Not Another Happy Ending (33 page)

‘Go away.’

Tom frowned. ‘Hmm?’

‘Not you.’

He looked round to check who else was in the room. ‘Jane, are you all right?’

‘No, I'm bloody not all right. I want more chocolate.’

Reluctantly, Darsie proffered the remainder of the bar.

Tom reached over one arm of the chair and hoisted his trusty messenger bag from the floor. He unbuckled it and slid out her manuscript.

‘Maybe it'd help if we talked it through …’

‘You brought my manuscript?’ The nerve of the man. The only reason she'd let him through the front door was so that he could apologise to her endlessly and unsuccessfully. Instead she found herself in the middle of an editing session. Trust Tom to turn a fiasco into an opportunity.

‘Yes, I thought that once I'd prostrated myself sufficiently and begged you for forgiveness we could get onto the important stuff.’ The hint of a smile crossed his lips and then it was gone like a ghost.

‘Oh, he's so single-minded,’ said Darsie, impressed.

Jane felt her jaw go rigid. Tom laid one hand on the cover of the manuscript. It covered most of the page.

‘And what big hands you have, grandmama.’ Darsie nudged Jane.

He took a long breath and considered the novel. ‘I think the problem might be that you don't get to choose your ending. It has to follow naturally from what comes before, or it doesn't feel true.’

Darsie caught Jane's eye. ‘And so insightful,’ said her heroine with a twinkle.

‘I want to start with Darsie,’ he went on.

‘Goody.’

‘I don't understand her.’

‘No kidding,’ said Jane under her breath.

‘I mean, why's she in love with Tony Douglas, a man who betrays her so utterly? He's emotionally crippled, obsessed with his umbrella factory, has an uncomfortable tendency for mean-spiritedness …’

She felt bad that he hadn't yet twigged. ‘He has nice hair,’ she offered, and saw him reach understanding the way a parachutist with no chute reaches the ground.

He shot out of the chair and dropped the manuscript as if it had bit him. It landed with a thud on the flagstones.

‘OK, OK, so yes,’ she confessed, ‘maybe there is an
element
of autobiography.’

He snorted. ‘An element?’ He began to pace the small room, the top of his head brushing the low ceiling.

‘Which means you're the reason I can't write.’

‘Me?’

‘At some point during the last few weeks it dawned on me that when I finished this novel we were finished too, and some insane part of me—’

‘Hey, why you looking at me?’ said Darsie indignantly.

‘—doesn't want that to happen.’ She hadn't intended to say it, conscious that to do so was to lay herself open to him. Typical, she'd been blocked for a month but when she actually wanted to keep a lid on it the words had rushed out. She paused. ‘You're my block, Tom.’

He affected the same look of deep concentration as before. ‘But I want you to finish it.’

She'd bared herself and in return he had disappointed her. Again. She got to her feet to harangue him. ‘Of course you do. And for what? So you can turn a profit. All you care about is your company.’

‘I've sold it,’ he said quietly.

‘What?’ said Darsie.

‘What?’ said Jane.

‘I've sold the company. Your new novel will be published by Tristesse Books, an imprint of Pandemic Media.’

Her mind whirled. ‘You can't have sold it! That stupid company is you. Get it back. You can't do this to me. I'm on the moral high ground here. I'm not getting off now.’ She let it sink in. He might as well have said that he'd sold a lung. No, he had two lungs, but only one Tristesse. ‘You
sold
it?’

He nodded. ‘And you can take all the time you need with the last chapter. I made it part of the deal.’

What had that cost him? Not financially. She knew he didn't care about that, but in every other way. She weighed the balance. He had hurt her with his high-handed attitude to her title and then the foolish scheme to beat her writer's block, but he had cared about her novel when no one else had. And still cared. He could have taken the new manuscript with the terrible final chapter she'd given him, published it and saved his company. Instead he had sacrificed the thing most dear to him to prove that there was something else more dear. Someone.

So, what happened next?

It was up to her. Real life so rarely presented moments like these. Life buffeted you from one conclusion to the next, open-ended until it ended. Life was a series of accidents, happy and unhappy. But at that moment she had become the protagonist of her own story, this ending in her hands. All she had to do was find the right words.

