Chapter 4
A big part of why Marnie felt unable to really chill out at home was because it wasn’t her home. It was just a house filled with someone else’s furniture, none of it fitting her concept of ‘aesthetic’. She was renting 34A Redbrook Row in Doreton on the outskirts of Sheffield on a short-term lease and she hated the damned place. She had shut herself away for Christmas and cried herself stupid in this alien house, where every room was decorated in miserable greys which reflected her mood perfectly. Her mother had gone down to stay with Gabrielle in Leicester for the festive season so at least Marnie didn’t have to hide behind a facade that all was well with her. A lone Christmas was, at least, better than putting herself through the strain of all that acting.
Since moving into the house in early December, she had felt increasingly restless and agitated, unfulfilled and frustrated. She did love her job at Café Caramba, but she had to try so much harder than her male counterparts to be taken seriously. Sometimes life felt like such an uphill slog and she had too many anxiety dreams about trying to catch up with a figure in front of her whilst she could only walk in slow motion, or screaming and no sound coming out of her mouth. The only light relief in her present existence was meeting Lilian Dearman in the cheesecake forum every weekend. Someone who may or may not be a sweet old lady. Someone who had a wicked sense of humour, whoever she – or he – was.
Marnie had set up a new account with the Sisters of Cheesecake and she was so glad she had because it had been the best entertainment. Without fail, for the last three Friday and Saturday nights Lilian had been causing merry hell on the far-too-serious baking forum to Ealing comedy standard and Marnie hoped that this weekend would be no different. Lilian operated under multiple personas to cause maximum havoc: BigBase, Yorkpud, Creamtop, Lilette amongst others. Marnie powered up her laptop to find ‘Lilette’ single-handedly battling an army of cheesecake fanatics as always. Marnie grinned, suspecting that Lilian was being deliberately controversial.
‘I have on occasion had a very successful result replacing butter with extra virgin olive oil,’ Lilian had typed, causing a woman from Kings Lynn to resort to capital letters in her vituperative response. Marnie waded in. ‘Or goose fat. Though more sugar should be added to the crumb.’ She chuckled heartily at the wave of abuse that started scrolling up on the screen, turned to scratch an itch on her neck and caught sight of her cheerful reflection in the mirrored glass door. She realised then that she couldn’t remember the last time she’d laughed properly before this.
‘What a bunch of old farts,’ wrote Lilian on the forum private messaging page. ‘How are you, dear?’
‘I’m good,’ replied Marnie. ‘How are you?’
‘Could be better. Crumbling spine, alas,’ came the answer. ‘More crumbly than a Digestive base, in fact. I’ve become intolerant of sleeping tablets but I’ve found a good debate wears me out and helps me to have a decent sleep. Have the new mugs arrived? How’s Mr Fox?’
Lilian knew everything about the new swanky mugs and her involuntary attraction to Justin. In fact she seemed to know everything about Marnie, thanks to that first communication, which Marnie tried not to think about.
‘I shan’t be online for a couple of weeks,’ Lilian typed after half an hour’s jolly chat. ‘I have to go to hospital on Monday to hang upside down like a bat. Or at least that’s what happened last time I went on traction.’ She added a couple of smiley faces but Marnie didn’t feel comfortable making a joke of it.
‘Doesn’t sound too great,’ she fired back. ‘Hope it goes well.’
‘Lots of love,’ Lilian replied quickly. ‘I am now off to bed early for a change. Sweet dreams. Hope you have something to report about Mr Fox the next time we converse.’
Marnie doubted it, but she was wrong to. It would shortly go from zero to ninety miles per hour, commencing with a screaming orgasm.
*
The next week began on a particular low as Marnie broke her resolve not to look at Aaron’s Facebook page and found that he was in Sorrento with his girlfriend looking very loved up. They were staying in the hotel that Marnie had found online the week before they split up. She’d wanted to book it for them but he’d said that he didn’t fancy Sorrento. He’d meant, of course, that he didn’t fancy Sorrento with her. The next picture featured a close-up of his girlfriend’s hand showing off a big sparkly ring. Marnie forced herself to close the app and gave herself a stern word when she felt a prickle of tears behind her eyes.
