On The Market Chapter 18 - Deja vu, a pride and prejudice fanfic

Far too little changed over the following weeks.

On the positive side, tradePad was coming along fine, and Elisabeth was grateful for each day Will brought her her morning macchiato, didn't call her Lizzie and kept schtum about Paul's Christmas photo.

Sadly the bad stuff didn't go away either: Jane was still stuck in hospital and Elisabeth still couldn't stop kicking herself for having put her idiotic faith in Tom.

She thought of him countless times daily, each time with a twang of physical pain. It started when Will walked in with a coffee for her and didn't interrupt an email exchange, and it only stopped when she finally managed to get to sleep without speaking to him. She went swimming almost every night now, so that she wouldn't have to sit in the flat and be tempted to answer the phone, in case it was him. Even Sunday night pancakes were a bit of a chore now: Ben and Mac still ate them cheerfully enough, but she couldn't even add flour to eggs without thinking of how she had done that with Tom, and what a silly, silly flirt she'd been.

Elisabeth felt at least as stupid as she felt angry about the whole thing. She should have known she'd never measure up to Sara. Now what she desperately longed for nowadays was her old, solid self. She had forgotten what it was like not to be obsessed with Thomas Wickham Lorcan Geroge Reilly and that wasn't only painful, it was scary. She could not begin to understand it, and worried whether there would ever be an end to it, a point in the future when she'd stop feeling so stupid, and used, and lonely. On Thursday nights she would go and visit Jane at the hospital, and be reminded that compared to her she didn't have any problems worth moaning about, and come back determined to get a grip, and then fail to, and then hate herself some more over that.

Then on Saturday, January 29th, Elisabeth pulled a pink dress out of her wardrobe. This was the dress Jane had made her buy for Charlotte's wedding back in November. This was the dress Tom had made fun of as he'd glimpsed at it the night of Mac's party. This was the dress she'd shown Charlotte when she'd visited before Christmas. Happy days...

Today it was cold outside. A hard wind was blowing wisps of white clouds across a background of higher, milky grey ones. Rain could not be far, and holding the hanger in front of her chest Elisabeth felt like that shopping trip last year had taken place not just in a different year, century or millennium, but in a different universe altogether: a universe where being single hadn't felt nearly as daunting as it did now, and where Jane had very occasionally been free to walk about the West End's shops looking at pretty things.

Pink had seemed like a good idea at the time. Elisabeth wanted to go for a more sober dark green, but Jane had convinced her that green would make her look even paler, and that pink was a much more suitable colour for a wedding. The dress was short and slinky, like most things this winter. Jane had pointed out how lucky Elisabeth was that it would show off her long legs so nicely. She had also made her buy some sort of cropped tweedy jacket in a very light grey with a pink trim and mother of pearl buttons, which Elisabeth had thought looked horrid, until Jane had pointed out that it went both with the dress and across Elisabeth's swimmer's shoulders.

Jane had promised she'd sort out her hair, and lend some accessories and make-up on the day, but since that was no longer happening Elisabeth just got dressed by herself and, having looked at herself in her wardrobe mirror, grew nervous. She looked absurd: her body that of some girly complete stranger, her head the familiar one of a short haired, bespectacled City worker. She thought of changing into her business suit, the "client presentation" suit. That one went with her face and she knew she'd feel much more at ease in it, but charcoal grey was hardly appropriate for the occasion, and the whole point of today was to try and do Charlotte proud.

She did deserve a bit of an effort, good old Charlotte, who aside from Leo Tolstoy had been Elisabeth's only lifeline these last four weeks. Even with her own wedding looming Charlotte still called every couple of days to check on her, and watched with the patience of a saint as Elisabeth failed to eat up most of the meals they went out for. Charlotte loved the grey-pink combo, which was probably why she herself hated it, but for friendship's sake Elisabeth now put the jacket on and set off, best foot forward, sticking out like a sore thumb on the Holloway Road's pavement on a darkening Saturday afternoon.

Things kicked off with a religious ceremony at St Mary Woolnoth on Lombard Street, which being about fifty yards from both the Bank of England and Barclays's headquarters had never struck Elisabeth as the most romantic place to celebrate a lifetime's union. The exit of the Bank tube was eerily quiet: in all her years of commuting she had never heard her own steps resounding in the station's empty corridors. There were no grey-suited throngs to fight on the way to the church either. Elisabeth settled herself into a discreet seat around the back and took a curious look to the front.

