If I Never Met You(60)
‘Thank you. Yes, very well. He’s great and we have a lot in common.’ Laurie blathered this off the top of her head as she’d rather die a thousand deaths than say anything to Salter that could be construed as code for rampant boffing.
‘Do you?’ he said, with a tone that was a real question, not courtesy.
‘Yes, we’re both very serious about our work …’ Laurie smiled. ‘And equally serious about eating and drinking well at the weekend.’
‘Haha! Amen to that.’
Laurie’s main point of bonding with Mr Salter when they had to make Christmas party small talk was always his wine cellar, and botched attempts at cooking.
‘OK, good. Good. I’d never have put you two together, but if it’s working well for both of you, good. You’re attending the Christmas party, I hope?’
‘Oh yes, absolutely,’ Laurie said. Gah.
‘Good, good. Well, that was all. Marvellous stuff with the Brandon case.’
‘Oh, thank you!’ That was a Found Innocent Of All Charges of weeks back.
Laurie beamed as she passed Kerry on her way out, who glared back with barely concealed disappointment and irritation. Hah, Kerry wasn’t as clued up as she liked to pretend, then, if she hadn’t known that was going to be benign.
Laurie waited until she was leaving for the day to WhatsApp Jamie and say she might’ve just given him a major boost to his hopes of promotion.
Jamie
Seriously? YOU BEAUTY. Thanks L. Jx
Still glowing, she was stopped in the lobby by the office junior, Jasmine, their trainee legal clerk.
‘Are you seeing Jamie Carter?’ she said, pushing strands of her long, thin hair out of her moon-like face. She had hunted eyes and a tremulous demeanour that made Laurie worry for her.
‘I’m not quite sure you’ve got the right to ask me that, Jasmine?’ Laurie said, taken aback.
‘No, sorry. Everyone is talking about that photo of you … together.’ Jasmine somehow managed to make it sound like it was worthy of Pornhub.
‘Well … yes,’ Laurie said, shrugging.
‘I didn’t think you liked him?’
‘Hah, why?’
‘You said he was, uh, untrustworthy. You said he could never be trusted. You said he was like a tom cat that had not been neutered.’
Jasmine sounded as if she was reading a translation from the original Turkish and Laurie bit back the impulse to shrug: did I, so what? as this clearly mattered to Jasmine.
‘Ah. Snap judgement I suppose? Don’t pay too much attention to me.’
Jasmine’s expression spelled confusion and betrayal and she searched Laurie’s face intently for something. Oh, no. Laurie realised what Jasmine was searching for – nothing about Laurie, per se, but what specifically Jamie Carter had fallen for. Thanks to Laurie verbalising her antipathy to Jamie, Jasmine’s fevered imaginings had never gauged her as a threat, and yet there Laurie was, suddenly by his side.
Poor Jasmine. She had the strained look on her face of the stricken boyband groupie who was about to let out a primordial howl of longing and be wrestled away by burly security.
‘He’s nice … but it’s very new,’ Laurie said. ‘Who knows where it’ll go. If anywhere.’
‘Oh?’ Jasmine said, at first in surprise, and her look of horror deepened. Laurie was messing with Jasmine’s future husband and captain of her heart for nothing serious, the facetious whore!
What was left to Laurie to say, as comfort?
‘I’m sure he’d say the same,’ Laurie said.
‘Actually, he told Jemma you were the funniest, cleverest person he’d ever met.’
‘Aw, did he?’ Laurie said, genuinely touched.
‘Don’t hurt him!’ Jasmine said, in a sudden impassioned cry, and rushed out, apparently with ‘something in her eye’.
She left a bemused Laurie staring at three receptionists, for whom Christmas had come early.
24
‘Strike one, he had empty champagne bottles used as décor in his room,’ Emily said. ‘Strike two, he has seen Mumford & Sons’ – she paused – ‘live.’
‘He was unlikely to have seen them dead,’ Laurie said, shifting the glacé cherry on the cocktail stick out of the way to drink from her glass of rum and crushed ice.
‘More respect if he had, and was holding a dripping cutlass when the police arrived. Strike three, had a tattoo of the Coca-Cola logo. I asked him why and he said it was a private joke about his love of coke. I fucking mean. Rock and roll. Shine on, you crazy diamond. Farewell, Josh. It was like the “financial advisor has it large” starter pack.’
Emily was holding court on her latest Tinder calamity, having organised a night at The Liars Club, a subterranean tiki bar and ‘tropical hideaway’ of kitsch. It was all uplighters and downlighters and murals of palm trees on brickwork, and Laurie was sure she was meant to scorn it as naff, but she loved it.
Emily had invited Nadia, her radical feminist, medieval history lecturer friend who always wore a cloche hat and a scowl.
Emily was like this, an effortless collector of people, though not in a status-led or meretricious way. Just as an enthusiast. People seemed to attach themselves to her, as if she was Velcro. Emily had worked on an account at the university and come away with friends in academia.