Grace didn’t answer.
‘All I can say is that Alistair hit pay dirt when he found a woman as dedicated to order as you are.’
‘We’ve talked about this before, Gilbert,’ she said, carrying on with the polishing. ‘I’m not necessarily doing it for Alistair. I like things to run smoothly, be in the right place. Anything else makes me feel unsettled.’
‘Never think of initiating a coup though, Grace? Storming his desk, taking over the company? You could run it better than he could with your eyes closed.’ Gilbert did a camp pause. ‘Actually, I think that is how Alistair runs it most of the time – eyes closed, fingers in ears, brain up his—’
‘Don’t be daft, Gilbert.’
‘Or looking for something else, something with a bit more power? Yes,’ he lowered his voice, ‘you could set up a rival company. I’d come and work for you like a shot. Bet quite a few of the other art guides in London would too. I can see it now.’ Gilbert swept his hand through the air in an exaggerated arc. ‘Guided by Grace. Got a certain ring to it, don’t you think?’
‘No, I don’t. I’m perfectly happy pootling around here. Suits me, Gilbert. I like the routine.’
She didn’t know if that sounded a bit defensive, but the soothing strains of Mozart emitting from Gilbert’s phone distracted him. His face suggested he was anything but soothed.
‘Ah, what fresh hell is this?’ he said in a weary tone before answering it. For a long time he said nothing, and when he did it was obvious he was really having to fight to get even one or two words out.
‘No … I did tell you he would be coming … Yes, we discussed it … to read the meter. He should have had an identification thing round his neck … well, that’s all right then … no, what? Wait … so he hasn’t read the meter? Well, yes, it could have been forged … but … No, I’m not cross … just … look … I’ll be back soon. Yes, I’ll remember.’
‘Another day in Paradise,’ he said, coming off the phone, and Grace tried to head off what threatened to be a return visit from the black cloud of Vi by wondering aloud what was so urgent that Alistair had to leave as quickly as he had. It was almost furtive. And why did they have to stay until he got back?
‘Perhaps he’s gone to see a man about a Doge,’ Gilbert said laughing hysterically and then apologised immediately. ‘Too long spent in the Venice rooms this afternoon.’
They batted a number of increasingly daft ideas about before deciding that it was probably something mundane – perhaps he was picking up proofs of the new leaflet from the printers and wanted them to stay back to check them over?
Which was when they heard the door downstairs slam.
‘Brace yourself,’ Gilbert said, and they sat and waited for Alistair to climb the stairs. They heard the door to the reception area open and Alistair say, ‘Just through here.’
‘He’s got someone with him,’ Grace whispered.
Gilbert laughed. ‘Bit heavy-footed for a fancy woman.’
The door was flung wide.
‘Ah, here you are.’ Alistair seemed very jovial. ‘I’ve got someone I’d like to introduce. Someone who’s going to bring a bit of new blood to the team. Here he is: Tate Jefferson.’
Before she saw him, Grace knew it was going to be the guy with blond hair. And here he was: striped trousers, evening dress jacket, rubber wristbands, biker boots.
‘There you go, Gracie,’ he said, giving her a double thumbs-up, ‘told you we might bump into each other again.’
CHAPTER 5
‘It’s Grace, not Gracie,’ she said, but Tate Jefferson gave no indication of having heard her. She was going to repeat it, but decided she could not summon up enough politeness to make it sound anything less than aggressive. She smiled serenely instead, as if she were pleased to see him again, but her heart was somewhere at the back of her throat and her mind already laying out the framework for a coping strategy, some way of minimising the presence of this disturbing, memory-stirring, testosterone-exuding man grinning away at her.
She continued to smile serenely as Alistair made a speech about how it was a new era, how he’d had to think hard about ways to widen the company’s appeal and how Tate (boyish slap on the blond guy’s back) would attract a completely different group of clients.
‘Tate,’ Alistair said, laying down his briefcase, ‘will do more cutting-edge tours, show people the up-and-coming artists – even the ones no one has heard of yet. It’ll be contemporary, in your face, challenging.’
