Seven Week Itch

by Victoria Corby

  The lunchtime rush had been unusually hectic and I was stomping around the saloon bar, wiping spilt beer off tables and collecting glasses when a man I hadn’t seen before came in. I dumped a tray-load of dirty glasses on the end of the bar and turned to smile mechanically him when Lauren, my lunchtime co-worker, pushed past me, hissing, ‘I’ll do this one.’

  The Bull and Bush doesn’t do table service outside the lunch hour, and normally Lauren reserved the right to refuse to carry a half around the bar with all the passion of a trade-union convenor. She must have broken up with her boyfriend and was applying balm to her wounds in the traditional way, I thought, seeing her pout seductively at the customer and run her tongue around red lips. I started getting the clean glasses out of the washer and drying them, glancing over to see how she was getting on. He was a bit old for her, in his mid-thirties at least, though he was fairly good-looking, with well-cut but not cutting-edge hair. His glasses were surprisingly fashionable for someone wearing his sort of classic grey suit, which looked as if it had come from a seriously upmarket tailor rather than a seriously stylish and infinitely more expensive men’s designer clothing emporium. The Bull and Bush was not accustomed to punters of either type patronising it. Lauren sashayed back, giving the customer ample opportunity to admire the fine shape of her rear, and leant with her elbows on the bar, thus stretching her back (and the other bits) out elegantly. ‘Be a love, Susie, and do us a half of Special and a roast-beef sarnie, with mustard.’

  I reckoned she was wasting her time. Unlike my best friend, I’m not capable of summing up a man at a hundred paces, but this one had the air of someone who was afraid molestation was imminent and, what’s more, didn’t believe in the old adage that when rape’s inevitable you should lie back and enjoy it. True to my fears, when I came back with the sandwich, which, if I say so myself, was immaculately made with a particularly fetching garnish of lettuce and tomato on the side, Lauren was muttering under her breath that he must be a poof or something.

  ‘He didn’t even look at me properly,’ she said indignantly, and in truth most men with the normal number of hormones look at Lauren - several times. She almost snatched the plate from me, scattering my handiwork around, and stumped over, hurling the plate on the table as if she were playing Shove Ha’penny. To add insult to her injury, the man didn’t appear to notice he’d caused offence, for his eyes were fixed on a small notebook as he reached one hand out for the sandwich. Then a group of journalists from the local paper came in for a swift half and a bag of crisps. Lauren thought one of them could pass for Brad Pitt’s younger brother, which always made me wonder if perhaps she didn’t need glasses, and she was off like a terrier after a bone, the man with the sandwich completely forgotten. He looked relieved.

  I returned to polishing glasses, letting my mind wander for the umpteenth time back to that strange conversation with Rose about Luke Dillon. She’d refused to say any more, just shaking her head and saying in a maddeningly superior voice, ‘You’ve got to trust me on this one, Susie. You don’t want to go near that man.’

  But I had the feeling that I might like to go very near Luke Dillon indeed, at the very least have a closer look, and this had sounded suspiciously like the advice she’d doled out when we were sixteen and I was eyeing up the hero of the sixth form from St Anselm’s Boys’ School at our school dance. I suspected that now, as then, her advice wasn’t strictly dispassionate. She’d ended up wound around the hero of the sixth form herself and we didn’t speak for nearly two weeks.

  I’d wondered before if Rose wasn’t a bit more in love with Jeremy’s house and the idea of being the mistress of Moor End Hall than with the man himself. I didn’t mean to imply she was merely motivated by things mercenary, since, unlike men, women are capable of thinking about two things at once; we tend to assess both the sex appeal and the quality of the future nest when making our decisions but I knew Rose had started to worry about heading for twenty-eight without a ring on her finger. The dreaded thirtieth wasn’t so far away either, and the last year had seen a positive rash of her friends racing for the altar. Had she panicked and decided she had to grab the next available man because, unlike buses, she couldn’t be sure there’d be another coming along to save her from a life on the shelf?

