Who's Afraid of Mr Wolfe? (13 page)

Jack was in the doorway.

‘Word. Gavin. My office. Now.’

Gavin went, nose in the air, an arrogant swing to his hips.

Jack watched him go and then turned back into the room. ‘I see you got the brochure.’

‘Yes,’ said Ellie. ‘We can’t wait to get started.’ She pushed the brochure along her desk as if it were a piece of radioactive waste. ‘Lucky us, getting it again this year. So how come it isn’t Jon and Zak’s turn?’

‘Gavin said you and Lesley have got spare capacity. Besides, nothing like keeping busy, eh? Take your mind
off things.’ Jack directed the last statement straight at Ellie. ‘Oh, and you wrote too much copy last time. Try and rein yourself in this year, will you?’

He looked exceptionally pleased with himself as he left the room and Ellie felt the unfairness of his comment like a slap. Nobody had tried harder than she had to get that copy cut back.

‘No problem, Jack,’ she said loudly. ‘I’ll get Jubbitt Junior to cut it so that it will fit on the head of a pin. And while I’m about it, I’ll go and find the Holy Grail too, shall I?’

Lesley stared at her as though she were insane, and then Jack reappeared in the doorway. His good humour had gone and Ellie felt the temperature inside the room drop.

‘Meaning what?’ Jack said extraordinarily slowly.

‘Meaning I tried like mad to get him to cut it back last time and it was impossible.’

‘Then why not simply say that?’ Jack snapped.

‘What?’ Ellie said, knowing exactly what point he was trying to make but deciding to annoy him further.

‘Why not just say that? Why go in for all that dramatic head of a pin and Holy Grail rubbish?’

Ellie chanced a smile. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Jack. I thought that you employed me to be good with words.’

Under the desk, Ellie felt Lesley’s foot connect sharply with her leg.

Down went the temperature again, and Jack walked over to her desk. ‘Yes, Ellie, I do,’ he said, bending down so
that his face was level with hers, ‘but the thing is, you see, I pay you to be good on paper. Not to show your verbal brilliance by being sarcastic when you’re not happy with the jobs you get.’ He straightened up. ‘And you know what? That little habit you have of always wanting to have the last word? I don’t pay you for that either.’

Ellie bit down on her anger as Jack started to move out of the room. Reprimanding her like that in front of Lesley wasn’t on. She waited until he had reached the doorway before saying softly, ‘Are you sure that I always have to have the last word?’

Jack came to an abrupt halt and Ellie received another sneaky kick from Lesley.

‘Yes, I’m sure,’ Jack said without turning round. His tone was clipped and mean.

Ellie said nothing and Jack started to move again.

Ellie coughed.

Jack stopped walking.

Ellie kept quiet again and saw Jack’s shoulders rise and fall rapidly before he left the room.

One, two, three.

‘OK,’ she shouted. ‘Perhaps you have a point, Jack. I do always have to have the last word.’

There was a muffled noise, which may or may not have been Jack swearing, and then Lesley jumped up and raced to the door. She scanned the corridor before returning to her seat.

‘You’re lucky, he’s gone,’ she said, ‘but, Jeez, Ellie, he looked really angry. Really hacked off with you. What are you doing?’

‘I just don’t like the way he dumped that Jubbitt & Jubbitt job on us.’

‘Well, you made it seem like you were making fun of him, as if you’re kicking against him being in charge.’ Lesley selected a pencil from her pot. ‘If you’re not careful, you’re going to make it seem like you’re on Gavin’s side.’

‘As if.’

‘That’s what it could look like. You’ve already had two run-ins with Jack, haven’t you? There’s no way you’re going to win.’

‘I’m not trying to win. I’m simply standing up for myself.’

‘Well, it’s not really working, is it? Seems to me that he’s proving a point by giving us the Jubbitt & Jubbitt brochure, and if you don’t mind, I could do without you annoying him any more since I’m the one who now has to photograph the pug-ugly Jubbitt & Jubbitt team. Again.’ She picked up the brochure and the brief and started to read them.

Later on Ellie apologised to Lesley.

‘I’m being an idiot. I’ll make a real effort not to stir Jack up again.’

Trouble was, even as she was saying it, a part of her knew she didn’t mean it. There were bound to be further fights; how could she avoid them when Jack thought he
could walk into the agency and pulverise everything in his path?

Three days later Ellie trailed up the road and pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. Half past pigging seven and she’d been discussing the position of full stops and semicolons with Jubbitt Junior for the last two hours.

