Chapter Twenty-Six London Friday 12 February 2010 #3
She saw him again the next Friday evening. Melodi was off; sometimes her sister had to work, dancing for men in suits at Spearmint Rhino, the gentlemen’s club (‘They are no gentlemen,’ Melodi would snarl), and the pay was better than Melodi’s, so Melodi babysat.
‘Sorry,’ the man in the suit had said, as Olivia came in with the hoover and the box. ‘It’s me again.’
‘That’s OK.’
‘I’ve already emptied my bin.’
‘Thanks.’
His desk was tidy, too. A sheaf of papers neatly stacked; a brace of ballpoint pens lined up like sleeping soldiers next to his laptop. Olivia did the bins and the desks, and when she was in the kitchen, he popped his head around the door.
‘I still had my mug, sorry.’ He handed it to her.
‘That’s alright.’ His face was tired, she thought, but handsome. The kind of handsome a man wasn’t aware of. A man, she imagined – and she let her imagination take her to unknown places – who might be nervous to tell you he loved you, then never stop telling you.
He hesitated in the doorway. ‘Have you been a cleaner long?’ he asked.
‘A while,’ she said. It had been eighteen months. Then, she added, ‘I work at the London Library during the day,’ and she didn’t know why she’d needed to tell him.
‘Oh, interesting,’ he said. ‘St James’s Square.’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s a nice building.’
‘It’s gorgeous.’
‘My name is James.’
‘Oh, right. Mine’s Olivia.’
‘I’m very pleased to meet you, Olivia,’ said James. ‘Would you like to go for a drink?’ he asked suddenly, and his wan cheeks suddenly pinked.
‘Oh, no, thank you,’ she said hurriedly. ‘That’s really nice of you, but . . . I’m very busy.’
‘You have a boyfriend.’
‘Yes, I do,’ she lied. She couldn’t go on a date with someone she cleaned for. Could she?
‘That’s a shame. You seem . . . lovely.’
‘Thank you.’ She’d appreciated this, tabard on, hair pinned up. ‘Well, I should get on,’ she’d said, and she had, but she’d seen him leave later, through two partitions of glass, a big coat over one shoulder and a briefcase in his hand, eyes down.
Leo was burning bright. He talked first about ideas, how he was on the lookout for them wherever he went. He talked about how he always went out with a notebook and scraps of paper, how he scribbled notes, lists on the backs of beer mats, CD sleeves, receipts. He held up one of his scrawly lists.
‘Green hat, long coat, tired, cynical, pipe smoker but no pipe – not any more – scuffed shoes, Racing Post . . .’ he read out. ‘See?’ he added triumphantly. ‘That’s already a character conjured up.’ And his audience nodded, raptured. ‘I got the idea from a friend of mine.’
He glanced over at Olivia and winked. She smiled weakly back.
The wink, like the brushing of the fingers and the touch of the hand, was a signal of something more between them, if she let it become one.
A reaching out that she sensed from Leo, sometimes.
But hadn’t there always been a sexual attraction, a connection?
Something disastrous. Especially now. Because theirs was a connection and a friendship that had begun to turn sour.
There was an obvious imbalance. Leo’s star was in ascension – gloriously, rambunctiously so; hers had appeared in the sky, twinkled slightly then petered out to nothing.
Her book wasn’t selling. Bookshops were making returns to her publisher.
The great reading public was simply not interested.
Since that meeting with her publisher, she had tried not to despair, tried not to want success so very badly, but sometimes the universe does not appreciate a trier.
Leo had started emailing her things like, Great things will start to happen for you, too, I know they will, or Things will turn around, and at first she would email back with her thanks and gratitude, then she began to be silent in the face of these words, or to throw them back at him and write that he was wrong, that it was alright for him, until he began to apologise for the good things that were happening to him, and there were so many of them.
She was increasingly despairing and jealous, and hating herself for it; Leo was bemused and often exasperated. She picked holes in the fabric of their friendship until the hole was bigger than what remained.
‘Post-it notes, that’s right!’ Leo said – to a laugh.
He was talking about plot points – beats, he called them – the Post-it notes he stuck on his office wall, dozens of them, in different colours.
He was bouncing on the balls of his feet, excited.
His audience was engaged – virtually married – laughing at his jokes, drinking him in, the commander of the room.
‘So that’s where you begin the second act,’ he said.
‘Check your pacing. Speed it up, slow things down, keep your reader guessing.’
He glanced over to Olivia again, gave her a quick, almost undetectable, smile. She returned one – always uncertain, these days.
Twenty minutes later, he announced a short break. He found her in the office, where she was hiding.
‘What are you doing in here?’
‘Just checking on something for next week.’
‘Right.’
She didn’t look up from the paperwork she was pretending to check. ‘Cressie’s here,’ she said.
‘I saw.’
‘Did you invite her?’
‘No. Yes. She saw the ad for it. I reserved her a ticket.’
‘That was nice of you.’
‘I hope so, she’s my friend. Do you think it’s going well?’
She finally looked up at him. ‘Brilliantly.’
‘I haven’t seen you a lot lately. Are you still doing the cleaning job?’
‘Why are you asking me that?’
Today of all days. Here they were, halfway through his wildly successful workshop, as a wildly successful bestselling author, while her silly little book was floundering and she was still working two jobs just to survive.
‘I just wondered.’
She’d only told him about it – finally – to get out of a book reading he was doing at Waterstones a few weeks ago. ‘Well, it’s none of your business.’ She returned to her papers, started shuffling them randomly. He looked at her, amazed.
