A Home for Broken Hearts, page 14
‘Let’s not go back,’ Pete coaxed blearily in Matt’s ear. ‘Let’s go over the road to that Irish pub. They’ll serve any fucker …’
‘Pete, we’ve got an editorial meeting in under an hour and you’re totally fucked. You need to get back and sober up quick.’ Matt was resolute.
‘I’ll be fine,’ Pete said, lurching into Matt so that he in turn staggered into a passing woman, nearly knocking her off her feet and unleashing a tirade of curses from her in a language that he was very grateful not to understand.
‘No you will not, we’re going back.’ Matt put one arm around Pete’s back, supporting him under his hot and fetid armpit, and with gritted determination propelled him down the road and into their office building. With relief he saw the lift doors slide open and he bowled his charge into the cubicle before it could move.
It was only when he had Pete propped in a corner of the lift, pinned in place by Matt’s steadying hand on his chest, and the doors had closed that Matt realised they were not alone. The blonde subeditor stood to one side, staring resolutely at the panel of illuminated numbers. His gut sinking, Matt really wished that he had found the time to make that call.
‘Hello …’ Matt trailed off. He’d called her the subeditor so repeatedly that her actual name had escaped him.
‘You got home OK then?’ he enquired belatedly, talking to her back. ‘The other night?’ Her shoulders rose and fell in an almost imperceptible sigh before she turned to face him, her pretty features set and tense.
‘Yes thanks, luckily I found a taxi at the end of the road who didn’t turn out to be a mugger or a rapist.’ Unsurprisingly she was angry with him, but not as angry as she would be if she ever got sight of that column, though. He remembered Ellen in the kitchen, her quiet disapproval when he’d told her about his night with this woman, and he squirmed.
‘Everything OK then …?’ Matt cursed himself mentally; her name simply would not come to mind. She barked a mirthless laugh.
‘Lucy,’ she said flatly. ‘My name is Lucy and yes everything is fine, except that I’m the kind of idiot who wakes up with a fuck of a hangover after letting someone who is obviously an utter, utter twat take me home, get me into bed and then kick me out in the middle of the night without so much as even phoning me a taxi. And you don’t even remember my name, you arsehole!’ She rolled her eyes to the ceiling. ‘God I hate myself. I make myself sick. I did everything the magazine I work for is constantly telling its readers not to do – and for you of all fuckwits. I mean sure you’re pretty, but that’s about it. You’ve got the conversational skills of an mentally impaired Rottweiler and your bedroom skills are frankly lacking in finesse.’ She sighed as the lift stopped at her floor. ‘When will women finally learn what cunts men are?’
‘Hey hang on, that’s not fair – Lucy!’ Feeling compelled to go after her and to have his moment of decency albeit a couple of weeks late, Matt momentarily stepped away from Pete who immediately threatened to topple like a felled tree, forcing Matt to stay where he was and shore him up again. He called out of the lift just as the doors slid shut. ‘I didn’t turf you out, it was like I told you, my landlady … and anyway I was going to call you .. .’ The lift doors closed before Matt could finish his explanation, which he realised belatedly wouldn’t have done him any favours with Ellen.
Still, he felt unjustly slighted. How did Lucy know that he hadn’t been about to call her and ask her out again, how did she know that he hadn’t been telling the truth about his landlady being a dragon? Of course he would have called her a cab, only his mobile was dead and … and the landline had been cut off. Matt sighed as the lift hefted up one more floor, groaning as if it too could smell Pete’s rancid fragrance. Lucy was right, he’d behaved like a total shit. She had him bang to rights, and weirdly he liked her more in that moment than he had in any other in their brief acquaintance. In all fairness to her, what he should do was find that column and pull it from the shared folder and replace it with something else. But Pete and Dan had seen it and liked it already; he’d look like some kind of half-arsed cowardly idiot if he tried to come up with a reason to change it now.
‘You fucked her too? You bastard,’ Pete slurred as Matt dragged him on to the magazine floor. After a moment’s hesitation about what to do with his addled charge, Matt bundled him into the men’s toilet and pushed him into a cubicle.
