Seeing Other People (4 page)

She handed the book to me. ‘I can’t tell you how much I love this. It would absolutely make my day if you’d sign it for me.’

‘Very funny,’ I replied curtly. ‘Who put you up to this?’

Bella looked stunned. ‘I don’t know what you’re on about. No one’s put me up to—’

‘Don’t insult my intelligence,’ I snapped. ‘You’re telling me that you just
happen
to be a fan of a huge pile of overwritten angsty old tosh that’s not even been in print in over a decade? I don’t think so.’

Without another word, I abandoned the intern in the middle of the hallway and marched over in the direction of the desk of the
Correspondent
’s books editor, Dave Walsh. This prank had his fingerprints all over it for sure. He’d always been a bit sniffy about me having written a novel when from what I’d gathered over the years he’d written several without managing to secure a publisher. Did he really believe that I was gullible enough to believe that the young, pretty, intern he’d sent over to wind me up was a fan of the one and only book I’d ever written? Not even I was that deluded.

‘Nice try, Walshy,’ I said, slapping the book down hard next to his overpriced coffee. ‘But you’ll definitely need to work harder than that to catch me out!’

Walsh’s deep baritone laugh filled the air as he picked up the book between his thumb and forefinger like he was afraid of catching something from it. ‘You’re not trying to blame this old potboiler on me are you? It’s your name on the cover!’

So, he was going to play dumb. Weak ploy. I’d make him admit it, if it took all day. ‘Come on, admit it, you put her up to it.’

‘Put
who
up to
what
? You’ll have to be more specific.’

‘That intern,’ I replied. ‘Pretty. Dark-haired. Started on the arts desk last week. You know the one I mean. Come on Walshy, just admit it: you talked her into asking me to sign a copy of my book.’

Walsh roared so loudly with laughter that everyone within twenty feet of him turned around to get a better look at what was going on.

‘You mean Bella? She’s a fan of your distinctly limited oeuvre, is she? If I’d known that she certainly wouldn’t be working for me!’

If he was lying his face wasn’t letting on. I had a moment of doubt. Could I have got it wrong after all?

‘Are you saying it wasn’t you?’

‘Hand on heart.’

‘So the intern is . . .’

‘A genuine fan of yours? It would certainly look that way.’

With the sound of Walshy’s laughter echoing in my ears I returned shamefaced to the spot where I’d so rudely abandoned the intern and apologised.

‘You must think I’m insane,’ I began.

‘I’m just confused, that’s all,’ she replied. ‘Did I do something wrong?’

‘It’s just that, well, I thought that . . . actually, you know what, it doesn’t matter what I thought. I was an arsehole to you and I shouldn’t have been. Look, I feel terrible about this. Why don’t you let me take you out for coffee this afternoon? I’ll sign your book and we can talk about working on the paper and I can give you the benefit of the obviously minuscule amount of wisdom that I have.’

‘I’d love to.’ She smiled as though this was the most exciting prospect that she’d ever heard and then opened her mouth as if she had something else to add but before she could say a word my boss Camilla appeared in my eye line.

‘Joe,’ she asked. ‘Have you got a minute?’

I made my excuses to Bella and followed Camilla into her office. She told me to take a seat and handed me an espresso from the little machine in the corner. It had all the makings of someone about to deliver bad news.

‘It’s about the editorship of
Sunday
,’ she said as if reading my thoughts. ‘You didn’t get it.’

So that was that. After three rounds of interviews, two presentations to upper management and numerous sleepless nights I hadn’t got the job.

‘Who have they given it to?’ I asked.

‘Hannah Bainbridge from the
Sunday Reporter
. She really dazzled them from day one.’

I’d met Hannah a few times over the years. She was just one of those people who were naturally adept at promoting themselves and everyone seemed to buy into it without question. It didn’t help that she was pretty damn good at her job too. Even I would’ve struggled not to appoint her over me.

Camilla offered me a commiserative smile. ‘For what it’s worth you were my first choice but I just couldn’t get anyone else to see you as anything other than a safe pair of hands.’

