It was true, Ellie was mad at him. Furious. Fists clenched so tight she could feel her nails digging into her palms. She hated feeling so helpless and out of control, but there was nothing she could do right then. Whatever she did, short of hoovering up the coke herself, would have her labelled as uptight yet again and it wasn’t the time or place for a serious discussion with Richey. Not that he’d take any notice when he was starfished on the bed and kept nudging Ellie with his foot.
‘Cheer up,’ he stage-whispered. ‘You’re bringing everybody down.’
Just as Ellie decided that she could take no more and she was going to throw everyone out, even if they did think she was uptight, they were interrupted by the yurt compound’s crack security team, who removed the gatecrashers, though Spencer refused to go until he’d attempted to knock down the yurt, and screamed a string of obscenities at the stars.
It wasn’t until the security guards came back to warn Ellie that if she sneaked in anyone else, both she and her possessions would be forcibly ejected from the compound, that she realised that Richey had left with Spencer and the two girls, who couldn’t have been older than nineteen.
Now it was ten o’clock on Sunday morning and the alarms on her phone, iPad and MacBook were beeping to remind Ellie that she had a brunch meeting in an hour. An hour to repair the ravages of last night when she’d stared up at the billowing white folds of the yurt and begun to grieve the end of another relationship. They hadn’t officially broken up and she hadn’t actually got any proof that Richey had done anything harder than some weed, but she couldn’t think of a way that they’d come back from this.
Yes, they were at Glastonbury and the normal rules didn’t apply, and yes, she was sometimes a little uptight, but if Richey wanted to really be with her then he was going to have to lose his loser friend with the coke habit. But Ellie wasn‘t good at issuing ultimatums, especially not when Richey was MIA and she needed to take a meeting in one of the backstage restaurants with a hip-hop mogul in an hour. In Ellie’s experience, moguls were usually at least thirty minutes late, but she daren’t risk it.
Ellie showered and frantically blowdried her hair straight as she went over her talking points, tried to remember the names of the hip-hop artists the mogul represented and work on her poise, which was currently nowhere to be found. Then she piled on concealer and tinted moisturiser to try to hide the fact she’d had no sleep. Oh, and if she tied her vintage Hermès scarf round her head, it would offset any potential frizz and her Nars Orgasm highlighter would make her look perky even if she didn’t feel it.
It was a point of pride that at exactly five minutes to eleven Ellie was sitting down at an empty table in an organic restaurant backstage. It was also a point of pride that she was wearing a pristine white, broderie anglaise dress, nipped in at the waist, with a full skirt.
It was a trick she’d learned a long time ago – when all around you was chaos, you needed to find some area of your life that you could control and let that define you. It didn’t matter that she was on free schoolmeals and had a mother who wore leopard-print catsuits and dressed her in charity-shop clothes, when Ellie had the neatest handwriting in her class and was homework monitor five years in a row. Or when she had a tidier bedroom and better manners than her many cousins, who all lived in two-parent, semi-detached splendour in Belsize Park. When your boss was giving you hell and your flatmates were fighting and you’d been dumped again, there was something cathartic and peaceful in spending the afternoon in your pristine, minimalist office, rearranging your reference books by height and colour. So, a girl who could parade around Glastonbury in a spotless white dress was a girl who was calm and in control. Sometimes you had to fake it to make it.
She was back in her Hunter wellies because it was rare to get through a festival without being rained on, but there were lots of girls wearing wellies – it was accepted festival chic – and secure in the knowledge that her outfit passed muster on all counts, Ellie could settle down and wait for her hip-hop mogul.
Ninety minutes later Ellie was still waiting, still trying to appear calm and in control as she gazed at her laptop screen as if she was diligently working and not staring blindly at her email inbox in the hope that a message would suddenly arrive from the absent mogul apologising profusely for his no-show and promising to turn up in the next five minutes. Ellie tried to ignore her misery, her hangover and her urgent need for coffee. She knew that if she had coffee, she’d then need to pee and of course he’d turn up while she was braving the loos.