‘Stay there, don’t move, I’m going to get you coffee.’
‘Bastard,’ Pete murmured, resting his forehead against the cubicle wall, his eyes closing and his jaw slackening simultaneously.
Matt paused briefly to look at himself in the mirror, running his fingers under the cold tap and then through his hair before patting his damp palms against his hot cheeks. Then he headed out to find coffee.
‘That for Pete?’ Suze asked him coolly as he filled first one and then a second plastic cup at the coffee machine. Matt considered lying but as Dan’s PA, Suze missed nothing, and it was fairly obvious that she did not like him, which was a bad thing. Suze seemed to wield a disproportionate amount of power in the office: she was the only woman whom none of the lads talked or joked or made smutty innuendoes about. Suze ran Dan like a military operation, making him look much more efficient and capable than he really was, and everybody knew that if you were on the wrong side of Suze it was only a matter of time before you were on the wrong side of Dan. Matt had been trying to warm her up to him since the first week he’d arrived, but no amount of flattery or charm could coax that perfect pout into a smile. Maybe by showing that he was taking care of Pete (if accompanying a known alcoholic to the pub could strictly be called taking care of) he would somehow impress her, show her that he was more than just another Jack the Lad.
‘Yep,’ Matt told her, grimly serious. ‘I’m trying to sober him up again. He does this a lot, doesn’t he? This is the worst I’ve seen him, but I bet it’s not the first time.’
‘Or the last,’ Suze said primly. ‘Dan puts up with it because Pete helped him a lot when he was a rookie, got him some breaks that got him where he is today. That’s why he’s practically the only person in the industry that’ll give Pete a job – but he won’t be able to turn a blind eye for much longer. The old fool’s getting out of hand.’
‘What should I do?’ Matt asked her miserably, hoping that appealing to her expertise would flatter and impress her.
‘Get that down him, then get him into his office to sleep it off. Whatever you do don’t let him come to the meeting. If he turns up drunk then Dan’ll have no choice but to sack him, which would put Dan in a foul mood – bad news for the rest of us. The trick is to keep Pete on an even enough keel to make it OK to keep him on.’
‘Right,’ Matt said, staring at the two coffees and wondering if the watery grey concoctions would be nearly enough to perform the required miracle. ‘But how do I stop him leaving his office if I’m at the meeting …?’
Suze looked him up and down with an ill-disguised sneer that made Matt worry about what exactly he’d done to deserve it, and shrugged.
‘You’ll have to stay with him,’ she instructed him. ‘Don’t worry, Dan loves your columns, especially the one about Carla, he laughed out loud when he read it. And the guys thought it was the funniest thing they’d heard in ages, you did a real hatchet job on her, didn’t you? You don’t need to be at the meeting to impress him.’
‘You do realise that it wasn’t really about Carla, don’t you?’ Matt winced, beginning to understand the chill in the air that had persisted ever since his first column had been printed.
Suze pursed her glossy lips and tipped her chin back. ‘Let me see – how did it go? “Redheads are supposed to be fiery in the bedroom (and every other room) and this make-up-girl minx was no exception,” ’ she quoted verbatim. ‘ “It was obvious from the first minute we met that it wouldn’t take much to get her to take her clothes off, but what took me pleasantly by surprise was how quickly she ripped off mine! The second we got into her apartment she had me pinned up against the wall, powerless to resist as she rubbed her gorgeous body up against me …” ’ Suze broke off, shaking her head in disgust. ‘I get it, I get that I work for a magazine that treats women like lumps of meat to be pawed at. But at least those girls in the pictures choose to take their clothes off and want a load of men they don’t know to wank off over them. It’s their choice. Carla didn’t choose that.’
‘She chose to come out with me, though,’ Matt defended himself. ‘And she chose to go to bed with me, even if it wasn’t exactly like that. It’s not as if I forced her. She chose to be with me.’
