Happily Ever After (4 page)

I know I screwed this up, can you give me another chance?

I really need this job otherwise I have to go back to Sussex and I can’t live with Mum any more, I just can’t.

I have read
Lace,
some bits several times, in fact, it’s just I can’t talk about it without blushing.

My skirt is too short and I will address this issue should you employ me.

No, no, no. “I—no. Thank you very much. It was lovely to meet you. I… fingers crossed!” And Elle finished by holding her hands up, making a thumbs-up sign with one, and crossing her fingers with the other.

“Right…” Jenna said. There was a pause as both of them stared at Elle’s hands, shaking in mid-air. “Thanks for coming in, Ellen. Great to meet you.”

“Eleanor…” Elle whispered. “Yes,” she said more loudly. “Thanks—thank you! For this opportunity.” That was one of the phrases, she remembered now. “I’m a keen enthusiastic self-starter and I’ll work my guts out for you,” she added, randomly. But Jenna was ushering her out down the narrow maze of passageways, and Elle realized she wasn’t listening, and furthermore she, Eleanor Bee, still had one hand cocked in a thumbs-up sign. “Idiot,” she muttered, as they reached the lifts.

“I beg your pardon?” Jenna smoothed down her lilac crêpe dress and fanned her fingers through her glossy hair.

“Ah. Nothing,” Elle added. She got into the lift. “Thanks again. Sorry. Thanks then—bye.”

The lift doors closed, shutting out Jenna’s bemused face.

I MADE A
thumbs-up sign.

Elle weaved her way down the Strand, swinging her handbag and trying to look jaunty. “Let’s all go down the Strand,” she sang under her breath. “Have a banana. Oh, what…” Her voice cracked, and she trailed off. She glanced at her reflection in a shop window and shuddered. She looked
awful,
that stupid short skirt, why had she bought it? And that silly blue top, it was supposed to look like silky wool, but what that actually meant was that she had to hand wash it. Her light brown hair was too long and thick, tucked behind her ears and sticking out in tufts. She stared at the window again, and winced. She was looking into the window of a Dillons bookshop with a banner bearing the legend “Our Spring Bestsellers.”

“
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
… I read that last summer, why on earth didn’t I say that?” Elle smacked her forehead gently with her palm. “
The Celestine Prophecy
—oh, God, that’s the crazy book Mum’s reading. Did she really want me to talk about that? That’s not literature!” She stared at the array of books. “
The Beach… Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus
… what does
that
mean?”

Elle slumped her shoulders and stared at the Pret A Manger next to the bookshop, where busy office workers were coming out clutching baguettes and soup.
She
wanted to eat in Pret A Manger. She’d never seen them before she came to London and to her it seemed the height of glamour, to go into a shop with other office workers and buy a proper coffee and a croissant.

But she didn’t have the money for a coffee from Pret A Manger, nor a desk nor a job. Elle caught her bottom lip with her top teeth to stop herself from crying.
Come on,
she told herself, standing in the middle of the Strand as people pushed past her.
Buy an
Evening Standard,
go back to Karen’s, have a cup of tea
while you go through the Jobs section and you’ll feel much better. There’s something out there for you. There is.

The truth is, Eleanor Bee was starting to get desperate. It was April. She’d left Edinburgh University the previous summer, and was still trying to find a job. It seemed all her other friends had something to do: Karen had a job as a runner at a TV production company, her old university flatmate Hester was doing an MA in Bologna, and the other, Matty, was in teacher training college. Her ex-boyfriend Max was a trainee accountant, she’d bumped into him off Fleet Street the other day. It was just before an awful interview at an educational publisher where Elle had not really understood what they were talking about and when they’d said,
So do you think that sounds like something you could do?
, she’d replied,
Sure, can I let you know? No,
the grumpy, large, middle-aged man in cords had said.
I wasn’t offering you the job. I was asking if you thought you’d be able to cope with the job. Thank you, we’ll let you know.
She was sure bumping into Max was the reason she’d been so flustered. Not that she even cared about Max that much—he was using hair gel, for God’s sake, and kept getting out his stupid new CD Walkman to show off to her. But it was the principle of the thing.

