One Summer Night At the Ritz (6 page)

‘Why do you care so much where I go?’

‘Because I’ve given up my evening for this and I don’t want to be stuck inside looking at mediocre art.’

‘This is the Summer Exhibition,’ she said. ‘And I never asked you to come with me.’

‘Yeah I know,’ he shrugged. ‘But it looked nice. You leaving the hotel, having a free evening exploring London.’

‘You watched me leave the hotel?’ She’d assumed he wouldn’t give her a moment’s thought and the idea of him doing so gave her a flutter of confidence.

‘Yeah, why?’

‘Nothing,’ Jane said, a little smile on her lips as she walked as casually as she could to the next room that was hung floor to ceiling with lots of small pictures. ‘Except you didn’t have a free evening, you had a dinner with someone called Heidi,’ she said, starting to look at the first tiny painting in detail.

‘Yeah but that’s sorted. Are you seriously going to look at every single one of these?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘But it’s such a nice evening outside. Come on, there’s a city to walk.’

It did sound appealing, like her flaneur dream, and, if she was honest, the amount of pictures to look at in this room alone was almost overwhelming. As if he could sense her wavering he started to walk really close behind her and said things loudly like, ‘That’s rubbish. That’s OK. At last, a good one. Who picks these? That’s actually not that bad. No that one’s awful,’ so that people started turning and tutting and Jane had to bash him on the chest to stop but he carried on even louder, half-laughing, which made her laugh and, in the end, had to leave out of sheer embarrassment.

Out on the pavement Will looked like he’d won another battle between them, grinning cockily like she’d now follow him anywhere. So Jane paused, got her A to Z out, which made him laugh, and said, ‘I’m going shopping in Selfridges.’

Chapter Ten

Selfridges was in the midst of a promotional event. The make-up section had a DJ blasting hip-hop tunes out at full volume and girls dressed in wigs every colour of the rainbow were dancing between customers. Will groaned.

‘Really?’ he asked.

Jane had to hold in a smile. In-house dancing and deafening beats weren’t necessarily her thing, but just to see the look on Will’s face was enough to make her push through the crowds and pretend to browse the cosmetics.

The music made the floor shake.

Strangely it reminded her of nights lying on the top of Enid’s boat while classical musical filtered into the night sky, threading its way around her and through Enid’s cigarette smoke to wend its way up to the stars. She would lie and listen as Enid would talk. Sometimes she’d read poems, which if she told someone about it would sound naff, but in reality it was so beautiful and calming that she wouldn’t want to leave even though she knew that she should. That she should go back to her own boat. Because the two of them, Jane and her mother, were a burden. There was no way to get around that fact. And the problem with being a burden was that however polite people were there was always the fear that one had outstayed one’s welcome.

As she picked up a lipstick from the counter, her eyes widened at the price. It reminded her of the money she’d found in the account. It had crossed her mind when she discovered it that it was an inheritance of some sort left to her by her father. But that had immediately seemed too fanciful. Like a wish rather than reality that tied in with her naive hope that he had come to find her, had thought about her enough to leave her money.

‘Don’t you know her?’ she heard Will shout over her shoulder.

‘Who?’ Jane asked confused.

‘Emily Hunter-Brown, isn’t this her stuff?’

Jane looked down at the red lipstick she was holding and saw EHB Cosmetics embossed in gold on the side of the packaging. ‘Oh yeah, I wasn’t really concentrating.’ She put it down and started to walk away. Then she paused amid the crowd. ‘How do you know that I know her?’ she said, turning back to Will who was being shoved this way and that by all the people.

‘Erm.’ He frowned. Then opened his mouth to speak, but Jane narrowed her eyes at him and spoke instead.

‘You’ve spied on me?’ she said loudly over the music.

‘No.’oWill shook his head.

Jane pushed her way through all the people and finally popped out into the relative quiet of the designer handbag section.

‘You have,’ she said. ‘You’ve looked me up. What else do you know?’

Will shrugged, realising he’d been caught out and it was pointless to deny it. ‘Not a lot actually. There’s not much about you,’ he said with a laugh.

But Jane wasn’t finding it funny. ‘But you know something.’ She swallowed. ‘What do you know?’

‘Really nothing,’ he said. ‘There was just a bit about your family and some flower competition.’

