About That Night
Sometimes it only takes one night to change everything…Elizabeth Place might have been jilted by her fiancé on her wedding day one year ago, but at least she’s still got her brilliant job producing one of the biggest shows on TV!But when larger-than-life TV host, Ricky Clough, dies live on air, her life is sent spinning out of control. And with foul play suspected, the spotlight is turned firmly on his colleagues – especially Hutch, the man desperate for Ricky’s job, and who Elizabeth is secretly dating.As her world comes crashing down around her, Elizabeth realises that perhaps the only person she can really trust, is herself…
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ELAINE BEDELL was a BAFTA award-winning TV producer before becoming Controller of Entertainment at the BBC and Director of Entertainment & Comedy at ITV. She has commissioned and produced some of the UK’s most popular entertainment shows, including The X Factor, Strictly Come Dancing, Take Me Out, Britain’s Got Talent, The One Show, Top Gear and Saturday Night Takeaway. She lives in Hackney and has two children. She is currently Chief Executive of the Southbank Centre. About That Night is her first novel.
About That Night
Elaine Bedell
ONE PLACE MANY STORIES
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
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First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2019
Copyright © Elaine Bedell 2019
Elaine Bedell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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E-book Edition © July 2019 ISBN: 9780008297695
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Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780008297688
In memory of my dear dad Bert who should have lived to see it all.
Contents
July 2017
Elizabeth Place is packing up her life. The protesting screech of duct tape and the thwack and swoosh of folding cardboard corners have been the soundtrack to her day. She’s surrounded by sealed brown boxes. Two muscular men arrived first thing in a white van with its big red boast ‘We’ll Make the Earth Move For You’ and stomped up the stairs to her first-floor flat, Where do you want us, love? Between them they carried a sofa, four chairs, a chest of drawers and her double mattress – up a bit, right a bit, upsy-daisy, there she goes, easy does it – while drinking twelve cups of tea with twenty-four spoonfuls of sugar.
Now only the boxes to go.
She sits and surveys her empty flat. She’s very tired and a little bit queasy if she’s honest (although she has an unfortunate inclination not to be honest, especially with herself). Her entire life has been swaddled, stacked and squashed into eleven cartons: thirty-five years of life, love and loss. Elizabeth isn’t much good at maths, but she knows that thirty-five doesn’t go into eleven without some leftover bits. What’s happened to the rest of her life? Those bits and pieces that might have caused her to tick another ten boxes?
She’s thirty-five and single. It wasn’t meant to be like this.
She reaches for the last empty box into which she’ll carefully stow the few remaining, very personal items. The things she’s left until last. Her National Television Award, still on the mantelpiece, sparkling bronze: Elizabeth Place, Producer: Best Entertainment Programme, Saturday Bonkers; a framed photo of her dear dad waving proudly at her down the years from the deck of a boat that isn’t his; the engraved card from ‘Matthew, Controller, All Channels’ which read ‘Only you could have got us through that show. Well done! X’; a black and white postcard of Paris, on which Hutch had written out an extract from Shelley’s ‘Love’s Philosophy’ along with the words Dear Miss Clumsy, I really miss you bumping into things; Elizabeth and Jamie, framed on their graduation day, carelessly waving their mortar boards in the air. And standing on its spine, propping up the rest, a valuable first edition of Yeats, given to her by Ricky one morning after a terrible night before.
Elizabeth tucks all these mementoes carefully away in the last box and closes the flaps quickly, like a ventriloquist silencing his troublesome puppets. All apart from the Yeats, which she clutches to her chest. She stands for a moment gazing at the empty spaces, thinking of the life she’s leaving behind. A life she has loved. A seductive life: of glamour, of glory, of giddiness. An addictive, adrenaline-fuelled roller coaster of a life, with all its exhilarating highs and exhausting lows. A dangerous life.
