Who's Afraid of Mr Wolfe? (41 page)

Ellie followed him into the house and Jack watched them go, not sure what to do next. Nothing in life had really prepared him for the correct way to end a day that included a botched declaration of love, a death, burying the evidence of somebody’s parentage and standing in a garden with a fish slice in your hand.

Ellie rolled over and then sat up quickly and scrabbled out of bed. Ten thirty – she was going to miss the Creative Department meeting.

Then she became aware of two things: she was still wearing yesterday’s clothes, and Edith was dead. That second thought made her sit back down on the bed with a bump. No more filthy Scrabble; no more huge neat gin; no more crazy clothes; no more of Edith’s sheer exuberance at being alive.

All that love and companionship they’d built up over the years, gone in minutes.

Ellie sat there bringing up deep sobs until there seemed nothing left to mine. She reached out for a tissue and blew her nose. Her chest felt as though somebody was sitting on it.

Yesterday had been like that rollercoaster ride Lesley and she had tried out. The high of seeing Jack, the low of arguing with him and then the depths of Edith dying. No,
not a rollercoaster ride: more like a vertical drop down a mine shaft. No wonder she’d flaked out last night. She remembered finding the bedding for Constance and Pandora and then going to sit up in her own room for a bit of peace.

Jack’s shoes and socks were by the bed and Ellie wondered if he’d spent the night in the room with her. Perhaps he’d put her to bed.

Yesterday morning she would have been beside herself with joy at the thought of spending another night with Jack. Now she wasn’t sure she cared any more. There was too much else careering round her brain. Thinking about a man who had dumped her and then reappeared talking regretful gibberish was too much. She kicked out at his shoes and then went to have a shower and find some paracetamol.

The house was silent as she phoned Lesley to tell her she wasn’t coming in. That conversation was torturous. Lesley had left a message on the answerphone the night before asking how Edith was, but Ellie had not been able to face telling her the truth. Listening to the shock in Lesley’s voice, followed by the sound of her crying, set Ellie off again. It was some time before she got down into the kitchen to find a note on the kitchen worktop:
Gone to sort out registrar and funeral details. Back late afternoon. Constance/Pandora
.

At least she had time to get herself pulled together.
Ellie’s mind limped over the events of the evening before, but when she started to go over the bit about digging the hole for Edith’s letters, she forced herself to stop. That would mean thinking about how kind Jack had been and she didn’t have the emotional battery power for that right now.

Once the kettle had boiled, she made a cup of tea and headed for the garden. Someone had left the back door unlocked.

Outside, she took a step back at the brightness of the sun. The temperature was already high and it was going to get higher. Even in her thin kimono she felt hot and overdressed. She sipped at her tea and wandered over to where they had buried Edith’s letters and photos, and saw that somebody had scattered a handful of small stones over the area, so that it was almost impossible to tell that the earth had been moved.

The person whom she supposed had done it was standing at the end of the garden looking up at the back of the house with his arms crossed. Barefoot and with stubble shadowing his cheeks and chin, Jack looked like something wild that had strayed into suburbia. He was heart-stoppingly sexy and he was still here, but what that meant she didn’t know, and right now she was fed up with trying to second-guess what Jack was up to. She’d been trying to work that out since that first night in his flat.

She saw him glance her way.

‘What are you looking at?’ she asked, turning to peer up at the roof.

‘The roof.’

She finished her tea and fumed. One- or two-word sentences from Jack weren’t good enough right now. What she wanted were pages and pages of explanation for the way he had treated her.

‘Any particular reason?’ she said.

‘Think there’s a slate missing.’

Ellie felt all her remaining nerves snap one after the other. Reappearing unannounced back in her life and coolly discussing the roof right after Edith had died wasn’t on. It wasn’t even his roof.

‘Tell you what, Jack,’ she said slowly, ‘why don’t I get you a ladder and you can climb up and have a good look. With any luck you’ll fall off it and break your bloody neck.’ She walked off down the garden, but not before seeing Jack’s face. She registered that he didn’t look surprised or angry, just resigned.

Ellie pushed open the back door and went into the kitchen again, switching the kettle on as she walked past it. She needed more tea – what she did not need was a session of playing riddles with a taciturn Yorkshire-man.

