Name & Address Withheld (36 page)

‘Good alfternoon, ladies. May I draw your attention to zer specials of tooday?’

Without looking at each other, Lizzie and Susan both sat up
a little straighter to give the
monsieur
their undivided attention.

‘We haf for you a deleecious deesh of wild sea bass. Gently pan-fried with a delicate sawce of the mushroom and spinach, served with a bake of potato, cheese and shallot.’

Lizzie and Susan were both salivating, although from the amount of hair flicking and direct eye contact going on opposite Lizzie it appeared that Susan was as taken with the waiter as she was at the prospect of sea bass. He must be almost half her age.

‘Or, if you fancy something cold…’

Did he look at Lizzie then, or was she just feeling self-conscious? Thanks to the recently poured mineral water she had actually stopped sweating now.

‘…today we have a dressed lobster with a salad of mixed herb leafes and a light limon dressing.’

‘I think I’m just going to have to go for the wild sea bass.’ Susan lingered just a little too long over the ‘wild’, and almost created a small breeze in the W1 area with the rapid fluttering of her eyelashes. Lizzie had to sip her water to prevent a snigger escaping. Susan was shameless…and a thoroughly entertaining lunch companion. Waiter aside, however, Lizzie had to admit that it did sound good—even if she was sure there was no such thing as tame sea bass and the ‘wild’ was probably pure marketing.

‘I’ll have the same, please.’

‘He was rather nice,’ Susan whispered just a little too loudly to be discreet. ‘I love this place. Full of young red-blooded Frenchmen. In my prime I was always a sucker for a bit of a foreign accent…beats the Croydon twang hands-down every time!’

Lizzie had never seen the attraction of surly Gallic men—nor their Croydon counterparts—but laughed and nodded conspiratorially with her editor, whom she imagined had once been a bit of a man-eater. Luckily for the young waiter, it seemed she had moved on to fish. Susan took the initiative.

‘So how
are
you, Lizzie? We haven’t had a proper chat in ages…’

By ‘proper chat’ she meant a good gossip. Lizzie could feel a new wave of totally non-exercise-related heat sweeping across the surface of her skin underneath her cardigan.

‘Still happy at
Out Loud
?’

‘Oh, very. You know I love my job.’

‘Well, you’re very good at it, and the readers love you, so we love you too.’

‘Thanks. How’s circulation?’

‘Levelled off a bit in the last couple of months, but overall still increasing. No mean feat when you look at the new titles out there now.’

‘That’s good…’ Lizzie wasn’t really listening. She was actually rehearsing her next sentence in her head. And there was only a slight pause before she decided that the sooner she got her hidden agenda off her chest, the sooner she could relax and actually enjoy the complimentary croutons and fish pãté. She took a sip of water and cleared her throat before continuing. ‘Actually, Susan, I wanted to ask your advice about something.’

‘Really?’ Susan leant forward, her chin practically resting on Lizzie’s side of the table with the anticipation of a potentially juicy titbit. ‘Personal or professional?’

‘Professional…although it was my personal life that got me into this mess in the first place.’

Susan remained motionless, determined not to miss a syllable.

‘Well…’ Lizzie took a deep breath ‘…I wanted to talk to you about my options. About the possibility of me moving away from the agony aunting side of things and maybe doing something a little less emotional—something a little less hands-on with people.’

Susan leant back against the wall of the booth, her brow furrowed. Concern and confusion tinged her usually radiant complexion. ‘Why make the break?’ Her tone was perplexed. ‘People love you; you’re a real natural. And why now, just when you’ve got your broadcast career up and running? It doesn’t make any business sense. From what I hear, The
Agony and the Ecstasy
is outstripping all its rivals.’

‘I know. I know it all sounds strange. It’s just that…well…people might not love me quite so much if a certain bit of gossip gets to them.’

‘Tell Auntie Susan…I promise I’ll be honest. I bet it’s not as bad as you think. It never is.’

Lizzie looked at her fork before making a potted confession at break-neck speed, finishing with Rachel’s ultimatum at the
Blue
launch. Tempting as it was to include Clare’s revelation, Lizzie knew better than to tell Susan. It would have been as discreet as projecting the information onto the side of the House of Commons. When she finally looked up, expecting disapproval from her editor at the very least, Susan was beaming at her, apparently unruffled. If anything, she looked amused.