‘That’s me in a nutshell, isn’t it?’ I replied. ‘That’s everything I amount to: a pair of hands, not even a whole body.’

3

In the course of the past year alone I’d applied for at least a dozen senior positions on various newspapers and magazines and while I’d come close to getting them a few times luck never seemed to be on my side. Getting rejected by my own paper in favour of Hannah Bainbridge of all people, however, felt like a real slap in the face. Where could I go from here? Without me bringing in more money Penny couldn’t give up work and we’d be forced to carry on at this manic pace that rendered us virtual strangers to each other. And while I knew it wouldn’t always be so tough it was hard to imagine that day. Penny and I were stuck in the middle years in more ways than one. We were halfway through our lives, halfway through bringing up the kids and as far away from the beginning as we were from the end. It was like hitting the wall in the middle of a marathon and knowing that the only way out was to give up on everything or somehow find the strength to carry on.

That afternoon, still feeling beaten down by the disappointment of not getting the promotion, I reluctantly took Bella the intern to Allegro’s, a cheap and cheerful Italian café favoured by journalists from my own paper and others round about. On our way to the only free table in the place I took care to acknowledge Faye Bonner from the
Correspondent
’s crime desk
,
waved hello to Simone Patterson, senior features writer at the
Post
, and nodded a greeting to David Owen, arts editor of the
Sunday Reporter
.

‘I’m feeling a bit star-struck,’ said Bella as we took our seats. ‘I can’t believe I’m sitting in a café with the great and good of the media world.’

‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ I replied. ‘They’re just people and anyway I’m sure one day, in the not-too-distant future, some new intern will be looking at you eating lunch in here and won’t be able to believe they’re in the same room.’

We ordered two cappuccinos and I tried to make up for that morning’s mistake by showing an interest in her life. She was born in Kent but raised in Hereford by an army officer father, who she didn’t really get on with, and a homemaker mother who divorced her father and remarried when Bella was nine. She did her first degree in modern languages at Durham then went travelling around Australia for six months, which had turned into eighteen before she realised that she needed to turn her attention to her career. On her return to England she decided that she wanted to practise law but by the time she’d trained up and got a job at one the big law firms in the City she realised that it wasn’t for her and gave it all up at the age of twenty-five to get into journalism.

‘Anyway,’ she said in conclusion, ‘that’s enough about me. How about you? I can’t believe you never wrote another novel.’

‘It wasn’t for me,’ I replied. ‘I think I only ever had the one story in me.’

‘I don’t think that’s true for a minute,’ dismissed Bella. ‘And even if it is, I can’t imagine a better book to have written: “The image of her moved like liquid honey in my mind tracing all the words she never said to me and I knew from that moment on that neither life, nor love, would ever taste the same again.’’’

She was quoting a passage from
Hand in Glove
when the protagonist realises that the girl he’s waiting for is never going to arrive. The idea had come from a row Penny and I had at Florence’s Santa Maria Novella train station. It was during the summer break and I’d told her that I was thinking about dropping out of university and moving to London. She’d asked me what I thought the move would mean for us and I’d told her that I didn’t know and that was when she’d run out of the station. I spent two hours alone with the luggage, wondering what to do, by which time I had made up my mind that if Penny ever did return then that would be the last row we would ever have.

I didn’t know what to say. I was simultaneously flattered, self-conscious and not a little confused.

‘I don’t understand. You’ve committed lines from my novel to memory?’

‘That’s the sort of thing seventeen-year-old girls do when they read a book that changes their lives.’ She laughed and briefly touched my hand. It was like a bolt of lightning ran straight through me. In an instant I felt alive, energised and strangely invincible.

And then it was gone.

‘I’ve been carrying this book around with me hoping to see you since I started last week, just for a moment,’ she said as I drew my hand away from the centre of the table. ‘When I spotted you in the office today I thought I’d scream. I hope I didn’t embarrass you, it’s just that it was too good an opportunity to miss.’

