Suddenly, everything clicked into place. Of course she’d been awkward and embarrassed last night. She was still a long way from a size ten. When she was a size ten, everything would be different. She’d be different.
It was such a relief to know that it wasn’t really her fault, that Neve went to lunch with a spring in her step and a new resolve that had her walking briskly around Holborn for an hour and only having soup and salad for lunch. The bad decisions of last night weren’t forgotten, but she was going to try really hard not to think about them.
In fact, she didn’t think about them until five minutes before her lunch-break ended and Celia rang her mobile at exactly 1.55 like she did every day. It always meant that Neve was late back to the Archive basement where there was no phone reception unless she climbed on top of the draining board in the kitchen and tried to get as close to the window as humanly possible.
‘Hey, Seels,’ she said, when she answered. ‘What’s up?’
‘What’s up with you?’ Celia rapped back.
‘Not much. In Transcribing Hell, went to the gym before work, same old, same old.’
‘I know about last night,’ Celia said flatly. ‘I can’t believe you’re trying to be all evasive about it.’
Neve tried to ignore the icy dread that washed over her. ‘What am I being evasive about?’ she asked carefully.
‘You always do that when you’re being shifty! You answer a question with another question – it’s so annoying,’ Celia snapped. Neve hadn’t heard Celia or Yuri come home last night, which meant that her sister was both sleep-deprived and hungover – a deadly combination. ‘I know about you and Max! Didn’t I warn you about him?’
Neve had to clutch on to the nearest lamp-post for support. ‘Well, yes, but—’
‘Beth from Features saw you going into the tube together,’ Celia said.
As usual with Celia, it was something and nothing. Neve let go of the lamp-post she’d been gripping because she could deal with this unaided. ‘We got the tube to Finsbury Park together because he lives in Crouch End,’ she explained. ‘It was perfectly innocent. Don’t jump to conclusions.’
‘Well, if I’m jumping to conclusions it’s because I’ve seen Max this morning and your stories don’t match,’ Celia said grimly. ‘He said he came home with you.’
‘He saw me to the door …’
‘And then came right up the stairs because he said you had more books than Waterstone’s.’
Neve felt chilled in a way that had nothing to do with the icy gusts of wind that were lifting strands of her hair and whipping at her cheeks. She tried hard not to groan down the phone. ‘What else did he say?’
‘Not much,’ Celia admitted. ‘He just said that you had serious issues but then he asked if I’d spoken to you today and if you were all right. He tried something, didn’t he? Did he hurt you?’
‘No. No! Look, he came in for a drink and …’ Neve racked her brains for something to tell Celia. Not the truth, obviously. Although Celia didn’t know the meaning of TMI, Neve tried to keep her own counsel. Usually it wasn’t difficult as nothing remotely exciting ever happened to her. But she couldn’t tell Celia about last night because something had happened and it had been awful – but it hadn’t been Max’s fault at all. She’d lured him into her attic room under false pretences. Not that Celia would ever believe that. ‘It was just a drink. Did he seem angry?’ she added.
‘Hmmm, not so much angry as well – troubled, I suppose,’ Celia mused. ‘But that might be because he’s having a nightmare with the June cover. But seriously, Neevy, I swear if he tried to date-rape you, I’ll cut off his dick with the Fashion Department scissors!’
‘Seels, do you really think that someone who looks like Max and who’s probably slept with models and—’
‘No “probably” about it. He’s definitely slept with models and that girl who did that stupid song about—’
‘Then why would he try it on with me?’ Neve asked her. ‘And if he had, which he didn’t, I can take care of myself. I box with Gustav.’
‘Well, I s’pose when you put it like that …’ Celia said slowly, and Neve could tell that she wasn’t planning to exact revenge on Max’s manhood any more. ‘Don’t get me wrong, you’re gorgeous and pretty but it’s the kind of pretty that’s like a Marc Jacobs collection. Most people don’t get it on first viewing, you know what I mean?’
