The Love Letter (5 page)

A week later he sheepishly asked her to upgrade him to a Radisson and book him a chiropractor.

Legs had worked for him tirelessly, often staying late, never complaining when he loaded her with extra duties, knowing that little by little she was becoming indispensible, showing her intelligence and initiative, and earning his trust. She soon even managed to make him laugh, a reward equalling those rare, vivid moments of praise from the man of few words and many million-pound manuscripts. But his laughter was always hard won, and she paid the price for trying too hard.

Eight weeks after she started at Fellows Howlett, Legs scored a triumph by rearranging a long-planned trip to Frankfurt in a way that gave Conrad an unprecedented afternoon off, an upgraded flight and a first-steal meeting with an American publisher eager to snap up new British talent. He was highly impressed. ‘You should go far, Allegra.’

‘Are you flattering me, or suggesting I remove myself to a greater distance?’

‘Stick around.’

‘I’ll be as sticky as you want me to be,’ she promised naughtily.

He had flashed that rare smile, as succinct as his speaking manner, but his green eyes remained serious. ‘Flirtation is small arms fire in business; I suggest you drop it from your CV if you want to break through the glass ceiling.’

After that lecture, she stopped the wisecracks. Yet she had often caught him looking at her through the smoked-glass wall that divided their work spaces, his expression impossible to read. Breaking through ceilings and walls became a recurring theme in her dreams, where she would shatter her way through hothouses, halls of mirrors and observatories to get to his side.

As the weeks passed, her crush on Conrad had grown in direct
proportion to her increasing dissatisfaction at home. Her fiancé Francis had a far better job, fast-tracking a route through the editorial department of a blue-chip publishing group, but he despised it. He was tiring of London, he said. He talked obsessively about returning to his family home, Farcombe, and the festival his father had started up. He talked about the wedding as though it was a baptism to a new life. She suddenly saw parallels with Ros abandoning all her musical ambitions, and it frightened her.

She kept these fears from friends and work colleagues. ‘How’s the wedding shaping up?’ Conrad would ask.

Eager to cheer him up, Legs embellished plans for fire jugglers and jazz quartets, clifftop pyrotechnics and hosts of performance artists. Despite his warning, she started to made her boss laugh again, continually in fact, and loved the sound, like the surf crashing on Devon shingle. Conrad’s laughter became a new favourite song she wanted to hear again and again.

Three months after his separation, he made her feel as though she was beginning to penetrate the inner circle when he took her along to an important lunch with a client, a blustery old academic whose strange fictional tomes set in the Sassanid Empire had proven surprisingly commercial, largely because they contained rather a lot of graphic sex. The academic was a terrible old letch and immediately locked onto Legs as bait, making her suspect that Conrad had invited her along purely to sweeten his client’s palate. Polite and professional, Legs had tolerated his attentions, although the temptation to spear him in the groin with her fork every time his hands wandered over her thighs beneath the table was almost overwhelming. Instead, she’d drunk too much champagne, laughed along gamely to risqué jokes and sought distraction during the academic’s long, boring monologues about himself by focusing her thoughts upon Francis and the wedding. But by then, these subjects were both starting to worry her intensely, as the fairytale compared increasingly unfavourably to the quality, grown-up fiction and fact she encountered daily at Fellows Howlett.

When the old letch had been put on the Oxford train, blowing Legs kisses from his first class seat, she’d shared a taxi back to the office with her unusually quiet boss.

By then, she was wound too tight and felt too worked up to keep a lid on her anger.

‘I really enjoy working for you, Conrad,’ she’d blurted. ‘But I didn’t deserve that.’

He said nothing, staring out of the window at the plane trees as they crawled along Holland Park Avenue.

‘You were the one who told me to drop flirtation from my CV!’ she raged.

A long silence followed. Just as Legs had convinced herself that she’d just blown her career chances, he said quietly, ‘I miss you flirting.’

