You Belong With Me

chapter054

Much as Fraser and Molly’s wedding being precipitous had been a talking point from the start, Edie still couldn’t quite believe how fast it arrived. There was getting on with it – then there was this.

‘Nice day for it,’ said Edie’s driver, as he punched the postcode into the satnav. Edie had gamely resisted the Elliot Owen trappings, but she’d started to get used to the chauffeuring.

Inevitably, the hotel was the variety to have wrought-iron gates and an ‘approach’. Inside, everything was soft carpets, thickly lined curtains, and framed prints of noteworthy historic animals. It was sufficiently large that Edie encountered no others from the wedding party as she checked in – or not ones she recognised.

She made at herself at home in the room, getting ready in leisurely fashion, and wondered at the practicality of roll-top baths in front of uncovered windows – especially if strangers were keen to take photographs of you.

‘Fuuuuuck, the traffic was a bastard,’ Elliot said, crashing in at midday, pulling headphones from his neck. ‘Hi, you OK? I can’t stop, I need to get in that shower …’ He stopped. ‘Wow. You look amazing.’

‘I don’t look like I’m going to a funeral?’ Edie said. She had teamed the Vampire’s Wife with a birdcage mesh veil, attached to a thin band, which covered her eyes.

‘If so, even if it was my wife in the coffin, I’d be all over you at the wake,’ Elliot said. ‘My clothes arrived?’

Edie pointed at the suit bag on the wardrobe. ‘Magic. Right, sorry for neglecting you, but – hygiene …’

He disappeared into the bathroom to the sounds of running water and emerged shortly afterwards, clad only in boxers, looking like he should be filmed in sepia and scored by a retro torch song. Edie was a girlfriend and not a common or garden voyeur fan, yet sometimes she felt like both.

She’d never divulged that when she was particularly missing Elliot, she looked up a famous, PG-13 scene on YouTube in Blood Gold. His weeping servant wench love, Malleflead, tenderly sponged his battle-brutalised body by candlelight, then matters developed. It was Prince Wulfroarer’s heavy burden to still inflame ladies’ loins when requiring first aid.

(Meg walked in once and said: ‘Eww, and why’s she clambering on top of him if he’s that fucked up?’

‘Why do you think?’

‘If I was Elliot I’d shout, “get off me you mad bitch.” Maybe he saves that for you, hahaha.’

Edie turned it off and said: ‘Wank ruined,’ to screaming from her sister.)

‘Oh God, I feel like I’ve been kicked from the back of a Bedford van at sixty miles an hour. I’ll wait for the adrenaline proper to gush through my veins and put me back in the room. Probably better that than alcohol,’ Elliot said.

His suit was narrow black pinstripe, with pale pink tie, white shirt, brown and white dress shoes.

‘Not sure about it, are you?’ he whispered, holding it up against his chest. ‘Am I trying to run 1920s Chicago with an iron fist?’

‘You look good in anything,’ Edie said, rolling her eyes.

‘Even with my Beetlejuice complexion?’

‘Even as a dead miscreant jester.’

Elliot sat down to pull the trousers on, then shrugged the shirt on and buttoned it. ‘Wait, where’s my flower thingy?’

‘Over there.’ Edie indicated a writing desk in the bay window. ‘With your tie and cufflinks.’

‘Oh, thanks.’

He carried on scurrying around, piecing immaculate Best Man together, while Edie investigated the cable channels on a television in a wooden box. It was a pleasant gender reversal to have the man finicking over his appearance and Edie ready and at a loose end.

‘The Pepsi account, by the way,’ Elliot called from the bathroom. ‘Any news?’

‘Oh my God! I meant to tell you! We got it!’

‘Edie, amazing!’

He put his face round the door so he could exchange a smile with her: ‘When you talked me through it, I felt sure you would. Brilliant.’

‘Thank you.’

Edie wiggled her heels in satisfaction on the quilt: satin black Mary Jane courts with a glitzy buckle. They gave her a pleasing undulation when she walked, an extra inch and a half in height, and despite the gel insoles, would no doubt cripple her later.

