The next day Elisabeth took the pink dress and matching jacket to the first of the Holloway Road's many charity shops. She cleaned her room, and spent the rest of the morning wondering how she could ever make it up to Charlotte for starting an altercation on her wedding day. The first stage was to call and apologise, of course. To apologise by text would be too much of a cop out, but then she didn't want to call and wake up the bride on her first day of married life. Equally she didn't want to miss her before she boarded that plane to Zanzibar, so in the end she picked up the phone at twelve sharp:

'Mrs Williams, you up? Is now a good time?'

'Elisabeth! Of course it is! How are you?'

'I'm fine, look, I'm just... I'm really sorry about the whole thing with Caroline yesterday. I was out of order and I shouldn't have... I don't know what possessed me, but I'll take you out for lunch as soon as you're back, somewhere proper and fancy for once, and I'll try and make it up to you, I promise.'

Elisabeth stopped when she heard Charlotte burst out laughing on the other end of the line.

'What?'

'Don't apologise, Elisabeth. Mike told us all about it and I'm glad you did that. Shame only you left early, you shouldn't have, Caroline had it coming.'

'What?'

'That cow!'

'Well I'm... I'm glad you're coming around to my way of thinking but can I ask what's brought this about?'

'She broke my aunt's hip in the bathroom and then she had the cheek to have a go at her!'

'She did what?'

'She barged into the ladies' room ten minutes after you left. There was a bit of a line and apparently the floor was wet because of the snow... anyhow, the door knocked my poor aunty Pam over and she fell and broke her hip.'

'Oh dear, I'm so sorry! How is she?'

'She had to leave in an ambulance for an emergency hip replacement, thank you Caroline. But that's not the worst part. Aunty Pat was standing next to Aunty Pam and she started, well according to Caroline she started lecturing her but I'm sure she probably just called her young lady and asked her to apologise or something, anyway: Caroline called them a pair of sad old fat reactionary trouts!'

'Oh dear, I'm so sorry.'

'And then she wouldn't back down! She left in huff calling my wedding a pile of pretentious crap!'

'No!'

'Let me tell you what's a pile of pretentious crap. Her bloody Oxfam goats wedding present, that's what's pretentious and crap! What on earth is wrong with Selfridges vouchers?'

'Nothing, Charlotte, nothing. Oh dear, I'm so sorry. Your wedding was great, I wish I'd stayed. I'm so sorry, she was probably just still pissed off with me.'

'Well that's neither here nor there, Elisabeth. No one talks to my aunties like that! Especially not after breaking their hip.'

'I know, and they're so sweet, the two of them.'

'I'm still waiting for an apology from her, as you can imagine!'

'Hey, I'm still waiting for over five years' worth of apologies so I wouldn't hold your breath.'

'Don't worry I'm not really, it was a figure of speech.'

'But look, whatever she did, I'm really sorry. Your wedding was great and weddings are not the place for score settling so I'm sorry I had a go at her.'

'Don't worry, Elisabeth, we're cool. Really.'

'Thanks. But please let me buy you lunch when you're back anyway. What time are you off?'

'Next weekend.'

'What?'

'Have you had a look outside?'

'Well, I know it's a bit snowy but...'

'There's precisely two inches down South so Gatwick's gone completely out of action.'

'That's ridiculous!'

'It is, but the travel agent called and suggested rather than go and wait at the airport we just rebook the whole thing and we thought let's do that.'

'You must be gutted.'

'Not at all! We went to see Aunty Pam in hospital, and now we'll have some lunch, unwrap the presents and go sledging. And now you can take me out to lunch this week so what's not to like?'

'You're right! Well good, enjoy then, I'd better go. Thanks again, Charlie, and congratulations.'

x

Elisabeth went back to bed and caught up on the sleep she'd missed the previous night, ahead of what she knew would be a hellish week. Raj's idea was to put a live trade through tradePad on Thursday, even though she'd tried to explain to him that there was far too much left to do between now and then. She already felt exhausted by Tuesday afternoon, when she heard Will's voice to her left:

'Elisabeth, you got a minute?'

'Hmm, not really, why?'

'Something's gone wrong here, can you have a quick look?'

'It never ends up being a quick look,' she pointed out, her eyes still on the interminable piece of code she was combing through, and heard Will stifle a sigh. A second later she realised that if she could hear him stifle a sigh the desk must be unusually quiet, which made her cast an eye towards the clock at the bottom of her screen. Quarter to eight? Surely not. She looked up at the ticker tape: yep, quarter to eight alright. To her right and on the other side of the screens everyone was gone apart from her.

And Will:

'OK, can you come and have however long a look you'd like but please do it now?'

