Chapter 32
32
OK, so if Fabian had fallen back in love with the gorgeous Alexandra, then there was little I or anyone else could do about it. How could I blame him? He’d been with her for years; she’d given up on him and now she wanted him back, even following him up to Yorkshire to achieve that. How could I blame her ? I’d seen enough of the pair of them, back in The Alchemist, Alexandra draped possessively all over Fabian, to know when I was beaten. Between Gillian and Julius Carrington, and now Alexandra Brookfield, I needed to come out waving my white flag.
I surrender.
The Friday shopping crowd had thinned, but the evening revellers were out in force, already seated and drinking underneath the ridiculously large gas patio heaters outside Restaurant Bar and Grill and Banyan in City Square. The huge equestrian statue of Edward, the Black Prince, gazed down stonily as I crossed over the road in front of him, making my way back to the NCP car park.
‘You been dumped as well?’ I asked, glancing up at Edward.
He didn’t reply but a grizzled street sleeper, bedding down for the night in his sleeping bag and cardboard, shouted back at me: ‘I ’ave that, love!’
I found a fiver in my pocket and handed it over to him. ‘Sorry, I can’t do more just at the moment.’ I realised I was crying.
‘D’you want to join me in ’ere, love?’ he asked, revealing brown stumps instead of teeth and opening his sleeping bag in invitation. ‘Come on, have a wee drink wi’ me and wipe them tears off.’ He proffered a can of cider in my direction.
‘Come on, Robyn,’ I censured myself. ‘Get yourself home.’
I realised, in my misery at seeing Fabian with Alexandra, I’d come out of Trinity the wrong exit and now had to walk back up to the car park on Albion Street via Park Row and Bond Street.
Get yourself home? Back home where? To the Dower Cottage? Without Fabian? He’d be off back to Harrogate – or was it Ilkley? – now Alexandra had reclaimed him. Eventually, presumably, back to London with her.
Oh, and poor Jess! She’d been utterly sold on the idea of her and Fabian turning the white house into a top restaurant.
One more dream squashed flat.
I finally made it to the multistorey and, too weary to take the stairs, tried to take the lift to the top floor where I’d managed to park the car. I say, tried: the door closed behind me, and then reopened, closed and reopened and closed once again. I pressed the relevant buttons and the lift trundled up to the first floor, wheezing and groaning as it went until it stopped. And remained stopped! Then, after a good minute, suddenly, without warning, descended back to where we’d started.
Fuck’s sake.
I turned back to the buttons, pressing every one in turn until the lift door suddenly opened, someone got in and, just as quickly, despite my yelling: ‘Don’t, don’t! Get out! I think it’s broken!’ the door clanged shut once more on the pair of us.
The woman’s head was down and she was crying, real shoulder-heaving sobs as she stood, not caring, it seemed, where she was, or where she was trying to get to.
She eventually lifted her head, obviously trying to work out what was going on; why we weren’t moving.
We stared at each other, realisation at who the other was almost immediate.
My heart appeared to stall.
‘You’re crying.’ She seemed surprised.
‘So are you,’ I sniffed.
‘Look…’ we both started.
‘I’m sorry…’ we tried again.
‘The lift’s broken,’ I said.
‘So’s my heart,’ she said.
‘ Your heart?’ I said. Actually, it came out as a sneer. I cleared my throat and tried again. ‘Why your heart?’
‘Why d’you think?’
‘I’ve really no idea. I’ve just seen you wrapped around Fabian in The Alchemist. Your heart appeared far from broken there!’
‘You were there?’ She stared. ‘Where?’
‘In the bar in The Alchemist. I’d sent Fabian a message to meet me there, but he never replied. And then I saw why he hadn’t replied… You know…’
‘He’s been without his phone all day,’ she interrupted. ‘Left on the kitchen table, he thought.’
‘I saw you together and realised he still… you know…’ I broke off, unable to speak further. We stared at each other for a good five seconds until eventually I blurted out, ‘Fabian never even told me about you. I’d no idea he’d been with you for so long. That, when I met him, you and he were…’ I air-quoted the words ‘…“on a break”. Sounds like a weekend in Blackpool.’
‘That’s strange.’ Alexandra gave a little sob. ‘He told me everything about you.’
‘To make you jealous? To make you come back to him?’
She stared. ‘I tried everything to get Fabian back. Even moving up to Yorkshire to be near him when he left London.’
