On The Market Chapter 20 - Go live, a pride and prejudice fanfic

Charlotte was right: Elisabeth had to stop feeling sorry for all her past idiocies, and try to move on as gracefully as possible. She started by getting in extra early the next day, and with a clear head, some peace and quiet and a bit of method she found Paul's last bug after only twenty minutes, just as Will was walking in with the morning coffees. Great, if he was still buying her macchiatos then things were probably cool, so she took ten seconds to save her changes before she looked up and acknowledged him.

'Morning, Will! Thanks!'

'Good morning, Elisabeth.'

Oh dear.

People were scared of his death-stare but this was way, way worse: he was giving her his corporate smile. The one he'd used on Toad during his job interview. The one she'd seen him flash at countless idiots since, whenever he knew better than to argue with one. Being idiots, the countless idiots usually bought it and just smiled back at him, but Elisabeth was no idiot. She had, admittedly, been a right old idiot yesterday, but she had since made a promise to Charlotte. So instead of fiddling with her hair and mumbling another pointless apology she forced on a smile and spoke loud and clear:

'Good news: I found the bug!'

Her smile wasn't nearly as polished as his, and she didn't kid herself that he wouldn't see right through her and realise that she felt awkward as hell. But it showed willing, which was the whole point.

'Great! So we're back on track for Thursday?' he asked, still with the same unbearable grin. Already she was struggling to keep smiling back at him, but smile on she did, as best she could.

'With tradePad we should be, yes,' she said, turned back to her screen and let her face relax.

'Great,' he said again.

She didn't check his face. She'd rather not know.

Instead she worked hard again all day, and since Neil was going to be her guinea pig tomorrow she mostly spoke to him, to the test brokers and to Paul. Which was just as well because on the rare occasions she had to appraise or consult Will he either gave her the horrible fake smile, or that dejected look from after their fight, the too-fed-up-to-bother-even-getting-angry one. She smiled on, of course, though probably not sweetly enough. She and Paul stayed late again that night, talking to New York and making sure they were ready for all eventualities.

Then came the fateful day.

Elisabeth made a conscious decision to carry on with her t-cost report for Raj and let Paul handle the live trade with Neil. He was going to be the first line of support going forward and she wanted the guys to trust him. But she kept an eye on him and Neil all day, thinking what a fantastic parody it would have made of that scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey where the apes find the monolith.

First came fear and anger. Why wasn't it opening? Oh hang on, it was doing something now but where had Neil's emails gone? Where were they? They used to be right here! Paul brought back Neil's Outlook window from behind tradePad's, and asked him how he would prefer to have things arranged across this three screens. First disaster averted: they'd demonstrated that opening tradePad did not result in loss of emails. Excellent.

Anger gave way to mistrust. What? A login screen? But he'd logged into Pimms already! Different software – did Neil really want a trading platform that the cleaner could get into? Oh good point. Neil gingerly entered his new log in.

Then came the cautious prodding stage, and a barrage of questions. What did this button do? That one? This icon? Hang on, but what if I press it twice instead of once, by mistake? It'll never work, see, it doesn't work, I just pressed it and nothing happened. That's because you haven't loaded any orders. Oh, I have to load in orders? Yes, why don't we try it? They pressed the button with "Load order" written on it, and they tried just two: a buy of Vodafone and a crossover trade, a sell and a short sell, in Man Group.

The prodding now became more eager and more confident. Oh, so this is how I can send an order to the market. Nifty. Oh look, that price just moved! Yes, it's real time. Are you really sure nothing bad's going to happen if I press this button and send the bid? Nothing, go ahead. Really, sure? Go ahead, you can pull it back later if you want. The recoil of Neil's shoulder after he clicked on the "Place order" button would have made you think he'd just fired a Kalashnikov.

And then nothing bad happened.

The number of shares left for him to buy on the main page had gone down by the amount he'd just placed, and Neil calmed down. He stopped prodding and started exploring properly, all by himself. He sliced what was left of his two orders into about thirty clips, and had great fun placing them high and low on the two stocks' respective order books. Normally he would have dealt these two stocks in a couple of tranches maximum, but today was a quiet day and Andy had been given all his other trades to deal, so Neil could focus. The rest of the trading team, which had so far stayed well out of it, started gathering behind Neil's chair and asking to "have a go" too.

