by Lucy Keane
She would have to make sure she gave him no cause for complaint, even comment. Then he would believe that what had happened had no real significance for her. That way, it could present no threat, and there would be no repercussions. But, despite her common-sense resolution, she spent all weekend thinking about him.
On Monday the post arrived unusually early. There was a large white envelope on the doormat, and the handwriting was unfamiliar.
She tore it open, half her mind, as usual at that time of the morning, on Charlie and the cat. There was a large, stiff double-sided invitation inside, and she had read it before she realised.
Mr. and Mrs. Anthony Harper-Maxwell invite Miss Amy Thompson to the wedding of their daughter Fiona to Mr. Julius Prior on…
Her hands were shaking. Despite her rationalised approach to it all, she had been living since last night in two different worlds. In one world, she and Julius had just discovered a mutual attraction had taken them both by surprise—and in that private world outside the office and the claims of everyday life, somewhere below the level of conscious thought, she had been indulging in a sort of formless fantasy in which she cared for Julius, and he for her, in a way that made Fiona entirely irrelevant. Now one uncompromising white square of card reminded her that that world had been total illusion. In the real world there was Fiona, and there was the office, and her boss had kissed her in a way he shouldn’t have done, as a result of which her job might be in jeopardy. And that was the reality she should have been living all the time.
She tore up the invitation and threw it away. She would make absolutely sure she was doing something that would guarantee acceptance impossible. It was only an office perk, and it wouldn’t make any difference if she was; there or not. She didn’t know how she was going to get; through the day at the office. Or face Julius. She found herself resenting him again.
Excited discussion of the invitations—both Zoe and Jacquie had received them—vied with minute analysis of hot news, courtesy of a friend of a friend of Jacquie’s, that Fiona had been seen only that weekend at a dance in London wrapped round a handsome fairhaired man. Amy, mindful of Julius’s parting comment, refused to be drawn into the gossip.
‘I think for someone who’s supposed to be getting married to our Julius, and with the wedding only weeks away, the beloved Fiona is behaving very badly!’ Jacquie remarked, in a final attempt to get some interested reaction out of her. ‘Something must have gone wrong. Has she met someone else—or has he!’
Amy stifled the inconvenient little fantasy that had revived again at the speculation, and gave a sweet and insincere smile. ‘I can’t imagine!’ she said, and went back to concentrate ferociously on her typing.
Julius didn’t come into the office on Monday, which was both a relief and a disappointment, and the following day he was so busy she scarcely saw him.
They never exchanged a word. The first time their paths crossed he gave her a sharp look, and then, later, a small sideways smile that despite all her resolutions she found rather endearing. Her own answering smile, though, was merely perfunctory. Whatever had happened in his flat was firmly in the past. Dennis’s secretary could have nothing to do with the girl in the sexy black clothes who had cooked and served his dinner on Saturday night, sat with his friends, and then let him get within inches of seducing her.
Jess rang her when she got home to tell her that a cheque made out to Cookery Unlimited had arrived through the post. She had guessed from the signature the nature of the ‘Abbott’ mistake, but her excited demands for details of the evening were countered by Amy’s heavily edited version. It was the first time she had ever been reluctant to discuss anything with her friend.
Why hadn’t Julius taken an opportunity to give her the cheque in the office? It would have saved him trouble. But perhaps he preferred to avoid a direct encounter, and the inevitable uncomfortable reminder of what had happened between them.
‘It’s an awful lot more than we quoted!’ Jess was exclaiming. ‘Do you think he made a mistake?’
She felt suddenly cold. Julius didn’t make mistakes about money. ‘How much more?’ she asked suspiciously.
‘Well, not quite twice as much, but getting on that way. Could he have thought that the price we gave him was just for one cook, and he’s paying us for two and deducting a bit because I wasn’t there—if you see what I mean?’
‘I don’t think he was working it out on that basis.’
‘So the extra’s a tip? He must have liked you an awful lot!’
