by JL Merrow
In a village like Shamwell, though, there were probably a lot of conservative types around even now. Public displays of affection between those of the same gender were probably frowned upon. It was one of the reasons he’d chosen the place—it’d help him stand firm in his determination to put his daughter first and avoid looking for hook-ups while she was living with him.
Of course, he hadn’t expected to meet anyone like Patrick.
Mark and his daughter had been living in Shamwell for precisely one month, having found a house in the centre of the village. Or rather, Mark had found it, as Florence’s sole contribution to the house-hunt had been a sullen “Whatever” every time he’d showed her the latest wodge of details that’d come through from the estate agent.
Florence wasn’t happy about moving to a country village. She wasn’t happy about changing schools and leaving all her friends. She wasn’t happy about anything, at least as far as Mark could tell. Reminding her it was all her own fault just didn’t seem to have the desired positive effect.
It’d all started with the phone call from Ellen three months ago. Mark had been halfway through his Lean’n’Mean chicken curry and a bit annoyed to be interrupted. “Ellen, I’m eating. Can I call you—”
“Do you know what your daughter’s done now?” Ellen’s voice was shrill and a bit painful to listen to over the phone, so Mark moved the receiver an inch or two away from his ear.
“Not being a mind-reader, no, I don’t.” Mark cringed at his tone. He’d tried to keep it light, but he had a nasty feeling he’d only managed supercilious.
That was what usually happened when they spoke on the phone these days. Or off the phone. Mark had hoped the lingering bitterness might have faded after more than a year apart, but apparently he’d been wrong about this—as, indeed, he’d been about so many things, at least if you listened to Ellen.
Looking on the bright side, though, since they’d split there had seldom been any occasion to leave passive-aggressive notes for one another. Mark hadn’t, of course, kept any of Ellen’s notes, but he was fairly sure the course of the marriage breakup could have been charted by the increasing spikiness of her handwriting.
“Oh, it’s all right for you, isn’t it?” she was saying. “You with your warehouse bloody flat and your lack of responsibilities and your bloody career. You can afford sarcasm. Go on, make your little jokes. I’ve got all day.”
“Ellen…” Mark looked sadly at the remains of his curry as it congealed on his plate. It hadn’t been that nice to start with. He doubted letting it cool to room temperature would improve the flavour.
“And if you bloody tell me to bloody calm down, I’m warning you…”
“Sweetheart, what is it?” Damn it. That was the second thing that always seemed to happen.
“Don’t you dare call me sweetheart. Don’t you dare.” There was a loud sniff.
And there went the third. “Ellen, I’m sorry.” For everything. “Please, just tell me what she’s done.”
There was a pause for audible nose-blowing. “She’s been excluded.”
It didn’t quite register at first. “Wait—you mean she’s been expelled?”
“They don’t call it that these days. They call it excluded. But I suppose I can’t expect you to know anything about schools.”
“Now that’s not fair, Ells. Look, will you just tell me what happened?”
“She and a group of friends got together,” Ellen said, enunciating her words with bitter clarity, “and they vandalised a teacher’s car.”
“What?” Mark stared, horrified, at the phone in his hand, then hastily put it back up to his ear. “What kind of people have you been letting her hang around with, for God’s sake?”
“Letting her? Letting her?” At Ellen’s ear-piercingly shrill tone, Mark moved the phone farther away again. “I’d like to see you bloody well try and keep her away from them. She’s fourteen, Mark. What do you want me to do? Lock her in a playpen?”
“You just need to be firm with her. Let her know the boundaries—”
“You know what? You do it, for once in your life. You have a go at getting her to behave. You live with her and see if you do any better. I’ve had enough of being the one who has to say no all the time. You try it and see how you like it.”
“Ells, sweetheart—”
“Don’t you say another word. I’m serious, Mark Nugent. It’s about bloody time you took some responsibility for your only child.”