Conrad had also consumed a great deal of champagne over that lunch. The sleeping policemen which lined back roads to their Green Park offices had continually thrown them together, finally dislodging the scales from his eyes. For many weeks his male colleagues had all been lamenting the fact that lovely young Legs was engaged; such a sweet, sexy thing. Conrad had barely spared her a thought. Yet that day, observing her under attack at lunch, his attraction towards her was so sudden and overwhelming that his libido soared like a phoenix rising from the ashes.

He’d fixed her with his sexy, heart-battered green gaze. ‘I think you’re having serious second thoughts about getting married, Allegra.’

That Conrad had the guts to say it out loud, as well as the perception to see it when all her family and friends seemingly remained blind to it, won her runaway heart yet more. It might have been a lucky guess, but it had hit target with total accuracy.

‘I am,’ Legs had said in a small voice, hardly daring to believe she was admitting it.

‘Stay behind later and let’s talk about it.’

But Conrad was not a believer in talking. He might love the
passion of written words, but he was a man of physical action. That evening, after all their colleagues had left the office, he wasted no time in kissing Allegra by the water cooler, the heat between them so scorching that it threatened to boil its contents clean away, blister the partition walls and melt the office block’s atrium roof.

‘What about the glass ceiling?’ she’d asked helplessly, knowing that if the earth moved this much when he touched her, the roof had already begun falling in on her life.

‘You’re in the executive lift now,’ he had assured her.

From that day on, Conrad walked taller and Legs floated on air.

A year later, Conrad now rented a huge townhouse just off Wandsworth Common with rooms for each of his children that they used regularly, and he’d even taken a holiday with his entire family including his estranged wife. On the surface all was civilised calm. The divorce petition had been dropped when Mrs Knight realised how much money they both stood to lose by formalising the arrangement, and she now even wanted them to attend marriage therapy together, which Conrad wouldn’t countenance. The children were reportedly struggling to cope with their parents’ separation and believed, as their mother did, that the marriage could still be saved. Only Conrad maintained that it was the end of the line, which was ironic given that he hadn’t been the one to pull the plug in the first place. But he certainly kept quiet about the fact that he had a girlfriend fifteen years his junior, and remained reluctant to introduce Legs into his family life, or to spare more than one Saturday in four, which was why today was so special.

*

They parked on West Carriage Drive and found a quiet spot beneath a chestnut tree overlooking the Long Water. Unfurling a checked blanket with a matador’s skill, Conrad stepped back as Legs stretched out luxuriously upon it as eagerly as a sunbathing cat. His dark glasses slipped along his nose as he gazed
down at her, so that two roguish green eyes glittered above the wire rims.

Even after a year, he remained the most stomach-tighteningly sexy man she had ever encountered. That rare mix of old-fashioned machismo with a poet’s soul got her every time. To be adored by a man as powerful as Conrad Knight was utterly hypnotising.

Glowing in the glory of his company, backed up by the sunshine and a hamper full of iced cakes, she lay back on the checked blanket and gazed adoringly across at him as he mixed freshly squeezed orange juice with Prosecco. Her father, the drinks snob, would disapprove enormously, having always claimed buck’s fizz no better than an alcopop, but right now she could think of nothing she’d like to drink more. Dorian North disapproved of everything about Conrad – his age, his pushiness, his rough-diamond charm, and the fact that he had destroyed what Dorian believed to be his daughter’s greatest chance of happiness in marrying her childhood sweetheart.

Conrad was everything Francis wasn’t; an ambitious gambler with a quick temper, a steel-framed ego and a super-fast corporate brain. A self-made man, he had a fearsome reputation as a brilliant business mind in the ivory towers of literary fiction publishing, and it was said that he had single-handedly dragged renowned old agency, Fellows Howlett, into the twenty-first century. Since being head-hunted from top London publishing house, Clipstone, to take over the directorship from the last of the Fellows family, he had signed a succession of radical new literary names with commercial appeal while pensioning off the worst of the dinosaurs. Literary snobs had accused him of selling out at first, but with more Booker, Orange, Pulitzer and Nobel winners currently on his books than the Athenaeum Club membership list, Conrad had proved his worth. His were high-grossing, chart-topping authors, as well as being critically acclaimed thoroughbreds with good pedigrees and perfect fetlocks, and he saw himself as the leading London trainer. Legs had noticed that the only time he became
touchy was when it was hinted that his real success could be attributed to just one author, the legendary Gordon Lapis with his Ptolemy Finch series, a multi-million-selling runaway success that appealed to children and adults alike and had spawned four smash-hit movies, huge global merchandising and a brand name as recognisable as many fast food chains, fizzy drinks brands and football teams.

