A Passionate Love Affair with a Total Stranger

by Lucy Robinson

  I am calm six-foot woman, I told myself. Not angry six-foot woman. I will not give her what she wants. (Ness had once sat me down and told me that the only thing scarier than a six-foot woman was an angry six-foot woman.)

  As if she were reading my mind, Margot took it to the next level, leaning back in her chair with all the expansive ease of a CEO. ‘I wonder if you should be assessed by one of our doctors before you make any firm arrangements to come back.’

  I took a deep breath. ‘Margot, I’ve been keeping abreast of things and it’s obvious that you’ve done an excellent job laying down foundations for the Simitol launch. Seriously –’ I gritted my teeth ‘– I’m so impressed that you’ve won over the health minister and made such brilliant progress with the patient groups. But in two weeks we go public with the biggest brand launch in twenty years and the government and ABPI are going to be all over our every move. It’s absolutely essential that I personally manage that process.’

  ‘I couldn’t agree more,’ said a voice from the doorway behind me.

  I froze. Oh, please, no.

  John was meant to be in Paris at a conference set up by one of our competitors, who had a significant drug in phase three: I’d timed today’s meeting especially to coincide with his absence. Of course I accepted I’d have to deal with him at some point, but I also knew that today was not the day. But there he was. All six foot four of him, suited, booted and beaming, still tanned from his honeymoon at that stupid winery in California with a stupid gold wedding ring on his finger. Stupid, stupid, stupid. And yet more impossibly handsome than ever.

  I tried to stand up, but he bent down to kiss my cheek instead, saying it was nice to see me. I was so thrown by the situation that I could barely hear him, but I came to rapidly as he slid a hand discreetly along the curve of my neck. It lingered there for a split second before he straightened. I glanced round furtively but neither Margot nor Carly appeared to have noticed.

  The dog. The flirty, dirty dog. Touching my neck with his wedding-ring hand?

  And then I realized something very strange was happening. My neck was not tingling where he’d touched me. Well, not much. My privates were definitely not on fire. And actually, as the shock of unexpectedly seeing him wore off, I felt really quite calm.

  Eh?

  ‘Well, then, Charley!’ he said. He only called me Lambert in private. ‘How’s the star of the company? Ready to take the helm on Monday?’

  I nodded, noting that Margot looked furious.

  John, meanwhile, was watching me keenly. ‘Are you going to be OK, my dear?’ he asked, in a more human voice. ‘It won’t be too much?’

  ‘Course not,’ I replied brightly. ‘Margot can start emailing stuff today so I’ll be up to speed.’

  Why wasn’t his compassion turning me to squelch?

  John, perhaps wondering the same, squatted on his haunches and brazenly took my hand. I sensed Margot’s frontal cortex exploding with envy and suspicion. ‘Are you sure, Lambert?’ he murmured quietly. ‘Your health is far more important to me than Simitol.’

  For a man as driven by his business as John, this was a fairly dubious claim. And yet, looking at his face, I got the impression that he was being absolutely straight. ‘Of course I’m sure!’ I said brightly, withdrawing my fingers. I actually didn’t want him holding my hand! This was extraordinary. I wasn’t falling apart and I wasn’t hatching some deluded campaign to steal him back from Susan Faulkner. That’s because you’re busy trying to destroy Shelley Cartwright’s stab at happiness instead, my head informed me. What a nice girl you are, Charley Lambert! Why bother looking for a man of your own when you could steal someone else’s?

  John smiled, his eyes boring into mine. I smiled politely back at him and put my BlackBerry into my bag. ‘Good to see you, Charley,’ he said, after a pause.

  Twenty minutes later, sitting in the back of a taxi on the A1, I tried to make sense of this. Was this thing with William the doctor – William the total stranger to whom I had no entitlement whatsoever – really enough to end seven years of unadulterated obsession with John MacAllister?

  I thought about William and the way he had just effortlessly tunnelled inside my mind. He’d already been to places John had never got close to. I felt more confused than ever. Surely this was how you were meant to feel when you’d been with someone for a while and started to fall in love.