‘Not to be near your twin sister, then?’
‘No! I followed him up here – can’t bear the bloody north to be honest: you all talk funny and say you’re having your tea instead of supper.’
‘Not all the time,’ I objected, put out at her rudeness about my beloved Yorkshire. ‘We can be quite posh when we want to be. We do eat “lunch” instead of “us dinner” these days.’ More air-quoting of words. I shook my head, to clear it. ‘So, just a second, are you saying, you and Fabian are not…?’
‘No, you’ve won, you’ve got him. He loves you. He said so.’
‘I wasn’t aware there was any competition going on,’ I lied.
‘No competition? Oh, don’t give me that. Listen, I’ve known everything about you since you first set your cap at him in the Old Bailey. Inveigled your way into his life, didn’t you? What he sees in you, I really can’t imagine. But there you go, there’s no accounting for taste…’ She pushed past me to reach the lift buttons, pressing each one in turn, her voice rising in panic once it appeared we were going nowhere. ‘I need to get out… I need to get out of here… I get claustrophobia…’
‘I’m not wonderful in enclosed spaces myself,’ I said. If what she’d said about Fabian was true, I could afford to be magnanimous. She’d said Fabian loved me. He loved me . ‘Alexandra, you need to calm down. I’m so sorry, but you need to calm down . Or we’ll use up all the oxygen.’
That probably wasn’t the best thing to say, because she now started hyperventilating.
‘Please, Alexandra, just try taking deep breaths… right, alarm, there must be one… here it is. We’re still on the ground floor, I think. We’ve not moved since you got in the lift.’
A disembodied male voice crackled over the intercom. ‘Lift engineer. You called? What’s up?’
‘What’s up?’ For heaven’s sake. ‘We’re stuck in the lift. We’re on the ground floor and it won’t move.’
‘Ground floor? Well, that makes it a lot easier. Have you tried pressing the open-door button?’
‘ Oh? Open-door button? Silly me, why didn’t I think of that?’ I gave it another couple of pushes for good measure. ‘No, no go.’
‘Hang on, we’ll be with you in five minutes.’
It was very strange standing in a tiny enclosed space with your lover’s ex-lover (make a great title for that book I always intended writing one day: My Lover’s Ex-Lover ) waiting to be released. Did we conscientiously avoid looking at each other, remaining silent, or should I try striking up a conversation such as, What’s the weather been like with you up in Ilkley? Doing anything interesting this weekend? Been away yet this year? Which, seeing we were still in January, was a bit pointless. Mind you, girls like Alexandra probably went off en famille to the slopes of Gstaad or Cortina d’Ampezzo…
Alexandra had stopped crying and hyperventilating but was simply standing, stony-faced, and I truly didn’t know what to say to comfort her. What was there to say?
Voices, some banging, some laughter (this was funny?) and the next moment the lift doors were being forced apart with something metallic and three men in yellow hi-vis jackets were peering in at us.
‘You’re out now, love,’ one man was saying as another attached an ‘Out of Order’ notice to the door.
Alexandra went to exit and I laid a hand on her arm. ‘I’m sorry, Alexandra. I’m truly sorry.’
She gave me one final look of distaste, shook her head at me before elbowing the three men out of her way and shooting up the stone steps towards her car. I waited a good five minutes, not wanting to bump into her again (as one inevitably did down every aisle in Sainsbury’s after an initial ‘hello, how are you?’ with someone you’d not seen for years and had to then pretend to be finding something incredibly interesting in ladies’ incontinence pads or the tinned pilchards in order to avoid eye contact).
I took out my phone and saw there were three messages:
Robyn what are you playing at? What the hell are you doing in Leeds? I’m here, with an open bottle of wine and two steaks that are ready to go under the grill! Love you, you know that.
Fabian xxx
And:
Oh, girls, the flight here was so exciting. I’m in a posh restaurant in Montmartre with the very lovely Kamran. I think he likes me too! See you all tomorrow. Oh, and I need to tell you something.
Mum xx
PS, Jess, can you make sure Roger has plenty of water in his bowl?
And:
Robyn, it’s me, Jo. Just been doing a lot more research on your mum’s birth mother but not getting very far really. But then, my mum’s just been round and we got talking!!!! Ring me tomorrow, would you?!!!!!
Jo xxx
Ten minutes later I was heading home. Home to Dower Cottage.
Home to Fabian.