Then came the mystical sunrise moment, when Neil's first bid was hit and the first tranche of the Vodafone order appeared in the "Executed" column of the main screen.

…And there was much rejoicing throughout the desk.

Not from Elisabeth though and not, by the look of it, from Will either. She would not relax until she knew that Neil's however many clips of Vodafone and Man Group were accounted for safely both in Pimm's, and at the broker's, and until the back-office guys confirmed that everything matched. The pretty windows flashing numbers on Neil's screen were but the tip of the iceberg: Paul and Elisabeth had spent hours automating the upload of executed trades back into Pimms, and automating an email of the same information back to each broker they'd dealt with. This was the very piece of code, which until yesterday randomly lost trades. She could only hope that it wouldn't now randomly start losing zeros.

The wait was agonising. Five minutes after they'd shut tradePad down for the day the back-office guys said the broker still hadn't received the trade confirmations. How could that be? Paul tracked the email down to the point where it had left the bank's servers, precisely 37 seconds after tradePad had shut down. After that there was no telling where the info had gone, if not to the broker. Neil grew nervous again and Will started talking about re-sending the confirmations, manually, from Pimms.

Fuming, Elisabeth almost told him to piss off again, but managed to ask him for an extra ten minutes instead, in a nervous but polite way. He crossed his arms and gave her five, together with his worst death-stare. She was immensely grateful for both.

Four minutes passed, three more phonecalls were made by the back-office to the broker, to no avail. Neil had already started copying and pasting from Pimms into an email, ready to bypass weeks' worth of late night and early morning programming by both Paul and Elisabeth. This was infuriating. All the complicated parts of the process had gone fine, and now they were going to fail over a stupid email. Jesus, even Mike could do emails...

'Wait, Neil! You too Will! Just wait!' she cried, pointing a bossy index finger at each. She stood up and walked across the aisle on Neil's side and to the back-office desk.

'Put them on the line again,' she said.

'We've only just called, they haven't got anything.'

'No no, they have, put them on speakerphone.'

Someone did, reluctantly.

'Hey, have you guys checked your spam folder? Is our email there by any chance?' Elisabeth asked.

The yes which came back was timid and barely audible, but the yes which Elisabeth then let out, punching the air, must have been heard all the way to the seventh floor.

Now there could be much rejoicing throughout the desk. Even Will looked, for once in his life, genuinely happy. In Charlotte's line of work this would have been a group hug moment, but out here it was just another "go out and get plastered" moment. The only trouble was, today was Thursday, which meant Elisabeth was due to go and visit Jane. But the guys wouldn't hear of her not joining them.

She didn't want to sound like a party pooper, but she also couldn't contemplate letting Jane down, so she tried to explain to them that she really must see this friend in hospital, without getting drawn into explaining who the friend was. In the end it was agreed that the guys would all go to Borough Market, so that she could join them as soon as she was finished, in one quick hop down the new Jubilee line extension.

She got to the hospital just as Jane was having her tea: poached salmon, new potatoes and steamed veg. Spotted dick for pudding. Some cheese. Elisabeth realised she might be starting to get over Tom, or tradePad, or both: the smell made her peckish, something she hadn't felt in ages. Normally she hated feeling peckish, once she started she found it almost impossible to think about anything other than food, but tonight she was just ecstatic to feel her stomach rumble with something other than anxiety.

As for Jane, she was looking and sounding more like the Buddha every week, reclining there with her expanding tummy and her quiet smile. She'd cleared 26 weeks and things were looking great, by which she meant that she could look forward to another two to three months stuck to a drip in this dismal pink room, during which she would be extensively shafted by her employer, which didn't matter one jot because she'd soon be giving up on a brilliant career to become an earth mother. Elisabeth couldn't make sense of it, so she gave up on her sister in law's good sense and appealed to her sense of duty instead:

'You've got to come back, Jane. If you don't do it for yourself then do it for the sisterhood.'

'What sisterhood?'

'Precisely. There's precious few enough of us out there already, think how long it'll be before we have another woman MD if you don't come back.'

'Oh.'