The longer she waited, the more tearful Ellie became. How dare Justin E. Peary keep her hanging for nearly two hours? Did he think that her time didn’t matter, compared to his time? That she might have better things to do than sit in a glorified canteen and listen to the members of a mid-level American rock band at the next table boast of last night’s sexual exploits? Why did people think they could walk all over her, treat her like shit and that she’d be OK with it?
Just as Ellie was biting her lip hard to stem the first wave of angry tears, there was a flurry of activity at the restaurant entrance and a skinny young man in red trousers, white shirt and a truly astounding pair of snakeskin loafers walked into the restaurant flanked by several minders, who were each the size of a small outbuilding and equipped with lots of chunky gold jewellery and walkie-talkies.
Ellie thought that maybe her eleven o’clock had arrived one hour and fifty-two minutes late. She stood up and mustered a big smile and a half wave.
The man and his entourage changed direction. ‘Sweetheart! Do you hate me very much?’ Justin E. Peary seized Ellie’s hands as soon as he was in grabbing distance and clasped them to his chest. ‘Sorry I’m late. Here, let’s sit. Bono and Jay-Z were meant to be flying in so we had to land the helicopter in a field right out in the boonies. Cows and sheep everywhere. I mean, what the fuck? And there was no cellphone reception and you’ve been waiting all this time. Have you ordered? You should have ordered. All English food sounds really fucking rude. Bangers and mash. Toad in the hole. Spotted dick – I don’t even want to know what that is. Shall we have a bacon butty? Do they do decent coffee?’
It was a verbal onslaught. All Ellie could do was nod, shake her head and smile. She and Justin E. Peary had been emailing back and forth for a couple of months because he wanted to leave his current art dealer (‘’cause I work with rap artists he thinks all I want to buy is graffiti art. For fuck’s sake. I’ve got a degree in History of Art and Visual Culture from RISD, and yeah, I blew my first few mill on bling and Bentleys but I’m not a fucking philistine’) but they’d never actually spoken before.
Not that they were really speaking now. Ellie was still nodding and shaking her head and smiling while eating a bacon butty, which was either going to be kill or cure on her hangover, while Justin did all the talking.
Ellie suspected that once you stripped away the brashness and the bravado, there was a sharp operator who could sniff out bullshit at fifty paces. So it wasn’t a surprise when she finally and hesitantly began to talk that they had an in-depth discussion about Rashid Johnson and post-black art. Then she showed him the pieces she’d picked from their roster of artists. Justin didn’t go for the big names or the flashiest pieces for his new Tribeca penthouse but honed in on the photo collages from a young artist Ellie had only just signed.
He looked at the fifteen images. Asked Ellie to get the guy on the phone, then pinned her with a look. ‘What kind of discount for a bulk buy?’
‘Ten per cent,’ she said as decisively as she could.
‘Twenty-five,’ countered Justin. Now he decided to go quiet on Ellie to unnerve her. It was kind of working.
‘He’s only just starting out so you’re already getting him at a bargain rate.’ She hated negotiating. It always made her feel nauseous, even when she didn’t have a hangover. ‘I could do thirteen per cent and then he’s just breaking even.’
‘Or you could waive your commission if you’re that worried about hi
m.’ Justin allowed himself to blink. ‘Twenty-two per cent.’
Ellie could waive her commission but she wasn’t going to. ‘I cannot go any lower than fifteen per cent, but I will let you have first refusal on any new work and I could probably get him to do a one-off personalised piece if you wanted to sit for him next time you were in London.’ She folded her arms and tried out a flinty-eyed look of her own. ‘If I went any lower than that, then I wouldn’t be representing the best interests of my artist.’
Justin tried his best to stare Ellie down. The effort to resist made her eyeballs throb, then he shrugged. ‘OK. Fifteen per cent, I get first look at any new pieces and we’ll make arrangements to fly him to NYC. Shall we shake on it?’
They shook on it, though Ellie wished that her hands weren’t quite so sweaty, then it took five minutes to arrange a wire transfer and they were done.