“Ellen—”
“I can’t, all right? I just can’t, not anymore. You don’t know what it’s like, worrying about her being out all hours and doing God knows what with God knows who.” Her voice, which had been getting higher and higher, broke into sobs.
Mark had been getting ready to remind her of all the twelve-hour days he’d worked when Florrie had been little, building up his career—what the bloody hell was that if not taking responsibility for his family?—but all at once, a new plan had popped, fully formed, into his head. It wasn’t just a plan. It was a good plan.
“Right,” he said firmly. “Pack her things—she’s moving in with me.”
“What?”
“That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
“Well… But… How long for? Next weekend? A week? Until I find her a new school?”
“No, of course not. Indefinitely. I’ll find the school.”
“You don’t know anything about schools! And I’m not having her in some inner-city comprehensive full of girl gangs and drug dealers—”
“Of course not,” Mark said soothingly. “I’ll get a new place. Somewhere in the country. Somewhere it’ll be safe to raise a teenager. The centre of London is no place for Florrie to grow up.”
“That’s what I keep telling you. You always do this. You take what I say and you make it sound like it’s all your own idea and I’m the one being unreasonable. You always have to bloody well know best—”
“Ellen, I really think it’s what’s best for Florence that’s important here.”
There was a pause. Mark wasn’t certain, but he thought he could hear Ellen counting under her breath. Her voice was definitely a semitone less shrill when she spoke again. “But you hate commuting. And the country.”
She had a point. Then again… Hadn’t he been feeling already that he’d gone about as far as he could in Whyborne & Co? “I’ll give up the job,” he said decisively. “Florence is more important.”
“What?”
“I’ll take a year out from work. And once she’s back on track, I’ll look for something new.”
“And just what are you planning to live on? Don’t think I’m paying for this. You know I don’t earn much, not after all those years out looking after your daughter.”
“Oh, you needn’t worry about money. Bonuses have been excellent for the last few quarters.” Not to mention, without Ellen to insist on family holidays—a total waste of money as far as Mark was concerned, seeing as he always seemed to spend half of them on the phone or on his email dealing with things that had come up at the office—he hadn’t been spending a great deal.
“What?” Ellen sounded bewildered.
“This is what you want, isn’t it?” Mark said cautiously.
“Well, yes, but I never thought you’d actually agree! Mark, you barely even know her these days.”
That, Mark thought, was unfair. He’d done his bit by Florence—he was never late with the child support payments, and he’d bought her everything she’d ever asked for. He was damned if he’d let his child suffer the disappointment of being promised the earth and then thrown a lump of mud. “All the more reason to do this, then. I’m not having my little girl grow up a stranger to her father.”
There was a strange snorting sound down the telephone. “Your little girl? Oh, just you try calling her that. Just you try it.”
&nb
sp; Mark wasn’t entirely sure what she was getting at there, but it would probably be safer to let it go. For his eardrums, if nothing else. “Anyway, it’s decided,” he said firmly. “I’ll let them know at the office tomorrow, and start looking for a house. A proper home for her to grow up in.”
“We had one of those,” Ellen muttered. “Until you broke it.”
* * * * *
Mark slept soundly that night, his dreams full of idyllic walks in sunlit meadows with his daughter—whom his subconscious seemed to have aged down to about eight, but that was just a minor detail. When he woke, he found his resolve had only strengthened. He was going to do this.
He expected his announcement at the office to meet with a certain amount of surprise and (he hoped he wasn’t flattering himself unduly) some dismay. He’d underestimated the amount of sheer, uncomprehending disbelief he’d face, however.
First thing in the morning, Mark strolled into his office with an airy step, hung up his trench coat and considered how to go about breaking the news. The correct thing, he knew, would be to speak first to Charles, senior taxation partner and his immediate superior. However, for several reasons, Mark thought he’d speak to David, his PA, first. Should he call him into his office? Mark stared for a moment out of his window at the magnificent view of the Thames, stretching down to the London Eye. Damn, he was going to miss that view… Focus. No, a more casual approach would be better.
