“He’s all right,” Rory says, wrinkling his nose. “He’s just stressed. Really stressed. This is his last project before he retires, and he’s got forty thousand documents to move in the right order, plus the ones that are being scanned for digital storage.”
“We’re all busy, Rory.”
“He just wants to leave it shipshape. He’s old school—you know, everything’s for the good of the paper. I like him. He’s of a dying breed.”
She thinks of Melissa, she of the cold eyes and high heels, and cannot help but agree with him.
“He knows everything there is to know about this place. You should talk to him sometime.”
“Yes. Because he’s obviously taken such a shine to me.”
“I’m sure he would, if you asked him nicely.”
“Like I speak to you?”
“No. I said nicely.”
“Are you going to go for his job?”
“Me?” Rory lifts his glass to his lips. “Nah. I want to go traveling—South America. This was only meant to be a holiday job for me. Somehow I ended up staying eighteen months.”
“You’ve been here eighteen months?”
“You mean you hadn’t noticed me?” He makes a mock-hurt face, and she blushes again.
“I just . . . I thought I would have seen you before now.”
“Ah, you hacks only see what you want to see. We’re the invisible drones, there merely to fulfill your bidding.”
He’s smiling, and spoke without malice, but she knows there’s an unpleasant kernel of truth in what he said. “So I’m a selfish, uncaring hack, blind to the needs of the true workers and nasty to decent old men with a work ethic,” she muses.
“That’s about the size of it.” Then he looks at her properly, and his expression changes. “What are you going to do to redeem yourself?”
It’s astonishingly hard to meet his eye. She’s trying to work out how to answer when she hears her mobile phone. “Sorry,” she mutters, scrabbling in her bag. She clicks open the little envelope symbol.
Just wanted to say hi. Away hols tomorrow, will be in touch when I get back, take care Jx
She’s disappointed. “Say hi,” after the whispered intimacies of the previous evening? The uninhibited coming together? He wants to “say hi”?
She rereads the message. He never says much via the mobile phone, she knows that. He told her at the start it was too risky, in case his wife happened to pick it up before he could delete some incriminating message. And there’s something sweet in “take care,” isn’t there? He’s telling her he wants her to be okay. She wonders, even as she calms herself, at how far she stretches these messages, finding a whole hinterland in the sparse words he sends to her. She believes they’re so connected to each other that it’s fine, she understands what he really wants to say. But occasionally, like today, she doubts that there really is anything beyond the shorthand.
How to reply? She can hardly say “Have a good holiday” when she wants him to have a terrible time, his wife to get food poisoning, his children to whine incessantly, and the weather to fail spectacularly, confining them all to a grumpy indoors. She wants him to sit there missing her, missing her, missing her . . .
Take care yourself x
When she looks up, Rory’s eyes are fixed on the removals lorry outside, as if he’s pretending not to be interested in what’s going on beside him.
“Sorry,” she says, tucking her phone back into her bag. “Work thing.” Aware, even as she says it, why she’s not telling him the truth. He could be a friend, is already a friend: why would she not tell him about John?
“Why do you think nobody writes love letters like these anymore?” she says instead, pulling one from her bag. “I mean, yes, there are texts and e-mails and things, but nobody sends them in language like this, do they? Nobody spells it out anymore like our unknown lover did.”
The removal lorry has pulled away. The front of the newspaper building is blank and empty, its entrance a dark maw under the sodium lights, its remaining staff deep inside, making last-minute changes to the front page.
“Perhaps they do,” he says, and his face has lost that brief softness. “Or perhaps, if you’re a man, it’s impossible to know what you’re meant to say.”
The gym at Swiss Cottage is no longer near either of their homes, has equipment that is regularly out of order and a receptionist so bolshy that they wonder whether she’s been planted there by some opposition, but neither she nor Nicky can be bothered to go through the interminable process of ending their membership and finding somewhere new. It has become their weekly meeting place. After a few desultory laps up and down the small pool, they sit in the hot tub or the sauna for forty minutes to talk, having convinced themselves that these things are “good for the skin.”
Nicky arrives late: she’s preparing for a conference in South Africa and has been held up. Neither friend will pass comment on the other’s lateness: it’s accepted that this happens, that any inconvenience caused by one’s career is beyond reproach. Besides, Ellie has never quite understood what Nicky does.
“Will it be hot out there?” She adjusts her towel on the hot bench of the sauna as Nicky wipes her eyes.
“I think so. Not sure how much time I’ll get to enjoy it, though. New boss is a workaholic. I was hoping to take a week’s holiday afterward, but she says she can’t spare me.”
“What’s she like?”
“Oh, she’s all right, not knitting herself a pair of testicles or anything. But she really does put in the hours, and can’t see why the rest of us shouldn’t do the same.”
“I don’t know anyone who gets a proper lunch break now.”
“Apart from you hacks. I thought it was all boozy lunches with contacts.”
“Hah. Not with my boss on my tail.” She tells the story of her morning meeting, and Nicky’s eyes screw up in sympathy.
“You want to be careful,” she says. “She sounds like she’s got you in her sights. Is this feature coming okay? Will that get her off your back?”
“I don’t know if it’ll come to anything. And I feel weird about using some of this stuff.” She rubs her foot. “The letters are lovely. And really intense. If someone had written me a letter like that, I wouldn’t want it put into the public domain.”