A tip. For services beyond the call of duty perhaps? But it hadn’t been like that, and he knew it. Perhaps now, in the cold light of day, he was feeling guilty, and perhaps he’d seen Fiona since. Hush-money? Or an apology for the way the evening had ended?
It made her feel ashamed. And then angry. ‘Jess, we’re not going to accept it!’
Jess was incredulous at the other end of the phone. ‘You must be mad! It wasn’t a cheap dinner in the first place, but this is money way beyond our usual avarice!’
‘I’m serious,’ she insisted, suddenly feeling very tight inside. ‘It’s a mistake. Listen, bring the cheque round here tonight and I’ll ask him about it in the office tomorrow. We should at least give him the chance to get it back.’
Her friend groaned. ‘You’re too honest.’ But she couldn’t really disagree.
No, Amy thought later, I’m not honest. I’m just cross—and hurt—that he thinks he can make a bad situation better by paying me for something that shouldn’t have happened.
She dithered about her moment for confronting Julius. Stock market trading had a slow start, and neither he nor Dennis seemed to have much to occupy them. Finally, when Julius asked for coffee, she plucked up her courage and offered to act as waitress instead of Zoe, with the excuse that she wanted a signature on a letter. It would be the first time they had had an opportunity to speak to each other since Friday night.
Julius was just about to pick up the phone as she came in. He abandoned it, and sat back in his chair, playing with a pencil on the desk in front of him and eyeing her. She couldn’t assess his mood.
‘Yes, Amy. What can I do for you?’
Businesslike. Real life, she thought. And a tiny flickering hope she’d been nourishing despite herself that he might have made one favourable reference to Friday died instantly. She couldn’t read his expression, although for Julius it seemed almost too carefully neutral.
She said, ‘We can’t accept this.’ And put the cheque down with the coffee.
He glanced at it, and then looked back at her directly, his eyes piercing. ‘Why not? Did I forget to sign it?’ He could see that he hadn’t. And he could see that she could see that he hadn’t.
‘No,’ she said awkwardly. ‘But it’s too much.’
‘Too much?’ Both dark eyebrows arched. ‘What sort of business are you supposed to be running?’
‘You know the job wasn’t worth as much as this!’ she replied defiantly.
‘Do I? It was worth it to me. All right, then, consider the extra a tip.’
That was just what she’d been afraid of. ‘For devotion beyond the call of duty?’ She couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of her voice and the phrase, particularly apt, was out before she meant it. She could see from the sudden flicker in his eyes that he understood exactly what she had been alluding to. She hadn’t forgotten one smallest particle of a second of what had happened when he had begun to kiss her. She couldn’t expect him to remember it exactly the way she did, but she could see now—she just knew—he hadn’t forgotten it either.
‘That has nothing to do with it,’ he said abruptly. ‘Why be so aggressive about it? I didn’t take anything you didn’t want to give—and we both know that.’
That had been true at the time, she couldn’t deny it, but it didn’t make it any better. And it wasn’t particularly sensitive of him to point it out. It made her sound cheap.
She felt the blush creeping over her face, and knowing that she was
blushing made it worse. ‘I just don’t want to be paid for it afterwards!’
He held the cheque delicately between two lean fingers of one hand, and looked down at it for a while. Then his eyes met hers, and there was a steely glint in them.
‘I’m sorry if you think that. I was extremely grateful to you, Amy—am grateful—for what you did on Friday night. You turned what could have been a difficult evening for me into a very enjoyable one. You did far more than you were required to by the terms of your employment because I asked you a favour, and I wanted to show you I really appreciated it. Why not go out and buy yourself and Jess a present?’ His glance raked over her and he held out the offending cheque. ‘And if you’re stuck for ideas, why not start by buying yourself a pair of tights? You don’t seem to do too well with them.’
The sarcasm wasn’t too obvious from his tone, but it was there all right. She opened her mouth to explode, couldn’t think of what to say exactly, shut it, and then took the cheque from his outstretched hand.