‘I wondered when you were going to tell me…’

Lizzie stared at her lunch companion. Rachel had promised she wasn’t going to say anything. She knew it had been too good to be true. Unless, of course, Clare had been interfering again. Secretly she was becoming a little bit annoyed at Clare’s repeated intervention on her behalf. She knew she was being ungrateful, but she had to learn to deal with her own fuck-ups.

‘When did she tell you?’ Lizzie carefully left the ‘she’ non-specific, so she could work out for herself whether it was ‘she’ Clare, or ‘she’ Rachel.

‘You’re not going to like this, but I overheard your little spat at the
Blue
launch.’

‘At the
Blue
launch…?’ Lizzie’s heart nearly stopped dead mid-beat. ‘You were at the… What? You weren’t…? God…’

It took a couple of goes for Lizzie to regain her composure. Susan waited patiently for Lizzie to put an intelligible question together.

‘What were you doing there?’

‘I could ask you the same question.’

Lizzie could feel herself blushing again. Her capillaries were working on overtime. ‘Well…I…well…Robyn…she told me to go. Apparently the editor…um…what was her name? Oh, anyway, well, the editor…’

‘Melissa Matthews?’

‘Yes, that’s it. Melissa Matthews…’ Lizzie was concentrating so hard that she failed to acknowledge the fact that Susan seemed to know exactly who Melissa Matthews was ‘…was interested in meeting me. As it happened I never got to meet her anyway.’

Susan was smiling. ‘It isn’t the first time Melissa’s wanted something that I already had.’

Lizzie looked at her boss quizzically.

‘Well, she thinks you’re fantastic—perfect for
Blue
, just what they need, etc., etc., and then, of course, there is the as yet unavenged fact that I went and married the man she’d always lusted after.’

‘I didn’t know you’d been married.’ Lizzie had always seen Susan as the archetypal vixen. Self-assured, hard to get, but worth the wait. The woman men always looked back on and reminisced about as the one that got away.

‘Oh, it didn’t last very long and I was quite young. I’m not sure that I really loved him, you know. Everyone else did, but once the thrill of the chase was over and we’d got back from our honeymoon in the British Virgin Islands he was actually quite dull—’

Lizzie interrupted her. ‘I take it that you don’t have to be a British Virgin when you arrive there?’

Susan laughed. ‘I’d never have been allowed off the plane! I’d never thought about it like that before…’

Lizzie was full of misplaced admiration for Susan. She wasn’t exactly a guru of how to live your life—unless, of course, you were aiming to live it as selfishly as possible. But in terms of anecdotes and far-flung stories she was excellent value. Guaranteed to have been there, done that, bought and given away the T-shirt long before anyone else had even heard of it.

‘Anyway, where was I? Yes, so you see Melissa and I go back a long way. She’s heading up the team at
Blue
and invited me along partly to thank me for all the tips I’ve given her over the years and largely, I’m sure, to gloat a little and show off at its launch. We’ve managed to flout convention and keep it very much a friendly rivalry.’

‘Did she ever get married?’

‘Oh, yes, she got her man in the end…’ Her eyes were shining. ‘Shame he turned out to prefer men after all the effort she put in. We should have known. He’d always had suspiciously good taste in clothes—oh, and in women, of course…’ Susan couldn’t stop a smile from spreading across her face.

Lizzie was amazed. Susan had been at the launch. And if she and Melissa were friends then she probably knew that Melissa had been talking to Robyn about contracts. But how on earth had she overheard her and Rachel? And if she’d been listening in how many others had been close enough to the Ladies’ to be privy to the whole thing?

‘No wonder you didn’t want to meet that Rachel woman for dinner. It was that same one who rang me a couple of weeks earlier, wasn’t it?’

Lizzie nodded. She wasn’t coming out of this very well. Unless, of course, her objective was to tell her boss as many lies as possible—in which case she must be on the leader board for Deceitful Employee of the Year.

‘She sounded quite a character. Feisty. Who’d have thought it? My very own
Ask Lizzie
a mistress.’

Lizzie looked devastated. Susan didn’t even look cross.

‘So where were you? Did you hear everything?’ Lizzie just had to know.

