Who's Afraid of Mr Wolfe? (32 page)

Well, he had turned round, but he hadn’t even glanced in her direction. She’d had to find a seat quickly to stop herself from falling down. Now all she could do was look at him. He seemed taller and stronger and even sexier than she remembered. Knowing every inch of his body
made it even more appealing. But the sudden realisation had hit her that she was probably never going to hold him in her arms again, or get to know him any better, and the bitterness of that thought made her lower her gaze.

Back to staring at the same old carpet, but for a whole new set of reasons.

Jack started to speak again. ‘OK, as this is our last get-together, we’ll have a quick run-through where we stand on the major accounts and what’s in the pipeline. But first I think Ian has some news about the Sure & Soft campaign …’

Ian did a little drum roll on the desk with his hands. ‘Figures for audience recall of the ad are very high – it’s in the top five – and I had Pauline Kennedy on the phone this morning saying they are pleased … No, correction: they are delighted with the latest sales figures. She’s given the nod to roll out the poster and press campaign, and has changed her mind about the radio – she’s up for it now. We need to get the twenty-second ones polished up.’ Ian gave a sharp laugh. ‘I stopped myself from saying, “I told you so.” She’s also going to liaise with our Web guys about the design of their existing site … If you’ll pardon the pun, it’s pants. She’s keen to explore their Facebook presence too … Twitter … you name it … Bring them into the twenty-first century in fact.’ He turned to Ellie and Lesley. ‘So well done, you two.’

There was a little round of applause before Ian went on, ‘Also, of course, it’s had a good reception from everyone in the industry, which bodes well, come award season. Better get yourselves some posh frocks, girls.’

Ellie gave a little half-smile and then started to feel disconnected from everything around her. She was aware that Jack was talking them through various accounts and then there was something about being chosen to do work for a council in Yorkshire.

Just then she happened to glance up and caught his eye and there was absolutely no glimmer of anything there for her. No warmth, no guilt, no embarrassment. He was a stranger to her. His gaze passed right through her and he was on to the next subject.

She stood up abruptly and walked out of the room, only pausing in Mrs MacEndry’s office to say, ‘I’m sorry you’re retiring. I’ll miss you,’ before going up to her office, collecting her bag and going home.

Back in Jack’s room, Lesley explained how Ellie had been feeling ill since she’d got in and shouldn’t really have come to work at all. Jack nodded along with everyone else and then filled them in on what had happened with the yoghurt account.

Jack opened the door of his flat and Ellie sensed that he wasn’t surprised to see her. Which made her feel worse: like he believed she was the kind of woman who habitually stalked men who chucked her.

‘I thought you’d gone home. Lesley said you’d been feeling ill.’

‘You made me feel sick.’

He regarded her coolly. ‘Sorry.’

‘That’s it? You’re sorry?’

She saw his hand go to the knot in his tie. ‘If you’ve got something to say spit it out, Ellie. I’m a bit busy.’

She could not believe that this was the same man who had held her in his arms when she had been crying. He seemed to have had all the warmth sucked out of him.

‘When did you decide to go to New York?’

His hand strayed back to his tie, but he said nothing.

‘And all that lovey-dovey stuff the last night we were together, that was what?’

‘People say things in bed they don’t mean, Ellie. Come on, you’re an adult, you understand that.’

She didn’t know why she was doing this to herself; it was like picking at a sore. ‘I never tell people I love them if I don’t, Jack,’ she said, and heard the tremor in her voice.

He wouldn’t look at her. ‘I don’t know why you’re here, Ellie. We had a great time, a great two weeks, but these things don’t always work out.’

‘You aren’t going to let it, you mean?’ she shot back.

Jack didn’t answer.

‘I’m asking you again, when did you decide to go to New York?’

‘I don’t see what relevance that has to anything.’

‘It makes a difference to me whether you knew before we got together or not.’

He wasn’t going to give her an answer to that, she could tell. She swallowed rapidly, determined she was not going to cry.

‘It was just sex, then, was it, Jack? Another notch?’

He nodded.

