Another Way Read online

  Another Way

  Frankie McGowan

  © Frankie McGowan 2018

  Frankie McGowan has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 2001, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1993 by Harper Collins Publishers

  This edition published in 2018 by EndeavourMedia Ltd

  For Angela, with love and for John, Joanna and Laura whom she loved

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  And Then…

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  The office was nearly deserted as Ellie emerged from the lift. Trafalgar Square had been solid with traffic making the journey from Lombard Street to her own office south of Piccadilly frustratingly slow. It was not even up for discussion that after a taxi ride slower than a mule train and a driver with more hostile views on the economy than a failed banker, her expression suited her crumpled appearance. London in the grip of a late summer heat wave had left her wanting only to strangle the next person who told her how much they envied her busy life. The interview had been a complete waste of time.

  She pushed the swing door open, almost flattening the Chief Sub against the wall on the other side.

  ‘Ouch,’ he yelped pushing himself upright. ‘What are you doing? Plotting a murder?’

  ‘Oh God, sorry Barney,’ Ellie said giving his sweater a brush. ‘No. Not murder. Tempting though. Just interviewed a second rate politician with a third rate brain. And in this heat. Unusable. Were you looking for me?’

  ‘Just checking you’ve seen the layouts on the Sonia Kelly piece,’ he said. ‘Looks good.’

  ‘No, but I will,’ she promised. ‘Just give me five. When do you need it?’

  ‘Ten minutes ago,’ he said. ‘But for you? Okay. I’m feeling generous. Five.’

  Ellie poked her tongue out as they reached the little cubby hole of an office that was hers, just one of three that lay behind a glass wall that lined one side of the corridor away from the mainstream of office life that made up the Focus newsroom. Only the knowledge of the private and confidential handwritten note from Roland Whittington that morning made the pressure bearable. Left on her desk by Dixie — Roland’s private secretary — before Ellie had arrived in the office that morning, it had been in her bag all day.

  At first the sight of the heavy black scrawl had made her uneasy. But that was not unusual. Her upbringing had conditioned her to believe that all unexpected news was bound to be of the worst kind until proven otherwise. What with all these redundancy rumours, why, she argued with herself, should she feel any different at the sight of a personal letter she wasn’t expecting?

  She had shut the office door, and instructed Lucy not to put any calls through. Then she had taken a deep breath and prised open the note. In the rumour-driven, gossip-drenched world of journalism that Ellie had inhabited for the last dozen years, she had learned very early on that to survive on any level, it was important not to be seen to be bowed down by whatever crushing blow came your way.

  But it wasn’t just that. Pride — the cloak that shielded Ellie from a world which had sent a few unwelcome curved balls her way over the years — had been her saviour. A few minutes was all she needed, all she had trained herself to permit, to get over the sickening shaking she knew would follow on from bad news, just long enough to make sure no-one guessed you were only just about clinging on.

  Swiftly she scanned the contents of the envelope and as she did, her hand flew to her mouth and she gasped. She read it again and then clenched her eyes tight. Her own column. At last her very own column. The Eleanor Carter Interview.

  Until Roland himself returned from New York, she wasn’t to tell anyone until he could make the announcement in a few days’ time. Of course she had old Jed. Trying not to run, she had walked as causally as a girl who’d just won - in her view - the equivalent of the lottery, down the corridor, burst into the gossip columnist’s office, shut the door and handed him the note.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ he laughed, grabbing her in a bear hug. ‘Celebration tonight, my flower. Champagne on me.’

  ‘Ssh,’ she had warned. ‘Roland will slay me if he thinks I’ve said a word before he gets back.’

  Jed dutifully rearranged his features into a frown.

  ‘That better? Good. Mungo’s? Six o’clock. Well done, flower. But come to think of it, as you’re now a star, champagne will be on you.’

  ‘Dream on,’ Ellie had ruffled his hair, and departed. There were very few people Ellie trusted, Jed was one and Oliver, her brother, was another.

  Four years older than Ellie, there was a bond between them, which even his marriage to Jill could not entirely dent. Oliver, she knew, confided everything to Jill; but it was Ellie who understood his fears like no-one else could, as he understood hers. Even their very different lives — Dorset, where he ran his hotel, and London where Ellie was now firmly ensconced — could not shake their closeness.

  Later, after she’d had a drink with Jed and checked the layout for Barney, she’d call him. She wriggled out of her jacket and her heels and slipped on a pair of flats. In the outer office the lights were off and the computers closed down which meant Lucy had gone for the night, leaving Ellie a pile of messages, the first of which was to say that James Baldwin, the company lawyer, had been trying to reach her all afternoon.

  Ellie dumped her bag on her desk and went back to the outer office to see if the percolator was up to a quick hot drink before she tackled the pile of work on her desk. Minutes later she returned sipping a carton of strong black coffee. Holding the door open with her hip, she hooked her foot around a chair and wedged it in front of it to keep it open.

