Who's Afraid of Mr Wolfe? (29 page)

He smiled up at her, his eyes sparkling. ‘I have had four.’

‘Oh dear. That means you’ve had one gin and tonic and three neat gins. Edith’s measures are a bit haphazard.’

Jack came up a step so his mouth was level with hers. ‘Don’t worry.’ He lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘It will have absolutely no effect on my ability to pleasure you repeatedly until morning.’

Ellie still had her mouth open when he lifted her up and put her over his shoulder. ‘No, Jack,’ she shouted, ‘I’ll be sick. I’m full of pizza and wine and sambucas.’

‘Shut up, wench,’ Jack said, stumbling slightly on the top stair before heading for the bedroom. ‘You’re going to be full of something a lot bigger in a minute.’

When Ellie woke up, Jack had gone and there was no sign that he had ever been there at all. She struggled up from the floor and wondered what Jack had against using a bed.

She got herself under her duvet and lay there for a while thinking about him. Since that first weekend he’d sought her out nearly every day. What did that mean? That he liked her? That he liked having sex with her? Both? She turned over and pulled the duvet right up around her neck. What would Rachel do in this situation, besides put up a billboard announcing the news? She’d lie back and enjoy it, of course, and not read too much into it. Just go with it and not look to the future. That’s what any savvy woman would do.

She turned over again and wriggled about until she was comfortable, ignoring how the muscles all the way up the insides of her legs hurt. The important thing was not to look too far ahead. Not to make plans, any plans that involved Jack. Yes, she had to remember that. Really.

Ellie went out to the cinema with an old school friend that evening and came home and wandered around downstairs for a bit, rearranging things that didn’t need rearranging. In the end Edith told her to sit down and watch some television, but Ellie only managed a few minutes before she was up on her feet again. She checked the answerphone and then decided to sort out her handbag and have a look at her mobile. Then she wandered off into the garden and rushed back in at one point because she thought she had heard the front doorbell ring.

‘I think you need to calm down,’ Edith said, looking a little weary.

Ellie took herself off to bed and tried to guess what Jack was doing now, and even while she was wondering, she knew it was madness. He was probably out having a good time. Or even worse, staying in and having a good time.

That he didn’t need her tonight was obvious.

The thought of that made her curl up into a tight ball under her duvet and force herself to think about what would happen when she went back to work. Was she really the kind of woman who could sit opposite Jack in a meeting and forget all the times they had made love?

She sat up abruptly. Made love? Made love? How had it gone from ‘having sex’ to ‘making love’?

She hurtled out of bed and started sifting through the piles of paper on her desk until she found the latest copy of
Ad Infinitum
. Then she took it back to bed with her and looked again at the job adverts she had previously circled in red.

Letting Edith go into the Hampton Court maze on her own had probably been a bit of a mistake. She had been gone twenty minutes already. If she didn’t come out soon, Ellie was going to have to go in after her.

Ellie wandered about a little longer, trying not to keep checking her watch. Honestly, this must be what it was like when your kids were late home.

It had seemed natural to come here today when she needed distracting. If she couldn’t forget about Jack here, she wasn’t going to do it anywhere. This had always been one of her favourite places, the Tudor bit of it especially. Maybe it wasn’t as elegant as the later bits closer to the river, but that red brick, the massive gateway and the secret, cobbled courtyards all cast their magic over her.

She didn’t need to close her eyes to imagine Henry VIII and his court living here; she could still feel them, almost see them.

There was Henry beating everyone at tennis, his white
shirt sticking to his skin; here was Anne Boleyn, her hand tracing the wood panelling as she walked and casting a look over her shoulder at some man she had bewitched. But the one she could see most clearly was poor Catherine Howard. The story went that Henry had been told of her infidelity in a note he had been given at chapel. Whenever Ellie visited that part of the palace, she imagined Catherine screaming and being hauled away by the guards as she tried to reach Henry to somehow convince him she was innocent.

Among all this grandeur, all this history, it still came down to sex and betrayal.