In February, Elle’s best friend from school, Karen, had said she could come and sleep on her sofa. “You’re never going to find a job in publishing in a tiny village in Sussex, Elle,” she’d said briskly. “Bite the bullet and come to London.” And Elle had accepted, nervous but also overwhelmed with excitement.
London
. She’d dreamed of moving to London, of living in the big city, since she was a little girl. She’d conquer it. She’d own gray Wellington boots with heels. And have a matching gray briefcase, like the Athena poster of the city girl hanging off the back of a Routemaster bus blowing a kiss to her handsome boyfriend that Elle still had in her bedroom.

But London was very far from the welcoming and bustling literary salon Elle had expected it to be. Notting Hill was grimy, full of cracked pavements and crack addicts, and sleeping on the floor in Karen’s was no fun. She’d been here two months now. She’d applied for every job going, written to every publisher she could find in the
Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook
to ask them for work experience. But no one was interested. She was discovering she’d been totally naive to think they would be. She’d had four interviews, and this one today, at a major publishing house, was like the big one that had to work out, and she’d clearly totally one hundred percent blown it. She’d thought she was so prepared: she had read everything,
everything,
in fact Karen said the trouble with her was she couldn’t get her nose out of a book.

She hated the way she spent her days now. She’d sit in the silent flat, feeling crappy about herself and knowing she should buck up, watching Richard and Judy and dreading the moment when Karen would get back from work and say, in an increasingly unsympathetic tone, “So, what did you get up to today then?” Her social life consisted of going to the pub or sitting around in the dark flat off Ladbroke Grove waiting for the electricity meter to run out. Plus Karen’s other flatmates, Cara the chef and Alex the ad man, clearly found Elle a hindrance rather than a delightful addition to communal living.

On the Tube back to Notting Hill, Elle wondered for the first time if she should have come to London at all. It wasn’t how she’d expected it, and even though she was used to not fitting in, she’d never felt less welcome anywhere, in her whole life. It struck her that if she packed up her meager possessions this evening and got a train first thing tomorrow, she’d be back at her mother’s by lunchtime. But then—what? She and her mother, in the converted barn Mandana had bought after the
divorce, doing what? Would it be worse than being here? Probably not.

Elle had a stroke of luck as she got off at Notting Hill Gate. Someone had left an
Evening Standard
behind on a seat and she scooped it up. It was a cold April day and she shivered in her thin coat, the paper clamped under one arm, as she walked through the empty streets, trying not to let her mood sink any lower.

It was just really hard, though, trying to find your place in the world. At university it had been so easy. You knew where you were going each day, what you were doing, and with whom. After university, the rules had suddenly changed, and Elle felt she’d been left behind. But the irony was, she knew exactly what she wanted! She’d always known! She just wanted to work with books, to read fine literature, to meet authors and to learn to edit, to have conversations like those she used to have with her Victorian Literature tutor Dr. Wilson, about the Brontës and Austen and whether
Middlemarch
was the great Victorian novel or not and… that sort of thing. Of course, she knew she’d have to start at the bottom—she didn’t mind that at all, in fact she rather thought she’d like it. But that didn’t seem to make a difference.

What am I going to do?
she thought to herself, walking briskly, head down.
Will I just be someone who falls through the cracks in society and never gets a job? And turns into one of those weirdos who keeps every newspaper from 1976 and carries a brown satchel and goes through the bins? Oh, my God, is that going to be me?

The cold sharp breeze stung Elle’s eyes. She wiped them with the back of her hand, and the
Evening Standard
dislodged and fell on the pavement, where a rolling gust of wind carried it off, into the middle of the road. She ran after it, and as she picked it up, noticed it was a week out of date. One whole
week. She heaved her shoulders, and looked round for somewhere to dump the offending newspaper. There wasn’t even a bin and she wasn’t so far sunk into depression that she would just chuck it on the pavement. She stomped back towards the flat, muttering under her breath, not caring if she was taking one further step down the line towards being a newspaper-hoarding, bin-rifling weirdo, and thinking that the world was a cruel, cruel place.