'We need you: me, the girls in marketing, legal, even the girls in market data and the back office, we need a role model and right now that's you. You just can't leave.'

Jane frowned with typically modest incomprehension, so Elisabeth elucidated:

'You know that woman who does the early shift in the back-office? She's there at six every morning so she can leave at three and pick up her kid from school. No one else ever wants to do her shift, but it's the only one she can do so according to her boss it's the bank that's being really flexible, not her.'

'That sounds a very good arrangement. Quite a few mums work that way in other teams too, if the dads can do the drop off in the morning.'

'That's not the point. The point is she's knackered but she was saying the other day that at least when she looks at you she sees what she could do.'

'Me? Why would she even know me?'

'Everyone does, Jane! All the women anyway. How often do they get to see a mum of two and a half on Win!, announcing portfolio launches and a new nursery voucher scheme?'

'None of that's gonna make any difference,' Jane said in the end in a cool, detached tone. Elisabeth recognised her defence mechanism:

'What do you mean it's not going to make a difference? Come on, Jane! Weren't you on the committee that finally got the maternity policy extended to six months? You gave everyone another two months to breastfeed, I think you should take pride!'

'Clearly you haven't tried breastfeeding,' Jane joked, but still with that defensive coldness in her voice.

'OK I haven't, no, but if you've done it for the twins then it must be the best thing to do, right?'

'What I mean is that none of this Diversity stuff is going to put any women on the bank's board,' Jane said, as if Diversity was a rude word.

'OK maybe it won't put women on the board next year, but in the long run?'

'No, even in the long run it won't make a speck of difference, let me tell you. Might even make things even worse,' Jane insisted.

Which she very rarely did.

'Well, what would make a difference then?' Elisabeth asked, sensitive to what must therefore be the exceptional strength of Jane's feelings on the subject.

'Quotas,' Jane said, loud and clear, and drew her lips as she watched Elisabeth's face decompose.

'Quotas?! Quotas? Are you mad! What are we? We're not disabled for goodness' sake, we're just women! And since when did you become such a raving leftist anyway?'

'I'm not a raving leftist, and I wasn't expecting you to agree,' Jane said calmly.

'I'm sorry, Jane, but I really don't think you'll find many people to agree with you on that one. Quotas? You're mad. It's so bloody... demeaning! I can't believe you, of all people, are saying that we can't get there on our own merits.'

'Not while mothers compete with fathers for those board positions, no. Not until women learn to neglect their children in the way fathers do, everyday. Or until women stop having children altogether. Because until then there won't be such a thing as a level playing field. Of course if that ever happens it will be a sad day for humankind, but never mind that.'

Elisabeth's mouth was gaping with disbelief. Jane by contrast was back to her old, sparky self:

'From where I stand it's either quotas or the New Man. Remember that guy, last century, who was going to love us without objectifing us, who'd respect us and who'd share all house and child-care duties with us on an equal footing?'

'You mean the man I thought Mike was, and Vincent will never be?'

'Precisely: so that leaves quotas.'

'Never. All this is just talk, anyway. It's all very well for you to say this to me in here but I bet you'd never repeat it in front of Vincent. Let alone to the Board.'

'Of course I wouldn't!' Jane said, inexplicably cheered up by this conversation, 'Don't be silly, Elisabeth, only a man could get away with saying something like that to the Board!'

OK, so Jane wasn't joking. Or budging. In fact it felt very much like she'd just won the first round. Perhaps Elisabeth shouldn't have taken the argument to the macro, political level after all. Best perhaps to keep it personal:

'But come on, Jane, I know it's always been harder for you than for the old boys but you've done such a great job! Can't you get some more help, I don't know...'

'Oh I do know,' Jane cut in. 'Fiona Kemp out in New York, she's an MD, just got her third kid. She came back full time after three weeks, and she explained to me how she does it. She expresses her milk at work and she's got three nannies: one daytime, live in, one night-time, live out, and one for handover and emergencies. The three of them share 10% of her bonus, so they're incentivised to support her career. Isn't that brilliant? She gets plenty of quality time with the kids at the weekend -apparently.'

'That sounds pretty perfect to me.'