Jubbitt Junior? That was a joke: he was sixty if he was a day.

Some time ago he had discovered that Ellie had an English degree and had been beside himself with joy. Now there was nothing he liked better than to show her how her grasp of English was, in fact, inferior to his own.

‘I’m a mere solicitor, Eleanor,’ he would begin, and then point out what grammatical murders she had committed.

No matter how many times she tried to explain that she was writing selling copy and not an essay, he ignored her. Pulling his chair up close to hers, he would go through her copy with a red pen, destroying anything that was punchy, annihilating sentences starting with ‘and’ or ‘but’ and adding clauses, sub-clauses and extra paragraphs. And all the while taking every opportunity he could to touch her knee or her thigh. No amount of glaring on her part seemed to deter him, and Ellie was kicking herself yet again for letting him get away with it. She’d practised in her head over and over the little speech about respecting
her personal space but always lost her nerve at the last minute. The man was a personal friend of Gerald Wiseman, one of the directors, and she wasn’t ready to commit professional suicide yet.

Ellie dragged her feet and looked around her morosely. Jubbitt & Jubbitt’s offices were in Epping, right at the end of the Central Line, and she’d got so fed up with the sweaty, packed Tube journey back into town after the meeting that she’d come up for air at Marble Arch. Even up here it felt pretty stale and muggy. Spring had arrived, but today it felt like there was a thunderstorm coming.

People barged into her as she moved along Oxford Street. The pavements were dirty. London didn’t look so great this evening.

She’d been ravenous after the meeting and had just downed a chocolate brownie and a latte, some of which she’d spilled down her jumper. She picked at the stain with a nail and felt very, very tired. Ruddy Jack Wolfe; it was his fault she was trapped in the life-sapping Jubbitt & Jubbitt brochure. All because of one innocent ‘girlfriends’ comment.

She decided to cut away from the crowds still choking Oxford Street and head down a quieter side road. She had a long journey home ahead of her and only the wilted contents of her fridge to welcome her when she got there. No Sam to help her poke fun at Jubbitt Junior. If she was really lucky, Edith would turn up for some X-rated Scrabble.

She trudged on and then saw something that made her stop abruptly and nip into a doorway. There was Jack; Jack in a beautiful charcoal-grey suit with a tall, reed-like woman in a black dress. An aura of glamour hung about them and the woman’s blonde hair moved seductively in the slight breeze. Ellie recognised her as Leonora Pritchard, daughter of the sushi king. Feeling tired and dishevelled as she did, Ellie had no wish to bump into this golden couple and was about to retrace her steps back on to Oxford Street when she slowed down. Then she turned round and started to walk, with great determination, towards them.

Jack had got himself into a bit of a tricky situation. He’d made the mistake of calling Leonora ‘Sophie’ for a second time and she had stalked out of the restaurant in a huge sulk. People passed by and looked at them as they stood on the pavement and he tried to smooth Leonora’s ruffled feathers. He was hungry and thirsty and this wasn’t how he wanted to spend his evening. His plans for good food, good wine and a good shag were rapidly disappearing.

‘That’s not the first time you’ve called me Sophie this evening. Who the hell is she?’ Leonora’s mouth formed itself into an ugly line.

Jack decided that if he was going to lie, he’d have a go at a big one, just for the hell of it. Should be easy enough with Leonora: although she had many impressive features, her brain wasn’t one of them.

He shot her a wide smile that made his eyes twinkle. ‘Come on, Leonora, you know who Sophie is. She’s one of my sisters.’

Jack saw Leonora’s gaze hold his and then flick to his mouth. ‘I thought they were called something like Grace and Louise. Or was it Laura?’ Her tone was slightly less sulky.

He moved his hand gently to touch her arm, following up on his hunch that she was willing to be convinced.

‘Clever you,’ he said in his best low and husky voice. ‘You had the first name right – one is called Grace. But the other one is Sophie. And it’s her birthday soon and I’ve been thinking what to buy her, so she’s been on my mind and her name slipped out.’ As he talked, he moved his hand very gently to Leonora’s waist.

‘Hmm, well, I suppose you know your own sister’s name,’ Leonora said peevishly, but Jack saw her wet her lips a little with her tongue. He was nearly there.

He pressed home his advantage by leaning forward and kissing her gently on her cheek. ‘Come on, honey, I hate it when you’re cross with me. Come back inside and let’s have some champagne.’ He gave her a tender look and then kissed her hungrily on the mouth, feeling her relax into him.