‘I’m afraid so.’ Susan at least had the decency to look sheepish at this point. ‘I hate to admit it. It’s so uncouth, and dreadfully seedy, but I was in the toilets the whole time. Behind a locked door…in a stall… It would have been pretty difficult not to listen. I would have left, but there didn’t seem to be an appropriate moment so I thought I’d be better off staying put.’

Lizzie’s head slipped into her hands. At least Susan hadn’t decided to make a break for the basins. She wasn’t sure she’d have been able to cope with her presence if she’d known about it.

‘I’m surprised you didn’t just post me my P45 the next morning.’

‘To be honest, I’m actually a little bit disappointed that you haven’t come to see me sooner about it all. I’m hardly going
to sack you because you fell in love with the wrong man. It’s not like I’m perfect, is it, darling?’

‘But he was…sorry, I should say, he
is
…married to someone who had written to me asking for advice.’

‘But I bet he wasn’t wearing a label saying “married man” when you met him, was he? They never do. Bloody unfair, if you ask me.’

Lizzie pulled herself into the upright position as she realised Susan was on her side. ‘So you’re not cross, then?’

‘Cross? What for?’

‘Well, I could bring the magazine into disrepute if this gets out.’

Susan laughed again. Lizzie wasn’t sure how she felt about the fact that she was providing her editor with such an entertaining lunch break.

‘I very much doubt it. Just think Marje Proops. She was a mistress for years, and after the news broke everyone still valued her advice. Plus, a few column inches in a few choice publications might get us a few more readers. I employed you as an agony aunt, not as a saint. You’re human. Don’t underestimate how important that is to your readers. Some employees have to go on courses to gain qualifications, just see your training on this occasion as a little bit more hands-on!’

Lizzie couldn’t help but feel that Susan was being a little bit flippant about the whole thing. Fancy dismissing her affair as vocational. The bottom line was that it wasn’t funny. Well, not that funny. Well, OK, quite funny if one of the people involved wasn’t you. But Lizzie seemed to have temporarily misplaced her sense of humour. She was sure she’d had it there earlier.

‘But Rachel has threatened to end my career if I so much as speak to Matt again…’

‘Calm down, will you?’ Susan shook her head disapprovingly. ‘You really are very uptight about all of this, aren’t you? Maybe I’ll get Bridget to give you a massage later on—she’s a fully qualified aromatherapist, you know—or maybe you should try doing a bit of yoga…it’s done wonders for my quality of life. Pilates is another one. It’s just amazing how the way
you breathe can change your posture and your outlook. It really toned me up, you know. But if you want to see definition that Ashtanga power yoga is what you need. It’s the business. Just look at Madonna.’

There wasn’t a fad that Susan hadn’t embraced like a long-lost relative.

‘I’m fine.’ Lizzie tried her best to act cool.

‘Now, where was I? Ah yes…you being a mistress…’

Lizzie flinched inwardly. She still couldn’t quite deal with ‘mistress’ being used as an adjective to describe her. It made her sound so calculating. As if she’d deliberately gone out there in search of a married man, determined to ride roughshod over some unsuspecting little wife, her actions dictated by her raw and potent sexual magnetism. The stereotype was all-prevailing and totally detached from the reality of what had happened.

‘Well— 1) He didn’t tell you he was married when you first met him. 2) You’re not with him any more. You tried to do the right thing when plenty of people would have been less considerate and much more selfish. 3) You genuinely fell for him. It’s not like you deliberately set out to sabotage her marriage. Your readers—and the same will apply to your listeners, I’m sure—would rather take advice from someone human but flawed than some sanctimonious do-gooder who wouldn’t know great sex or physical attraction if it got into bed next to them.’

‘I suppose so.’ Lizzie was feeling much better already. She wished now that she’d told Susan weeks ago. It might have saved her a few sleepless nights.

‘I know so. First-hand experience is always the most educational… Maybe we should make this a bit of a feature…’

‘Susan…’ Lizzie knew what was coming next. Susan had a very commercial handle on everything. ‘I don’t want to become the “me and my love triangle” side show, OK?’

‘OK. Although, now you come to mention it, it does have a bit of a ring to it.’ Susan was just seeing how far she could push her.

‘Susan…’ Lizzie’s voice was loaded with warning tones.

‘Come on, now—give me a bit of credit, will you? All I was going to say is, how about you write about all this for the magazine and come clean? You don’t have to name any names, but I bet you’d get a lot of sympathy…’