Читать книгу Let's Call The Whole Thing Off - Jill Steeples - Страница 11

Chapter Four

When I woke, it was just gone seven. Shame washed over me as I looked across at Ben’s empty place in the bed, feeling a pang of disappointment that he wasn’t there. He’d been right. Even without having seduced him I felt much worse this morning as all the events of yesterday crashed in on me. I wasn’t sure if my pounding head was down to the awful memories of the day that would surely rank as the worst of my life or the number of glasses of wine I’d drunk.

I located my jeans in the guest room, pulled them on and wandered downstairs to find Ben.

‘Hey!’ He turned round from where he was standing at the stove and flashed me a big grin. ‘I was just doing you a bacon sandwich.’

‘Oh, lovely,’ I said, my nose twitching at the delicious smells wafting my way. For the first time ever, I felt self-conscious in his company, the memory of standing half-naked in front of him making me cringe with embarrassment. I dropped my gaze to the floor. ‘Look, Ben, I just wanted to apologise for last night. Really,’ I said, catching his eye, ‘I don’t know what came over me.’

‘Forget about it. I have.’ Clearly my spectacular entrance into his bedroom hadn’t been as memorable as I thought. ‘You’d had a tough day; it was perfectly understandable,’ he said, in the understatement of the year. He fell silent as he spread butter onto bread and then scooped the bacon out of the pan and onto the bread, squirting ketchup on the top. He handed me a plate and it felt like the loveliest thing anyone had ever done for me. I wasn’t sure Ed had ever fixed me breakfast in all the years we’d been together.

‘So how are you feeling today?’ He brought over mugs of tea and sat down at the table with me.

‘Fine,’ I said, not really meaning it, although I felt a resolve that hadn’t been there the day before. I didn’t think I could shed a tear now even if I wanted to. ‘I suppose I ought to get ready if I don’t want to be late.’

‘You’re not going in to work today?’

I nodded. It was the last thing I wanted to do, especially after yesterday’s bombshell. I was supposed to have ticked off dozens of jobs on my to-do list, but I hadn’t managed any. Not that it mattered any more. My wedding to-do list was now clearly redundant. Now I didn’t know whether I should be ringing round and telling everybody the wedding was off. The thought that all my dreams and hard work could be undone in a couple of phone calls made me shudder.

I wondered if the universe had been testing me, putting me through some elaborate pre-wedding initiation task. One which I’d clearly failed. If I hadn’t read that diary then I would never have known about Sophie and Ed and our wedding would have gone ahead as planned. Perhaps it was only a last-minute fling on Ed’s part and their relationship would have fizzled out once we’d married and I would have been none the wiser. Blissfully ignorant and happy.

Only I wasn’t. Now I was very much in the know and miserable.

‘So have you decided what you’re going to do? Are you still set on going ahead with the wedding?’ He paused, his sandwich in mid-air.

‘I think so.’ I couldn’t meet Ben’s eye. Instead, I ran my tongue around the outside of the doorstop of a sandwich, mopping up the oozing ketchup. Did I even still want to marry Ed after what he’d done? The thought of cancelling the wedding was the worst thing I’d ever contemplated, but did I have any other choice? Maybe I needed to postpone it at least, to work out with Ed if we even had a relationship worth saving.

Aargh. Frustration surged around my body. One minute I wanted to rush round to Ed’s place and commit serious bodily harm upon him, the next minute I wanted to forget I’d even read that stupid diary and pretend none of this had happened.

I needed to buy myself some time. Get things straight in my own mind before I faced everyone else.

‘We’ve been together such a long time. We were so looking forward to being married. Well, I was,’ I said, wondering if Ed had ever felt the same. ‘I don’t see why I should throw my whole life away because of Sophie. If what you say is true, that it’s me Ed really loves, then maybe there is some way of coming back from this?’ I could hear the desperation in my own voice. ‘Maybe this was just a pre-wedding blip. Something he needed to get out of his system.’

Ben shrugged, taking a sip from his tea, and I felt so grateful that he was there, allowing me to talk rubbish, nodding in all the right places, without making me feel worse than I already did.

‘You might be right.’ He looked at me closely, his gaze on my face unnerving. ‘Listen, can’t you call in sick? If I’m being honest you’re looking pretty rough.’

I smiled wryly. Perhaps I could rely on Ben to give it to me straight after all. I smoothed my hair back off my face and wiped the back of my hand across my mouth in what I realised, too late, was a particularly feminine and endearing move. Ben had certainly seen me at my best these last couple of days. Something else I wish I could scrub out and pretend had never happened.

