chapter031
‘Hat or no hat?’ Elliot said, proffering the sort of knitted beanie he’d been in the first time Edie interviewed him, when she’d inwardly scoffed at his self-importance.
She laughed in recognition. ‘Remember when …’
‘Remember when you called me a big-headed twat, made me remove it, and we got mobbed? Yes. Expect to hear that tale in a speech someday.’
This was pure Elliot: his flirting often hinted at a shared future. Edie tried in vain to fit together the casual adoration, this risk-taking with her expectations, with what Fraser had said. The exact opposite. His brother had prefaced his WhatsApps about Ines to Edie with: He’s not going to bother lying to me, is he? How those words had turned from comfort to poison.
‘No hat,’ Edie said, ruffling his shiny dark hair affectionately, as he stuffed it in his coat pocket. ‘I think it might draw attention indoors at night.’
Approximately fifteen minutes later, she bitterly regretted both the no hat policy and her inability to learn from the past.
‘How fast can you drink?’ Edie whispered, knocking back a quarter of a white wine in one go.
They were in a reasonably lively bar near the hotel, and Edie could feel pennies dropping. It was odd how you developed a sixth sense for it.
The trouble was, Edie thought, Elliot was pleasant to look at. It happened in stages. First, they walked in and existing customers scanned the newcomers merely reflexively. Then eyes settled on the fact that Edie’s male companion was not only handsome but wore that special, indefinable aura of a polished-up, loaded person from another realm.
It wasn’t that Elliot was showy, if you set aside coats that cost four figures. He was just a bit too chiselled and pore-less to be a standard sight in a regional boozer on a Saturday night.
Once he was being inspected for his intrinsic aesthetic appeal, there came the dawning realisation. Didn’t he have dragon-green eyes, at some other time? Wasn’t he in armour? Was his hair a bit longer? Did he possibly wield swords in the direction of computer-generated, fire-breathing magical creatures? Clunk. It’s that guy. You know, the guy from that thing. What? It can’t be. I’m telling you, it is. Look. Isn’t he from round here?
‘We been made?’ Elliot said, managing a deep swig of Estrella.
‘We are in the process of being made, I think,’ Edie said.
Elliot looked over her shoulder at the crowded room beyond. ‘Given the size of the place and the level of pissedness, it might be an idea to cut our losses.’
‘Yeah.’ Edie sighed, having figured as much.
They downed another gulp each and communicated wordlessly: straight to the door.
Edie glanced back as they escaped and could see a group of half a dozen or so by the bar staring in wonder at them, mercifully not waving phones.
They were seconds away from figuring out that the couple leaving their round undrunk was confirmation of their suspicions.
Outside, Elliot pulled his hat on. ‘Is there somewhere quieter?’
‘It’s Saturday night,’ Edie said. ‘Nowhere is, really.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ Elliot said.
‘Don’t be. It’s nice you tried.’
She remembered when they were working on the book and Elliot said something like: people refuse to treat you normally then accuse you of not being normal enough. Right now, she could see why known faces opted for nosebleed expensive private members’ clubs and restaurants with door men.
‘OK, I may have a Plan B,’ Edie said, putting her arm through Elliot’s, as they winced against the chill. ‘It’s crazy but it might just work. It’s the best bad idea I’ve got.’
She chaperoned him to a slightly out of the way pub that no one would choose as a destination. It was a stopgap chain place, one for divorced men to stare listlessly over pints of mild and play the fruities. Its dreariness surely offered a high degree of safety.
Edie’s mistake with the last venue was to choose one with the demographic of clientele to watch fantasy sagas and have Instagram accounts.
As they arrived, Elliot pulled his phone out. ‘Missed call from Lillian. And she messaged me saying she needs to talk ASAP. I’ll tell her I’ll pick it up when I get in? It’s only afternoon, her time.’
‘Want to take it now?’ Edie said. ‘I don’t mind.’
Edie got the round in, and Elliot paced the pavement outside, conducting what looked to be a very involved conversation. She worried in case he was recognised, but the combination of hat, frowning with handset on face, and the fact temperatures were too low for loitering seemed to be protection enough.
She twiddled the stem of her glass and mentally replayed the Fraser quotes for the hundredth time. Why would Elliot tell his brother they wouldn’t last and freely hint at cohabitation and marriage on the horizon to her? Eavesdroppers never hear any good of themselves. Turned out clichés were clichés for good reason.
Elliot eventually swept back in, pulling the hat off as a statement of fuck it. He picked up his pint with gusto. ‘I need that.’
‘Is everything OK?’
Elliot swallowed and fixed her with a look. ‘A gossip site in the US is running the story that I flew back overnight to see you about the Ines story.’
