Shades Of Submission: Fifty By Fifty Part 46

I couldn't work out if he was genuinely fl.u.s.tered, or if it was an act, a Hugh Grant thing that he thought would let him get away with anything.

"So...?"

"I could apologize now, but that would just be words. It would be easy. But perhaps easy isn't enough, Trudy Parsons-Editorial."

Was this all a joke? An arrogant English toff having fun with the colonials? I really was having trouble reading men these days!

"A gesture might be more appropriate," he went on. "Lunch, perhaps? An apology over lunch?"

"So this is all for me, right? Or is it just for you, another chance to... to pursue me like you did on Sat.u.r.day?"

"Could we cut the negotiations and agree that it's both, perhaps? Lunch and an apology for you; an opportunity to redeem myself and enjoy your company for me. That kind of thing? I promise to be on my best behavior. The perfect gentleman. At the very worst you get a free lunch with the dull but polite brother of your new sister-in-law. What do you say, Trudy Parsons-Editorial? Shall we give it a crack?"

He knew where I was, of course. If he could find my Islington apartment and have a rose delivered there late on a Sat.u.r.day night, it was never going to be beyond his powers to have someone Google the street address of a reasonably well known publis.h.i.+ng company.

After I'd put the phone down I sat back, applied some fresh lip gloss, and gave myself a quick spray of Madame.

He's gaming you, Trudy. You know he's gaming you, with all this 'best behavior, perfect gentleman' bull.

I did. And I didn't care. I was a successful, professional woman and I figured I could handle a bit of flattery and hot pursuit.

Almost immediately there was a buzz from Ellie in the general office. "Someone here for you, Tee. Shall I send him through?"

"No, I'll be right down."

The stairs were narrow and steep, the walls lined with shelves full of a quite exceptional array of first editions, an eBay fortune just waiting to be had.

He was waiting in the office. Will.

I was a little disappointed. I'd expected him to send someone, a driver to whisk me away, not for him to show up here in person.

Then those eyes found mine, the predator eyes. I'd forgotten what that look could do to a girl. Immediately, I started to blush. Then I took a deep breath. Get a hold of yourself. This was my environment, my company. They weren't van Goghs on the walls, they were books. This was my world.

I stepped forward, smiled and held out a hand for him to shake. "Mr Bentinck-Stanley. So good of you to come."

He smiled. He knew when he was being played, too. He took my hand, dipped his head, and kissed it with the most delicate of touches.

From the corner of my eye I could see Ellie turn to Jo, the two of them struggling to suppress giggles. This was going to take a lot of living down later.

He turned toward the door. "Shall we?"

When we stepped outside into the narrow street I expected a car to be waiting. I was thinking The Ivy, or maybe the Savoy Grill, or some discreet little back-street bistro only known to the cognoscente. Instead, Will paused as I looked around, then raised a hand to indicate that we should start walking.

He had a table waiting in a wine bar a few doors down. He must know that this was somewhere I visited at least once a week. So low-key and familiar was his game plan.

"Thanks, Lou," I said, as a familiar waitress showed us to our table. We sat, and I saw a bottle of my usual Sauvignon Blanc in a cooler. Will's gla.s.s already had some wine in it, and I worked out that he must have been sitting here when he phoned me.

"So," I said, "you're going to be on your best creepy stalker behavior, are you?" I was joking, but only to an extent.

He dipped his head, reached across and poured me some wine.

The table was at the back, in an eating area lit by a high, domed ceiling, the perfect position to sit back and watch the place filling up for the lunchtime rush.

I sipped at my wine, studying his features. He'd shaved today, at least. That was something.

He looked back at me, clearly starting to feel a bit uncomfortable under my scrutiny.

Eventually, I relented, and said, "So...?"

Then he got it. The apology.

"Ah. Yes. I'm sorry. I mean... not just sorry, but sorry. Let me start again."

Maybe it was rude of me to laugh at his discomfort and his fl.u.s.tered Englishman act, but h.e.l.l, I figured I was due a laugh at his expense.

"Trudy." A pause for breath. "Please do accept my apologies. I was rude and boorish. It was a difficult day for me and you caught me off guard. I hadn't expected you to be so"

"Are you going to say it was my fault...?"

