The Love Letter (51 page)

Kizzy honked and peeled with laughter, hooking her burnished curtain of hair behind her tiny ear to reveal that Conrad was standing at her shoulder, looking delighted.

Legs didn’t find it particularly funny, but plastered a smile to her face for professional damage limitation.

‘Why exactly
has
Gordon chosen Farcombe?’ asked Kizzy. ‘It does seem a very odd choice given the festival’s reputation.

‘The chair of the selection committee
is
a huge fan of Ptolemy,’ Legs reminded her.

‘Yes, but Gordon can’t have known that Poppy Protheroe devours his work in secret, can he?’ Kizzy queried.

‘Gordon is a very odd man,’ Conrad huffed, ‘and very, very difficult to handle.’

‘He’s a genius,’ Legs flared.

‘Poppy would agree with that,’ said Kizzy. ‘She claims his books have an Oedipal subtext and contain carnivalesque satire which is a moral map of modern society.’

‘Bloody good reads, too,’ Legs muttered.

‘I like “carnivalesque satire”.’ Conrad pursed his lips, one eye closed as he committed the phrase to memory.

Legs replayed her own subtext, past, present and future. ‘It’s over; it’s over.’

When Kizzy finally left Fellows Howlett, she gave Legs a tight hug farewell. ‘You’re so lovely. Please marry Francis and have lots of babies so I can have your job.’

‘Don’t say you heard it from me,’ Legs whispered, ‘but I have it on good authority there’ll be a vacancy here very soon,’

Letting out a little shriek of excitement Kizzy rushed back into the office to press her new contact details into Conrad’s palm, cheek-pecking him ostentatiously and with so many gushing thanks for his time that Legs was half convinced she was going to drop to her knees and unbuckle his flies.

Afterwards, Conrad retreated to his tinted glass lair to make some calls. Legs could see testosterone smoking off him like petrol fumes on a start grid.

Please don’t call me through, she prayed silently, knowing that
if he did she’d be tempted to wrench up the water cooler by its base and cart it into her office to hurl at him. She quickly called up Google on screen to trawl all online history of Brooke Kelly, race-fixing and Hector Protheroe’s involvement.

He called her through.

As soon as she entered, Conrad pulled her behind the big potted cheese plant and started necking her, lips sucking on her skin with clumsy urgency. Still drunk from lunch and no doubt randily excited by Kizzy, he obviously thought this was the best way to appease her.

‘No!’ She pulled away. ‘Anyone in the office could see.’

‘I’ve wanted you all day.’

‘Not here.’

It’s over, it’s over, it’s over, her head screamed.

‘The boardroom then. Ten minutes. Be tender.’ He raised an eyebrow. It was Conrad shorthand for a blow-job.

She returned to her desk for her ten-minute stay of execution, barely concentrating as she flicked up and down the Ptolemy Finch references, ‘it’s over’ screaming in her head. Then a word caught her eye, bringing the blessed silence of focus.

Never Moor.

It was the place Ptolemy had been born, a miserable hellhole the boy had only just escaped with his life. She had heard it said several times in recent days in quite a different context, but it hadn’t registered until now. She’d even been talking about it with Kizzy over lunch. The farm where Byrne had grown up with Brooke and Poppy had the same name.

She Googled ‘Never Moor Cottage’. Nothing. She changed it to ‘Nevermore Farm’.

Bingo! There it was, just a few miles from Farcombe, buried deep in the hinterland of uncultivated inland valleys.

Legs felt her palms start to sweat as the mouse raced, clicked and zoomed.

Streetview flew her down to the nearest lane, from which she
spied sagging roofs, broken chimneys and derelict outhouses that made Inkpot Farm look like a new-build.

She emailed Gordon, heart racing.
Nevermore Cottage.

She waited for a reply, fingernails hooked over her lower teeth. She hadn’t looked up from the screen in a quarter of an hour now. Conrad would already be waiting in the board room, she realised. It’s so over.

