The Temp

by Michelle Frances

  Carrie glanced at the clock. It was seven thirty. Not late at all. Not unless you were in bed at eight thirty because you had to get up several times in the night for a baby.

  Back in the kitchen, they worked together, mostly in silence, just exchanging the odd practicality: ‘Please can you grab the butter from the fridge?’; ‘Water or juice?’

  Once they were sitting at the table, Adrian looked up at her, apologetic.

  ‘I might go and work at the beach house tomorrow.’

  Dismay gripped her. ‘But . . .’

  He responded before she could really say anything. ‘It’s just hard, you know? Being able to concentrate. And I don’t want to be a grump. Rory’s only small – of course he’s going to cry – but I just need the space to crack on.’

  She’d been looking forward to her day off and being at home with both Rory and Adrian, and briefly thought about trying to persuade him to stay but was suddenly exhausted by it all. The gulf between them was widening faster than she could close it.

  Her original vision for this period in their lives was being able to spend more time together. Instead of her working long hours every day in the office and Adrian writing at home, she’d had this cosy, romantic notion of her pottering around the house with their baby, him coming out for breaks and draping a protective arm round her shoulders, drinking in the scent of his newborn son’s head. The three of them together. It was almost laughable how she’d got it so wrong.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Thursday 7 December

  Adrian insisted on picking her up at the station, and as Emma came out into the road outside, she had no trouble finding the silver BMW he’d texted her to look out for as it was in the parking space directly opposite, the only shiny thing in among the grey tarmac and furiously scudding dark clouds. He waved as she appeared and she crossed the road, the wind propelling her over. Then she opened the car door, her coat sliding smoothly across the leather seat as she got in. She was immediately enveloped in a warm, luxuriant cocoon. Outside, she could see other passengers battling the wind as they walked, eyes screwed up and shoulders hunched against the cold.

  ‘Thanks for coming down,’ said Adrian over the radio, a funk tune courtesy of a youth-oriented, cutting-edge music station.

  ‘No problem.’ Emma put on her seat belt and looked around at her sporty surroundings. She glanced over her shoulder, noticed it was a two-seater. No room for baby seats.

  They set off down the main road towards the town centre, which was strung with Christmas lights, unlovely and characterless until dusk would arrive in the late afternoon, and then she saw the sea, glimpsed between the buildings, a heaving grey mass flecked with shards of turquoise when the sun escaped through the clouds for brief seconds.

  Emma had had no idea Carrie and Adrian owned a second home by the sea until he’d called her that morning saying he needed her to work over some scenes, and if it wasn’t too much trouble, would she get the train from London, fully reimbursed of course? As she hung up, she wondered about this new place, whether it was somewhere Adrian escaped to write, whether it was somewhere he kept his private documents, and she felt a cold thrill as she sensed new possibilities.

  They drove through the town, Emma catching further glimpses of the sea between the buildings, and then they turned north, along residential streets. After a few minutes, Adrian pulled into a wide, quiet road where up ahead two large metal posts blocked both the entrance and exit ways. A large sign across the central brick barrier announced they were entering the private North Foreland Estate and that CCTV was monitoring those who entered.

  The entrance barrier obligingly descended into the ground as Adrian drove over a metal plate in the road and Emma sat up, taken aback by the size of the properties. She caught glimpses of individualistic grand houses hidden behind six-foot-high fences or large, tightly planted evergreens, a breathtaking tease at something majestic that was immediately hidden from view again as they moved on. Not all of the houses were concealed. Some displayed their ostentatiousness proudly: a white cubic mansion with full-length glass balconies; a three-storey mock-Tudor manor.

  They drove towards the sea, closer and closer until Emma thought they’d go right over the cliff, but then the road swung left and they followed the clifftop, the edge vertiginously close. The road curved round, hugging the line of the chalky cliff, and at each bend, Emma could see the drop, a sheer plummet to the beach and the churning waves below. Adrian stopped the car and reached over to the glove compartment with a polite ‘Excuse me’, then pulled out a remote control, which parted a set of iron gates, flanked on either side by huge, dense pine trees.