‘Thanks, Ben, but I ought to go. Hopefully it will take my mind off things.’

***

Fat chance there was of that! It seemed like the whole world, or rather the entire workforce of Purcells, was conspiring against me by wanting to talk weddings, and my wedding in particular. Head down, I’d raced up the stairs to the accounts department floor, past Helen in credit control, past Sue and Bev in purchase ledger, past the entire sale ledger, trying to avoid eye contact with any of them, but I swear each and every one of them called out as I passed, ‘not long to go now, Anna!’

And now that young lad Adam from the warehouse was standing in front of my desk with a soppy grin on his face.

‘So how’s the blooming bride?’

‘What?’ It came out much more tersely than I’d intended.

He shifted uneasily on the spot.

‘How are you?’ His grin lost some of its previous sparkle. ‘Not long to go now, eh?’

Why hadn’t I noticed before that everyone at work seemed to talk in trite little clichés?

‘What’s that then, Adam? Month end? Pay day? The end of the world?’ I knew which one was most apt for my new circumstances.

‘Er, no, I meant your wedding, it’s this Saturday, isn’t it?’

‘Ah right, yes, silly me. How could I have forgotten? Ha ha, well, that’s hardly likely, is it, with everyone around here reminding me of the fact.’ I looked up at Adam’s crestfallen face and felt a momentary pang of guilt. I’d clearly just gained another label across my forehead. ‘Office bitch’ as well as ‘office bride-to-be’.

Only I wasn’t the office bride-to-be now, I was the office laughing stock, even if the office weren’t yet aware of the fact. And if they weren’t aware of it now, they soon would be if I returned to work after the honeymoon without that magic ring on my finger, or even on Saturday for the lucky few who had been invited to witness the wedding crash of the year. Oh yes, I was definitely on the fast track to obtaining company notoriety. Maybe I should just climb up onto my desk right now and make the big announcement.

Ladies and Gentlemen! Sorry to interrupt your early-morning internet browsing disguised as working, but my wedding, which seems to be the hottest gossip on the office floor, is officially off! Cue stunned faces and hushed whispers. So maybe we could all stop dissecting the finer details of my non-big day and move on to discussing someone else’s life. Yes?

That customary prickle of shame ran across my skin again. I knew I’d never be able to return to work if the wedding didn’t go ahead, facing everyone’s sympathetic looks, hearing the furtive whispers. No, I just couldn’t do it. I’d have to run off and join the circus or something or find another job at least.

I looked up at Adam who’d turned a fetching pink colour.

‘Sorry,’ I muttered, grabbing the contents of my in-tray and straightening them in my hands, ‘it’s just that I’ve got lots to do here before I can even think about marrying the man of my dreams. Was there something in particular you wanted?’

‘Oh right, yes, of course. No, it was nothing. Nothing important. Just a chat. I’ll let you get on with … your, um, work then.’ He shuffled backwards in to the corridor looking like a man desperate for a means of escape.

Huh, the man of my dreams! Had Ed ever been the man of my dreams? If you’d asked me before yesterday morning then I would have said a categorical yes. Now, he’d morphed into the man of my nightmares and I felt as though I didn’t know diddly-squat about anything.

Mum thought Ed was God’s gift. In fact, I sometimes wondered if she didn’t get on better with Ed than I did! They chatted incessantly, bonded over obscure American TV thrillers and shared silly little jokes. Admittedly she’d put him through an extensive and arduous interview process for the position of ideal son-in-law, over several Sunday lunches, and he’d passed with flying colours. But what would she say when she found out that the golden boy was nothing more than a two-faced conman?

He’d appeared to be all the things a mother would want in a potential son-in-law: he was kind and friendly, clean-cut and polite, with impeccable manners and good prospects. In fact, he possessed all the things a woman would want in a potential husband, but all those good traits had now been wiped clean away by the discovery that he was just another low-life, lying little toerag.

I took a sip of my coffee, put down the wad of papers in my hand and clicked on my inbox. Ninety-six unread emails in one day. Yuk. I had no idea where to start, what my job was even or what I’d been doing when I’d left the office on Friday night, – full of hope, heading off for my last weekend as a single woman. Now it would be forever remembered as my last weekend as a happily engaged woman before the bolt of lightning struck, with the upcoming weekend looming like a toxic cloud over my head. Somehow I had to get through the next few days pretending everything was normal and that I was perfectly capable of carrying out my job, which at that moment seemed way beyond my reach.

‘Anna?’

I jumped and my hand flung out involuntarily, knocking my mug of coffee and spilling the entire contents over my desk. The huge heap of papers I’d been aimlessly shuffling around were now drenched.