‘I’m sure your partner will be able to bring herself to bank it, even if you can’t.’ There was a little more warmth in that, even a glint of humour, as though he was allowing himself to soften just a little. ‘Was there anything else?’
Hating him for the way he was making fun of her, and embarrassed because she’d made a stupid issue over something he’d clearly dismissed as incidental—after all, she was the one who had claimed that his existence outside their work was a matter of indifference to her— she muttered a just audible, ‘Thank you,’ and got out of the office in record time. She had to admit that his words on the topic of Friday night had been appreciative, but too often he had a way of putting her in the wrong that made her look a complete fool. If only it weren’t so desperate that she keep her job! she thought with some resentment. He wouldn’t see her for dust— but only after she’d given him a very good idea of what she thought of him first!
It was outside the door that she remembered the letter she’d had for him to sign, still clutched in one hand. She couldn’t bring herself to go back in again. She would have to ask his co-director for a signature later.
She avoided Julius for the rest of the day, paying the cheque into her joint account with Jess in the lunch-hour, and ringing her when she got home that evening.
Charlie, surprisingly, didn’t have any homework to do, but she didn’t feel up to nagging him and collapsed in front of the television, using the images on the screen merely as a background to her thoughts. Deliberately, she avoided a replay of what had happened in the office and wondered instead, in a vague and inconstructive way, what she ought to do about preparations for Christmas.
Christmas Day itself they would be spending with Jess and her family. It would be the first Christmas since the deaths of their parents, and she was very anxious that she and Charlie shouldn’t spend it alone. The contrast with the last one would be too stark.
She found herself thinking about the extra money Julius had given them. It was ironical that with all the expensive food she had to buy for the business she couldn’t afford to feed Charlie in the way she would have liked. But she could buy a few small presents, more as jokes than anything else, and a Christmas tree—thanks to Julius, of course, though the last thing she wanted was to have to feel grateful to him just at the moment.
She fell asleep in front of the television set.
She didn’t know whether her headache next morning was the result of the crick in her neck she’d got from spending half the night so uncomfortably, or merely the tension of the last few days making itself felt. And when she wasn’t expecting Julius to pounce on her for something she’d done wrong even the normal office routine was a strain.
The headache, despite several doses of aspirin wasn’t going away, and her throat felt as though she’d swallowed a knife. She felt very weird all over.
‘You look awful!’ Zoe told her cheerfully. ‘Are you sure you ought to be here?’
By that time she wasn’t sure where she ought to be. She couldn’t understand why at the cottage, where there was no heating, she’d felt OK, and here, in centrally heated offices, she was shivering.
‘Ask Dennis if you can go home,’ Jacquie advised. ‘You sound as though you’re coming down with flu.’
Go home. That was the best thing anyone had said so far! The wait for a bus was a daunting prospect, so it would be better to ask Dennis now and get away as soon as possible, especially if the flu she was suffering from was one of those lightning-strike varieties.
But it wasn’t Dennis, with his friendly concern, she encountered first—it was Julius, whose rather abrasive manner made his response sound more like an accusation than a solicitous enquiry.
‘What on earth’s the matter with you?’ he demanded, giving her one of those laser looks. ‘You’re always a bit pale but now you look positively ghastly. You shouldn’t have come in to work.’
Because she might infect the rest of the office? It was difficult even to summon up the energy to answer him, and she found herself mumbling, ‘I’ll be fine if I can go now.’
‘How are you getting back home?’
‘Bus.’
She wasn’t sure now whether she was answering him or not—it was such an effort to get a word out, and it seemed important not to let him see how much she was shivering. He looked unreal, his body remote but somehow threatening, and she was only aware of his eyes—their colour and the intensity of their gaze. She hadn’t the strength to face any fuss. If only they would all leave her alone to get the bus home in peace!