‘You’re lying, Jack. You’re not that good an actor. You’re running away from me for some reason and I don’t know what it is. The things you said, the way you looked at me—’

Jack cut across her impatiently. ‘Look, Ellie, I’m sorry if you thought that there was more to it than there was.’

That was the point at which she lost her resolve to be dignified and calm. ‘But you don’t normally have sex with the women you work with,’ she wailed.

She saw Jack take a step back and there was a nasty set to his mouth. ‘True,’ he said, ‘but perhaps I’m psychic. Perhaps I knew we wouldn’t be working together for much longer.’

‘I don’t recognise you like this, Jack. It’s as if you’re thinking of the cruellest things to say to drive me away.’

‘Cruel to be kind, Ellie. No use giving you false hope. It’s over.’

Ellie could feel the tears running down her face. Her breath was coming in big gasps. ‘I … I … have deep feelings for you, Jack. You know that. You let me tell you that the last time we were together. And you said you couldn’t get enough of me, you wanted to protect me. Yet now you do this? I don’t know why you’re being so cold to me. If you wanted to end it, why not be honest?’

Jack turned away from her and went to go into his flat. Ellie reached out and grabbed hold of his arm and yanked him back. She couldn’t even speak now, she was sobbing so hard.

‘Ellie,’ he said without looking at her, ‘it was a mistake. I shouldn’t have got involved with you. Having sex with someone you work with is always a bad idea. They start to read too much into it. They think that they know you better than the other people you work with.’ He shook
her hand from his arm. ‘Well, you don’t know me, Ellie. All you know is what I’m like in bed and there’s a long list of women who know that.’

It was too brutal and Ellie tried to reach out for him again. He dodged away from her and folded his arms and watched her cry.

At some point he said, in a matter-of-fact tone, ‘You’ll feel better about this soon. Nothing has altered at work. I still think you’re a brilliant copywriter and there are more big changes coming to your department. I can’t tell you what yet, but changes for the better. For you and Lesley. You deserve what’s coming.’

‘What, for sleeping with you?’ she managed to blurt out.

The look he gave her was filled with distaste. ‘I’m not even going to bother talking to you, Ellie, if you’re going to be stupid like that.’ He moved quickly into his flat and slammed the door behind him, leaving her standing there.

When he looked out through the spyhole a few minutes later, she had gone.

Ellie never made it into work the following day, and when she did return, she kept to her office. She didn’t want to see Jack and she certainly didn’t want him to hear she was moping around. She couldn’t bear him to feel sorry for her. Although judging by his performance outside his flat, he actually didn’t feel anything at all for her any more.

She put her head down and surreptitiously wiped her eyes. Her official line was that she had some kind of virusy-cold thing. A virusy-cold thing that made her eyes red, her bottom lip wobbly and plastered a look of permanent misery over her face.

She wished she could talk to Lesley, but everything was too raw to put into words. Having any kind of conversation about it seemed impossible.

She had to go through the motions of being a fully functioning human while, two floors down, the man she loved got ready to leave her behind.

She couldn’t even comfort herself that she’d got over Sam and it was only a matter of time before she started to feel better about Jack. She was never going to feel better about Jack. Simple as that, she knew it in her bones. A part of her had been missing before he’d come along and it would go missing again when he went.

She had only managed to write two words of copy since she’d got into work. Not a great output, especially as one of them was a ground-breaking ‘and’. Any minute now Lesley was going to notice that she wasn’t in fact doing anything and ask her for the third time in an hour whether she should have come back to work so soon.

Ellie put down her pen and took herself off to the toilets for some solitude and yet another chance to gnaw away at her thumb and at all those things about that last
night together with Jack that didn’t make sense. Did she have to face the fact that it had all been an act on Jack’s part? She definitely wasn’t ready for that yet.

When she returned to the office, Ian was sitting in her chair waiting for her.

‘Ah, Ellie, Ellie, Ellie,’ he said with a ‘little boy in trouble’ look on his face. ‘That’s a lovely top you’ve got on today. The red kind of matches your eyes.’

‘What do you want, Ian?’ she said abruptly.

