You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me (7 page)

Neve wended her way through the huge open-plan basement office which was an obstacle course of cardboard boxes stacked in precarious piles, dilapidated metal filing cabinets lined up against each wall and anywhere else there was room for them, and stopped to say hello to pretty blonde Chloe, who was meant to be in charge of new acquisitions but spent most of her time filling in job applications to become a literary agent. She then greeted Rose, the Office Manager, who’d been at the LLA for donkey’s years and was a good person to have on side because she was in charge of the petty cash and could quell Mr Freemont with a raised eyebrow and one terse word, and Neve’s work ‘husband’, Philip, who put in time at the archive when he wasn’t writing his PhD thesis. The other members of the staff were a motley collection of socially inept academics who’d been unable to find employment with even the most lowly universities. ‘The ones that used to be polytechnics,’ Mr Freemont was fond of sneering when he was hauling someone over the coals for inaccurate cross-referencing.

Once she’d established that Mr Freemont was out for the morning, Neve hurried to the little ante-room that she’d commandeered as her office, to switch on all three bars of the portable heater. She turned on her computer, which was still running on Windows 98, and wriggled around on her hard-backed chair in a futile attempt to get comfortable. Then she slotted a cassette into a battered Walkman, which had to be tapped gently in just the right place to coax it into playing.

A large part of Neve’s workday was spent listening to crackling cassettes because an awful lot of minor literary figures had dictated their memoirs on to tape before they died, and Mr Freemont insisted that they were all transcribed. He honestly believed that one day they’d stumble upon an undiscovered Shakespeare play or even a lurid sex scandal featuring members of the Bloomsbury Set that would put the LLA firmly on the academic map.

Not today. J. L. Simmons (1908–97) had a peevish, querulous voice and was so verbose that Neve had to keep pausing the tape to consult from three different dictionaries on obscure words that had the spellcheck on Microsoft Word completely flummoxed. It was boring and her mind kept wandering back to the night before. It didn’t take any effort at all to conjure up the awkwardness and embarrassment that had been the overriding themes of the hours she spent with Max. That was when she wasn’t diving into his mouth tongue-first.

But the moment Neve kept coming back to again and again was the excruciating part where Max had stopped and slid out of her because he’d lost his erection. In fact, she didn’t even know how he’d managed to get hard in the first place, because she wasn’t the sort of girl to make a man feel that he might just die if he couldn’t be inside her. After last night’s débâcle, Neve felt as if she was destined to be alone and unloved, which would mean that the last three years had been for nothing.

She had six months to get her act together. Six months to be the best Neve she could be. Six months until William came back from California and saw the new improved, streamlined her.

Neve paused the tape again so she could rummage in her bag for the letter she’d received a fortnight ago. The pale-blue airmail sheets were creased and crumpled because she reread the letter at least once every hour, even though she’d already memorised the contents. She loved that they wrote letters, proper letters that they posted to each other, though Celia had been appalled.

‘Why can’t you just send each other messages on Facebook like everyone else?’ she’d asked.

Because friending William on Facebook so he had full access to her daily status updates and photo albums would give the game away. It wasn’t as if either of them were technophobes, they talked on the phone once a month, sent each other emails with links to articles from literary journals, but mostly they exchanged letters because, ‘We studied English literature and there’s a rich tradition of epistolary …’

‘Oh God, you know I don’t like the long words,’ Celia had whimpered.

‘Writing letters is more romantic,’ Neve had clarified, and Celia had rolled her eyes and said she needed to get out and meet real, live boys so she wouldn’t still be crushing on her student adviser from Oxford.

