A Home for Broken Hearts, page 10
Ellen relaxed as she looked into Simon’s warm amber eyes. He had a knack of settling her down, washing calm over her with a few simple words. It was one of the reasons that she liked working for him so much. Nothing in life seemed to faze him and his confidence and optimism were somehow contagious, making you believe that the world was a much simpler place – at least while you were in his company.
It was a shame that Simon had yet to find anyone special in his life, Ellen mused. A tall, good-looking man like him, well dressed, all his hair still intact, financially secure, even in these difficult times, deserved the right person to love him. Perhaps Hannah was right, perhaps Simon didn’t want that. Perhaps he chose a series of brief encounters rather than anything more, seeking out embraces in the dark, passionate kisses stolen under moonlight, names rarely exchanged, just a few moments of pleasure and then …
‘Goodness me, Ellen Woods, what are you thinking?’ Simon asked, cocking an amused brow.
‘What, why?’ Ellen pulled away from him, pressing the back of her hand to her cheek.
Simon studied her face closely. ‘Just for a second there you looked like a smouldering, smoky-eyed siren planning your next seduction!’
‘Me? Nonsense, I was thinking about cooking for Allegra, you idiot!’ Ellen laughed nervously. ‘Honestly Simon, you and I spend too much time reading romantic fiction. We must remember that real life is much more mundane.’
She turned to pour boiling water into the teapot that she had found languishing at the back of the crockery cupboard, hoping the rising steam would be reason enough to explain away the colour in her cheeks. Whatever had come over her? First that incident this morning and now this? What was happening to her? Months, years, if you counted her all-but-redundant sex life with Nick, of an essentially sexless existence, and now a rebellious streak was catching her unawares at every turn, mentally undressing more or less every man in sight, which amounted to only two, thankfully.
It was the upheaval, Ellen told herself. All the changes were upsetting her equilibrium, together with the particularly high ravish count in The Sword Erect. Once she had settled herself down to working with Allegra, her brain would be properly occupied and thoroughly distracted from all the sorrow and anguish that had dwelt there for so long. It might even become a quiet and peaceful place once again, concerned only with the small things. The details that so many other people missed but Ellen loved to pore over.
‘So do you think Allegra would like special fried rice or noodles?’ Hannah broke Ellen’s train of thought.
‘Neither, she is having …’ Ellen picked up one of the recipes that Allegra had provided. ‘A supreme of grilled chicken with steamed broccoli and new potatoes – and so are we. Simon brought enough to feed a small army, so I thought I might as well cook it for Charlie and me too.’
‘Not me,’ Charlie said. ‘I’m having fish fingers.’
‘Yes but I thought that tonight you might like a change?’ Ellen suggested. ‘You know, we’re starting a new chapter in our lives and I thought you might feel like eating something new too, for a change.’
‘I thought you said what I eat isn’t a problem?’
‘I did and it’s not, it’s just …’
‘No, you know I don’t like chicken or broccoli or any of that stuff. I’ll have fish fingers. I can do it myself if you can’t be bothered.’
‘Of course I can be bothered, it’s just I thought you might …’
‘It’s not that big a deal is it, sis?’ Hannah asked her, slinging an arm around Charlie’s shoulder.
‘I just said it wasn’t, didn’t I?’ Ellen snapped. She took a breath and forcibly lightened her tone. ‘I’ll do you some fish fingers now. Sabine, would you like to join us for dinner? There’s plenty to go round.’
‘Ooh yes please,’ Hannah replied, before Sabine could answer. ‘I’ll get a couple of spare chairs from the shed.’
‘Quick, she’s coming in!’ Charlie hissed, as if he expected them all to hide.
Allegra opened the back door and peeled off her gloves, glancing around the room.
‘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 told her reproachfully.
‘Let me introduce you to my son, Charlie. And this is Sabine, she has the room above yours, and 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 released her. ‘Are you all right?’
Ellen watched in disbelief as Allegra beamed at Matt, her face lighting up with a smile that instantly peeled 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 Ellen told 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 him. ‘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, blonde, sexy and full of light, and couldn’t see the comparison.
Allegra patted his cheek and then, coquettish as a girl, glanced over her shoulder and waved at him as she left the room.
‘Top old lady.’ Matt grinned round at the others.