Ellie gravitated back to the entrance of the maze, moving into the shade to stop the back of her neck from burning in the sun, and then spotted a couple whom she recognised as having gone into the maze slightly before Edith. ‘Sorry to disturb you,’ she shouted, ‘you didn’t by any chance notice an old lady in there who might have got a bit disorientated?’

‘Wearing bright-red Crocs?’ said the man.

Ellie nodded. They were Edith’s latest acquisition and she teamed them with everything.

‘She was sitting on the seat right in the middle when we last saw her,’ said the woman. ‘She was talking to some French students about India. She seemed perfectly happy.’

Ellie thanked them and rushed off, hoping that she would be in time to stop the French students from dying of confusion.
She had not got very far when Edith appeared, surrounded by a group of young men chatting animatedly.

‘Ah, here is my great-niece now, the one I told you about, the one with the singing knickers.’ The men turned to look at Ellie as though they actually expected her underwear to burst into song. Perhaps something had got lost in Edith’s translation.

‘
Bonjour
,’ Ellie said, and gave a little wave.

‘We have been discussing the similarities between the role of the British in India and the role of the French in Indo-China. Quite, quite fascinating,’ Edith explained.

The students nodded enthusiastically.

‘But now I must go, my dear friends. It has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for helping me find my way out of the maze. Really, it’s a wonder I ever found my way back from India.’

There was much laughter and then Edith and the students exchanged kisses and hugs and they all gave Ellie a kiss on both cheeks too.

Edith and Ellie watched them wander off, a little group of bright T-shirts and jeans and olive skins.

Ellie put her arm round Edith. ‘You know, you keep right on surprising me.’

‘Thank you, dear,’ Edith said, reaching up and patting Ellie’s hand. ‘Is that when you’re not surprising yourself?’

‘Me? Surprising myself?’ Then the penny dropped. ‘Ah, with Jack, you mean,’ she mumbled.

‘Yes, with Jack.’ Edith prodded at the dusty path with one foot. ‘I seem to recall somebody telling me that although she found him attractive, nothing was going to happen. Judging by the noises that were coming from your flat last week, a lot seems to have been happening.’

‘Well …’

‘He’s very different from Sam, isn’t he? Are you glad you weren’t too scared to leap into that particular pool?’

They walked on. Ellie didn’t want to talk about Jack and she certainly didn’t want to think about all the ways in which he was different from Sam. She had only seen him once more since that night she’d discovered him playing Scrabble with Edith. He had arrived on the doorstep, been monumentally taciturn – except when they were actually entwined round each other on the floor, when he had been very vocal indeed – and then stomped off into the night. Tomorrow, she knew, he was flying out to New York.

Filling her days with retail therapy and trips out with Edith had not stopped her wondering what he was up to and whether he had now lost interest in her.

It worried her that he was still rampaging around in her head. She had kind of imagined that when she got to know him better, she would like him less.

Ellie tried to distract Edith with a visit to the kitchens, set out as they would have been at the time of a Tudor banquet. They marvelled at the sheer quantity of food
needed and agreed that it would have been hell to work in this part of the palace. They chewed over what peacock would have tasted like. And then all their energy left them and they were filled with the desire to sit down and eat something processed and modern.

‘Sam was very much what I call a boy-man,’ said Edith mid-sandwich, as though there had not been any delay in the conversation since her last utterance about him.

‘A
boy-man
?’

‘Yes. It’s not a criticism. He was grown-up, but still a bit boyish, you know. Whereas Jack, well … Jack’s lived. He’s a man, isn’t he? You won’t catch him lighting his farts.’

‘I don’t recall Sam doing that, Edith.’ Ellie stirred her coffee a bit too vigorously and watched it slop over the side of the cup.

‘Don’t get cross, dear. It was a theoretical example, not an actual one. All I’m saying is that Jack is a man and, well, now I know him, I can see there are depths there. Quite substantial depths, I’d say.’

Ellie took a large bite from her sandwich and was happy it gave her an excuse not to answer.

