The Home for Broken Hearts (18 page)

“What should I do?” Matt asked miserably, hoping that by appealing to her expertise, she’d be flattered and impressed by him.

“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 him in a foul mood, which is bad news for the rest of us. The trick is to keep him on an even enough keel to make it okay to keep him on.”

“Right,” Matt said, staring at the two coffees and wondering if the watery gray 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. “Don’t worry, Dan loves your columns, especially the one about Carla—he laughed out loud when he read it. Everyone thought it was the funniest thing they’d read 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 realize 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 makeup-girl minx was no exception,’” she quoted verbatim. “‘It was obvious from the first minute that 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 whack 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.” Suze 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 got the guts to get shut of him for good and the poor girl’s been in pieces ever since. 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—because 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 that some of the coffee in the plastic cups slurped over the side and burned the back of his hand, causing him to drop both of them on the floor.

“Fuck,” Matt muttered under his breath as he pulled out reams of hand towels from the dispenser, dropped them on the floor, and trod them into the slowly spreading lake of machine coffee. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

What was it about the women around here that made them want to break his balls today? It must be something in the water, he thought; he’d never got this grief back in Manchester. But then again, he never messed about in his own backyard back 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 had arrived here.

Ellen in her red pajamas, standing in her bare feet on those cold kitchen tiles.

Ellen paused, her fingers hovering over the keyboard. Eliza, who was just on the point of being ravished by a Royalist rogue who had kidnapped her on the road, had broken free and killed her attacker in her first fiery display of determination not to be made a victim again. Ellen was breathless with excitement. She had fallen headfirst into the story as Allegra talked and she typed, the office, the computer fading out—her former dining room transforming into a stale-smelling bedroom in a seventeenth-century coaching inn. And then, just as Eliza put a permanent end to her attacker’s assault, Allegra had stopped talking. Ellen 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 considering how late Allegra was with the book, it would be quicker for her to dictate to Ellen, who would type it directly into an 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 in several months, she’d sit in her chair at the kitchen table and chew the end of a Biro until something came out, usually some stuff and nonsense about a woman and her house and her husband and her son. She’d um and er and huff and puff over a couple of paragraphs at the most, which had always made Nick chuckle—her attempts at authordom, as he referred to them; he’d come in, peer over her shoulder for a brief moment, 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 labored efforts and scribbling and scrawling had shown that she’d 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
like Allegra surely was, the process was much more spiritual, like an emotional release. Afraid of disturbing Allegra but uncertain of what to do now, Ellen whispered her name again.

“Allegra?”

“Ellen.” Allegra spoke her name with some resignation, as if she had just been awakened from a rather wonderful dream.

“That was—that was utterly brilliant!” Ellen was unable to contain herself. “I was right in the moment, with Eliza. It’s so exhilarating and liberating! What happens next? Will Captain Parker come and rescue her and take her back to the manor?”

Allegra’s nearly translucent lids fluttered open as she observed Ellen from across the room.

“No, my dear, it’s rather too soon in the story arc for a happy ending. We need to put Eliza in rather more peril first, I’d say.”

“Yes, of course,” Ellen agreed. “It’s just that if it were up to me, there wouldn’t be a story arc; all of the characters would
start out happy, be happy, and then end up happy. But I suppose that would make for a rather dull read.”

“Have you ever worked on any of Melanie Love’s titles, Ellen?”

“Yes, once or twice.” Ellen nodded, thinking of the sugary-sweet faux-regency romance novels where the nearest any of the characters got to peril was dropping a handkerchief.

“Well, then you’ll know that dull is exactly what that kind of book is. Not to mention moronic, but still, if there are people to read that kind of rubbish, there will always be people to write it.” Allegra’s smile was razor sharp. “Now, it was you that got these rusty cogs working again, and the words flowing. What do you think Eliza would do next?”

Ellen thought for a moment, thinking of Eliza standing over the corpse of her attacker. How would she feel? Frightened, exhilarated, confused? Allegra had already decided to move the action to London, so now it was just a question of how to get a fugitive female murderer there.

“What if she dressed herself in his clothes, cut her hair, took his horse, and made her way to London dressed as a man? It was your idea that Eliza would fight off her latest attacker and escape to London dressed as a man,” Ellen suggested tentatively.