‘No, I haven’t got a clue, but thanks for the compliment. It was a compliment, wasn’t it?’
‘Of course it was!’ Celia giggled. ‘Look, don’t worry, we’ll find some totally lush guys for you to snack on before William comes back. Sensitive guys who go to art galleries and hold doors open for you and shit.’
Max hadn’t held any doors open for her last night, but he had walked on the road side of the pavement and enquired after her well-being during every perilous step of their climb towards sex. ‘I think I’m going to hire a male escort and practise on him instead,’ Neve said. She was thinking no such thing but wanted to hear Celia’s gasp of shocked delight.
‘I’m so telling Mum,’ she said gleefully before she rang off and Neve was left to sneak back into work ten minutes late.
Neve really couldn’t settle to transcribing and cross-referencing after speaking to Celia. That morning she’d been so involved in her own pity party that she hadn’t even considered how Max might be feeling.
Recalling the sequences of events was painful and felt a lot like picking at a scab that should have been left to heal, but Neve forced herself to do it, to see herself lying there with her eyes tightly shut and a pained expression on her face that her family called her ‘eating kippers look’.
‘When the girl underneath you obviously wishes she was somewhere else.’
Max had sensed that something was wrong and he’d stopped and he hadn’t got mad until she’d acted like a crazy woman. God, she couldn’t even pick the right guy for a one-night stand. Celia had said Max was a ruthless seducer of women and he’d certainly lived up to his reputation, but hadn’t Neve given every impression that she was ripe for being seduced?
Instead of wringing her hands and behaving like the innocent victim in last night’s debauchery, Neve was forced to confront the unwelcome truth – that it was actually Max who was the injured party.
Oh, bloody hell!
After a hazardous journey home where she’d almost been knocked off her bike by a cabbie suddenly swerving into the bus lane without warning, Neve opened the front door and steeled herself for the unpleasant task that awaited her.
Right on cue, as she propped her bike against the wall and took her satchel out of the pannier, she heard Charlotte and Douglas’s door open. Inevitably, the shouting started before Neve even saw Charlotte’s head pop over the banisters.
‘I didn’t get a fucking minute of sleep last night,’ she shrieked, because Charlotte always went from nought to ear-perforating in a second. ‘What the hell were you doing?’
Neve knew that to the rest of the world she, Neve Slater, was a fully functioning grown-up. She voted, ate her greens, let old people get on the bus first, had a job and paid her bills on time, but with Charlotte she instantly regressed to the shy, bumbling, inarticulate fifteen year old that she’d used to be.
‘I’m really sorry, Charlotte,’ she whimpered. ‘It won’t happen again.’
‘Well, you bringing home a man isn’t something that’s likely to happen more than once in a decade anyway,’ Charlotte sneered, and even with her face contorted with the rage that Neve always roused in her, Neve was still struck by how pretty she was.
You had to strip away the fake tan and the fake eyelashes and the highlights that transformed her mousy-brown hair to blonde, but Charlotte was still an easy, effortless pretty. She was toned and tall, so whether she was wearing one of her beloved Juicy Couture tracksuits or a tiny black dress and teetering heels, she always looked groomed and pristine. Even tonight’s ponytail and jeans combo looked as if it had been pu
lled together by a top stylist.
Neve’s mother, who didn’t know the half of it, always said that Neve should make more of an effort to be friends with Charlotte. But as far as Neve was concerned, you didn’t attempt to cosy up to the girl who’d made your teen years a living hell, even if she was now your sister-in-law. It had been just about bearable when they’d first moved into the house because Neve and Charlotte had given each other a wide berth, but then there’d been that fateful weekend when Douglas had gone to Sheffield and Charlotte had had her horrible friends to stay. The same horrible friends who’d tormented Neve at school all the way through Years Seven to Eleven.
