“Ow, you’re hurting me,” I complained, as my mother was a little bit too enthusiastic with the hairbrush while putting my hair up into something that resembled a Regency style. My mother’s hair was too short to do anything with, so she was wearing a bonnet. Trixie was going to tell her that women wouldn’t have worn bonnets at dances but we were all mostly wearing day dresses anyway so our authenticity could only go so far.
“This is far too tight,” Missy moaned, pulling at the bodice of her pale blue gown.
“We could let it out,” Mum said as she stabbed at me with a few final hairpins.
“We let it out last time,” Missy said. “There’s nothing left to let out.”
“It does look rather ravishing though,” I said. With her tattoos, 1950s style makeup and green diamante glasses, Missy made the whole outfit look amazing. But again, it wasn’t exactly authentic.
“You look rather good yourself,” Missy said to me.
“I really don’t.” I was wearing a rose-pink gown, which I thought made me look washed out. I looked pale and exhausted and, standing next to Missy, I felt small and dowdy.
“You do,” she insisted. “You look dainty and demure. You’ll have Xander on his knees.”
“We both know Xander isn’t coming,” I said.
“Dot will bring him,” she replied. “You’ll see.” Dot had, at least, confirmed that she’d be here tonight in full costume, which I supposed was something. If Xander didn’t come maybe I could talk to her. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to ask her, though. Since my conversation with Philomena Bloom I’d moved from upset to angry when it came to my emotions around Xander. He knew, according to her, that it couldn’t possibly be me who was the whistle-blower and yet he still hadn’t got in touch to apologise. Did the night we’d spent together, the things we’d shared, not mean anything to him?
Perhaps it was better if he had gone back to London and we both moved on. As my father liked to remind me, there were plenty more fish in the sea. At least his choice of words was slightly more appropriate now than they’d been after Joe had died. He means well but for a poet, my father was terrible at subtlety.
“So tell me more about Philomena’s proposition,” Missy asked as we went downstairs to the bookshop to start getting the space ready and wait for everyone else to turn up while Mum got her latest batch of potato puddings out of the oven.
“It was quite cryptic really,” I replied. “Which is fairly typical of her. She started off by saying she wanted me to be Cuthbert.”
“Cuthbert?”
“As in ‘Bloom & Cuthbert Literary Agents’.”
“But I thought Cuthbert didn’t exist,” Missy said, her brow furrowed in confusion.
I laughed. “He doesn’t, but he will as of January. He will be me.”
“She asked you to go into partnership with her?”
“Not exactly, I mean I have no experience of being a literary agent, after all. But she wants me to work for her. She says she wants to take on someone who can go through the editing process with her newer authors. Apparently she doesn’t like that bit very much and she knows how good I am at it. In return, she’s going to train me up to start taking on my own authors in due course.”
“Wow, that’s amazing,” Missy said. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but why you?”
I laughed again. “Who knows? She says she liked me from the first time we spoke and that she’s done lots of research into me, which is a bit scary, and I’m exactly what she needs.”
“Will you have to move to London?”
“That’s the best bit,” I replied. “She works from home so sees no reason why I can’t too. I’ll have to go to London for events and some meetings but, as she pointed out, not all authors live in the south so it might be nice for my, so far mythical, clients to live nearer their agent too. So basically I get the best of both worlds – I get to go to London and stay here.”
“This is amazing Megan. I’m so happy for you.”
“To be honest it feels a bit too good to be true and I probably won’t fully believe it’s happening until I’ve got the contract in my hand.” I paused, looking around the bookshop sadly. It was strange to think that in a few weeks’ time I wouldn’t be living here anymore. “Anyway, come and help me move these bookcases.”
Just as we started to move the furniture, Bella, Norm and Bryn arrived, which helped matters a lot. The three of us stood around in our gowns bossing the Viking duo about until the bookshop looked exactly how I hoped Trixie would be expecting it. We’d just finished when Mum came down with her potato puddings.
“I think these are worse than the last lot,” she said. “They are hard as bullets. I give up.”
Admittedly they looked horrible but Norm and Bryn valiantly tried one each without complaint.
“Let’s see what Trixie thinks,” I said. I was quite looking forward to seeing Trixie try to defend Mum’s potato puddings. “It might be that they are supposed to taste disgusting.”