‘It’s been great, Ellie. This could be the start of something really beautiful,’ Justin called over his shoulder as he was spirited away by his entourage. ‘Let’s diarise soon.’
Ellie sank back down on her plastic chair and willed her hands to stop shaking. As soon as they did, she called Nathan, the artist, to tell him the good news. Then, with the help of the calculator on her phone, Ellie worked out her commission, which was nearly three thousand pounds after tax, and if she hadn’t been in such a public place then she might even have allowed herself an air punch. She settled for a slow, luxurious stretch, realised it was nearly three o’clock and leaped to her feet.
Right on cue, her phone beeped with a plaintive text message from Ari: Awful hangover. U 2? Fancy getting head massage? Am @ John Peel stage. Where U @?
There was no way Ellie was letting anyone touch her hair with fingers coated in oil, even an essential oil, but she’d have a shoulder massage to keep Ari company as she got some advice about the Richey situation. Just thinking about him made her stomach clench into a painful knot.
Coming to find you, she texted as she hurried out of the restaurant. Been backstage. Let’s meet @ phone recharge place halfway between. Hangover almost go …
She looked up momentarily to see where she was going and her gaze was immediately riveted to the two girls on her right. They were both dressed in floaty tops and teeny, tiny denim shorts that showed off long, tanned legs, as they were interviewed by a TV crew. Just as her father was never mentioned by name, his two daughters – his other daughters, Ellie’s two half-sisters – weren’t mentioned either. Ellie thought about them often, though. It was hard not to when she saw their pictures every time she bought a magazine. And there they were, twenty metres away from her.
Ellie could feel her mouth hang open, the shock of seeing them like a sudden but vicious punch to the gut. They both suddenly tossed back long, blonde hair in unison and smiled at each other, and it felt like another blow aimed directly at her solar plexus. She’d never had anyone smile at her like that; with affection and acceptance and a little bit of resentment, the way that sisters did.
She needed to look away and start walking because she was causing a bottleneck, but even as she took a step forward, then another and another, she couldn’t tear her eyes away from Lara and Rose and …
‘Oh!’ Ellie gasped, as she cannoned into someone and a hand shot out to steady her.
Chapter Five
Ellie jerked, because that simple, incidental touch, a hand on her arm just below her elbow to guide her, steady her, still her, sent tingles racing through her.
Not tingles – that was ridiculous – but it was as if her skin had just sat there, covering her arm, not really doing much and now it felt fully alive for the first time. All it had needed was the right kind of touch to wake it from a long slumber.
So, so weird, but then the last twenty-four hours had been one hellish event after another, so it was no wonder that Ellie was so overwrought. ‘Careful!’ a voice said. A deep pleasant voice that Ellie didn’t recognize but which still sounded familiar. ‘It’s dangerous to text and walk at the same time.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Ellie said, looking up from her phone, which she’d been staring at without even seeing it, into a kind, clever face and a smile that she’d have wanted to get to know better if she hadn’t still been aware of Lara and Rose just outside her line of vision. She shook her head slightly so she could focus on his hand, which hadn’t left her arm and, oh, it was on the move, cupping her elbow.
‘We’re causing a jam.’ The man with the tingling fingertips gave Ellie another devastating smile as he steered her to the right so they were standing against a fence and not blocking any major thoroughfares. ‘That’s better.’
‘I’m really sorry,’ she said again. ‘I’m not normally quite so feeble-minded.’
‘Not feeble-minded,’ he demurred, and he was smiling again, showing two rows of beautifully even, beautifully white teeth. ‘It’s so easy to get distracted. Yesterday I had to take a work call and I found myself deep in something called the Field of Avalon. It took hours to retrace my steps.’
‘Oh, so are you camping, then?’ Ellie asked, because he was wearing navy-blue chino shorts that ended just above the knee, with a short-sleeved blue and white checked shirt and dark blue Converses. He looked box fresh, not as if he’d spent the night in a tent.
