Name & Address Withheld (13 page)

‘You. have. one. new. message. message. received. today. at. four. forty. six. peee. emmmm.’

‘Hi, Lizzie…it’s only me.’

Lizzie could have jumped for joy. It wasn’t ‘only me’. It was bloody well him.

‘Just calling to say hello.’

He sounded drunk. Or was it just a bad line?

‘Hope Christmas Day was fun and that you’re enjoying the whole festive over-eating, over-drinking season. No doubt you’re out partying hard…or watching lots of extra-long fes
tive episodes of soap operas…or both. Well, I’d better get going. There’s no point me just waffling into a machine for hours. Happy New Year for Thursday night from the mountains. See you soon.’

Life was so unfair. It was Sunday afternoon. Surely he should be slaloming down a mountain black run, or whatever you do on skiing holidays? Yet he calls. Just like that. Rationale started to creep in. At least he’d rung. Lizzie listened to the message several times before wondering what exactly she was listening for and starting to question her sanity. Satisfied that she had committed it to memory, she deleted it before Clare found it—and transcribed it for her mother.

Mood improved, Lizzie hummed to herself as she returned to her study. She loved this first bit of relationships. The excitement of attraction and not knowing that he clipped his toenails into the bath and left them there. The time when everything was endearing, fun and never too much trouble.

Although she would never admit it to Clare or to her mother, after years of slating women for doing it, Lizzie too had started to imagine every man she met as the potential father of her children. Looking at Alex and Jonathan, she did occasionally have twinges of verdant-edged envy. And she definitely wasn’t interested in the freeze-your-eggs, find-a-sperm-donor approach to reproduction. Unlike Clare, who’d become a right old feminist since her divorce, Lizzie did want to try and create a family unit, and she reckoned she had four years left to find a playmate and a father for her children before investing in a couple of cats and embracing the whole spinster lifestyle—reading glasses, amber necklace, meal for one, cut flowers, padded slippers
et al
.

But one brief message and her subconscious was cluttered with images of her and Matt sitting in thick white bathrobes at sunny breakfast tables reading papers and sipping orange juice as their charming, wide-eyed, intelligent, clean and practically silent pre-school children, complete with juvenile bowl haircuts and freckles, arrived to join them. Lizzie forced her
self to stop when she started to picture him wandering around ‘their’ garden in a cardigan because:

1) She didn’t have a garden

2) She hated men wearing cardigans

3) He was skiing

4) They had only seen each other twice…ever.

chapter 10

M
aking sure that nobody she recognised was in the vicinity, Rachel picked up the latest edition of
Out Loud
magazine and, as she flicked past the various articles, berated herself yet again for posting the sodding letter in the first place. She must have been a whole lot iller than she had felt. Practically certifiable.

Scanning the magazine every Thursday—often sandwiched between the conveniently outsize pages of
Campaign
—had now become a ritual, even though she had no idea how far ahead of herself this ‘Ask Lizzie’ person worked. She’d only popped out of the office to make the most of the last week of the January sales, yet here she was in Selfridges, a floor away from the nearest designer collections, just checking.

Finally she found the relevant double-page spread. And there she was. Well, it was. Her letter. Letter of the frigging week. Rachel felt instant colour closely followed by instant pallor hitting her cheeks, and her ice cool façade temporarily slipped as she instinctively clutched the magazine to her chest and her body locked. Regaining the use of her limbs several
seconds later, she put the magazine back as discreetly as she had picked it up.

After completing a circuit of the department, and lingering a little in Cards to regain her composure, Rachel returned to make her purchase. She toyed with the idea of buying all the copies on the shelf before eschewing the hysterical approach and instead losing it amongst a few other titles in her basket. At the till, blasé was replaced by bashful, and she could barely look the salesgirl in the eye. Pathetic behaviour. No one knew it was her letter or her problem. Yet she left the store convinced that everyone was giving her sidelong glances. Instant paranoia had descended.

‘Hold all calls. I don’t want to be disturbed for the next ten minutes.’