She turned to look at him: he wasn't in full Kingsley-Darcy-death-stare mode, which was good, but he didn't look happy either, and she'd learnt to prefer him being amused at her expense, than not at all. His top button was undone and his tie loose. He'd never done that before so she wondered at first whether that was good or bad, and then she concluded that it was just distracting. It made her want to stare in between the ends of his shirt collar, but she'd put up with enough IT guys talking to her chest to realise that Will probably did not want her to address her conversation to his Adam's apple.

'Well, since you do ask so nicely,' she said, wheeling her chair his way. 'Let's see, what have you done?'

'I haven't done anything.'

'Well, if it's not you then it'll be Market Data,' she said, and got stuck in.

He crossed his arms in front of him and sat back in his chair with a frown. She didn't like it, but it beat that look Andy and Yoda gave her every time the spreadsheet played up on them: that anguished "Doctor, what's happening, do you think he'll live?" stare.

As she'd expected it wasn't just a quick look, and as she'd expected it was Market Data wasting her time. She typed, she tutted, she tucked her hair back, she control-tabbed impatiently to flick back and forth between Pimms, Excel and Reuters, and in the end she sorted it out:

'Off you go,' she said, unaware of how loudly she'd just sighed, or indeed of how many times she'd sighed loudly while working at Will's PC. She pushed off the edge of his desk to roll her chair back to her own workstation and tried to remember where she'd been before he'd interrupted her.

'Thank you, Elisabeth.'

'That's right, piss off,' she said while squinting at line 546 for a possible missing semi-colon.

'Excuse me?'

She should have heard him, he was speaking loud and clear, only she had not been focusing on him because Paul hadn't indented his code very well, and she was trying to work out which of the four nested "ifs" the "else" on line 548 referred to.

'Right, Elisabeth, enough now. What the hell's your problem?'

OK now that, that was the death-stare. To the power of ten. Plus crossed arms. Equals trouble. She remembered as if in a dream that she might just have told him to piss off, she wasn't sure why. He'd probably sounded a bit annoyed with her even as he'd thanked her, and she'd definitely been very annoyed at a whole bunch of people at the time. Back in Research, her old colleagues would never have questioned it after eight straight hours of debugging, let alone twelve and a half. She couldn't expect Will to know that, but she also didn't have time for an argument with him right now, because although she'd already found three bugs in Paul's code today, there clearly were still more of them out there.

'OK sorry, don't piss off, I didn't mean that. Mind if we get back to it?'

This failed to unclench Will's jaw, or indeed his elbows.

'I do mind, actually. You gonna tell me what your problem is?'

'Well, I thought that'd be rather obvious: it's gone eight o'clock and I'm still here debugging.'

'Go home then! But for pity's sake cheer up, Elisabeth. Please.'

'What?'

'Cheer up, please, it might never happen.'

'Right,'

Suddenly she forgot all about not having time for an argument. She attempted to take a deep breath, but anger was tightening her fists and the back of her neck, her entire body felt like a rigid, unyielding mass of uncontainable irritation, and her lungs refused to swell:

'OK, Will, let me tell you what might never happen, at this rate: tradePad might never happen. Not this Thursday, certainly. Paul's written us this settlement program here, which randomly loses between five and twelve trades per broker, which I'm pretty sure isn't part of the original spec. I'll tell you what might very well happen though: Pointless Poynton's gonna lump us with a full internal audit unless we re-file our blooming User Testing Documentation for the umpteenth time, before we go live. Oh, and Raj's just emailed to give me precisely a week's notice to produce a full report on a year's worth of UK and European cost numbers, but I guess there's no way that's gonna happen either. So you know what, Will, if I forgot to smile sweetly while fixing Market Data's umpteenth cock up instead of dealing with any of that then I'm terribly sorry and you have my most sincere apologies. Will that do?'

He waited until he was sure her tirade was over, then smiled what she thought might be a sympathetic smile. Perhaps it was the top button thing, perhaps it was the memory of his unexpected kindness at the Christmas party. Or perhaps it was that she'd finally had a good rant so she felt a fraction less frustrated, but she looked at his face and for a second believed that he might mean well.

Until he opened his mouth:

'Smile sweetly, you? That'd be the day.'

Past the initial shock she felt herself tense up all over again. This time a good part of her anger was directed at herself: how could she have been so stupid as to expect sympathy from Fitzwilliam Kingsley-Darcy? Would she never learn? Sympathy was just too far beyond the reach of his stunted emotional capacities. Clearly she was still the bane of his life.

Because she didn't smile enough.

'Look who's talking,' she spat back, in a tone grating even to her own ears. 'Because of course you smile sweetly all the time, don't you? I tell you what, why don't I just get back to Paul's code, if I'm such a pain in the backside?'

'I never said you were a pain in the backside.'

'You're right: you probably meant a pain in the arse.'