David would undoubtedly milk every drop of drama out of the situation however Mark dropped the bombshell, but at least this way he’d be able to escape if things got too overwrought.
He could see David through the open door of his office. He’d hung up his long, full-skirted military coat, unwrapped the vast lengths of a cashmere scarf from around his neck and removed his slim-fitting dark grey suit jacket, and now sat looking like an advertisement for tailored shirts in deep purple. Mark couldn’t see his computer screen from here, but the rapidly changing expressions that flitted across his sensitive, finely boned face suggested he was checking his Twitter feed.
Not for the first time, Mark wondered why he didn’t find David attractive. He was undeniably beautiful—but it was the sort of beauty Mark could admire only in an abstract manner, like a pre-Raphaelite painting or the Taj Mahal. Mark would hesitate to call David’s beauty feminine—for a start, if David heard him, he’d probably launch into a sulk epic enough to dwarf even the Great Stationery Order Debacle—but there was a certain fineness to his features and grace to his movements that might have had something to do with it.
Nevertheless, it had been David’s arrival as his PA two years ago that had first prompted a no doubt long-overdue self-examination on Mark’s part and led, finally, to the breakup of his marriage. Which, come to think of it, had probably also been long overdue, given that the results of Mark’s soul-searching had been the ninety-nine percent certainty that he was queer as a three-pound note.
Ellen hadn’t taken the revelation particularly well, even though Mark had been at particular pains to point out she should be relieved to hear their dismal sex life wasn’t her fault.
Anyway, it was time now for action, not introspection. Checking that no one else was in earshot, Mark ambled casually out of his office and perched on the edge of David’s desk in what he hoped came across as a relaxed attitude. “David, I’ve got something I need to tell you.”
David raised a dark, and possibly plucked, eyebrow, a worrying gleam in his eye as he leaned in just a little too close. “Really?” he breathed.
Mark cleared his throat. “Yes. I’ve decided to take a career break. For at least a year, maybe longer.”
David startled back and almost knocked over his skinny vanilla latte. What was more, Mark was ninety-seven percent certain it wasn’t just one of his usual melodramatic gestures. “Give up work?” David squeaked, now gripping the edge of his desk as if he needed something solid to hold on to. “You? But you live to work.”
“What? Nobody lives to work.” David was making it sound like he had absolutely zero outside interests, which was patently untrue. There was the running, for a start. All right, he’d let that lapse a little of late, but he hadn’t had time to find a good route since he’d moved…a year ago. And there was the theatre, which had been part of his decision to move into the centre. There were dozens of shows he’d been meaning to see. He just hadn’t had anyone to go with, that was all.
“Not unless they’re called Mark ‘Weekends are for Wimps’ Nugent. Were you aware that when polled, fifty-seven percent of junior staff were under the impression you don’t even have a home to go back to? A further twenty-two percent thought you have got a flat, but it’s so long since you’ve seen it, you’ve forgotten where it is. A small but significant five percent think you’re actually a robot who never sleeps and just plugs himself in to charge overnight.”
“What? That’s ridiculous. I don’t come into the office every weekend,” Mark protested.
David cocked his head and pursed his lips. “No, of course not. It’s the paperwork fairies that leave a neat stack of correspondence for me to find in my in-tray every Monday morning.”
Charles waddled past with a sour expression and a muttered, “Thought you were the paperwork fairy. Isn’t that why they call you Camp David?”
Mark winced. There was more than one reason why he wasn’t out at work. Sorry, he mouthed to David behind Charles’s broad, retreating back. Thank God the man hadn’t come by a couple of minutes earlier.
“Oh, I don’t mind him. He’s just tetchy because the Hausfrau’s put him on another diet. Ve haff vays of making you thinner.” David broke off and stared at Mark, wide-eyed. “Oh. My. God. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?”
