‘It’s odd, isn’t it? Did you get the tingles?’
It was an audacious thing to ask, but Ellie had to know. He held up his hand, glanced at his fingertips, then nodded. ‘All the way down my spine.’
Ellie smiled uncertainly and he smiled back. She had the strangest feeling, another strange feeling to go with all the other strange feelings she’d had in the last five minutes, that he was going to kiss her because he was leaning in again, staring at her mouth. Ellie could feel her body straining towards him even though they weren’t even touching any more. She also felt short of breath, light-headed but—
‘Babe! I’ve been looking everywhere for you. Are you still mad at me?’ Someone grabbed her around the waist. Ellie’s first reaction was to squeak, which she did, because the person who’d grabbed her round the waist was pulling her back against his bare and clammy chest and trying to nuzzle her neck.
‘Get off me,’ she hissed at Richey, at least she hoped it was Richey and not some loved-up random. Richey! For all of ninety seconds she’d forgotten about him while she talked to a complete stranger who felt a lot like a kindred spirit. Now Ellie flushed with guilt and embarrassment, and had to use her elbows to extricate herself as Richey clung even tighter.
‘Oh, don’t be like that, babe,’ he slurred in her ear. ‘We’re at a festival. You really need to chill out.’
Ellie couldn’t be sure, because Richey now had his tongue in her left ear, but she thought she heard the other man snort. She succeeded in wriggling out of Richey’s hold and allowed herself to shoot him one positively malevolent look before she turned her attention back to the fantasy father of her imaginary curly-haired children and tried to mitigate the circumstances.
‘Well, nice bumping into you,’ she said. ‘I guess I’ll … um, see you around.’
He opened his mouth, probably to say something equally noncommittal or demand to know why she’d asked him about the tingles when she already had a boyfriend, but Richey was pushing Ellie aside so he could step up to the other man.
‘Who are you anyway?’ he asked belligerently when there was no need to be aggressive, even though the other man was looking at Richey, stripped to the waist and sweating exceedingly, with distaste. ‘Are you bothering my girlfriend?’
‘Oh my God. Shut up!’ Ellie grabbed hold of Richey’s arm, which was as sweaty as the rest of him, and tried to tug him away. It was like trying to move a forklift truck without the aid of a forklift truck. Ellie caught a whiff of the stale ethanol fumes oozing from Richey’s pores as if he’d fallen into a vat of vodka after he’d left her last night. He kept working his jaw too, even when he wasn’t opening his mouth to say ridiculous things, and she was going to have it out with him at Glastonbury, whether she wanted to or not. Despite what Tess and Lola might have thought, she had bad-boyfriend limits and Richey had pushed hers to breaking point. ‘Go and stand over there,’ she ordered, pointing at a nearby bottle refill point. ‘Please.’
‘It’s fucking rude to come on to someone else’s girlfriend,’ Richey told the other man, as though Ellie hadn’t even spoken. Then Richey jabbed his finger at his chest. The man stared down at it but it was impossible to tell what he was thinking because he’d put his sunglasses back on. ‘Not when I’m standing right in front of you.’
The man took a step back, brushed his shirt with the back of his hand and allowed himself a little grimace. ‘I was helping your, er, “girlfriend”,’ he made the word sound like it should have sarcastic quote marks around it. ‘She was texting and walking. Nearly fell over, didn’t you?’
Ellie nodded and nodded like a little nodding dog on a windy day. ‘Right. That’s exactly what he was doing,’ she agreed as she grabbed hold of Richey’s wrist again for a second attempt to pull him away, but he side-stepped out of her grasp so he could throw an arm around the shoulders of the man, who stiffened like an angry cat. ‘Sorry, mate,’ Richey said. ‘Way out of line. Been caning it a bit hard, you know.’
Ellie shielded her eyes from the sun’s glare with her hand as she peered up at Richey’s face. Then she reached out and lifted up his huge mirrored aviator shades. As she suspected, his pupils were pinned, his face pale. She knew exactly what that meant, and it had nothing to do with falling into a vat of vodka.
‘You promised me,’ she said, wagging her finger accusingly. ‘You promised.’