  They drove up a wide brick driveway and Emma caught her breath at the sprawling dark-brick house ahead of her. Just off its centre was an arts and crafts-style roundel, the more noticeable as it was rendered white. The windows were large and made up of several smaller panes, and when the sun caught them, they reflected the sea back at her. This house had one of the lucky positions facing directly out to the Channel.

  Adrian turned off the engine and Emma got out of the car and was immediately caught in a gust that tried to whip her head off. She pulled at her coat and deliberately faced into the enemy. It was coming from beyond the road, from the vast expanse of open air and slate-grey sea that she could glimpse through the gates and beyond the cliff edge. Then she looked behind her, holding her pummelled hair away from her eyes, and saw a white, octagonal lighthouse on the higher ground just outside the estate.

  ‘The North Foreland lighthouse,’ said Adrian, and then he pointed southwards down the coast. ‘And just a short way down there, Bleak House.’ He spoke with a note of pride in his voice. ‘Dickens’s residence when he wrote David Copperfield. And here on this very estate’ – he waved his arm with a flourish – ‘the Thirty-Nine Steps. As in John Buchan. A hidden staircase that goes down through the cliff into the sea. The book was written here where he lived,’ he added, and threw his arms up into the wind with a self-deprecating grin. ‘A town of genius writers!’

  He might be pretending to joke, but Emma knew he secretly wanted to consider himself in this category and so she laughed obligingly.

  ‘Want a tour?’ asked Adrian.

  Emma looked up at the house. ‘Sure.’

  ‘No, I mean the steps. All us residents have a private key. Come on!’

  He led her out of the driveway and back down the road they’d just driven along. The cliff edge was to Emma’s left, just a few metres from some tufted, windswept grass, and there was no fence, she noted, and kept her distance.

  ‘Tide’s coming in,’ Adrian said, peering cautiously over. ‘We’ll have to be quick.’

  The wind whipped her face, its roar mixing with the crashing waves and the screech of seagulls. After a few minutes, they came to a wooded area, a tiny copse grown out of the tufted grass. It was surrounded by a metal fence and Adrian led her to the entrance gate, and pulling a key out of his pocket, opened it. A large yellow hazard triangle with a picture of a falling man warned of the imminent slipperiness. Another sign declared the area dangerous and stated that the authorities washed their hands of any injury during use.

  Emma could see the first few steps heading down into a door-shaped hole in the rock – a dark, cavernous mouth that led into the belly of the cliff.

  ‘Does it go all the way down to the beach?’ she asked in awe.

  ‘Yep. Some people say it was used for smuggling back in the day,’ said Adrian. ‘Come on.’

  He bounced down the steps in his eagerness to show her, his slight, wiry body navigating the stairs easily.

  ‘We’re going down?’ asked Emma.

  ‘Course.’

  ‘But what about the sign?’

  ‘Sign schmign.’

  Emma cautiously followed, realizing quickly that Adrian had disappeared into the darkness. Suddenly a light came on ahead – he’d switched on the torch on his phone.

  A damp, salty smell enveloped her as she descende
d and she touched the walls of the stairwell, shivering at their cold clamminess. Because Adrian was pointing the torch beam ahead, she couldn’t see her footing properly. She found herself slipping more than once and grabbed a rusting handrail to steady herself. Some of the steps were crumbling and she once again questioned the sanity of going down there, but Adrian was determinedly striding onwards. After a while, they came out of the shaft and into a tunnel section, where up above her, Emma could just glimpse the remnants of light fittings in the shadows. It seemed to go on forever, step after step, after step, zigzagging through another shaft and two more tunnels. The darkness was claustrophobic; the cold, dank air stuck in her throat. As she descended, the sound of the waves grew ever louder, echoing up through the stairwell, and then finally, a glimmer of grey daylight ahead. Emma took the last few steps especially carefully as they were strewn with wet seaweed, and then she was spat out of the chalk tunnel and onto the beach.

  Adrian was beaming at her, delighted with his adventure. ‘There are more than thirty-nine of the buggers, eh?’

  She smiled tightly and assessed the tide. The sea was crashing up onto the beach, the waves nipping at their ankles. As she cast her eye up and down the coast, she realized there was no escape. The only way out was back up the steps.