That summer Posh and Becks had got married first in matching white, then in matching purple, with thrones. Well never mind them: Charlotte Lucas-soon-to-be-Williams was going with a white and platinum colour scheme. That's right: those space-age cummerbunds around the ushers waists weren't tin-foil, they were not silver either, they were platinum. Charlotte had tracked them down on the internet and had them shipped from the US, together with matching belts and Alice bands for her bridesmaids.

Claire, Charlotte's very big sister, and Jenny, her very lean step-sister, were doing an outstanding Stan and Ollie impression in their bridesmaid dresses. White was terribly unflattering both to Jenny's complexion and to Claire's figure, but at least Claire was, like her sister, a naturally flamboyant dresser, and she had not only embraced the flashy Alice band and belt, but also gleefully squeezed her calves into a pair of flat silver boots. By contrast Jenny, whose natural dress sense was more librarian than Space/Spice Girl, looked both cold and mortified as she tugged on the short sleeves of her dress.

Elisabeth smoothed the skirt of her own dress and tried for a more positive take on things. Why not look at this as a white and bling wedding, only one done to perfection, Charlotte-style? Even in her dejected frame of mind Elisabeth had to own that everyone did look bright and cheery today in their shiny accessories, ready for the party to end all parties. Everyone, that is, but herself: would it kill her to try for a bit of bright and cheery herself? No it wouldn't: in fact it might do her a power of good.

Mercifully the sermon, like the bride's dress, was of the short and flattering variety, and a rumour started going around while they showered the newlyweds in custom-made, glittering, "C&C" monogrammed confetti at the church gates, that Charlotte had struck a deal with the priest whereby her Church donation would be inversely proportional to the length of his homily.

The downside of this otherwise highly practical arrangement was, that the time thus saved was used by some celebrity magazine photographer friend of Charlotte's to finesse a fancy-lit outdoor photo shoot of the wedding party in nearby Leadenhall Market. He didn't mind that the night was turning bitterly cold, and that fat white shreds of winter sky had started to fall on the waiting guests: he was shooting from behind the fur trim around the hood of the most enormous bright yellow parka ever made, out of which stuck only his matching yellow moon-boots, and a pair of cut-off woolly gloves.

The bride meanwhile couldn't believe her luck in securing an actual white wedding, and smiled blissfully in her little dress, little shoes and a minuscule feathery shrug, impervious to the cold, crowned in cubic zyrconia and glorious snowflakes, and all the while probably thinking something along the lines of: take that, Posh Spice, you skinny cow.

And good for her. Ever the true professional, Charlotte had ordered three huge vats of steaming mulled wine to be served to her wedding party, and to a few puzzled weekend City stragglers drawn in by the sweet tones of the Brazilian steel-drummers she'd hired for a rendition of Pachelbel's Canon.

'Elisabeth, Elisabeth come here! Come!' Charlotte shouted from afar, waving and jumping in her high heels, just as Elisabeth's hands started to thaw around a silver, sorry platinum, paper cup. They'd just finished shooting the best man and bridesmaids and Elisabeth saw Mike and Rachel file way away from the photographer's umbrella lights. She approached tentatively, blinking in their glare.

'Oh, Elisabeth, isn't this great!' Charlotte said, and almost smothered her in thirteen stones of fragrant, cream-silk-wrapped enthusiasm.

'Charlotte, it's just perfect. I'm so happy for you!' said Elisabeth, forgetting all about her painfully frozen toes. The photographer's blinding lights were much harder to ignore:

'Smile! Here-a, please, darrrrlings!' he called in cool, stern Italian.

'Look at him, look at him!' Charlotte laughed, and changed her grip to give Elisabeth a vigorous side-on hug while smiling away at the camera.

'No! Take-offa zee glasses. Please!' the yellow photographer said, throwing his hands up and starting to tut.

'Leave her alone! She's my friend and she's perfect as she is!' Charlotte shot back, at which Elisabeth's face finally relaxed and smiled at the flashlights.

'Oh and by the way, I have a surprise for you,' Charlotte whispered in her ear before she was shooed away, 'Hope you like him, but you can thank me later – love you!'

The wedding party made its way in dribs and drabs, on foot across London Bridge. The photographer and his entourage stopped everyone halfway across the Thames to set up the umbrella lights again and take a couple more urban shots against the backdrop of lit-up Tower Bridge. Eventually they all reached a huge, warmly lit, red brick wine cellar not far from Borough Market, and as Elisabeth found her seat for dinner the meaning of Charlotte's last remark became evident:

'Good evening! I'm Frederic Stanton-Morley.'

'Nice to meet you: Elisabeth Bennet.'