'Elisabeth, you say that now, but wait until you get your own little bundle of flesh and need. You'll see: what she described is your brother's idea of being a parent. That's my boss's idea of it. It's everyone's idea around here,' Jane said, forgetting for a moment that she wasn't at the office, 'but it's not mine. I'm sorry but my children are more important to me than the bank's bottom line. I want to be with them when they're sick. Personally I don't think it makes me un-committed, I think it makes me human. But this whole City's culture is built on putting the company first. It's not just our bank, and economically I can understand it. But deep down it makes me angry, Elisabeth. It does, but it will never ever change and meanwhile I only get one chance with this one,' she concluded, patting her belly. There was not a trace of gaiety left in Jane's voice now as she enumerated:

'Banking. Golf. Fishing. Cricket. Men will always come up with occupations more important and even more time consuming than looking after their offspring. The City's just one of them, and I'm done battling against it.'

The last sentence hit Elisabeth like a punch to the chest.

Perhaps it was Jane's sullen resignation, rather than her actual words, but at last Elisabeth begun to understand what had been going on inside her head. All these weeks she'd refused to hear it because it was scary, unthinkable. Ever since the twins had been born she'd looked at Jane as the woman who had it all: a stable marriage -albeit to Vincent-, cute bilingual kids, a brilliant career of her own, money in the bank and a smile on her face. Jane Bennet-Bingley didn't do complaining, and Elisabeth had foolishly thought that was because she was fine.

It was too painful to start seeing the cracks in the great feminist ideal, to acknowledge that there just might not be such a thing as a happy working mum. And if Jane couldn't be happy in a well-paid job that she was great at, then who stood a chance? Not Elisabeth certainly, not with her talent for corporate bumbling.

Worse than that, Elisabeth realised that all these years she'd failed to see her friend's struggle. She shouldn't have bought Jane's happy front, she should have seen through the brave smiles and the "never minds". But she'd been too absorbed by her own childish fights with the Old Boys to see those of her friend. She'd been too cowardly to ask questions she wouldn't like the answer to. And now Jane was here, stuck between four pink walls, and giving up, and Elisabeth felt it was every bit as much her fault, as it was Toad's, or anybody else's on the bank's Board.

'How's things with Tom?' Jane asked, back to her usual warm, considerate self. Elisabeth stared at her in disbelief. How could Jane care about Tom when... hell, compared to what Jane was going through, her heartbreak over Tom was just self-indulgent piffle. It didn't feel like it, still, far from it. But it was.

'Tom? You know what, I think it's time I moved on from Tom. Several people have been suggesting it, and I think they've got a point.'

'OK, great! That's great, I'm glad you're getting over him.'

'Who said I was getting over him?' Elisabeth said, blushing at the thought of her most recent outburst at Will, 'But I think I should at least try and get over him, if you see what I mean.'

'That's great. I guess he must be back with... I mean he hasn't tried anything on, has he?'

'Thank goodness no, he hasn't. I might be stupid enough to fall for it.'

'You weren't stupid.'

'I was. You know I was, I know I was. But, as of now, I'm going to try not hate myself over it. It's going to be hard because you know how hard it is for me to tolerate stupidity in anyone, let alone in myself, but I guess I'll have to make an exception. After all if you and Charlotte are still putting up with me...'

'We never put up with you, Elisabeth, we put you straight,' Jane said and, to Elisabeth's immense relief, smiled again. 'But look, if you're going to get over Tom shouldn't you go be hanging out with handsome traders rather than with me?'

Elisabeth frowned. Oh yes, right, she must mean Will. If only she knew.

'I guess you're right, I should,' Elisabeth replied.

She'd come to the conclusion on her way over that perhaps she just intrinsically annoyed Will. After all there were plenty of people whom she found annoying, just like that, for no particular reason. In which case there was little she could do other than to try and put up a bright front, as indeed he'd been doing, coffees and phoney smiles and all. She felt her phone vibrate in her back pocket. 'It's Neil, they're going for tapas.'

'It's nice of them to check on you. You should go.'

'Are you sure?'

'They'll kick you out of here in a minute anyway,' Jane said with a dismissive flap of her still delightfully small hand. 'Off you go! Hurry up and have fun for both of us!'

'I'll try my best. See you next week?'

'I certainly hope I'm not going anywhere,' she replied pushing her tray and reaching for Hello!