Kitty looked up guiltily from her frenetic e-mailing and minimised the dialogue box on her screen instinctively. Rachel didn’t know why she bothered. She knew Kitty was doing something personal. She never typed that fast when it was work-related. Nevertheless, Kitty did her best to nod industriously at Rachel as she swept past, before returning to organising her social life electronically.

The office door firmly closed, and seated safely at her desk far away from the searching eyes of assistants, Rachel silently read and reread first her letter and then the answer. So they used real letters. A cynic, and well aware of the short-cuts that the media took when necessary, Rachel had often wondered how genuine the problems really were. But there was her feverish letter. In print. For all the world to see. To read. To judge.

Name and Address Withheld. She searched for any clues as to the identity of the author. Objectively, no one could possibly know it was from her. She wasn’t sure that she even knew anyone who read
Out Loud
. Everyone she knew seemed to be reading
Vanity Fair
,
Vogue
and
Tattler
on the days when they weren’t immersed in the aspirational lifestyle publications of
Wallpaper
and
World of Interiors
.

Lizzie was good. Most of her response was state-the-obvious without being patronising. Paris for lunch wasn’t out of the
question either. They’d just have to co-ordinate diaries. She wondered if shopping for the new collections while they were out there would be allowed? Probably not.

She’d only just started on the third read-through when there was a knock at her office door. Luckily, in hanging her coat on the back of the door, she’d obscured the glass panel that usually enabled visitors to watch her check her make-up for imperfections before she waved them in. Flinging the magazine on the coffee table, she opened a new document on her screen before responding to the follow-up batch of knocking. What was it with people? No one had a divine right to see her, and since when had appointments been out of date? Rachel sometimes wondered what she paid her PA for. Next time she’d have to be a bit more specific. Do not disturb until the big hand is on the six…

‘Come in.’ It was more of a bark than a welcome.

‘If this is a bad time I’ll come back later. I just wanted a quick word.’

Her annoyance was rapidly evaporating because Will was currently standing at the entrance to her office. Boyishly good-looking—hell, he was only about twelve…or was it twenty-five? Now she was on the wrong side of thirty it was becoming increasingly difficult to tell. Still, despite his testosterone-filled, confident and cocksure approach, Rachel had to admit he was bloody good at his job. Unnervingly, as vile as she could be, he never appeared to be intimidated, and she had to admit that their flirtations gave her as much pleasure as anything these days.

Will headed straight for the couch, placing one state-of-the-art trainer on her coffee table as he lit up. Rachel’s office was one of the few places you could still smoke on the sixth floor, and he always used it to his advantage. She could sense her plastic-looking-but-genuinely-living office plant collection holding its breath. He held the packet out to her.

‘No, thanks.’

‘Not still pretending to be a non-smoker, are you?’

‘I haven’t had one since…’ Rachel didn’t have to think back
very far. ‘Well, I haven’t had one during the day for over a month.’

‘Or a cigarette.’ Will tipped his head back as he exhaled and his smoke rose up towards the ceiling in a vertical column. Rachel, as a rule, hated people smoking in her office—especially when they were junior to her and hadn’t bothered to ask first—but she decided to wait and see what Will had to say before she started getting testy. She walked round the desk, carefully resting her bottom on the other side.

‘So, what can I do for you?’

‘Just wanted to run a few more ideas past you for the campaign…’

Rachel’s afternoon was rapidly improving. She loved their meetings. Will was brimming with initiative and his enthusiasm was infectious. Rachel pulled her shoulders back and thrust her chest out a little further. Power-flirting was one of her specialist disciplines. She was sure she must be one of the best in the business.

‘I’ve been brainstorming with the rest of the team over lunch and I thought it’d be better to catch you in the office face to face if I could. This way you can tell me what you think and we can get on with it, or regroup and get our thinking caps back on. Just be honest. If you think any of the ideas are crap, just tell me.’

‘Believe me, I will.’

‘Yeah, well, you’re not known for beating round the bush, are you?’

‘No.’

‘Right.’

From Will’s demeanour, Rachel imagined this ideas session had involved a few drinks.