Trixie arrived not long after that, carrying a huge pile of what looked like suit bags and with Stan, John and Dot in tow – and my dad appeared from wherever he’d been all afternoon as well. Trixie looked around the bookshop and nodded before counting us all.
“No Xander,” she said.
“No, he couldn’t come tonight,” Dot said quietly, and my stomach dropped. It turned out I had been hoping that he’d come after all, no matter how angry I was.
“Well that makes us one short for dancing,” Trixie huffed in annoyance.
“I can sit out the quadrille,” I said.
“Could Colin not come?” Trixie asked.
I shook my head. I had been going to ask him, but he’d been avoiding me all day again so I hadn’t bothered.
“Well, we’ll just have to manage,” she sighed. She sorted through the pile of suit bags and threw one aside. I noticed the label on it simply read “X.S.” and I felt another wave of anger. Trixie had gone to all this trouble and Xander couldn’t even be bothered to turn up.
Trixie started to organise the men, giving them their outfits and telling them to find somewhere to change. Mum opened the office area for them to go into.
While all that was going on, Dot came up to me.
“I tried to get him to come,” she said quietly. “But he wouldn’t. He’s…”
“Rude and arrogant,” I said.
“More mortified and embarrassed, I think,” she replied. “He knows it wasn’t you, but…”
“Would it hurt him to pick up the phone and tell me that?”
“He wrote you this,” Dot said, handing me a white envelope with my name written in dark blue ink on the front. “He’s usually better at writing things down than trying to say them. He asked me not to give you this until later but I think you should read it now. If you want to, once you’ve read what he has to say, you should still be able to catch him at my house.”
“Did you know?” I asked. “That he was Ruby Bell?”
Dot shook her head. “I had no idea. That newspaper headline was as much of a shock to me as it was to anyone. I’d never have guessed.”
“Did he tell you…” I began.
“About his mother?”
I nodded.
“Yes,” she said simply. Then she smiled and stepped away, leaving me to read the note on my own. I stepped behind one of the taller bookcases, hiding from the chaos that the trying on of costumes seemed to have created, and slit open the envelope with my index finger.
Megan
For a man who can write 800 pages of drivel and call it a book, it appears I am hopeless when it comes to writing letters. If you could see the discarded drafts that surround me…
I am no Captain Wentworth then, but I am half agony and half hope. I am a lot of other things as well – arrogant, rude, heartbroken, confused, embarrassed, foolish… but most of all I am sorry. I am sorry for so many things – for every time I’ve been rude or demanding, every time I’ve pushed you, but most of all I am so sorry for storming into your shop without thinking and for accusing you of something I know you didn’t do. Once again I reacted badly to something I couldn’t control, and treated you appallingly – just as I did at Graydon Hall.
Most of all I am sorry that I haven’t called and that it has taken nearly a week to write this letter. That is unforgiveable and I have no excuse other than my own cowardice.
Everything that has happened between us over the last couple of weeks has taken me by surprise. For nearly four years I have closed myself off from the world and hidden myself behind a brick wall of my own making. And then you came along and smashed the wall down. I fell head over heels for you the night I pushed my way into your bookshop and realised you were the woman from the supermarket.
I told you that anyone who was worthy of you would wait until you were ready to move on, but I don’t think either of us was prepared for what happened between us. I have loved watching you talk about the future, I have loved seeing you opening yourself up to start again and I hope you still want to take those big steps into your new life – because you deserve to shine, Megan. You deserve to know a life full of your biggest dreams.
But I don’t deserve you, not after what I’ve done. The fact that I can’t bring myself to say these things to your face, that I can’t bring myself to pick up the phone, is enough to know that I am not worthy of you. I hate that I have hurt you and I wish I could turn back the clock but without that ability I just wanted to say goodbye, to tell you that I’ll be thinking of you as you step into the beautiful life I know you’re going to have, and to wish you nothing but happiness.
Love, Always,
Xander
I stared at the letter, my eyes scanning the words a second time. His writing was big and loopy, exactly like the signature I’d seen him write in Sharpie on the front pages of all those copies of his book on the night of his launch. I remembered his smile that night, the way his hair kept falling into his eyes.
He was right when he said what had happened between us had been unexpected. I’d spent the last few years building a very similar wall around myself as well, but Xander hadn’t smashed that wall down in the way he claimed I had. Instead, he had quietly dismantled it brick by brick, until I’d been able to talk to him, to open my heart to him. I hadn’t realised it at the time but as each brick was pulled away, I had slowly begun to allow myself to fall in love with him a little bit more. I suddenly missed him so much it felt like physical pain.
