by Linda Miles
She bicycled gloomily off down the drive. For a minute or so she wondered idly why Olivia should want to flatter Driscoll, or hire him, or help him—she didn’t seem the altruistic type. But then she remembered Grant, and had no attention to spare for trifles like the strange conversation she’d just heard.
Rachel did not have another chance to talk to Grant at length. Occasionally she ran into him when she went back to the house to deal with her records; he was always meticulously polite and repellingly formal. He always seemed to be frowning now, and hardly seemed to speak except to bark orders.
Rachel tried to tell herself it was just because he was unhappy, but that didn’t make it any easier to take. He’d obviously made his choice, and nothing as lightweight as her inexperienced self could talk him out of it. Too right she wasn’t a femme fatale, she thought gloomily; any fernme fatale worth her salt would have had him at her feet. Instead, she’d simply driven him further into this new mania for work.
Well, it was probably all for the best, she assured herself, after another two weeks of the cold shoulder. She scowled up at the gathering clouds above the reedbed. Drops of rain splashed on the water; the wind was beginning to rise.
Did she want to be here? She did not. Whose fault was it that she was standing here? Grant Mallett’s. Any man with a scrap of decency would have released her from her contract and let her move into a comfortable office; Grant had insisted she finish the work, because, obviously, he hadn’t a scrap of decency and was a selfish swine. Did she want to marry a selfish swine? No. Well, yes, but that was a temporary lapse of sanity; she wasn’t going to many a selfish swine, and it was all for the best.
Lightning flashed on the horizon. Hastily Rachel dictated a few more remarks into her tiny tape recorder and tucked it safely back in her pocket. She wasn’t likely to get much more done today; she’d go back to the house and work some more on her report.
Rachel waded back to shore, mounted her bicycle, and set off again on the by now all too familiar access road. Rain began to fall steadily; gritting her teeth, she struggled to keep the bicycle on track.
She reached the house about half an hour later, steaming inside her raincoat. She remembered that a conference was booked in now, and took her bicycle round the side to park it out back. She draped her macintosh and hat over it, and left her muddy boots beside it. Slipping into the house, she padded in her stockinged feet round to the office.
A cold-drinks machine was groaning softly to itself in a corner by a little lounge—Grant had finally decided in favour of vending machines. Rachel realised suddenly that a cold drink would be wonderful. She’d stopped by the machine, and was digging money out of her pocket, when she heard voices.
‘I’m sorry, Olivia, but there’s nothing I can do.’ Grant sounded unutterably weary. ‘If you’d told me a few months ago it might have been different, but my capital’s all tied up now and it’ll be that way for a long while to come. It’ll be five or, more likely, ten years before the park starts breaking even, never mind making a profit; I can’t just take half a million out of it again at a moment’s notice.’
‘But Grant,’ Olivia protested, ‘half the reason my business is in trouble is that I’ve been down here when I should have been in London or Paris—I missed some crucial shows…’
There was a short pause. ‘I’m sorry,’ Grant said at last. ‘I thought you were getting less interested in fashion and wanted to be more involved here. I’d never have asked you to sacrifice your business if I’d known. The problem is that at this stage to help you on the scale you need would jeopardise the science park, or at least mean postponing it for several years. I’d have to think about that very seriously—I couldn’t possibly give you an answer now, when I’m leaving for New York in a couple of hours.’
This was getting worse and worse. Rachel wished desperately that she could somehow escape her hiding place unseen. She thought, briefly, of just walking out, and shuddered.
Olivia said nothing. After a moment Grant went on, ‘I’d thought of putting you in charge here while I was away, but obviously this puts matters in a different perspective. You must want to be back in London now. Surely if you work at it single-mindedly without the distraction of my affairs, there’s a good chance that you could pull it back from the brink?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Olivia. ‘That is—to tell the truth, Grant, I think my second-in-connnand can deal with things for now. I take it you’d pay a full-time salary if I ran things here—that would help me a bit—and I don’t want you worrying about things while you’re away. You’re right, this is the important thing. I’ll handle everything. Just leave everything to me.’