ELLE SAT AT
the kitchen table, reading the week-old newspaper and sipping a cup of tea, glad to be out of the cold, but still shaking at the injustice of the day she’d had. Absolutely no jobs yet again in the
Evening Standard
. She’d missed it last week; it had been sold out, and even if she’d had it a week ago it’d have been useless, unless she wanted to go into local government or work for a magazine called
Red Knave,
and she was sure she didn’t.

Washing-up was piled high in the sink. They’d had people round the night before; Alex had made pasta and a bong, and Karen had made everyone sing “Total Eclipse of the Heart” into wooden spoons. Elle had wanted to go to bed early to prepare for her interview, but she couldn’t really get out her duvet and lie on the sofa while five other people were glugging Bulgarian white wine out of a screwtop bottle and yelling about the upcoming election.

Elle knew she should do the washing-up in a minute; perhaps then Alex would stop glaring at her when he came in and saying, “Oh. Hi.” Which meant, “Oh. You’re still here, blighting my life.” She didn’t like Alex much, all he seemed to do was show off his new mobile phone and take calls on it, then play
Tomb Raider
all weekend in the sitting room with his friend Fred. Elle had snogged Fred only the week before, more because she’d been trying to get to sleep and it seemed easier to snog him and then let them get on with playing
Tomb Raider
than tell them to leave. Plus Fred was actually an OK snog, even if she didn’t have much to say to him. He’d been there yesterday too—but he’d been in a funny mood, and she wasn’t sure he was interested anymore, which wouldn’t be a surprise, to be honest. He had a job and a flatshare, he wasn’t sleeping in someone’s sitting room and reading week-old newspapers.

Elle took another sip of tea, and turned from the out-of-date Jobs section to the news pages, cravenly aware this was a waste of time. There was a picture of Tony Blair, meeting some old ladies, and smiling. He looked young and tanned, and his hair was pretty good. Elle couldn’t help thinking that was a plus point, not that it should matter but somehow it added to the overall romantic-lead sheen of him. Tony Blair always made her think of that line in
Pride and Prejudice
when Jane asks Lizzy how long she has loved Mr. Darcy for, and Lizzy replies, “It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.”

Thinking of this now made her smile weakly. She closed her eyes and thought about Lizzy Bennet and Mr. Darcy, wondering how they’d talk to each other after they were married and living at Pemberley. Because that always bothered her, what happened after the couple got over their misunderstandings to live happily ever after. She couldn’t help thinking Mr. Darcy wouldn’t be sympathetic if Elizabeth ordered the wrong dinner service when a duke came to stay. She had seen what had happened with her parents, how vicious it had been, and Elle couldn’t ever imagine that they’d once been in love.

John and Mandana had been divorced for seven years. Sometimes it seemed ages ago, sometimes she could still remember, as if it were yesterday, their old, cozy, normal life at Willow Cottage. The final papers had come through as Elle was preparing for her GCSEs. There was a lot of lip service paid to not letting it affect her exams, and people treated her very carefully, as if someone had died: the headmistress even called her into her office for “a little chat,” to see if she was all right. Elle hadn’t known how to answer when Mrs. Barber had asked her how she was coping. How did you explain that you were a horrible person, because you were glad they were
splitting up, glad they wouldn’t be together anymore, glad her dad was going away because these days he just seemed to upset her mum so much? Even when they had to sell the house and move to a barn outside Shawcross, and even when John remarried with what Elle overheard a friend say to Mandana was “insensitive haste” she knew she didn’t care in the way she should. She’d wondered whether she was a homicidal maniac—she’d read a book about them and one of the first signs was a lack of empathy. But Elle was just glad it was over, because it was horrible living like that.