He stopped. Took a breath. Started again. "No. It was all my fault. I can be an arrogant p.r.i.c.k at times. It's one of my less endearing traits. Will you forgive me? Can we start again? For Ethan and Eleanor's sake?"

That was his trump card, and he knew it. The happy families card.

"I guess..." I said. I wasn't going to let him off the hook quite so easily.

Lou returned to take our order, but I hadn't even looked at the menu yet. It broke the tension, though. I knew I wanted the salt and pepper calamari anyway, so I ordered that while Will skimmed the menu and chose sea ba.s.s.

"So... Ellison and Coles," he said, as Lou departed with our orders. "One of the last independents."

I shook my head. "No. Not any more. It's all part of a multinational these days. " We'd fought hard to keep the imprint name, but that was all it was: an imprint. Ellison and Coles was more than a hundred years old, one of the great names of British publis.h.i.+ng. I'd gone there as a temp, not long after I'd come over to visit Ethan at Cambridge and decided to hang around. It had looked like good experience before I tried to break into New York publis.h.i.+ng.

My timing was all wrong, or all right, depending on how you looked at it. I started there at the onset of one of the periodic upheavals of the publis.h.i.+ng business, just as the still independent Ellison and Coles was about to succ.u.mb to the weight of economic inevitability and become an imprint of one of the multinationals. Senior staff left, opting for retirement or finally taking the plunge to start the novel they'd always planned to write. Suddenly I found myself as one of the most experienced members of staff, inheriting a list of literary stalwarts and charged with breathing some new life into the imprint if it was to survive in the new corporate environment.

One small victory was that what was left of Ellison and Coles resisted the pressure to move into the modern offices by the Thames and we were still based in those ancient offices in Covent Garden, a d.i.c.kensian building on four floors, with tiny offices and uneven floors and a charm that reminded me every day of why I'd chosen to stay on in London.

"So you're here for good, in love with the quaint world of British publis.h.i.+ng?"

I realized I'd been talking at length. Somehow he'd just set me off. I took a long sip at my wine. "Not for good," I said. "Not necessarily. I don't plan that far ahead."

"What if you meet someone?"

"It's not all about meeting someone," I said. I remembered now how Eleanor had vowed to obey Ethan at their wedding. Will's family clearly had a very different view of a woman's place to anything I would subscribe to.

He raised his hands, briefly. Best behavior.

He seemed different today. More relaxed. Less intense. More ready to smile and laugh.

I know I'd been stressy at the wedding: family tensions, lost ground to make up with Ethan. Maybe it had been something like that for Will, too.

You think you might have been a little harsh with him, Trude?

We talked some more, about Ellison and Coles, about how I'd come to England to visit Ethan and just happened to stay.

"It's that kind of place," said Will. "My family did exactly the same thing, about four hundred years ago." I think he was making a joke at his family's expense, but I wasn't sure. It could easily have been a simple pa.s.sing comment. His family had such a long history, it could be easy to take for granted.

"So are you going to tell me if I ever met you at Cambridge?" I asked him. "If you, Charlie and Ethan were buddies it's hard to think I didn't."

He shook his head. "I'd have remembered," he said, skirting that fine line between best behavior and flirting once again.

I looked at him with one eyebrow raised for a second or two, then relented.

"No," he went on. "We were close early on, me, Charlie and Ethan. A band of brothers. Always destined for great things, or so we believed. But you know how it is. People drift."

I thought of me and Ethan. I'd come to England to visit him, stayed here, and when our parents died we were suddenly the only family we had. But even then, over the last year we had drifted. Sometimes you just don't value what's right under your nose.

"Yes," I said. "It happens, doesn't it? People drift."

We ate on in silence for a time. I think we were both lost in thoughts, memories, regrets maybe.

"I really mean it," he said eventually. "The apology. All the emotion of the wedding, and all that. And I was tired. So tired. I was tired and emotional and I never should have behaved the way I did."

"You certainly looked tired." d.a.m.n. I'd said that out loud.

Briefly, he looked p.i.s.sed with me, then he relaxed again. "I was," he said. "I'd been up all night. Hadn't slept in 48 hours or so."