‘Do you want a coffee?’ Rachel was determined to send Kitty to the Italian place over the road as her penance for letting Will in early and creating a close call. The coffee there was legendary, if you could endure the hapless lecherous flirtation of the staff. It would’ve been classified as harassment if you didn’t actually choose to go in. ‘If you’re going to hi-jack the
next half-hour I might as well also use it to top up my caffeine levels.’

‘Sure. A latte would be lovely.’

Rachel popped out to Kitty’s desk with her wallet and ordered two posh coffees and a nice bit of cake. To her horror, when she got back Will was reading the problem page, which unfortunately was where
Out Loud
had fallen open, even after its earlier flight from her desk to the coffee table. Rachel ordered herself to play it cool, despite the fact that Will was sitting there in his baggy trousers, youth personified, still tanned from his recent snowboarding trip and definitely smiling at what he was reading. Smiling out loud. A phenomenon which was more commonly known as laughing. And, to Rachel’s despair, the source of his amusement appeared to be on the page he was reading. Rachel pretended to join in with his sentiment in the hope that they could move on…swiftly. She took the initiative.

‘Some of it’s amazing, isn’t it? It makes you wonder who writes in to these magazines. I don’t know why people bother.’

‘I know. I mean, what sort of loser would write to an agony aunt in the first place?’

Rachel silently ordered herself to relax. It was anonymous. That was the whole point. Will, unfortunately, hadn’t finished yet.

‘Don’t people have mates any more? Anyway, I bet the staff writers make up the letters they reply to, to suit their theme of the week.’

Rachel was rattled, but she knew she couldn’t let on. She would be the laughing stock of the department if anyone found out.

‘Oh, I don’t know. I bet some people write all the time.’ She feigned being offhand not entirely convincingly. Luckily Will was on a mini-roll, and oblivious to her discomfort.

‘Yeah. The same sort of people who enter word search competitions and watch daytime quiz shows, I bet… I mean, look—take this one…’

Will was now on his feet and using some of his excess energy for pacing.

‘I mean, perlease…check this out…’ Will adopted a silly squeaky voice and read from the open page. ‘“My husband is a really nice guy, he’s not a cross-dresser, or an S&M aficionado or even a difficult bloke…if only he can just hang in there I feel certain that we can make things work again…The trouble is that he seems to be giving up on me and I am beginning to wonder whether he might be thinking about having or even have started an affair…” Of course the bloke’s having an affair. She even admits later on that she’s practically stopped shagging him—and think about it from his point of view. He’s married to someone who reads agony aunt pages and then writes in. Good luck to him. I’d say he was well out of there.’

Rachel was now sitting at her desk, nervously sliding her chair through one hundred and eighty degrees and back again, trying to look entertained by Will’s flamboyant display. Having her letter read aloud to her as if it had been written by a congenital idiot, by a guy who probably still had wet dreams, was not what she had planned for the afternoon. Will perched on the desk right in front of her, and as he scanned the rest of the page he continued his commentary.

‘This woman needs to get out there and get herself a life. To be fair, though, the reply’s not a lot better. I mean, to write…. “I’m afraid there is no magic solution to your problem…” Get away! You don’t need to be a fully qualified aunt of agony to work that one out, do you?’

Suddenly Rachel had had enough. Will’s behaviour was making her realise how young he really was. His earlier charm was rapidly dissipating. She resisted the urge to be too defensive of the anonymous author, although she could feel her ears going red under her hair at the indignity of it all.

‘What you really can’t see from the photo is that this Lizzie woman is seriously fit. I wouldn’t mind telling her my problems. She’s that blonde one with the phone-in on City FM. Hot property, by all accounts. About your sort of age…’

He gave Rachel a suggestive glance and she met his gaze halfway. She had to hand it to him; the boy had a nerve. His meaningful look delivered safely, and with the desired flustering effect, he consciously increased the distance between
them and returned to the sofa, still talking. ‘She’s one of those older women with sex appeal that we’re all supposed to be mad for at the moment. I hope
Loaded
or
Maxim
stump up lots of cash for her to take her kit off. I bet she could solve a lot of problems with that body. Thinking about it, I bet you could too. Maybe you should think about becoming an agony aunt?’