“Have you told your husband?” I say, as the thought suddenly occurs to me.
“I’ve filled him in.” Demeter sighs. “But he can’t really comprehend it. His first reaction was, ‘We’ll sue them.’ That’s very James.” A little smile comes to her lips. “But there’s not a lot he can do to help in Brussels, to be honest.”
“OK.” I nod. “So, here’s what we do. We plan all night and have a meeting tomorrow morning, early.”
Demeter shakes her head disbelievingly. “You really think we can win round Alex?”
“We have to win him round.” I force myself to let a pause elapse before I add, as casually as I can, “Do you know where he is?”
“Right now, you mean? Don’t know.” Demeter scrutinizes me. “I’ve been wondering something. Are you two…”
“No.” I feel the color rush to my cheeks. “I mean, we…we…” I clear my throat and get up to make my cup of tea.
“Oh God,” says Demeter, watching me. “You are. I thought so. Oh Christ. You’re not smitten, are you?”
“No!” My voice leaps up like a fish. “Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous—”
“Katie, listen. Don’t get smitten.” She sounds almost urgent. “Protect yourself. Don’t let him into your heart.”
“Why not?” I try to ask as nonchalantly as possible.
“Because you’ll get hurt. Alex is—” Demeter breaks off, wrinkling her brow. “He’s adorable. But he’s incapable of commitment. What he loves is novelty. New cities, new ideas, boom-boom-boom. Right now you’re the latest novelty, but before long…”
I remember Alex on the office roof, darting about, enthusing about virtual experiences as if they were the real thing. Then I thrust that thought from my mind. Because it’s irrelevant.
“Look, Demeter, it’s fine,” I say, as robustly as I can. “It isn’t serious. I don’t expect it to go anywhere, it’s just a bit of…you know. Fun.”
“Well, as long as that’s all it is.” Demeter eyes me doubtfully. “But I’ve known a lot of his girlfriends and I’ve seen a lot of broken hearts. You know his nickname? It’s ‘One-Way Alex.’ Because once he’s off, he doesn’t come back. He’s like a one-way ticket round the world; never touches the same ground twice. I’ve seen bright, intelligent girls, waiting and hoping…” She shakes her head. “They know deep down he’ll never come back.”
“So why do they hope?” I can’t help asking.
“Because it’s human nature to hope for impossible things.” She eyes me shrewdly. “You’re in marketing. You know that.”
“Well, don’t worry.” I tear my gaze away from hers. “I have no expectations or hopes or anything. Like I say, it’s just a bit of fun. Fun.”
“OK.” She nods once, then looks at her watch. “I’d better get back to Hal and Coco. See you in the morning. Thanks, Katie.” She stands up, then comes over and kisses me on the cheek. As she does, there’s a knock on the kitchen door.
“Hi,” says Alex, coming in. “Oh, hi, Demeter.”
“Hello, Alex.” She shoots him a mistrustful look. “What do you want?”
“Came to see Katie.”
His eyes meet mine and the intent in them is so visceral, I catch my breath. I have an immediate flashback to the meadow. For a moment I can’t quite speak for lust.
“Hi,” I manage.
“Are you OK?”
“Fine.”
My whole body is quivering, wanting a whole, delicious, uninterrupted night with this man who turns me to jelly. I want his touch. But I want his voice too. His thoughts and his jokes…his worries and sadnesses…his theories and wonderings. All the secret parts of him that I never guessed existed.
“Well, I’ll let you get on with it,” says Demeter, standing up. “Whatever you’re up to.” And she shoots such a reproving glance at Alex, I almost want to giggle.
“Demeter, it’s fine,” I say as she reaches the door. “Really. What you said just now…” I gesture surreptitiously at my heart. “I won’t.”
But Demeter shakes her head wryly. “You think you won’t.”
At about six o’clock in the morning, I nudge Alex’s bare calf with my foot. “Hey, you,” I say. “City boy.”
We haven’t really slept all night. We’ve just dozed and laughed and devoured each other in a bubble of him and me and nothing else. But now the birds are chattering and sun is filtering past my curtains and real life begins again.
“Hmm,” he murmurs, only half-waking up.
“You need to go and sleep in your bed.”
“What?” Alex turns a rumpled face to me. “Are you chucking me out?”
“Biddy will be really upset if you don’t. You’re her first customer. Go and try it out, at least. And, anyway, you don’t want to use my shower. It’s, like, a dribble.”
“In a minute,” says Alex, sucking the bare skin of my shoulder, pulling me toward him, and I succumb because I can’t not; he’s like some magnetic force that just drags me in.
But then, a while later, when we’re both sated, and I’m wondering belatedly if we were a bit noisy, I give him a firmer kick.
“Go on. Be a good B&B customer. I’ll see you at breakfast.”
“All right.” He rolls his eyes and pushes back the duvet. I think it was the description of my shower as a “dribble” that tipped the balance. He strikes me as a guy who might have quite uncompromising shower standards.
“See you at breakfast, then,” he says, heading to the door in boxer shorts. Which isn’t very discreet, but if he bumps into Biddy, he can always say—
Oh, whatever. He can say what he likes. She’s not stupid.
I wait until I’m sure he’s gone before I move. Then I leap out of bed and take my puny shower. I yank on some jeans and a top and creep out of the house in the other direction. I hurry over the dew-laden grass to Demeter’s yurt, say, “Knock, knock!” and let myself in.
Demeter is sitting up in her wooden Ansters Farm bed, wearing pale-gray marl pajamas and one of our alpaca blankets round her shoulders. She’s sipping from a water bottle and tapping feverishly at her laptop.
“OK,” she says, as though we’re seamlessly continuing the conversation from last night. “I’ve remembered something. There’s a whole stack of email printouts in my office.”
“In your office?” I think doubtfully back to the piles of paper on Demeter’s floor. “But won’t Sarah have gone through those and thrown out anything incriminating?”
“Not the ones in the cupboard.” Demeter looks up with a glint. “The ones she doesn’t know about.”
“Doesn’t know about?” I echo in blank astonishment. There’s something in Demeter’s life that Sarah doesn’t know about?
“She got so cross at me for printing out emails that I used to do it secretly. And then I put them all in that big cupboard. There must be hundreds in there. The cupboard’s locked.” She pauses. “And I’ve got the key. Here on my key ring.”
“Hundreds?” I stare at her. “Why did you keep hundreds of email printouts?”
“Don’t you start!” says Demeter defensively. “I suppose I thought I might need them one day.”
“Well,” I say after a pause. “You did.”
“Yes,” says Demeter dryly. “Turns out I did.”
She meets my eye and I feel a sudden rise of confidence. A conviction. She’s bloody well going to win this. Demeter taps again at her computer and I can see her eyes teeming with ideas again. Ideas and anger.
“You seem different this morning,” I say tentatively. “You seem like…you want it.”
“Oh, I want it,” says Demeter, and there’s a steeliness to her that makes me want to cheer. The strong, determined woman I know is back! “I don’t know what got into me last night. But I woke up today and I thought…what?”
“Exactly!” I nod. “What?”
“I am not being fucked over by my own fucking assistant.”
“Hear, hear!”
“The only thing which has come to me…” She pauses and rubs her brow. “I think Sarah must have teamed up with someone else. Some of that information she played around with came from meetings she didn’t attend.”
“Right,” I say after a pause. My mind is already working round the possibilities. “So who do you think…”
“Rosa,” says Demeter flatly. “Has to be.”
“Or Mark,” I say.