‘I can’t let you do that,’ said Grant. ‘You’ve done too much already.’
‘No, I insist. Don’t give it another thought.’
Grant gave a rather strained laugh. ‘Well, I can’t do that, but, if you’re sure, I’ll accept just temporarily—it would be hard to change at such short notice before I go. You’re an angel to do it. As soon as I get back I’ll make sure someone else is brought in to deal with everything here.’
At last they moved out of earshot. Rachel got a cold drink from the machine and went to her office to face the loathsome task of writing up.
She hadn’t done much more than shade in a few squares of graph paper in an absent-minded doodle when the door opened and Grant came in.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ he demanded.
‘I was standing up to my waist in water, letting the rain deal with the rest of me,’ Rachel retorted. ‘Then I came here to write up.’
‘Hard at work, I see,’ he said sarcastically, glancing at the sheet of paper. ‘I thought I told you not to hire that idiot.’
‘I didn’t,’ said Rachel.
‘Well, I see you know who I meant,’ he observed, with a sardonic grin. ‘Everywhere I go I seem to fall over him. I thought you’d broken up. What happened, did you kiss and make up?’
Rachel fought down an urge to tell him to mind his own business or, even better, tell him that she was marrying Driscoll tomorrow. ‘No,’ she said patiently. ‘We’re still disengaged, and I did not put him on the payroll. It was Olivia’s idea.’
Whatever he had been expecting it hadn’t been this. ‘Olivia!’ he exclaimed incredulously. ‘Why on earth would Olivia hire that blockhead?’
‘She had some idea about making this an—an ecological haven for rare species,’ said Rachel. ‘She said she knew it was what you would want.’
Grant scowled. ‘I’d rather we did the right thing by the habitats we’ve got,’ he said. ‘Why didn’t you tell her?’
‘Why should I?” asked Rachel. ‘She’s your fiancée. The one who agrees with you on everything of importance, remember? If she says she knows what you want, who am I to disagree?’
Grant opened his mouth and then shut it, loyalty winning out over annoyance. ‘Oh, well, I suppose he can’t do any actual harm,’ he said at last, grudgingly. ‘I know Olivia meant well. Just don’t get re-engaged while I’m away.’
‘Away?’ Rachel remembered just in time that this should come as a surprise.
‘I’m going to the States for a month to talk to some potential investors.’
A month! Rachel thought in dismay. But it was already the first week of June—and the wedding was in August! The past few weeks hadn’t been encouraging, but at least he’d been here. How could she possibly expect him to change his mind, though, if he didn’t even see her?
‘But what if something turns up in the EIA?’ she asked.
‘Is that likely?’ he asked quickly. ‘If there was a problem and the Press got onto it, it could kill investor interest pretty swiftly.’
‘It’s looking good so far,’ said Rachel. ‘But you never know. Still, if something does turn up I won’t tell anyone but you.’
‘You can tell Olivia. I’m leaving her in charge and she knows where to reach me.’
Rachel agreed reluctantly.
&
nbsp; There was a long silence. Rachel braced herself for another barrage of criticism. Grant was staring down at her, the blue eyes unusually brilliant.
‘Well, hope it all goes well,’ he said at last. ‘See you in a few weeks.’ He hesitated. Then, to her astonishment, he kissed her on the cheek and walked abruptly out of the room.
The next week seemed to go smoothly enough. Rachel didn’t know what Driscoll was doing for Olivia—the great thing was that she hardly ever saw him. Apparently he was doing something or other in the woodlands at the opposite end of the property. Rachel had been able to report on these using material already available; since no new research was needed she had only visited that part of the property once or twice.
On Friday evening, however, Rachel bicycled over to the house to find Olivia waiting for her. The blonde woman invited Rachel into Grant’s office and sat down behind his desk, frowning.
‘Rachel, I don’t know how to put this, but I’m going to have to ask you to leave the survey.’ She propped immaculately manicured fingers against each other. ‘I’m asking Driscoll to take over from next week, with staff if he needs it.’