‘Yes – the poor bloody bitch,’ Suze said bitterly. ‘And it’s all my fault. I’ve been encouraging her to get out there again and meet men. I’ve been telling her that not all men are bastards like her ex and that she should take a chance.’ She shook her head. ‘Did you think for a second to find out anything about her apart from her cup size? For the last year she’s been trying to break free from some tosser of a photographer who cheated on her, stole from her and beat her up. A few weeks ago she finally had the guts to get shot of him for good. Then you turn up and act all sweet and charming, act like you’re interested in her, and she makes the mistake of taking you at face value and going too far too fast. That makes her naïve – but it doesn’t give you the right to treat her like a joke and it doesn’t give you the right to spread her all over the pages of a national magazine like one of those cheap sluts on the cover. She was just about getting her act back together and you’ve destroyed her all over again. But don’t worry about it, Matt – Pete and Dan and all the arseholes out there on the floor think it’s hilarious. So, good for you, Matt. Bravo. Enjoy babysitting Pete.’
Suze thundered out of the office, jogging Matt’s elbow as she went so some of the coffee in the plastic cups slurped over the side and burnt the back of his hand, causing him to drop both of them on the floor.
‘Fuck,’ Matt muttered as he pulled out reams of paper towels from the dispenser bolted to the wall next to the coffee machine and trod them into the slowly spreading lake of coffee. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’
What was it about the women round here that made them want to break his balls today? It must be something in the water, he never got this grief back in Manchester. But then again he’d never messed about in his own back yard at home either, except on that one very, very ill-advised occasion. It probably wasn’t that London women were more pissed off than northern ones, it was more that they knew where to find him.
And in his mind’s eye there was still that image he couldn’t get rid of, that made him feel all the more uncomfortable about what he had done since he arrived here.
Ellen in her red pyjamas, standing in her bare feet on those cold kitchen tiles.
Chapter Ten
‘Well my pretty little Puritan maid, God must love me very much to bring me such a treasure on the road,’ Eliza’s abductor purred as he watched her in the candlelight.
Eliza spat at him, twisting against the ropes that bound her hands above her head to a beam in a room at the coaching inn. He had brought her here, paying the leering landlord handsomely not to come to the room, no matter what screams he might hear.
‘And such a fiery maid too,’ he continued, his eyes lazily travelling her length. ‘What sport I will have with you, my love, in fact if you please me I may keep you with me permanently. I never expected you to be quite so beautiful.’
‘I will die first!’ Eliza hissed at him, fury mounting in her like a volcanic eruption. Was she an animal, a chattel that she could be passed so roughly from man to man with none honouring her as a human being? She pulled again at the ropes above her head and her attacker laughed, thinking she was struggling in vain. He had not glimpsed that with every rough rasp of the rope against the serrated edge of the beam another strand frayed and spun away. So far Eliza had struggled her way through about half of its thickness.
‘Yes you will,’ he told her, drawing a knife from its sheath and turning the blade so that it glinted in the candlelight. ‘Be most assured, my love, if you do not give me the pleasure I seek you will die, I have no time for a mewling wench who brings nothing but misery.’
In one swift cat-like move he brought the blade to her throat, and Eliza nearly choked on the stink of his fetid breath, his dark eyes burning a hair’s breadth from hers.
‘Hold still, vixen, ’twould be a shame to scar such a perfect hide.’
Eliza trembled more in fury than fear as the rogue traced the tip of his blade down the length of her neck and over the swell of her bosom, until it was inserted between the laces of her bodice.
‘Let’s see what treasure lies buried here, shall we?’ he whispered, his voice thick with desire. In one swift motion he swept the blade downwards, severing the ribbons that were all that protected Eliza’s much-abused modesty.
‘You animal,’ she hissed at him as he stood back to appraise his work, using the moment to drag and drag frantically on the rope once again.
‘All men are animals,’ he told her, quite unoffended. ‘We have but basic needs, good food, good wine and as much rutting as a man can bear.’
His two hands clutched the opened edges of her bodice and ripped them asunder, shredding her thin cotton mantle. Eliza sobbed, outraged that once again her person was being so violated. She would not let it happen again. She would not let another man debase her so.
‘Oh my sweet, my love,’ the villain growled, his eyes burning with lust as he tore the rest of her gown from her. ‘What perfection.’
