The Home for Broken Hearts (12 page)

“I’ve done my best, but someone will need to clear up the debris,” she told Ellen. “I don’t do bending.”

“Thank you, Allegra, you didn’t have to.”

“Ah, but I did,” Allegra said reproachfully.

“Let me introduce you to my son, Charlie.” Ellen gestured first at her son and then at Sabine. “And this is Sabine, she has the room above yours, and this—this is my sister, Hannah.”

Allegra nodded stiffly at each in turn. “I’ll take dinner in my room. I like to listen to the radio in the evenings.”

Just as she was about to exit, she collided with Matt, who all but took the poor woman off her feet, only saving her from falling by catching her in his arms.

“Oh, I am so sorry,” Matt told her as he righted her. “I really didn’t mean to.”

Ellen watched in disbelief as Allegra beamed at Matt, her face lighting up with a smile that instantly took a good twenty years off her age.

“Please don’t worry, it’s not every day a woman of my age is swept off her feet,” she told him sweetly.

“What, thirty-five?” Matt’s compliment was quite without guile.

Allegra fluttered her lashes. “So you are the young man Simon warned me about? Matthew Bolton?”

“I suppose I must be, unless it’s young Charlie here you need to watch out for.”

“And you are a writer, too?” Allegra asked. “You are, I can see the creative fire in your eyes.”

“That might be the two pints I had on the way home.” Matt grinned at her.

“How charmingly male,” Allegra said, placing the flat of her hand against his cheek. “One quite misses the scent of testosterone in one’s life. Ellen, I think we might model our hero on this dashing young man; I think he might be quite an inspiration.”

Ellen thought of Captain Parker, dark, moody, and dashing, and looked at Matt, blond, sexy, and full of light, and couldn’t see the comparison.

Allegra patted his cheek and then, as coquettish as a girl, glanced over her shoulder and waved at him as she left the room.

“Top old lady.” Matt grinned around at the others.

“She likes you, that’s for sure.” Hannah laughed, extending her hand. “You are quite the charmer. I’m Hannah, Ellen’s sister, by the way; we spoke on the phone.”

“And I am Sabine. Pleased to meet you, Matt.”

Matt looked from Hannah to Sabine. A tall, leggy redhead, sexily dressed and with the kind of look in her eyes that if he’d met her in a pub or a bar, he would have taken as a challenge, and a shorter, curvier blonde, with what looked like a slamming body under her sensible work clothes. And both of them off-limits—that is, if he were to stick to his second rule, which he was determined to do this time. Never mess with girls you have to see on a regular basis. Not flatmates, not work colleagues (he didn’t count Carla as one of those), and not friends’ girlfriends. Especially not friends’ girlfriends; he’d learned that from bitter experience—it was one of the reasons his PS3 was still in Manchester.

“You joining us for dinner, Matt?” Hannah asked. “There’s plenty to go round.”

“Really? If you’re sure, that would be great. I haven’t had a chance to get to the supermarket yet.”

“That’s okay, isn’t it, Ellie?”

Ellen pursed her lips. “Well, not if you stay, Hannah—I might have exaggerated a bit about the small army. I’ve only got four portions.”

“You could have a fish-finger sandwich with me,” Charlie offered.

“Brilliant. If you’re sure?” Matt looked at Ellen.

“Of course. I’ll put the grill on.”

“Tell you what, I’ll do the fish fingers in payment for the sarnies.” Matt grinned at her, taking the grill pan out of her hands and heading for the freezer.

Ellen watched him covertly as he rifled through the freezer drawers, and she tried to imagine him in tight breeches and a white shirt, open to the navel, with ruffled sleeves that fell over his knuckles. Turned out it wasn’t quite as difficult as she had thought.

