Exclusive Third Chapter of It Felt Like A Kiss by Sarra Manning

Chapter Three

Ellie loved her office. Not just because she was twenty-sixand already had her own office – it was the only place in her world that was exactly how she wanted it.

It was airy and light. It was minimalist. She had a big desk, which was actually a Le Corbusier dining table, with nothing on it but her telephone, laptop, a white Roberts radio, and a small white Eames elephant, which she’d found heavily reduced in a little shop in Margate that was going out of business.

There was one splash of colour from a reproduction artdeco rug in soft shades of blue. Her books and reference guides and box files were neatly arranged on her modular shelving and everything else was hidden from view in the cupboard below.

Ellie strived to achieve the same clean minimalism at home but it was hard with two flatmates who liked to traipse into her bedroom to borrow clothes, books and make-up, and to spill drinks or, worse, nail varnish, on her floor and even her bedclothes as they hung out in her room to escape the noise of bouzouki music and plate smashing from Theo’s restaurant when he did special ladies’ nights on alternate Wednesday and Thursday evenings.

It was little wonder then that her pristine work environment was so pleasing. Calmness and order reigned, and every time Ellie walked into her office she felt like the best version of her that there was. It was a feeling that she could never get used to. Like this morning, as she sat down on her Arne Jacobsen swivel chair, her bum nestled lovingly on over two thousand pounds’ worth of white lacquered, laminated sliced veneer, which had been languishing in her boss’s storage facility in King’s Cross until Ellie had liberated it, and sipped her latte as she read the morning’s emails. It was at moments like this that Ellie felt like a proper grown-up, though most proper grownups probably didn’t have to remind themselves they were proper grown-ups.

She worked steadily for half an hour but was replying to an email from her grandmother who wanted her to go to John Lewis in Oxford Street and buy vacuum cleaner bags because the Brent Cross branch were out of stock when her office door, which had been ajar, opened.

‘Cohen, where’s Piers?’

She didn’t pause.

. . . and I can pop them in the post or bring them when I come round for Friday night dinner in a couple of weeks, if you can wait that long.

Lots and lots and lots of love

Ellie xoxo

Then she looked up at Vaughn, her boss, who was waiting with a querulous expression on his face. To be fair, he spent ninety per cent of the time looking querulous. It was just the way his face was.

‘He had some errands to run,’ Ellie lied, trying to sound harried and glancing down at her laptop as if she was busy with important gallery business.

‘What kind of errands were more pressing than the customs declarations that I needed on my desk first thing?’ Vaughn wanted to know.

He sounded properly annoyed now. Ellie decided to give him her full attention.

‘He had to take an invoice to the printers because they forgot to sign it, then he had to go to the post office.’ She frowned. ‘Something to do with the customs declaration. He did say, but I wasn’t paying much attention.’

‘You’re lying, Cohen,’ Vaughn said. He always called her ‘Cohen’ because he said her first name was too insipid to be said out loud. Ellie didn’t take offence. He also refused to call Muffin anything other than Alexandra, which was the name she’d been christened with. ‘You always give everything your full attention so you must be covering for him.’ He sighed and almost cracked a smile, so he was obviously in a good mood. ‘Dare I even ask what he’s done now? Has he put his foot through something again?’

For the briefest moment, Ellie considered telling Vaughn about the penis epidemic, but his moods were mercurial and she didn’t want to talk about penises with her boss. She liked to maintain some professional distance. ‘Nothing like that,’ she murmured non-committally. ‘Just errands.’

Vaughn wasn’t convinced but Ellie managed to distract him by giving him an update on the Emerging Scandinavian Artists exhibition she was curating and soon he was leaving her office with an uncharacteristic: ‘Looks like you have everything under control. By the way, Grace says that Copenhagen is the new Berlin, but then she’s always saying something is the new something.’

Grace, Vaughn’s much younger wife, was fashion editor on Skirt magazine. In the two years since he’d got married, Vaughn was much easier to deal with, apart from when he and Grace rowed (which they did frequently), when he

was much worse. Luckily, Piers was tight with Grace and Lola knew her socially, so Ellie got the nod when Vaughn and Grace had been fighting and could stay out of his way.