'Fingers crossed!' she said, gave Jane a kiss, and left to go and catch the Jubilee Line.

She called Neil back as soon as she got a signal, and waited as instructed at the Borough High Street exit with Leo Tolstoy. Pierre was in all likelihood about to go and propose to Natasha, at long last. After 700-odd pages of Pierre's thwarted devotion, Elisabeth had read on obsessively up and down the station's stairwells and corridors, and still could not put the book away while she waited:

"But he had hardly entered the room before an instantaneous feeling of loss of freedom made him aware with his whole being of her presence."

That 'instantaneous feeling of loss of freedom': yep, that's what she'd felt whenever Tom had been around, with every email he'd sent. It was indeed a loss of freedom because she only realised now, and with Leo's help, how completely it had bypassed her rational free will, and hence her famed intellectual faculties. Yet she still felt a remnant of that folly even now as she read, and let out a sigh tinged with both sadness and hope. Love, a hundred years ago in a land far far away. It was a while before she sensed someone standing close to her:

'Enjoying it?' Will asked.

She snapped the book shut and, with mixed regret and apprehension, she placed it back in her pocket and looked up.

'Complete genius,' she said with a slow nod.

He was no longer giving her the horrible corporate smile, thank goodness. In fact by Kingsley-Darcy standards he even looked chilled. Perhaps he too had been more stressed out about tradePad than she gave him credit for. Whatever the reason though, it felt good to see him like this, and as per her fresh resolutions she decided to play it chirpy too and smiled, and he back, in a more subdued and hence far more convincing fashion than in the morning.

'Can I have a look?' he asked, pointing at the distended Barbour pocket which served as her book bag. 'Whereabouts are you?'

'Almost finished, don't spoil the ending!' she said, handing the book over.

'Hate to, but Napoleon loses,' he said while looking for her last cornered page. 'You don't really believe in keeping books neat now, do you?'

'It's not just books, I thought you might have noticed by now.'

He made to reply other than to smile again, though she had no idea whether that was at what she'd just said or at what Leo Tolstoy had written over a century ago. She watched him read on, mulling over the mind-blowingly awkward prospect of discussing Pierre's feelings for Natasha with him.

'Amazing stuff,' he said at last, handing the book back. 'Hate to tear you away from it, but Tolstoy will still be there in the morning.'

'Ah but you were absolutely right about the military strategy: fabulous stuff, especially for insomnia,' she joked. She spoke from bitter experience: some parts of Book Three had been a great help in finding sleep in her new polyester sheets.

'Philistine. You didn't like that?'

He seemed dead serious.

'I got the gist but it went on a bit. Where are we going?'

'Over there,' he said pointing across the road. 'Wanted to catch you first though, we had a call from Raj. He said well done, of course.'

'Of course,' she repeated, with a fond thought for Raj, 'but surely what you mean is he praised our outstanding achievings, at the very least he mentioned thought-leadership and the stakeholders, right?'

'Something like that, yes,' Will smiled, 'And there's good news. The panel review's gone through and Neil's been promoted.'

'Oh the panel review, of course…'

She was very pleased for Neil, naturally, but her first thought had not been for him but for Jane, lying bravely, all alone, in her hospital bed, while the bank gave her promotion to some Tom, Dick or in her case: Nigel.

'What's wrong, you OK?'

'Yes, yes, no, that's great! Fabulous news!' she said.

'I'll carry on getting the coffees, if that's what you're worried about.'

'Oh no no, you don't have to.'

'I know.'

OK, now that was pretty smooth. Just confident enough to gloss over the surprise and awkwardness of her "You don't have to", but not over-confident either. There was wriggle-room in there if she cared for it, but why on earth would she? She liked her morning macchiato, and she liked even more that Will seemed to have relaxed again, and to be trying to get them over the awkwardness. She liked him miles better that way.

'Well, in that case that'd be very nice, thanks.'

'Come on let's go, they're all waiting for you.'

Everyone at the Tapas Bar was already merry, so her arrival was indeed greeted by a chorus of loud cheers. Then a glass of Rioja was thrust into her hand, so smoky it probably stained her lungs as well as her teeth.