‘What?’
Olivia raised one beautifully plucked eyebrow. ‘Apparently he’s found a dozen endangered or at least rare species of insect in that woodland patch you decided we didn’t need to survey, and a couple of rare plants.’ She placed a sheet of paper with a list of Latin names in front of Rachel, then took it back before Rachel could look at it closely.
‘He went over that waterway that you fell into the other day, and actually turned up a number of rare plants that must have been right under your nose.’ Her eyes were cold. ‘I suppose Grant shouldn’t have insisted on your taking the contract; anyway, this standard of work isn’t quite what he had in mind. I understand you’ve been wanting to get out ever since you started, so I hope you won’t mind taking two weeks’ pay in lieu of notice.’
Rachel opened her mouth and shut it. She had wanted to leave, of course, but she hated to leave a job half-done. She just couldn’t understand it. She knew Driscoll wasn’t nearly as painstaking as she was. Had he decided to show an excess of zeal just to impress, or because he was desperate for a job? It just defied belief, though, that she could have missed so much.
‘As far as the waterway is concerned,’ she said stiffly, ‘it was raining very hard that day—so hard that I’d already decided I couldn’t carry out any more observations on the areas I’d already selected for study. The fact that I may not have noticed something under poor conditions has nothing to do with my competence. Most of my work has been over strips of ground that I’ve conducted repeated surveys of, week in, week out. The whole point is to get enough data to produce meaningful statistics, which allow for the possibility that on some particular day you miscounted, or there were unusually high or low numbers to be counted.’
‘And how do you explain the high numbers of rare species in areas you decided not to survey?’ Olivia inquired.
‘You don’t do an ecological assessment by surveying every inch of the countryside from scratch,’ Rachel explained patiently. ‘You go through the information that’s already available, pinpoint the areas that are likely to be affected and carry out new research if required.’
Olivia looked blank.
“There was no reason to think the waterway required any special attention,’ Rachel insisted. ‘Nothing in any of the existing data, and no striking features when we did the general survey. What you tell me is surprising, and odd, but I can assure you we’ve followed best practice.’
‘Well, I’m afraid it’s just not good enough,’ said Olivia.
Rachel bit her lip. It went sorely against the grain to receive her dismissal from Olivia. What would she tell Grant? That Rachel hadn’t been doing her job properly? That she’d walked out on it?
‘Does Grant know about this?’ she asked. ‘As you say, he insisted on my taking the contract; I want to be quite sure he’s agreed to release me from it.’
‘Of course he knows about it,’ said Olivia. ‘I explained the situation to him, and he asked me to deal with it. He’s extremely disappointed with the way you’ve carried out your assignment. Feel free to call him in New York if you want to—but remember that he’s horribly busy just now. I’d have thought you could be responsible enough not to take up his time.’
‘Of course,’ said Rachel. ‘But I think there must be some mistake.’
‘I’m afraid the only mistake was ours in taking you on,’ said Olivia severely. Rachel got the distinct impression that the other woman was enjoying herself. ‘I’m sorry if that hurts your feelings, but there’s rather a lot riding on this; it’s extremely disturbing to see it put in jeopardy like this.’
‘I can see it would be,’ said Rachel quietly. ‘Is there anything else?’
‘Yes,’ said Olivia, with a venomous look. ‘You can take your bloody tarantula with you!’
In the white heat of her fury with Grant, Rachel found she was capable of superhuman feats that she could never have accomplished otherwise. She walked into her aunt’s kitchen, glass case under her arm, and informed her aunt starkly that William would be staying with them in future. Aunt Harriet demurred, with violence and no little eloquence. Rachel repeated that William was staying, in her room, and stalked upstairs. If only all battles were so easily won!
CHAPTER TWELVE
RACHEL spent the next two weeks in what should have been the job of her dreams. She’d found an opening as a secretary at a local auction house, whose premises had not known live flora or fauna for at least five generations. She wore the beautiful clothes Grant had bought her. She typed correspondence at a respectable sixty words per minute, answered telephones and read Vogue in the many quiet moments.