  ‘STOP IT,’ I shouted at myself, as the taxi pulled up outside my flat. ‘THIS IS NOT LOVE.’ I paid the bewildered driver and prepared to haul myself up the stairs, determined to take some positive action.

  Failing to come up with a plan of positive action, I decided to call Hailey instead.

  ‘Banqueting, good afternoon?’

  ‘Hailey …’

  ‘Hello, Charleypops! Please don’t tell me you’re calling to talk about the Internet doctor.’

  ‘Um … I’m calling to talk about the Internet doctor.’ I leaned against the kitchen sink so I could look out of the window without the aid of crutches.

  I heard Hailey pull the phone round the corner into the chefs’ locker room. ‘Chas,’ she said. ‘We’ve talked about this. He’s not yours to obsess over, my love.’

  ‘I know. But I saw John today and I felt nothing. All I could think about was how much William seems to understand me.’

  ‘He doesn’t understand you, Chas. He doesn’t even know your name. When he thinks about you, he’s visualizing some bird called Shelley. He’s going on a date with her.’ She sounded tired.

  ‘Sorry, Hails. I’m really pissing you off now, aren’t I?’ I bit my lip, staring distractedly out of the window. Brightly coloured tankers cruised into Newhaven, calmly unaware of my romantic turmoil.

  ‘No, my love, it’s just … I just think you’re in a fantasy world. If you’re over John that’s great but you can’t really attribute that to this imaginary affair. Has Shelley seen the emails yet?’

  ‘No. She hasn’t even asked for them. She just doesn’t care. She wants me to do all the dirty work so she can turn up and decide if William’s good enough. He isn’t right for her, Hailey! He’s right for me!’

  ‘So what are you going to do? Fly to London and spy on their date?’

  Now there was an idea. ‘Dunno,’ I mumbled.

  Hailey sighed, exasperated. ‘Look, I can’t stay on. But I’m telling you once and for all that this has to stop. It’s immoral, it’s selfish and it’s insane. Understood?’

  ‘Murgh.’ I ended the call and looked at William’s picture on my laptop one more time. She was right: I was going to have to let him go. It was immoral, it was selfish and it was insane.

  But as I looked at him, all handsome with his jumper and manly stubble, a bubble floated up the screen telling me I had a new message. Immoral, selfish and insane, I thought, throwing myself across the room without crutches and opening the message as quickly as I could.

  Dearest Shelley. (Dearest? Too old-fashioned? Oh, never mind.)It’s lunchtime and I’ve been thinking about you all morning. This is mad! I’ve decided to take up a load of hobbies to keep my mind busy until I meet you. Current favourites: poetry writing and harpsichord lessons.

  I took myself out for dinner last night after my shift finished and imagined you sitting opposite me. You were tall and even prettier than you are in your photo. You arrived without glasses because you thought you looked better without them, but then you had to put them on to read the menu. I thought you looked lovely with them on. And off. I made an inappropriate joke about sodomy and then went bright red. You pretended to have a tiny little feminine appetite and then gnawed your way through a gigantic rump steak in ten minutes.

  I watched you eat and wanted to stretch my hand out and hold yours. I didn’t, though. I was being manly. But then you caught me looking at you and took my hand.

  Then my real-life burger arrived and I stopped mooning over an imaginary woman.

  I’ve bloked up now. Fuck harpsichords and poetry. I’m going to go and pump
iron and watch football and drink lager. Maybe beat someone up. A patient, ideally.

  How about a place called Polpo for our date? It’s sort of Italian tapas, if such a thing could exist. Always noisy so if we don’t get on we won’t be sitting in silence. 7.30 p.m.? Surely you’ve finished work by then? If you haven’t, make an exception.

  X

  I read the message three times, an uncontrollable grin stretching across my face. I wanted to be sitting across the table from William, eating Italian things and giggling as he made tasteless jokes about sodomy. I wanted to reach over and take his hand just like he’d imagined. I wanted this more than was healthy.

  Was this Internet love? No way. It was bigger than that. Real love? ‘Shhh,’ I told myself, alarmed. But then I realized it didn’t matter what it was. All I knew was that William was the most wonderful and brilliant man I’d ever met. And that I was going to have to disobey Hailey and find some way of getting him into my life.