Richey ignored her in favour of pulling the man’s stiff body a little closer. ‘You in the music biz, then?’ he asked as the man pulled away, his mouth set in a grim, forbidding line. ‘Do you want to buy some charlie?’
‘No, he absolutely does not,’ said an icy voice from behind them. Ellie whipped round to see a woman standing there. Richey took a step back so the woman could slide her arm round the man’s waist and they exchanged a look. If they weren’t both wearing sunglasses, then Ellie would have sworn it was less of a look and more of an eyeroll. ‘Darling, I was wondering what was taking you so long.’
Of course they were together, because men like him – handsome and charming – weren’t going to be flying solo. And of course he’d be with a woman who was lithe and slender, with the kind of naturally shiny, sleek hair that Ellie aspired to but could never achieve – not even with a £150 Brazilian blowdry every three months – and who was wearing a draped top and blindingly white jeans. Snowy white jeans at a festival trumped a white broderie anglaise dress, which had now crumpled in the heat, every time.
Compared to her, Ellie was just a grubby, hungover girl in a wilted white frock and wellies. She was something less, a lot less, especially when she was accessorising with a boyfriend who was nothing but trouble.
‘I got held up,’ the perfect boyfriend was saying, except he wasn’t a boy. He was in his mid-thirties, but this wasn’t about his age. It was about the way he held himself and the way he looked, and the air of capability and control that he possessed. He was a man in a way that Richey would never be. Even if he lived to be a hundred – which was unlikely, given his lifestyle – Richey would always be a boy, a Jack-the-lad, a one-way ticket to heartbreak. ‘Shall we find somewhere quiet to have a cold drink? Well, somewhere quiet-ish anyway.’ He turned to Ellie even as his arm settled round his girlfriend’s shoulders. ‘It was nice to meet you.’
‘It was nice to meet you too,’ Ellie said because it had been, until Richey had rocked up and ruined everything. Though there wasn’t much to ruin if he already had a girlfriend and Ellie had Richey, who now slung his arm round her shoulder like a dead weight.
‘Babe,’ he said, ruffling her hair with a hot hand. ‘Babe, let’s go somewhere quiet too so we can fuck.’
Ellie went from always giving even her most challenging boyfriends the benefit of the doubt and never having the guts to dump them, to putting her hands on Richey’s perspiration-soaked chest and pushing him hard. Pushing him away from the man she’d had a weird, tingling moment with and his supercilious, absolutely perfect girlfriend, who were the last people she’d ever want to have a ringside seat to her utter humiliation dealt out by her lying, drug-taking, drug-dealing boyfriend.
‘How could you?’ she shouted at Richey, who looked more bemused than anything else. ‘No! No! NO! This is not something I can work with. This is an absolute deal-breaker. I shouldn’t have to put up with this sort of crap! We are finished. I never want to see you again!’
She couldn’t even risk looking at Mr What If or his girlfriend. Who knew what he thought of Ellie now? She’d become one of his stories, an anecdote, a ‘this time I went to Glastonbury and met this insane girl and her drug-addled boyfriend’.
‘Babe!’ Richey spluttered. ‘Babe! Babe! Don’t be so fucking uptight, babe.’
There were no words, so Ellie settled for shoving Richey so hard that he cannoned into the golden couple and she could start running, stumbling through the crowds, almost falling over her wellies in her determination to get as far away from him as humanly possible.
Chapter Six
Ellie had left
Glastonbury early in a dark, despairing mood. It set the tone for the rest of the week.
Her mood wasn’t improved by the fact that Muffin had flown out to St Barts for two weeks with ten of her closest friends who all had names like Tiger and Flick (one of them was even called Poo), which meant that Inge was supposed to take over Muffin’s workload. Not that Muffin’s day-to-day duties were heavy, but Inge preferred to sit behind the reception desk daydreaming, when she wasn’t fending off pale young men who came into the gallery just to gaze adoringly at her.
‘Inge is lovely,’ Piers would say as he passed Ellie’s open office door on his way to find out why Inge had just cut off one of his calls, ‘but I wish she’d learn how to work the bloody switchboard.’
