Bitter Sweet, page 2
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I’d never had friends like Ophelia and Eddy, and they fast became my closest confidants. At the time, they both worked as assistants, too—Ophelia in the editorial department and Eddy in the publicity department with me. When Ophelia’s housemate moved out that first summer, I moved into the beautiful, sparsely furnished house in Stoke Newington that her parents bought for cash as an “investment” some years before. We quickly decided that Eddy should move in as there was another empty room, and so a few weeks later he joined us.
It was a tall, terraced house built of red brick on a quiet street lined with silver birch trees. The house was set across four floors and the attic had been converted into an extra bedroom with an ensuite, which Eddy took, because Ophelia rightly said that you should never share a bathroom with a boy if you want your friendship to last. Ophelia had the main bedroom, on the floor below, and below that was my room and an office, which her parents used for storage. There was even a spare bedroom, which they kept in case they needed to stay, but she said they never did. They only lived in Cambridge.
It was a great house. None of us would be able to afford to even rent a room in such a house as this on our tiny publishing salaries; we paid rent far below what Ophelia could have charged us. Given just how comparatively badly paid publishing was, I was confused by the fact that everyone who seemed to work with us had so much money.
“It’s because they can afford to live on such shit wages,” Ophelia explained to me as if she wasn’t talking to me from the other side of a ravine. “It’s a job you do for the love, not the money. If you want to make money in PR, you go into finance, politics or the charity sector. That’s what my dad always says.”
Ophelia Devereaux was stunning and rich and generous. She had received a world-class education at a very prestigious private school known for its “hippie” campus and relaxed teaching style, before studying English at Oxford and walking out with a first. She was effortlessly vibrant, extremely well read and ate even more rarely than I did. Everything about Ophelia seemed to me to be perfect; her dark hair that never had a split end, her enormous brown eyes and spotless golden skin. She was radiantly gorgeous and I loved her. Eddy Carnegie—Eddy being short for Edwin, which amused us endlessly—was from Edinburgh but puzzlingly spoke with an English accent. He was rich and beautiful, and beautifully gay. Taller even than Richard, Eddy wasn’t just “publishing hot” (a phenomenon that occurs in which even the most mousy or mediocre man becomes suddenly desirable and handsome when they work in publishing, due to the dire lack of men in the industry). Eddy was hot hot. He was slender with thick, dark-auburn hair and russet freckles scattered like stars on his skin. For a redhead, he was very tanned. Eddy had a 2:1 in comparative literature from Cambridge and wanted to be a writer, but was very insistent that this be kept secret. Back then, nothing was more embarrassing than working in publishing and having aspirations of a literary career.
Both Ophelia and Eddy had complicated relationships with their families, which they talked about a lot. Ophelia’s mother, Clemmie, would pop by regularly, filling up the fridge with organic fruit and vegetables and other expensive things from Whole Foods when she did. She always seemed perfectly nice to me, if a little absent. Like Ophelia she was beautiful, with the same big eyes and a tiny frame, but her hair was a shocking white. She wore a lot of silver jewelry, which she made herself in a studio built on their Cambridge property. Shortly after I moved in, I found her arranging lemons in a bowl on the kitchen island. The leaves were still attached, which I had never seen before. Her silver bangles chimed against each other as she hummed something I didn’t recognize. I watched her from the door before sneaking away back to my room. She was lovely, this mother. I felt very sad imagining how my own mother would have filled the fridge for us, taking me to the supermarket and then maybe for a glass of wine before I put her on the train home to Dad. How would she have greeted him—a baby in his arms, Laura in her house, in her space? It was easy for these fantasies to jumble with reality before smoothing themselves out as being strange parallels that could never coexist.
Ophelia’s mother’s childhood best friend’s older sister from her years growing up in Switzerland was the former sales director at Winden & Shane, recently retired at fifty.
Eddy was much more coherent when it came to explaining his family situation. He was so rehearsed and clear in his arguments that he must have been relaying them for years to various crowds: the boarding-school boys, then the university lot, now us and really anyone who would listen after three large reds on a Thursday night. His father believed that men should be “proper men.” His mother had left his father shortly after the financial crash and now lived in Malawi with a younger man. Eddy’s three older brothers—two of whom worked in the City making disgraceful amounts of money and one who worked as a scuba-diving instructor in Thailand—were much less of a disappointment than Eddy, whom they nicknamed Nancy from a young age.
“The most frustrating part of it is that Barnaby is as gay as I am, and he has always been the meanest of all of them.” Eddy would lean forward and confide this, teeth stained with red wine. “He can parade around with Pandora or Penelope or whatever girl he is currently fucking, but he is one hundred percent getting dick on the side. Everyone at school knew it and at Christmas I borrowed his laptop—cock pop-ups everywhere! But Dad just acts oblivious and off they all go to the shoot, parading their masculinity like a bunch of peacocks.”
Eddy’s godfather was the former literary editor at the Telegraph.
