Who's Afraid of Mr Wolfe? (11 page)

Four o’clock and Ellie was nearly ready. She wedged a chair under the handle of the office door and off came the work camouflage and on went the new underwear, a silky dress and high, strappy sandals. It felt weird to be wearing something so insubstantial and expensive. She
did a quick calculation of how much it had all cost and then decided not to put a price on love.

Looking down, she found herself face to face with her cleavage. She tried to hitch the neckline of the dress up a bit and then thought about how she was meant to be exuding sexiness. She lowered her hands, but soon they were fussing with the neckline again. A nervous tic, she’d have to fight it. She should think about that makeover incident. Her hands lay still.

Ellie leaned over the desk and scrawled a hasty note to Lesley explaining why she was leaving early and then walked to the lift, sashaying in her high heels. She swung her hips and giggled.

It was Friday, she was dressed to seduce, and all was right with the world. In the lift she did a little dance before the doors whooshed back open.

Even the sight of Jack Wolfe striding into reception wasn’t going to dampen her spirits. She lifted her chin and delayed putting on her coat. Stuff him and his views on her. She was off for a sexy weekend in a foreign city with a man who was worth three of big, bullying, woman-eating Jack.

‘Ooh, nice dress,’ Rachel said, as she passed. ‘Special date?’

‘Yeah, with Sam. Surprise weekend in Barcelona.’ She hoped she’d said it loud enough for Jack to hear. She lavished a large smile on him and was pleased to see him
raise his eyebrows in surprise. ‘Bye, Jack,’ she cooed. ‘Have a lovely, lovely weekend.’

Jack began sifting through the pile of messages that Rachel had handed him, head down, engrossed.

Except he wasn’t really concentrating on his messages; he was watching Ellie out of the corner of his eye, watching her in that dress, with those legs. He was especially interested in the way bits of her jiggled beautifully as she walked.

And then his mind went to another woman whose body used to do that when she moved and he looked away sharply and started to find his messages very, very interesting indeed.

The woman at the hotel desk seemed a bit spooked. Perhaps Ellie wasn’t making herself clear; her Spanish was pretty good, but maybe they only spoke Catalan in this hotel.

Ellie tried again. ‘Signor Bulstrode, here? This hotel?’

There was a breakthrough. ‘Yes,’ said the woman, but it was accompanied by a shifty look towards the porter.

Ellie felt weary and grubby and anxious to have her reunion with Sam. Her feet hurt in her strappy sandals, and the radio on the reception desk, pumping out a high-octane commentary on a football match, was hurting her ears.

‘Could I please check in and go up to his room?’

‘You want to go up too?’ said the woman, the look of consternation in her eyes intensifying.

Ellie sighed. ‘As well as Mr Bulstrode? Yes.’

The woman’s brow furrowed, but she indicated to the porter to take Ellie’s bag, telling him to go to Room 27. The porter gave Ellie a strange look as well, and she began to wonder whether they were very religious and upset by the fact that she obviously wasn’t
Mrs
Bulstrode. That suspicion was confirmed as Ellie got into the lift and the woman called out after her, ‘We’re a family hotel, you know.’

Ellie tried not to look at the porter as the lift rose and instead studied the rather faded pictures of Barcelona. The photographer had managed to achieve the impossible and make the place look like Croyden.

Soon they were outside Sam’s room and Ellie knocked on the door, pulled in her stomach and put on her best seductive look. There was a slight pause and the door opened a fraction. Sam peered out and she saw a look of panic cross his face.

‘Ellie, what …?’ he said.

The porter looked at her and looked at Sam.

‘Aren’t you going to let me in, Sam?’ Ellie purred. ‘This was a lovely idea.’

Sam did not move and so Ellie gently pushed the door. Sam held on to it tightly and she noticed how his breathing seemed to have speeded up.

‘Are you all right, Sam?’ she asked, worried that he
might be feeling ill. She noticed that he only had a towel round his waist and was sweating a lot. His hair was plastered to his forehead. Perhaps he had a fever.

