Bitter Sweet, page 1
Ballantine Books
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Copyright © 2025 by Harriet Adam-Smith
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Published in the United Kingdom by Orion Books, London.
Hardback ISBN 9780593874202
Ebook ISBN 9780593874219
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Cover design: Elena Giavaldi
Cover art: Katy Holley
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Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Now
Acknowledgments
About the Author
_152035895_
For my daughter, Astrid Snow
What happens in the heart simply happens.
—Ted Hughes
Prologue
It took years for me to stop looking for Richard.
With just a few clicks, if I wanted to, I could find some update on him. There’d be a new interview to read or an article that he had written himself, sometimes a television appearance to watch back. That kind of access to someone who is no longer a part of your life is just plain unhealthy.
Well-meaning friends would message me when he won an award, or had a big publication, saying things like I hope you are ok, and, Thinking of you. When they did, even years later and after I had started to turn away rather than look into his light, it would prompt me to go online and search his name to see what they were referring to.
There were times that he would catch me off guard—a picture of his face in a newspaper I was reading, there looking back at me as I turned the page, or, worse, his voice on the radio, suddenly like he was in the room with me again. His mouth next to my ear.
He could not ever be contained, because he was famous. He permeated the bounds of our own relationship and our direct connections.
It must be a small club to be a part of, to have loved and then lost someone whom the whole world has a piece of. Maybe that’s why no one ever warns you.
Chapter
One
2010
Richard Aveling stood to the left of me. I had been so distracted by thoughts of the man that I hadn’t even noticed him as I’d fumbled a wet thumb over the wheel of my lighter trying to get a spark to light my cigarette. I had been watching this day move closer in my calendar for months, knowing it would be the day that I would finally get to meet him. He was as tall as people said, and broader. He was older than the photos printed on the inside of the covers of his books by perhaps ten or even fifteen years.
“Do you need a light?”
“Yes, please,” I said, my heart hammering against my ribs. I pushed my hood back, realizing in horror that I was standing in the alleyway at the back of the Winden & Shane office in my old blue waterproof jacket and a fake leather skirt, smoking a roll-up in front of a man who had lived inside my head for over ten years. I’d planned my outfit for today so carefully, but my heels were upstairs waiting for me under my desk. This wasn’t how I had imagined it. Not at all. “I don’t usually smoke this early in the morning.”
He lit my cigarette, positioning his own between his lips as he did. One hand shielded the flame from the gray drizzle that was falling quietly around us. The attraction was immediate.
“Neither do I. But I have an insufferably boring meeting this morning so I thought I would allow myself one.” His voice was deep, and the soft northern corners of his accent were more angular than when he spoke on the radio or television. He looked me straight in the eye, drawing heavily on his own cigarette. There was a spot of rain on the white paper and the end burned gold around it.
The meeting he was referring to had been booked in since before Christmas. I had felt like it might never really happen. As I’d shaken my umbrella off outside the office building that morning, I’d thought, How did I get here? I had felt elated, excited for everything. This was my adult life. I felt proud of myself. The shelves of books that lined the walls in Reception only confirmed to me that I had moved seamlessly into the majestic, distinguished literary world of publishing. Now, though, I didn’t know what to say.
“Richard Aveling.” He presented the hand he wasn’t smoking with.
“I know who you are. I’m Charlie. I’m Cecile’s assistant.” I surprised myself by saying it in a tone that implied that it was just a silly job and I knew it, this job that I was so proud to have, that I defined myself by. I took his giant hand, shook it, and leaned back against the wall so that we were standing opposite each other. The concrete was cold and wet through my thin coat. I regretted this move immediately but committed to it. I tried to look confident.
“What happened to the last one—Kate, was it?”
“Katy. She got a job at Simon and Schuster. I joined last spring. I’m going to be helping Cecile with the PR for the new book.”
“Are you now?” He raised a thick, dark eyebrow and took another long drag on his cigarette, which he held like a dart, eyes never leaving mine. “And what is it exactly that are you going to be doing?”
I stuttered. This was not something I should have said to him. He was celebrated as one of the best British authors of the last century, famous far beyond the confines of publishing. He was certainly the biggest and most important author that we published. He was guarded like a secret by everyone who worked in his team. This was unthinkable.
