean and Jimmy Jimee, there was a piety that allowed Gordon his dark, sexy wit and clever tropes without ever being accused of salaciousness.
Ptolemy Finch, despite being immortal, was far too young to get jiggy, and had thus far spent five books building a deep, fierce friendship with coquettish sidekick Purple without so much as a kiss. It wasn’t even entirely clear whether Purple was female or male, but this whirlwind of wit and flirtation could hack any computer and hot-wire any vehicle, metamorphosise into a meerkat, speak any language and channel spirits, occasionally all at the same time. Purple also upheld the ‘Ten Rules to Live By’ that every child was taught at soothsayer school with almost religious fervour. Gordon clearly had high, if eccentric standards, in sidekicks as well as pet-friendly hotel rooms.
Perhaps Gordon was a priest, she wondered suddenly, imagining the media furore to find the great author standing before them in a dog-collar.
Conrad had left her with a mountain of prep work to do for the Farcombe appearance, liaising with half a dozen contacts from Gordon’s publishing house, informally dubbed ‘Team GL’.