'Jesus, Elisabeth, what's wrong with you!'

At long last he was beginning to sound about half as worked up as she felt. Most people found him terrifying, even when he wasn't actually angry, but now that he was Elisabeth, far from being scared, felt almost gratified to know that she had roused him, finally. Got under that stupid rhino hide of his.

'Me? Hey, don't think there's anything wrong with me, Will. Nothing I can't handle,' she replied with a cold smile, and a self-righteous right index finger on her sternum. She was beginning to think she may be on a rare winner when Will re-crossed his arms and started again in a cold, deliberate voice:

'Then do us a favour, will you? Quit snapping at everyone, whining at everything and starving yourself. Go on, give it a go. Because if you think that's gonna bring that idiot back then let me tell you: it won't.'

She uncrossed her arms to get hold of the desk's edge and turned back to her screens. It was late, this bloody program was still not working, she was knackered, her left temple was pounding, her neck was rigid with stress about the bug the audit and the yearly stats, and this was the last thing she needed. She'd never asked Will to like her but to bring Tom into it, it was just... low. And surprisingly painful, still. Coming from anyone else she would have discounted it as a word too far, a slip of the tongue, but not from him, oh no:

'What was that supposed to mean?' she asked slowly. She'd turned back to him with her best attempt at the Kingsley-Darcy death-stare, but she was in fact clutching at the edge of her desk with something much closer to desperation.

'Have a guess, I think you can work it out.'

'You have no right to bring Tom into this,' she said, feeling her voice beginning to quiver.

'If you don't want me to bring him into this then quit beating yourself up over some foreign-dwelling idiot who's not worth the...'

'Will, butt out!'

She was shouting now, but it was either that or starting to blub, and she wasn't going to give him the satisfaction.

'Fine,' he tried to say, but she was off:

'Just butt out, OK? Tom is none of your business, is that clear? And yes, perhaps I will stop beating myself up, yes, the day you stop being such a cold, mean, arrogant, emotionless...'

'You were right before: perhaps we should just get back to work.'

His poker face had just registered something like surprise, possibly even pain. It was some satisfaction, but not enough to make up for the fact that she'd lost it. Arguing with him was one thing, a pretty common thing in fact, but it had never got personal before. To shout at him, or at anyone for that matter, was just not on. It was undignified, unprofessional, it was beneath her and she now felt like a complete idiot – yet again.

She turned back to her screens, and him to his. But she knew there was no way she'd find that bug now. Debugging requires clear, cool and unemotional thinking, and right now she wouldn't have trusted herself to add 2 and 2 without screwing it up. Plus, according to Will, the bug in Paul's program wasn't a problem anyway, despite the go-live date less than three days away. So she decided she might as well head home. Shame the pool would be closed by the time she got there.

'Try and have a good night, Elisabeth,' she heard after she'd passed his desk. She stopped and turned to look back at him from the doors to the atrium, fully expecting him to be spoiling for a fight again, but no. He just sat there watching her from his seat with his arms crossed and his tie loose and his top button undone. She couldn't decide whether he looked hurt, or just disappointed, but she knew for sure that she wanted the building to collapse down and swallow her:

'I'm really sorry, I'm just knackered, I didn't mean...' she started, one hand in her hair.

'Don't beat yourself up about that either, OK? It's fine, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to upset you.'

'You didn't upset me.'

She let her hand fall back down and they stared on at each other in silence.

'Good night,' he said after a while, but rather than go back to his spreadsheet he carried on looking at her after he finished, so she wasn't sure what to do:

'Don't work too late,' she said, and left.

x

'Owwwwww, Charlie, what have I done now!'

It wasn't so much a question as a long moan, uttered on her mobile phone as soon as she was out of the building and shivering on her way to the bus stop.

'Elisabeth? What's up, darling? What's Tom done now?' Charlotte asked - a fair assumption given the general drift of their conversations since the New Year.

'It's not Tom, it's me. I don't know what's wrong with me, but I think I just went off on one again and called Will a tosser.'

'I know, he is a bit of a tosser, isn't he?'

'To his face, Charlie! I think I called him a cold, mean, emotionless, arrogant... he stopped me before I could finish and call him a bastard or a git. Or worse, I'm not quite sure where I was going with it.'

Charlotte let out a peal of the purest laughter.

'Oh, Elisabeth, my dear, dear Elisabeth! You are priceless, well done you! Someone had to tell him!' she said, and started giggling again.

It was hard not to go along when Charlotte was having one of her legendary laughing fits, so Elisabeth surprised herself by letting out a couple of half-hearted half-chortles, soon followed by a deep sigh.

'OK, right, sorry about that,' said Charlotte, still panting a little, 'Not funny of course. But I am proud of you, you know!'