  Shortly after I’d sent a reply, Sam crashed through the front door with a face of thunder. No, worse than thunder. It was pure, sooty blackness. I slammed my laptop shut so he couldn’t see what was going on but I needn’t have bothered: he didn’t even look in my direction. Instead he stormed over to the cupboard and took out a loaf of bread and the Nutella jar.

  ‘Oh dear,’ I said. ‘What’s happened, Bowes?’

  He ignored me, shoving two slices of bread angrily into the toaster.

  ‘Sam? What’s wrong?’

  ‘Yvonne,’ he muttered.

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘It’s over,’ he said, abandoning the toast and marching off into his room. The door slammed behind him. I stared at it, open-mouthed.

  Two seconds later, he wrenched his door open, marched back to the counter, grabbed the loaf, the Nutella and a knife, and took them with him. The door slammed again.

  I was more shocked even than when they’d got engaged. Sam and Yvonne were … They were lovely! Delightful! Happy! How could this have happened?

  This, Charlotte Lambert, is why you’re far better off helping other people start relationships than trying to have one yourself, I thought, dazed. ‘Fucking hell,’ I said to the empty room. No one replied, but Sam’s toast popped up forlornly.

  Love is a nightmare, I thought. Change of plan. Stop emailing William. Walk away before this ends in a miserable mess too.

  A great sadness welled up in me. Letting go was the right thing to do: nothing about the situation was healthy. William was due to meet Shelley in five days, the ball was now rolling and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Apart from anything else, I couldn’t take another moment more of the bipolar it’s on/it’s off thoughts flying around my head.

  There was no argument. I had to let go of William. And that absolutely sucked.

  After a few seconds, I limped purposefully to Sam’s cupboard, removed from it a loaf, his spare jar of Nutella, then took a knife out of the drawer and went to my own bedroom.

  The door slammed behind me.

  Margot marched out of my office in a vulva-skimming skirt, her inappropriate suede high heels stalking across the communications office with angry precision. She had always worn strange clothes but in my absence her wardrobe appeared to have undergone a metamorphosis from strange to plain old slutty. I wondered vaguely if it was an attempt to attract John, but doubted it. Margot didn’t like John any more than she liked me. Or anyone else who was senior to her, for that matter.

  This was going to be even harder than I’d thought. Margot had reorganized our entire system and was keeping any remotely important information close to her chest. Anything that would help me to do my job remained a mystery. But any information that was irrelevant or would annoy me was readily accessible.

  ‘What about Suki Gilpin from the Mail?’ I had asked her a few minutes earlier. ‘She must have had something to say.’ All of the papers had found out about Simitol and, inevitably, a few were trying to stir up trouble. Or, at least, a ‘provocative angle’. Suki Gilpin was normally the worst for this.

  ‘She called, yes,’ Margot replied. Her face, which was curiously seahorsy, was closed.

  ‘And? She needs careful managing.’

  ‘And I dealt with it.’ Margot sniffed.

  ‘OK. Can you email me a written update of how they’ve all responded so far?’ I said. ‘I need to know what’s coming my way.’

  ‘I really don’t have time to write update emails, Charley. I’m extremely busy.’

  ‘With what? This is what I need to know, Margot. I haven’t come back to drink tea and read Vogue.’

  Margot rolled her eyes and consulted her watch. ‘Charley, I’m sorry but I just don’t have time to walk you through my in-tray right now. I’ll try to find some time for you later, OK? Now, please excuse me, I’ve got a call to make.’

  And off she marched.

  I felt overwhelmed. Over the three months I’d been away I’d forgotten quite how demanding my job was, and indeed how crazed Margot was about status. In the coming weeks I couldn’t afford to put a foot wrong and the weight of this responsibility, combined with Margot’s complete refusal to hand my job back, was grim.

