Rosie Noah was worried, which in itself worried her. It was, as so many things in Rosie’s world were, whether she would admit it to herself or not, Rosie’s mother’s fault.
Rosie had become quite used to a world in which her mother hated the idea of her marrying Fat Charlie Nancy. She took her mother’s opposition to the marriage as a sign from the heavens that she was probably doing something right, even when she was not entirely sure in her own mind that this was actually the case.
And she loved him, of course. He was solid, reassuring, sane—
Her mother’s about-turn on the matter of Fat Charlie had Rosie worried, and her mother’s sudden enthusiasm for wedding organization troubled her deeply.
She had phoned Fat Charlie the previous night to discuss the matter, but he was not answering his phones. Rosie thought perhaps he had had an early night.
It was why she was giving up her lunchtime to talk to him.
The Grahame Coats Agency occupied the top floor of a gray Victorian building in the Aldwych, and was at the top of five flights of stairs. There was a lift, though, an antique elevator which had been installed a hundred years before by theatrical agent Rupert “Binky” Butterworth. It was an extremely small, slow, juddery lift whose design and function peculiarities only became comprehensible when you discovered that Binky Butterworth had possessed the size, shape, and ability to squeeze into small spaces of a portly young hippopotamus, and had designed the lift to fit, at a squeeze, Binky Butterworth and one other, much slimmer, person: a chorus girl, for example, or a chorus boy—Binky was not picky. All it took to make Binky happy was someone seeking theatrical representation squeezed into the lift with him, and a very slow and juddery journey up all six stories to the top. It was often the case that by the time he reached the top floor, Binky would be so overcome by the pressures of the journey that he would need to go and have a little lie-down, leaving the chorus girl or chorus boy to cool his or her heels in the waiting room, concerned that the red-faced panting and uncontrolled gasping for breath that Binky had been suffering from as they reached the final floors meant that he had been having some kind of early Edwardian embolism.
People would go into the lift with Binky Butterworth once, but after that they used the stairs.
Grahame Coats, who had purchased the remains of the Butterworth Agency from Binky’s granddaughter more than twenty years before, maintained the lift was part of history.
Rosie slammed the inner accordion door, closed the outer door, and went into reception, where she told the receptionist she wanted to see Charles Nancy. She sat down beneath the photographs of Grahame Coats with people he had represented—she recognized Morris Livingstone, the comedian, some once famous boy-bands, and a clutch of sports stars who had, in their later years, become “personalities”—the kind who got as much fun out of life as they could until a new liver became available.
A man came into reception. He did not look much like Fat Charlie. He was darker, and he was smiling as if he were amused by everything—deeply, dangerously amused.
“I’m Fat Charlie Nancy,” said the man.
Rosie walked over to Fat Charlie and gave him a peck on the cheek. He said, “Do I know you?” which was an odd thing to say, and then he said, “Of course I do. You’re Rosie. And you get more beautiful every day,” and he kissed her back, touching his lips to hers. Their lips only brushed, but Rosie’s heart began to beat like Binky Butterworth’s after a particularly juddery lift journey pressed up against a chorine.
“Lunch,” squeaked Rosie. “Passing. Thought maybe we could. Talk.”
“Yeah,” said the man who Rosie now thought of as Fat Charlie. “Lunch.”
He put a comfortable arm around Rosie. “Anywhere you want to go for lunch?”
“Oh,” she said. “Just. Wherever you want.” It was the way he smelled, she thought. Why had she never before noticed how much she liked the way he smelled?
“We’ll find somewhere,” he said. “Shall we take the stairs?”
“If it’s all the same to you,” she said, “I think I’d rather take the lift.”
She banged home the accordion door, and they rode down to street level slowly and shakily, pressed up against each other.
Rosie couldn’t remember the last time she had been so happy.
When they got out onto the street Rosie’s phone beeped to let her know she had missed a call. She ignored it.
They went into the first restaurant they came to. Until the previous month it had been a high-tech sushi restaurant, with a conveyor belt that ran around the room carrying small raw fishy nibbles priced according to plate color. The Japanese restaurant had gone out of business and had been instantly replaced, in the way of London restaurants, by a Hungarian restaurant, which had kept the conveyor belt as a high-tech addition to the world of Hungarian cuisine, which meant that rapidly cooling bowls of goulash, paprika dumplings, and pots of sour cream made their way in stately fashion around the room.
Rosie didn’t think it was going to catch on.
“Where were you last night?” she asked.
“I went out,” he said. “With my brother.”
“You’re an only child,” she said.
“I’m not. It turns out I’m half of a matched set.”
“Really? Is this more of your dad’s legacy?”
“Honey,” said the man she thought of as Fat Charlie, “you don’t know the half of it.”
“Well,” she said. “I hope he’ll be coming to the wedding.”
“I don’t believe he would miss it for the world.” He closed his hand around hers, and she nearly dropped her goulash spoon. “What are you doing for the rest of the afternoon?”
“Not much. Things are practically dead back at the office right now. Couple of fund-raising phone calls to make, but they can wait. Is there. Um. Were you. Um. Why?”
“It’s such a beautiful day. Do you want to go for a walk?”
“That,” said Rosie, “would be quite lovely.”
They wandered down to the Embankment and began to walk along the northern back of the Thames, a slow, hand-in-hand amble, talking about nothing much in particular.
“What about
“Oh,” he said. “They won’t mind. They probably won’t even notice that I’m not there.”
Fat Charlie ran up the stairs to the Grahame Coats Agency. He always took the stairs. It was healthier, for a start, and it meant he would never again have to worry about finding himself wedged into the lift with someone else, too close to pretend they weren’t there.
He walked into reception, panting slightly. “Has Rosie been in, Annie?”
“Did you lose her?” said the receptionist.
He walked back to his office. His desk was peculiarly tidy. The clutter of undealt-with correspondence was gone. There was a yellow Post-it note on his computer screen, with “See me. GC” on it.
He knocked on Grahame Coats’s office door. This time a voice said, “Yes?”
“It’s me,” he said.
“Yes,” said Grahame Coats. “Come ye in, Master Nancy. Pull up a pew. I’ve been giving our conversation of this morning a great deal of thought. And it seems to me that I have misjudged you. You have been working here, for, how long—?”
“Nearly two years.”
“You have been working long and hard. And now your father’s sad passing—.”
“I didn’t really know him.”
“Ah. Brave soul, Nancy. Given that it is currently the fallow season, how would you react to an offer of a couple of weeks off? With, I hardly need to add, full pay?”
“Full pay?” said Fat Charlie.
“Full pay, but, yes, I see your point. Spending money. I’m sure you could do with a little spending money, couldn’t you?”
Fat Charlie tried to work out what universe he was in. “Am I being fired?”
Grahame Coats laughed then, like a weasel with a sharp bone stuck in its throat.