They’d all been trooping down the stairs in stripper heels and a cloud of cloying scent as Neve had been coming up them, and she’d heard that awful name that had followed her all the way through school. Worse, someone had shouldered her into the wall. And even worse, when they’d come home drunk at three in the morning, they’d proceeded to get even drunker and crank up SingStar to an unimaginable volume so that even Celia (not Neve, but Celia) had banged on their door and told them to shut the fuck up. That was when they’d started singing ‘Nellie the Elephant’ followed by ‘Hey Fatty Bum Bum’ and even ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’ until the Barcardi Breezers ran out.
Neve had spent all of the next day crying on Celia’s shoulder. Celia had told their mother, who’d passed it on to Mr Slater, who must have had a word with Dougie and he’d definitely said something to Charlotte because after that, the gloves had come off. It was open warfare. Celia and Charlotte had had a screaming match in the middle of Stroud Green Road. Mrs Slater could hardly bring herself to be civil to Charlotte, and Charlotte took it out on Neve. Plus ça bloody change.
‘I’m sorry,’ Neve repeated, because it never did any good trying to explain or, God forbid, argue with Charlotte. She just gave back a hundred times worse and she always made it personal, so Neve had decided long ago that repetition was better than reason. ‘I’m really sorry.’
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Charlotte snapped as Neve took a step forward. ‘How many times do I have to tell you? Shoes off!’
With all the grace of a baby elephant, Neve wobbled on one foot as she tried to yank off her boot and succeeded in crashing into her bike.
‘The bike shouldn’t even be in the hall,’ Charlotte exploded all over again, not at all concerned that Neve was gingerly feeling her hip to see if it was broken. ‘You’re so fucking selfish. I tore a new pair of tights on it, which you should totally pay for.’
It was a double-fronted house with a hall so large that even if there were bikes stacked three deep, there’d still be room to pass unhindered. But Neve wasn’t going to get into that. ‘I suppose I could try and mount it on a wall rack but I’m not sure the plaster’s strong enough to take it.’
‘I don’t fucking care! Leave it outside! It’s not like cycling anywhere is having much impact on your figure, is it?’ Charlotte demanded nastily, and when she smiled like that, her face lit up with malice, she didn’t look so pretty.
It was just Charlotte throwing out the same tired old insults that weren’t even true any more, but Neve still looked down at her body just to make sure it hadn’t swelled in size since Charlotte had started shouting at her.
‘Sorry,’ Neve offered again and she stood there, hands hanging limply by her sides, head bowed until with one last muttered curse, Charlotte went back into her flat and slammed the door shut behind her.
Neve crept up the stairs, tensing as she reached the first-floor landing in case Charlotte decided that she was ready for an encore performance because she did that sometimes. Just to keep Neve on her toes.
Once she was inside her own flat, Neve made herself an omelette very quietly, making sure to carefully place plates and utensils down on the rubber mats she’d bought. She’d even fixed rubber stops to her cupboard doors so it was impossible to slam them shut, though she hadn’t had much luck with her cutlery drawer. She ate her dinner at the kitchen table and then it was seven thirty and Charlotte would be settling down to EastEnders and not liable to start banging on the ceiling because the sound of Neve’s fingers on her computer keyboard or turning the pages of a book could be classed as noise pollution if you were the most heinous, evil, black-hearted witch that had ever walked the earth.
As she washed up, Neve thought about Max. But then she’d been thinking about Max all afternoon. She longed to be the kind of girl who could metaphorically shrug her shoulders, find some perspective on the situation and then turn it into a funny anecdote to tell her friends. As it was, Neve knew she’d take the sordid secret to her grave and never tell a soul, and she could only hope that Max felt the same way. Maybe he was already holding court over cocktails in some private members’ club in Soho and making his glamorous, jaded friends roar with laughter as he gave them a blow-by-blow account of how he’d spent the previous night.
Neve clutched her head in her hands and felt a wave of shame and revulsion shudder through her. She was still sitting on her kitchen chair and rocking gently when the phone rang ten minutes later.