Hard not to think of the last time she was dolled-up for an occasion like this. Thank God she was so far away from it, in so many ways.

When Elliot emerged, mid-toothbrushing, Edie was supine, feeling self-congratulatory.

‘By the way, did Declan say anything amorous, on your trip to London?’

‘Er. Sort of,’ Edie said as an empty, embarrassed reflex.

Thinking about how to broach what had gone on there with Elliot – and whether to broach it at all – was an ongoing internal debate. Declan appearing to insult her to deflect others from realising he had feelings for her was something Elliot had done, once. This echo made her even more sympathetic towards Declan’s predicament, yet that similarity was likely to make it worse from Elliot’s point of view.

But she knew she couldn’t lie to Elliot now he’d asked and amend it later. It would break fundamental things between them if she did.

‘Something was said? What happened to promising to tell me?’

‘I wasn’t sure if it qualified.’

‘Did he say he had feelings?’

‘… Yes.’

‘Then why wouldn’t it qualify?’

‘He didn’t mean to tell me. I saw a message from his sister that I wasn’t meant to.’

Elliot looked quite shellshocked. ‘In other words, you were respecting his confidence instead of keeping your promise to me. There’s that adrenaline I ordered.’

‘No! It wasn’t that at all …’ Edie started.

She berated herself for not foreseeing it could come out like this. She didn’t think in the melee of Fraser and Molly tying the knot, Elliot would spend a second on it. She’d not considered the way this issue uniquely troubled him.

‘He didn’t intend me to see anything …’

‘Sounds familiar. Hang on …’ Elliot ran off to rinse and spit and returned without the toothbrush.

Edie sat up straighter.

‘Yes?’ Elliot said, arms folded.

‘… I accidentally saw a message from his sister that made it look like he’d been misspeaking me.’ Edie edited out misspeaking Elliot, as it would add nothing other than even higher blood pressure. ‘I saw his phone on the train … He was forced into correcting it by admitting he likes me.’

‘“Forced”? I refer you to my point: not trying hard enough to hide it.’

‘Well, he stressed he’d never do anything about it. He was mortified.’

Elliot stood, staring, as he took this in. ‘I need the actual wording for “likes me”.’

‘He said he adored me.’

There were several beats of silence before Elliot spoke. ‘You weren’t going to tell me, were you?’

‘Yes, I was. Just not today,’ Edie said, with conviction. ‘I promised you I would. I was finding the right time, and I didn’t think this was it. Well done for being entirely correct about it all,’ Edie continued. ‘Safe to say, I feel a right twat.’

‘It’s not a victorious feeling. I’m now worrying about how much I was right about. I don’t want to be right twice.’

‘What do you mean? You don’t trust me?’ Edie said.

‘I do trust you. I know when the day comes that you have to speak to me, you won’t have done anything, and you’ll still hate yourself.’

‘Have to speak to you about what?’

Elliot picked up his tie and started putting it on. He stopped and said: ‘It’s not working, is it? One of us has to say so.’

‘What isn’t working?’

‘Us.’

‘It is working?’ Edie said, shocked. She could already hear her voice sounding unnatural.

‘Whenever we’re alone, it works. It couldn’t be better. Then we go back to daily life, and the rolling shitshow resumes. This is the latest episode. I don’t know what to do about someone competing with me when I’m not there most of the time.’

‘You don’t have to do anything?’ Edie said. ‘I sorted it.’

‘I don’t ever want you to stay with me in order to keep your word,’ Elliot said.

‘I’m not!’

‘Nor do I want you to feel you have the responsibility of saving me from the life I chose.’

‘Why are you saying these ominous things?!’

An inner voice piped up: wakey wakey,sounds likeyou are being dumped, and she could not begin to comprehend it.

‘Not passing that on about Declan has forced me to confront this.’

‘I was waiting to discuss it with you face to face!’

‘Now we’re face to face, and I had to drag it out of you.’

‘It’s an hour before your brother’s wedding!’ Edie whisper-hissed.

If Elliot needed a gesture of commitment to get past this crisis of faith, it was definitely time.

‘If you think this isn’t working as things stand, I could move to New York,’ Edie said.

