The Driver

by Heidi Austin

  Over the remainder of the evening I went back to that bar several times and Lucas and I were probably the result of a police report at gone midnight when we walked each other home in a drunken stupor singing a song neither of us could remember, at the top of our lungs, in the middle of a farmer’s field.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The following weekend was sunny and bright, which seemed to encapsulate my mood so badly I wanted to throw something at the sun.

  Since the explosive meeting with Cal’s father and my sacking, I had spent a very enjoyable but alcohol-fueled night in the pub with Lucas, woken up very much the worse for wear on his sofa the following morning and then gone home, sat at my breakfast bar and wondered what the hell I would do with my life.

  I had my own car and had done a lot of contracting throughout my career, so at least travelling halfway across London to collect my car gave me a purpose for the day. I loved my Mercedes and once I was back behind the wheel, I looked through my old list of contacts and started putting the feelers out.

  I wasn’t sure how many of Donald Emerson’s threats to believe but I wasn’t naive enough to think he didn’t have any influence in the city. I did, however, know that he had plenty of enemies, who would love to have his old driver in their pocket, so I wasn’t too concerned to start with.

  A few days later and I was decidedly less optimistic. As I sat on the tube on the way to the meeting with Thea and Martin I was getting pretty worried. I had plenty saved, as I was good with money, but I also needed a steady job, just to be able to pay my mortgage.

  I didn’t like sitting around doing nothing and I certainly didn’t relish the idea of doing it when all I could think about at the moment, and for the past several days, had been Cal. I grimaced at my phone as the tube barreled along towards the centre of London and hoped desperately that some of the jobs I had applied for would come through.

  As I emerged from the tube station I glanced around at what could be a new commute and a new area. It was definitely what you would call ‘up and coming’. Not entirely gentrified but with some good little independent shops that looked promising.

  I found myself wondering what Cal might think of this venture. I also wondered whether he had been ‘given’ another driver by his father. Maybe a woman this time, who he would of course eventually marry. They would spend their days laughing amongst their gaggle of children about the driver who he had once had a dalliance with.

  Then my brain went in the other direction and couldn’t stop thinking about the inevitable George Clooney lookalike sitting up front, driving Cal around and then using him to blow off steam between meetings.

  I couldn’t stand the thought of Cal being with someone else. Even though I had no claim to him I still felt as though he was mine. It was always that kind of thinking that brought me back to our final night together, the one that haunted me more than any other.

  I had felt a connection between us that was a lot stronger than I’d ever felt with my other lovers. As though we were in sync with each other in a way that you can’t fake or manufacture; something relationships either have, or they don’t.

  Cal had felt it too, I was sure of it. There was a real joy between us the following morning, maybe not an acknowledgement that we were together as such, but certainly an acceptance that we both had had a great night and we enjoyed each other’s company, aware that there were possibilities laid out in front of us that we had an opportunity to explore.

  Then his father had arrived and ruined everything.

  I reached the street and checked my phone. Google Maps said that the venue should be just up ahead on the right and as it came into view I stopped, to take a better look at it.

  The restaurant was set back off the street with a long dark blue sign above the door, which had been left blank for the new owners to put their stamp on. There were a small number of chairs out the front and some tables, and as I approached I realised that it was much bigger than I had expected given Martin’s comments about the ‘lack of space’.

  I felt a lurch in my stomach as I reached the door, looking at the exposed copper piping and the beautifully appointed bar that stretched along the left hand side of the far wall. There was exposed brickwork along the back and a large open space on the right for tables, with an eclectic golden wall as a backdrop, which, oddly, I loved on sight.

  This felt like us. It felt like something Martin could mould perfectly into what he wanted for his business, and it felt, as my stomach did another flip of its own accord, like somewhere Marie would have approved of.

  I heard my name and turned to see my brother trotting across the road behind me with his paperwork and laptop in hand, the girls following closely behind, Molly pulling Cassie across the road, an eye on the traffic.

  I smiled at them and Martin approached, I gave the girls a quick hug, and then we both just stood outside the restaurant in silence for a few minutes.

  Martin looked at me.

  “What do you think?” He asked, in an attempt to be casual.

  “I love it.” I said, as honest with him now as I would have been if he’d just presented me with a new cake to try. No bullshit, no sugar coating it. “I love it.” I said again. “But it has to be right, and she might be a bitch.”

  Martin turned to Cassie and Molly. “You girls be good, okay? No running around or touching anything that looks like exposed wiring. Stay with Daddy, but no talking ok?”

  The girls chimed out in unison that they’d be good, as though they’d had this lecture for much of the morning already.

  He laughed and we turned together as the door opened.

  The woman standing in front of us was not what I had expected from the photos I had seen on the internet. Most of them had been headshots or informative pieces where she looked like a CEO. This woman was more casual, less intimidating and much friendlier than I’d expected. She gave us a warm smile and beckoned us in out of what had turned out to be a cold November morning.

  We entered and she held out a hand to me.

  “I’m Thea. You must be Jonathan.” I shook her proffered hand. She turned to Martin. “Martin, good to see you again.”