He rocked back on his heels and executed a weird kind of swing at an invisible baseball with an invisible bat which Grace assumed was a movement designed to make him seem go-getting and modern. It was as embarrassing as watching your dad grooving his way on to the dance floor at a wedding.
There was the slightest of double-takes from Tate at Alistair’s puzzling body language, and then he turned his attention back to Grace. Suddenly his hand was out towards her for shaking. It was the hand with the silver ring.
She took it graciously and refused to listen to any of the nerves in her body and what they were shouting at her. One shake and she would drop this unsettling hand, but its owner seemed quite happy to let it linger round hers.
‘What’s Tate short for?’ she asked, trying to pull her hand free. ‘Mutate?’
‘Grace!’ Alistair said, but her words had the desired effect on Tate: she felt him let go of her hand as he laughed.
‘Gracie’s pissed with me,’ he said, turning to Alistair. ‘We had a run-in earlier. You know you suggested I tag along on a tour, see how they’re done? Well, I tagged along with Gracie.’
‘Grace.’
‘And, well, cut to the chase, we didn’t see eye to eye.’
‘Ah,’ Gilbert said getting up. ‘So you’re the obnoxious, opinionated American Grace was telling me about.’
Tate looked down at his boots and then back up at Gilbert.
‘Yeah, guilty of that.’ He did not look guilty at all. His hand was out again and Gilbert came over and shook it with every appearance of being amused.
‘I suspect Tate is short for Tate Modern, hmm?’ Gilbert said. ‘Or have you heard that a million times?’
‘A million and one times now.’
They both laughed, before Tate added, ‘Suppose you get people asking if you’re half of Gilbert and George?’
‘Only once.’
There was more laughter and Grace wondered what Gilbert was doing. That ready handshake felt like disloyalty towards her somehow, the jokey chat almost as if he were flirting. And Alistair: was he mad? What had possessed him to hire this brash idiot? This was all wrong … wrong! Didn’t they see how disruptive a guy like this would be? How threatening to the smooth running of … everything?
And how was she going to consign ‘the blond guy’ to the dumping-ground section of her brain if, at this very moment, he had a name and was standing in the office, by her desk, chatting and looking like he felt at home?
She needed some time to get her composure back.
‘I’ll make us all tea,’ she said, and before either Gilbert or Alistair could stop her, she had plugged the kettle in again and switched it on.
There was a ‘phutt’ noise and everyone disappeared into calm cloaking black.
Grace could hear Alistair huffing away, asking how she could forget so soon that the kettle was faulty? Gilbert joked about Tate needing to get used to being kept in the dark in this company, which Alistair responded to with something blustery before Tate cut in with, ‘Hey, Gracie, think you got your night-time routine turned around. You put me to sleep this afternoon, now you’re switching the lights off. What next? You gonna do some tucking into bed?’
However soothing the dark was, it couldn’t stop Grace feeling aggrieved by that smug familiarity, and she turned in Tate’s direction and pulled a face before doing the ‘penis on the forehead’ mime for a dickhead. It felt pretty good, until there was the sound of a match being struck and Tate’s head and shoulders were ill
uminated in a glow of light. She wasn’t sure she’d put her hand down quickly enough to avoid her rude gesture being spotted.
The match burned down and they were back in the dark.
‘I’ll get the torch,’ she said, fumbling for her desk, and all at once being in the dark didn’t seem such a good idea. Someone was moving; she could hear them. She worked her way around her desk, her hands feeling clammy, and Gilbert started to whistle. He sounded as if he were still standing right where he had been when the lights went out. She listened again. Someone was definitely moving around – there was the scuff of a shoe, or a boot, on the carpet not far from her.
‘Remind me to take that kettle out with the rubbish when I go tonight, Alistair,’ she said, just to gauge from his answer where he was now standing.
Exactly where he’d been before, judging by the uninterested, ‘Right,’ she got back.
Pulse ricocheting about, she bent down quickly and grabbed the handle on the middle drawer and pulled. She felt for the torch and then squawked.