There was an ugly, strained pause before Elliot replied: ‘I don’t want you to.’

Time stopped. They were words Edie realised she’d spent their whole time together fearing she’d hear.

‘You don’t?’ she said. It was like he’d kicked her in the stomach.

‘I don’t want to take you away from your dad, your sister, Nick and Hannah. A job you enjoy and that you’re great at. A life that’s right for you and makes you happy. For what – to sit alone in an apartment, waiting for me to get back late from a very long day? Me keeping you like some kind of pedigree house cat through my own entitled inability to recognise or accept what’s best for you, not best for me? The guilt would kill me. And probably kill us.’

They were doing this again, with roles reversed? Now that she was all in: heart, body, and soul? Edie was light-headed.

Elliot couching it in concern for her made it deadeningly real – like management going into HR-friendly speak about what a great effort you’d made in your time at the company, and they’d truly appreciated it, because the decision had been taken and the ink was dry.

‘You’re now saying that this is impossible?’ Edie asked. ‘The distance? That you knew about on Christmas Day?’

‘It’s not only distance, it’s context. I didn’t know Your Table was the highlight of my career, and how it would feel that so many people’s jobs would depend on me keeping it. I didn’t fully appreciate how much I was asking you to give up in England until I spent time with you there. All I could think about was how much I wanted you back. It was selfish.’

‘Loving someone that much isn’t selfish,’ Edie said.

‘Actually, I’ve found out it can be.’

‘I wasn’t a princess in a tower and you a knight climbing up to rescue me, you know,’ Edie said. ‘If you don’t think what we have is worth the trouble any more, then you have to say as much. Don’t do this patronising what’s best for you stuff, because I know what’s best for me, and it’s you.’

There was a perilous dead quiet where Edie feared he would take her up on this. She was bluffing; his thinking was clearly somewhere else.

From the first time they separated, Edie had been anticipating and avoiding this very showdown. He’d awakened from the desire stupor, the thrill expired, and he thought: God this is a lot of work.

Don’t try to outrun your destiny: it would come and find you after you’d peeled the price stickers off new shoes in a country house hotel in Suffolk.

Soon, they’d need to have their happiest faces ready for hours on end. They shouldn’t be doing this now, but unfortunately, they were.

‘I’m not patronising you. I’m admitting that I’m trying to be somebody to you that I can’t be,’ Elliot said. ‘I’m trying to have something with you that I can’t have.’

‘You can only have – what, a geographically mobile, rich, famous girlfriend? Would’ve been better for me if you’d worked that preference out a lot faster. Even the newspapers have been telling you I was the wrong fit for you.’

‘Fuck’s sake, Edie, that’s low. That’s not what I mean, and don’t pretend to think it’s what I mean, given it’s a character assassination.’

‘If this isn’t working, who can you have, then?’

Edie wasn’t at all sure this was her wisest or logical line of attack – how will Elliot Owen ever find another suitable female companion? – but she was panicking and floundering.

Had he and Ines got closer still? Enough to make him daydream about something different? It was so painful that Edie couldn’t even contemplate it.

‘What’s the other conclusion from you saying my being normal and your lifestyle don’t mix?’ Edie said.

‘Normal?’ Elliot said, and there was the handbrake release sensation of a proper, no holds barred fight breaking out.‘You know what, I have never, not once, raised my job up at you as if it means I automatically deserve you or as if I have the upper hand. Yet you’ve thrown it at me endlessly – it always comes back to how I hold all the cards, how I can’t possibly find anything as hard as you do.’

‘I’m trying to work out how we got from a man I work with hit on me to let’s not bother with this ruinously important love affair I persuaded you into, after all? Am I being punished for something somebody else did? Do you know how much Buddhist calm I’ve had to find about a co-star you’ve very literally got off with?’

‘It’s not a competition.’

‘What is this, then? Tell me.’

Elliot simply glowered.

There were many connections to be made, but Edie had no time to make them. She’d been careless in her management of this situation with Declan and was confronting the terrifying possibility she had awoken to its damage too late.

Unless, even worse: Declan was the excuse, not the reason.