Having discovered Gordon in the agency slush pile, Conrad held the claim of creating a megastar, but he regularly complained that this meant he took all the shots from Gordon’s legendary short temper. He was increasingly using Legs to draw the fire away from his busy days.

Even now, he read a message on his BlackBerry with lowered brows. ‘Gordon is trying to contact you. Why would he think I can help on a Saturday?’

Fumbling to turn on her own phone, Legs cleared her throat awkwardly. ‘He might think we work some weekends. He does, after all.’

‘He works every day. He has more creative energy than Hollywood.’

Legs found a new email from Gordon waiting for her:
Would Julie Ocean fight for justice at any cost? If so, would she favour martial arts or firearms?’

‘Is it about “the Reveal”?’ demanded Conrad, trying to read the message past the sun-blinding screen glare.

‘No.’ She hastily typed
Tai Chi
and pressed send. ‘Just research he’s doing. He always refers me back to you about that. You are his earthly portal, after all.’

Gordon’s royalties alone accounted for eighty per cent of Fellows Howlett’s not inconsiderable annual profit, but pandering to Lapis’s increasing eccentricity had started to vex Conrad, who preferred his authors bibulous and biddable. He’d told Legs that he thought her more cheerful, informal manner might calm the hermetic scribe. It seemed this was not happening.

‘He’s being impossible about the Reveal,’ he sighed now, handing her a plastic flute of Buck’s Fizz before lying back on his elbows and tipping his face up to the sun.

Conrad was rightly proud of his golden literary find, and he remained crucial to its success, providing the only link between the super-famous boy hero, his enigmatic creator and the real world. But like the man with the goose that laid the golden egg, he constantly wanted to cut through the feathers and see what lay beneath.

Tai Chi is non contact,
Gordon had replied to Legs.
There is no point continuing this conversation as it is no longer constructive. P.s. Tell Conrad I remain resolute.

‘He remains resolute,’ she told him.

‘He’s infuriating!’

Legs admired the thrust of Conrad’s square chin, and the Grecian profile. She’d always thought he looked more a rugby player than a literary connoisseur, which was possibly why he rampaged through the publishing world like a prop forward tackling the scrum. He adored the cut and thrust of deal-making, but delicate negotiations frustrated him, and Gordon Lapis was an author who required a great deal of sensitive handling, more now than ever. The author had recently and very reluctantly agreed that it might be time to reveal his identity at long last, not least because the tabloids that had been threatening to do it for many years now appeared closer than ever, and the media man-hunt was reaching feverish proportions. Conrad saw the release of the next Ptolemy Finch book as the perfect cue for an unveiling.

But Gordon’s Reveal was not proving easy to plan. At first, he had changed his mind endlessly about the time and place, the stage management and the pomp and circumstance involved. An exclusive deal with a national newspaper had been mooted then dismissed, followed by failed discussions with Oprah’s production team, Hay Book Festival and Alan Yentob. Most recently, he’d settled on a venue that was laughably unrealistic.

‘He’s absolutely fixed on the Farcombe Festival idea,’ Conrad sighed.

On hearing the familiar word, Legs swallowed a blade of dismay and dread. The most elitist arts festival in the UK, notorious for its snobbish selection process, Farcombe would no more want Gordon on their programme than an end-of-pier Punch and Judy act. For all Conrad’s Booker nominees and literary grandees, he rarely ever had a client that matched up to the Farcombe entry mark. It was widely rumoured that they’d once turned down a request from the Poet Laureate to appear at the small, cherry-picked annual September festival because the role was deemed too mainstream.