She had a lunch meeting on Monday with the departmental heads though Justin Fox didn’t attend as he was away in London until Thursday. She got lumbered with Sweaty Andrew who put her off her quiche with his sour odour and bored her to death with his flawed vision of million-calorie dessert coffees. The days after that dragged uncharacteristically, though there was a retirement party on Friday lunchtime in the pub local to Café Caramba for the old bloke who worked in the post room to look forward to. It spoke volumes when that was the highlight of the week.
Clifford Beech had been in the building since before it was Café Caramba, even before it was the HQ of the West Riding Building Society and was Fraser & Lunn Insurance, where he was taken on as a school-leaver to be a post room boy and, over his fifty-year stay, he worked his way up to post room man. He liked it there; he had no interest in fancy job titles and no ambitions further than working in the post room, though he had trained many other entry-level post room boys and girls – some of whom were now management. He was as much part and parcel of the building as were the cavernous cellars which sprawled under the city and the oversized cockerel weathervane that spun on the rooftop and if someone had cut Clifford Beech in half like a stick of rock, they would have found the words ‘post room’ written through the middle. Thank goodness no one had, though, and he was able to retire healthy and intact.
More or less the whole building popped into the Dirty Dog on the Friday lunchtime to buy Clifford a drink, or give him a present or an envelope with money in it collected by their department. Laurence the CEO had done the formal gift presentation in the atrium: a set of golf clubs and two all-expenses paid tickets to a course in Spain for a week. Clifford was delighted to tears, especially because Laurence had the reputation of being tighter than a worm’s arsehole and he’d been expecting a carriage clock. Marnie let her staff have an early and extended lunch break so they could join him and say their goodbyes. She went to the pub herself after they’d returned and would go home straight from there because she’d booked half a day off to sort out her car. She took with her the envelope of money that Beverage Marketing had collected for the old lad and a bottle of rum that she’d bought for him herself.
As she turned the corner into the Headrow, who should she see about to go into the Dirty Dog but Justin Fox and her heart gave a stupid teenage leap. The odd thing was that the more she had tried to avoid him, the more their paths seemed to collide. It’s Fate with a capital F, said some stupid hopeful voice inside her that still – despite her back catalogue of disastrous relationships with men – clung to the belief that one of them would walk straight out of the pages of a Midnight Moon romantic novel and into her heart. Could he be the one?
The timing was off. It was far too soon after the Aaron debacle. Plus she didn’t want to be distracted. She was throwing everything she had at the massive company overhaul and didn’t want to zone out at her desk with a head full of soft-focus images of Justin Fox holding her hand as they strolled through a sunny field of cowslips. She needed to keep her mind on a track of cappuccinos, lattes, flat whites and espressos. Unrealistic hope was her worst enemy at the moment.
But even as she was thinking that, she pulled into the disused doorway of a recently closed clothes shop and checked her face in the mirror of her compact. Her eyeliner was in place, her foundation hadn’t clumped around the sides of her nose and there were no Alice Cooper runs of mascara. She touched up her power-red lipstick and bared her teeth to make sure it hadn’t transferred, then blotted her lips with a tissue. Just for good measure, she gave herself a spray of perfume, then tipped her head upside down and flung it back to trap some volume in her thick black hair. She lifted each leg behind her and checked over her shoulder for ladders then took a deep breath, jutted out her more-than-fair share of breasts, sucked in her stomach – whilst all the time a counter-romantic voice in her head was tutting disappointedly – and walked the remaining fifteen steps to the front door of the pub.
It was empty apart from a bleary-eyed Clifford who was grinning like Michael from Ryan’s Daughter, a couple of stragglers who didn’t want to go back to the office and Sweaty Andrew who was chatting to the man who threw Ben Affleck right into the back of the shade, Justin Fox. Marnie could feel his eyes on her sashaying bum as she journeyed across to Clifford to give him a kiss and a hug, rum and the envelope. The table behind him was covered in boxes and a stack of other envelopes . . . and a line of cocktails, pints and shorts.