“I just mean helping her with admin, booking trains, restaurants, mailing books, that sort of thing. I won’t be doing anything important, I’m just the publicity assistant. You probably won’t even see me again.” I tried to smoke my cigarette but a raindrop had put it out. He said nothing. Then—
“Well, I hope that’s not the case.” A half-smile equally reassured me and made me feel uneasy. “It’s nice to have someone new here. It becomes quite tedious working with the same old lot of them every time. They mean well but they do fuss. It wears me out.” He flicked his cigarette to the ground, ignoring the ashtray. “Would you be so kind as to let me back in this way? I left my umbrella in Reception.” A twitch at the side of his mouth. I wasn’t fussing, it said.
I punched the code into the keypad and the door clicked open. He moved past me and I could smell the smoke on him, and something else that I half recognized: something expensive. He nodded and headed in, familiar with where he was going.
* * *
—
A little while later, I was sent to Reception to collect Richard and his agent, an important and serious man called John Cormorant, and take them up to the boardroom on the top floor. I had recovered myself and without the blue raincoat, and with some lipstick and my best heels—a pair of black suede boots that had cost close to a week’s pay—I knew that I looked good. I was thin and young and with that, I was powerful.
When I introduced myself formally, Richard made no acknowledgment of our earlier meeting, which I liked very much.
Chapter
Two
I’d interviewed at Winden & Shane in the spring of 2009, the year before I met Richard. I was twenty-three, and it was my second job out of university. I had dreamed of working in publishing since I was a teenager and my mum had explained to me that publishers existed. I hadn’t really thought about it at all before then, p
The interviewer had asked me what I liked to read. I’d said that I loved Richard Aveling’s writing, but I’d been careful not to say how much in case I’d seemed too intense, or like a fangirl. When I’d gone back for a second interview with Cecile, who was to be my boss, I told her, too, thinking this would be a positive. Her follow-up question caught me off guard.
“If you are successful, you would be working with Richard and his team directly. I’m sure you have seen the news that he has a new book coming next year. With such a long gap since the last one this is naturally going to be our focus for 2010. Can you tell me about a time when you’ve managed a very high-pressure situation at work?”
I faltered badly and left convinced I would never hear from Winden & Shane again. In all honesty, I had no idea how I would hold it together in front of this man whom I privately, quietly idolized with religious fervor. But despite my fears, I got a call later that week to say that I had got the job. At the time I was working as an assistant at a women’s magazine, making a lot of coffee and processing a lot of expense receipts, very occasionally writing filler copy. When I told them I had another job they said I didn’t even have to work my notice and that I could just finish up the week, which told me everything about how replaceable I was. Maybe it was because London was overrun with graduates desperate for badly paid, entry-level jobs. Maybe my lack of enthusiasm had showed.
So, it happened. The following week, I started at my new role as a publicity assistant at Winden & Shane. On my first day I sat in that big, arterial reception, which felt like some magnificent library, thinking about how this was the very real beginning of something. This is where I belong, I thought to myself. I am seen, finally, and understood. My hair, previously streaked with pink and green, and, for a short time, blue, was now a respectable brown. I had a new dress on, a new handbag, new shoes and even new tights, with no holes in the toes. I felt like the person I always dreamed of becoming. A smart, young, professional woman living independently in London.
Cecile came to get me herself and we sat down in the large basement that served as a breakroom for a cup of tea, to talk about my first duties and what the week would entail. I wrote notes in my best cursive in a brand-new blue notebook, specially bought from Paperchase like it was the first day of term. I smiled and nodded, hoping she wouldn’t see how nervous I felt on the inside. I thanked her again for the opportunity. She seemed distracted, as she always did, too busy for small talk. The longer I worked there, the more I realized this was often the way with the older staff. They wanted to get out on time at the end of the day and to do that, when the workload was so massive, all pleasantries and social chatter needed to be cut. They were terrifying, and I was honored to be terrified by them.
Winden & Shane was the smallest of the big publishers, and the biggest of the small publishers. It was always talking of its “independent spirit,” which really just seemed like an excuse for the office being a mess and the email server always breaking. There was a constant feeling of disorganization, and everything was always urgent, or late.
