Chapter 33
Shirley, the woman I’m here to meet, is waiting in reception. ‘Tori,’ she says warmly, extending her hand as I approach. ‘Thank you so much for sparing the time to see me.’
‘Always a pleasure, Shirley,’ I tell her, pleased by my ability to switch into professional mode. My personal life may be a mess, but at least I’m still good at this.
‘I’ve booked us one of the guest meeting rooms,’ she explains as she leads me across the lobby. ‘It saves us from having to get you a security pass and all the other nonsense. Sorry, I’m forgetting my manners. Do you want a coffee or anything before we start?’
‘I’m fine, thanks, Shirley. I had one on the way over.’
‘Excellent.’ She holds her pass against a pad, and the meeting room door unlocks with a beep and a soft click.
The room itself is typical of its type. There’s a table in the middle with rather ugly grey plastic and chrome chairs around it that probably cost a fortune, and a massive TV screen at one end.
We sit down opposite each other, and I pull out my notepad.
‘So, the reason I asked you to come in, rather than just chatting to you over the phone, is that we’re in a very exciting position,’ she tells me. ‘We’re expanding, and there are a number of roles we’ll be opening up that I think you will be able to help us with.’
For the first time in what feels like forever, I’m actually in a good mood as I leave a little over an hour later.
Shirley’s given me the details of six positions that they’re going to be looking to fill, and my mind is already coming up with some possible candidates as I make my way towards the underground.
This is what I need to help put Gabriel behind me, I decide.
Stop moping and focus on my work. Oh, and project Ro-Ro, of course.
Priya and I both agree that the first meeting between Rosie and Robert was a tentative success, but they might need a bit more of a push.
Maybe we should organise another evening at the weekend.
My head is full of all this as I walk into the office shortly after eleven, so it takes me a moment to notice that both Lily and Sonya are looking at me strangely.
‘What?’ I ask, automatically feeling around my mouth in case there are any crumbs lurking from the Danish pastry I ate on the way over.
‘There’s someone here to see you,’ Lily says carefully. ‘We’ve, umm, put him in the meeting room.’
‘Who is it?’ I’m wracking my brains now, trying to work out if I’ve inadvertently double-booked myself. I’d be the first to admit that I haven’t been bringing my A-game over the last few weeks, so it’s entirely possible, although I’d like to hope I’m still capable of being more organised than that.
Lily glances at Sonya, who almost imperceptibly shakes her head. ‘It’s probably best if you see for yourself,’ Sonya says.
‘I need to get the details of these new positions onto the system while they’re still fresh in my mind,’ I tell them. ‘Can’t one of you deal with it?’
‘He asked for you specifically,’ Lily replies.
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake,’ I growl. ‘It had better not be Trevor whatsisname, come to badger me again about why I haven’t found him a position yet, I’m not in the mood.’
‘It’s not Trevor,’ Lily tells me. ‘Just go and look, will you?’
I sigh. ‘Let me get my coat off and grab myself a coffee.’ I plonk my bag down on my desk and head for the kitchen.
‘Never mind the coffee,’ Lily calls after me. ‘I’ll bring you one in a minute.’
‘What the hell is the urgency?’ I ask.
‘It’s not urgent, as such,’ Lily replies. ‘It’s just that he’s been here for a while and it’s probably a good idea not to keep him waiting too much longer.’
I’m still trying to work out which of my clients has come to hassle me as I open the door to the meeting room, so it takes me a moment to properly register the person who is getting to his feet to greet me. When I do, my mouth opens in shock.
‘Gabriel,’ I say, once I’ve recovered the power of speech. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I’ve come to see you,’ he says simply.
‘Why?’
‘Because I have a number of questions I want to ask you. Don’t worry, I’m not going to make a scene.’
‘I think, if anyone around here is going to make a scene, it should be me,’ I tell him coldly. Now that I’ve recovered from the initial shock, I can feel the fury starting to course through my veins.
Gabriel looks nonplussed. ‘Sorry, I’m not following. Are you angry with me?’
‘Oh, no,’ I say sarcastically. ‘What on earth have I got to be angry with you about? I mean, besides completely blindsiding me and dumping me with no more care than you’d give a used teabag.’
‘Look,’ he says. ‘If this is about the way Harvey spoke to you at the airport—’
‘Are you for real?’ I’m aware that my voice is getting louder and I force myself to bring it down a notch or two.
This is not a conversation that needs to be overheard.
‘Yes, I was horrified by the way Harvey treated me, as if I was some kind of toy you’d grown out of, but I was more surprised when you didn’t stand up for me at all. ’
‘I did, remember? He would have just bundled you into a taxi.’
‘Oh, well done, Gabriel. Give yourself a gold star for going two minutes out of your way to drop off the suddenly inconvenient woman.’
‘I should have stood up to him, I know, but I was on the back foot. When he suggested a warm-up concert in Jamaica before we went to the US, I never realised that he was going to go the whole hog with sponsors and so on. I did try to make it up to you though, with the car and everything. I was going to apologise at the after-concert party, but then you never showed up.’
‘Of course I never showed up! You specifically asked me not to show up in your shitty, cowardly, “thanks for everything, now fuck off” letter. Do you even have the first idea how humiliated that made me feel?’