  ‘Air at last,’ she muttered, settling herself behind her desk. Pulling her diary towards her, she began to check where she was up to in her busy life. The cluttered pages proved a number of things to Eleanor Carter. That she led a hectic, full, active existence was indisputable. That her views, her presence, her approval was sought after by so many, unquestionable. But to the more discerning, the more cynical and the realistic, it revealed, as she herself well knew, only that she was wholly incapable of saying no.

  It was a thought Ellie had recently come to find disturbing, not least because having just passed her thirtieth birthday she could no longer excuse such wholesale acceptance of invitations as simply youthful enthusiasm for her job. But for one so discerning about what appeared under her name in the magazine, Ellie was uncomfortably aware that she didn’t apply the same discipline to invitations.

  Frowning, she scrolled through the endless pages of lunches, dinners and committee meetings, some crossed out only to be reinstated at a later date, others firmly lassoed with capital let
ters decreeing their importance; bold, black felt pen underscored those marked ‘Must Go’ or ‘Vital’ in an urgent tirade of endless activity.

  Without taking her gaze from the crowded pages, she groped in the mug full of pens sitting on her desk and began to make some swift adjustments to the pages.

  Her frown cleared. That was better. Move Polly to Wednesday, suggest drinks instead of dinner to the new PR at Hogarth and Lejeaune and leave lunch free to fit in a brief look in at Cassandra’s book launch. Perfect.

  Satisfied with her efforts, she relaxed in her chair and skimmed through the newly constructed week. She could afford to change her mind, shift appointments, alter plans. As long as she didn’t cancel completely, Ellie knew she would be accommodated.

  Not by Paul, of course — Paul D’Erlanger, travel writer and her colleague at Focus. She lifted her head from the page and gazed thoughtfully into the distance. Last night Paul had required a great deal of accommodation to compensate for Ellie running late all day, opting out of accompanying him to a first night and not getting back to her flat till past eleven.

  The memory was not one she cared to dwell on. Paul’s sexual demands and the boundaries of Ellie’s commitment to him were on collision course. Angrily she massaged the back of her neck. She wasn’t comfortable about last night. She had been tired, not ready for his sulky demands.

  Faint protests, an angry exchange and absurd accusations had preceded a capitulation from her that she now felt embarrassed about. What was the matter with her? She was strong, independent. She didn’t need that kind of cheap performance. Face it, she sighed, you don’t need half of what’s going on in your life right now.

  ‘If the rumours are true,’ the style editor, Rosie Monteith Gore, had said earlier that afternoon. ‘I for one will take the redundo and be off like a shot. What will you do?’

  Ellie had shrugged, knowing that Rosie was lying. But better bravado doing the talking than the panic-stricken exchanges taking place in the newsroom. Who would go, who would stay? The mortgage, the alimony and what about her reward for all this hard work, Rosie had wailed, two weeks in Spain with her seven year old son?

  Roland had more or less assured Ellie that if the worst happened she would be okay, so she tried not to be alarmed. For one thing, there was no slackening of interest in the weekly news magazine. Why, there were queues, veritable queues of people wanting to be interviewed. She was unashamedly pursued by those who needed to be profiled by her and she in turn was rarely refused a meeting that she had sought. It was not unusual to find her office, small though it was, awash with flowers, complimentary review copies of the very latest novels, tickets for previews, or samples of perfume. There were some who would have been pulsing with pleasure at being so sought after. Indeed Ellie used to be one of them.

  Now she wasn’t particularly pleased or otherwise. It had become a fact of her increasingly hectic life that the gravy train would pass through her office several times a week and that she had merely to mention, to comment, to exclaim, to wish out loud to be granted her desire by the bevy of Press Officers, eager to please her.

  But it was the silence that descended at the tail end of such a day she had begun to relish the most. A time when desk lamps were gradually extinguished, goodnights had been called out, and the cavernous room took on an alien calm, leaving Ellie sitting quietly at her desk, gently leaning back in her chair, her hands linked behind her head, prepared to recognize the rules of the game. And if playing them correctly would keep her from ever again having to endure the struggling years she had experienced on arriving in London a decade ago, she was prepared to play them for all it was worth — and to win. She went where she was asked, said what was expected, was there when required. Her diary was evidence of that.

  Some other time, not tonight, I will fix a few days off, she promised herself, swinging long, lithe legs still bronzed and golden from her trip to Antigua two months before, on to the chair beside her.

  It was so hot in London, she decided, that’s what was getting her down, not the work. That was it. She would go home to Dorset, see Oliver and Jill and the twins, maybe even drive down to Devon to see Pa and Alison.

  She smiled at the thought of her family, admiring their unity, the completeness of their lives, without envying any of it. She had come too far for that. She led another kind of life, now. To be honest, they all did. Such different choices, all wanting different things, and yet still a united family with the kind of closeness that only comes from having stood on the edge of ruin together and stared scandal in the face… well, never mind about that.