'As in Bennet, Brunswick & Cunningham, FAJ 1994, right?'

FAJ being geek for the venerable but exceedingly dry Financial Analysts' Journal, this guy was either a fellow geek, or else a scarily well-informed stalker. But he didn't look like either, he just looked like a bit of a toff, except an incredibly good-looking one. He wasn't handsome in a Kingsley-like, after-shave-ad fashion, he was more of a Michelangelo beauty, with a roman nose and gorgeous large blue eyes, bordered by the sort of long dark lashes that most girls in the room would have given their right arm for.

'Uh yes, that's me alright. How did you...'

'Charlotte told me I might have read some of your stuff. I had, actually,' he said, smiling as if that was anything to be proud of.

Elisabeth smiled politely back and before she sat down she looked around and caught Charlotte's eye at the high table. The bride raised her threaded eyebrows and pointed in Frederic's direction with a knowing smile and a none too subtle nod. Wow, trust Charlotte to go and find her a single, posh, attractive quant. She didn't feel a bit like it but Elisabeth now realised she owed it to herself, and to the bride, to try and at least flirt with the guy.

'How come it doesn't say Dr E. Bennet on your place card then?' he asked.

'Almost certainly because I haven't got a PhD: our Charlotte would never miss something like that, believe me.'

'But you've published, what, three, four papers?'

'Mostly Ian Brunswick did when he was my boss. They were all his idea: I just did the numbers and the writing up. I remember he kept telling me to get married to Mike so my name would stop coming before his.'

'I can't believe you actually know Ian Brunswick,' Frederick said, clutching the table with one hand while loosening his tie with the other. Elisabeth swayed back to make room for his excitement.

'Yeah, he gave me my first research job, he was my tutor back at...'

'What's he like?'

'I don't know,' she shrugged, trying to think about it: 'Perfectly nice, infuriating, changed his mind every five minutes, you know, never ever made decisions, couldn't spell for toffee – standard head of research material,' she said indifferently, and saw poor Frederic's face fall. 'Oh but yeah, no, he's really really clever!'

'I'm finishing my PhD at UCL,' he said, 'Econometrics, with Bertrand Viallet – do you know him?'

'No.'

'Really? He was one of the first to apply cointegration in a financial context.'

'You don't say?'

Or rather, she was already beginning to wish he would stop saying. She thought of how often she'd moaned to Charlotte that she never got to meet people she could discuss her job with. What a fool! It was nice that Frederic understood what she did all day, and it was even nicer that he seemed unaware of how good looking he was. But what on earth made him think that she wanted to discuss cointegration on her night off?

'And Bertrand's French of course. Didn't Charlotte say you were French?'

'I am a bit, yes.'

'He's really, really good. He's really big in Fixed Income,' Frederick said, with the kind of "phwoar" tone the back office guys put on to discuss car engines.

'That'll be why I don't know him: I'm more of an equity person, don't know anything about fixed income, really,' she said, exaggerating her ignorance in an attempt to close the subject.

'We're working on copulas,' Frederick explained, undeterred.

'I see.'

She didn't, but if it was anything like cointegration then he should stop now.

'Have I met you at an Inquire conference before?'

'Possibly...'

By the end of the main course Frederic was still busy explaining to her how joint cumulative probability distributions, and hence copulas, were used in pricing Collateralized Debt Obligations, i.e. bets on bets on loads of mortgages defaulting at the same time. To Elisabeth those sounded like the recipe to bigging up the next financial crash, but to Frederic they were just good old-fashioned econometric porn. Hence she was almost glad when she saw Mike rise up at the high table and adjust his platinum bow-tie. Ah yes, best man's speech. That meant the meal was nearly over, and then hopefully she could get Frederic to shut up, take his impeccable suit jacket off, and start dancing.

'Ladies and gentlemen,' Mike started, and cleared his throat while waiting for the hum of conversation to ebb away. Silence spread from the high table at the front to the lowest ones at the back, and Mike started again:

'Ladies and gentlemen, I will always remember the day Colin told me he'd just proposed to our lovely Charlotte. I'm afraid my faith in womankind was at an all time low: a week before my girlfriend of seven years had cleared out of our flat, leaving me a note on the kitchen table to say she was off to New York because she needed "time to think"...'

'Ooooooooh...' went the whole cavernous room's sympathy, right on cue while he paused for breath or, more likely, for effect.