‘She liked you, that was 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.’
‘So now we are complete.’ Sabine smiled approvingly.
Matt looked from Hannah to Sabine. A tall leggy redhead, sexily dressed, with the kind of look in her eye 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 was 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 him. ‘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 OK 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 beamed 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 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.
Chapter Eight
Ellen sat in her chair at the kitchen table, watching the clock ticking towards three a.m on Saturday morning, sipping camomile tea by the light under the units. She was wondering if she needed to do something practical in her new capacity as landlady, perhaps draw up a bathroom rota to make her look as if she were capable and in charge of this house that was newly brimming with strangers, but she realised such a rota would be pointless. Matt had his own shower room, she had her own en suite, Allegra’s knees meant that she wouldn’t be venturing upstairs and preferred to attend to her toilette in the downstairs loo. Nick had squeezed a shower in this little room 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. And 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 there should be something that 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, and what had followed. It hadn’t gone quite as she had expected …
She had brought Allegra breakfast right on schedule, and had found her already reclining on her chaise longue, 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 and her lips coated with the kind of dry orangey-red lipstick that looked like it went out of production in the 1950s. Ellen could not imagine how long it would have taken Allegra to put together such a glamorous appearance. She had been up since six thirty herself, rousing Charlie for school and choosing something to wear that seemed appropriate for Allegra Howard’s research assistant, deciding that supermarket jeans and a second-hand man’s shirt simply wouldn’t do. Finally she 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, now mainly grey, but at least designed for a woman to wear.
She’d felt self-conscious as she’d showered, aware of the other people in the house, the sound of Sabine’s TV as she caught up with the markets around the world before she went into 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 disconcertingly, she was 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 the fact that he was standing naked over her head at that very second.
Ellen had switched the shower to cold and rubbed herself briskly dry, hoping to chafe off all her foolishness along with her dead skin cells. Something about having Matt in the house, together 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 glimmers of feelings. It was just that Matt was a young attractive man, and she was a lovely woman who hadn’t had any kind of meaningful male contact since long before Nick had died.
Her body had responded to his 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 she would soon build up an immunity to him, just as she did 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 Matt looked at her, and the hazy half-remembered dreams, would fade away like a crop of hives.
Ellen 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 these unfamiliar feelings. 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 were 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 her.
Ellen had returned to the kitchen where she sat silently as Matt rushed around, pouring coffee down his throat in a single gulp and panicking 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 was empty again, and Ellen was left alone with the sound of her heart pounding in her chest. 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 full of strangers and life, talking, eating, laughing out loud. No, shock wasn’t the right word. What she felt was 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 ankle. She motioned for Ellen to sit herself 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-coloured 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 maths question. She felt her tongue sticking to the roof of her suddenly dry 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 at her 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 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 the levels of anxiety that she had only experienced before when telling Nick she was pregnant with Charlie. It had been an accident, one of those things that happened despite the number of precautions used, and 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 groundless then, and she 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 …’
‘But?’ Allegra enquired down the length of her aristocratic nose.
‘But? There is no but, I think it’s brilliant in every respect.’ Ellen beamed at Allegra, as if the intensity of her own smile might 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 a first draft – and I usually only ever read your final draft for copy-editing purposes …’
‘You don’t. I only ever write one draft,’ Allegra told her.
‘Oh well, it’s just that it seems that this book is a little lacking in …’ Ellen lost her nerve.
‘Lacking in …? Spit it out, woman!’
‘Substance.’
Ellen spoke the word quietly, as if she were revealing an unpleasant secret.
‘Substance?’ Allegra’s tone was neutral, her expression implacable. Miserably Ellen realised that she was required to elaborate.
‘Well, what lifts your books above the others,’ she battled on, ‘is the historical context, the attention to detail, the way that you bring alive the sights and sounds of another age. The characters, the plot are brilliant but – correct me if I’m wrong but I think The Sword Erect is the first book you have set in the English Civil War. It’s such a rich and interesting time, yet you skirt around it almost as if it were incidental and …’ Ellen faltered. For a second her passion and interest had swept her along but then she remembered she was standing in her former dining room telling one of the greatest historical-romance writers how to do her job. How could she, Ellen Woods, who had never done anything more than read books and correct grammatical errors, even presume to tell Allegra where she was going wrong?
