2 #2
‘From what Elizabeth said, the press wasn’t kind to them at any rate,’ Lyssa soldiered on, determined to keep the conversation on course. ‘According to her, the conservative establishment that still ruled the press in those days delighted in putting them down whenever they could.’
‘Jealousy,’ Jason snorted. ‘I hope they lived fast, died young and left good-looking corpses. That was the saying, wasn’t it?’
‘Well, they certainly did that,’ Lyssa said sadly. ‘Monty was only a day over twenty-three when she died.’
Carter whistled through his teeth in sympathy. ‘Drugs, I take it?’
‘Drowned in the pond in her garden. But with LSD and champagne in her system,’ she corrected.
Jason opened his mouth, no doubt to say something cheerfully inappropriate, but subsided as both Carter and Lyssa shot him a sturdy look. Instead, he mumbled something and reached for the newspaper and began to study his crossword puzzle again.
‘So, it’s a whitewash job she’s after, is it?’ Carter asked, looking at Lyssa thoughtfully.
‘Maybe, but I hope not,’ she replied.
Carter nodded his understanding. He was unrepentantly one of the city’s ‘perpetual students’ – one of those who came to Oxford to do a BA degree but then fell in love with academia and stayed on, doing degree course after degree course.
His family back home had begun to despair of him, and from time to time used various bribes or threats to try and entice him back across the Atlantic and take a sinecure job in one of the family’s many businesses.
Instead, he preferred to immerse himself in history – first taking his BA in History, but going on to do the MPhil on the Restoration period, whilst currently his DPhil thesis was covering the ancient British feudal system, back when King Alfred the Great had been trying to fight off the marauding Vikings.
He, unlike Jason, was a widely read man in many fields, however, and once he’d learned that his next-door neighbour was a ghostwriter and biographer, he’d read every word she’d ever written.
Much to her profound relief, he had liked her work, and as such she often used him as an intelligent sounding board and valued his opinions highly.
Back when she’d first started out and needed all the commissions she could get, she had written a few biographies where it had been made clear to her that an unbiased view of things was neither required nor desired.
However, she much preferred to write balanced and truthful books.
And due to having a growing body of work and good critical reviews behind her, she was now beginning to find herself in a position whereby she could turn down a project that came with too many restrictions and wait it out for a few months to see if another, braver client came along.
‘I’ll have to see how my preliminary research goes. But even if only a few of Elizabeth’s claims about the real Amelia Montrose are true, a book about her would certainly make for an interesting read.’
‘What claims are these, then?’ Jason asked, looking interested again, but Lyssa knew better than to discuss anything even slightly confidential with Jason. The man had all the discretion of a journalist spotting a politician at a seedy nightclub.
‘You’ll just have to wait and read all about it,’ she teased.
‘What? Don’t you trust me?’ he asked, clasping a hand over his heart, as if mortally wounded.
‘She has far more sense,’ Carter informed him crisply, toasting him with his glass.
Half an hour later, feeling refreshed and in a buoyant mood (nobody could be around Carter and Jason for long and not leave them without a smile on their face) she returned to her more humble flat and slipped off her sandals.
She took a quick shower, and then after pulling her hair up into its usual high ponytail, wound it around and around in a bun, to keep it off her face and neck. It was much cooler that way.
On her way to her workstation by the window, she paused by a sideboard, on which rested a vase of freesias, a lamp and a large, framed photograph of a man.
Even as a subject in a photograph, you could tell that he was a big man, with wide shoulders and a strongly corded neck.
This was not surprising, since her husband had been a personal fitness trainer, and regularly worked out at the gym.
A natural sportsman, he’d been able to hold his own on the tennis and squash court, play a mean round of golf, out-swim most and bench-press who knew how many kilos.
Blond, moderately good-looking and with a wide, warm smile, he’d been a massive presence in her life and she missed him so much.
She paused now to stare back at his image.
‘Well, Kyle, what do you think about Monty Montrose? Wild child or Miss Understood?’ She ran a finger gently over the glass-protected face and then forced herself to step away.
She walked to her work desk and sat down, opened her laptop and then reached into her handbag for Elizabeth’s memory stick, and inserted it. With a click, she called up the first file and began to read.
About three and a half hours later, Lyssa suddenly became aware of a pain in her neck, despite the efforts of her prized, ergonomically designed swivel chair.
Her shoulders also felt tight and rather sore.
She knew what had happened, of course – she’d lost track of time, as she usually did whenever something engaged her whole attention, and now she was stiff from sitting so long in the same position without a break.
She sighed, reluctantly closed her appliance and, swivelling the black-leather chair a little to one side, glanced out of the window.
It was that period sometime between late afternoon and early evening, when the sun, though still relatively high and bright in the sky, was beginning to change from bright white light to something just a little more mellow that forewarned you the night was coming.
It was the perfect time for a short run. Donning her jogging outfit and running shoes, she went through the warm-up exercises that Kyle had taught her, then headed out to her favourite route along the riverbank.
She wasn’t what she thought of as a ‘natural’ jogger and had never even considered the activity until she’d met Kyle.
He, of course, could have run a marathon, but she had never aspired to such dizzy (and exhausting) heights, content to merely keep him company for a mile or so, but unable to match his pace for any longer than that.