  I liked Jeremy, it would have been difficult not to, for he was full of good nature and bonhomie, but it has to be said, while it wouldn’t bother Rose that he wasn’t exactly brimming over in the brains department, he was also singularly lacking in the street-cred glamour which she’d always insisted on in her boyfriends before. Jeremy would rather have died than have an earring, or have any other part of his anatomy pierced. I’d presumed that her tastes had changed, matured, for her previous men were definitely not what you’d call good husband material, or even husband material at all, but had I been wrong? She’d better have realised that now she was married it was strictly a question of look, don’t touch, or I could see real trouble ahead.

  Why hadn’t I ever heard of Luke before? When she was going out with Nigel Flaxman, and had presumably met Luke, I hadn’t, for once, been paying much attention to what she was up to. I was far too absorbed in my own belated discovery of the delights of the flesh. I’d had boyfriends before, of course, and experienced a certain degree of the delights, but it wasn’t until I went to Montpellier for the third year of my degree that I really discovered what it was all about. And being someone who doesn’t understand moderation, as my mother is always complaining, I became totally immersed in my new-found pleasures.

  I suppose I must have done some of the normal things that year, explored, made friends, talked a lot of student rubbish, I must have gone to my lectures, for my marks were fine, but I can’t remember it. All my memories of Montpellier have Arnaud in them. Walking, talking, cooking, driving, swimming with him. Above all, being in bed with him. Wrapped around him, making love, the sheer pleasure of his warm skin next to me. And then the sick despair when I realised he had no intention of waiting in solitary state while I finished my degree. He had a thoroughly masculine, French view of our liaison. It had been fun, and he’d be happy for us to continue having a part-time affair, but that was it.

  Back in England that last year at university, I’d been so busy boring my friends rigid about my heartbreak and getting payback for the many hours I’d spent listening to their problems that Rose could have told me she was having simultaneous affairs with the entire judging panel for that year’s Booker Prize and it would have gone in one of my ears and winged straight out of the other. So I might have missed Luke’s name, though surely if he’d been anything more than her ex-lover’s friend I’d have registered his name sometime after I became a functioning member of society again?

  I hung on with Arnaud, because I lived in the hope that if I stayed around long enough he’d eventually realise that a rose-tinted future lay in wait for of us. Then, as I was at last realising it was unlikely to happen and I’d better cut my losses, the great cosmic joker up there arranged for Arnaud to be transferred to London for a year. Of course, I ditched any vague ideas to chuck him, decided to live for the moment and our affair went back into reheat. He had been back in Paris since August and, contrary to what Rose believed, I wasn’t living in some sort of nun-like state, waiting for him to call. I was actively, if not on the prowl, at least eyeing up what talent there was on offer. The problem was, I didn’t find most of it very enticing. I’d tried branching out a couple of times, but neither man held my interest for long. But then they hadn’t looked like Luke Dillon.

  Was Rose just being dog-in-the-mangerish? Did she really expect me to hold off one of the most delicious men I’d ever seen because she was a bit unsure about whether she wanted to keep him in cold storage? Or did she know something about him? Was he a serial killer, or mean to kittens, or didn’t pay his parking fines? I doubted Rose would care too much about the last. I frowned. All this pondering was pretty academic. Luke’s tongue had hardly been hanging out while he was talking to me
, and since he hadn’t taken my telephone number I wasn’t likely to run into him again even if he’d been doing a deft job of concealing almost unbearable lust.

  I came back to earth as a throat was cleared in front of me. It was Lauren’s customer in the grey suit with his cleared plate on the counter and holding his empty glass. I smiled at him broadly for his consideration, besides in the looks department he was a considerable improvement on the majority of the regular customers, who tended to the sort of figure that comes from the regular propping up of bars. ‘I’m sorry, I was miles away.’ I gestured towards his glass, ‘Can I get you another?’

  His eyes slid sideways towards Lauren, still fully occupied in flirting with Brad Pitt II, and nodded. ‘Please.’

  ‘I haven’t seen you before,’ I said chattily in my best barmaid fashion as I poured the beer. ‘Are you from around here?’