‘Hello?’ she said warily into the receiver, because her mother always called about this time and she wasn’t sure that she could handle Mrs Slater loudly lamenting about how cold it was in Yorkshire and how many inches of snowfall they’d had in the last twenty-four hours.
‘Neve? It’s William. How are you?’ Just like that, just with six words from William, Neve went from despair to delight.
‘I’m fine,’ she gasped, face pinking up from pleasure. ‘What a lovely surprise. How are you?’
‘All the better for hearing your voice. How do you do that?’
‘I don’t know,’ Neve said, resisting the urge to giggle girlishly and preen at William’s compliment. ‘I thought we were going to speak on Sunday. Is something wrong?’
‘Not exactly.’ But William sounded so forlorn that Neve felt her heart ache in sympathy. ‘Neevy, I’ve got myself in a terrible bind with the footnotes on that paper I’m writing about Rossetti. Honestly, I’m thinking of giving up academia and getting a job in a bookshop.’
‘Oh dear,’ Neve cooed, her tone getting so saccharine that she actually wanted to gag. ‘I don’t think you’d be a model bookshop employee; you’d be too busy reading under the counter to do inventory and you’d refuse outright to sell books to customers if you thought they were badly written or without any literary merit.’
‘And you wouldn’t?’ William enquired, and he didn’t say it snidely but with such rich amusement that Neve couldn’t take offence.
‘Oh, I totally would,’ she assured him. ‘So is there any way I can help? I mean, the Romantic Poets aren’t my strongest area, but would you like me to read your latest draft?’
‘Would you?’ William’s relief was palpable. ‘Also, are you going to the British Library in the next week, because I need to check a couple of references but the inter-library loans take for ever and I’m not even sure that they’ll have—’
‘It’s no trouble. I’m due a visit,’ Neve said eagerly. Every few weeks or so, she’d invent a reason to slope off to the British Library, and after she’d spent ten minutes diligently checking a source note, she’d while away a couple of hours on non-Archive business. She always felt guilty about it and lived in fear that Mr Freemont would suddenly appear to check up on her, discover the awful truth and sack her, but she still did it nevertheless. ‘Why don’t you email me the references and I promise I’ll have them checked before the end of next week.’
‘Thank you so much,’ William breathed, and Neve clutched the phone tighter because even though there was a tiny transatlantic delay each time he spoke, she imagined she could feel his breath stirring her skin. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you.’
‘Really, it’s nothing,’ Neve said, turning her head away from the receiver so she could momentarily grin like a loon. ‘Always happy to help,’ she added, when she could trust herself to speak.
‘
Well, now we’ve got that business out of the way, maybe you can explain why you lied to me,’ William said briskly.
‘What? I haven’t lied. What have I lied about?’ Neve demanded, even as she racked her brains for anything she might have written to William that veered away from the truth. Maybe he meant lying by omission because she hadn’t told him about …
‘I can tell that you’re not fine, even though you said that you were. I knew as soon as you picked up the phone and said hello that something was troubling you.’ William’s voice softened. ‘I’d like to think that you trust me enough to confide in me.’
‘I do trust you,’ Neve said quickly, and though she’d give anything to be able to tell someone about last night and beg for some sound advice, William was the last person she’d tell. She’d tell her mother before she told William. ‘And really, I’m fine. It’s nothing.’
‘You are not fine and it’s obviously something rather than nothing. I’m going to have to resort to cliché and tell you that a problem shared is a problem halved.’
‘Well, I’m not sure that’s true,’ Neve groused and William tsked, and more to keep him on the phone than anything else, she said, ‘I, well … um, I made an error of judgement and it led to all kinds of er … wrongness and there was someone else involved and I think I may have upset them.’ She frowned, and if she hadn’t been holding the phone, her head would have been back in her hands. ‘Or they might have told other people what I did. Oh God, I’m in such a pickle.’