The feeling of intimacy I had with Ophelia and Eddy was completely new to me. It was intoxicating in the best possible way. They were tactile and open about everything. They would take baths with the door open, asking for a top-up of wine or for you to pop in and put a towel on the radiator without batting an eyelid. Ophelia would often crawl into my bed at night when she was drunk or upset or both, curling an arm around me and sighing something sweet into my ear about friendship and forever. Eddy would bounce onto me like a lovely Tigger while I sat on the sofa, asking me to translate any potential subtext to a message from whichever boy he was chasing that week.
I was completely and utterly in love with both of them, and understood really nothing of either of them. I had no idea what they saw in me, but they did, for whatever reason, seem to love me back.
Chapter
Three
At work we all did our very best, getting in early and working late. Work never ceased to give us hours of things to talk about, mostly disbelief or disgust at how badly our bosses were treating us or how unfairly other people were being promoted.
Ophelia and Eddy had been at Winden & Shane longer than me and were probably owed a promotion. They had this way of talking, like the world was going to come to them eventually, so why shouldn’t it just hurry up and do it now? They were frustrated with my more passive approach to my career and abilities, which almost certainly stemmed from having absolutely no idea what I was doing. I was just constantly surprised, each and every single day, that I had this job, that I’d not broken this wonderful dream in half. I loved the work. I loved every day of it. I was hungry to learn and hungrier to please and for the most part I was fairly efficient. There was something about my naivety that Cecile liked in those early days.
Cecile was, like all our bosses, the subject of much interest and speculation. She was in her mid-forties, I’d guess, and she was very petite with a head of spectacular, dark ringlet curls that bounced when she walked. I didn’t know much about her life and how she had grown up, other than that part of it had been in France. A little trace of an accent could be heard in her voice, and she sometimes swore under her breath in French. She dressed beautifully—“Just like a Parisian,” everyone would say. I had no idea what that referred to, having never been to Paris.
Cecile was famous for her speed. She spoke quickly, worked fast and walked at a remarkable pace for someone of her stature. Even though I towered over her at five feet and seven inches, it was hard to keep up with her and I wore flat shoes when we were out of the office for this reason. She was always highly caffeinated. A voracious coffee drinker, Cecile was very particular about her coffee and where it should and shouldn’t be bought from. Cecile had been at Winden & Shane for over fifteen years and was the director of publicity. She was very well known across the industry for being the toughest, and the best. Journalists feared her. There were stories of authors throwing hardback copies of their own books at her and her ducking without even blinking, and of magazine editors being reduced to tears on the phone for posting an early—or worse, bad—review.
Our favorite rumor about Cecile was that she had a huge portrait of herself in her own hallway, but I’d never heard that from anyone who had actually seen it. She didn’t seem to be the sort, but then if there was a sort, I’d have been the last person to know. I didn’t notice any vanity in her other than that she looked amazing each day.
“I bet she’s naked in it, with just a red silk sheet covering her modesty,” Eddy had said on one of our first trips to the pub as a trio. He and Ophelia were thrilled to be relaying all the office legends to my virgin ears. We were smoking with our glasses of wine balanced precariously on the brass windowsill, the air heavy with exhaust and pollen. I was listening to them with rapt attention, giving the exact right amount of shock and awe at each revelation.
“No, I think it’s classier than that,” Ophelia replied. “Like, in her Barbour, and a flat cap, holding a shotgun with a brace of pheasant. Or in a toga with a shield! Hah. Yes, I bet that’s it. She’s such a tiny Boudicca.”
“Well, she certainly married a king,” Eddy said with glee. From the way Ophelia laughed too it must have been a joke that related to an education that included classics. I went along with them, hoping they wouldn’t notice I was totally lost. “Charlie, you must have heard about this—it was the biggest scandal in the industry for years. You’ve heard of Matthew Ridgebrook, as in Ridgebrook & Co.? He’s, like, the biggest literary agent—or he was until about ten years ago because he is ancient and although he apparently refuses to retire, he does less these days. Anyway, he was married to Elouise Linden, who was one of the directors over at Bloomsbury back then. You know Cecile used to be at Bloomsbury before she joined Winden & Shane? Well, she left there around the same time that Matthew left Elouise and now they are married and live in a Regency mansion in Islington and have twin boys.”
“She had an affair with her boss’s husband?” This shocked me, but I knew I should add a good mix of delight in with it, so I did.
“That’s what everyone says. This industry is absolutely rife with scandal. I can’t get enough of it.”
None of us could. Like a captor we had fallen in love with, it didn’t seem to matter how many times publishing kicked us, we would excuse it and then come back for more.
* * *
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In my life, there are things that have happened to me, and things that I have done, that have proven to be moments with a clear before and an after. One of those moments, perhaps in some ways the biggest, was the day that I met Richard Aveling for the first time.