  Martin smiled at her and shook her hand “Looking forward to seeing the place. These are my girls, Cassie and Molly. They’re on their best behaviour today, aren’t you girls?”

  Thea grinned at the girls and gave them a soft greeting, which both of them returned quietly, Cassie instinctively held Martin’s hand.

  Thea turned back to us. “Shall I give you the tour?”

  She led us through to the main area first and showed us the bar, which was long and spacious and I was already envisioning the tables filled up with people and a bustling atmosphere. The right hand side of the space was a little cramped due to the central wall and we both looked at it as though it wasn’t really there, both of us removing the barrier in our minds to make a much wider, open space.

  Next was the kitchen and I knew this was a deal breaker for Martin. He knew what he wanted and he knew what size it needed to be and I was pleasantly surprised as we walked into a wide, beautifully appointed kitchen at the back.

  “This was the main reason I wanted this place.” Thea explained to me, as Martin walked around checking appliances and outlets. I stood back holding onto the twins so they didn’t run off and accidentally get locked in the walk-in fridge. I was no chef and we both knew it. This was Martin’s domain. I watched him as he looked around, checking under the cookers and behind the sparse equipment that had been left there.

  He had an excellent poker face and I found his expression impossible to read.

  I wasn’t certain, but I thought that it was ticking a lot of the boxes we had specified for our original location next door to Mama’s Hut and it hadn’t escaped my notice that he had cycled here. It was much less busy in this part of town and much closer to his house. He could drop the girls at school, and collect them, and have more time either side, meaning I definitely wouldn’t need to hel
p as much.

  He came back as Thea chatted on about her recent projects and I asked her about her franchise business, which she was clearly very passionate about.

  “I needed a new challenge, and small businesses are it.” She said animatedly. “I have been working near Mama’s Hut for a while and I loved that it’s open late. I like the business model of a restaurant and a café, somewhere you can come in the evenings that won’t necessarily mean you need to be ordering alcohol or that all of the clientele are already drunk. I think your vision for the restaurant was a good one, and I think we could make some big things happen.”

  Martin and I exchanged a glance and this time I could read him more easily. He wanted to do it. The main question was the money side of things.

  “And I have a confession to make, I’m afraid.” Thea continued. She’d had her phone in her hands for much of the tour but having checked it, she now pocketed it and turned back to us, looking slightly apologetic.

  We both looked at her and I saw Martin stiffen. He didn’t like surprises.

  “This isn’t just my venture. I don’t usually work this way but he was quite insistent he wanted to meet you for the first time today. Come through, I want to introduce you to my partner.”

  We walked back through the swing doors, Marv and I exchanging a worried glance. This was completely out of the blue.

  We came back into the main space and there was a man standing with his back to us behind the bar. A man I would have recognised anywhere. My stomach plummeted as though I’d been driving too fast over a dip in the road.

  “Son of a bitch.” I said, without really thinking about who I was with. Thea turned to me looking a little startled, and Cal turned round from his solitary station at the bar and looked at me with a determined expression.

  Marv looked from Cal to me and back again and I quickly raised my hands. “Don’t get any ideas. I didn’t know anything about this.”

  Thea looked from Cal to me, and back again. Cal approached her and cleared his throat.

  “Sorry, T, I needed to get them here to talk things through, but I’m sorry to put you in this position”

  Martin’s gaze was fixed on me but I didn’t have the courage to look at him, standing in this shell of a place that both of us could see a future in and I had never felt more betrayed in my life.

  “Thea, I have some questions about the kitchen, actually, could I borrow you while these two have an enormous fight in here?”

  Martin, ever the tactful. Thea gave Cal a meaningful look, she didn’t look like she had enjoyed the surprise any more than we had, and I had a feeling Cal was risking a lot by springing it on her at the same time as it was revealed to her clients.

  Thea narrowed her eyes at Cal who shrugged apologetically and she cleared her throat and gestured for Martin to precede her into the kitchen.

  Finally we were alone.

  I looked at him, and I could feel the loathing in my expression without the benefit of a mirror.

  “You arsehole.” I said, with feeling.

  “Are you going to let me talk?”

  “I haven’t decided. It would probably be easier for me to manipulate you into doing what I want, seeing as I’m so fucking good at that.”

  He winced and took a step away from me. Parts of the floor were littered with forgotten junk mail and strewn flyers from endless postal drop offs into this empty room. His shoes made a scraping sound as he walked away from me. He turned when he was just by the door, his hands in his pockets. I tried not to notice how good he looked, but it didn’t go too well.

  “I have an explanation that I’d be grateful if you’d actually let me give you before biting my head off or punching me.”

  I stared at him, listening to the murmuring of Marv’s voice next door, wondering why I hadn’t stormed out yet.

  “Sure, why the hell not?”

  Cal leaned back against the door, looking round at the walls of the room and I found myself doing the same, drinking in the space. It was perfect. Damn him.

  “I’ve been trying to get out for a long time.”

  “From me grooming you?”

  He stiffened and his expression hardened. “Jay, I swear to God. Just… can you just let me speak? Please?”