‘Lovely Marnie, help me out here,’ slurred Clifford. ‘I can’t drink all these. Take what you want. There’s a slex on the beach, there’s a snippery whipple, pina colander and that, I do believe, is a . . . oh, I can’t remember.’ He pointed to a small glass full of muddied liquid: a lethal blend of Baileys, vodka, Kahlua, amaretto and cream. It had more calories in it than one of Elvis’s special burgers. But it looked deceptively innocent against all the others and so Marnie lifted that one and chinked it against Clifford’s glass, just before he was stolen away by someone who had decided he really should have a cup of tea and a sandwich from the buffet before he threw up. Marnie sipped her drink, trying not to notice that Justin Fox was on his way over, holding a tall glass that appeared to have half a harvest festival balancing on its rim.
‘So you’re partial to a Screaming Orgasm then?’ was his opening line.
‘Pardon?’ said Marnie. Blimey, he did move fast.
‘The cocktail. It’s a Screaming Orgas— oh you didn’t . . . did you think . . . Oh . . .’ He threw back his head and laughed and Marnie saw how beautiful and white and even his teeth were. Shark-like, her brain said, which she thought was a bit unkind of it. ‘I thought you knew what it was called,’ he went on. Marnie didn’t buy his innocence. Nice try, though.
Her laughter joined his nevertheless. ‘Nope, I didn’t know. I thought you’d been reading my diary—’ Shit, too flirty. ‘. . . Er, so what did you go for then?’
‘A very tame Tequila Sunrise,’ replied Justin, touching his glass against Marnie’s. ‘Nice to meet properly over a drink instead of stale sandwiches in the boardroom. Or women sprawled over your carpet.’
‘Yes, it is,’ Marnie answered, feeling her cheeks begin to heat up. She flapped at her face. ‘Hot in here, isn’t it?’
Justin grinned as if he knew that the room temperature had nothing to do with why Marnie was standing in front of him with cheeks the colour of a red velvet cake.
‘So, tell me what you really think of Café Caramba’s new marketing slogan: “Flat white – it’s buzzing”?’
‘I think it’s. . . very Laurence,’ said Marnie diplomatically.
‘I think it’s very crap,’ said Justin. ‘What the fuck does it even mean?’
Marnie pulled an ‘I have no idea’ face.
‘And let’s not even talk about “Make every day a Macchiato day”. Good grief. Is this really the man who turns companies around?’
Marnie throttled back on a hoot of laughter. She should be careful, though. What if Justin was a spy? Laurence was surrounded by yes-men and if she was honest, Justin had been nodding very approvingly in the aforesaid Flat White meeting, where Laurence rode over everyone’s ideas and implemented his own.
‘He has some good concepts,’ she delivered cautiously.
‘Absolutely. Really liked the one for espresso. “Black. It’s the new black”. Have to give him that.’
Marnie’s lip curled. That had been her brainchild. She’d asked Laurence in a one-to-one meeting in December what he’d thought about it. ‘Not a lot,’ he had replied with a condescending sniff. Then he’d only gone and nicked it for himself and the whole building was raving about it. Marnie tipped the tiny cocktail down her neck and reached for another. There was nothing like a couple of screaming orgasms for blotting out some blatant plagiarism.
The next half-hour flew as they talked about Laurence and his mad company directives and the jargon spouted in the meetings. Blue-Sky Thinking, Game-Changer, We’re on a Journey, Thought Shower – Laurence brought them all into play. Sweaty Andrew had tried to impress with a Let’s Get our Ducks in a Row once, which had Marnie pretend-blowing her nose to cover up the involuntary snort she made. If she’d caught anyone’s eye in that meeting that’d had the smallest amused twinkle in it, she’d have exploded. Now she knew that Justin was of the same mindset, she had better never look at him again when Laurence went cheesy-corporate.
Then their conversation crept beyond work boundaries and into the territory of personal. So, Marnie, do you live in the city or commute? Where do you come from originally? Are you single? He barely gave her time to bat back any questions to him; it was all about her, which was refreshingly unusual. Marnie hadn’t had any lunch and those liqueurs were quickly going to her head and she felt very warm inside and dangerously receptive to his flattery. All worries that Justin might be a plant had dissolved. She doubted a Laurence-spy would have used the line, ‘You know, your eyes are the most amazing shade of green.’
‘I suppose I’d better get back to the hell-hole,’ he said eventually with a loaded sigh. ‘Walk back together?’
‘I’ve got the afternoon off,’ said Marnie. ‘I caught the train in this morning. My car’s poorly.’