‘Tom. I didn't sign. With Klinsch and McLeish. I couldn't do it.’

She studied his face, trying to read his reaction—was he pleased to hear this news? He gave nothing away. Then after a pause that lasted forever he said:

‘You could stay.’ He took a step towards her. ‘With me.’

She could feel his breath on her face. ‘I could.’

He started to speak and she held up a finger to cut him
off. ‘If I hear the words “sad”, “beautiful” or “music”, you're a dead man.’

She wanted to hear him say something else. Had been waiting since the night in the cottage when they'd got all Chapter 17 on each other. She relished the sequel—ached for it—but before they made love she wanted to hear him say it. Those three little words.

He gazed at her steadily. ‘I … block you.’

She held his stare. ‘And I block you too.’

He slipped an arm around her waist and pulled her to him. In the split second before their lips met she felt herself resist. She would never end one of her novels like this. It was unrealistic and smacked of wish-fulfilment. In her stories the universe turned a cold eye on the lives and loves of her characters. She felt his fingers gently stroking the nape of her neck. What was she saying again? Something about the harsh uncaring universe …

They kissed but then in the midst of the embrace she broke off. She stared past him, out of the corner of her eye aware of him regarding her with the dismal expression of a Frenchman thwarted mid-snog.

Darsie stood in front of the fireplace, smiling sadly. The fire was dying, the solitary log reduced to a thin layer of hot ash, its glow fading.

‘What?’ he complained. ‘What now? What could possibly be so important?’

She hadn't noticed until that moment but her head was filled with an endless, wearying hum. Only knew it now
because for the first time since she'd become stuck on the final chapter the hum had stopped.

‘I know how it ends,’ she mouthed and turned for the door. She hadn't dragged her laptop to the cottage, but there was a notebook and pen in the kitchen. ‘And I just want to make a few notes …’

She felt Tom's fingers close around her arm, gentle but firm. ‘I don't care,’ he said.

She glanced towards the kitchen. Doors. Tricky things to get through. When she turned back Darsie had vanished. And this time she knew it was for good.

He kissed her again. A smirk slid across his face. She recognised that look. Had missed its promise. That was a Chapter 17 look. His hands were on her, unbuttoning, unzipping. She pulled his shirt over his head and as she did so brushed his forehead. It felt hot. Feverish.

‘You're on fire,’ she said, suddenly concerned.

‘You're pretty hot your—’

He pitched into her like a felled oak tree. Somehow she held onto him and manoeuvred his dead weight into the armchair, all the time calmly repeating his name. It would be OK. Everything would be OK. He slumped in the chair, unresponsive. They were eight miles from the nearest village. No working phone. She shook him, shouting his name now. Felt his neck for a pulse, her fingers desperately seeking the reassuring beat that would tell her everything was going to turn out all right in the end.

‘Singin’ in the Rain’, John Martyn, 1971, Island

O
N A HILL
above the city they gather in the breezy cemetery. Rain is forecast, but with callous disregard for the appropriate mood, for now the sun shines out of a blue sky. Solemn-faced men and women line the graveside, six deep. A decent turnout.

Roddy stands hand in hand with Nicola. Behind them his English class, smartly turned out in their school uniforms, most unsure how to behave at such a gathering. Benny Lockhart offers Anna LeFèvre a handkerchief. Donald MacDonald looks old. The only sound is the wind in the yew trees. Jane watches their branches sway, remembers reading somewhere that the funerary trees are traditionally planted in twos. The bitter irony doesn't escape her here, where couples inseparable in life are finally parted.

Her eyes fall on the dark wooden casket that rests in front of an empty podium. She can barely look at it; the
sight offends her. She wants to blame him. In her head she has berated him often: how could he do this to her? But she didn't say it when she had the chance and now it's too late.

She walks slowly up to the podium as she has rehearsed, bends her head and begins to read. She hears the words issue from her mouth, hardly listening to them. She steals glances at the audience. Nicola comforts an inconsolable Roddy, openly weeping into a red handkerchief, the spot of colour popping against the wall of black. Her dad fights welling emotions but she can see his lip trembling with the effort to resist. Hard men don't cry. And then she's at the foot of the page and the final paragraph. She experiences an inrush of feeling, like air rapidly filling a vacuum. The world shrinks and the words telescope.