Mark frowned. “Diets? Charles’s wife? What’s The Trout—I mean, Traute—got to do with me giving up work?”
“Not Charles’s wife. Yours. You’ve found another one, haven’t you?” The eyes turned sorrowful. “You’re leaving me for another woman,” he wailed.
And that was the other reason Mark wasn’t out at work. David’s flirting, bad enough when Mark had been safely married to Ellen, had increased exponentially once he’d become single. If David ever got wind of the fact that Mark wasn’t as straight as he seemed… Mark shuddered. “No. There’s no other woman. No woman at all, I mean. I simply want to spend some time with my daughter.”
“Who is not a woman?”
“Not in that context she isn’t!” Mark was frankly appalled at the thought of Florence being counted as a woman in any context. She was practically still a baby, for Christ’s sake. She wouldn’t be a woman for…for decades, if he had anything to do with it. “She’s a child, and she needs my guidance.”
“Really? Isn’t she a bit young to be filling in a tax return?”
Mark flushed. “Tax isn’t the only thing I know about.”
“Oh really? Let me see. Mark Nugent: his limits…” David started to count on slender, well-manicured fingers. “One, knowledge of popular culture: nil. Two, music: nil. Three, sport: nil, so how you manage to stay so trim is beyond me. Four, tax: immense. Can spot a loophole at twenty paces and tie a tax inspector in knots with it, presumably to the satisfaction of all concerned but, most of all, to that of the client.” He paused to bat disconcertingly lush eyelashes at Mark. “You can ensnare me in one of your loopholes anytime. What are we up to now? Oh, yes. Five, sex: well, one would have to presume a basic working knowledge, given that you apparently managed to produce a daughter, although—”
“Thank you, David.” Mark cut him off firmly. “That’ll do.”
“Are you sure? I’ve got loads more appendages to count on.” David waggled his fingers suggestively.
“Quite sure, thank you,” Mark said firmly, not wishing to see anything else waggled. “Anyway, I need to go and give Charles the bad news.” Mark stood up and was about to walk off, determined to get it ov
er with, when David’s soft hand landed on his arm.
“You’re serious about it, then?” David’s solemn expression was disconcerting on a face seemingly designed for frivolity.
Mark nodded, although not without a curiously empty sensation in his belly. “I am. Look, don’t worry. You’ll be fine. Charles would have to be an idiot to let you go—you’ll be needed to help out whoever takes over my clients.” He gave David an awkward pat on the shoulder.
“Oh, it’s not that. But you were my one constant in life. I always thought you’d be sitting at that desk until the day you keeled over from a heart attack and the cleaners had to cart you off with the rubbish.”
Mark stared. David sounded worryingly serious. “All the more reason to take a break, then,” he said firmly.
“If only to spare poor Mrs. Patel the shock. But what are you going to do all day? I presume the little moppet will be spending her days at school. Are you sure you’ve thought this all through?” David’s soft brown eyes were doing a passable impression of saucers, and his hands fluttered anxiously.
“Calm down. It’s all going to work out. I’m selling the flat and moving to the country. We’ll get a house, a proper home. Somewhere with a sense of community. So I’m sure I’ll get involved in…community things. You should come and visit, once we’re settled,” Mark went on hastily to forestall any demands for specifics, and crossed mental fingers David wouldn’t take it as a sign of interest. “Bring your boyfriend,” he added as insurance.
He was sure that David would, one day, make someone a wonderful wife. But Mark had had one of those, and it hadn’t worked out.
David wasn’t looking happy. “It’s a midlife crisis, isn’t it? Next we know, you’ll be dyeing your hair and getting a trophy girlfriend who’s younger than your daughter.”
“I hope not, seeing as Florence has only just turned fourteen. And what do you mean, dyeing my hair? My hair doesn’t need dyeing.” Mark ran a hand over his head. The touch of grey at the temples just made him look distinguished, didn’t it?