Ellie was also fed up with asking Inge to send out catalogues or order flowers for clients only to discover that she hadn’t done it. ‘Sorry,’ she’d sigh, waving a languid hand about to convey her dismay and generally looking as fragile as her celebrity doppelgänger, Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby, ‘I haven’t had time to get round to it.’
Inge’s father was a famous portrait painter – painted-HM-The-Queen famous – and her mother a Swedish countess who’d once come to the gallery to take Inge for lunch and spent two hundred thousand pounds on an avant-garde sculpture while Inge was fetching her coat and scarf, so Vaughn wasn’t going to sack her. Not that Ellie wanted Inge to get fired; she just wanted her to develop a work ethic.
Vaughn would have no compunction about sacking Ellie, though. In fact, he came pretty close to it on the Wednesday morning when a sale she’d been painstakingly working on for months had fallen through at the eleventh hour. Not even at the eleventh hour, but when she phoned to ask if there’d been a problem with the bank transfer and was told the deal was off.
‘Give me one good reason why I don’t fire you!’ he’d roared. His personal assistant, Madeleine, who worked on site only two days a week, had stood behind him shrugging helplessly and pointing at the picture on Vaughn’s desk of his wife Grace, which was office shorthand for ‘they had a row on the phone not five minutes before you walked in’.
Of course, after lunch, which Ellie had eaten at her desk with a martyred air, Vaughn had poked his head round her door.
‘I’ve been through the proofs of the catalogue for the Scandinavian exhibition,’ he said. ‘Don’t spell “fiord” with a j; it looks common. Apart from that, it will do.’
Obviously Vaughn and Grace had made up from their fight and her job was safe, but it was still irritating.
She was irritated with the weather, because it was hot and muggy with no promise of a good thunderstorm to ease the stickiness. Irritated with superfood salads and almond milk because she was detoxing after Glastonbury. Irritated with Tess and Lola, who were so overjoyed that she’d dumped Richey they kept trying to high-five her and were busy making plans to vet all her future boyfriends.
But mostly she was irritated with Richey for being her lamest duck yet. Once again, she was on her own after another relationship turned into a catastrophe. She was also regretting the what-might-have-been with a tall skinny man with really curly hair and deep blue eyes, whose name she didn’t know. Even if that woman he’d been with turned out to be his sister, pining for him was pointless. The in credulous, appalled look on his face would probably stay with Ellie until her last moments on earth.
When Richey did finally call late on Thursday night, Ellie tried to swallow down her bitterness and disappointment so she could graciously accept his apology.
‘So, like, I need to come round tomorrow morning to pick up my stuff,’ he said without preamble. ‘You going to be in around nine, then?’
‘I’ll be at work,’ Ellie said tersely, though the terseness took a lot of effort. Her natural inclination was to launch into a lecture about the dangers of hard drugs, then gently ask Richey to seek professional help. ‘Anyway, what stuff?’
Richey’s stuff amounted to a couple of T-shirts, a can of shaving foam and a six-pack of Stella, four of the cans already consumed by Lola.
‘I need my stuff,’ Richey insisted when Ellie asked why he had to collect it by nine tomorrow. ‘Those T-shirts have sentimental value, and it’s six cans of Stella, and I don’t get paid until next week.’
Richey couldn’t make much of a profit from dealing class-A narcotics.
‘You should have been honest with me and maybe I could have helped you,’ Ellie said reproachfully. ‘I wouldn’t even have been angry – well, not much – but to behave the way you did in front of those people was un acceptable. You humiliated me.’
‘Look, none of this was a big deal until you made it one,’ Richey muttered. ‘So, yeah, I do a bit of coke every now and again, and if I have a bit spare I try to make a profit on it. It’s what everyone does …’
‘I don’t! My friends don’t, because it’s wrong.’
‘Yeah, but you stress out about everything,’ Richey explained, though Ellie didn’t think she stressed out about everything. Only some things, and not all the time. ‘Look, there’s no point in dragging this out. I just need my shit.’
‘Fine,’ she said thinly, though it wasn’t at all fine. ‘Whatever.’