“How very Shakespearean,” Allegra mused. “It could work, though. How much of a fraud does it make me exactly? I wonder that my assistant is the one coming up with all the ideas.”

Ellen got up from her chair and walked around the desk, resisting the urge to sit on its polished walnut surface, as she was certain that Allegra would not approve. Instead she leaned against it, enjoying the slight breeze that wafted in through the open french doors, carrying with it a scent of roses in full bloom, mingled with the perfume of next door’s freshly cut lawn and beneath that the earthy stench of moldering plant life, last summer’s dead splendor, never cleared away and still rotting slowly into the earth. Beyond the unruly and
unpruned cherry tree at the bottom of the garden, its fruit rotting amid its roots, there would be the neatly trimmed and weeded borders of the garden that backed onto hers, and the garden that backed onto that one, going on and on forever in a suburban patchwork of love and attention, leading Ellen to imagine her own garden standing out, a single frayed, unruly square besmirching the whole design. Perhaps, she thought, perhaps it
might
be time to venture into the garden again. She watched a pair of cabbage white butterflies dance and flutter around the open door before lifting off in haphazard zigzags into the empty sky. Perhaps another day she’d go out there and assess the situation; she’d think about it, anyway. She turned back to her boss.

“I might have had the idea, Allegra—but you put it into words,” Ellen said, her eyes shining from the thrill of being involved in the process. “You’re the one who makes it so exciting and so real! I could never have done what you just did, I don’t know how you do it—the words just streamed out of you, it’s amazing—you’re amazing, so just because you’re a bit stuck on the plot, it doesn’t mean you’re not a writer anymore. You’re more than that—you’re a born storyteller. I feel so lucky that I get to see you in action.”

Allegra’s smile was wan, but she sat up a little and smoothed her hair back from her face, seeming a little bolstered by Ellen’s enthusiasm.

“So,” she said. “We have our heroine, in disguise, speeding toward London, where… she hopes to find sanctuary with her father’s childhood friend.”

“Yes, yes!” Ellen nodded.

“And for once he will be a kind and fatherly figure who will want to look after her and protect her and not rip her clothes off,” Allegra added. “We always need at least one decent man per book, apart from our soon-to-be-reformed hero. It adds balance. Now, as you quite rightly mentioned, at the moment the book is lacking a little historical context—where should we
send Eliza running to that will add that aspect to the book?”

“Well, I was thinking—and this is just an idea, so say if you think it’s rubbish—that you might set it in the Tower of London—in the Civil War it was a Roundhead armory with a permanent garrison posted there; they also used it to imprison a couple of dangerous Royalist supporters. I thought we could make him protector of the garrison general.”

“Perfect—he could be an honest and forthright man who believes in the true cause of the war and in a republic for the people.”

“Exactly—the people of London were so sick and tired of Charles and his blinkered belief in divine rule, by that time,” Ellen told her. “They really believed that England could be a republic, where all men and women were equal. It’s quite revolutionary when you think about it, not that it would have ever worked, especially not with Cromwell in charge.”

“And,” Allegra said thougthfully, “perhaps while she is there, Eliza can become involved in some secret mission, some way to help the puritan cause? Now is the point in the arc when we want to start to show that her experiences have changed her.”

“That she isn’t just a girl anymore—but that she’s becoming a strong, independent woman,” Ellen added, seeing herself for a moment as if through a window. A woman on her own, earning her own money, paying her own bills. It gave her an unexpected thrill of exhilaration.

Allegra nodded. “Yes, yes—it’s perfect, and then our dear Royalist Captain Parker will have to stray right into the enemy’s nest to track down the woman whom he does not yet know he loves.…” Allegra looked thoughtful. “Let’s say he’s followed her trail, gathered that it must have been she who murdered our villain—a villain that we can make into someone important to the Royalist cause—and perhaps it is Captain Parker who is charged with discovering his murderer and then must bring his own true love to the noose!” Allegra’s eyes sparkled
as she spoke.

“Brilliant!” Ellen clasped her hands together. “You see? Now you are the one who’s coming up with all the ideas. Soon you won’t need me to do anything but type.”

“I’m not at all sure about that.” Allegra smiled. “I’ve known you only a few weeks and yet I have a feeling that you are my amulet, my lucky charm. You get this old brain creaking again, Ellen.” The two women smiled at each other, Ellen feeling a rare moment of pure pleasure.