  Perhaps at the end of the week, she would ask Roland for a couple of days’ leave. Make a long weekend of it. Get away from Paul, not to mention these ghastly rumours. If she remembered at all, that it was only last night and indeed, if she were honest, the night before that as well, that she had embarked on a similar resolution, she seemed not to recall it. Or maybe she preferred not to.

  Glancing through the glass partition that separated her own office from the sprawling, shambling chaos of the newsroom, she noticed the time on the large round clock suspended from the ceiling, and with a small tsk of annoyance pushed her chair back. She began to scrabble around under her desk to locate her shoes, then gathered up her jacket and the discarded high heels she’d worn to the interview, shoving them into a leather tote, realizing that, at nearly six thirty, something would have to give.

  There was no dispute here. All thought of celebrating with Jed was now abandoned. Anxious only not to be late for her next appointment, she flew around her tiny room, throwing letters into the out tray, giving one last hurried glance around and backing out clutching her bag and briefcase between her knees while she locked the door, before walking briskly down the corridor to tell Jed that he was going to be the latest sacrifice on the altar of her hectic life.

  *

  ‘No-one else but yourself to blame,’ Jed Bayley said bluntly, when she told him how much she really didn’t want to go to this meeting, but was now obliged to having said she would, and now it was too late to back off and could they have a drink later perhaps? ‘You’re always banging on about making contacts,’ he said. ‘You should be like me. Heartless, ruthless but terribly happy.’

  ‘But you’re not,’ Ellie protested. Together they left the building that housed Belvedere Publishing PLC and plunged into the sticky heat of a late June evening.

  Pushing their way along the crowded pavement they weaved in and out of the rush hour scramble as London’s offices and shops disgorged their occupants at the end of the day, and headed for the tube at Green Park.

  ‘I mean, you’re not really ruthless,’ she argued to his back as he pressed ahead of her. ‘You just pretend you are. You know you do. It’s just that it’s easier for men. Women have to work hard just to be accepted. They... hey! Where are you going? Honestly, Jed... I wouldn’t just walk away if you...’

  ‘Yes, you would,’ Jed called out as he craned his neck for the sight of a cab. ‘If I’d said "it’s easier for men" as many times as you have, you most certainly would. In fact you wouldn’t be as kind as I am. You’d have told me to stop moaning ages ago.’

  ‘Moaning?’ She was aghast. ‘What do you mean, moaning?’ Genuinely appalled, she halted abruptly in the middle of the crowded street.

  ‘Really,’ hissed an infuriated middle-aged woman, colliding into her.

  ‘Watch what you’re doing,’ bellowed a man brandishing a bulging briefcase, as Ellie stepped back on him. For a moment she was buffeted between the two.

  ‘How can you say that?’ she demanded, outraged, extricating herself from the havoc she was creating at the entrance to the tube. ‘No, not you, madam, I’m talking to my friend over there.’

  ‘Easily,’ Jed threw back at her without taking his eyes from the more pressing problem of transport. ‘Moan, moan, moan. That’s all you do these days. In fact I should have mentioned it a long time ago.’

  ‘Oh, should you really?’
she shouted furiously, trying to keep him in sight as a swarm of commuters swept between them. ‘And why is that?’

  ‘Because that’s what friends are for. If you don’t enjoy what you’re doing, then it’s not what you should be doing. Try enjoying yourself — we may not have much longer, the way the rumours are going. And now you’ve got your own column, think of how many people will be rushing your name on to their list of useful people to be extra nice to. So why not... Taxi... Taxi…. go for it. Want a lift?’

  Ellie shook her head as he reached for the door handle of the black cab that swung alongside him.

  ‘A lift?’ she said with heavy sarcasm as Jed dived in and slammed the door. ‘What? Me? You’ve got to be kidding. Miss the chance of making a few new contacts on the Piccadilly line? I’d never forgive myself.’

  He was laughing as the cab pulled away from the kerb, leaving Ellie frowning after him.

  The few curious stares she attracted passed her by. She stood at the top of the steps, a tall, slender young woman, her serious grey eyes, perhaps a too generous mouth and a sweep of beige hair secured at the nape of her neck robbed her of classic beauty but Ellie Carter was rarely dismissed as average. The word most people used was ‘striking’. But at this moment the expressive features were struck with nothing more edifying than indignation.

  Moaning? How dare Jed say that? He was one of her closest friends. Surely he knew her better than that?

  ‘Moaning,’ Aunt Belle had said to her many years ago — and Ellie could hear her as plainly as though she were standing next to her, ‘will get you nowhere. No-one will help you unless you help yourself.’

  Ten-year-old Ellie had listened and believed her. Her life thus far contained nothing that could possibly contradict what her aunt had told her.

  Oh to hell with it, she thought, turning abruptly into the station entrance, I am enjoying myself. I wouldn’t have it any other way. As for the rumours, well, rumours are just rumours. It may never happen. Who cares what Jed thinks? If it gets me what I want, she shrugged, moving towards the news kiosk and picking up an evening paper, I shall moan on regardless.