‘So when did you, you know, realize that you wanted to be with her?’
‘Eighteen months ago she’d just come out of a serious relationship and I knew if I didn’t make my move, I’d probably lose her for ever. Like I said, girls like her don’t stay single very long. We got together and I asked her to marry me last Christmas.’ There was a ghost of a smile. ‘What was the beautifully romantic thing she said? “Jesus, Anderson, what took you so long?”’
Something cataclysmic must have happened to make Amber call off the engagement. ‘Do you mind me asking what happened?’ Lizzy said.
There was a long silence. ‘Let’s just say I wasn’t the man she thought I was.’
What does he mean by that?
Lizzy wondered. The next moment the anguish had crept back into Elliot’s face. ‘I just miss her. I miss her company. It’s so weird, we were part of each other’s lives for so long and now there’s just this …
silence.
’
‘Are you sure you can’t work it out?’ Lizzy asked.
There was another pause. ‘Yes. Now do you mind if we talk about something else?’
Lizzy met up that night with her friends at YO! Sushi. Nic had her own theory about why Elliot and Amber had broken up.
‘Bet she caught him shagging someone else.’
‘They were engaged, Nic!’ Poppet said.
‘That gives him even more reason. Once men get that ring on the girl’s finger it’s an insurance policy to act how the hell they want.’
‘I dunno, he seems a bit rigid and principled to be the cheating type.’ Lizzy watched the conveyor belt go past. Could she fit another Californian Roll in?
‘It’s obvious, isn’t it?’ Poppet said. ‘They waited all these years before getting together and then Amber must have realized Elliot wasn’t “The One” for her after all. Poor bloke. What a kick in the stomach.’
‘And now he’s using Lizzy as a drop-in therapy session,’ Nic said.
Poppet shook her head. ‘Men are so weird. They either want to have meaningless sex with us, or cry on our shoulders. Why is there no middle ground? Why can’t we be their friends
and
their lovers?’ She sighed. ‘All I want to do is go for romantic walks down the Embankment with someone and throw up handfuls of autumn leaves.’
‘Send, you effing thing!’
Lizzy and Poppet looked at Nic. Nic was simultaneously emailing on her BlackBerry, shovelling Spicy Seafood Udon into her mouth and drinking wine. There were so many different coloured plates around her it looked like the aftermath of a children’s party.
‘How many of those have you had now?’ Lizzy asked.
‘Leave me alone,’ Nic mumbled. ‘Can’t you see I’m stress eating?’
‘You’re late,’ Elliot announced, still tapping away on his iPad as Lizzy rushed into the café.
Antonia had been having another Zen Ten/Jocasta meltdown and Lizzy had rushed out on the pretence of having to go and buy some tampons. Still slightly breathless, she took her coat off and sat down.
‘Why do girls do that?’ he asked.
‘Do what?’ she asked confusedly.
He had a combative gleam in his eye, quite different to any expression she’d seen him wear before. ‘Wear so much animal print.’
She looked down at her jumper, which had the face of a roaring tiger on it. ‘What’s wrong with animal print?’
‘You think it’s cute and sexy, but it just makes you all look mad. No wonder you’re—’ He shut up.
‘Oh my God! Were you going to say, “No wonder you’re single”?’
Elliot had the grace to look slightly contrite. ‘It just doesn’t send out a good impression. As if you live on your own with six hundred cats or something.’
‘Yeah well, at least I don’t walk round in the same boring navy and grey suits all the time.’
He looked mortally offended. ‘This is Armani.’
‘Still boring. A nice sparkly cat brooch would liven it up.’
‘Oh yeah, that would look
great
on the news tonight.’
‘Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. Why can’t the news be more fun? I’m sure you’d get more viewers.’
‘Thanks for that. I’ll be sure to bring it up with ITV’s chief executive next time I see him.’
Lizzy picked up her coffee.
He narrowed his eyes. ‘What are you smiling at?’
‘Nothing. I didn’t realize you took such a keen interest in my wardrobe.’
‘It’s not exactly easy to ignore it.’ He shot another look at Lizzy’s jumper. ‘
Tigers
.’
That was the start of a bizarre friendship. Or the ‘Bloodbath Coffee Club’ as Nic was calling it. Over the following weeks Lizzy and Elliot would meet at Café Crème and basically argue for an hour. It was understandable that Elliot would be in a bad place after losing Amber. Lizzy just didn’t realize how dark. The man was so cynical he made Jack Dee look like Mary Berry.
