He was sitting at his desk, staring at his laptop screen, hand fisted in his hair, and didn’t even look up as Ellie stood uncertainly by the door.
‘Sit,’ he barked. This obviously wasn’t going to be an informal chat on one of his comfy white leather cubed armchairs. It was going to a bollocking administered while she sat on the very uncomfortable, very rare, wire mesh Marcel Breuer chair, which would probably snag on her broderie anglaise dress.
By her estimation, Ellie sat there for a good five minutes without Vaughn acknowledging her presence, which was certainly a theme for the day.
Ellie had been here before. Not often. Only once when she’d been outbid at a very important auction. Vaughn had given her the silent treatment for eleven agonising minutes until she’d nearly cried from the sheer antici pation of the impending telling-off. Piers had once sat in this very spot for twenty-three minutes. But instead of feeling cowed and liable to prostrate herself on the floor and beg for mercy, Ellie could feel the righteous anger spark up in her belly once more.
She was so over men and their utter inability to behave like normal, rational beings. The game-playing! The sneakiness! The double-speak! Compartmentalising their feelings until they were so tucked away, they couldn’t find them any more.
Enough!
‘You know what? I refuse to be sacked,’ she said. Vaughn’s head jerked up. He tried to glower but Ellie had taken him by surprise and it lacked its usual ferocity. ‘I don’t accept my dismissal. I rescind it.’
‘You can’t rescind it. It’s legally binding.’ Vaughn had now succeeded in knitting his brows together. ‘You’ve dragged down the good name of my gallery and you went on that awful television show. What did I say to you before the opening?’
‘You said a lot of things.’
‘Never complain, never explain,’ Vaughn repeated grimly. ‘You did both. And if I hadn’t already fired you, I’d be firing you right now. You have no dignity, Cohen. You should be ashamed of yourself.’
When he was being this objectionable, Ellie really had to remember why she wanted to continue working for him. ‘I love my job and I’m good at it—’
‘You’re not that good at it. You knew absolutely nothing when you first arrived here,’ Vaughn said loftily. He was enjoying himself, which was actually a good sign. Ellie didn’t doubt he was furious with her, but if he’d been really furious, his voice would be a flat, ominously quiet weapon that could inflict all manner of pain. ‘You were nothing without me, you’ll be nothing again.’
‘I’m not going anywhere.’ Ellie crossed her legs and folded her arms to show that she was serious. ‘The fact I went on TV doesn’t affect my ability to do my job. You trained me up and promoted me because you recognised my talent and—’
Vaughn yawned. ‘Is this going to take much longer?’
‘Are you going to give me my job back?’ Ellie sounded metronome-steady but her heart was racing as much as it had been when she’d stepped onto the On The Sofa set earlier or clapped eyes on her father in the not-so-loving flesh for the first time ever. Today was sucking beyond all measure.
‘No.’ It was brutal and uncompromising. It was fuck off and don’t ever darken my doorstep again. There was nowhere left to manoeuvre. Except …
‘Fine,’ Ellie said, folding her arms, furrowing her brows and pursing her lips in a way that Lola always described as her epic bitchface. ‘Whatever. I know a really good lawyer and I have an excellent case for unfair dismissal. Excellent. You think the good name of the gallery’s been damaged by me standing up for myself on live TV, well, just wait until my case makes the papers.’
Vaughn was doing some epic bitchface of his own. ‘What’s got into you, Cohen? Whatever it is, I don’t like it.’
‘Well, I don’t like being sacked because of a situation that wasn’t my fault and was an utter living hell, not that you cared about that. My dismissal was unjust and unreasonable.’ Ellie breathed out through her nostrils like an angry dragon. ‘I refuse to be treated like that.’
‘If I’m such a beast to work for, I’m surprised that you still want your job back.’ He made a big show of looking at his watch. ‘So, was that everything?’
It was Vaughn at his most bloody-minded. Ellie wondered if she did actually want her job back. Oh, but she did. She so did. Vaughn had taken a chance on her, seen something special in her and he’d taught Ellie everything she knew about buying and selling art. But he hadn’t taught Ellie everything she knew, which reminded her … ‘I think so. But before I go, I just want to show you something,’ Ellie said, unzipping her laptop case and pulling out her iPad.
