I know Jack to be a good guy despite this mistake and don’t doubt for a second you’ve been offering it to him on a plate, trying to break them up.
I hope you are happy now you’ve got your wish but you won’t be because terrible people never are.
Lucie Maguire
She’d learned Edie’s name, at least, and it sounded as though Louis got a nice memento.
The activity overall was an odd blend of frenzy of attention and rejection: Edie could see her friend numbers had dipped, yet a lot of people wanted to talk to her – another couple of notifications pinged as she browsed. She clicked through, stomach churning, to Charlotte’s Facebook page and saw, ‘This Link May Be Broken’. This link is very broken. She didn’t blame Charlotte for coming off entirely. In fact, that was one small mark of respect she could offer, and do the same.
Edie deactivated her own page. Why provide a toxic waste dump site.
‘You’re off early,’ said the taxi driver.
‘Yes,’ Edie said, blearily and blankly. ‘Lots of work on.’
‘The trains won’t start for a while yet.’
‘Oh. I best get a coffee then.’
‘The café might not be open for a bit either.’
‘Oh. Yeah.’
Edie spent the next few hours waiting for a connection to Leeds, hiding in the loos for fear of running into other wedding guests, then staring unseeing out of grimy windows, feeling a queasy mix of listless and terror-struck. This wasn’t, she accepted, one of life’s wrinkles. This was one of those jolt-crashes that nearly threw you out of the dodgem car. She felt so morally unclean, it was like she needed a whole-body blood transfusion.
She could call Hannah. But she couldn’t face it, not yet. Hannah would be raging at Jack but might not see Edie’s role in it as much better. Edie didn’t yet have enough distance on this to work out how even those closest to her would see it. And if her best friend withdrew her support, Edie would collapse completely.
After rewording it three or four times, she risked a text to Jack.
Hardly know what to say, but, what happened & why? Call me if you can. E.
No reply. She didn’t think there would be one. Ever, possibly. She needed to message Charlotte too, but that was going to take more time and thought.
Once she was through the door of her cupboard-sized flat, she flopped down on the sofa and burst into heavy, heavy sobbing. She wanted to scream those childhood complaints, that This Was So Unfair and It Wasn’t Her Fault.
This was Jack’s fault. He’d chosen to marry one woman and kiss another, and both were paying a horrendous price. Edie was furious with Jack, but most of all, she was mystified. If he’d wanted her, even so much as for an affair, why choose the first few hours of making an honest woman of Charlotte for his rankest act of dishonesty?
By lunchtime, she steeled herself to call their boss, Richard. Leaving her job, without one to go to, wasn’t only a professional disaster, it felt personal. She hated letting Richard down, and she writhed at the thought of him being repulsed by her behaviour. It was one thing to be despised by the Lucie Maguires of this world, another to disgust people whose good opinion you really valued.
Richard was an incredibly handsome black man and so impeccably dressed, Edie imagined he’d walk away from a plane crash adjusting a cufflink, with one extra waistcoat button undone. (‘He doesn’t sweat,’ Jack said. ‘Literally or figuratively. Ever.’) His wife was a high-flying prosecutor, and they had two eerily well-mannered kids. The secret nickname among their colleagues was ‘the Obamas’.
Everyone said Richard had a soft spot for Edie and she was his ‘little favourite’. Edie didn’t know if that was true. If it was, she could only think it was down to the fact that she dealt with someone as smart as Richard by being absolutely straightforward. A lot of others responded to his fearsomely cool intellect by bullshitting him, which was, to use a Richard phrase, the wrong play.
He answered his mobile immediately.
‘Edie.’
‘Richard, I’m sorry to bother you on a Sunday.’
‘OK. We can skip the explanation as to why.’
‘… Can we?’
‘Louis helpfully put me in the picture.’
Setting aside what this told Edie about Louis’s loyalty, she said: ‘I’m so, so sorry, Richard. I’m handing in my notice. I won’t be coming into work tomorrow so you don’t have to worry about a bad atmosphere or anything.’
‘You’re required by your contract to work four weeks’ notice.’
‘I know,’ Edie said. ‘Under the circumstances I thought you might … let me off it. I can take part of it as holiday owing?’
‘I’m not clear which half of the unhappy couple will be reporting in yet. Am I supposed to have two staff on gardening leave, and a third functioning from behind a vale of tears?’
‘Sorry,’ Edie said, in a small voice.
Richard sighed.
‘Why did I break the no couples rule? Mind you, even when your employees aren’t a couple, it’s no guarantee, eh.’
Edie said nothing.
‘Look, your extra-curriculars are none of my business, except when it affects my business.’
‘Richard, I’m sorry. If there was any way I could come back I would, but I can’t.’ Edie tried not to sob.
‘I don’t want decisions made about that, yet. It so happens I have a suggestion for a solution that might suit us both. A very short-notice job has come in, I was going to talk to you about it tomorrow. Have you heard of the actor, Elliot Owen?’
‘Er. Yes. From that swords and sandals show?’
The conversation had taken a surreal turn.
‘That’s him. A friend at a publishing house has on their knees begged me to spare a copywriter as a replacement to ghost-write his autobiog, after the last guy walked at the last minute. Or the first minute, the one where they met each other.’
‘OK …’ Edie grimaced.
‘He’s back home in Nottingham to do some TV thing. “One for the cred not the bread,” I’m told. There’s a three- month window starting now to get all his hilarious stories out of him, before he’s off to America. Then four to six weeks to type the thing up. You’re from Nottingham too, am I right? So, go. See the folks. It’s good money. Then afterwards, we’ll look at how the land lies in the office.’
‘I’ve never ghost-written a book before,’ Edie said. ‘I don’t know how.’
‘No, but how hard can it be? This will be one of those “separate kids from their pocket money” jobs where you pretend this vacuous pretty boy has amassed a lifetime of wisdom at twenty-five and everyone just looks at the pictures. You’re plenty literate enough to make him sound halfway articulate.’
Edie fell silent.
‘Seriously, it’s stenography. He talks, you marshal his self-aggrandising