She bit the inside of her cheek.

Will raised his brows and shrugged again.

‘I don’t want to walk around with you any more,’ she said. ‘I’m going to go. It was nice to meet you,’ she added, then turned around and walked away though all the lovely handbags till she stepped out onto Oxford Street.

She walked as fast as she could, occasionally catching the shoulder or arm of someone walking past her but she didn’t care.

The idea of William Blackwell sitting in his office perusing her life like he might his day’s to-do list and finding it tiny and insignificant made her feel furious. She walked a couple more paces, knowing that it wasn’t fury she was feeling but embarrassment. Shame. She felt ashamed of what he would have found. Her great achievements culminating in a Cherry Pie Island Show rosette. She didn’t know what else was available about her but she knew there wasn’t a lot because there hadn’t been a lot. Search Emily and you’d see her shining film career, her almost marriage, the launch of her cosmetics range and her brilliant, public acceptance of Jack Neil’s proposal the other month. Search Annie and you’d get her design company and her successful transformation of The Dandelion Cafe from failing business to Cherry Pie Island landmark. Search Jane and what would you get? Maybe the order of service of her mum’s funeral. Perhaps, at a push, her year studying Textile Design but that had probably never even made it onto a computer. There wouldn’t be anything else. She had nothing to show for her life. No great success stories. She could hardly shout from the rooftops that she made sure her mum died happy.
Hey, guys, that was my life
.

And then she realised as she marched past Oxford Circus and onto Regent Street that he – or some secretary, knowing what she did of him – would have searched for her birth certificate. They would have seen Father Unknown and stupidly that made the embarrassment more. There was William from his Blackwell legacy. And there was her with just her mum on her family tree and a grandmother she had learnt from the diaries was called Kate.

She felt stupid and ashamed and she hated herself for it.

‘Wait.’ There was the sound of Will’s out-of-breath voice again. ‘Wait! Please stop walking off. It’s a nightmare.’ He finally fell into step with her as she marched towards the flags of Hamley’s toy shop. ‘Listen, I don’t understand why you left just then. I know nothing about you. You’re an enigma to me and my team,’ he laughed. Jane looked away. ‘I was quite impressed that you don’t have a Facebook page.’

She paused. ‘A Facebook page?’ she said.

He nodded.

That’s what he was looking for? That’s what they cared about?

‘I thought everyone had a Facebook page,’ he said with a shrug. ‘I’m impressed that you haven’t succumbed. Made me almost tempted to delete mine.’

A slight smile played on her lips. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No I don’t have a Facebook page.’

William narrowed his eyes as he looked at her. ‘Does that make everything better? Sorry I just, I feel like I’m about ten steps behind. Bring back Heidi,’ he said with laugh and Jane raised a brow as if that wasn’t funny.

‘Where are you going?’ he asked.

She shook her head. ‘I have no idea.’

‘
Please
can I show you something?’ he said. ‘Something that you wouldn’t normally go and see? Something kinda cool.’

Jane bit her lip and watched him as he spoke. He’d run his hand through his neat hair so it was now a bit skew whiff. He’d taken his jacket off to run and catch up with her and rolled his sleeves up. His tie was in his pocket. He looked more approachable than he had in The Ritz. Less of a Prince Charming with a stormy past, more just a normal bloke who wanted, for some reason, to show her around his city.

‘OK,’ she said.

‘OK?’ he repeated, almost incredulous. ‘OK, it’s that easy to get you to agree?’

‘OK, let’s get on with it,’ she said with a shake of her head and started walking confidently on.

He stayed where he was. ‘You’re going the wrong way.’

The Tube was rammed. They were pressed up against each other amid a mass of bodies. She was so close to Will she could smell the sharp freshness of his aftershave. He glanced down at her just as she was breathing it in and raised his eyebrow in question when he caught her eye. She looked down at the floor, holding in a smile.

‘OK, we’re here,’ he said as the doors opened at Charing Cross. As Will just marched his way through the crowds, manoeuvring past tourists with suitcases and families studying the tube map, walked up the left-hand side of the escalator and asked people to move to the side who were blocking the way, Jane followed, remembering her earlier dilly-dallying at Green Park tube and thought how he would have been one of the people to storm past her tutting.