The office itself, which was near King’s Cross, was totally chaotic and looked nothing like the modern glass-and-chrome building of my imagination. Instead, it consisted of two enormous and very grand Georgian town houses which had been knocked through to create one interior. There was a wide staircase, which branched off to the left and right at each of the four floors, and a lot of dark corridors peppered with small, dimly lit meeting rooms that were impossible to identify. Every door in the whole building seemed to be made of oak and took the full weight of a body to open or close.
Each department had an open plan floor with a kitchenette and individual desks, which enjoyed ample light from the tall, slim windows at the front of the building. Desks were piled high with newspapers, books and manuscripts, and there were cardboard boxes on the floor around every corner waiting to trip someone up. In winter, a draft ran through the whole place, so we’d sit in coats and hats at our old Dell computers watching the little egg-timers on the screen turn until we gave up and held down the power button with a gloved finger, mourning the loss of an hour’s work.
Our managing director was the most feared of all. She was an ice-cold woman called Allegra Evans-Milberg. Allegra was American English, extremely thin, and had white-blonde hair cut into a sharp bob that was professionally blow-dried every morning at her home, or so it was rumored. She wore thick, red glasses on a beaded chain that jangled when she walked, and huge decorative earrings that hung below her hair. Allegra paid the junior staff almost no regard. If you erred and sat too close to her at any of the meetings she chaired, she would look at you with such quiet intensity that you would immediately give up your seat and scuttle to the back of the room and sit on the floor, or, if you were lucky, a filing cabinet. Allegra had an elderly terrier called Woolf (after Virginia) with bad breath and worsening incontinence, and she needed to be taken outside regularly. Care of Woolf during the day—which included cleaning up accidents—fell to the assistants, or whoever was on work experience that week. It was your only chance to be noticed and have your existence acknowledged by Allegra, though, so it was worth it.
* * *
—
Quickly, and subtly, I’d started to feel some sort of difference from my peers. For as long as I could remember, I had felt like an outsider, sometimes for reasons I could give words to, but more often not. I’d been so sure that now, as an adult, in the gorgeous world of glittering books and brilliant minds that could be as easily lost in made-up worlds as mine, I would finally find a place where I could fit in. But it had not been anything like I had imagined. Everything about publishing was different from what I had expected, but mostly the people.
Before I’d started working at Winden & Shane, I had never thought anything much about how I had grown up. I hadn’t thought that we were exactly poor, but we lived modestly. I had never even known the kind of wealth enjoyed by my colleagues existed for what were apparently regular people. The way I spoke started to change without my meaning it to. I developed new mannerisms. I was creating a version of myself that would better fit in, but I was racked with anxiety, eternally self-conscious and worried I would break the veneer I was forging for myself. There was only so much I could pretend. Almost all of the other juniors seemed to have a flat or house in London that they or their parents owned. They were Oxford or Cambridge or Durham graduates, and had a relative who was an author or worked at the Guardian or The Times. Everyone seemed to me to be connected, existing in a web that I had no knowledge or understanding of. I had a degree from Sussex University and, when I first joined, lived in a damp single room in a shared flat near the notoriously grim Hornsey Lane bridge in Archway. I flushed when one of the aloof, beautiful young publicists mentioned she had been a student at the private school where my dad taught PE. I said nothing, and later felt bad about that.
Despite this, which was a part of how I felt about my life at work but not all of it, I found kindred spirits and best friends among the junior staff. There was a group of us who would eat supermarket sandwiches on the canal at lunchtime when it was warm enough, but it was out of hours that we came into our own. We’d drink cheap wine after work in the many pubs of King’s Cross, somehow always still waking early and fresh enough for work. I smoked roll-ups and at home ate almost exclusively plain pasta. I wore ballet pumps or lace-up, pointed boots, short skirts and big necklaces over tunic tops. Sometimes I slept with men I met in pubs or at parties on weekends, fell in love with them immediately, and scared them away just as quickly. Sometimes I took ecstasy and kissed my friends in the corners of dark rooms in strange houses with no idea of how I’d get home. We’d indulge our comedowns the next day with Bon Iver and Bright Eyes, dreaming of the kind of love those men felt, and wondering if we would ever find anything so iridescent and beautiful. Nothing was permanent.