'Cheers, Lizzie, what would we do without you?' Neil asked dramatically, clinking glasses with her.

'Have a lot more to eat, that's what,' she replied, and started tucking into the olives and patatas bravas. 'I'm starving. What's everyone else having?'

She hadn't felt this hungry in a long, long time, and her renewed appetite made everything she tried taste delicious. Neil smiled as he helped himself too.

'How was your friend?'

'Same old, but thanks for asking.'

'What's wrong, if I may ask?'

'She nearly lost a baby over New Year. She's on bed rest in hospital, potentially for another couple of months.'

'That sucks, I'm sorry.'

Elisabeth shrugged and tucked her hair back. Will had vanished but reappeared to her right and picked a slice of the chorizo:

'What did he say?'

'Nothing, why?'

'Oh just…' he said mimicking her hand gesture behind his ear.

'No, that was just my hair, Will.'

But she tucked it back absent-mindedly and in doing so she made him smile again.

'Fair enough,' he said, 'Food to your liking?'

'It's fine.'

'That's high praise, coming from you.'

'Very high. She has exacting standards,' Neil said, and she looked from one to the other and back.

'I do have the most exacting standards, yes, that's why I work with you lot, isn't it? Now do pass that chorizo.'

'It's pretty hot,' Neil warned as he obliged her.

'Never mind. I'm hungry.'

'She could do with eating,' Will agreed. 'And with cheering up. You know what, she's not doing badly tonight, we should get her drunk more often.'

'I'm not drunk!' she protested, then shook her head as she realised that he was making fun of her -again.

'In that case,' Will reached for a bottle and topped her glass up, then Neil's, then his, 'to our first tradePad trades, and to Elisabeth and Paul!' he toasted.

She clinked glasses with all the guys in turn, drank some more, then felt her shoulders relax for the first time in far too long.

'That's better, isn't it, Lizzie?' said Neil.

'It's "Elisabeth".' Will stage murmured to him, all the while keeping his eye on her.

'Sorry, you don't like Lizzie?' Neil asked. If he was anything like her, he was switching on the comedy Scottish accent to hide his shock.

'Nope,' she said, shaking her head, and tucked her hair back, then took another sip. Neil immediately aped her, although of course there was nothing to tuck back in his case, and they both started to giggle.

'El-isabeth!' Neil said. 'Why didn't you tell us?'

Just then Dean arrived and saved her from having to answer. She hadn't seen him since that awful broker do, but they recognised each other with mutual pleasure and greeted each other as they had bid each other goodbye: with a continental kiss on both cheeks.

'Elisabeth! Good evening, long time no see!'

'Hang on a minute!' Neil said, 'How come he gets special treatment?'

'Hey, Dean, that's Neil,' Will said.

'Of course, I remember Neil!' Dean replied, nodding as they shook hands.

'Nice to see you again, sir,' Neil said. 'But how come Elisabeth's all nice to you?'

'Because he is nice to me, Neil,' she explained slowly, 'so I am nice back.'

'You're too kind,' Dean said.

'No, she certainly isn't,' countered Will.

'Not to us,' Neil agreed.

' 'fraid they're right. I'm not always very nice to them,' she said, only pretending to speak to Dean, 'But you know what, they're not always very nice to me either: they say a lot of rude things, sometimes they shout them, they cross their arms and glower a lot, sometimes they even send rude emails.'

'OK,' said Will with good humour, 'let's spoof for the next bottle before she gets me in trouble.'

'What's the point?' Elisabeth asked, 'I thought this was on Raj?'

'That is so not the point of spoof!' Neil corrected her with the utmost seriousness. 'The point of spoof is, that while you still suck at it, we can enjoy one of the few things you can't beat us at.'

'Well put,' Will agreed, 'But watch the gloating, Neil. Let's just spoof for who has to go to the bar. To prove a point.'

'But you don't have to: I suck at a whole lot of things. Tennis, diplomacy. Pretty much all ball sports in fact.'

'Thanks, we might try you at pool later,' Will said, 'Get some coins.'

She did, and the four of them put their fists in the middle.

'You start!' said Neil.

'Eight!' she said confidently.

'Six.'

'Seven.'

'Nine?' Dean concluded, looking at her quizzically. She got out first, Will last.