Ellen sat in her chair at the kitchen table, watching the clock ticking toward 3:00
A.M
. on Saturday, sipping chamomile tea in the dark, wondering if she needed to do something practical in her new capacity as landlady, perhaps draw up a bathroom schedule or something that made her look as if she were capable and in charge of this house that was newly brimming with strangers, but she realized that such a schedule would be pointless. Matt had his own shower room, she had her own en suite, and Allegra preferred to attend to her toilette in the downstairs bathroom, which Nick had squeezed a shower into for when he came back from his runs and sometimes when he got in very late at night and didn’t want to disturb Ellen. As for the main bathroom, Charlie so seldom went near it voluntarily that Sabine might as well have called it her own. Still, Ellen felt that there was something she should be doing, rather than merely sitting back and letting these people simply be here. It was just that she couldn’t think of anything, and perhaps that was a blessing, because she had the distinct feeling that working for Allegra Howard was going to take up an awful lot of her time. The old lady was rather… demanding.

Cupping her mug of warm tea in her hands, Ellen relived her first day of working for Allegra Howard and what had followed. It hadn’t gone
quite
as she had expected. In fact, it hadn’t been like she had expected at all.

She had brought Allegra breakfast, right on schedule, and had found her reclining on her chaise longue already, neatly dressed in a pale lilac skirt and white blouse, open at the neck. Her fine hair had been expertly whipped into a chignon, her skin powdered, her lips coated with the kind of dry orange-red lipstick that looked like it had gone out of production in the 1950s. Ellen could not imagine how or when Allegra would have found the time to put together such a glamorous appearance, because she herself had been up since six thirty, getting Charlie off to school and choosing something to wear that seemed appropriate for Allegra Howard’s research assistant, deciding that supermarket jeans and a secondhand man’s shirt simply wouldn’t do. Finally, Ellen had settled on a faded khaki linen skirt that she had found languishing at the back of the wardrobe and a once-white T-shirt that was now mainly gray, but had at least been designed for a woman to wear. She’d felt self-conscious as she showered, aware of the other people in her house. She heard the sound of Sabine’s TV as the woman caught up with the markets around the world before she went in to work, and Charlie skulking about in his room, refusing to make an appearance until at least five minutes after he should have left, whereupon he would grab a piece of white toast from Ellen and munch it as he walked down the street. Most disconcerting, she had become aware, as she stood in the shower, letting the warm water run in rivulets over her shoulders and breasts, of the sound of Matt’s shower draining away above her, and had realized that he was standing naked over her head at that very second.

Ellen had then switched the shower to cold for a moment, after which she’d briskly rubbed herself dry, hoping to chafe off all her foolishness along with her dead skin cells. It was just being near an actual man, she’d reasoned. Something about having Matt in the house, combined with reading Allegra’s latest work, had combined to create these… very stupid, very
foolish feelings. They weren’t even feelings, they weren’t even
ideas
of feelings. It was just that Matt was a young, attractive man, and she was a single woman who hadn’t had any kind of meaningful male contact since long before Nick’s death.

Her body had responded to Matt’s proximity just as a flower opens its petals to the morning sun. These little flutters of desire that she felt when she looked at him, or thought about him, were physiological reactions, nothing more serious than sneezing when you get something up your nose. That was the reason behind all this foolishness. That, and that she had seen him with his top off.

In any case, soon, she’d told herself, she would build up an immunity to him, just as she had to her mother’s cat whenever she went home to visit and sneezed her head off for the first hour at least. The rush of blood to her cheeks whenever he looked at her, or the hazy half-remembered dreams would fade away like a crop of hives.

Ellen had considered her flushed face in the mirror, her cheeks still ruddy from the cold water, her eyes bright with the prospect of something to do. In the meantime, she might as well enjoy it. A harmless secret crush on a man a million miles out of her league wasn’t hurting anyone, and while a part of her felt a little as if she was being unfaithful to Nick for even thinking about another man, another very tiny, dark part of her that she was barely aware of was immensely relieved that she was still capable of feeling anything at all.

Allegra had examined her breakfast without comment and dismissed Ellen with a single wave of her hand.