'Thanks.'

'Complete career suicide of course. What happened?'

'I don't know, I had to help him with a spreadsheet. Bloody market data team's cock up, as usual. And then you know how I can get a bit shirty when I'm debugging... I mean no shirtier than they all get on a daily basis of course, but then he dragged Tom into it and I don't know, I just lost it.'

'Well, understandably! What on earth does Tom have to do with your spreadsheets?'

'Apparently I've got to stop feeling sorry for myself because it's no fun for them, you see, poor traders,' Elisabeth explained with another sigh. This time she heard herself do it, because Charlotte remained uncharacteristically silent on the other end of the line.

'Charlie, you there?' Elisabeth asked, and checked the signal on her phone.

'Aha, yes,' Charlotte said, but her voice was a bit faint.

'Oh good, thought I'd lost you for a sec. Must be a bad line.'

'No no.'

'What is it?'

'I'm really sorry, darling, but...' Elisabeth heard Charlotte take a deep breath and when she spoke again she got it over with as quickly as she could: 'I kinda think he might have a point. Maybe.'

'What?'

'Look, I'm sorry. I know it's been real tough for you, honey, but he's got a point, you know. Tom's the tosser in all this. You know that. Everyone can see that, yet for some reason you beat yourself up about it as if it'd been your fault. It wasn't!'

'But, it was. I knew he wasn't relationship material, I knew it and I decided to ignore it because I'm vain and a silly little flirt.'

'Oh, Elisabeth, stop it now. Just stop it!'

'You know I'm right though.'

'OK, fine! Let's say you were monumentally stupid and it is all your fault. How is moping and starving yourself and blowing up at people going to help?'

'I'm sorry!'

'Stop being sorry, that's the whole point! We all make mistakes, you know. I do too, everyone does! At least it sounds like your mistake was fun at the time.'

Elisabeth thought about this, and about the countless times the guys at work had done terrible trades, been ribbed about it, and just kept calm and carried on, as per the red WWII poster. Seen in a trading context it was pretty obvious: self-pity only makes a bad call worse.

'You know what, it wasn't even that much fun at the time,' she said, thinking of Mac's party.

'I'm sorry, Elisabeth. I really hope you don't take this the wrong way. Of course I understand you feeling rotten. Of course I do. Will doesn't know about Jane or half of the rest of the crap you're putting up with at the moment, but you've just not been you, you know. All you do is work and swim, you never have any fun and then you have a go at people. I mean both Will now, and Caroline at my wedding, they fully deserved it, don't get me wrong. But you hardly ever even smile anymore. I know it's hard but I miss the old you, Elisabeth!'

'Me too... well, I'm smiling now.'

'Oh good!'

'You're the best, Charlie, you know that?'

'Thanks. D'you think you can keep it up?'

'Smiling? I'll try. At least with you I know I will.'

'How about with Will though? How did you leave it?'

'Oh, all very British, you'd have been proud. I apologised of course, then he apologised for upsetting me, so I pretended not to be upset, all fine and dandy,' she said, but her mind went back to that long look he'd given her before she'd left, and the memory erased what was left of her smile.

'Good, I mean as long as appearances are kept up, who gives a monkey's what he thinks of you, you hate his guts anyway.'

'It's not even that easy hating him these days, Charlie, that's the problem.'

'Eh?! Sorry, hon: which part of calling him a tosser didn't come naturally to you?'

'OK, first of all I didn't call him a tosser.'

'But you would have.'

'And second of all he's been really gracious covering my back over Paul's coke photo thing since the New Year. He brings me coffee, he uses the word please in context, he's completely stopped Lizzie-ing me, and as you've just pointed out he's actually dishing out pertinent life advice, in his own sweet way.'

'What?'

'It's not the first time either, you know, he was right about Toad too,' she said, frowning to herself.

'That's true.'

'He just doesn't add up.'

'He doesn't add up?'

'No. He doesn't. I find that frustrating.'

'Of course you do, darling, you do like your adding up,' Charlotte said teasingly.

Another frustrating thing had just flashed through Elisabeth's mind, which she shooed away because Will's top shirt button had nothing to do with any of this and besides, it would be done safely back up again in the morning.

'Exactly,' she said.

'But you reckon you can carry on with the British thing in the morning?'

'Oh yeah, we'll be fine, God, he's good at this, no cross that, he's great at it. I'll just play along, it'll be fine.'

'Good. Are you gonna cheer up a fraction then?'

'Just for you, maybe. I'm sorry, I can't believe I'm spoiling your first week of married life with this tosh.'

'Don't worry Elisabeth. Don't worry about any of it, OK?'

'OK I'll try. Love to Colin, bye.'

'Bye, love you!'

Copyright Mel Liffragh 2021, all rights reserved