‘OK, Jack,’ she said, pulling away from him, ‘I forgive you. This time.’

Jack chuckled at his own ability to turn the situation
around. Sometimes this was too frigging easy. He took the now smiling Leonora by the arm and they were about to re-enter the restaurant when he spotted Ellie walking towards them.

Despite her rumpled and stained appearance, she had a strange, triumphant look on her face, and Jack suddenly felt queasy.

‘Hello, Jack,’ she said, and then turned to Leonora with her hand outstretched. ‘You must be Jack’s new girlfriend, Sophie. I’ve heard so much about you.’

Seconds later Leonora was stalking racehorse-like down the road and Jack was rubbing his slapped face. Ellie opened her eyes wide and met Jack’s glower with a glittering, green look of her own.

‘Have a nice evening, Jack,’ she said, and then pushed past him and was gone.

Jack stood there for a while and then laughed. Last word to her, he supposed.

So, she wanted to play hardball.

Fine.

Mrs MacEndry contemplated Jack’s office door with a worried expression.

‘Are you sure Jack asked to see you right now, Ellie dear?’

Ellie nodded. Jack had been brusque and insistent on the phone and she suspected that he was going to chew her out for her little performance the evening before.

‘Well, he already has somebody in there with him,’ Mrs MacEndry said, straightening some papers on her desk that already looked pretty straight to Ellie. ‘But I suppose if you’re sure he told you to come …’

Ellie knocked on Jack’s door and pushed it open. A woman was sitting by Jack’s side, her portfolio of work open on the desk. Her glossy red hair was very close to Jack’s choppy, thick black hair.

Jack raised his head and shot Ellie a cursory glance. ‘Yes?’

The woman turned to look at Ellie too, and as she flicked
her gaze up and down what Ellie was wearing, her blood-red lips formed into a little smirk.

‘Ellie,’ she said.

Ellie’s brain froze. What the hell was copywriter Monikka Steel doing in Jack’s office? Nasty, scheming ‘Feral Monikka’? She must be thinking of leaving Rackman Jarvitt. Or even worse, Jack must be planning to tempt her away.

Ellie’s eyes went to Monikka’s portfolio again.

‘Yes?’ repeated Jack, a hint of irritation in his voice.

‘You rang me. You wanted to see me.’ Ellie could not wrest her attention away from Monikka’s portfolio of work.

‘Did I?’ Jack’s face showed innocent puzzlement. ‘Can’t think what it was about now,’ he said, shrugging. Then he turned back to Monikka, who was examining him very closely. ‘You were saying, Monikka?’ he asked, shifting his chair a little nearer to her.

As Ellie backed from the room, she heard Monikka in full flow: ‘Well, Jack, this was a difficult concept, yeah? But I came up with this clever way of combining the message with the medium, yeah, and it played very well. The judging panel loved it.’

Ellie all but ran back to her office, but there was no Lesley there to offer sympathy. She was currently reshooting metal flanges with a particularly truculent photographer.

Not that Lesley would have been able to help much.
Elle knew what was going on. Gavin’s days were numbered and now it seemed that hers were too. She had been right: there was only one way of doing things, Jack’s way. They’d had one too many arguments and now she was about to lose her job to a Monikka with two ‘k’s, a glossy femme fatale who wasn’t invisible. Nobody would mistake her for a ruddy student.

She moved around the office, taking in all the things that she and Lesley had collected over the years. There was the chart on the wall showing how many people had made the ‘Hey, your name’s Les and you are actually a Lesbian’ joke. She looked at the little figure of Frankenstein that they had christened ‘Hugo’, and at the posters and rude postcards. She thought back to the first day Lesley and she had moved in. Then she went downstairs to ask Rachel for some black bin liners.

Mrs MacEndry put Jack’s cup of coffee on his desk. ‘All I am saying is that she could not hide how very, very upset she was.’

Jack grunted and Mrs MacEndry retreated to her office, having learned through hard experience that this particular noise meant ‘end of discussion’. Jack carried on looking at the papers on his desk and then sat back in his chair. There had been no mistaking the look of shock on Ellie’s face when she had seen Monikka. Still, Ellie was a bright girl; she’d know it was a warning shot, a little
message that he didn’t take kindly to her mooching about like some lovesick Victorian, or dropping him in it with Leonora. Whatever the reasons she’d been engaging in this little power struggle with him, that should knock it on the head.