‘Got another little problem. I’m meant to be going up to Yorkshire, preliminary talks with these council people. It’s that account Jack was talking about, the one he got through his old contacts?’ He stood up to let her sit in her chair and then perched on the edge of the desk. ‘It’ll be a quick visit – up in one day and back the next – going tomorrow. But my wife has rung. Looks like Josh has come down with chickenpox, and what with the baby not being weaned yet, she’s demented. I don’t suppose you fancy a trip?’

It was a gift, the chance to get out of the office and away from Jack. ‘Where’s the council again?’ she asked, giving the impression that she’d known and simply forgotten rather than not been paying attention in the first place.

‘Scarsdove,’ Ian said, pinching one of the biscuits from their tin on the filing cabinet. ‘It’s a nice little market town between Halifax and Leeds. You know, the place Jack comes from.’

Ellie liked Scarsdove on sight, and not just because it was where Jack was born and grew up. It had a main street of shops, little independent ones, not the big names, and it sat slap-bang by the moors. Half wild and half civilised. A bit like Jack.

Ellie had decided not to fight the need to think about him while she was there. She wanted a good wallow and there was no better place to do it. So, after a very friendly and productive meeting with the council representatives, she wandered around the town. Over a cup of tea in a little café with white tablecloths and china teacups, she found herself looking out for strong noses. There appeared to be quite a few in this part of the world. After that she sat on a seat in the square and wondered if Jack had ever sat there and toyed with the idea of going to find his old school. Then she spotted the library. They would have copies of old newspapers and perhaps she’d come across a picture of him.

She was a lost cause, but at least she was only hurting herself.

The library was deserted except for a bored-looking librarian, whose eyes lit up when Ellie walked in. She directed Ellie to the local history section, indicating a curving metal staircase up to the first floor. Evidently the newspapers were still on microfiche and the librarian was very eager to come and help Ellie find what she was looking for. Fortunately at that moment a man with a nylon shopping bag came in through the library doors. Ellie saw the librarian go a little pale and skulk off behind the large-print section. Ellie left her to it and headed upstairs, her heels making a loud tapping noise on each of the steps as she went.

Fitting the microfiche in the machine was fiddly and her eyes soon began to ache, but she found the steady cycle of agricultural shows, nativity plays and summer fêtes comforting. She felt close to Jack here, or at least to his past. After a few minutes there he was, a smiling schoolboy, holding up a trophy for winning a long-jump event. Even all these years later she felt proud of him and sat there with her fingers lightly touching the photograph for a while.

A few more pieces of microfiche and there were other photographs of him: one as part of a school group off to Rome and another announcing his departure for Leeds University. He was more recognisably Jack in that last photo.

She jumped forward a few years to when she figured he would have graduated and then realised she’d gone too far. She was about to reverse when a small headline leaped out at her. Her obsession must be particularly acute: she’d picked Jack’s name out from a whole page of small type. As she started to read, her heart rate speeded up. Her eyes scanned quickly through the article, barely able to believe what she was reading. When she’d finished, she went right back to the beginning and read it again more slowly. Then she sat back, not seeing anything.

It was some while before she reached down into her handbag, pulled out her notebook and pen, and started to write.

Jack was heading home for the evening when it struck him that he hadn’t had a pint for a while. Very soon he wouldn’t be able to simply pop into a pub and get one. He bumped into Ian at the bar and bought them both a pint of Tetley’s.

‘I can’t stop long,’ Ian said, lifting his glass to his mouth. ‘I’m on daubing-the-spots-with-cream duty tonight.’

Jack made a face. ‘How’s it going?’

‘Early days. We’re waiting for the rest of the kids to come down with it now.’

‘Probably better they get it when they’re little. That’s what they say, isn’t it? And we’re quiet at the moment if
you do need to nip off early some days. Even when I’m gone.’

‘Thanks, mate … and that reminds me … When you’re gone, can I have your office? Not for me – I was thinking of turning it into a games room – you know, basketball hoop, table tennis, that kind of thing. Break down the barriers, get the creative juices flowing.’ He took a sip of his beer. ‘Mind you, Ellie’s going to have an unfair advantage when it comes to basketball. Have to make sure we put the hoop as high as it’ll go.’