He said something she didn’t catch, and then Jacquie was helping her on with her coat. She was hardly conscious of collecting her things together, although she was aware that she was leaving a letter half typed. She started to try to explain about it.
‘Don’t worry about that. I’ll finish it for you,’ Jacquie offered kindly. ‘Come downstairs with me. I’ll help you. He’s gone to get the car.’
What car? It wasn’t running. It had been parked in Mr. Watson’s drive for the last four months!
The staircase seemed to sway round her as she made her way downstairs, and the feel of Jacquie’s fingers gripping her arm were the only reality. She felt truly awful.
The cold fresh air of the street was momentarily reviving. Jacquie stood with her on the pavement until the grey Mercedes pulled up alongside the kerb and Julius got out, leaving the engine running.
Without knowing quite how she got there, she found herself sitting in the passenger seat, leaning her head back against the head-rest, her eyes closed. The headache was no better, and she was floating in an unreal world, but at least she didn’t have to make an effort to stand. She was still inexplicably cold.
She was aware that Julius had got in beside her, without saying anything. She wondered dazedly where they were going, her thoughts becoming deliriously confused. Perhaps he would use this as an excuse to get rid of her?
Then after a while he was saying suddenly, ‘This is Applecot. Which is your house? Amy?’
She opened her eyes. He was sitting sideways in the car looking at her, a frown creased between his dark brows. ‘Amy—are you awake?’
She pulled herself together. They were in the main street.
‘Turn right at the end,’ she muttered vaguely.
‘Here?’
‘Mm.’
They were parked in the middle of the row of cottages.
‘Which house?’
‘The one at the end.’ It took all her effort to get that out. The rest he would have to guess.
The car had stopped again. He reached forward to open the handbag in her lap, and picked out a bunch of keys.
He held them up. ‘These?’
She nodded. He got out, and with the part of her mind that was vaguely rational she expected him to come round immediately to the passenger door, but when he did reappear it was without the keys. He opened the door.
‘Come on, not much more. Swing your legs out. That’s righ
t. Now—let me pull you up.’
Before she was conscious of obeying any of his curt instructions, she suddenly felt herself being lifted up. Strong arms round her back and under her knees.
‘Put your arm round my neck—’
She rested her head against a shoulder. It was wonderfully reassuring, comforting. She wished she didn’t feel so utterly ill.
Julius carried her up the path to the front door, which was open, and into the hall; then he was taking her upstairs. She clung to him and shut her eyes. He seemed to know without asking which door opened into her bedroom.
He put her down on the bed, and looked at her. ‘There’s a young man with spiky red hair downstairs who says he’s your brother. Do I believe him?’ Charlie? What was he doing…? He should be at school—
‘Get into bed. It’s damn cold in here.’
‘There’s an electric fire downstairs.’ She thought she said the words, but she wasn’t sure if they came out right.
He left her lying on the bed, wondering if she ought to get undressed, and feeling too ill to move. But it was better lying down. She didn’t know if she’d find the strength ever to get up again.
It seemed a very long time before he reappeared, Charlie behind him clutching the electric fire.
Charlie shouldn’t be there.
She managed to croak, ‘What are you doing home from school?’
He looked sheepish. ‘I—er—didn’t feel too well.’
‘You look just fine to me,’ Julius said harshly. ‘It’s your sister who’s ill, not you. Are you going to help her get undressed or shall I?’
With the bit of her brain that was still functioning, she thought that if she’d felt better she’d have been amused by the expression of undisguised dismay that crossed her brother’s face. He vanished from the room with the speed of light.
In other circumstances, she would have got a secret pleasure out of being undressed by Julius, but feeling as she did there was nothing particularly pleasurable about the touch of his hands—she ached all over, and was conscious only that he was stripping her down to her underwear with clinical efficiency. She didn’t even care that her underwear was distinctly ragged at the edges, and she had a safety pin in one of the straps of her bra. She felt too ill to be embarrassed by it.