‘I’m not embarrassed,’ I replied, ‘I’m just . . . I don’t know, but whatever it is, it’s not embarrassment.’

We talked for just over an hour, mostly about the paper, but also the future of the industry, the difference between working on newspapers and magazines and even about our favourite books. I’m sure we could have gone on much longer but then I looked at my watch and remembered that Carl had booked a car to take us over to the shoot at two and so I paid the bill and we headed back to the office.

‘I can’t thank you enough for taking me for coffee, Joe,’ said Bella as we stood outside the revolving doors to the building. ‘It was really kind of you to take time out to talk to me.’

‘It was nothing,’ I replied casually. ‘I’m just sorry that we got off on the wrong foot. Anyway, I really do hope your time on the paper goes well.’

She laughed, and tucked a stray strand of hair that had been caught by the wind back behind her ear. ‘How could it not after a start like this?’ she replied. A nearby car sounded its horn before I could reply. I turned to see Carl and his assistant waving at me to hurry up from the back of a black Addison Lee minivan.

‘I’d better go,’ I said. She nodded and gave me a smile that if I hadn’t known better I might have described as flirtatious, then headed back into work leaving me alone with my thoughts for the walk to the car.

‘Who was that then?’ asked Carl, leaning out of the window to get a better look at Bella. ‘The next Mrs Clarke?’

‘It was no one,’ I replied, climbing in. ‘Look, let’s get a move on if we’re not going to be late for this stupid shoot.’

The studio we’d booked was in one of the few parts of East London yet to be gentrified but was as overpriced and overstyled as any I’d been in. Hair and make-up had arrived, the stylist was at the ready and now all we needed were the stars of our show who were nowhere to be seen. I couldn’t get a signal to call them from where we were set up and so cursing my brand-new state-of-the-art phone with its mega memory and superior processing power I headed out into the corridor to get a better signal when I saw a tubby guy in a stained sky-blue puffa jacket and grey supermarket tracksuit bottoms staring at me. He held an open bag of chips in his hands.

‘Can’t get a signal?’

‘Not for love nor money,’ I replied, assuming he was some kind of caretaker. ‘I don’t know what the point of these things is if you can’t actually make calls with them.’

‘I can’t seem to go a month without killing a phone,’ replied Tubby Guy. ‘I’m like a phone serial killer.’ He laughed, clearly amused by his own joke, and as I turned away to resume my signal search he coughed and said, ‘I don’t know if you can help me mate. I’m looking for Joe Clarke, a journalist. I don’t suppose you could point him out could you?’

‘That’s me,’ I replied. I looked at him again. Maybe he wasn’t the caretaker. Maybe he was some kind of delivery guy. ‘Do you need me to sign for something?’

Tubby Guy looked puzzled. ‘I’m not sure I . . .’

‘You’re here to deliver something aren’t you?’ I wondered if I’d missed an accent that might explain why he didn’t understand English.

Tubby Guy laughed. ‘No, I’m not delivering anything – I’m the star of the show!’ He wiped one of his greasy hands on his tracksuit bottoms and held it out for me to shake. ‘I’m Stew, I’m a neighbour of Gary Crossly from your IT department. I’m here for the shoot.’

I immediately thought back to Camilla’s words on the day she’d commissioned the feature:
Readers never getting tired of good-looking guys who have made a mess of their lives
. When Tubby Guy’s friend, Gary from IT, had responded to my appeal for divorced dads he’d assured me that not only was his mate Stewart a recently separated father of two but also good-looking in a ‘poor man’s Hugh Grant’ kind of way. Even though my usual protocol was to demand a jpg upfront in order to verify the photogenic status of respondents, the studio, photographer, make-up artist and stylist had been booked and as I still had another two slots to fill I just said yes and decided to hope for the best. I looked at the lumpy, red-faced man smelling of vinegar standing in front of me. The only way he resembled Hugh Grant was that both he and Hugh had two eyes and a nose. I made a mental note to kill Gary from IT with my bare hands first thing in the morning.