‘So, you’re still working two jobs and burning yourself out.’
‘I like the jobs that I have.’
‘You like the cleaning job?’
‘Yes, I like the cleaning job.’ She glanced up. ‘I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth,’ she said, ‘unlike you.’
‘It’s not all it’s cracked up to be,’ he muttered, almost under his breath. ‘And that silver spoon, as you so originally put it, has nothing to do with my writing career!’ he protested. ‘Anyone can make it as a writer!’
‘You’re a writer with a cushion,’ she retorted. ‘A very comfortable one. You have the luxury of time, and you’ve also been very lucky. I’m comfortable with the two jobs I’m doing and . . . and I’m comfortable being small and unsuccessful.’
‘Since when? And you should never be comfortable feeling small . . .’
Since that meeting, she thought. ‘But what if that’s how I’m meant to be? What if that’s all that’s meant for me? I should just accept my life as it is and not hope it’s going to get any bigger or better because it probably won’t, and that’s fine.’
‘Now you’re being defeatist!’
‘Or realistic.’
‘You’re bitter.’
‘You think I’m bitter?’
‘I don’t know. Yes. Perhaps I think you are, and I’m not sure it suits you. I don’t think you’ve felt “comfortable” since your book was published.’
‘It also doesn’t suit me,’ she cried, and she knew her eyes were blazing, ‘to shrink and shrink while you grow and grow, to become dimmer and dimmer while you glow and glow and light up the skies, dazzling everyone. To be your friend, help out at your events, hold your bag, have people ask, “And what do you do, Olivia?” and for you to pipe up, “Oh, Olivia’s a published author, too” – so sympathetic, so patronising.
And, well, I think you’re becoming a little arrogant. ’
‘Arrogant?’
‘You think you deserve it, not just that you’ve been lucky. You with your private education and your rich parents. You’re loving it just a bit too much!’
‘What, you think I’m strutting around, boasting all the time? I’ve worked hard!’ he shouted. ‘I’ve worked bloody hard! And my parents are nothing to do with it! God knows they’re not. And, you know what, you’ve got a chip on your shoulder about being working class. You always have.’
‘Maybe I have!’ she shouted, and she was almost crying now.
‘Maybe it’s sitting there every day, spurring me on.
’ She tapped at her right shoulder ferociously.
‘You don’t have that. You have everything.
You’ve always had everything! But you’ve lost something, too.
Recently. You’ve lost . . .’ She inhaled. ‘You’ve lost your vulnerability.’
‘You want me to be vulnerable!’ He shook his head in disbelief.
‘I liked it when you were, just like you liked it when I was, when I lost my father. You liked my sadness, my bittersweet neediness – you slept with me because of it, didn’t you? You used to have a softer, less self-important side—’
‘Like a likeable flaw in one of your romantic heroes? Your only romantic hero, to date. Writing believable, successful characters . . . how’s that working out for you?’
She winced. ‘That’s a low blow.’
And Leo shrugged, a shrug that told Olivia a lot of things but, mostly, that their friendship, or whatever this was, was over. He had said too much. She had said too much. She looked at her watch.
‘It’s time to go back up.’
‘Wait,’ he said, and he looked defeated.
She had defeated him with her words, she realised.
‘You know, I thought – recently – we might be able to start something up again, you and me. I hoped . . . well, we could maybe become more than friends again. I realise now that it was a very stupid idea. It’s still not the right time for us, is it? ’
‘I don’t think it’ll ever be the right time for us, Leo.’
‘No.’
‘I need more than what you’re offering.’
‘I can see that.’ He grimaced.
She was crushed, exhausted.
‘I’m going to go back up.’
She was back in her place at the side of the room.
Leo was nearing the end of his presentation.
He was talking about clues, saying he scattered them throughout his books, that when Agatha Christie wrote her mysteries, she would reach the end and then go back and add them all in, and he did the same.
He made a self-deprecating joke about comparing himself to Mrs Christie and his audience laughed.
Leo had finished. The congregation was rising from their seats and heading for the big desk, lining up, clutching copies of Midnight Shadows. Leo gathered and stacked his notes, got his signing pen ready, ran his hand through his wavy hair.
‘Thanks so much, all of you, for coming. I really do have the best readers! If anyone wants a signed book, my pen is poised!’
He sat at the desk while his readers queued up.
They laughed with him, watched with delight as he signed their books.
Smiled adoringly into his face. Cressie reached the front of the line, and Leo broke into a broad grin.
He touched Cressie on the wrist. Cressie bent over the desk, her small pale hand cupped at its edge, and gave him a kiss on the cheek.
As the kiss landed, Leo glanced over at Olivia, his eyes blank.
There was no one in the lobby of the library when Olivia left. Nobody to see her stand at the top of the steps outside the library and breathe in the cold, sharp air. She walked down into St James’s Square and bumped straight into a man in a dark grey overcoat, the collar turned up.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said – the handsome man who had stayed late at the office. ‘St James’s Square.’
‘Hello,’ she replied.
‘Are you on your lunch break?’
‘Sort of.’
He was smiling at her. His eyes roamed over her face, and he looked captured by it.
‘Would you like to go for that drink?’ he asked her shyly. ‘Or do you still have a boyfriend?’
She smiled to push away her sadness. She smiled to paper over her broken heart. His smile was warm and exclusive, and seemed, if not the promise of something, then an escape from something else.
‘I’d like to go for that drink.’