Someone had just blown in her right ear.
‘What’s the matter now?’ Alistair called.
‘Nothing, nothing,’ she said, swiping through the dark off to her right with her hand, but only connecting with air. ‘I touched something sharp in the drawer. No damage done.’
This time she managed to get the torch and held it in her not very steady hand to turn it on. In the beam she could see that Alistair and Gilbert were indeed where they had been when the lights went off, but Tate was closer to her desk. His face was a lesson in how to look innocent.
She asked Gilbert to unplug the kettle again and repeated the whole process of carrying the chair out through reception before balancing on it to reach the fuse box. As she did, she listened to the flow of conversation between the three men. It stopped and started as if they felt a bit self-conscious talking into the dark.
‘So, what’s your background?’ Gilbert asked Tate, who replied, ‘Art Institute of Chicago. Then a gallery in New York for a few months …’
Grace flicked the switch back up, the lights came on and she carried the chair back into the room.
‘Wanna hand?’ Tate said, nodding at it.
‘No, thank you. I can manage a chair.’
‘But not a kettle?’
Grace was careful not to plonk the chair down and when she opened the drawer to drop in the torch, she did it gently. Years of training herself to keep the lid on her more extreme emotions were paying off.
‘Good job you had a flashlight,’ Tate went on, raising his eyebrows. ‘Can get pretty scary in the dark.’
She ignored the subtext of that, even though all of a sudden she wanted to put her hand to her ear.
‘Oh, I’m prepared for most things,’ she said brightly and then wished she hadn’t as, rather than making her sound like Superwoman, she felt she had come across like a very old, faintly pathetic female Scout. The kind of person who carries a Swiss army knife around just in case anyone needs something gouging out of somewhere.
‘We depend on Grace to get us out of any mess,’ Gilbert said, making her feel worse. ‘So, you have matches. Please say you’re a fellow smoker? Normally I’m exiled in the yard alone. Be nice to have some company round the back.’ He left a beat. ‘If you’ll pardon the pun.’
Yes, Gilbert was definitely flirting and Tate seemed to be flirting back in a kind of metrosexual way that was something else Grace knew she was going to grow to hate about him. Empty, easy charm. The worst kind.
‘Yup, I’ll keep you company,’ Tate said, ‘but I’m really trying to kick the habit. Cut right back in the summer, but now …’ He turned to Grace. ‘Guess you’ve never been a smoker?’
‘No, afraid not. And now, Alistair, sorry to interrupt, but there are a couple of things on your desk I’d like to talk to you about. Shall we?’
She waved in the direction of Alistair’s office, which was always a tricky manoeuvre and meant you had to decide in advance whether to be literal and do a zig-zagging thing with your arm to indicate the route into the reception area and back out again, or go for the simple option and, with a sharp jabbing motion, suggest a theoretical route straight through the office wall.
She had gone for the jabbing, which seemed to rouse Alistair. He picked up his briefcase, but before detaching himself completely from the others announced, ‘I used to smoke quite a lot.’ A schoolboy snigger. ‘Not tobacco.’
Gilbert winced and as Alistair did that weird baseball action again, made even clumsier by the presence of his briefcase, Tate caught Grace’s eye just at the moment she was remembering Mr Baldridge’s comment about ‘a bunch of pot-smoking Democrats.’
She looked away. He could forget about building little connections between the two of them based on in-jokes. She was busy building a high wall to keep him out, with possibly a moat beyond.
In his office, Grace saw Alistair glance at the notes she had left him about Gilbert’s payment and the phone messages, and push them to one side.
‘Seems … interesting, Tate,’ she said, knowing an oblique approach to any issue was always best with Alistair.
‘Mmm. Challenging, bit brash maybe, but I can see his potential.’ Alistair did that face Grace suspected he had read about in management technique books – the one he imagined made him appear inscrutable. In reality, it made it look as if he had a piece of food stuck between his molars and was trying to extract it surreptitiously. ‘I can see him really connecting with the funky young clients,’ he went on. ‘Making us the go-to company for hip tours.’