'Thank you so much for letting me win,' she said to him before he made for the bar. 'That was very considerate of you.'

'Gloater. But at least you've cheered up.'

'Well there you go, it wasn't that hard. Off you go.'

Will smiled and walked to the bar, and Dean turned to her:

'So how have you been? A good year, so far?'

'Well, a great year so far, yes – work-wise.'

'Ah, I see. I'm afraid Will did mention you hadn't been too happy.'

'I'm sorry that it shows around the office,' she hastened to say, 'I shouldn't let it, really, they're all very good to me.'

'They just take an interest. I don't think anyone's complaining,' Dean hastened to reply.

'Oh no, believe me he does complain,' she said, nodding towards the bar, 'But never mind, I'll be fine -I think. How about you?'

'Same as you, really. The new job's going extremely well.'

'Oh dear, so is that our new euphemism for being dumped?'

'Most abjectly.'

'I'm sorry. Join the club,' she said holding out her hand, and they shook on it with melancholy smiles.

'Are you surprised?' he asked, with unmistakable sadness in his pale eyes.

'Can I be honest? Not really.'

'I knew it. She was just out of my league, wasn't she?'

'Of course not!' Elisabeth cried. 'No no no, Dean, you're out of hers! By a long way.'

'You are too kind.'

'I'm not.'

'She isn't,' Will agreed, back from the bar.

'Thanks, Will,' she said without turning.

'You're welcome. Top up?'

'Not for me, thanks. 'you got any water?'

'Do you want to spoof again? See who's gonna go and get that?'

'No thanks, I'd just like to drink some water.'

'Ta-dah!' he said, and pulled a clear bottle from behind his back. 'I knew it: she's a complete wimp when it comes to alcohol,' he explained to Dean.

'Absolument! Fab! Thanks!' she said grabbing the bottle eagerly.

'Hear that, Dean?'

'You should be honoured,' Dean said with a mock-serious nod.

'Oh I am. And just think: what a cheap date!'

'I like to think of it as a high value rather than cheap, if you don't mind.'

'But of course,' Will said, and went round to top the others up.

'He does like you, you know,' Dean said casually when Will's back was turned, not seeming to care very much whether he could be overheard. She frowned for a second at the blatant absurdity of it, before she remembered that Dean's only flaw was his excess of diplomacy:

'Oh it's OK, Dean, you don't have to say that. I can see he's making an effort tonight and that's great, he doesn't actually have to like me.'

Dean looked at her for a moment as if there was something he couldn't work out.

'Well, I'll say this much, Elisabeth,' he said in the end, 'perhaps you guys are as hard to please as one another after all.'

'That must be why we both like you!' she replied, and clinked his glass.

'You really are too kind.'

'No, she really isn't,' she heard behind her back.

'Thanks again, Will, and I love you too,' she replied, shaking her head in mock exasperation, still with her back to him. She couldn't see what face Will was pulling behind her, but soon Dean raised his eyebrows and started laughing at the two of them.

'At bloody last!' Will cried, and she spun round to check why.

'At long bloody last! Look, look what you've done, Elisabeth, you've bloody made him laugh!' he exclaimed, pointing at Dean with the broadest smile she'd seen on his face in a long time -possibly ever. 'The sad bastard's been moping for weeks! Seriously, I've not seen him like this since that so-called friend of yours dumped him.'

'Hey look, I just flatshare with two of her college friends.'

'Whatever: well done, look! He's still smiling!'

And yes, Dean was indeed looking happy as he pushed his glasses up his nose. Happy in his shy, almost apologetic way, but happy enough nonetheless to put a smile on Elisabeth's face, and even on Will's.

'I hate to give you credit, as you well know,' Elisabeth told him, 'but I think that was a team effort.'

'You know, perhaps she really is too kind,' Will said to Dean, 'God, I hate it when you two are right.'

'You'd think he'd be getting used to it by now,' Dean told Elisabeth, at which she shrugged and tucked her hair back, just to make them smile again.

God, how could she have let herself forget how good it felt to make people smile? Her chest was lightening up at last and swelling with a little unselfconscious joy. She was no longer making an effort. She didn't care. Perhaps being tremendous entertainment value wasn't such a bad thing after all.