‘Oh, Christ! What is it? Look what you made me do! If you’ve come to make small talk about my wedding that’s very nice of you, but I really don’t have the time. I do have a job to do, you know, and if I don’t get this lot cleared by Friday, then there’s every chance I won’t have a job to come back to.’ I picked up the soggy mass of papers and held them up in the air over my bin, watching the brown water drip out. They were past saving, I knew. I slumped down into my seat and finally looked up with a scowl at the person who was frankly the cause of my current damp predicament.

‘Oh shit! Helloo!’ I said, sitting up straight again in my chair. My boss, the official holder of the title ‘Office Bitch Numero Uno’ was looking at me darkly.

‘Everything okay, Anna?’

‘Yes, yes, absolutely fine. Sorry! Just spilt my coffee.’ As if that really needed explaining.

‘Yes. I can see. Well, I’m glad to hear you’re attempting to clear your desk, but had you forgotten about our meeting?’

‘Oh shit!’ My three-month review with Nina Palmer, how the hell could I have forgotten? The meeting I’d been dreading for weeks, it had been uppermost in my mind until yesterday when it had been trumped in spectacular style by the discovery that my boyfriend was a complete shit. It was the meeting where she would tell me how I’d been getting on in the company and whether I had any future with them. Judging by her tight-lipped expression, I guessed I already knew the answer to that one.

‘I am so sorry,’ I said, apologising in my head for the over-use of the shit word, which was the only one that seemed to want to come into my head at the moment and then apologising for completely forgetting about our meeting. I glanced at my watch. It was 9.25 a.m. and from the recesses of my memory our meeting was set for 9.00 a.m. I was clearly not in the line-up for the ‘most punctual employee of the month award’.

‘Get yourself cleaned up and then come into my office, would you?’

‘Yes, yes, of course,’ I said, feeling my skin turning a bright shade of pink as Nina waltzed off.

Oh well, this is just bloody marvellous, I thought, when I returned to my desk armed with a wad of kitchen towels, making a half-hearted attempt at mopping up the mess. Somehow not only had I managed to alienate my fiancé and send him running into the arms of my best friend, it looked as though there was every chance I could lose my job as well and all in the space of a couple of days. Everything was Ed’s fault. I looked down at the warm soggy patch on my jeans and sighed again. Had I got dressed in the dark this morning? Jeans and T-shirt, what had I been thinking? I never dressed so casually for work. If I’d been looking to make a good impression, I’d clearly failed.

‘So,’ Nina said, when I stumbled in to her office and she beckoned me to sit down opposite her, ‘how do you feel your first three months at Purcells has gone?’ She sat back in her chair, and crossed one stockinged leg over the other.

‘Okay, I think.’

‘Just okay?’

What the hell did she expect me to say? I’d been stuck in the corner of the office entering invoices and manipulating spread sheets for three months. It was hardly very taxing. I could quite easily have done it standing on my head, but it was a job and I needed a job after being made redundant from my dream job only four months earlier. This was never meant as a long-term career move, just as something to pay the bills, a stop-gap until something better came along, only nothing better had come along.

‘Well, you know, good-ish, I think.’ I had lost the capacity to construct a coherent sentence. It didn’t help that I felt like a completely disorganised and inefficient slouch in my old clothes, especially when Nina was dressed in a grey silk slub suit that oozed authority and class.

She nodded and looked at me intently.

‘Is there something wrong, Anna?’

‘No, no, nothing wrong at all.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, absolutely!’ I said, trying to look and sound like someone who was perfectly employable.

‘And do you enjoy working here, Anna?’

‘Yes!’ I gave a little leap in my seat and banged my hand on her desk. ‘Sorry … I love my job,’ I said, not entirely convincingly.

Please don’t sack me. Please don’t sack me. Please don’t sack me.

‘Good. It’s just that I couldn’t help noticing you’ve been a bit short with everyone this morning. Poor Adam couldn’t get away from your desk fast enough. There was the incident with the coffee. You completely forgot our meeting and I’ve just had an email from you that I think was intended for one of our suppliers.’ She turned her computer screen around so I could see for myself the incriminating evidence. ‘Is the stress of the wedding getting to you?’

‘Oh God. I am so sorry.’ I cringed in my seat. That was definitely the email I’d sent but no way had it been meant for Nina. Of all the people I could have mistakenly sent it to, it had to be my boss and on the day she was doing my appraisal too. ‘That email …’ The words trailed away. What words were there? Apart from disorganised, inefficient and ‘what job?’