Jack appeared in the kitchen. ‘Ellie—’

‘Leave it, Jack. Go back to New York, work your way through all of the women in North America and leave me
alone. I’ve had enough of trying to guess what you’re up to, what you really feel. I don’t need another of yesterday’s half-hearted little speeches telling me how you didn’t want to want me.’

Ellie wrenched the top off the jar holding the teabags, grabbed one, threw it in her cup and then sloshed water from the kettle on top of it. ‘Do you remember how you were always trying to get me to raise my game? Well, you were right. I shouldn’t settle for the callous way you treated me. I deserve better.’

She jabbed a spoon into the teabag in the cup and then fished it out and slung it in the sink, not caring that it left a trail of brown liquid across the worktop.

‘Funnily enough, Jack, I’m a little bit upset this morning, and to be honest I’m surprised you’re still here. Shouldn’t you be off shagging someone else? It must be all of twenty-four hours since you’ve had sex. Unless of course you had a go at me while I was asleep.’

Jack hung his head as she pushed past him to get the milk from the fridge. ‘Ellie,’ he said, ‘I know you have so much else on your mind. I know I cocked it up yesterday, but let me explain.’

‘Don’t kid yourself, Jack,’ she said, pouring milk into her cup. ‘You cocked it up way before yesterday.’ She picked up her tea and walked past him back out into the garden. This time she stayed on the patio and settled herself into one of the chairs.

Jack came to sit in the chair opposite and gave her that intense, grey stare of his.

‘Ellie, sit and listen to me for ten minutes.’

‘No, Jack, don’t try and tell me what to do. You’re not my boss here in this garden. When I’ve finished this cup of tea, I’m going back to bed.’

Jack sighed. ‘OK, OK. I know you’re really angry with me.’

‘Oh, you picked that up, did you?’

‘Ellie … please …’ It was the same tone he had used in the meeting room yesterday, the one that had almost made her turn back when she had been heading for the door. Even this morning it managed to take the sharpest edge off her anger. She made a vague ‘go on’ gesture, but deliberately didn’t look at him. She wanted to hear what he had to say, not be distracted by the way he looked.

Jack leaned towards her. ‘Yesterday I was rubbish. If it had been a pitch to a client, I would have blown it. I said all the wrong things, started in the wrong place. Completely the wrong place.’

Ellie took a sip of tea that was far too hot and felt it burn its way down her throat.

‘I should have started by telling you that I love you, Ellie. That last night we spent together, well, I knew then that I was in trouble.’

‘Trouble?’ Ellie slammed her cup down on the table. There he went again, talking about her as if she was something
to be avoided, something bad that had happened to him.

‘Damn,’ Jack said, and rubbed his hand over his chin. ‘I used to be able to talk in a straight line without putting my foot in my mouth.’ He picked up her cup of tea and held it out for her to take. ‘I’m sorry, just … just drink your tea and give me another go.’

His tone once again swayed her and she slowly reached out and took the cup from him, but the familiar flip of her stomach that had greeted the phrase ‘I love you’ had now fizzled away to nothing. If Jack loved her, and it was a big ‘if’, he had a funny way of showing it.

She saw Jack shift in his chair. ‘I don’t find this easy, talking about Helen, laying out all my emotions as if they were things at a car-boot sale for people to pick over.’

Ellie looked down the garden and focused on how the heat was making little mirages of water appear on the lawn. She wanted to tell Jack that she wasn’t any old ‘people’, but it was his turn to talk, not hers.

Jack bent down, picked up a piece of loose stone from the patio and looked at it as though it had upset him in some way.

‘Helen dying was incomprehensible,’ he said sadly. ‘I’d known her for nearly seven years, four of them we’d been married, and then it was all gone. A matter of months. I had everything I wanted and then I had nothing.’

‘Afterwards … being around everyone I’d grown up
with, I couldn’t do it. So I took myself off to Manchester and just ate and slept and worked.’ He gave a mirthless laugh. ‘For the best part of two years I didn’t even think about anyone else.’

Ellie didn’t comment, just kept concentrating on the lawn and the shimmering heat haze.