‘Ellie,’ Sam started to say, ‘I’m … I …’

Ellie was definitely worried now. He couldn’t even speak properly.

And then a voice sounded from inside the room. A female voice.

‘Sam,
was ist los? Wer ist da?
’

Ellie felt as though somebody with an icy hand had reached into her chest and squeezed her heart.

She gave the door a hearty push. Sam backed out of the way and then she understood everything. All the late nights. Those new clothes. The torrent of mobile-phone calls he got at home but never answered in front of her.

Lying naked and dishevelled on the bed was a blonde woman, her long, tanned legs culminating in a pair of killer heels.

Ellie heard herself say, ‘One of your German colleagues, Sam?’ and Sam said something like, ‘Yes. Lotte.’

And then she was back down in the reception area, but this time in the little office. The Spanish lady was pouring her a glass of wine and rubbing her hand and jabbering away in Catalan to the porter with such vehemence that Ellie knew it was something along the lines of ‘All men are bastards and Englishmen are the worst.’ The unsympathetic look on the porter’s face told Ellie
that however Catalans thought ‘this is priceless’, he was thinking it.

Ellie felt as if she were acting in a very bad farce and that soon somebody would leap through some French windows dressed as a vicar. Things like this did not happen to people like her. Except they did and they had, and now she was sitting in a Spanish hotel wondering how she could have been so deaf, dumb and pigging blind.

Ellie could not remember much about the plane journey back from Barcelona. She knew the woman in the hotel had booked the flight for her and she had some recollection of the taxi drive to the airport, but after that it was as if somebody else was doing all the talking and sitting, while Ellie herself was limping along behind, unable to think about anything except how Sam had acted when he had opened the door to his room.

Somehow she found herself sitting on the sofa in their flat. It was dark outside, and she must have been sitting there for a while because she had pins and needles in her feet. Next to her, on the table, there appeared to be an empty bottle of wine and a pile of damp tissues. Everything else in the flat looked the same as it had when she had left on Friday, but she had no idea how that could be, as her whole life was different now.

None of this was possible. Sam and Ellie, Ellie and Sam,
they were a couple. They’d been through university together, the thrill and fear of getting their first jobs. She’d stood on the touchline at hundreds of rugby matches for him; he’d dragged himself round art galleries for her. He’d supported her through the death of her parents; she’d comforted him when his best mate had been killed. He understood she couldn’t get started in the morning without a cup of tea; she understood how much he hated peanut butter. Big things, little things. It was Ellie and Sam against the world, for God’s sake.

Except it wasn’t any more. Some other woman had taken her place and all those little milestones of sharing, all those signs of infinite caring for each other, had been discarded. They’d been examined and found not to be enough. And she’d been lied to, for weeks, even months. Lied to and cheated on like some sad sap.

She should have known. She should have seen that the steam was going out of the relationship. Why hadn’t she read the signs? Not just Sam’s late nights and more frequent absences, but also the way she herself had reacted to them. What had been behind that failure of perception, her almost suicidal lack of effort?

Ellie hauled herself up from the sofa and collapsed on the bed with her clothes still on. She slept very little, relentlessly going over in her mind where she had gone wrong and how stupid she felt and how sad she was that someone who had loved her and whom she had loved back
could have travelled so far away from her without her even noticing.

When Ellie got into work on Monday morning, she sat at her computer and scrolled through email after email asking her how her weekend had gone. She heard Lesley say, ‘Ellie, are you feeling OK? I mean, I know you’re not OK … but … is there anything I can do? Anything I can get you?’

She shook her head. Lesley had done enough yesterday when Ellie had finally got out of bed and telephoned her. She had listened to Ellie’s barely coherent account of what had happened, made all the right, sympathetic noises and then come round and made her eat something and have a bath and wash her hair.

It was simple love, given without a fuss, and it had been in evidence again this morning when she had arranged to meet Ellie outside the agency and walk in with her. Fielding Rachel’s questions, she had got Ellie upstairs without her having to talk to anyone else. She would have to face them soon, of course, but this little breather was what she needed before the real and the mock sympathy started.