Nina widened her eyes, looking at me expectantly.

‘Right, well, let’s not worry about that for the moment, shall we?’ she said with an imperceptible sigh. ‘If I’m being honest with you, Anna, I think you’ve done a reasonable job within the department, although I’m pretty certain this wouldn’t be your ideal choice of career?’

‘No, but—’

‘I wonder if it wouldn’t be better if …’

Oh God no. Please don’t sack me. I was pleading with my power of thought, but my subliminal suggestions were clearly not reaching the other side of the desk. Obviously there was some wonky celestial alignment at work, Mercury was in retrograde or Pluto was at odds with Neptune or Uranus was having an off day. It was the only explanation for everything going wrong in my life at the moment.

‘Nina, sorry to interrupt you but if you’re going to sack me I would much rather you come straight out and say so. Don’t worry about sparing my feelings. I’m really getting quite good at dealing with bad news right now.’

Nina put down her pen and sat back in her chair, chewing on the inside of her lip.

‘Ah, so there is something wrong. I knew it.’ She gave a supercilious smile, the smug bitch. ‘Why don’t you tell me what’s been going on, Anna?’

I looked at her, feeling all the energy slump out of me. What did it matter now? People were bound to find out sooner or later and if I was about to lose my job it wasn’t as if I’d have to come back and face everyone. I could disappear into the sunset with my pride hanging precariously in place.

‘Oh, it’s nothing really. Just the wedding, my wedding, this Saturday, it’s, um, well, it’s all a bit iffy now.’

Nina’s perfectly sculptured eyebrows shot up her forehead.

‘That’s hardly nothing. I’m sorry to hear it. But if you were having second thoughts about the marriage then maybe it’s for the best.’

‘Oh, I wasn’t having second thoughts. I just found out Ed was doing a bit of last-minute sampling of other models currently available on the market, that’s all.’

‘I see.’ She put down her pen and pulled down the lid on her laptop, nodding sagely, as if she knew everything about being dropped from a great height. Which was highly unlikely. Nina was definitely the type of person to be doing all the dropping. Boyfriends. And now employees, by the look of things. ‘Look, Anna, why don’t you go home?’

‘Home?’ Oh God, my worst nightmares were coming true, but surely she’d have to give me some kind of warning, let me work my notice period. I know I’d been cocking up left, right and centre today, but nothing that warranted being sacked on the spot.

‘Take the rest of the week off. Your mind is clearly not here, which is perfectly understandable in the circumstances. We can do this meeting when you get back.’

‘So you’re not sacking me, then?’

She gave a wry smile.

‘I never had any intention of sacking you, Anna. I actually wanted to discuss a new opportunity within the company that I think might better suit your skill set, but it can wait until another day. You need to go home and get things sorted out.’

‘Thanks, Nina,’ I said, feeling totally wrong-footed by her uncharacteristic show of kindness, ‘but I haven’t got any holiday left. I’ve used it all up for my honeymoon. Well, exotic holiday for one now, I suspect!’ I said brightly, trying to inject a note of humour into the whole sorry saga.

‘I know. Don’t worry about it. Just take it as compassionate leave.’

‘Really?’ I felt a huge lump rise in the back of my throat and tears gather in my eyes. Nina was showing me compassion. I wasn’t sure I could handle it. I’d never really liked her, considering her uppity, hard-edged and tight-lipped, but for the first time I was seeing a softer side to her character. ‘Thanks, Nina. I really appreciate it,’ I said, feeling bad at having misjudged her.

I wondered for the first time if we could actually be friends. As I turned to walk out of her office, I wanted to say, Hey, Nina, if you’re not doing anything on Saturday, why don’t you come along to the evening reception for a few drinks, but I didn’t even know if there would be a wedding ceremony, let alone an evening ‘do’ now. I quashed the pang of guilt I felt for not having previously invited her.

‘Absolutely. You go and try to enjoy yourself. We can talk when you get back.’

‘Thanks.’ My hand grabbed the edge of the door, emotion threatening to overwhelm me. ‘You know, what everyone says about you, all that rubbishy stuff, it isn’t true. You’re absolutely lovely, you really are?’

I don’t know what my mouth was thinking of. It was working totally independently of my brain. I saw the look of incredulity spread across Nina’s face.

‘Not that anybody says anything too—’

‘You have a great time, Anna,’ she interrupted.

I walked out of her office with my dignity somewhere around my nether regions.

Obviously Nina didn’t bear grudges. Obviously I was a rotten judge of character. Sophie, Ed and, most surprisingly, Nina had taught me that these last couple of days.