He stares at me blankly. ‘What letter? I never wrote you a letter.’
‘Well, I can assure you it wasn’t from my fucking fairy godmother,’ I snap. ‘I mean, I’ve never had a letter from her, but I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t sign it with your name.’
He continues to stare at me for a moment before his eyes narrow. ‘Have you still got this letter?’ he asks.
‘Oh, yeah,’ I say, my voice dripping with sarcasm. I don’t think even Stuart’s lies made me this angry. ‘I keep it under my pillow and kiss it goodnight when I go to bed. What do you think? Do you keep letters where people make you feel like something they stepped in?’
‘I promise you, Tori, that I did not write you any letters. What, exactly, did it say?’
‘I don’t remember it verbatim,’ I tell him. ‘But it was pretty standard dumping fodder. You know, “I’ve had lots of fun but now it’s time for me to go back to my real life. Thanks for everything and good luck with your future.” That was basically the gist of it.’
To my surprise, his expression hardens even further. ‘And you didn’t question, for a moment, whether this letter was genuine?’
Now I’m the one looking confused. ‘Why would I? Who else would send it?’
‘Let me ask you a question, Tori, and think very carefully before you answer. Do you honestly think I’m the kind of person who would behave like that? After everything we shared?’
I sigh as I pull out a chair and sink into it, the anger draining out of me and being replaced by confusion.
‘I don’t know, Gabriel. I thought you were this wonderful person, but then Harvey arrived and you just seemed to morph into someone completely different.
The letter fitted pretty well with Airport Gabriel. ’
He sits back down as well and closes his eyes for a moment. I’m completely unable to process what’s happening here, so I just wait quietly for him to say something else.
‘Why are you here, Gabriel?’ I ask eventually, when the silence starts to become oppressive.
‘Because I thought we had something real,’ he says softly, opening his eyes to look at me again.
‘I know I messed up badly at the airport, and I should have been much firmer with Harvey, but I guess I’m so used to him running my life that I just went into autopilot.
It was a blip and, as soon as I realised how it must have come across to you, I was ashamed.
If it’s any consolation, I did give him a piece of my mind once I got him to his hotel.
I made it his top priority to organise the car with the champagne and strawberries while I was rehearsing.
I know it was a silly gesture, but I’d hoped you’d see it for what it was – the beginning of an apology that also included the Lady Gaga mashup in the concert, and which I was planning to complete at the party afterwards.
It was the closest I could get to the scene at the end of Pretty Woman where Richard Gere turns up with his head sticking out of the limo and an enormous bunch of flowers.
But you never showed up to the party, and Harvey told me he’d seen you leaving as soon as the concert was finished.
’ His eyes widen as something obviously occurs to him. ‘No,’ he mutters softly.
‘What?’ I ask.
‘Was it handwritten, this letter?’ he asks.
‘I wouldn’t even be giving you the time of day if you’d typed it,’ I reply.
‘I don’t know how many times I need to tell you this before you hear it, but I never sent it, Tori. Can you remember the handwriting?’
I close my eyes. I don’t have a photographic memory, but some things just burn their way into your brain, don’t they, and it doesn’t take me long before I have a clear mental picture of the letter.
‘It was spiky, kind of spidery,’ I tell him.
‘OK, so let’s start to clear this up,’ he says, grabbing one of the pads of paper we keep on the desk in our meeting room, along with a pen. ‘Remind me, as closely as you can, what it said.’
I screw my eyes closed, trying to remember. Although the image of the letter is clear in my mind, the words aren’t.
‘Dear Tori,’ I begin slowly. ‘Something about you hoping I’d enjoyed the evening, how you’d valued our friendship, but now you had to get back to your real life and were saying goodbye. Please don’t come to the party as you’ll be busy with your precious sponsors yada yada. You get the picture.’
‘OK,’ he says, shoving the pad across to me as I open my eyes again. ‘Did it look anything like this?’
The first thing that I notice is the handwriting.
Gabriel’s writing is rounded, with little flourishes on each of the capital letters.
It’s beautifully legible and nothing at all like the untidy scrawl on the letter I got before.
The second thing I notice is that the words he’s written are not the ones I dictated.
Dear Tori,
I’m so, so sorry for the way you have been treated, but hopefully this will reassure you that I did not and would never have written a letter like the one you’ve just described.
My feelings about you were, and still are, completely genuine.
If you’re able to believe this is true, I have some ideas about where this letter might have come from, and there’s something I want to show you.
Love
Gabriel x
‘Very touching,’ I say. ‘What is it you want to show me?’
He pulls out his phone and taps at it for a while, before showing me a picture of a piece of paper with what appears to be a list of piano pieces. The writing is spidery and I don’t need to have the letter in front of me to know that this is an exact match.
‘What is this?’ I ask.
‘When Harvey first starts to put together a concert, he makes lists like these. He’s old school, preferring pen and paper when he’s scribbling down ideas.
I then take a photo, go away and do a bit of practice, before coming back to him with my thoughts on whether the pieces form a cohesive programme, and what order would suit them best. Did the handwriting on the letter look like this? ’
I nod, and his expression turns dark. ‘Right,’ he says after a moment. ‘Time to sort a few things out.’