She tried to avoid Edith’s gaze, which was, for somebody her age, extremely penetrating, but Edith took her by the hand. ‘All I’m saying, dear, is that you have really only ever been with Sam. You’re not very experienced with men. You need to be careful with Jack. Don’t expect too much. Just try to treat it as fun.’

Ellie didn’t respond with anything more than a weak smile. It was painful to hear somebody else voice what she already knew about Jack. She realised that up until that moment she had been holding out some feeble hope that maybe, maybe she might mean something more to him than the rest of his harem.

And that, as even Edith knew, was foolish.

She had, indeed, become like all the others, doing the very thing of which she had accused them: hoping that she was the one who could burrow under all that stone and find a soft centre. All those brooding silences, that unpredictable temper, it was almost as if Jack had followed some guide to being the classic tortured hero.

Whereas Ellie had evidently ingested a study of romantic self-delusion.

Unfortunately, knowing all this didn’t make it any easier to be living through it. Ellie felt tears threatening to come and so made an excuse about getting some more milk and went off and took a long time to fetch it. When she got back to the table, Edith was busy studying her guidebook and for the rest of the visit they kept to the safer topic of Henry VIII beheading his wives.

By the time they were finished with Hampton Court, Ellie decided that there was no way that Edith could handle the journey back on public transport, so she found them a taxi and they sat in comfort all the way back to the house. Ellie had kept half an eye on the huge fare they were racking up and then decided life was too short to worry. The early-evening sun was infusing even the shabbiest bits of the route with a warm golden glow. It seemed as if all of London were sitting out on a pavement with a drink in its hand. Edith were singing gently and every now and again waving at people.

It might as well have been raining as far as Ellie was concerned. Jack had wormed his way into her heart and now all she had to look forward to was the humiliation of rejection and the hassle of finding a new job.

Oh, plus a few weeks of pretending absolutely nothing had happened between them and knowing another woman would be kissing those lips and messing up his hair.

She was going to be hopeless at pretending nothing had happened, she just knew it.

Ellie thought about Jack’s habit of putting his head down slightly when he came into her office and it made her stomach twist and turn. She remembered his arm braced against the headrest when they had made love in his car and the way he had of putting his jacket on and then shrugging his shoulders. Little details she was stuck with now for the rest of her life.

She closed her eyes and rested her forehead against the window and tried very hard not to cry.

When they arrived back home, Ellie helped Edith from the taxi and was handing the driver the contents of her purse when she heard Edith talking to somebody in the front garden. Her heart leaped and she almost ran through the garden gate to see if it was who she hoped it was.

‘Been somewhere exciting?’ she was in time to hear Jack ask. All of Ellie’s gloom melted away and she was standing in a sun-dappled street in London, with endless possibilities of happiness spreading out before her.

He was sitting on the step, and if Edith had not been there, Ellie would have got down beside him and put her arms round him. She smiled down at him, knowing that what she felt at seeing him must be obvious.

Except Jack wasn’t even looking at her.

‘We’ve been to Hampton Court,’ Edith said.

Jack hauled himself to his feet, looking hot and cross. He had a crumpled carrier bag in his hand.

‘It’s wonderful, Jack. They’ve made it so interesting,’ Edith went on, looking uneasily from Jack to Ellie. ‘It’s changed such a lot since I was there last.’

Ellie took a step forward, desperate for Jack’s attention. ‘No wonder it’s changed, Edith. When you were last there, Anne Boleyn was still making eyes at Henry.’

Jack gave her a withering glance as though he were personally offended by that joke.

Edith mouthed, ‘Oh dear,’ at Ellie behind Jack’s back and started to fuss around opening the front door. Ellie tried again to smile at Jack, but he turned away from her.

She scrutinised the expanse of charcoal suit in front of her, taking in how well it fitted him and how it accentuated the breadth of his shoulders. Well, she had a full understanding of what lay beneath that suit now, but was none the wiser about what was going on in his brain.

‘Are you both going to stay in the front garden or come in?’ Edith was holding the door open.