Besides, Vaughn could never be as scary as he’d been the first time that Ellie had met him. His name had been mentioned in awestruck whispers all the way through her degree course in Criticism, Communication and Curation. There had been a huge furore in her second year at Central St Martins when he’d mounted a successful coup to have the creative director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts fired. That same year he’d swept into one of the studios before the Fine Art undergraduates’ final show, bought every single piece from a German student called Frans and made him sign away the rights to everything he produced for the next ten years.

Then came that awful fateful day in her final year when Ellie had been tasked with curating the Conceptual Arts undergraduate degree show. Theoretically she was meant to be assisting but it had been a very weak crop of undergraduates that year and when the actual salaried curator had seen the badly executed, poorly conceptualised fruits of their labours, she’d washed her hands of them. It was left to Ellie to write the exhibition brochure, drum up what publicity she could, contact dealers, agents and museum muckety-mucks and beg them to attend.

It had been an absolute, bloody disaster, which had counted as thirty per cent of Ellie’s final mark. On opening night, the art critic of the Evening Standard had even refused to enter the gallery. ‘Far kinder that I say nothing at all,’ he’d told Ellie when she pleaded with him to stay for a glass of really indifferent Chardonnay.

Ellie had then spent the next two days being shouted at by Conceptual Artists and Conceptual Artists’ parents and significant others, who blamed her for the lack of interest. She’d been feeling pretty despondent on a Thursday afternoon, three days into the exhibition, and was standing in the gallery wondering if it might help in the slightest if she repositioned some of the pieces when Vaughn had walked in. He looked just like his photo on artpedia.org: tall, grim and utterly formidable.

Ellie had simply stood there, face aflame, as Vaughn had slowly walked round the space. Finally he’d walked up to her and she’d tried to smile but gave up when he said, ‘This is the worst undergraduate show I have ever seen. Every single one of these artists, though I hesitate to use that word, should be shot for crimes against aestheticism. You should be ashamed for having any part of this.’

Then he’d gone. Ellie had made sure that he was really gone and wasn’t coming back to say even more mean things, then she’d burst into tears.

It wasn’t until she’d scrubbed her eyes with a piece of toilet tissue, and phoned her mum and her grandma and her grandpa and her mum’s friends, who all assured her that it wasn’t her fault and she’d done the best she could in the circumstances, that Ellie had the best idea of her life. Ever.

She’d cobbled together a press release, then emailed the Evening Standard critic, the critics at The Times, the Guardian, the Independent, the Financial Times and every art blogger she knew with the scoop that she, according to the most feared and influential art dealer in London, was curating the worst ever undergraduate show to take up gallery space. She’d quoted Vaughn verbatim, then added a few flourishes about the hard lot in life Conceptual Arts graduates had and how the industry had to support them or there’d be no art industry left.

Somehow it had worked. The gallery was packed with critics, dealers and scenesters eager to see what all the fuss was about. Ellie had given countless interviews, coined the phrase ‘The New Ugly’ (she was still particularly proud of that), and sold every single vile piece and installation.

When the Dean of Undergraduate Studies asked to see Ellie, she knew no fear. The students curating the Fine Arts undergraduate degree show had done a pretty poor job and props were due but when she was shown into the Dean’s office, Vaughn was sitting behind his desk.

Ellie had looked imploringly at the Dean but he’d pushed her onto a chair and headed for the door. ‘I’ll let you two sort this out,’ he’d blustered, and left her with Vaughn, who wielded enough power to get some big kahuna from the ICA fired, so ruining her nascent career wasn’t going to tax him unduly.

They’d sat there in silence for an agonising while. Ellie knew what Vaughn was thinking: she was a nice Home Counties girl who’d crack under pressure. That was what most people at Central St Martins thought of her because she’d never cultivated a mockney accent or tried to disguise a privileged upbringing by dressing as if she’d just done a trolley dash in Oxfam. If that was what Vaughn thought too, then he was in for a nasty surprise, because she’d been brought up on a rough Camden council estate and had regularly stepped over the slumbering bodies of itinerant musicians who were kipping on the living-room floor as she got ready for school. Hell, she’d once been taken to the park by the late Ruby X, so if Vaughn thought he could start shouting at her and that she’d just sit there and take it, then . . . well, she’d probably cry but on the inside she’d be giving him the finger.