‘What? The showreel for your glittering new career as media whore?’ Vaughn asked nastily, but everyone knew his bark was about twenty-seven times worse than his bite.
‘No, if you won’t reinstate me solely because you refuse to admit you were wrong to fire me in the first place, then I wanted you to see the first clients I’ll be representing as an independent art dealer,’ Ellie said. ‘I’ll have to find gallery space, probably in East London, but it’ll be exciting. You know how much I love a challenge.’
Vaughn raised his eyebrows. ‘Just what the world needs. Another jumped-up gallery girl thinking that they have what it takes.’
Ellie held up her iPad to show Vaughn the film she’d shot of Claude and Marie’s trees in all their drooping, paper beauty. Then she showed him their timelapse movie of a forest through the seasons. ‘What do you think?’ she asked anxiously, because this wasn’t part of the scene they were playing. He was her boss, her mentor, and when it came to art, she valued his opinion above all others.
‘Interesting,’ Vaughn murmured. All of him was still, but if he’d been a dog his ears would have been on high alert and his tail would have been wagging joyously.
‘I know I’m getting ahead of myself but I can just see the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern transformed into a magical wood, can’t you?’
‘Maybe.’ Vaughn steepled his fingers. ‘It would also work well at the Guggenheim.’
‘Well, that’s something to consider after they’ve made the Turner Prize shortlist,’ Ellie agreed. ‘So, I’ll be back at my desk tomorrow morning, usual time. OK?’
‘Why don’t you want to set up on your own?’ Vaughn was looking at her with a grudging admiration that had to be killing him.
‘I haven’t quite finished picking your brains,’ Ellie said as she turned off her iPad, because Vaughn wasn’t going to sack her and they were back in that place where he was borderline mean to her and she gave him only borderline attitude. ‘And I’d really miss Piers and Inge.’
‘Do not start getting mawkish or crying, Cohen. Even I have my limits.’
She wasn’t planning on doing either of those two things. Not in front of Vaughn, anyway. ‘Do you want an update on obscure French Surrealists and female painters from between the wars before you go on holiday?’ she asked.
It was another hour, and many phone calls from Grace, before Vaughn left the gallery, after many dire warnings about what would happen if they forgot to set the security system.
Ellie waited until she’d watched Vaughn’s car disappearing out of the mews, then she shut the gallery door and turned to Piers and Inge, who were doing the final sweep. ‘I don’t want to go home just yet and I don’t have any paparazzi following me so I’m going out to drink huge quantities of alcohol. Who’s in?’
Piers said he’d love to but Monday night was his one alcohol-free night of the week, and Inge wasn’t that keen either.
‘Maybe one really quick drink round the corner?’ she suggested as Ellie chivvied the pair of them out of the door. ‘It’s definitely going to rain. The BBC said so!’
‘You won’t melt,’ Ellie insisted. ‘Come on! Today has pretty much chewed me up, then spat me out. If you’ve missed me as much as you said you had, then you have to come drinking with me.’
All she wanted to do was to wipe the day from her memory, and not even the part of the d
ay that featured a baying TV audience or her father barely able to summon up the energy to speak to her. She wanted to erase the picture etched in her brain of David on his knees as he said he was halfway to being in love with her.
Ellie longed to rush back to the offices of Wyndham, Pryce and Lewis and tell him that it was OK. She was ready to be loved by him and compartmentalised the rest of the time. Except it wasn’t OK, it wasn’t even a little bit OK, so alcohol was the best way she knew to temporarily erase some of the pain. She also needed to know that she wasn’t alone – she had people who accepted her wholly as she was, and would even hold her hair back when she threw up from too much vodka. Tonight, she needed a support system, whether her support system liked it or not.
Inge was far too placid to put up much of a fight. Piers capitulated once Ellie agreed that he could go back to his flat and change while she and Inge made their way to a bar in Hoxton that did killer cocktails. En route Ellie rang Tess and Lola and her cousins and the friends that she absolutely knew for certain hadn’t tried to sell her out to any news organisations.