I remembered thinking he looked like he'd come from an all-nighter. He could at least have shaved.

Maybe he read the disapproval on my face, because he went on: "It was unavoidable. I was in Oran. Algeria. Heavy negotiations. Dull, but vital. It may sound a little melodramatic, but people's lives really did depend on it. I flew back that morning. Only just made it. I looked like s.h.i.+t, I know."

He shrugged, smiled, and all of a sudden I felt guilty that I should ever have questioned him, that I should have been p.i.s.sed with him for slipping away to make important calls on his cell phone.

"I did my best, but I really should have done better, for Eleanor."

I shook my head and felt like a b.i.t.c.h, and only then did I start to wonder if he was still gaming me, if this was all some elaborate story concocted to get me into bed.

And then... I felt guilty again for even thinking such a thing.

I drank more wine, grappling with my confusion.

"So..." he said. "Apology accepted?"

I shrugged, then nodded, then reached across the table to solemnly shake his hand, trying not to be distracted by his touch, his firm grip.

"Apology accepted," I said, even if I wasn't entirely convinced that it was.

"I had a postcard from them yesterday," I said.

I looked at Charlie over the rim of my cup of Lapsang Souchong.

There is no 'us'.

We were in Grey's, a little boutique coffee shop just off Long Acre where I was due to meet one of my writers to talk about a book proposal. Small talk. Nothing more than small talk.

There is no 'us'.

"They sound very happy." G.o.d, I was acting like a complete moron. How could Ethan and Eleanor 'sound very happy' from a two-liner postcard? They were just married, honeymooning in a cabin on stilts over the sea in the Maldives. Who wouldn't be happy? But still...

"Good good," said Charlie. He was enjoying this. He was milking it.

I opened my mouth to speak, but then stopped. No good denying it with him, no point stressing the no 'us' thing. Look where that had gotten me last time.

I glanced at the clock on the wall behind the counter. Twenty minutes until Julie would get here to rescue me with talk of her proposed book about her time as a working cla.s.s Belfast girl studying at one of Oxford's most exclusive colleges. It was a no-brainer. Julie was an insightful and funny writer, and the first volume of her memoirs had already been reprinted eight times and was being filmed by the BBC. Of course we would publish it. But no harm in meeting for coffee and c.o.c.ktails to discuss the details and have her at least go through the motions of pitching the book.

"So what happened between the three of you, then? You, Ethan and Eleanor's brother."

Charlie shrugged and gave that easy smile. "Too many evenings at the Baron of Beef," he said. "Too many pints of Greene King IPA."

"There's such a thing?"

He laughed. "He's got to you, hasn't he?"

I'd told Charlie about my apology from Will. Now, I shook my head, perhaps too strenuously. "No he hasn't. Okay? I'm just curious. The three of you were buddies, but at the wedding there was clearly bad chemistry."

Charlie shrugged again. "s.h.i.+t happens, Trude. You know?"

I held his gaze, narrowing my eyes. "What kind of s.h.i.+t, Charlie?"

"Okay," he said. "You say Will told you we drifted apart. That's what happened. First year up at All Hallows we had rooms on the same corridor. Threw us together, you know? We did the things students do, we had the hangovers the next day. We were really close people called us the Cabal. But then Ethan got in with the rowing crowd, and Will, well he always moved in different circles."

"So you drifted apart? Why the dark looks, then?"

"There's a bit of bad blood. Nothing serious. There was a girl."

"There's always a girl."

"It all got a bit intense. Things were said. Handbags at dawn, that kind of thing."

It was hard to think of Ethan getting involved in that kind of dispute. He was such a big sweetie. But then, how well did I really know him? A group of friends, a girl... it all made sense. "So who got the girl, then?"

"No one," said Charlie. "It was a student thing. A bit of a fuss and then forgotten."

"Not forgotten."

"Well... no. Maybe not. The girl's forgotten can't even remember her name, cad that I am but the words can't be unspoken. Student life in Cambridge is full of opportunities. Why waste time on fighting? I moved on. Will and Ethan moved on. No big deal. End of."

I sipped at my tea.