The Love of My Life(46)

Chapter Twenty-Seven


LEO


Few newsrooms are empty at the weekend, and ours is no exception. Features is dead, of course, but today the news desk is frenzied, and politics is doing brisk business too. A protest has tipped into violence and skirmishes are breaking out across Westminster. Apparently the Foreign Secretary’s car has got stuck in an angry crowd. I hurry past the busy desks, unwilling to engage.

As I round the corner, I see Sheila at her desk.

‘Oh!’

‘Oh,’ she echoes. She removes her glasses.

It takes me a little while to realise she’s embarrassed. Her computer is switched off and there is a novel in front of her, and it’s ten past ten on Saturday morning. Eventually she places her book on her desk and swivels her chair to face me properly.

‘You look terrible,’ she says. ‘Are you OK?’

I shake my head.

‘Oh, Leo,’ she says quietly, and it comes to me, finally, that she has known all along. Humiliation comes at me like a landslide.

‘How did you know?’

‘The Rothschilds have been friends for years,’ she says. ‘Jeremy and I in particular; he’s always confided in me.’

I remain silent, mostly because I don’t trust myself to speak.

‘I’m sorry, Leo,’ she says. ‘I was never comfortable about you being kept in the dark.’

I’ve never heard tenderness in Sheila’s voice. It fills me with despair.

‘Is that why you kept asking about Emma being at Waterloo Station?’ I demand. ‘You were trying to tell me something?’

She looks down at her book. ‘Not really. I was passing through Waterloo on my way to interview someone, I saw Emma in the middle of the station, all at sixes and sevens, and I wondered what had happened. The next day we all heard about Janice disappearing. I realised that Emma must have just found out from Jeremy when I saw her.’

‘And . . . ?’

‘And, Leo, I felt angry for you. It wasn’t right that you didn’t know about them. That you had no idea just how close to your own life the Rothschilds have been.’ She sighs. ‘I suppose I asked about Emma because I hoped she might finally have come clean. But of course, she clearly hadn’t, and you just thought I was being nosy.’

I slide into someone’s seat: I’m still by the family and community desk, several metres from Sheila. The desk’s occupant has a Post-it reminder: PERSONAL TRAINER 6PM DON’T BE LATE.

‘You should have told me,’ is all I can say.

Sheila spires her fingertips. ‘I would have done, if I could. But I have loyalty to both parties, Leo. I had to promise Jeremy that I would never breathe a word of this to anyone.’

I stare at someone’s flashing voicemail light. Jeremy Rothschild doesn’t deserve your loyalty, I want to say. But she’s known Jeremy far longer than she has me.

Sheila continues: ‘I knew you’d find something when you started writing Emma’s stock. I saw you googling her university, Leo. Her TV series. I knew how upset and confused you’d be. I’ve found myself very conflicted.’

Someone in news turns on the giant TVs and the floor fills with noise. I get up and go to sit at my own desk.

‘I want to kill Jeremy Rothschild,’ I say, even though I’ve never been even half capable of violence.

Sheila sighs. ‘God knows, you must dislike him at present, but he’s not a bad man. He’s actually been very good to Emma.’

‘I bet he has!’

‘He’s not a bad man,’ she repeats.

‘Fine, Sheila. I get it. You’ve known him for years, you don’t want to take sides.’

She smiles, apologetically.

‘But, Ruby,’ I say, and my voice shatters. ‘What do I tell Ruby, Sheila? How can I be her father now?’

Sheila looks stern. ‘You’ll be her father in the same way you’ve always been,’ she says. ‘Of course. Look, this is not where you should be. Come to my place. I’ll give you some food, and then I think you need a good sleep. You look frightful.’

I’ve never been able to imagine where Sheila lives. She’s so private I don’t even know what part of London she travels in from every day – she just says ‘north of the river’. I imagine a flat somewhere sensible, maybe Queen’s Park or Barnsbury.

But Sheila is unlike anyone else I have met, and for this reason it is not a huge surprise when she tells me we can walk to hers in twenty minutes. And when she stops outside a townhouse on Cheyne Walk, north of the river by approximately five metres, I start to smile. Of course she lives in a grand house right on the river. Of course.

It is stylishly decorated inside; that sort of bookish, old-fashioned good taste Emma and I have striven for but never quite attained. Persian rugs and bookshelves; antiques from an ancestor’s Grand Tour. A pleasant smell of leather, flowers, ancient velvet.

‘Wow,’ I say, miserably. What a coup it would have been, in another life, to get an invitation to Sheila’s house. To be able to tell Jonty that Sheila is probably a multi-millionaire in property, that she has a neo-classical statue with a huge penis on her mantelpiece.

‘My father’s house,’ she says offhandedly. ‘Too many rooms for a single woman. Sometimes I – it gets too much.’ She gestures towards her bag, which contains the book she had come into work to read.