‘Well, you can walk part of the way with me at least.’
‘Okay,’ she agreed.
They both said goodbye to a totally plastered Clifford – Justin with a firm handshake and Marnie with a squashy hug – and Justin held the door open for Marnie on the way out. Aaron would have let it swing in her face.
‘I’m glad I’m not driv—’ was as far as Marnie got in the sentence before Justin grabbed the top of her arm and steered her right rather than left.
‘So let’s walk around the block and sober up a bit,’ he said, turning into the dead end of a lane that went behind the pub.
‘Ok-ay,’ replied Marnie, thinking that this was slightly odd but she went with it, presuming his intentions were innocent. Then he suddenly stopped, pushed her against the wall and kissed her full on the mouth. Caught unawares, it took Marnie a long second to press him backwards, politely but firmly.
‘Forgive me. I’ve wanted to do that since I was in the first meeting with you,’ Justin said, his voice a low sexy growl. ‘You had a navy blue suit on and red “fuck-me” shoes.’
Marnie raised her eyebrows. He had remembered what she wore? He had been lusting after her for two months? Gulp.
‘I trust your wife doesn’t know you’re in the habit of kissing other women in dark alleys,’ she said, hoping that he’d say he wasn’t attached because she would have slapped his face if he was.
He grinned. ‘I can assure you, there’s no one in here.’ He patted his heart with his wedding-ring-less left hand. ‘Now do I have your permission to kiss you?’
No, piss off with your soft velvety lips, said the protective angel on her shoulder, though her mouth issued no such protest. She couldn’t entirely blame the alcohol, although it played its part, but Justin Fox’s obvious desire for her blew all sense out of the window. He took her silence for concession. This time his kiss was tentative, tender, gentle and Marnie felt a complimentary hardness as he pressed against her.
Then he broke away and apologised. ‘Forgive me for being an absolute oaf. I have forgotten how to behave. This is what tequila at lunchtime and a marriage breakdown does for you.’
Marnie’s hands rose, palms flat on his chest, forming a definite barrier between them.
‘So you are married?’
‘In name only. Honestly. We’re in the final stages of our divorce.’ He rubbed his forehead with his fingertips. ‘Look, have lunch with me next week because a back alley isn’t the right place for this conversation, especially not when we’re both swimming with alcohol. I’ll explain then, if you’ll let me. And I’ll behave. I’ll try to anyway.’
He’s married, said that angel. Steer well clear.
Yeah, but let him explain, argued something else with a too-convincing voice. One that couldn’t believe its luck that this tall, dark handsome exec actually fancied her. Yep, she knew she was being too easily bought by him remembering what she was wearing in that meeting. She wasn’t even really sure if she had been in her navy suit.
‘Maybe,’ she said demurely, and opened her bag to retrieve a couple of tissues, because if she looked anything like Justin did at that moment, she might have been mistaken for Pennywise the clown. Her lipstick was smeared all over the bottom half of his face.
‘Please let’s keep this between ourselves,’ he said. ‘My divorce is complicated as it is and Laurence doesn’t like workplace relationships. He doesn’t want anyone to have what he can’t have himself, the ugly old bugger.’
Relationships. Is that where he saw this going? Blimey.
Marnie held up her compact mirror for Justin to wipe his face and he laughed.
‘We look as if we’ve been at a Billy Smart convention.’
He had such a lovely smile, said something soppy inside her and she knew she was in trouble.
As they exited the lane and moved onto the bustling Leeds Headrow, Justin turned to Marnie.
‘Well, hope your car doesn’t prove to be too expensive, and have a lovely weekend,’ he said.
‘And you,’ she replied, at a respectable physical distance now.
‘Mine will be hideous,’ he said with a sorrow-laden out-breath. ‘I want to fast-forward to Wednesday and that lunch. I’ll pick you up at twelve from outside the library.’
And with that he was gone and with delightfully trembly legs, Marnie walked down to the train station feeling more like a sighing Disney princess with every step.