One line winged back.
Don’t come here. GL

Gordon Lapis. She stared at his name in the Sender box for a long time. Gordon Lapis.

She’d always assumed he was old because he was so wise and opinionated, but so was Byrne, and he was her own generation. That dry wit was so distinctive, the sense of fair play and the brusque charm unique to them both for one reason; they were the same person. Jago Byrne was Gordon Lapis.

Grabbing a pen, she wrote out the letters G-O-R-D-O-N-L-A-P-I-S in a big circle and then started rearranging them.

Prodigal Son.

None of those clever, obsessive Ptolemy Finch fans had ever spotted it, she realised with a gasp.

No wonder Gordon had been so insistent that he had to make his first public appearance at Farcombe. He was going to show Poppy what a success her son had made of his life. Would he bask in the schadenfreude of the moment?

But even as she thought it, Legs knew it didn’t ring true of Byrne, who was so intense and private, and had only agreed to the Reveal at all under the greatest duress. She knew she should have protected him, instead she’d paved his way to hell. She closed her eyes and groaned as she remembered drunkenly boasting about Gordon’s forthcoming apparence that first night she and Byrne shared a table in the Book Inn. He’d been so rude about the books, calling them formulaic – and she had flirted so shamelessly. Then her eyes snapped open as she remembered him telling her, ‘I am about to lose my life.’

He’d grown up believing that Hector had crippled his father. Now he was back, was he planning to get even? She heard his words in her head again, that deep Irish burr: ‘When I was a little boy, I thought he was the Devil’.

She felt clammy with fear despite the cloying heat of the day. How far was he prepared to go to take revenge for Brooke’s accident, she wondered. She had to stop him.

I know who you are,
she emailed again with shaking fingers.
And I know why you are about to lose your life, Byrne. I am so sorry. It’s all my fault. I’ll make it better.

Two words came back.
Stay away.

Queuing up behind it, Conrad had sent a curt message from his BlackBerry.
Your ten minutes are up and my ten inches are up for tender.

With a sob, she ran towards the boardroom knowing that the only thing she was going to tender was her resignation, from both her job and her love affair.

Another storm was breaking outside. Rain was lashing the glass roof as she crossed the gallery around the big office block’s atrium. Somebody had left a wet golfing umbrella puffed out to dry on the rails. It was printed with Gordon Lapis’s first four covers. She grabbed it like Ptolemy plucking up his faithful sword, Lenore.

It didn’t help that Conrad was already ready for action, leaning back on the chair at the far end of the board table, flies lowered to release his expectant hard on.

‘Have you been singing in the rain?’ He took in the umbrella with surprise.

‘I’m having a Mary Poppins moment.’ She lifted her chin.

‘How thrilling.’ He was tapping his gold fountain pen on the sleek, polished beech of the board table. ‘Now slip under here. I have something to pop in you.’

Realising he wanted her to approach him on hands and knees beneath the table, Legs let out a soft laugh and instead, she climbed on board it.

Conrad looked both alarmed and highly excited as she clanked towards him, scattering notepads and corporate goodies that had been laid out for a big foreign publisher the agency were hosting later.

She stopped a metre short of him and looked up. The false ceiling was made up of opaque illuminated panels. She tried one with the sharp end of her brolly and it shattered beautifully.

‘What are you doing?’ Conrad yelped, leaping up from his chair.

‘Breaking through the glass ceiling,’ she laughed, shattering some more panels.

He made a dash for the door.

‘You might want to do up your flies first,’ she called after him.

‘You were lucky not to get arrested,’ Ros said disapprovingly later. ‘They’ll probably have you for breach of contract. And how are you going to pay your rent?’

‘You were lucky not to get arrested,’ Daisy said when she called Legs not long afterwards, having heard the story from Will, who had heard it from Nico. Legend now had it that she had scaled the Fellows Howlett atrium roof and smashed her way through that too.

