T Williams - To Rome, with Love

Sarah had been dreading this moment for the past week. She was determined not to cry and, as she felt the telltale stinging in the corners of her eyes, she hastily glanced in the mirror behind Catherine with Hall’s Tours, The Very Best in Travel etched in it, composed her face, and took a few deep breaths. Hopefully, getting back to work would help sort her out again after all that had happened, but first she had to get through today. She returned her attention to Catherine and, in spite of her best efforts, managed just one single word.

‘Cupcakes.’

Catherine looked puzzled. ‘Cupcakes?’

There was no doubt about it; Sarah knew there was no chance of her being able to say more without bursting into tears, so she gave a little wave of the hand and headed for the lift. Mercifully, there was nobody in it. Instead of pressing the button for the seventh floor, she pressed -1 and felt a huge sense of relief as the doors hissed shut behind her and the lift dropped downwards to the basement. Stepping out into the subdued, orange glow of the lights on the floor that housed the janitors, cleaning supplies and storage bays, she made her way down the corridor to the brochure storeroom and opened the door with her key. She walked inside, flicked on the light and closed the door behind her, turning the key in the lock. She sat down on a pile of last year’s skiing brochures and dumped the cardboard box on the floor beside her. Only then did she give in. Dropping her head into her hands, she cried her eyes out.

She must have stayed like that for a good ten minutes before finally managing to regain control of her emotions. At last, as she wiped her eyes, blew her nose and tried to restore some semblance of normality to her appearance, her overriding feeling was one of anger; anger with herself for being so weak. She had insisted that she wanted to come back to work straightaway, even when Polly and her mother had told her she was crazy. ‘Take some time off,’ they had said. ‘They’ll understand at work. Time’s a great healer. That’s all you need: time.’ But she had been adamant. She had felt sure a speedy return to work would help her get over what had happened, but she hadn’t expected to fall at the very first hurdle.

In fact, this sense of anger probably helped. She was not, she told herself firmly, going to give up and scuttle off home. She was coming back to work and that was that. She took a few deep breaths and looked down at the box at her feet. It had toppled over on its side, the lid had come open and a cupcake had rolled out. The wedding had been planned as just a quiet family affair; she had ordered the cupcakes so as to have something to distribute to everybody at work, and it had been too late to cancel the order. The initials S&J leapt out at her from the icing on top of the one that had escaped and she bent down to pick it up. Holding it in her hand, she scrabbled at the icing with her fingernails, trying to remove the initials that just underlined how disastrous the last week had been. The trouble was that the letters were set well in and, as she tried to scrape them off, all she did was remove great chunks of icing, making a terrible mess. She dropped the cupcake on top of a glossy photo of a snowboarder and snorted with disgust. It looked as though the mice had been eating it.

She glanced at her watch. It was gone nine o’clock. She was normally at her desk long before this, often one of the first into the building. She gave her eyes a final wipe and used the tissue to wrap the remains of the cupcake. Picking up the box, she let herself out, locking the door behind her, and walked back to the lift, depositing the tissue with its contents in a bin by the lift door. She pressed the call button and waited. Fortunately, the lift arrived empty and she managed to get up to the seventh floor without having to talk to anybody. All was going well until she bumped into Adam from Sales and Marketing. He gave her a big smile.

‘Hi, Sarah. So, how was the wedding?’

She took a firm grip, on both the box of cupcakes and her emotions, and did her unsuccessful best to smile. ‘I’ll tell you all about it one of these days.’

Hastily, she set off along the corridor towards her office. As she walked through the open-plan part of the floor, she heard a few voices calling out and even a whistle, but she couldn’t bring herself to stop and face the music. She kept her head down and walked as fast as she could. The door to her office at the far end was open and she dived in gratefully. She would ask somebody else to do the rounds with the cupcakes. She really didn’t feel she could face it for now.

She put the box down on the table in the corner and looked around the room. Nothing had changed. The blinds were open and she could see right across London to the towers of Canary Wharf, glittering in the clear June sunshine. It felt reassuringly normal to be back here and, for a moment, her mood of despair lightened. Then, returning her attention to her desk, her eyes alighted on the photo in its silver frame of her and James at the Grand Canyon. She reached across and picked it up, dumping it face down into one of the drawers.

‘Hi, Sarah, so how did it all go?’ Sarah looked up and saw Melissa at the door. Hastily closing the drawer, she straightened up, hoping her PA hadn’t witnessed the unceremonious disposal of her former fiancé’s picture. She had promised herself she was going to try to act as normally as possible, and throwing picture frames around wasn’t something she did normally.

‘Hi, Mel. It didn’t, I’m afraid.’

‘It didn’t?’ Melissa sounded as bemused as she looked. For the second time in only a few minutes, Sarah felt her eyes fill with tears. She was scrabbling for another tissue in her bag when she heard Melissa’s voice again. ‘What on earth? What do you mean, Sarah? What didn’t happen? Not the wedding, surely?’

It took a little while longer before Sarah regained some precarious hold over her emotions. She nodded and managed to offer a brief explanation. ‘Yes, the wedding, Mel. James decided he didn’t want to go through with it, so it didn’t happen.’ She took another deep breath and attempted a little smile that would have been more convincing if her voice hadn’t descended into a croak. She cleared her throat before continuing. ‘Anyway, it could have been worse. Look, cupcakes!’ She took out a few and set them on her desk before pushing the box across. ‘Why don’t you go and share them out. There are loads of them.’

Melissa was still standing there, stunned. After a struggle she managed a few words. ‘Of course, but are you sure you’re all right? It must have been simply awful for you.’

Just for a moment, Sarah thought her resolve was going to break, but she surprised herself by managing to reply with only the faintest tremor in her voice. ‘It was, Mel, but I’ll get over it.’ She caught Melissa’s eye as she repeated her words. ‘Sooner or later I’ll get over it. I have to.’

An expression of sadness and sympathy replaced the astonishment on Melissa’s face, and it looked for a moment as though she was about to return to the subject; but, to Sarah’s infinite relief, she took the box of cupcakes and disappeared into the corridor. Sarah ran the back of her hand across her eyes and sat down. She could feel her heart pounding and the tingling sensation of tears once more welling in the corners of her eyes. She dug out a tissue and wiped her face and blew her nose. She risked a quick glance in the mirror and was unsurprised to see her eyes looking very red. She blinked a few times, but there was nothing much she could do except wait for everything to calm down again. She didn’t even have a pair of sunglasses with her. She had known today was going to be hard. Maybe not as hard as that moment only a week ago when she had opened James’s letter, but hard all the same.