‘Then one night I went out to a bar and picked up the first woman I could. The sex was good. I woke up in a sweat in the morning half expecting to find Helen’s hands round my throat, but there was nothing. So I kept on doing it.’

Ellie had a vision of Jack hanging around the bars in Manchester and felt intensely sad.

‘Don’t look at me like that, Ellie. I know it wasn’t a good way to act.’

‘I wasn’t judging you, Jack.’

He looked unconvinced. ‘Well, anyway, it wasn’t always one-night stands. Sometimes it was two nights, a couple of weeks, a few months. Nothing heavy, though. It worked for me. Every time I had sex it was like putting two fingers up at fate. Like proving I was still alive.’ Jack looked down at the stone and transferred it to his other hand.

‘I told people in Manchester nothing. Let them think I was what they saw. Made it easier – I’d had a bellyful of “poor widowed Jack”.’ Ellie saw him scowl and the stone ended up on the patio.

‘When I moved to London, it became even easier. More
women who only wanted to keep it cool. Of course, every now and again I’d get it wrong. Someone would start getting a bit keen. But I knew the signs. They’d cook a meal for me, or buy me a tie, or a book.’ Jack shook his head. ‘Books. What is it with women and books? My sisters were the same. They were always buying books for boys they fancied.’

Ellie bent down and picked up the stone and put it on the table. ‘It’s like sending a love letter without having to write it yourself,’ she said softly.

Jack studied her for a while and then turned his face away. His voice when he spoke again sounded dry and tired. ‘Well, I didn’t want their books or ties or lovingly prepared meals. When that happened, I bailed out. I know it was horrible, that I was turning into the kind of heartless bastard I used to sneer at, but I didn’t want to get emotionally involved again. I gave the impression that I did, but at the end of the day I couldn’t have given a toss.’

He reached out and picked up the stone again. ‘So how did I find myself a few months after meeting you, having a good time playing Scrabble with your great-aunt and getting genuinely upset that both your parents were dead?’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I guess at the start you came up on my blind side. I couldn’t recognise you for what you were. I saw a scruffy, tricky, underachieving member of staff. I suppose I should have twigged when I found myself getting so irritated by you …’ Jack palmed the
stone again and closed his fingers over it. ‘Then when I did realise why you were irritating me, it was too late. All I could hope was that the sex was going to be rubbish, or once I’d had you, I’d lose interest.’ He snorted. ‘Well, those two ideas crashed and burned spectacularly.’

Despite her earlier resolution to keep looking at Jack to a minimum, Ellie had found herself watching his face as he talked, particularly his eyes. She couldn’t believe how miserable he seemed. Like he was describing some kind of accident that he’d been in. He had her emotions zigzagging all over the place. Should she be pleased she had at least had some effect on him? That he had been shaken up by her even though the whole experience had obviously been so unpleasant for him?

Then, quite unexpectedly, Jack laughed. ‘That first time in my flat, you were so … surprising. You weren’t pretending to be cool or experienced. You weren’t playing any little power games. You were so damned open. When you actually thanked me, in my kitchen, for making you less timid, I felt … God, I don’t know … like I’d done something great for once. Almost something honourable.’ He shook his head. ‘Then the sex bit kept getting better and better and I started to like you more and more and …’

Ellie had that old familiar somersaulting-stomach feeling again.

‘Every time I tried to end it, I couldn’t. I knew I was
scrabbling to stay upright and remain in control. It bugged the hell out of me. I wanted to shake you and tell you to leave me alone.’ He darted a glance at her. ‘Going to New York seemed the best solution and even then … your visit … I …’

Jack pressed his lips together tightly and Ellie waited.

Everything in the garden seemed to be holding its breath along with her.

‘No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop thinking about you,’ he eventually said. ‘What you were doing, what you were thinking. Even what you were eating for your bloody lunch.’

The intensity of Jack’s stare ripped through Ellie’s determination to be quiet. ‘But you didn’t want me to replace Helen. I was right, wasn’t I? You can’t let her go.’

Jack shook his head. ‘No. Helen’s been dead ten years. She’s a huge part of who I am, but I’ve had to get on with life.’ He put the stone very deliberately back on the table, and when he spoke next, it was so quietly that Ellie had to strain to hear him.