  ‘No, I’m just up for the day,’ he said and took the glass from me.

  Obviously my best barmaid f. wasn’t effective as a conversation starter, so I returned to polishing the hundred and ninety-third glass (well it felt like that) while he seemed happy to stay leaning on the bar and watch me work. I smiled at him brightly again, you never knew, he might be from one of the pub guides, though the mind boggled at anyone recommending the Bull and Bush. Well, maybe someone who was seriously into ‘unspoilt’ as in untouched for a hundred years. The original Victorian decor had been cheap and nasty in the 1890s and looked far, far worse now.

  He glanced down the bar in a hunted fashion to where Lauren was taking her time with the journalists’ order. Leaning forward, he asked in a hushed voice, ‘Is she always like that?’

  ‘Usually only when she’s had a row with the boyfriend.’

  ‘She’s got a boyfriend?’ he asked. ‘I got the impression that—’

  He was interrupted by Lauren, who pushed past him almost rudely. As a supposed poof she wasn’t wasting any more of her valuable time on him. ‘Hey, Suze! Three Specials, a Guinness, and a Bass, two cheese-and-onion crisps, a salt and vinegar and two peanuts.’ This said in such a rapid bartender’s drawl I couldn’t blame the customer for raising his eyebrows in sheer incomprehension.

  I’d filled all the glasses and put them on a battered tin tray for Lauren to take from me with a chirpy ‘Thanks, Suze,’ before he got around to clearing his throat and saying, ‘Suze? Are you Susie? Susie Gardener?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said in surprise. He’d come in here looking for me and mistaken Lauren for me? There are several basic differences between the two of us, starting with about eight inches both horizontally and vertically.

  He looked extremely embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry, it’s that chain she’s wearing around her neck. It’s got an S on it. I thought it stood for Susanna.’

  ‘It stands for Saul - her boyfriend. Instead of notches on the bedpost, Lauren collects her boyfriends’ initials and then hangs them above her bed when she’s broken up with them. She’s got a row and a half by now.’

  ‘Really?’ he said, casting her a fearful glance. ‘Well, I have to say she didn’t look like what I thought you’d look like. I began to think it must be me . . .’ He broke off and looked at me over the top of his glasses. ‘I expect you’d like to know why I came in here looking for you.’

  I nodded vigorously.

  ‘I’m Stephen Bailey-Stewart,’ he said, putting out his hand across the width of the bar.

  I shook it, rather amused at the formality after I’d already made him a sandwich and pulled him a pint. ‘I heard you were looking for a job,’ he said after a silence.

  I stared at him incredulously, then exclaimed, ‘Oh! You’re him, Hamish’s friend.’ He nodded. ‘I’d given up any hope of hearing from you.’

  ‘Hamish only rang me a couple of days ago. He said it had slipped his mind.’

  Oh yeah? It would have been pretty obvious even to a blithering idiot that Hamish had felt that he was being pushed into something. Perhaps he’d been hoping if he left it for long enough this Stephen would have recruited someone else. ‘Excuse me if I sound rude, but do you normally go into pubs to search out unknown barmaids on the chance that they might be just what you need?’

  I could have sworn that he actually blushed, but I couldn’t be sure as the lighting was a bit dim - according to rumour, so you couldn’t see if Jack the landlord was giving short measures. ‘I thought I’d nip in here to see what you were like, if you know what I mean, before I decided if I was going to contact you.’ I didn’t know whether to be annoyed or amused at this preliminary vetting. ‘But I was delayed in the traffic so I was late and then I made a mistake about who you were . . .’

  ‘And you’re bitterly disappointed about it,’ I interrupted.

  He cast a swift glance at Lauren. ‘God, no! You look altogether more practical.’ I’m sure he thought he was paying me a compliment, but I have yet to meet a woman whose heart thrills at being called ‘practical’. Well, it beats ‘well covered’ but any stranger who called me that once wouldn’t do it again. ‘Quite different to what I expected from Hamish’s description,’ he added thoughtfully.

