The Little Christmas Kitchen. Jenny Oliver

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      ‘Do you want a cigarette out the window?’ he’d asked.

      ‘I don’t smoke, Adrian.’

      ‘I know but sometimes moments call for a cigarette. If you don’t want one I might have one.’ He pulled open his desk drawer and fumbled around at the back for a hidden packet of Marlboro Reds and a box of matches. Hauling up the sash window he leant on the sill and inhaled half the cigarette in one. ‘Christ I’ve missed this.’ Exhaling he shook his head. ‘Max. Max, what are you doing?’

      ‘I think maybe it’s been photoshopped.’ Ella said, crossing the room to perch on the edge of the big leather covered desk. Outside it had started to sleet, watery white flecks cascading down like a snow globe. A couple of mangy pigeons on the roof opposite were shaking out their feathers, huddled up together next to a light up Santa Claus – plump and wet and depressed.

      Adrian raised a brow, the creases on his forehead deepening. Ella frowned. ‘You don’t think so? You think he’s having an affair. I don’t think he’s having an affair. Especially not with her. I really don’t. Look–’ she held out her arm where the bracelet slipped forward over the back of her hand. ‘Look.’ she said again, a little quieter.

      ‘It’s very pretty.’ Adrian nodded. Took another drag and then flicked the cigarette out onto the roof top, the pigeons scattered. ‘Do you want me to see what Anne thinks?’

      Anne was Adrian’s wife. Anne had been friends with Max since childhood and it was through a dinner at their house that Ella had met Adrian and he’d given her a job. They had garden parties in the summer in their huge dilapidated mansion and their wild, adorable children ran around in slightly dirty clothes and no shoes while everyone else drank Pimms and adored the roses. They were the antithesis of Max’s other friends. So rich they could bypass into shabby and boho and not care in the slightest. But they were all so inextricably linked. Like a web. Or Kerplunk. One stick pulled out and it all falls down.

      ‘No.’ Ella shook her head. ‘I trust him. Of course I trust him. There will be an explanation. There’s always an explanation for things like this. It’s not bloody EastEnders is it. She’s one of his friends for god’s sake. If he was going to have an affair, would he really do it on his own doorstep?’ She felt her voice catch in her throat. She thought of Max – gorgeous, funny, beautiful Max, with his arm casually draped round the waist of a woman who wasn’t her – a woman with lovely hair and eyes that tipped up at the corners. Amanda. One of his ‘girls’. The one who had taken Ella aside when they’d first got together and taken her shopping and bought her champagne and linked her arm through hers and managed to get her to tell all her secrets about Max.

      Max who she looked at every morning as he slept on their cream linen sheets and wondered how she’d managed to get that lucky. The sleet had turned to rain. It was pouring down the window and making a mockery of the Christmas decorations strung across the street. Little white lights trying to sparkle like her diamonds.

      Max was actually having an affair. No longer did she need to worry about it or imagine it. Because it was actually happening.

      No he couldn’t be.

      Adrian went over to his Nespresso machine in the corner of his office, ‘Do you want one?’ he asked and Ella shook her head.

      As it rumbled out the dark, glossy liquid in a thick white cup, Adrian said, ‘I’ve got some eggnog from that Christmas hamper we were sent last week. Do you want me to pour you a glass of that?’

      ‘No I’m fine. Honestly. I’ll just have some water.’ As Ella leant over to the carafe on his desk, her eye caught the photo that sat next to it of him and Anne and their kids. She thought of the amount of times she’d stared at that picture and imagined having one on her desk of her and Max and a couple of kids with his bright blue eyes and her dark hair. If Max was having an affair then he might want to split up and they’d never have children. And that might mean that she never had children because she’d have to get over Max, meet someone else and fall in love with them enough to want to have kids with them before she ran out of time. She was thirty-one. If Max was having an affair then not only would he have battered her heart, he would have snatched at her chance to have a family photo on her desk.

      Please God she thought, please don’t let him be more in love with the woman with the shiny hair and the eyes that tip up at the corners than he is with me.

      She felt Adrian watching her over the rim of his coffee cup.

      ‘Ok.’ she said after a pause.

      ‘Ok what?’ he said.

      ‘Ok, ring Anne.’ she said, when really she just wanted to ring Max and hear him say something funny down the phone and then walk into Claridge’s tonight looking all shiny and satiny in her new dress and for him to whistle and then grin and pull her chair out for her the way they’d taught him at Eton.

      But instead they were going to ring Anne. Anne wouldn’t lie.

      And that was why she was standing in her bedroom now, hauling her wheely case from under the bed, chucking in whatever was in front of her. Not her packing style at all. No rolled clothes and shoes in their own little bags, and travel sized toiletries. No outfits laid out on the bed making sure that she hadn’t missed a vital top or pair of shoes. This was more Max’s style of packing. Ella was the organised one, he was the haphazard fun one. That was how they complemented each other. That was why they worked so well. She succeeded, he charmed. They were the perfect unit. They were ‘Maxwella’ his friends joked.

      Going over to the wardrobe she yanked out everything closest to hand – a pair of Jimmy Choo flip-flops, Ralph Lauren shorts bunched up next to the top half of her Missoni bikini and the bottom half of a Stella McCartney one. Record temperatures across southern Europe this winter was all the news could talk about. Violent thunderstorms and above average hours of sunshine were creating flood havoc alongside flocks of holidaymakers jetting off for cheap winter sun. But – as she threw in some white Victoria Beckham jeans that she’d bought just because all ‘the girls’ had them, a kaftan and a huge wooly cardigan that she usually wore to watch TV on her own – she didn’t actually think she’d be wearing any of it. Her subconscious knew it was all for show. The case, the holiday, the fleeing just before Christmas. Because her knight would come home, throw his sword to the ground, scoop her up and carry her off into the rainy London sunset while declaring it was all lies.

      She chucked in toiletries, scattered in loose. Half pots of Eve Lom moisturiser and her specially mixed shampoo clattered alongside her hairdryer, straighteners, trainers. The crisp shirts she’d paid a fortune to have pressed at the dry cleaners were stuffed in willy-nilly. She stopped for a second and called a taxi – to the airport? Which one. I don’t know. Heathrow? Yes madam.

      She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror as she hung up the phone. Hair uncharacteristically skewiff. Eyes that someone who knew her well might say had been crying. The trace of mascara stains on cheeks that she’d scrubbed already with cold water and while telling herself to get a grip.

      Adrian hadn’t had to say anything. She’d just watched the expression on his face when he’d asked Anne if Max ‘might be perhaps being unfaithful’. She’d heard the cough he’d done to try and buy himself some time. Then the nod as if he was pretending that Anne was saying something completely different.

      ‘Shit. What am I going to do?’ Ella had said without thinking when he’d put the phone down.

      ‘Talk to Max.’ Adrian had said. He’d looked worried, СКАЧАТЬ