Grace studied Alistair’s V-neck sweater and the striped shirt under it, one side of his collar buttoned down and the other breaking free, and gave thanks he had not used the terms ‘wack’ or ‘well baaad’.
‘Have you been thinking of getting someone like this in for a while?’
‘Oh, yes. I mean, I know people think I sit in here just faffing around, but I’ve been thinking strategically. Our competitors aren’t standing still, Grace; they’re all offering a wider range of tours than us. And no offence, but neither you nor Gilbert is able to fill this gap in our services: Gilbert’s at home in the sixteenth century, the seventeenth at a pinch, and you’re far too busy keeping me in line.’ He leaned back in his chair. ‘Don’t think I don’t appreciate it.’
When he was like this, she could understand what Emma saw in him. He dressed far older than his years and he could do with shifting a bit of weight, but he wasn’t bad looking in a scrubbed, pens-in-his-top-pocket way. And he was decent. Not a flake. Not like Tate Jefferson.
‘So, he’s employed on a freelance basis? Same terms as Gilbert?’
She saw the beginnings of a look that suggested it was none of her business. ‘Uh-huh,’ Alistair replied with a mistimed wave of his hand, which Grace guessed was meant to suggest nonchalance. ‘Kind of a no-risk approach on my part.’
Grace very much doubted that.
‘And he has a Blue Badge?’
‘No. But what he does have is lots of contacts – artists, gallery owners, curators.’
She would not show how irritated she was that Alistair had put Tate’s extensive address book on a par with the tourist qualifications Gilbert and she had sweated and studied for.
‘And he has all the right paperwork, you know, for being employed in the UK? I expect you’ve seen his qualifications? You interviewed him formally somewhere?’
She could tell from Alistair’s face that the answer to those questions was ‘don’t know’, ‘no’ and ‘yes, in the pub’.
‘Grace, Grace.’ He folded his hands in his lap. ‘Sometimes you have to take a leap. Push back the boundaries. We all get so bogged down in making sure every “t” is crossed and every “i” dotted. Don’t you sometimes feel that you have to shake off the shackles of how things have been and move on to how things will be? A life lived with regret is a life not lived at all.’
She wasn’t really sure where Alistair was going with this; certain
ly not towards any practical considerations. Like whether Tate had the tact and patience needed to deal with tricky people. Tricky people who weren’t him. Or if his organisational skills would enable him to make sure he had the right people at the right place at the right time.
‘I suppose he understands all the health and safety issues?’ she tried.
‘He’s doing art tours, Grace,’ Alistair shot back, ‘not potholing.’ He got up and put an arm around her shoulder and she realised he was going to usher her out of the room. ‘I know what all these worries are about.’ His tone was kindly. ‘They’re just manifestations of a teensy bit of jealousy.’ She went to remonstrate, but he held up his finger. ‘And I understand, I really do. We’ve been a settled team for a while and this younger, trendier guy turns up. Charismatic. But really, Grace, you have nothing to fear. He won’t be stealing away any of your potential clients – totally different market. He won’t even be in the office much. It’s not like he’s going to share your desk or anything.’
‘Right.’
‘So, let’s welcome him on board. I told him we’d all go out for a quick one after work. Get to know each other.’
‘That’s a good idea,’ she said, despite having absolutely no intention of doing a quick anything with Tate
‘And after the weekend, first thing Monday, we’ll get to grips with publicising him and his tours, eh? Update the website, do some emailers, amend the leaflets.’ He took his arm from round her shoulders. ‘Right ho. Out in a minute.’
She found herself back in reception and there was a click behind her as Alistair locked his door.
Locking himself in now, as well as locking them out?
Grace returned to her own office, but hesitated in the open doorway. Tate was sitting at her desk and Gilbert was perched on a corner of it.
‘I went to Chicago once,’ Gilbert was saying, ‘very disappointed.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Well, it wasn’t windy. That’s like going to Manchester and finding that it’s not raining.’
Playing Grace Page 6