It took some tense negotiations but Lola agreed to deal with Richey at nine the next morning because she was currently working in Tabitha’s vintage clothes shop in Spitalfields and didn’t start until eleven. Ellie would leave Richey’s pitiful collection of ‘things’ by the front door and he wasn’t to be allowed in the flat.
Lola even got up early the next day to make sure Ellie left for work at her normal time because ‘I know you. One whiff of his cheap aftershave and you’ll be begging him to give it another go, and all the progress you’ve made will count for nothing.’
Ellie was sure that she’d do no such thing but at least it would all be settled. She could put a line through Richey. Get on with getting over him, then get on with the rest of her life. So she set off for her breakfast meeting with the arts critic from the International Herald Tribune with a spring in her step. Or a half-spring, because she wasn’t over Richey yet, not by a long shot, and at quarter to eight it was already hot enough that the boating lake in Regent’s Park seemed to shimmer in the heat and her pale blue Zara dress was wrinkled before she’d even arrived at the Riding House Café on Great Titchfield Street.
By the time breakfast was over and Ellie had prised the last bit of gossip out of the critic and seen him into a taxi, it was almost ten o’clock.
‘Hey, it’s me. Did it go all right?’ she demanded as soon as Lola answered her phone. ‘Has Richey been? Did he get his stuff? Was he an arse about the Stella?’
‘Hello to you too,’ Lola rapped back. ‘And yes, yes and yes. He was a total arse about his bloody Stella but I told him that the cans of Stella were compensation for the emotional distress he’s caused. He wasn’t too happy about that.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ Ellie said, but she still couldn’t unclench. ‘He didn’t take anything he shouldn’t? Like, he didn’t come in, did he?’
There was a pause, which made Ellie’s blood pressure rocket because Lola never paused before speaking. Usually she just said whatever she had to say without letting tact cramp her style. ‘Well … maybe he did come in for a little bit,’ she said at last. ‘Something about a CD or DVD he lent you.’
‘What?’ Richey had listened almost exclusively to dub-step so there had never been a time when Ellie had asked to borrow any of his CDs, though he had bought her a Justin Bieber DVD as a joke and if he wanted the present back – and not even a good present, but a present that had cost two quid from a bloke in a pub selling DVDs out of a carrier bag – then Ellie really was well shot of him. ‘I can’t believe he’d be that petty. You didn’t leave him in my room alone, did you?’
‘Of course I didn’t,’ Lola snapped indignantly. ‘Except, when he came round I was in the middle of washing my hair and I had shampoo in my eyes, then the postman rang the bell because Tess has been buyin
g more of that home-made crap from Etsy.’
‘Lola! You didn’t!’
‘Look, he was on his own in there for five minutes. OK, OK, maybe ten, but I checked and nothing’s missing. TV, DVD player, jewellery box, it was all there. I can’t guarantee that he didn’t go through your knicker drawer for a souvenir but what’s a pair of pants between friends?’
Quite a lot actually, especially if they were from Agent Provocateur, but there wasn’t much Ellie could do about it when she was due back at work to personally take delivery of a light installation that had been overnighted from Brazil.
She always left work early the first Friday of every month to go to her grandparents’ for dinner, but as Vaughn was on a yacht somewhere near Monaco with a Russian oligarch, Ellie left work even earlier so she could race home, fly up the stairs and burst into her room.
It looked the same as it had done when she’d left that morning. All consumer durables were present and correct. The bed was still neatly made. All the potions and makeup and beauty accessories were still in an orderly fashion on her dressing table and her knicker drawer, thank God, was firmly shut.
Ellie opened it just to be on the safe side. All appeared to be in order. Even the twenty-pound note for emergencies was still there. She sat on the edge of her bed and breathed deeply in and out until her pulse slowed to a manageable rate.
The panic had made Ellie hot and sweaty. She thought longingly of having a quick shower but made do with a damp flannel and a lot of body lotion. There was just time to change into a loose cotton dress and flats, then she was heading out of the door to get even hotter and sweatier as she walked up the hill to Belsize Park.
‘Ellie, Ellie, you make me shake like jelly,’ Morry, Ellie’s grandfather, sang to the tune of ‘Jeepers Creepers’, when he opened the front door. ‘Ellie, Ellie, you should be on the telly.’