After rewording it three or four times, she risked a text to Jack.
Hardly know what to say, but, what happened & why? Call me if you can. E.
No reply. She didn’t think there would be one. Ever, possibly. She needed to message Charlotte too, but that was going to take more time and thought.
Once she was through the door of her cupboard-sized flat, she flopped down on the sofa and burst into heavy, heavy sobbing. She wanted to scream those childhood complaints, that This Was So Unfair and It Wasn’t Her Fault.
This was Jack’s fault. He’d chosen to marry one woman and kiss another, and both were paying a horrendous price. Edie was furious with Jack, but most of all, she was mystified. If he’d wanted her, even so much as for an affair, why choose the first few hours of making an honest woman of Charlotte for his rankest act of dishonesty?
By lunchtime, she steeled herself to call their boss, Richard. Leaving her job, without one to go to, wasn’t only a professional disaster, it felt personal. She hated letting Richard down, and she writhed at the thought of him being repulsed by her behaviour. It was one thing to be despised by the Lucie Maguires of this world, another to disgust people whose good opinion you really valued.
Richard was an incredibly handsome black man and so impeccably dressed, Edie imagined he’d walk away from a plane crash adjusting a cufflink, with one extra waistcoat button undone. (‘He doesn’t sweat,’ Jack said. ‘Literally or figuratively. Ever.’) His wife was a high-flying prosecutor, and they had two eerily well-mannered kids. The secret nickname among their colleagues was ‘the Obamas’.
Everyone said Richard had a soft spot for Edie and she was his ‘little favourite’. Edie didn’t know if that was true. If it was, she could only think it was down to the fact that she dealt with someone as smart as Richard by being absolutely straightforward. A lot of others responded to his fearsomely cool intellect by bullshitting him, which was, to use a Richard phrase, the wrong play.
He answered his mobile immediately.
‘Edie.’
‘Richard, I’m sorry to bother you on a Sunday.’
‘OK. We can skip the explanation as to why.’
‘… Can we?’
‘Louis helpfully put me in the picture.’
Setting aside what this told Edie about Louis’s loyalty, she said: ‘I’m so, so sorry, Richard. I’m handing in my notice. I won’t be coming into work tomorrow so you don’t have to worry about a bad atmosphere or anything.’
‘You’re required by your contract to work four weeks’ notice.’
‘I know,’ Edie said. ‘Under the circumstances I thought you might … let me off it. I can take part of it as holiday owing?’
‘I’m not clear which half of the unhappy couple will be reporting in yet. Am I supposed to have two staff on gardening leave, and a third functioning from behind a vale of tears?’
‘Sorry,’ Edie said, in a small voice.
Richard sighed.
‘Why did I break the no couples rule? Mind you, even when your employees aren’t a couple, it’s no guarantee, eh.’
Edie said nothing.
‘Look, your extra-curriculars are none of my business, except when it affects my business.’
‘Richard, I’m sorry. If there was any way I could come back I would, but I can’t.’ Edie tried not to sob.
‘I don’t want decisions made about that, yet. It so happens I have a suggestion for a solution that might suit us both. A very short-notice job has come in, I was going to talk to you about it tomorrow. Have you heard of the actor, Elliot Owen?’
‘Er. Yes. From that swords and sandals show?’
The conversation had taken a surreal turn.
‘That’s him. A friend at a publishing house has on their knees begged me to spare a copywriter as a replacement to ghost-write his autobiog, after the last guy walked at the last minute. Or the first minute, the one where they met each other.’
‘OK …’ Edie grimaced.
‘He’s back home in Nottingham to do some TV thing. “One for the cred not the bread,” I’m told. There’s a three- month window starting now to get all his hilarious stories out of him, before he’s off to America. Then four to six weeks to type the thing up. You’re from Nottingham too, am I right? So, go. See the folks. It’s good money. Then afterwards, we’ll look at how the land lies in the office.’
‘I’ve never ghost-written a book before,’ Edie said. ‘I don’t know how.’
‘No, but how hard can it be? This will be one of those “separate kids from their pocket money” jobs where you pretend this vacuous pretty boy has amassed a lifetime of wisdom at twenty-five and everyone just looks at the pictures. You’re plenty literate enough to make him sound halfway articulate.’
Edie fell silent.
‘Seriously, it’s stenography. He talks, you marshal his self-aggrandising drivel into something vaguely coherent.’
Edie swithered. On the one hand, this sounded fairly mad. On the other hand, her boss was offering her a way of paying her rent for the near future. And Richard was right: as an alternative, he could contractually insist she worked her notice in the office. Anything was better than that.
‘OK,’ Edie said. ‘Thanks for the chance.’
‘Great. I said Tuesday to start, his people will be in touch. They’ll courier the cuttings over to you, so drop me a text with your folks’ address. By the way - I pass this on with a wry eyebrow raise – they, and I quote, want you to “really get under his skin and get some real meat out of this”. Try to ignore ground that’s been covered already in his press.’
‘Mmm-hmmm,’ said Edie, with the firm assurance of someone agreeing to do something they had no idea how to do.
‘Check in with me, every so often.’
‘Will do.’
There was a pause where Richard heavy sighed again.
‘And this part of the conversation is strictly off the record. I couldn’t care less about the rights and wrongs and who-did-whats of your superannuated game of kiss chase with Jack Marshall. But I’m disappointed in your taste.’
Edie was surprised at this, and could only say:
‘Oh?’
‘You’ve always struck me as a bright woman, with a lot about herself. He’s an irrelevant person. Learn to spot irrelevant people. Don’t expect someone who doesn’t know who they are to care who you are.’
Edie, surprised, nodded meekly and then remembered he couldn’t see her.
‘OK.
