Chapter Fourteen London Friday 22 October 2004
Chapter Fourteen
London
Olivia stopped in the drizzle, placed her right hand over one of the spikes to the railings bordering Green Park and pressed down hard.
She kept her hand there until she became self-conscious that people might notice her doing it, almost piercing her palm with that spike, so she took it off and moved on, bumping straight into a man in a trench coat walking in the opposite direction.
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ he muttered from above her. He was tall and she was small. ‘Why don’t you look where you’re going?’
She extracted her head from his chest. ‘Sorry!’ she spat, angry and defensive, and already pushing past him.
Her hand was smarting from the spike, and she welcomed it.
She’d wanted that sharp pressure, to feel a different kind of pain – one that was searing and only temporary. The man grabbed her arm.
‘Hey!’ he said. ‘Hey, it’s you, isn’t it?’ She turned back, furious, hurting, and looked at his face. ‘Olivia?’
It was him. It was Leo Greene. Her pub snog.
Her airport encounter. Her stood-up date from another lifetime ago, although it had been barely three weeks.
Her eyes flicked over him, taking in his various elements: beige trench coat, umbrella, mock-croc briefcase, hazel eyes.
He was just as handsome, just as devastating – why wouldn’t he be?
It was her world that had changed, and she was already devastated, so what did she care?
‘Oh, hi,’ she said. She didn’t care how she sounded. She didn’t care that she had stood him up. She didn’t care about anything.
‘Where are you going?’ he asked her.
‘Home,’ she said.
‘And where have you been?’ He didn’t add, ‘Looking like that.’ She was wearing a smart black wool coat, a black wool dress, black tights and black court shoes, and a broken heart.
‘I left my umbrella,’ she told him randomly, watching the rain drip from the edge of his.
‘And the Tubes are up the spout, and I’ve just walked from Pimlico.
I’m just walking around, really . . .’ Green Park.
She realised she was not far from the offices of the Morning Shout.
‘. . . and I feel like one of my heels is going to snap off and everyone will be staring at me when it does, and I can’t do it any more, this day,’ she concluded, and she didn’t know why it was, whether it was because his was a face she wasn’t expecting to see today, or because of the cold, or because of the rain, but she broke into sobs – big ones, loud ones, the kind to make the people walking past stare at her in horror.
Leo pulled her carefully back over to the railings, and she realised his hand was still on her arm, on the black wool, where raindrops stood proud on its furry surface.
‘You’re soaked,’ he said. ‘It’s OK,’ he added, and because his voice was kind, she collapsed against him, her head once again on the damp coolness of his trench coat, her tears soaking into the fabric as he steadied his arms around her. ‘Funerals are really, really tough.’
She’d thought her crying had been done for the day.
She’d been to the ladies just before she’d left the wake at the Boleyn Arms in Pimlico, and her eyes in the cracked mirror were red and her eyelids were swollen.
She’d splashed them with cold water and had told herself, ‘Enough now,’ but here she was, crying right into LL Greene’s mac.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, finally pulling back from him. ‘I have no idea what I’m doing.’
‘It’s OK,’ he repeated. She could still feel his arms around her, his kind embrace, here on the street, that she knew she didn’t deserve. He looked at her. ‘What would you like to do? Would you like to go for a drink?’
She stared back at him. ‘I stood you up three weeks ago,’ she said. ‘I didn’t even try to contact you.’
‘Don’t worry about that,’ he replied, and the tender look on his face wanted to make her burst into tears again. ‘There’s no need to explain.’
‘And all I’ve had are endless cups of tea,’ she continued. ‘Dry bar, because of bloody Aunt Amelie. The driest, most depressing bar I’ve known in my entire life.’ She attempted a watery smile. ‘I think I need whiskey.’
‘I can find you whiskey.’ Leo smiled gently at her. ‘Let’s go to the Ritz.’