Eliza screamed as his filthy hands enclosed her soft white flesh, squeezing and pawing her, his rotting teeth biting and nipping at the swell of her breasts.
‘No!’ she shouted, yanking once again on the thinning rope with strength that she barely knew she possessed. At last the rope broke. Both Eliza and her captor tumbled to the floor, he pinning her, her hands still bound at the wrist beneath his bulk.
‘You cunning little bitch,’ he said, with more admiration than anger. ‘The game is on now.’
Eliza writhed and fought as he continued to maul her, forcing his knee between her thighs. Horror swept through her like ice when she realised that one foul hand had released her only to unlace his breeches. She sobbed in despair, certain that now there would be no escape. And then she saw the knife he had used to cut her clothes from her lying on the floor, almost within her reach. It lay just a few feet away, yet with her hands tied it was useless to her.
‘Unbind me,’ Eliza said suddenly, her calm voice belying the rage and fear that possessed her.
Stopped in his tracks for a moment, the monster looked at her, puzzled.
‘I think not, my love. I do not fancy any scratches to take home to my wife and besides, I enjoy this more when the subject is, shall we say, confined.’
‘You have won, you have conquered me.’ Eliza forced herself to look into his bloodshot eyes. ‘I am not such a fool that I would fight a lost cause. I am a woman alone and must find protection where I may. Unbind me and I swear that I will not scratch you, and my hands free will bring you more pleasure than tied. I bid you, my master, unbind me and I will do whatever you bid me.’
The vile beast sat up astride her, taking a moment to admire the sight of her, her flesh gleaming in the candlelight.
‘Very well, I will. And on the morrow I will take you back home, where I will tell my wife she has a new maid and you will be at my beck and call whenever I require you. I shall become your protector, my love.’
‘I am grateful, sir,’ Eliza told him, though every word burnt through her tongue like acid. He bent over and loosed the rope that bound her wrists, making her retch as he lifted each bruised and chafed hand to his lips to kiss.
‘And now my sweet, we seal our bargain.’
Eliza forced herself to wait passively as the brute buried his face in her neck, his hands once more pawing and grabbing at her while freeing himself from his own clothing. She gritted her teeth, her eyes fixed on the knife, determined that no man would ever again enter where he was not welcome. With a supreme effort she reached for the knife and without allowing herself a moment to think plunged it into the back of his neck with all her might.
Ellen paused, her fingers hovering over the keyboard. Allegra had stopped talking. She raised her head to look at the older woman, who was reclining on her chaise longue, her eyes closed. They had decided that morning that as Allegra was so late with the book it would be quicker for her to dictate it to Ellen, who would type it directly into electronic format. Ellen waited and still her boss did not move a muscle.
‘Allegra?’ Ellen’s voice was low. Perhaps the old lady had drifted off, although Ellen could not believe that was possible after the breathless excitement of the passage that she had just typed up. More likely she was in the throes of some creative moment of enlightenment – having never spent much time around truly creative people before, Ellen wasn’t sure what the throes of creative enlightenment would look like. Simon had said that Allegra was suffering something of a writer’s block, or at least a problem with establishing the flow of the story, but Ellen couldn’t see what he meant. When she attempted to write her own stories, something she hadn’t been able to bring herself to do since Nick died, she’d sit in her chair at the kitchen table and chew the end of a biro until something came to her, usually some nonsense about a woman and her house and her husband and her son. She’d um and ah and huff and puff over a couple of paragraphs at the most.
Her attempts at authordom, as Nick referred to them, always made him chuckle. He used to come in, peer over her shoulder for a brief moment and then rub the back of her neck and say something along the lines of ‘still no inspiration strike then, I see?’ And perhaps he had been right, perhaps her laboured efforts and crossed-out scribbles had shown that she had never had a real feel for writing. Look at Allegra, she had just mentally downloaded at least a couple of thousand words in one go. Perhaps for real writers, real artists as Allegra surely was, the process was much more spiritual, like an emotional release. Afraid of disturbing her but uncertain of what to do now, Ellen whispered her name again.