Neve stared at her computer screen but all she could see was the encouraging look on William’s face when he’d ask her to go to the pub with the rest of her seminar group. How he’d always want to know her opinion on the book they were reading or what she thought of the article by their Dean that had just run in the
Times Literary Supplement
. How he’d always smile and nod and really listen to what she was saying, in a way that no one else ever did. There’d been a hundred of those soft looks, a multitude of those tiny kindnesses until he’d accepted a three-year teaching post with the English Faculty at UCLA, and it felt like he’d taken a piece of her heart with him in his carry-on luggage when he’d flown to California. But now he was coming back to her. She read the letter out loud, under her breath:

You’re the absolute first name on my list of people to see when I get back to London. It’s odd that three years and an ocean between us have made us so much closer. There are so many things I have to tell you, but not in a letter – I need to see your face. You never hide anything or hold yourself back; everything you think and feel is reflected in your eyes and the curve of your mouth when you smile at me or bite your lip because I’m talking utter nonsense and you don’t want to tell me because it might hurt my feelings
.

This is why I can tell you anything and everything with no fear of censure or judgement. I know that you’ve changed since we’ve been apart; grown stronger, more sure of yourself, and I’m intrigued to meet this new incarnation of the girl you used to be
.

Neve sighed. She was so fed up with unrequited love and platonic love and all the other kinds of love that weren’t passionate, romantic, can’t-live-without-you, I-have-to-have-you-right-now, the-beat-of-your-heart-matches-the-beat-of-mine love. She loved William like that, and the three years that he’d been away had just honed and refined it, made it burn that much brighter. She could tell from his letters that he felt something new for her that was more than just intellectual respect. So when he came back from LA, she couldn’t afford to screw it up; everything had to be perfect, nothing could be left to chance because Neve was determined that when she and William began their relationship, it was for ever and ever. And for ever and ever was going to mean a lot of forward planning for Neve. For starters, she needed some real-life experience of a successful relationship. She also needed to be a lot more worldly and fit into a size ten little black dress. Currently, Neve still couldn’t get into a little
anything
.

Suddenly, everything clicked into place. Of course she’d been awkward and embarrassed last night. She was still a long way from a size ten. When she
was
a size ten, everything would be different.
She’d
be different.

It was such a relief to know that it wasn’t really her fault, that Neve went to lunch with a spring in her step and a new resolve that had her walking briskly around Holborn for an hour and only having soup and salad for lunch. The bad decisions of last night weren’t forgotten, but she was going to try really hard not to think about them.

In fact, she didn’t think about them until five minutes before her lunch-break ended and Celia rang her mobile at exactly 1.55 like she did every day. It always meant that Neve was late back to the Archive basement where there was no phone reception unless she climbed on top of the draining board in the kitchen and tried to get as close to the window as humanly possible.

‘Hey, Seels,’ she said, when she answered. ‘What’s up?’

‘What’s up with
you?
’ Celia rapped back.

‘Not much. In Transcribing Hell, went to the gym before work, same old, same old.’

‘I know about last night,’ Celia said flatly. ‘I can’t believe you’re trying to be all evasive about it.’

Neve tried to ignore the icy dread that washed over her. ‘What am I being evasive about?’ she asked carefully.

‘You always do that when you’re being shifty! You answer a question with another question – it’s so annoying,’ Celia snapped. Neve hadn’t heard Celia or Yuri come home last night, which meant that her sister was both sleep-deprived
and
hungover – a deadly combination. ‘I know about you and Max! Didn’t I warn you about him?’

Neve had to clutch on to the nearest lamp-post for support. ‘Well, yes, but—’

‘Beth from Features saw you going into the tube together,’ Celia said.

As usual with Celia, it was something and nothing. Neve let go of the lamp-post she’d been gripping because she could deal with this unaided. ‘We got the tube to Finsbury Park together because he lives in Crouch End,’ she explained. ‘It was perfectly innocent. Don’t jump to conclusions.’

‘Well, if I’m jumping to conclusions it’s because I’ve seen Max this morning and your stories don’t match,’ Celia said grimly. ‘He said he came home with you.’

‘He saw me to the door …’

‘And then came right up the stairs because he said you had more books than Waterstone’s.’