‘How can people print this rubbish?’ He was reading one of the women’s magazines from the rack on the wall. ‘Fate Found Our Mate!’
Lizzy put her bag down. ‘What’s wrong with that?’
He shot her a look. ‘Listen to this:
‘A chocolate torte brought us together!’ says Sue from Holyhead: ‘I’d only popped out to the shop because I’d bought the wrong butter. Kevin and I met eyes over the self-service tills and I knew he’d be the man I’d spend the rest of my life with. I made the same chocolate torte for our wedding cake!’
‘I think that’s really sweet,’ Lizzy said.
Elliot snorted horribly. ‘Or how about this one: “Driven Together – we met in a car crash!” Good God.’ He chucked the magazine down. ‘Common interests and goals in life get people together, not some otherworldly set of forces conspiring. All this stuff does is put pressure on other women because they haven’t bumped into their own Mr Right buying sink unblocker in Halfords.’
‘I never saw you as down with the sisterhood.’
He didn’t appear to be listening. ‘And even if you
do
end up meeting the person of your dreams in the frozen-food aisle at the supermarket, you only pile unrealistic expectations on them and vice versa, and everyone ends up getting let down.’ He gazed blackly round the café. ‘Fate. What a load of
bollocks
.’
It was becoming clear that Elliot thought quite a few things were bollocks. He trusted nobody and everybody had an agenda. Some of them Lizzy could understand – politicians, banks, big corporations and Christopher Biggins – but others:
Big Issue
sellers, the National Trust, guide dogs, mental health charities – were just ridiculous. Elliot even harboured a bizarre suspicion of
Countryfile
’s Kate Humble (‘Too cheerful, she’s hiding something’), who Lizzy had always privately liked because they shared the same hair.
It wasn’t just their opposing outlooks. They inhabited completely different worlds. Lizzy spent her weekends catching up on sleep and seeing her friends. As far as she could make out Elliot chilled out by visiting obscure art galleries and attending global finance summits in Washington. She liked Agatha Raisin and Jojo Moyes; Elliot considered
The Economist
and Jonathan Franzen to be light reading material. When Lizzy had tried to argue the cultural significance of
Miss Congeniality 2
, an Amazon delivery containing a box set of the Coen brothers’ films had arrived at her office the next morning. Lizzy had never met anyone who thrived so much on confrontation. It was exhausting, infuriating and at the same time, strangely invigorating.
She’d tried to bring up the subject of Amber a few times but Elliot would just shut down and revert to his previous monosyllabic self. She hadn’t pushed it any further. If he wanted to talk about it he would.
Meanwhile she and Cassandra had been emailing on a regular basis.
Is he always this argumentative?
Lizzy wrote after one particularly exhausting debate about
Made in Chelsea
and popular culture.
Oh yes!
Cassandra had emailed back.
Sounds like he’s getting better!
Nic couldn’t get her head around it. ‘Do you want to bang each other or what?’
‘No way!’ Lizzy genuinely meant it. ‘He’s the most objectionable arse I’ve ever come across. I’m surprised Amber put up with him that long, quite frankly.’
‘Then what? You’re doing all this out of some weird promise to his mother?’
‘Maybe.’ There was something about Elliot that for some reason touched Lizzy. He was like an angry wounded animal. ‘I suppose I feel a bit
sorry
for him,’ she said.
Poppet nodded wisely. ‘He’s had his heart broken and he’s like a lone raft, cast adrift in the sea of humanity. You’re his lighthouse, Lizzy, guiding him safely back to shore again.’
‘What the hell are you going on about?’ Nic turned back to Lizzy. ‘I don’t get what
you
get out of it. You sit there and he shouts at you for an hour? People get paid good money to do that, it’s called a career in counselling.’
‘Nicola, Lizzy is helping someone in their hour of need!’
She shook her head. ‘Be it on your head, Mother Teresa.’
Lizzy didn’t want to say it, but in a way Nic was right. There was another deeper, more poignant reason she’d started to look forward to their exchanges. Her friends wouldn’t understand: Nic was an only child and Poppet had an older sister. The ripostes flying back and forth between her and Elliot, the one-upmanship and point-scoring, the way Lizzy wanted to give him a dead arm within ten seconds of meeting him – they reminded her of the relationship she’d had with her brother before Hayley-bloody-Bidwell had come along and driven a wedge between them.