‘I did a little digging on you,’ was what he’d eventually said in a calm voice. ‘I know exactly who you are. I used to know your mother . . . and your father.’

It hadn’t exactly been a shock, though Ellie felt herself pitching forward. When she’d mentioned her predicament to her mother, who knew absolutely everyone, she’d shaken her head. ‘Jimmy Vaughn,’ she’d mused. ‘Always thought he’d end up in prison or, well, dead.’

But to hear Vaughn mention her father, who was never, ever mentioned, wasn’t what Ellie had been expecting and the shock threw her for a second. But only for a second, until she’d forced herself to raise her head and look Vaughn directly in the eye. ‘Yeah, Mum says hi, by the way.’

Then she’d waited for him to start with the shouting and the threatening and the ‘I’m going to ruin yous’, but he’d offered her a job instead.

‘As my general assistant, then we’ll see how things progress once you’re house-trained,’ he’d said. ‘I do like to have someone poor and hungry on staff. They tend to have more of a work ethic than the children of the aristocracy.’

Ellie had lasted six months as Vaughn’s general assistant. He’d shouted at her every day; threatened to fire her without references every day; sent her scuttling to the loo every day so she could cry angry tears in private, but she’d learned more in six months than she had in her three years as an undergraduate.

When she’d picked a degree course it had been a compromise between her mother’s desire for Ellie ‘to do something really creative and rock ’n’ roll with your life’ and her grandparents’ belief in a solid recession-proof career. Ellie knew all about the major art movements, could differentiate between good and bad brush strokes and could understand why investing in art was a safer bet than hedge funds or stock options, but she didn’t really ‘get’ art. It turned out that not getting art wasn’t a huge obstacle to success if you worked for an art dealer and she did have great interpersonal skills.

So when a Premier League footballer had arrived to buy some art for his new Epping Forest mansion, Ellie was entrusted with the care of his wife, a nice girl called Carlie, who she’d taken up to Vaughn’s office so they could talk about handbags and shoes and all the other things Vaughn had told her to talk to Carlie about.

Carlie had been more interested in the catalogue on Vaughn’s coffee table. She’d done History of Art A level and, ‘I adore Fiona Rae. You got anything by her?’Ellie hadn’t but she sold Carlie two alabaster seahorse sculptures by a Japanese figurative artist from the catalogue at list price. Vaughn had bawled her out for not sending Carlie down to him and hadn’t spoken to her for two days, but then he’d sacked Minty, one of the posh girls, so Ellie could start working front of house and knocked fifty per cent off her pitiful salary ‘because it will give you an incentive to make up the rest in commission.’

Ellie now had her own office, a small but perfectly formed roster of young artists and even though she earned only seven point five per cent commission and Vaughn took the other seven point five per cent, she’d paid off her student loans and was now saving up for a deposit on a flat. Vaughn also let her pick two pieces of art every year for her own personal collection, as long as she didn’t go mad and ask for a Damien Hirst or a Tracey Emin, because she was indispensable. Being indispensable was a good thing. It meant that people were stuck with you.

She was pulled back from the undignified gloat about her successful career trajectory by a beep from her phone.

Hello sexy. Fancy lunch? I can come to you. Rich x

Ellie smiled as she felt that anticipatory rush course through her at the thought of seeing Richey. He was always so spontaneous, so in-the-moment, in a way that Ellie longed to be but couldn’t. Then the anticipatory rush was replaced with a feeling of despair. If she had things out with Richey as she’d been instructed, then a spontaneous lunch date might be the last time she saw him, which seemed crazy when she’d been imagining that they might have a future together.

Sounds great. Victory Cafe at 1? Ellie xoxo

Richey was only ten minutes late to meet her, which was a personal best. Ellie had already snagged the last free table in the fifties-themed café in the basement of Gray’s Antique Market in a little mews behind Bond Street station. She looked up from the menu to see him walk in just as two people were leaving. He stood to one side to let them out and Ellie let herself relax ever so slightly.