‘God, no! I can’t imagine anything worse than that. I’m staying in a bed and breakfast a few miles away and taxiing on and off site. I’d rather have a decent night’s sleep in a proper bed than collect cool points and insect bites,’ he said a little defensively, but he was in luck because Ellie was one of the few people at Glastonbury who wouldn’t think ill of someone with the good sense to stay somewhere that had hot and cold running water.
‘I stayed in a B and B last year,’ she told him. ‘It was great, but my friends threatened to disown me. This year I’m staying in a luxury yurt.’
He was wearing shades but now he lifted them up to reveal blue eyes. ‘I’ve heard all sorts of stories about the luxury yurts,’ he said, and Ellie thought that he might just be flirting with her.
Not that she was going to flirt back because she already had a boyfriend. But she didn’t want to think about Richey right now, not when all she wanted to think about was the man in front of her and how the colour of his eyes reminded her of the deep, deep peacock blue of her favourite Mac eyeshadow, which had been discontinued a couple of years ago. ‘Stories about proper beds and duvets? And really soft rugs?’
‘Is there an en suite?’ he asked eagerly.
Ellie shook her head. ‘No, but there are luxury bathroom facilities and twenty-four-hour security so I forbear.’
‘It sounds wonderful,’ he said, and Ellie wanted to keep him talking, to stay here with him for just a little longer, and also she liked the shapes his mouth made as he spoke. It was only looking. There was no harm in looking.
Think of something to say. Keep him here. Something funny and interesting and cool. ‘I put my wellies on because I was sure it was going to rain and now my feet are getting horribly moist,’ Ellie said, and it was the single worst thing she’d ever said to anyone. Even worse than the time when Tess had introduced Ellie to her new boyfriend and Ellie had laughed uproariously and said, ‘Yeah, right. New gay best friend, more like,’ and actually Alastair had been as straight as they come, though Ellie and Lola still had their doubts. Or the time that Ari had asked her to be honest and Ellie had said that the new song she’d been working on for nearly a month sounded like a really shit version of ‘Agadoo’.
It was as bad as that.
But this man, this beautiful man, looked down at Ellie’s green Hunters, then back at her face and smiled. ‘But if it does rain, at least your feet will be dry. Well, dry and moist.’
‘And I think the luxury yurt is rainproof,’ Ellie said, because she was destined to spout utter crap for the duration of this conversation. There was nothing she could do about it and he was going to walk away any minute now and she didn’t even know why the thought of him walking away ma
de her feel panicky and bereft but she touched his arm and she felt that brushfire tingle again – in her fingertips and in her heart, and even in the insistent pulse between her legs.
He ran his fingers through his dark brown hair, a short back and sides topped off with a riotous mass of curls. God, if they had children, they’d have the curliest hair in the world, Ellie thought, even though she had never been one of those sad, sad girls who imagined their wedding dresses and table decorations and the names of their four children seconds after being introduced to a man. She really wasn’t. He wasn’t even her type. He was tall enough that Ellie could wear heels, but he was thin. Too thin. Skinny. She liked her men with some heft. And in so many other ways he also wasn’t her type because it was obvious from their shared loathing of tents and their neat, freshly pressed appearance that maybe they were too alike. Opposites attracted and all that and Ellie preferred her boyfriends to take more of a walk on the wild side so she didn’t have to, though that approach didn’t seem to be working out so well for her. Anyway, she hadn‘t even been introduced to this man, so why was her hand still on his arm because it felt like it belonged there?
It didn’t. She stopped touching him and folded her hands behind her back where they couldn’t get into any trouble. No wonder he was eyeing her with a look of disbelief too; then she saw his lips twist.
‘It’s not just my imagination, is it?’ he asked Ellie, leaning closer as his voice was in danger of being drowned out by a heavy bassline suddenly emanating from the stage nearest to them. She could feel his breath caressing the side of her face. It felt a lot like being kissed and she shivered. ‘This isn’t just a line, I swear, but I feel like I’ve known you before.’
He didn’t say ‘met’, like they’d been at the same party or got their morning latte from the same coffee shop, but ‘known’, like there was a connection between them. Like he felt it too.