A first meeting is important, and this was the first time that Richard met me. But I’d first come across Richard when I’d just turned twelve. Our English teacher had been the one to introduce him; one of Richard’s poems had been on the English syllabus. It explored the idea of infinite time through the metaphor of a tree. Every child in the country read it. Richard was a great poet—he had published three collections of poetry—but he was much better known for his novels. It wouldn’t be for another year that I would pick up one of those. When I did, it was his first, The Road Goes Only Back. I loved him immediately. This handsome and dark-eyed man with round, wire-frame spectacles gazing back at me from the back of his book. Floppy, dead-straight black hair falling across his face. I studied that photo intensely, feeling some stirring of something new. It was not like the crushes I had on the boys at school. He was an adult, he was un-silly. The relationships in the book were full of sadness and rejection and longing and sex and things I was only just starting to understand, and I felt like he was holding out a hand to me from the other side of adolescence, saying, “I will not patronize you, because I understand how grown-up you really are.” I became obsessed with this feeling, and with him. The inescapable sadness that arrived with my teenage years started to cloud my vision and I could indulge it deliciously when I focused on Richard’s books.
These were the days before the next thing to do would be to go to the internet to find out more about someone. The first of his books that I read belonged to my mum, but she only had the one at the time, because she said you should always pass a good book on. So I went to the library, as I did every Saturday, and I borrowed all of the fiction he had written, which was, then, two other books. The librarian looked at me quizzically, no doubt because of my age, but I read them all in a few weeks, then borrowed them again and again until I eventually owned copies of them myself. His poetry collections I understood less, but nonetheless loved.
We were so happy then, the three of us in our little suburban family bubble. We lived in a small 1930s ex-council house on a quiet cul-de-sac, overlooked by an uneven row of firs. Glass doors at the back opened onto a modest garden with a sunken pond. There was a rope swing that hung from a willow tree. It was just us for the most part, and various cats. We were all completely unremarkable and our life was simple. We found color in all of it. I was quiet and bookish, loving choir and swimming, and walking the South Downs at weekends hoping for a glimpse of a horse or a dog. With the encouragement of my mum, I entered poetry and creative-writing competitions at the library, the local newspaper and even Blue Peter, and I sometimes won, and often came runner-up. Nothing made me happier than a new box of colored pencils. But, even then, when I was small and far from adolescence, I’d started to think that something wasn’t right. I would be easily overcome with feeling, at a harsh word spoken by a classmate, the death of a pet, a glimpse at the evening news from behind the sofa when I should have been in bed. So overcome that I would be rendered inconsolable and dumb with the feeling of it all, because there was just so much of it. I remember so clearly my mum wrapping her arms tightly around me, my own pinned at my chest, as she rocked me on her lap, whispering that everything was OK while I shook and wailed and screamed. The force of her arms, of her love, was all that could calm me. More than once she was called to school to collect me when I became hysterical and physically sick with it. Sometimes it came differently—on the morning of a day when I was due to sing a solo at assembly or present a project, or that there was a class party that meant we could wear our own clothes and not school uniform, I’d wake up white with fear, knocked into utter submission and unable to speak. I’d sit on the floor of the bathroom in my pajamas, unmoving, eyes fixed on the wall. Mum would try to coax me into the world again, reassuring me that it was OK, and Dad would look on, not knowing what to say, pacing with his hands behind his head. On those days she would call us both in sick and we’d spend the day on the sofa, or in the garden, or baking—there had to be an activity to distract me and it was often cooking. She’d then put a hat on me to disguise me in case we were seen out on a sick day, and then she would take me to the beach and get me to put my bare feet in the sea, even in winter, I suppose to shock the life back into me and bring me back to my body. She always knew how to break my sadness, how to cure me in a few hours. She was a magician in that sense, and because of it we had no need for doctors or therapists.
When I was older and we started sharing more of her interests, she would cut out any reviews or interviews that she thought I would like from the big newspapers she read on Sundays across the kitchen table from my dad. It was from these articles that I learned what books Richard liked and then read those, even Henry James and Philip Roth; all men of course. On summer weeknights sometimes we’d drive to the beach and I’d happily wander off to look in the rockpools gifted by the low tide as Mum and Dad sat on the stony shore, arms around each other, unpacking their days. Because they both worked at a school, we had long summers stretched out with trips to Norfolk or the Devon countryside, and once we even went to Spain. If it sounds idyllic it’s because it was, those precious and innocent years of my life that I try to keep close.
By my mid-teens, my moods shifted and although I could still easily short-circuit at the right stressor, my response was less dramatic and less external. What I found instead was that my mind wandered to the darkest of places when I least expected it, to thoughts of oblivion and emotional apocalypse. These intrusive thoughts bothered me but I could contain them; I could function knowing that at the end of each day there was safety at home, and that every five days I didn’t have to worry about school and friendships and lessons and teachers and boys and all of the awfulness that came with them. That I had two blissful days at home, with Mum and Dad, at the library, at the supermarket, at the beach or on the Downs, watching films with microwave popcorn, Mum and me in matching slipper socks.
* * *
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I was sixteen when my mum died.
It happened the week before I’d received my GCSE results. At the funeral, I’d read one of Richard’s poems. Two years later, after some of the worst years of my life, I’d written about Richard in an essay for my English A-level, comparing him to Richard Ford. In my loneliness a few years after that, in the small room I had taken near my university campus one hundred and fifty miles from the wooden urn holding my mother on a bookshelf in our living room, I’d read the first of his books again, remembering how Mum and I had talked about it and how she’d enthused over it. How she had said, “He’s terribly handsome,” looking at the photo of him on the back cover.