Her employer, Mr Murcheson, was a perfect gentleman. He always let her leave punctually at five. He lent her umbrellas when it rained, and tut-tutted if she came in with wet feet He did not sit on her desk; his interest in legs was confined to antique furniture; he would probably have fainted if she had suggested bringing in her pet tarantula. The problem was that she was bored.
Rachel wanted an employer who rushed in at five o’clock and insisted on talking about the metabolism of dinosaurs. She wanted someone who talked her ear off for three hours and then fed her on baked beans. She wanted someone who couldn’t take his eyes off her legs, and threatened to undress her when she got wet. She wanted Grant.
No, she did not want Grant, she told herself every time she reached this unpleasant discovery. His wedding was only a month away. Besides, she was furious with him. How dared he leap to conclusions? How dared he accept what Driscoll said without verifying it? She hadn’t thought he loved her, but she’d at least thought he liked her, how could he be so unreasonable?
Not that it made any difference to her. She didn’t want to be standing in a swamp, or counting insects in a square metre of woodland. She hadn’t asked to do his stupid project; he had forced her into it against her will.
But she was still furious. It was so obvious that something fishy was going on. Some of the species on the list were so improbable for the locale, and why had they all been turned up by Driscoll?
Sometimes she thought she was being paranoid—but didn’t it look like a deliberate attempt to get her out of the way? Why? What was going on? Why hadn’t Grant seen that something odd was going on and asked her to help him sort it out, instead of assuming she was to blame? And last, but by no means least, how dared he tell Olivia, of all people, to give her the sack? He could at least have had the decency to tell her himself!
Morosely, Rachel finished typing the morning’s correspondence and took it in to Mr Murcheson. There was nothing else to do, and she’d finished Vogue, Harper’s and Marie Claire, so she made a cup of tea and opened the office copy of the Financial Times. Her eyes drifted down the page; she raised the mug to her mouth, then put it down again while she read, frowning.
Her eyes had gravitated automatically to a piece
on the British fashion industry. The article analysed the factors that had made a number of British companies successful, then pinpointed the weakness of others that had been going steadily downhill.
The days were gone, it said, when who you knew mattered more than what you did; it devoted a scathing paragraph to Olivia St Clair, who had tried to get by on snob value when others had been succeeding through hard work, imagination and sheer professionalism. According to the piece, St Clair’s had been posting losses for the last five years, and had been on the brink of bankruptcy, though rumour had it that a fresh injection of capital had bailed out the firm.
No wonder Olivia had been so desperate for Grant to make a quick profit, Rachel thought. It didn’t look as though it was involvement with Grant that had undermined the company, though. If anything, Rachel’s baser self speculated, Olivia’s sudden uncharacteristic interest in Amazonian tribes and in Grant looked like a bid to save herself. And there was poor Grant going on about shared idealism! The worst of it was that if this rumour was right it must mean that Grant had decided to help Olivia after all, even if it meant jeopardising his own project.
Rachel folded up the paper despondently and washed out her mug. Then she made another cup of tea. She rearranged the pile of saleroom catalogues on the waiting-room table, spreading them in an artistic little fan. There was still nothing to do.
In desperation she opened the Financial Times again—and this time she stared at the pale pink page in open-mouthed horror.
FINANCING STALLS FOR SCIENCE PARK was the headline; in a short column, the piece described investors as increasingly cautious about Arrowmead. Several rare plants and insects had been spotted on the premises by the environmentalist in charge, Dr Driscoll Parry. Now Dr Parry had identified a breeding pair of Savi’s Warblers in an extensive reedbed on the property. There were thought to be fewer than twenty breeding pairs in the entire country; the sighting, if genuine, could significantly delay or limit planning permission. There was a serious possibility that the area might be considered suitable for a nature reserve in order to protect a rare breeding spot for the birds.