Neve felt chilled in a way that had nothing to do with the icy gusts of wind that were lifting strands of her hair and whipping at her cheeks. She tried hard not to groan down the phone. ‘What else did he say?’

‘Not much,’ Celia admitted. ‘He just said that you had serious issues but then he asked if I’d spoken to you today and if you were all right. He tried something, didn’t he? Did he hurt you?’

‘No. No! Look, he came in for a drink and …’ Neve racked her brains for something to tell Celia. Not the truth, obviously. Although Celia didn’t know the meaning of TMI, Neve tried to keep her own counsel. Usually it wasn’t difficult as nothing remotely exciting ever happened to her. But she couldn’t tell Celia about last night because something
had
happened and it had been awful – but it hadn’t been Max’s fault at all. She’d lured him into her attic room under false pretences. Not that Celia would ever believe that. ‘It was just a drink. Did he seem angry?’ she added.

‘Hmmm, not so much angry as well – troubled, I suppose,’ Celia mused. ‘But that might be because he’s having a nightmare with the June cover. But seriously, Neevy, I swear if he tried to date-rape you, I’ll cut off his dick with the Fashion Department scissors!’

‘Seels, do you really think that someone who looks like Max and who’s probably slept with models and—’

‘No “probably” about it. He’s definitely slept with models and that girl who did that stupid song about—’

‘Then why would he try it on with me?’ Neve asked her. ‘And if he had, which he didn’t, I can take care of myself. I box with Gustav.’

‘Well, I s’pose when you put it like that …’ Celia said slowly, and Neve could tell that she wasn’t planning to exact revenge on Max’s manhood any more. ‘Don’t get me wrong, you’re gorgeous and pretty but it’s the kind of pretty that’s like a Marc Jacobs collection. Most people don’t get it on first viewing, you know what I mean?’

‘No, I haven’t got a clue, but thanks for the compliment. It was a compliment, wasn’t it?’

‘Of course it was!’ Celia giggled. ‘Look, don’t worry, we’ll find some totally lush guys for you to snack on before William comes back. Sensitive guys who go to art galleries and hold doors open for you and shit.’

Max hadn’t held any doors open for her last night, but he had walked on the road side of the pavement and enquired after her well-being during every perilous step of their climb towards sex. ‘I think I’m going to hire a male escort and practise on him instead,’ Neve said. She was thinking no such thing but wanted to hear Celia’s gasp of shocked delight.

‘I’m so telling Mum,’ she said gleefully before she rang off and Neve was left to sneak back into work ten minutes late.

Neve really couldn’t settle to transcribing and cross-referencing after speaking to Celia. That morning she’d been so involved in her own pity party that she hadn’t even considered how Max might be feeling.

Recalling the sequences of events was painful and felt a lot like picking at a scab that should have been left to heal, but Neve forced herself to do it, to see herself lying there with her eyes tightly shut and a pained expression on her face that her family called her ‘eating kippers look’.

‘When the girl underneath you obviously wishes she was somewhere else.’

Max had sensed that something was wrong and he’d stopped and he hadn’t got mad until she’d acted like a crazy woman. God, she couldn’t even pick the right guy for a one-night stand. Celia had said Max was a ruthless seducer of women and he’d certainly lived up to his reputation, but hadn’t Neve given every impression that she was ripe for being seduced?

Instead of wringing her hands and behaving like the innocent victim in last night’s debauchery, Neve was forced to confront the unwelcome truth – that it was actually Max who was the injured party.

Oh,
bloody
hell!

After a hazardous journey home where she’d almost been knocked off her bike by a cabbie suddenly swerving into the bus lane without warning, Neve opened the front door and steeled herself for the unpleasant task that awaited her.

Right on cue, as she propped her bike against the wall and took her satchel out of the pannier, she heard Charlotte and Douglas’s door open. Inevitably, the shouting started before Neve even saw Charlotte’s head pop over the banisters.