  I would have given my eye teeth to know exactly how Hamish Laing had described me, in none-too-flattering terms, probably, since Stephen had thought it necessary to give me the once over before deciding whether to contact me. Sadly Stephen looked like someone who was far too gentlemanly and good mannered to ever reveal the unvarnished truth so there was no point in asking.

  He was looking at me with a degree of approval that made a welcome change from the way that anyone with a job to offer had eyed me recently. Not that it was going to come to anything, viable jobs that come through saloon-bar doors don’t get offered to people like me. Though I have had one or two employment offers of the other type. ‘Girls with figures like yours are wasted behind bars. You should be on top of one. With less on. Know what I mean?’

  ‘Would you like to know about the job?’ Stephen asked.

  You bet I would. I was longing to find out exactly why Stephen was so desperate for help that he was forced to ignore the more normal channels of the local recruitment agency, or even an ad in the paper. My mind boggled pleasurably, delving into wild fantasies about very unusual working practices. As it had come via Rose and Hamish it couldn’t be anything too disreputable, so perhaps it was one of those jobs you can’t tell your friends about because they’ll crack up laughing. Chicken sexing or putting the holes in Polos maybe?

  We went around the corner to a dingy little coffee house where we could talk without being disturbed. Stephen didn’t appear to notice his grotty surroundings as he described the estate agency he ran, Frampton, the almost too picturesque market town it was based in, and how his highly competent secretary, who I gathered had organised his life to the extent she virtually chose which ties he’d wear, had unexpectedly become pregnant and had been ordered to bed because of a repeatedly threatened miscarriage. And then, once her sick leave was over and the baby was born, she wanted to spend time with her surprise packet.

  ‘Frankly, I think she’ll decide she doesn’t want to come back and I can’t blame her, though it leaves me in a bind,’ he said. So now he needed someone to put his life back into order and boss him about for at least the next six months. I gathered that at least two others had tried and failed, he glossed over exactly why, and now, apparently basing his decision on my skill at making roast-beef sandwiches, he’d decided that someone should be me.

  ‘But you don’t know anything about me,’ I protested. ‘I don’t have the proper qualifications for a job like this.’

  He smiled, the crinkles around his eyes magnified by the thick glasses, ‘The last two had qualifications coming out of their ears and I couldn’t stand either of them.’ He glanced down at the scuffed Formica of the table top, ‘You look like someone I could get on with, which is the most important thing. So are you going to work for me?’

  It was out of the question. I belonged to London, not some two-bit little country t
own. I’d dreamed of living here since I was a teenager, of making a big noise for myself in the City. And those dreams hadn’t been too off course. I was one of the few from my year at university to leave with a job already fixed up, not a brilliant one, but a proper job, so perhaps, if not exactly marked out as a high flyer, I was still well above the roof tops. I’d done fine for two years and then I made the mistake of turning the boss down and, worse, believing fondly if I pretended it hadn’t happened we could go back to where we were b.p. (before the pass). A month later he reorganised the department and I found all my best clients had been given to someone else, though my targets remained the same. Six weeks after that I was informed my falling figures showed I’d lost interest in the job and I was given the chance to resign before I was sacked. It was too late to say anything about the pass, it would just have looked like sour grapes. I’d been well and truly stitched up. But I did find another job with a really fun, energetic, go-ahead firm. Too go-ahead. It went spectacularly bust in a scandal that rocked the City. That was six months and no job offers ago, but I still entertained hopes that somehow I’d claw myself back into an executive position in the Square Mile. It’s all right to be a barmaid while waiting for the golden job to come up, it’s so way off beam as to be acceptable, but to accept a job as a PA to a country estate agent would announce to the world in fifteen-foot high letters that Susanna Gardener had given up every hope of ever being Someone in the City.

  Even if the said PA’s salary was surprisingly high - I had no idea they earned that much - I didn’t want to move to the country. I like the country, heck I was brought up in it and I still liked to escape to it from time to time, but I liked the freedom of the big city, all the things you could do; it was my sort of place.