Charlotte shot Colin what was by her standards an exceptionally dark look, and then a strange thing happened. Mike carried on talking about how news of his oldest friend's engagement to the most incredible ... etc. etc., but instead of looking at him a few people at the front tables started to turn around to check the back of the room. Elisabeth turned around and checked the back wall too, expecting perhaps a repeat of the fancy slide show they'd projected there earlier.

But no: the screen was still rolled up, the brick wall just boringly... bricky. Elisabeth turned back to the front again and when she did she saw the look-backs spread like a Mexican wave. One or two people at each table would nod back and then the rest of their table would do the same, then the next table, and the next, until the wave reached the two tables immediately in front of hers and she was left in no doubt that they were all copping a good look at her. She thought of running to the loo, or at least hiding her burning cheeks behind her napkin, but in the end she just carried on sullying the Lord's name under her breath together with the best man's, while looking straight at the high table.

'So to paraphrase the immortal bard,' Mike went on with unselfconscious banality, 'let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment.'

'Do you know him?' Frederic asked, whose exalted mental faculties did not stretch to building an understanding of the situation.

'It wasn't like that,' she muttered, and re-crossed her arms and her legs.

Elisabeth knew she shouldn't, but after that delightful interlude the only thing for it was alcohol. She started with knocking back Frederic's champagne as well as her own over the wedding cake (white and silver, sorry platinum), then sent him to the bar for a refill, which he gallantly did fetch. But he balked at the dance floor, ruining what was left of his chances with her.

The music was, predictably, great, and there were bubble machines and smoke machines but, better still, the dance floor was the one place Elisabeth could be certain not to bump into Mike. Charlotte and Colin were already busy gyrating under the disco mirror balls and soon she was doing the same with one of Colin's smooth-moving and, seen through Champagne goggles, already not quite so ugly-looking cousins.

Then towards the end of "Rock the Casbah" she felt brutally thirsty and headed for the bar, having checked first of all that Mike's bacofoil bow-tie was nowhere in sight. She ordered a pint of cranberry and soda, which the gentleman behind the bar handed over in no time, and without even asking her to repeat her order first. My god, Charlotte, you really are good, Elisabeth thought to herself as she turned back, sipping her drink.

'Elisabeth!' said Caroline, and almost crashed into her.

'Elisabeth,' said Mike.

'Mike, Caroline, Rachel,' Elisabeth replied, surprised at how normal she managed to sound. Mike stood to the right, an arm wrapped proprietorially around little Rachel's shoulders and a smug smile on his face. Rachel was in the middle, looking a bit startled, but otherwise petite and cute with her big brown doe eyes. And Caroline was to the left, almost as small as Rachel, but beautiful rather than cute, despite having made no effort whatsoever for Charlotte's sake, and wearing the same spaghetti strap sequin top and skinny jeans combo she wore to every party, because how could she go shopping while there was a war going on in...

'It's nice to...' Rachel started.

'God, Elisabeth, it's sssso good to see you!' Caroline interrupted, an almost bowled her over.

Elisabeth's experience was that Mike's sister was at least as strong as she was small, but that she usually preferred cold-shouldering to more physical forms of aggression. What knocked her back for six, therefore, was the fact that Caroline was smiling away at her for the first time in... well, ever. And now taking an unprecedented amount of interest in her welfare too:

'How are you doing? It's been ages! We've missed you, you know, and I'm not just talking about Mike!'

Caroline? Miss her, Elisabeth Bennet? Highly unlikely. Elisabeth frowned and her eyes moved from Caroline's face to Rachel's. Understandably, after Caroline's performance she was looking up at her boyfriend for reassurance. He gave her a fatherly smile and squeezed her shoulder, and then the penny dropped: of course, what better way for Caroline to wind up her brother's new girlfriend, than to chummy up to the old one! Elisabeth was wondering how she could possibly get herself out of this situation without further inflaming it when Mike finally did the gentlemanly thing and stepped in:

'So how's things with Tom then?'

Oh, that was low.

Very low, even for him.

Because judging by the self-satisfied look on his face he knew exactly what he was doing. The opening of his best man speech had probably not been innocent either then. How pathetic: he should take a page from the traders' book and learn at the very least not to gloat so very obviously.

'Things with Tom are just the way I like them, Mike, thank you for asking,' she said, then tried to step away and back to the dance floor and to Colin's fun-ugly cousin.

'No, come on, have a drink with us!' Caroline protested, and stuck her arm out before Elisabeth could sidestep her, meanwhile shouting to the barman: 'Champagne, three!'

'Right, Caroline, well I'd better...' Elisabeth mumbled. But Caroline proceeded to bar Elisabeth's way with one arm, whilst with the other she grabbed the first flute off the barman and gave it to Mike. She then gave the second to Elisabeth and kept the third for herself.