“Return at ten and we will begin,” she had instructed Ellen.

Ellen had returned to the kitchen, where she sat silently as Matt rushed around, pouring coffee down his throat in a single gulp and flapping about where he had left his mobile phone until she noticed it on the windowsill. And just as
Sabine popped her head around the door to say goodbye and before Charlie came crashing through to grab his daily bit of toast, Matt had bent his head and kissed her on the cheek, calling her a star.

Then all at once the kitchen had been empty again, and Ellen had been left alone with the sound of her heart pounding. She couldn’t decide if it was the kiss on the cheek, the compliment, or the fact that in a few minutes she was due to start her new job. Or perhaps it was the shock of having her peaceful house filled with strangers and life again, talking, eating, laughing out loud. No,
shock
wasn’t the right word; the
surprise,
the surprise of finding that she rather liked it.

“So.” Allegra had repositioned herself on her chaise longue, her legs up, neatly crossed at the ankles. She motioned for Ellen to sit behind the burr-walnut desk that Simon had arranged to be brought in. “You’ve read the first few chapters of
The Sword Erect.
Your opinion?”

“Oh.” Ellen sat rather nervously on the amber-colored leather of the heavily padded desk chair, thinking of the departure of the last PA over—what was it?—artistic differences? “You want
my
opinion? On… on
your
book?”

“Well, I certainly don’t want it on the price of eggs.” Allegra scowled at her. “Of course I want your opinion on my book. Simon told me you have read all of my books—how does
The Sword Erect
compare?”

“Well…” Ellen hesitated, aware that she was anxiously knotting her fingers together like a schoolgirl caught out on a difficult math question. She felt her mouth dry up, her tongue sticking to the roof of her mouth. No one had asked her opinion on anything in years, but for Allegra Howard to ask Ellen what she thought of her book was like Shakespeare dropping by and asking if she liked his rhyming couplets.

“Good God, woman, it’s a simple enough question,” Allegra snapped impatiently.

“I’m sorry… it’s just, um, well—you know. I feel a bit… self-conscious, because after all what do I know, really?” Ellen chewed on her lip as the question hung awkwardly in the air.

“Let us hope you know something,” Allegra exclaimed. “Simon told me you had an excellent eye and an instinct for fine-tuning a story. He promised me that if I came to stay here in this…
house
that you would be useful to me. So—be useful. Tell me what you think of the book so far.”

Ellen took a deep breath, feeling a level of anxiety that she had experienced before only when telling Nick that she was pregnant with Charlie. It had been an accident, one of those things that happened despite the number of precautions used; Charlie had arrived at least two years ahead of schedule in Nick’s life plan—before they had the house, the business, and their lives together well established. Ellen had worried that Nick would not be happy, that he would blame her somehow, but after he’d had a few minutes to let the news sink in, he couldn’t have been more delighted. Her fears had been foolish fears then, and Ellen was sure they would be again. People were not nearly as frightening as she often believed them to be, even artistic geniuses like Allegra.

“It’s a real page-turner, that’s for sure,” Ellen blurted. “I couldn’t put it down and when I ran out of pages I was very disappointed. I’m desperate to know what happens to Eliza at the hands of that dreadful man who accosted her as she was trying to run away from the clutches of Captain Parker.…”

“But?” Allegra observed down the length of her aristocratic nose.

“But? There is no but, I think it’s brilliant in every respect.” Ellen smiled at Allegra, as if the intensity of her smile might somehow incite one in Allegra.

“Oh, Ellen, please don’t insult my intelligence. Of course there is a ‘but.’ I know it, Simon knows it, and you know it. It’s just that Simon and I can’t decide exactly what the ‘but’ is.
That buck, I’m afraid, has been passed to you. You must see the flaws with that keen eye of yours. What are they?”

Ellen swallowed and took a moment to frame her sentence. “Well—I know it’s only your first draft—and I probably usually read your second or even third draft for copyediting purposes—”