  On the road once more, Adrian still on a high, they returned to the house. Emma was shivering from the cold.

  ‘Let me get you a coffee,’ said Adrian as he led her inside. She watched as he keyed in the code to the alarm and went bouncing into what she saw was the kitchen. A radio station had been left playing and Adrian did some moves as he got two mugs out of the cupboard and filled them with coffee from a shiny chrome machine on the worktop.

  ‘Nice place,’ said Emma, admiring the spacious, modern kitchen. It was huge, all gleaming black work surfaces and rich oak cupboards. A silver fridge the size of a double wardrobe barely filled a wall; next to it was a floor-to-ceiling wine cooler.

  ‘Thanks. Generation Rebel paid for it.’

  Did it now? Emma smiled. ‘That’s nice of Generation Rebel.’

  ‘Nice of the Americans to buy the format. Hey, look – we have our own pizza oven,’ he said, opening a stainless-steel letter-box-shaped oven door and demonstrating by taking a long-handled wooden pizza peel and pretending to shimmy in a pizza.

  Emma kept her smile in place and continued to do so throughout the ‘casual’ tour, Adrian blithely reeling off rooms with a waft of his hand, but she saw the lingering pride in his eyes as they flickered over his very own beach house. It was magnificent, the kind of property that would feature in magazines. The dining-room table seated twelve comfortably; you could sit in the white oval bathtub and look out to sea. There was even a games room and a bar. From the landing window, Emma could see a pool, covered for winter, which took up a fraction of the large garden.

  ‘And here’s the office,’ he said, coming to a sizeable room on the first floor in the roundel. It was dominated by a large telescope, which pointed out of the window towards the sea.

  ‘Go on,’ he insisted.

  Emma leaned over and put the glass to her eye. Suddenly the heaving waves seemed within touching distance. She swung the telescope back onto the estate, stopping when she picked up the small wooded area just a short distance from the house, almost on the cliff edge itself. There were his Thirty-Nine Steps.

  Adrian took a seat at an enormous desk, a place designed to pull back shoulders and flex arm muscles. He was like a concert pianist preparing to conquer his instrument. His fingers struck at the keys of his computer.

  Emma sat at the window seat, found she liked to look out, was mesmerized by the cold block of churning water.

  As Adrian started to talk through the script, she listened, interjected, suggested, all the while realizing how reliant he seemed to have become on her. Maybe it was second-project nerves: after such a mammoth hit, they were all aware of the pressure to deliver, none more so, she knew, than Adrian. As they worked, Emma took in the room. The leather sofa, the handmade oak bookcases that fitted into the snug corners of the roundel, the comic-book canvas prints of Wonder Woman and Superman on the walls. She couldn’t see from where she was sitting but there were probably drawers underneath the titan of a desk. Drawers that she’d like to look through. There was also an oak unit to her right, again curved, with two doors either side of a set of three drawers. If only she had Superman’s X-ray vision so she could see inside. There was also, bizarrely, a framed pair of handcuffs hanging on the wall. He saw her looking.

  ‘From the set,’ he explained gleefully. ‘Used to cuff the headmaster. They’re the real McCoy. We had to have a special adviser on set just in case he needed to get free quickly.’

  After a couple of hours, they’d discussed enough for Adrian to be able to continue writing and Emma knew he preferred to be alone for a bit.

  ‘How about I go and fix us some lunch?’ she suggested.

  Adrian pulled a face. ‘There’s nothing in. House has been empty a while.’

  ‘I can go to the shop? If you point me in the right direction.’

  Adrian pulled something out of his pocket and tossed it to Emma, who caught it deftly.

  ‘Take the car,’ he said with a grin, and she looked down at the set of keys. ‘The one with the green cap is for the house so you can let yourself back in. The car’s self-explanatory.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Emma could tell the BMW was his pride and joy.

  ‘You have a licence, right?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Then you’re insured. Go for it.’

  ‘OK.’ She smiled and took the two twenties Adrian gave her and was about to leave the room when he spoke again.

  ‘Thank you, Emma.’