  I tapped my fingers nervously, thinking about her recent trip to the Salutech HQ in Washington when she’d had the great pleasure of telling them how successfully she’d lobbied MPs in my absence. Even though she was refusing to tell me anything I needed to know about the trip, she’d had no problem telling me how much she’d impressed the board of directors. Apparently Bradley Chambers – vice president of Salutech Global and my most senior boss, generally found groping and leering at me when he was in Europe – had been stunned by her all-round amazingness. ‘He didn’t get my name wrong once,’ Margot observed casually. Even though Bradley Chambers never missed an opportunity to sit too close to me in meetings, he’d always called me Sharon.

  I turned wearily back to my computer screen where my messenger was glowing orange with an IM from John.

  MacAllister, John: Morning Lambert. Margot behaving herself?

  It was like the old days – a familiar and slightly inappropriate comment that put us in a flirty little club for two. And yet I felt none of my old pant-wetting enthusiasm.

  Lambert, Charlotte: No.

  MacAllister, John: Need any help?

  Lambert, Charlotte: No. I’ll sort it out.

  MacAllister, John: This isn’t very professional but I thought it would cheer you up … Becky my PA saw Margot on a date with a man two foot shorter than her the other night.

  I snorted, then found myself laughing.

  Lambert, Charlotte: You’re right. It has cheered me up. See you later for catch-up.

  MacAllister, John: Can we do it over lunch? Would be good to have some one-on-one Lambert time. Weren’t we due a meal at the Tower?

  Lambert, Charlotte: Sadly I don’t have time to go into town … Next week maybe. Oh, no, we’re launching the biggest drug in the world. Maybe 2016?

  MacAllister, John: Hmmm. BTW, I’ve had to cancel my meeting with Arthur Holford in London on Wednesday. Can you cover? 11 a.m., his offices in Marble Arch.

  Lambert, Charlotte: Yes.

  MacAllister, John: That’s my girl. You and me: dinner later this week. No arguments.

  I was confused. This was sublimely weird. I just wasn’t bothered. What on earth was wrong with me?

  You’ve fallen in some sort of love with William, came the reply. You think about him approximately every thirty seconds and are dying inside at the thought of him meeting Shelley. But meet him she will, for he is not yours, Charlotte Lambert. On Wednesday night she will grope his testicles in a businesslike manner under a table in Polpo and you will lose him for ever. It is this tortuous thought that has reduced your interest in John MacAllister to almost nil. You loser! One fantasy after another! Never a real man! Never a real romance! Loser!

  Then I stopped short. Wednesday! I was going to be in London on Wednesday with work! Date day! That meant I coul
d …

  I could what?

  I put my head into my hands and slumped over my desk. Being inside my mind was exhausting and embarrassing. What was wrong with me? Wearily I looked up at the clock to see if the day was nearly over.

  It was not. It was eleven fifty-five a.m. and I’d only been there for four hours. But already I was considering abseiling off the fire escape. Trying to breathe deeply, I leaned forward to smell the bunch of flowers Ness had had delivered this morning. ‘Take it easy!’ her little recycled-cardboard notelet said. Fat chance of doing anything else, with Margot refusing to give my job back and me immobilized by fear, exhaustion and obsession with some doctor I’d never met.

  I took another deep breath and picked up the phone. I’d call Alan Vicary at the Guardian. He had always been my first call back in the days when we’d been able to publicize our drugs. A nice, calm man with tufty ears who had once bought me a cigar to cheer me up after I’d been mauled in a press briefing. Our relationship with the press had had to change a lot over recent years but I still worked with him when I could.

  ‘Alan Vicary.’

  ‘Alan! It’s Charley Lambert from Salutech. How are you?’

  ‘Charley! How’re all those fractures? Leg full of metal pins? We’ve all been thinking about you!’

  This, of course, was a lie, but it was probably the first question today to which I knew the answer. ‘Metal pins still there but I’m out of plaster and hobbling around,’ I said. ‘Could be worse.’

  ‘Great! So, I hear the HIV miracle you’ve been working on all these years is about to arrive in the chemists.’

  ‘Two weeks,’ I said. ‘And because of what it is I think we both know there’s going to be a storm. So I wanted to let you know you can go back to calling my mobile twenty-four/seven if you need a comment or a scientist interview … Patient group, key opinion leader – anything, anyone, Alan. I’ll sort it.’