  I bit my tongue and walked away from him, leaning up against the wall behind me. I waved a hand for him to continue.

  “My father’s business and everything associated with it are going to be entailed to me one day. It is not easy to extricate yourself from something that you are destined to inherit.”

  Okay, I hadn’t been expecting that.

  “When you started working for my Dad, I had been trying, pretty unsuccessfully, to start my own investment business. I had had three failed attempts where he had found out what I was planning and stolen it from under me.” He sighed. “I’d finally met, and made inroads with, someone who hated him almost as much as I did.”

  His eyes drifted to the kitchen door where I could now hear Thea speaking.

  “Thea and my father had been at odds for years,” he continued, “he had always looked down on her and a few years ago he tried to buy out some of her partners behind her back. He’d wanted her lucrative business, or, if he couldn’t have that, he’d wanted her.”

  I grimaced and Cal gave me a look of total agreement.

  “Needless to say he tried to assert his authority and it didn’t go well. Thea is not someone who will be pushed around. I knew if I was going to get anywhere I had to get into her good books, and I managed, after some cajoling to set her up with the contact who eventually bought Keelen’s for a tidy profit. As you can imagine, that took years. I started trying to get away from my father when I was eighteen; this is not something that I have been doing on a whim.”

  He sighed and shook his head. “Recently Thea mentioned that she wanted to invest in some small businesses. She had a few under her belt but was looking for something new that she could build from the ground up again.” He sighed. “I admit, when I was drunk, I mentioned this great little café I knew. A small business looking to expand and she instantly recognised the name of Mama’s Hut and, to my surprise, totally bought into the idea.” He looked at me apologetically. “I didn’t want to go behind your back, and, in truth, I’ve been trying to talk to you about it for weeks, but it was never the right time. My father has people everywhere and I couldn’t afford for him to find out about this new venture, which involved a much larger group of people, before the deal with the investors went through. I thought if I told you then it might get leaked somehow, I just couldn’t be sure, and every time I tried to explain it all I got scared that you would react just as you have; that you’d be angry and it would seem like I’d lied to you. So, I waited, for better or worse, I waited.”

  He pushed off the wall and came to stand opposite me.

  “Do you remember when you were driving me to and from St Albans every week?” I thought back to those long drives, when I’d first started the job and nodded. “That wasn’t anything to do with my father’s company. It was about two months after you started working with me that everything started to fall into place, and I finally had the chance to actually use my ‘driver’ for something useful.

  “I didn’t trust you until then. We must have had three or four really late nights, unscheduled late nights that were out of the blue and not really something you’d signed up for and yet you didn’t tell him what we were doing. You never broke my confidence. I wasn’t sure whether that was because you just didn’t care, or whether he had never asked you for the information, but the fact that you didn’t tell him allowed me to finalise the deal and get a cut into her new scheme. She was going to be my partner and bring a lot of the money I needed to the table.” He looked up at me sheepishly. “If I hadn’t had her alongside me I wouldn’t have been able to get out for another year.”

  I had a white-knuckled grip on my arms.

  “Well done,” I said bitterly, “you learned how to make money. What’s th
is got to do with me?”

  “When my Dad caught us, I was two days away.”

  I stared at him, feeling my breath fill my lungs and be expelled again, that was the only sound I could hear.

  “That bullshit with the competition law was holding everything up but once I signed on the dotted line I would finally, finally resign from the company and be free of him. I’d even looked at some flats, tiny ones, that I would have been able to rent when I moved out of the mansion. I was getting there, I could almost touch it. And then on one of the best days of my life, after we were together…the way we were,” he blushed furiously but barreled on, “my fucking father was standing in my living room finding out about us, two days before I could have broken away.”

  He stopped, seemingly to gauge my reaction, but I didn’t move.

  “I’d been waiting on the final phone call and when you were in the shower that morning I’d had it. The investors had confirmed, they were all on board, I just needed to finalise the last piece of the puzzle and I’d be out. Then I opened my fucking door and there he was.

  “I knew from experience that from that moment he would be on me like a hawk. He hates it when anything surprises him and his son being gay and fucking his chauffeur was definitely something he hadn’t seen coming. I was so panicked I could barely move. If he had me followed over the next few days he would likely find out about the deal and my father being my father, would see the opportunity and swoop in and I’d be tied to him all over again. It’s small beer for him, what I’m doing with Thea, but he likes controlling people and he loves having me at his beck and call. Thea wouldn’t have taken a penny of his money, but her other investors might have been intimidated into pulling out. I’d have had to leave it all behind.

  “Anyway, after the fucking shitshow at my flat and after...after you’d left,” he swallowed, “I had to go with him to sort the legal shit out. I knew if I told him I wouldn’t do it he would just monitor everything I was up to, and I work for him so I shouldn’t have had any commitments that he didn’t know about. I just needed to bide my time. I have never seen him as angry as he was that morning, and he was beyond disgusting in the things that he said to you, but I was standing there wanting to kill him, and I didn’t say anything because it felt like I was hours away from finally being able to tell him to fuck off for the first time in my life and if I lost you in-between I would do anything I could to get you back, but -”