After a few seconds of frowning down at her two drinks, then at Rachel standing empty handed less than a yard away, Elisabeth realised there must be a mistake and held the flute out to her. But Caroline raised her own glass in the way before Elisabeth could make contact with Rachel's hand, and the two glasses clinked with a crystalline ring:

'To Charlotte and Colin: good times!' Caroline cried, raised her flute again with a huge grin, and then knocked it back in a couple of hearty gulps.

With Caroline's glass thus out of the way, Elisabeth decided to try and hand Rachel the flute once more, but this time it was Rachel who withdrew her olive-skinned hand with a painful little sigh, and turned to her boyfriend with a tremulous voice:

'Mike?'

'What, your new girlfriend can't even get her own drink at a free bar now? Elisabeth used to be a bit more self reliant. Seriously, Rachel, if you can't get yourself a drink here today good luck getting clean drinking water next time you're in Sierra Leone.'

Caroline returned to smiling at Elisabeth. Mike cast an anxious look down at Rachel, then a pleading one at his sister, then an imploring one at the barman, then looked back at Rachel and squeezed her shoulder and then her tiny waist.

But, as ever, he did not say or do anything.

What Elisabeth experienced next was the most sickening kind of déjà vu. How many times had Caroline played this simple trick on her: blanking her first, then snapping at her if she dared point it out? It was weird though, experiencing it from the outside. Standing here across from the three of them it was obvious that Caroline's behaviour was out of order. Yet Elisabeth knew all too well how difficult this point was to get across to her and her brother.

For a start, Caroline's snipes were always targeted with the utmost precision, and rarely uttered in front of a wide audience. Also, Caroline knew how to be extremely pleasant to those she aimed to please, as she was now trying to do with Elisabeth. Most people, therefore, Charlotte included, had never fully understood what Elisabeth could have against her. Plus of course by now little Rachel would have had so much of the award-winning puppy spiel, she'd never even have thought to question the fact that Caroline had not, actually, ever set foot in Sierra Leone.

To her credit, the new girl was handling herself admirably. By this stage Elisabeth herself would long have lost the plot. But then, as Mike loved to point out, Elisabeth could be so "stubborn" and so "unkind". Meanwhile he was still busy giving Rachel a hangdog look worthy of the late Diana-princess-of-Wales.

Elisabeth knew that look well, it was the "oh woe is me, I love you both so much why can't you just get on, my life is so unfair" look and by god, it made her blood boil to see it work on Rachel as it once had on her. For Mike genuinely treated Caroline's relational issues with his girlfriends as what his fellow economists termed an "externality" or, in layman's terms, nothing to do with him. Oh no, he was the victim in all this.

Elisabeth turned around, set what should have been Rachel's champagne flute back onto the bar, then put down her cranberry-soda next to it and turned back around again, and started to speak in the slow, clear and florid tones they used on the desk on a bad day:

'Mike for goodness' sake, grow a pair, will you? Give Rachel here your glass, and tell her to piss off,' she said, still looking straight at him but thumbing at Caroline. Then she had an even better idea:

'Caroline: do them a favour, no, do us all a favour, and piss back off to the jungle, since you're so good at extreme drinks-ordering. Piss back off to Sierra Leone and give us all a break, will you?'

To Mike she added:

'There, Mike, that's how you do it,' and walked off.

God, why had no one ever told her that being a bitch could feel this good?

Seriously, in 28 years?

She headed back to the dance floor, bedazzled, her shoulders shimmying and her right foot already tapping the beat to Fatboy Slim's "Praise you". Colin's groovy cousin was dancing a few yards away, and looking back down from the gigantic disco balls on the ceiling she saw him wave at her with great enthusiasm and frowned: why was he looking all fat and ugly, all of a sudden? Oh that's right: Elisabeth had sobered up, her inner bitch was back in the doghouse where she belonged, and neither Elisabeth nor the bitch felt like dancing anymore. She waved back at Colin's cousin with a feeble smile, then turned around and went to bid good night to the bride and groom. Frederic intercepted her on her way back from the cloakroom and said something about meeting up again. She treated him to her brightest smile and to Mike's phone number. Let the two of them work that one out between them.

Naturally Charlotte had made sure that there was a line of cabs waiting for her guests in front of the doors, but before she stepped into one Elisabeth took a good look at the night sky above her glasses and thanked her lucky star, wherever it was behind that thick layer of winter clouds. Being single had never felt so good.