*
Over the weekend, Marnie grew a grin so large it had its own brain. Her thoughts were completely overtaken by her up-close and personal encounter with Justin Fox and there was no room in her head for researching her cheesecake book, mulling over her dissipating relationship with her best friend, Aaron and Sorrento, or Lilian Dearman and her disintegrating spine. Her frontal lobe was showing one film only: The Snog, which would have worn out by Saturday lunchtime had it been an old-style videotape. It changed a touch with each loop. She added in Justin holding her face in big square hands (though in reality they were quite long and narrow), kissing her eyelids, telling her that he had fallen in love with her the first time he saw her. She deleted from her memory the part about his mouth looking as if it had sustained third-degree burns from her lipstick. She added in that he kissed her again passionately in the middle of the street as they parted, throwing caution to the wind.
She lounged in the bath like a beached mermaid with expensive treatments on her hair and face. She went to Meadowhall and bought new underwear and indelible lipstick. And on Monday and Tuesday, not even Vicky’s miserable countenance could dampen her smile. Roisean even asked her if she’d had ‘a bit of work’ done because she looked different somehow. Must be the effect of the onset of spring, explained Marnie, imagining Justin springing from a wardrobe onto her spread-eagled body. Time seemed to take a tantalisingly long journey to noon on Wednesday.
Despite anticipating that something would arise to scupper plans, nothing did and the allotted hour eventually arrived. Marnie left the office early so she could reapply her makeup in the loo. Justin’s car pulled around the corner just as she reached the library and she hopped straight in. He gave her knee an affectionate squeeze as she fastened her seat belt.
‘I wondered if you’d remember,’ he said with a lazy, sexy grin.
‘I wondered if you would forget,’ she replied, trying to keep cool which was difficult as her nether regions were fizzing.
They drove to a quiet country pub where, over halibut and an arty-farty fan of vegetables, they’d gazed into each other’s eyes and smiled a lot like shy teenagers. Justin confessed that he hadn’t been looking for romance at all, didn’t even want to start something else whilst he was in the mess of his divorce but Marnie had hit him in the heart like a thunderbolt. And Marnie told him that she hadn’t been looking for romance either but he’d ignited something within her that she rather liked the feel of. They’d had a ridiculously passionate fumble in his car afterwards in which he admitted that he hadn’t had sex in fourteen months and so she had better watch out. He demolished her new flimsy knickers and, as she had no spare pair, she said that she’d have to go without them for the rest of the day and he replied that he’d better hide his crotch behind his desk all afternoon then because the thought of it would keep his erection so big they could have flown the company flag from it.
A month later, the affair was established and passionate. And it was wonderful, amazing, blissful and all-consuming and ticked all the boxes except one – the big fat box that had the word ‘perfect’ on the side of it, because her heart remained troubled by their relationship. She wanted to declare that they were a couple from the rooftops but that was strictly prohibited. Okay, so Laurence might have frowned heavily on romances in the workplace, which is why they gave no hint of any connection between them in Café Caramba HQ, but out of work should have been a different matter. Yet it wasn’t. Justin had only ever been to her house once. She’d cooked a meal which he ate nervously as if he expected his wife to appear from behind the curtains. His nerves, however, had not shown in the post-prandial bonk but they’d reappeared when the hands of the clock touched on 9 p.m. Marnie had barely got her breath back before he had leapt into the shower and dressed to go and not even his profuse apology that he had to rush off could smooth over the disappointment. They never went out to dinner or to the cinema or for a walk in the park in case they were seen. He gave her the best of reasons why they had to behave so, at least for the time being: because of his children. Justin still resided in the family home even though he and his wife lived separate lives now – and he knew that sounded like a line, but he really was telling the truth. His wife was a first-class bitch and yes, she’d agreed to a divorce but only on her terms. Terms he had to strictly adhere to because if not, he knew she would keep his three small children away from him. Or worse, poison them against him.
Suranna Fox, it seemed, had taken a leaf out of Gwyneth Paltrow’s book and insisted on a conscious uncoupling, which – Justin said – was a psycho-bollocks way of her drawing out the agony. It was making him depressed and thank goodness Marnie understood and wasn’t giving him a hard time like any other woman might have. Did she know how much of an angel she was for understanding such an impossible, sticky, horrible situation?
So how could Marnie give him any grief? She kept her misgivings to herself and gave Justin lots of care and attention and sex and the affair continued under a blanket of secrecy. But it didn’t sit right with Marnie at all.