Lizzy had just ordered when Elliot came striding down the street on his phone. Spotting Lizzy through the window, he gave her an imperious forefinger.
‘Something important?’ she asked sarcastically when he came in.
‘Another call from a developer about the Hall.’ Elliot sat down and looked round for the waitress. ‘I suppose my mother’s told you all about her grand vision of turning it into an art school.’
‘I think it sounds like a great idea.’
He looked at Lizzy as if she were an idiot. ‘It’s a terrible idea. The sooner we sell it the better.’
‘Your mum doesn’t want to go.’
‘Of course she doesn’t want to go. My mother floats round with her rose-tinted glasses on thinking everything is going to be all right. Unfortunately a fairy godmother isn’t going to sweep in and wave her magic wand and turn Beeston Hall into the art world’s version of
Fame.
’
‘Your mum’s got her dreams. What’s wrong with that?’
‘There’s nothing romantic about running a stately home. My dad tried every hare-brained scheme there was to keep the place going, poor bugger, and in the end the stress finished him off.’ He shook his head. ‘I have no intention of letting the same thing happen to me.’
That evening Lizzy was lying on the sofa mindlessly watching an E! special about Kim and Kanye when she got a text from her brother Robbie.
Yo DJ. Hayley’s away this weekend. Fancy coming to hang with the yokels?
It was typical Robbie. While Lizzy couldn’t function without her diary and had palpitations about double-bookings and leaving it too long between friend rotations, Robbie just went with the flow. Which normally meant going where Hayley told him to and spending his Saturday nights at couples-only dinner parties.
Along with the gym and Topshop, Hayley lived for her dinner parties. Once, when Lizzy’s plans had fallen through, Robbie had asked her if they could invite Lizzy along with them to someone’s house that evening.
‘I think it’s a bit rude to ask if we can bring someone else at this late stage. Sorry, Lizzy.’
‘But there’s only four of us. They’ve got a massive dining-room table.’
Hayley’s smile had turned rictus. ‘I think Michelle’s already done the stuffed chicken breasts. And I know she’s only bought two packs of the Gu cheesecakes.’
‘We can’t just rock up with your singleton sister!’ Lizzy had overheard her hiss at Robbie later. ‘What would everyone talk to her about?’
Lizzy had already made plans for the following weekend, but she hadn’t seen her brother since the barbecue. Getting time alone with Robbie was as rare as hen’s teeth. She’d better make the most of it.
Autumn finally kicked in and a band of cold weather descended on Britain. The windows of Café Crème were steamed up that day as Lizzy ran in with her umbrella.
Elliot strode in a few minutes later. His thick wet hair and rangy body reminded Lizzy of a red setter. She half-expected him to shake his coat out before he sat down opposite her.
‘You’re late,’ she said pointedly.
He was bristling with energy. ‘Some of us have got deadlines to meet. The news doesn’t write itself, you know.’
‘Anything exciting? Have they decided to change the pound coin for chocolate buttons?’
He looked round for the waitress. ‘As if I’d tell you. You’re the enemy.’
‘Like I care anyway. You journos are way too far down the pecking order of things for us PRs to worry about.’
‘Ah yes, I forgot how important your work is. How are you getting on with the Hungry Halo? Has it succeeded in single-handedly curing first-world depression?’
‘
Happy
Halo. So you did read the press release?’
‘I got halfway through the first paragraph before the superlatives started making my eyes bleed.’
‘You try writing five hundred words about the wondrous effects of cleansing dirty auras,’ Lizzy grumbled.
‘Who the hell is Shaman Ron anyway? He looked like Operation Yewtree’s next arrest. I wouldn’t let him anywhere near my aura.’ Elliot shuddered. ‘Seriously, though, don’t you ever question what you’re doing?’
‘What do you mean?’
He sat back and appraised Lizzy in his annoying superior way. ‘Don’t you want to do something else with your life other than trying to promote a load of twaddle that no one is interested in? Why don’t you get a proper job?’
‘PR is a proper job.’
‘PR is not a proper job,’ he said loftily.
‘Excuse me, mate, just because we’re not all breaking financial
world exclusives
and going on the telly to talk about whatever baseline the Bank of England has set.’