‘You were lucky not to get arrested,’ said her father when she dropped in to see him at the Kew house that evening. ‘And it doesn’t do to be unemployed at your age. You can come and work with me at the shop if you like.’

‘What are the wages like?’

‘Don’t talk nonsense. I can only offer Saturdays to start with, but
there are digestives at tea break. I
can
purchase groceries myself you know,’ he chided gently as he watched her stacking his fridge with Waitrose ready meals, half-moon spectacles propped in his thinning grey hair, one side of his collar up, and kind grey eyes amused.

‘Yes, but you forget, Dad. You’re already looking too thin.’

‘You sound like your mother.’

Legs cast him a long, watchful look, waiting for more.

He stared her down. ‘I’m
not
going to talk about it.’

‘
You
sound like Mum.’ Emotion caught in her throat.

He looked stubbornly away.

She wondered briefly whether his glamorous lady shop assistants were rallying around to help; Vegan Megan was probably lovingly baking him lentil loaf each day, while Scented Rose tended his garden and Clever Heather lured him out to the theatre to take his mind off things.

Holding up her hands in despair, she turned away to fetch the last of the Waitrose bags to the fridge.

‘Have you got flu? You look unwell.’ He observed her clumsy movements and the pallor of her face.

‘Just a summer cold.’ She made light of it. Her headache still wouldn’t budge despite dosing herself up with painkillers all day, and she was increasingly short of breath, but she didn’t want her father to go in search of the home medical journal to start diagnosing life-threatening ailments, one of his favourite occupations. ‘I’m fine. Tired and jobless, that’s all.’

‘So are you going to start work with me on Saturday?’ he persisted.

‘I’m going straight back to Devon.’ When she turned back towards him, his face had brightened with delight.

‘Have you got a message for Mum?’ she asked hopefully.

‘No. But you can tell Francis I’m looking forward to visiting the British Museum together again soon.’

‘Dad, I’m not with Francis any more.’

‘Oh.’ He looked incredibly sad. For years, he’d assumed his role
as father-in-law was a fait accompli. ‘Please think about this very carefully, Legs. Didn’t you say that he’s just given you a car?’

‘You gave me a car when I was eighteen. Does that mean I have to work in the shop for ever?’

He screwed up one eye. ‘Your logic is not entirely linear, although I do get the thrust of your point.’

Legs laughed, ignoring the razorblades of pain in her throat. She loved his erudite predictability, the sayings and phrases he had repeated so often through her life that they were now familiar motifs. Friends had often teased her that in Francis she’d chosen a man just like her father.

She had intended to drill him about her mother again that evening, to probe into his feelings, demand a reaction other than this gentle, resigned apathy. She’d even dared herself to ask him about his own infidelities. But she felt too wiped out, and had already lost heart. He seemed so fragile for all his customary clever bravura. It would be like interrogating an old teddy bear with Guantanamo Bay torture techniques. Instead, she bunged a Waitrose meal for two in the oven, made a pot of tea and settled beside him in one of the sagging conservatory sofas.

‘Do you have a copy of “The Raven” you could read to me?’

‘Since when have you been interested in Edgar Allen Poe?’

‘Just a passing fancy,’ she reassured him.

He chuckled, heaving himself up to search the bookcase in the hall, calling back over his shoulder. ‘It’s rather long.’

‘I’ve got all night.’ She curled into the sofa arm, fighting tiredness, her chest on fire. She really did feel ill now she came to think about it. ‘Can I sleep in my old bedroom?’

‘You’ll have to make up the bed.’ Reading glasses on the end of his nose now, releasing the unkempt grey coronet of hair to spring up like wild grass around his pink pond of a bald patch, Dorian brought in a battered volume of poetry from the hall.

Then he settled back to recite the Poe classic in which a raven traps the soul of a heartbroken man beneath his shadow with the
incessant cry of ‘nevermore’ in answer to every question about his lost love Lenore. To her shame, Legs drifted in and out of sleep.