If Richey were such a bad person, then he wouldn’t have such good manners. ‘Manners maketh the man’ was what people, especially her grandparents, said. It made Ellie smile and wave with more enthusiasm than was strictly appropriate when they needed to talk about his alleged problem with class-A narcotics.

Richey smiled back. He wasn’t tall, only a couple of inches taller than Ellie, but he was a little dangerous looking with his shaven head and the tattooed sleeves inked on his arms, shown off by his tight white T-shirt. He had good muscles too; being a runner for a film production company involved a lot of heavy lifting, and there was something about the way he smiled, how the light in his eyes became more of a glint, that made Ellie want to blush and duck her head. She did neither but tilted her face so Richey could kiss her cheek as he reached her side.

Finally Richey was sitting opposite her, knee brushing against hers and Ellie had to think of a way to lead into a serious discussion that wouldn’t result in a big fight. They’d been seeing each other for eleven weeks exactly, only slept together a handful of times, so serious discussions were new territory.

‘You look so buttoned up in your work gear,’ Richey commented, as his eyes swept over Ellie’s hair, which had had a quick encounter with her office hair straighteners, as had her grey cotton tunic dress, so it was at its optimum uncreasedness. ‘Bit different to how you looked on Saturday night.’

On Saturday night Ellie had cuffed her boyfriend jeans and worn them with an old Sonic Youth T-shirt she’d borrowed from her mother, and white Converses; her hair had been tied back in a ponytail. It had been the perfect

outfit to see Lola’s friend’s band in Soho and go to the aftershow party in Hoxton. Then Lola had invited everyone back to their flat, where the night had quickly degenerated into mayhem when Richey had supposedly done a few lines of coke on the breakfast bar and it transpired that doing a few lines of coke turned Richey into a belligerent tool.

Ellie pushed away the panini she’d barely touched, because Richey had given her the perfect opening gambit, but before she could open her mouth, he reached across the table to take her hand.

‘That reminds me,’ he said. ‘Look, about Saturday night, I’m really sorry about what went down.’

‘Yeah, well, I wanted to talk to you about that,’ Ellie said carefully. ‘Tess and Lola are quite annoyed with you.’

Richey pulled a face to indicate that Tess and Lola and their feelings towards him weren’t weighing that heavily on his mind. ‘But are you annoyed with me?’

‘Well, I wasn’t there for your big rampage. I’d gone down to the High Street with Laetitia to find her a cab and when I got back you were passed out in the bath.’ Ellie paused to gauge Richey’s reaction so far. He was nodding and his eyes were fixed on her intently. He had lovely eyes; they were dark and slumberous, and he had such long lashes that Ellie half suspected he’d had eyelash extensions. ‘But I saw the broken plates, and Lola told me what you called her when she, you know, saw you doing coke in the kitchen.’

‘Oh God,’ Richey said, and he cradled his face in his hands. ‘What else did I do?’

Ellie’s heart was galloping at a rate that couldn’t be healthy. ‘Tess said that she caught you rifling through her drawers. Like you were looking for something.’ Richey’s face was still hidden and she took a deep breath. ‘I’m sure there’s a simple explanation but Tess is convinced that you were hunting for something to sell to fund your habit. You weren’t, were you?’ she added anxiously.

Richey groaned, which wasn’t a no or a yes. Then he lifted his head and he looked so stricken, so ashamed that Ellie couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. And then she felt sorry for herself because she’d seen that look before on other men’s faces just before they confessed to getting their jollies from dressing up in women’s underwear or that they’d just put their entire month’s pay on red, and black had come up instead.

Not again, she thought. Not a-bloody-gain.

‘The thing is, Ellie . . .’ Richey faltered, and Ellie gripped the table top and said nothing, though she was sure everything that she was trying hard not to say was written all over her face. ‘. . . well, it’s all a blank. I remember going back to yours and I remember waking up in the bath and stumbling round in the dark and tripping over when I tried to find your room, but the bit in the middle just isn’t there.’

‘So you don’t recall buying any coke?’ Ellie asked sceptically. ‘It just fell into your pocket, did it?’