She was right behind him now, though, and it hadn’t taken her long to learn how to keep up. The world, she was realising, wasn’t quite as impenetrable as she had always thought.

They came out of Charing Cross and walked up the road towards Nelson’s Column and The National Gallery. She was trying to work out where he was taking her when she followed the step of a tourist next to her and, instead of checking the traffic first, put her foot out into the road.

Will yanked her back as a bus swung round the corner and beeped at both Jane and the tourist.

‘Oh shit!’ She held her hand to her chest.

‘You’ve gotta look where you’re going,’ Will said with a shake of his head. His hand was still on her arm and she moved to one side to step out of his hold.

He looked down at his hand and then up at her, his expression slightly puzzled. ‘I just saved your life, I wasn’t trying anything on.’

Jane blushed. ‘I know.’

The thing was that while Jane had had the odd fling and some short-lived relationships in the past, she had pretty much OK’d herself with the fact that she was going to be single for ever. And she was down with that. It suited her. And while she couldn’t ever conceive that anything would happen with her and someone like William, the feeling of him touching her, of his hand reaching out with the express purpose of saving
her
life (Hers. And him holding on to check she was OK.) was kind of comforting but alien and unnerving at the same time. Certainly not something that she ever wanted to get used to. Like taking up smoking. If you never try it, you can’t get addicted.

But then, put like that in her head, it seemed instinctively like a cowardly way to live. She wanted to lift up his hand and put it back on her arm.

‘Sorry, it was just me being stupid,’ she said. ‘Thank you for saving me, William.’ She took a breath in and then said, ‘So where are you taking me?’

‘This way.’ He pointed towards Admiralty Arch. Still seeming bit put out. ‘And it’s Will. The only person who called me William was my grandmother and well – we all know what she was like.’

Neither of them said anything else as they walked to the huge archway and he paused before he walked underneath it. ‘It feels stupid now,’ he said.

‘What does?’ she asked.

‘What I’m going to show you.’

‘Why?’

‘Because that was a bit weird back there.’

Jane frowned. ‘You’ve been a massive pain since I met you. I think I’m allowed to be weird every now and then. And I apologised.’

‘Yeah I just don’t understand it. I don’t think I’ve ever been shirked off like that before.’

‘Well first time for everything, isn’t there?’ she joked.

Will shrugged.

‘OK, it was nothing to do with you. It was me. I’m not touched that often. OK?’

‘What d’you mean you’re not touched that often?’

‘I’m not touched. That’s it. Christ, you know everything there is to know about me in your little Jane Williams file. I’ve spent ten years looking after my mother. It doesn’t lead to that many instances of touching that aren’t you trying to force said mother to do things like eat or go to bed or just stay on the bloody boat.’ She looked at him, realised she’d been gesticulating as she spoke and put her arms back down by her sides.

Will swallowed. ‘I didn’t know that.’

‘What?’

‘That you’d been looking after your mother.’

‘Well you have crap investigators then.’

Will laughed.

‘So what are you showing me?’ Jane asked.

‘Now it seems
really
stupid.’

‘Just show me.’

‘OK, but it’s really stupid.’

He led her under the archway and pointed about a foot above his head. Sticking out the wall was a shining gold nose.

‘It’s a nose,’ he said, almost cringing.

‘It
is
a nose,’ she said with a laugh.

‘That’s what I wanted to show you. I thought for ages it was some sort of shrine to the Duke of Wellington’s huge nose, but that was a myth apparently. Some artist put it there in the nineties. Which is sort of a disappointment but it’s still a nose on a wall. Which is kinda cool.’

Jane reached up to touch it. ‘It
is
kinda cool.’ She looked back at Will. ‘Thanks.’

‘What for?’

‘For showing me your stupid nose.’

He laughed. ‘You’re welcome. Come on.’ He reached out to take her arm but then hesitated and didn’t and for a second she wished she had never told him about the whole not being used to touching thing. ‘I’ll take you for a drink in the park.’

Chapter Eleven

The sun had dipped by the time they got to the restaurant in St James’s Park. He made them take a detour so she could look across the lake at the amazing view of Whitehall that was so majestic in the fading evening light that she felt more like she’d stepped into a Disney film than a London park.