The French Girl(48)
“Believe me, he’s very good at it when he tries. Very efficient.” Of course he is. Tom is the man who does what needs to be done, no matter what.
“I know, but . . . nasty to you? What did he say?”
“It doesn’t matter—no, really, it doesn’t.” I shake my head at her. “I don’t want to drag you into anything.” I look at the ceiling again. Does it need repainting? Or is it just that the lamp is casting uneven shadows? I wonder where Severine is sleeping—does she even sleep? She’s only in my head, so I suppose she must sleep when I do, except that I can’t imagine that at all. I can imagine her still, even imagine her with her eyes closed, but there’s a readiness there, like a panther in repose. At the slightest movement or sound she would unhurriedly raise her eyelids and survey the surrounds with her dark, secretive eyes. The thought is oddly comforting, like having a guard dog on the premises. Severine, my protector. I almost laugh out loud.
“Did you want it to turn into anything?” Lara asks carefully after a moment. I turn my head to look at her, but this time she’s the one inspecting the ceiling. There are mascara flakes on her eyelashes; I will find smudges on my bed linen in the morning that are hell to get out. “You always just seemed like . . . mates. What about Seb?”
It crosses my mind that Seb never looked to Lara first. Right from our very first meeting he honed in on me. In retrospect I wonder if that was part of the attraction. “Seb and I broke up a decade ago.” She turns her head to look at me with unashamed skepticism, and I can hardly blame her for it. If I didn’t know myself that I was over Seb, how could I expect anyone else to? “Seb now . . . he isn’t the same as the Seb I knew back then. Or thought I knew . . .” I’m not sure Seb was ever who I thought he was. “Maybe if I’d seen him in the intervening years I’d have been over him long ago.” Or maybe not; maybe it’s the stark contrast of now versus then that allows me to see things more clearly.
“Closure,” she says thoughtfully. Then again, with a tired smile and an American accent: “Closure.” A large yawn arrives, which she covers delicately, somehow putting me in mind of a cat, and then I think of her again on that car journey back from France, golden and sated, the cat that got the cream. I close my eyes tightly, but the image remains. “But Tom,” she is saying. “Did you really want something more?”
Is she being more or less tenacious than I expect? Is she schooling her expression or is this a natural reaction? I can’t stop the second-guessing. “God, I don’t know. I never thought of him like that, and then suddenly . . .” Was it so sudden? I think of coming to the surface in his car after the journey back from lunch with his folks: wakey wakey, sleeping beauty, of that instant before the world rushed back in. Perhaps that fleeting moment lingered in my head, setting off ripples . . . I shrug, somehow disturbed by that thought. “I don’t know.” Her yawn is catching; I’m yawning myself now.
“Mmm,” she says, her eyelids drifting closed.
I reach out and flick off the bedside light. How is it that I can feel her warmth stealing across the inches between us, sense the rise and fall of her chest as she breathes evenly: the physical connection plus the intangible webs that link us—how is it that all of this binds us, yet we’re still alone inside our heads?
* * *
—
On Monday Julie has a message for me when I get back to my office after a meeting: Call Caroline Horridge, followed by a Haft & Weil number. There’s no message from Tom, not that he would call my office number, and not that I expect him to call at all. I answer a few e-mails first, but the yellow Post-it with Julie’s curly script sits on my desk and glares at me unrelentingly until I recognize I’m prevaricating. I grit my teeth, pick up the phone and dial, ignoring Severine, who is lounging against the wall inspecting her fingernails.
Caro answers exactly as she always does, stating her name in crisp tones after a single ring. “Hi, Caro, it’s Kate Channing here,” I say breezily, determined to cut off any of her game-playing tactics. “You left a message at my office.”
Nonetheless, she leaves a beat or two, as if, even after hearing my full name and exactly why I’m calling, she’s still struggling to place me. “Ah, yes, Kate,” she says warmly, when she finally does speak. “Apologies, I’ve just been immersed in some difficult drafting. Back to the real world, though: I was calling to talk with you about the recruitment progress.”
I have no idea what she’s talking about. “In relation to . . . ?”
“Haft & Weil, of course. Our recruitment plans. I’m sure by now Gordon has told you that he’s handing over the reins of that project to me.”
“Um . . .” My fake smile slides right off my face.
“He hasn’t? Oh, I am sorry”—no, she’s not—“I didn’t mean to jump the gun”—yes, she did—“I was sure he’d spoken to you.” She knows he hasn’t. “Well, he has, so you and I are going to be working together on it from now on.” She pauses expectantly.
“Interesting,” I say. It is, actually, on a number of levels, but of course she expects something more than that. I recover the fake smile and plaster it on. “Well, welcome aboard.” I’m sure Gordon would have wanted to tell me himself; I wonder how he will react when he realizes he’s been leapfrogged.