‘Why is it that the saddest endings seem the truest? In the stories I told myself I was always the heroine, always reaching for my happy ending. It didn't turn out that way. I won't get to spend the rest of my life with him. But I was loved, and that's enough.’

Her voice fades and all that remains is the breeze in the trees and the sound of quiet weeping.

And then another voice mutters behind her, the accent unmistakable: a wisp of French mixed with a few stray Scottish vowels. ‘I knew this would happen,’ says Tom.

She turns to see him staring regretfully up at the clear sky. ‘I was going to hire a rain machine, but you have no
idea how expensive those things are. I think they must charge by the drop.’

He sidles up to join her at the podium, clears his throat and addresses the gathering in a loud, confident voice.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,
fellow mourners
, Jane Lockhart will now be signing copies of her new novel,
You'll Catch Your Death
.’

At his signal two men dressed as undertakers flip open the coffin lid. The white silk interior is lined with copies of Jane's latest book. On the cover the title and her name frame a stylised photograph of a beautiful but melancholy young woman sheltering beneath a red umbrella.

Months ago, as they'd edited the manuscript, working speedily towards publication, he'd presented options for the cover. Annoyingly, this was the first design he had shown her. She loved it immediately, knew in her gut that it was the one. The figure was exactly how she'd pictured Darsie and the title worked beautifully with the image. So, naturally she had rejected it out of hand, making a giant fuss in the process, forcing him to mock up a dozen more designs before suggesting they revisit the first one. All in all she considered that he'd taken her shenanigans with surprising good grace.

The title had come to her in a flash, that night in the cottage when he'd suffered his little fainting fit. That's how she referred to it these days, just to wind him up, but for about thirty seconds she was sure he was dead. And during those moments of abject terror the title had popped
into her head.
You'll Catch Your Death
. She was ashamed to say it, but even as she tried to rouse his inert body she experienced a momentary spike of pleasure. It was a
great
title. And hot on its heels another thought—she blushed that it should ever have crossed her mind—if he
did
die then he couldn't possibly change it.

She'd shared the title with him on the drive home sitting in the cab of the AA rescue truck. Your near-death experience inspired my new title—isn't that funny?
Darkly amusing?
Oh come on you grumpy Frenchman, that's
funny
.

The AA guy said he really liked it.

Jane closes her own copy of the book which is resting on the dais. She taps the cover image fondly and whispers to her heroine, ‘I'm sorry about your ending, but it was the right one.’

Tony Douglas had to die, as much as Tom Duval had to live. Darsie didn't get her happy ending after all, but Jane Lockhart did.

‘Are you actually talking to your book?’

Tom is at her shoulder. She surveys the funeral-themed launch party that he's proudly organised. She'd objected to it when he proposed the idea, but not strenuously enough. And since he'd graciously let her choose the cover and hadn't offered even a pipsqueak of objection to the title, she felt she had to give him something. On the other hand … books in a coffin.

‘I wish you hadn't done that,’ she says, gesturing to
the casket from which Waterstones booksellers dispense copies of her new novel. ‘It's really offensive.’

A string quartet plays Beethoven's ‘Funeral March’ from the 3
^rd
Symphony, Tom having rejected Chopin's effort as too mainstream.

‘You don't think it's all a bit tacky?’ she says.

‘Tacky?’ He sounds indignant. ‘We have canapés.’ A waiter dressed as a pallbearer wafts past carrying a tray laden with vols-au-vent baked in the shape of headstones. ‘Now get signing.’

Sophie Hamilton Findlay leads her to a signing table. The queue already stretches back past six rows of graves and a mausoleum. As she settles into the familiar rhythm of greeting eager readers and sending out Best Wishes she watches Tom at the edge of the crowd in deep conversation with Anna, his bank manager. She holds her breath, hoping it's not more bad news. He'd sold Tristesse to some faceless corporation. For her. And then she sees the two of them clink champagne-filled glasses and a grin split his handsome face. ‘Oh, thank fuck for that,’ she says aloud—and inadvertently to a mother and her young daughter waiting for their books to be signed. The mother's smile slips. Horrified, she apologises profusely.