Ellie stopped looking through her emails and felt as if she wasn’t really sitting in the chair; it all seemed like a nightmare that was happening to someone else. Not to her and Sam.

With a sharp little pain in her chest, she realised there was no more her and Sam.

She leaned forward and started to type.

Thanks for asking about my weekend with Sam in Barcelona.

Well, in a word it was ‘crap’.

Got there to find Sam in bed with Lotte from Dortmund. And I guess from the sweat they had worked up, they hadn’t been doing much sleeping.

Seems he’s been teaching her English, she’s been teaching him German, and I’ve been learning how to be a stupid, blind idiot. It’s been going on for months evidently, right under my nose. Now he’s leaving me to live with her.

To those of you who didn’t know, join the club … and please, please don’t ring me. I know you will want to be nice and supportive, but I really don’t feel that I want to talk about this at the moment.

And to those of you who did know, thanks, appreciate it. You’ve made me look a tit in two countries.

Well, three, if you count Germany.

Not to mention adding another layer of humiliation to the whole thing.

Ellie

Then she sent the email to everyone Sam knew, including his dentist, the Tesco grocery delivery service and his stuck-up ruddy sister.

Ellie sat in the Creative Department meeting and marvelled that Gavin didn’t bore himself to death. On and on he went about his wonderful suntan lotion ad and how it was nearly ready for its very first viewing by the agency.

Jack was saying nothing. Every now and again he took a deep breath in, held it for a while as he lifted his chin and glared at the ceiling, and then let his breath out slowly. It was perhaps some kind of testosterone yoga that was just about stopping him from grabbing Gavin by the throat and squeezing him until he stopped talking.

Ellie could see that everyone was losing interest, apart from Zak and Jon, who were like little nodding dogs, hanging on Gavin’s every word.

She closed her eyes and went back to pick, pick, picking away at Sam’s betrayal and all that had happened in the three weeks since she’d pushed open that bedroom door in Barcelona.

It had all been horrible, starting with the tearful phone
call from Sam’s mother. She and Ellie had promised each other that they’d always make time to meet up and keep in touch, but they both knew that a leggy German blonde was now firmly wedged between them.

The absolute gut-wrenching low point, though, had been Sam’s visit.

Ellie opened her eyes to check on how the meeting was going. Gavin was still talking; Jack was still doing his deep breathing. Next to her, Lesley was drawing a picture of Gavin with one large testicle and one very small one.

Ellie closed her eyes and steeled herself to go back over the way Sam had looked and sounded the last time she’d seen him. As he’d stood there on the doorstep, Ellie could see everything had shifted. He hadn’t even smelled like Sam any more. She’d kept it together pretty well at the start, but then he had said that Lotte was in the car waiting for him and Ellie had felt like she’d been jabbed in the ribs.

Her intention to be calm had evaporated and she’d shouted, ‘Why, Sam? Give me one good reason why.’

He’d proceeded to give her loads of reasons.

Ellie suddenly became aware that Gavin had shut up and Juliette was talking. Probably a good idea to open her eyes again. Juliette was giving a round-up of what she and Mike had been up to in the last week, starting with the e-book account.

Ellie should really listen to this – she was interested in
e-books – but very soon she had tuned out Juliette’s voice and was thinking about Sam’s visit again.

‘Look, Ellie, I didn’t plan this,’ Sam had said. ‘It was … Lotte just came along and we, you and me, we seemed … stale.’

‘Stale?’

He nodded and wouldn’t look at her. ‘We … well … we were set in our ways. It began to feel like we were only doing things out of habit.’

‘It didn’t to me.’

‘Oh, come on, Ellie. You never suggested anything new. When was the last time we did something totally off the wall?’ He fumbled with the zip on his jumper. ‘Especially in bed. Lotte and I, well, let’s just say she’s not as timid as you.’

Another jab in the ribs. She sat down on the sofa, the tears running down her face.

‘Timid? But we still had fun, didn’t we?’ she said between sobs.

‘We got into a rut, Ellie. I hadn’t been having fun for a long time. And, you, well, you’d given up making any kind of effort as far as I could see.’