Tonight she wanted to get back to being the girl she’d been before all this had started.
Clerkenwell, London, Present Day
His name is David Gold and he says that, despite his better judgement, he’s in love with her daughter.
They’re not words designed to warm a mother’s heart, and Ari is no exception, but they end up drinking gin and tonics in a pub tucked away behind the Inns of Court.
‘She doesn’t want to be with me,’ he says yet again, and now he’s more mopey and less intense, he seems nicer. But he made Ellie lose her temper, and he’s a lawyer, and though Ari loves Ellie to pieces, even she’s starting to get bored with how much this guy keeps banging on about her.
‘Well, if she doesn’t want to be with you, then what can you do?’ Ari asks briskly.
‘I hurt her, that’s what I did,’ he says, and puts his head in his hands. ‘I tried to play her. And I should have told her about Charlie, about the songs Billy stole.’
‘You knew about the songs, then?’ Ari asks with a snarl because she wants there to be no ambiguity about this.
He inches his bar stool further away. ‘Of course I do. There’s been a contingency plan in place ever since Billy signed the recording contract.’ He stares down at his glass. ‘We never had this conversation, but if you have the stomach for a fight, if you’re brave enough, you have an excellent case against him.’
Ari has white-knuckled hands around her glass and she’s not sure if she’s going to throw it in his face. ‘So what else do you know that you haven’t told Ellie … yet?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he says. For a lawyer, he’s a terrible liar.
‘You know everything, don’t you? You know where every single one of Billy’s victims is buried,’ Ari muses, and he doesn’t deny it. ‘What do you mean by “a contingency plan”?’
He ducks his head, even though Ari still hasn’t thrown anything at him. ‘Your sister wrote to Billy several times after the adoption fell through. She was very upset.’
Ari nods. ‘Upset doesn’t begin to cover it,’ she says. She’s amazed that she can even talk when her heart is in her mouth. She can’t even be angry with Carol. It wasn’t until she’d got pregnant with Louis using IVF – though they used to call it having a test-tube baby back then – that Carol forgave Ari. Not forgave her, but maybe accepted why Ari had behaved the way she did. ‘What did she say in her letters?’
David Gold looks her in the eye. ‘She repeatedly mentioned your intention to have the pregnancy terminated. They’re all on file in my office.’
The room tilts wildly around her, floor rushing up to meet her, ceiling falling down on top of her. Ari can hear a rushing in her head and she thinks she might faint, or that the shame might swallow her whole. Deep in her bones she knows that Ellie would probably forgive her for this one terrible transgression, because surely Ellie must know just how fucking much she’s loved. But Ari still can’t forgive herself. Didn’t really know what love was back then until Ellie showed her how …
His hand on her arm brings Ari back to the ugly present. ‘Not a day goes by when I don’t regret what I almost did,’ she says in a voice gone rusty.
‘You have to understand that I’m not protecting him.’ His face twists into something ugly for a brief moment. ‘Protecting Billy Kay is a very unfortunate side-effect of protecting Ellie. She loves you very much, that will never change. She could deal with this, all of this but, quite frankly, I don’t see why she should have to.’
Maybe this lawyer guy isn’t so bad after all, Ari thinks just as Ellie rings. Ari can tell when Ellie’s faking it until she makes it. She’s trying to sound perky and peppy as she asks Ari if she has the garment bag containing her boring white work dresses that she left behind and she wants Ari to meet up with her and her friends. ‘Please come,’ she says. ‘Piers is wearing leder-hosen. It’s the most ridiculous thing ever!’
Ari glances over at David Gold, who’s sitting there trying not to listen to Ari’s side of the phone call. He doesn’t seem like one of Ellie’s lame ducks, one of her pet projects. He was more dangerous than that: he is someone who could really hurt her.
‘… we’re at that bar in Hoxton Square, underneath the Thai restaurant. Hang on!’ Ellie is shouting at her friends. ‘It’s called Happiness Forgets. Symbolic, much?’