Richey flushed. ‘I did a favour for my boss on Saturday. Helped him shift some gear and he gave me a couple of grams as a thank-you. It wasn’t like I could refuse. He’s my boss and I don’t normally do the hard stuff.’ He looked at her pleadingly. ‘I do a bit of spliff and it was Saturday night so, yeah, I sunk a skinful of booze but I don’t usually do coke. I really don’t.’

‘Yeah, but—’

‘Oh, come on, Ellie! I’m a glorified runner. I’m on minimum wage. I couldn’t afford a raging coke habit and if I did act like that on Saturday night, then I’m never touching the stuff again.’

He was certainly talking a good game and Ellie wanted to believe that he wasn’t just another headshot in her own rogues’ gallery, but she had to be certain.

‘I can’t be around someone with a drug habit,’ she whispered fiercely, because the jukebox was switching between tracks. ‘I’ve seen enough of my mum’s friends get really messed up. If you need help, I will absolutely support you . . .’

Oh God. Any doubts Ellie might have had about this whole lame ducks business were gone now. Ten minutes into a serious discussion with Richey and she’d reverted to type. She really was an emotional fluffer. There was no hope but to head for the door as fast as she could and swear off dating.

‘Hey, Ellie, don’t look at me like that.’ Richey gave her hand a little squeeze. ‘I promise it was just a one-off. I don’t have that kind of problem and I’d hate it if I’ve screwed things up before we’ve even got started.’

‘Really?’ Ellie still wasn’t convinced. But maybe she was amenable to being convinced.

‘I know it hasn’t been that long since we started hooking up, but I think we could be something special,’ Richey murmured, and he was looking her straight in the eye and Ellie would know if he was lying. She would, she was sure of it. ‘I’ll make this up to you and I’ll apologise to Tess. Not to Lola, though; she’s fucking scary.’

Ellie was as convinced as she could be without demanding Richey take a drug test. He wanted to put things right, not just with her, but with her flatmates too (at least Tess, because Lola really was fucking scary until you’d known her for a minimum of six months). He must think that they had a future together.

It was her turn to squeeze Richey’s hand. ‘I don’t want this to end either,’ she mumbled. ‘I’ll talk to Tess and Lola, and explain that this whole thing has just been a huge misunderstanding.’

Richey smiled crookedly; it made him look like a little boy who’d been caught stealing from the sweetie cupboard. ‘I bet you’re wondering what you did to get landed with an arsehole like me.’ ‘You’re not an arsehole. You’ve just made some bad decisions,’ Ellie insisted. ‘Look, let’s just draw a line under this and move on.’

‘But you do know that I’m sorry, right? I don’t want you to spend all your time at Glastonbury worrying I’m going to get high on crystal meth and wreck our yurt.’

Ellie didn’t want to spend her time worrying about that either. Not when she was worried that it was going to rain. Worried about having to get backstage to meet clients. Worried that she wouldn’t pack the right clothes. Worried that she might not be able to charge up phone, laptop, iPad, or plug in her hair straighteners. Worried about so many things that she didn’t have space in her schedule to worry about Richey as well. ‘I really wish I didn’t have to go to Glastonbury,’ she blurted out as she’d been blurting out at regular intervals for the last few weeks.

‘Yeah, sucks to be you.’ Richey grinned at her, and Ellie grinned back because now his thigh was pressing against hers and he was giving her a look from under his lashes that was making her feel decidedly hot in a way that had nothing to do with it being unseasonably warm for late June. ‘I don’t suppose you fancy bunking off for the rest of the afternoon?’

She sighed and moved her leg away. ‘I do fancy it but I have to be in King’s Cross in . . .’ She glanced at her watch. ‘. . . half an hour. Can we take a raincheck?’ She was already standing up and bending down to kiss Richey’s cheek. ‘Sorry, I’m going to have to run. I’ll pay on my way out.’

‘No, I’ll get this. It’s the least I can do.’

Ellie beamed at him, because if you took Saturday night completely out of the equation, which she planned to do, then Richey was a very good boyfriend. He might not be the normal boyfriend that Tess and Lola thought she should be dating, but normal was boring and normal definitely wouldn’t pinch Ellie’s arse as she got up to leave.

Oooh, can't wait to read on what happens next?
Check back tomorrow for the fourth chapter!
Click here to get your copy!