  She turned back, puzzled. ‘For getting lunch?’

  ‘No. For coming out here, being so good on the scripts. They’ve . . . really gone up a level. I can’t tell you how brilliant it’s been since you’ve joined.’

  She could see he was deeply grateful, and she thought she could even detect a hint of relief. ‘I enjoy it,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘And I like working with Carrie. She’s an amazing producer. I find her inspirational.’ She didn’t know if he believed her or not.

  The wind seemed to be pushing her away as she fought it down the drive to the car and she looked back once to see if Adrian was watching her, but the window she’d been sitting at five minutes before was empty.

  Emma drove down to the gates and remembered they were electronic. She fumbled in the glove compartment for the remote and after a click they started to glide open. She headed out of the estate, the steel bollard disappearing into the ground as she drove over the pressure-activated plate. As she checked the public road for traffic, a car pulled into the estate, slowing as the driver saw her face. It was an older, well-dressed woman, perhaps in her late sixties, and she stared at her, frowning. A small pug was in the passenger seat, also giving her a baleful glare. Emma wound down her window.

  ‘Is everything OK?’ she asked politely.

  The woman looked a bit taken aback but recovered quickly. ‘I was just wondering,’ she said, ‘who you were as you are driving my neighbour’s car.’

  I stole it, Emma felt like saying but had a sense the joke would fall flat on her audience. ‘I work for Adrian. He’s at the house writing and so I’m just running out for some lunch.’ The woman appeared to mellow at the mention of Adrian. Emma smiled. ‘It’s good to see everyone looks out for each other here. I’m Emma, by the way.’

  The woman nodded and then, seemingly satisfied, drove on her way. Don’t introduce yourself, then, thought Emma, as she watched the woman disappear into the estate from her rear-view mirror.

  She headed for the town centre, and finding a deli, got warm quiches and some soup. As an afterthought, she added two large chocolate brownies.

  Walking back to the car, she took a little detour, crossing the road to a re-heeling place she’d spotted on the way down. She hovere
d outside for a moment, looking through the tinsel-framed window. She’d gone over it in her mind again and again that morning. There was no other way. Emma went in and asked the man behind the counter to make a copy of the key with the green cap. It only took a few minutes, and then she left.

  ‘Smells fantastic,’ said Adrian, bounding down the stairs as he heard her come in. ‘Car OK?’

  ‘Slight dent on the offside front wing when I hit your neighbour’s car. Blue Volvo? Older lady, green hat with a feather, small pug on the front seat, both with a look of suspicion?’

  ‘Geraldine?’ There was a millisecond of alarm. ‘I take it you’re joking?’

  She grinned and he relaxed. ‘You know her, then?’ she said. ‘She seemed quite perturbed to see me driving your car.’

  ‘She’s a nosy old thing. Lives in the road behind us. Her plot backs onto ours. She probably wondered who you were.’ Adrian looked inside the bag of food. ‘She’ll be thinking I’ve got a bit on the side.’

  Emma stopped still, taken aback, her insides curdling at his words. Why would he say that? Deeply uncomfortable, she looked at him, but he was unpacking the lunch. He glanced up. Smiled.

  ‘Do you mind getting a couple of glasses out of the cupboard?’ He pointed behind her.

  Flustered, Emma reached back and opened up a cupboard door.

  ‘The next one,’ said Adrian, and she opened another and was faced with a row of gleaming glasses. She collected herself before she turned back again, but now he was getting some cutlery out of the drawer. Had she been mistaken? At the time, she’d had the feeling he’d known what he’d said, had in fact said it deliberately, thrown out as a hook to test her. But maybe she’d been wrong.

  ‘What would you like to drink?’ she asked.

  Adrian wistfully patted another chrome machine. ‘I’d do you a juice but we’ve no fruit. I’ve got rum,’ he said. ‘That’s something I never run out of. Better not get stuck into that, though – no idea where it’ll lead us.’ He laughed and looked her in the eye.

  Uneasy, Emma turned her back and filled two glasses from the tap, looking out into the garden. ‘It’s a lovely place you’ve got here. Be great when Rory’s older – bring him to the beach.’