Edie’s mouth fell open. ‘What? How? No one knew about that?!’
‘Yeah. I’m now like does my phone have spyware on it level of cold-sweat spooked,’ Elliot said. ‘I should’ve taken Lillian seriously earlier.’
‘The only people who knew about that were me, you, Fraser, Nick, and Hannah?’
‘And my agent, because he had to know why I was pissing everyone off by pushing a table read back by a day. He told no one in the production the details, only family emergency. So yeah. Six people that I can identify.’
‘Is it worth me stressing again that I’d never do that to you?’ Edie said.
Elliot leaned over and held her face. ‘Soft arse. Of course you fuckin’ wouldn’t.’
‘Never mind doing it to you, this isn’t a story I want shared either,’ Edie said sorrowfully, and Elliot dipped his gaze and murmured: ‘Sorry.’
‘… Anyway, Lillian has moved to a war footing and completely rejects any tech interference speculation from me. “Elliot, I believe in Occam’s razor, and it does not tell me end-to-end encryption on WhatsApp has been hacked. We’re not looking for Julian Assange. This is human fallibility, and it’s someone close to you, with fewer scruples than you thought. We’ve opened the jar labelled hard pills to swallow.”’
‘That’s a very good impression.’
‘Thanks, I’m an actor.’
He smiled, and Edie felt fluttery. Even in minor crisis, it was nice to notice they were still very much on a date.
‘She pointed out the faster I figure it out, the better for everyone. But, how?’
‘I’ll check with Nick and Hannah about who they told, but they’re so unlikely to have passed it on to anyone, let alone to someone who’d do this.’
‘You didn’t tell anyone else?’ Elliot asked. ‘I’m not saying you couldn’t. As Lillian says, these conversations are being forced on us now.’
‘No one,’ Edie said, recalling her seconds-long madness nearly disclosing it to Declan, deeply grateful she’d thought better of it. ‘Not even my sister, given her interest level in my love life can be summed up as “barf”.’
Elliot sipped his pint and shook his head. ‘I’m going to say it, because otherwise it hangs there as A Big Unsaid. Fraser’s always been completely military drill on not telling people what I’m up to. He’s beyond reproach. What’s changed is that he’s madly in love with Molly, about to make her part of the family. Naturally, he’s telling his fiancée absolutely everything. She’s got to be involved somehow. It’s the only explanation I can think of. I’m going to have to cut Fraser out of the loop for a while and see if that fixes it, but I hate doing it. What a horrible fucking bind.’
‘Yeah,’ Edie said. ‘It’s awful. Fraser’s devoted to you. You don’t know that it’s Molly.’
Edie’s vanishingly brief encounter with Molly told her she was sweet and guileless. Yet Edie had missed the nature of Jack Marshall, not so long ago. Also, Molly might be – even unwittingly – doing the bidding of another, if her family were mercenary about Elliot.
‘Lillian had a worse idea that I don’t currently have the stomach for.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Telling Fraser alone something untrue and seeing if it filters through.’
‘Fuuuuuuck,’ Edie said, eyes wide. ‘Like Coleen Rooney with Rebekah Vardy.’
‘Well, exactly. I’m not treating my brother as an enemy combatant. I’m not testing him. Imagine if he found out I’d done that? Imagine the betrayal?’
Edie shook her head and put her hand on his arm.
‘It gets worse when you reason it out,’ Elliot said. ‘If through this news blackout I have some sort of evidence his fiancée is likely selling me out, where will that leave me and Fraz? Molly will carry on denying it, because of course you would. Journalists won’t reveal their sources. So I’d be asking Fraser to choose who he believed and that very quickly becomes choosing between us, full stop. What would I do if he came to me and said, “Edie has done this terrible thing, here’s reasonable standard proof. It’s me or her.” Yet you denied it?’
Edie nodded, hoping this was rhetorical.
‘I know what I’d do. I’d choose you.’
Elliot said this in a throwaway manner, as if it wasn’t one of the most profound statements he’d made since they met. If this was a temporary insanity, fuelled by oxytocin, he was writing some large cheques off the back of it. They were sufficiently leveraged to be heading for the 2008 crash.
Edie gulped. ‘Really?’
‘Yes,’ Elliot said. ‘Except if the bad thing was raging infidelity, then you’d have some ground to make up, little lady.’ He sighed. ‘How can I expect Fraser to be any different?’
Edie absorbed the seismic nature of that declaration. The pub’s music system thundered with INXS’s ‘Never Tear Us Apart’, and Edie felt completely bewitched. Bewitched and bewildered.
You don’t think it will last.