As I read the words again, I felt anger as well. His letter was self-pitying, claiming he had failed me somehow, failed me so badly he couldn’t show his face again. If he had really fallen ‘head over heels’ as he claimed and as Bella had suspected, why wasn’t he here? He was right when he said that was cowardice. This letter wasn’t written by the Xander whose smile lit up a room, who had sat opposite me and listened to every word I said, who had spent the night with me and made me feel confident again. This was the Xander who gave in to self-doubt, who listened to his own inner demons, who cared too much about what the world thought of him.
That Xander wasn’t going to fight for us, that Xander wasn’t going to sit down with me and talk this through.
And if he wouldn’t, maybe I had to fight instead. Because all of those different parts of Xander made up the man I was falling in love with. A man I wanted in my life, whatever he may think I ‘deserved’. I had to see him; I had to let him know how I felt.
“Megan, where are you?” Trixie was calling me from across the shop floor.
I popped my head out from behind the bookcase. “Here,” I said.
“Ah yes, now come over here and tell me what you think.”
I walked out a little way towards her so I could see the men in their outfits. I thought they all looked amazing, and from the way Bella and Missy were fawning over Norm and Bryn it seemed they agreed. I hadn’t been able to imagine what the two Vikings would look like in breeches, stockings and tailcoats but the overall result really worked in the same way that Missy’s tattoos worked with her gown. Even my father looked good, despite Mum’s relentless teasing.
I looked at the couples around me – Bella and Norm, Missy and Bryn, Trixie and Stan, Dot and John, even Mum and Dad were back together. Usually in circumstances like this I ached for Joe, for him to be here with one arm slung around my shoulder, but this evening it was Xander who I missed, Xander who I wanted next to me – his hand on my thigh, his sarcastic whispers in my ear.
“Shall we start with dancing or cards?” Trixie asked me. I looked down at Xander’s letter, which I was still holding, and then back up at Trixie. “Perhaps if we do the quadrille first you can watch us and tell us what it looks like. You could even record it on your phone so we can watch it back and…”
I tuned out, thinking about Xander again. I wanted to tell him he was a coward, to ask him who he thought he was, making decisions for me, that I would be the one to decide who I wanted in my life and who was worthy of me. I wanted to tell him that I wanted him in my life, that the days I’d spent with him were days when I’d felt more like myself than I had in years, that I wanted to finish whatever it was that we’d started.
“Megan, are you listening to me?” Trixie asked, poking me quite hard in the arm.
I looked at her and then down at the letter once more, and remembered that Dot had said he was still at her house, that I should still be able to catch him. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the suit bag with his initials on and got angry all over again at how Trixie had gone to all this trouble and he hadn’t even bothered to turn up. I picked up the bag.
“Megan,” Trixie said again.
“I’m sorry, Trixie,” I replied. “I have to go.”
I turned on my heel, the letter in one hand and the suit bag in the other, and ran out of the shop.
“Go where?” Trixie’s voice followed me out of the bookshop. “You don’t even have your coat.”
*
Regency skirts are not conducive to running through the streets in, however much period dramas might try to tell us otherwise. I had to hold the suit bag and letter in one hand, because of course there were no pockets, and hitch up my skirts with my other hand to enable me to run. Dot’s house was about a fifteen-minute walk away from the bookshop but somehow, despite the skirts, I made it in just under ten. I dropped the skirts and held on to the wall as I took some wheezy breaths. I was totally unused to such exertion and was probably beetroot red so I gave myself a minute to calm down.
The house was in almost complete darkness, which didn’t bode well. Had he left already? Had he and Gus gone back to London? I felt sick and I wasn’t sure if it was the running or the thought of not seeing either Xander or his dog again. I pressed my forehead against the cool brick and took a deep breath before walking up the steps to Dot’s front door.
I’d only been here twice before – once to drop off some books to her when she’d had the flu and then again, just over a week ago, when Xander had cooked for me and we’d kissed on the sofa until Dot had come home from her college dinner. I took a shaky breath and knocked on the door knocker.
I was expecting to hear Gus bark but all I heard was silence. I tried again, pressing my ear to the door to see if I could hear anything. After the third knock I knew it was pointless. He wasn’t here. He’d already left.
I was too late.