Ari agrees that it is, and agrees that she might see Ellie later, then hangs up and turns to David Gold. ‘When you love someone, your first and last instinct is to shield them from anything or anyone that might do them harm.’
He nods gravely. ‘I know.’
‘But there are times they’re going to get hurt and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. Especially when you’re the person who might end up hurting them the most.’
‘That file, the letters, I’ll make it all go away. As though it never, ever happened.’ David Gold takes Ari’s hands as if he’s taking an oath. ‘You don’t have to worry. It will be all right. I promise you.’
Ari mouths a thank-you, can’t do any more than that no matter how much she wants to, and they sit there in silence for a good minute, her hands in his. Then someone pushes past them and the moment becomes awkward. Ari pulls away and almost smiles. ‘Look, I can’t say I’d be happy to have a lawyer in the family, but David, you’re Billy Kay’s lawyer …’
‘I know. I know. Believe me, I know,’ he snaps.
This relationship is doomed, Ari is sure of it, but he loves Ellie, and Ari has to trust that she’s done a good enough job raising her daughter that she’ll be able to give as good as she gets.
‘Will you please tell me where Ellie is?’
Ari hands over the garment bag, gives him the address of the bar and warns him that if he so much as makes Ellie shed one single, solitary tear she knows a man who’ll break his legs.
Chapter Thirty-six
By the time Ellie and Inge reached the tiny bar on Hoxton Square, just across the road from the White Cube gallery, Tess and Lola had already arrived, scored a table and ordered a round of Tom Collins.
After the Tom Collins, Ellie had a Ward Eight – rye whiskey, lemon juice and grenadine – which made her pull faces as she determinedly drank it down. Then she moved on to a Tantris Sidecar, a deadly concoction of cognac, calvados, cointreau, Chartreuse and syrup with more lemon, and third time was the charm.
Everything was soft focus in the dimly lit room as Ellie blearily looked around. Most of the people she’d called had turned up, even on a Monday night when the BBC said it was going to rain, because these were the people who were always on her team. Once Billy Kay and On The Sofa had been discussed for all of five minutes, Emma, Laurel and Tanya wanted to talk about a girls’ weekend in New York before Rosh Hashanah to find some really fit single, Jewish men (‘I mean, there have to be some’) and was Ellie interested? Lola had an interview for a part-time job as a taxidermist’s assi
stant, Tess had been given her very own in-ear microphone that afternoon and offered a permanent contract, and everyone else wanted to talk about how Portland was the new Brooklyn.
The world was carrying on same as it ever did.
‘Hello you,’ said a voice, and Ellie looked up from pensive contemplation of her empty glass to see Laetitia, one of Lola’s friends, smiling at her as she brushed something off her shirt. ‘You’re having a bit of a rough month, aren’t you?’
‘Roughest month ever,’ Ellie agreed. Her speech was ever so slightly slurred but her senses were still razor sharp. ‘Is that … are those … you’re wet! Is it raining?’
‘It’s like something from the Old Testament,’ Laetitia said, holding up a damp strand of hair for Ellie’s inspection. ‘I got here just before it really unleashed.’
Ellie nudged Tess, who was sitting next to her and talking animatedly to one of Inge’s male flatmates about something that involved having to stroke his arm a lot. ‘It’s raining,’ Ellie said. ‘Can you believe it?’
‘About bloody time,’ Tess said, without even looking up. Laetitia had gone to get a drink, two Japanese girls were taking a preening picture of Piers for their style blog and the cousins were all transfixed by the screen of Laurel’s iPad.
No one noticed when Ellie slipped out of her seat and up the scarred wooden stairs. She had to flatten herself to the wall to make way for two sodden people who seemed to think they had right of way, then she was opening the door.
The rain was coming down in a gushing fall of fat drops that bounced on the pavement on impact. Ellie stepped over the fierce stream of water sluicing into the gutter. The five seconds it took to take those five steps outside was long enough to soak her. Her white dress, even her bra and pants were drenched, feet slipping in her wedge sandals, but as she stood there, arms outstretched, face turned upwards, it felt like a fresh start.
The dirty hands of the Kay family had left smudgy grey fingerprints all over her, and the rain was washing them away.