by Terry Tyler
“Perhaps it’s three and four that she’s scared of,” I said.
“Eh?”
“Perhaps she’s scared that Phil would do it to her, and that he does fancy you.”
She flicked her hair over her shoulder and bit her lip; the grown-up Erin was back. “Her problem.” she said. “You can’t stop someone fancying someone else. The trick is to make sure they love you enough not to do anything about it.”
So wise, so young.
“Hey,” she said, just before she went, “Re my soon-to-be colleague Hugh-Twat-Bedingfield—Jaz would have called him H.Bed, wouldn’t he? I think that’s what I’m going to call him, from now on. In Jaz’s honour!”
And that made her cry, all over again.
Chapter Eight
Isabella
June 2011—March 2012
That whole summer was our honeymoon. No, we weren’t married and yes, I had the weight of Lanchester Estates on my shoulders, but with Phil just next door every minute of the day and in bed with me most nights, each day felt like my birthday.
Within a fortnight I felt as though he’d always been there. He grasped concepts so quickly that when there were tedious matters to discuss with the site managers, the architects, or Purchasing, I left him to it. Did people think I’d handed him too much power, too soon? I daresay they did. I didn’t care.
I rested easier once Erin had gone to Norwich. I didn’t like to mistrust my own sister, but I remembered Aiden Seymour. Most of all, though, I remembered Annette Hever. I was glad when Erin settled in over there, made friends with her colleagues, and came back at weekends less and less.
Phil and I agreed that the new head of Human Resources should be recruited from outside, especially as we were discussing redundancies. Such news was better delivered from one with whom the workforce was not already familiar at a lower rank. His preference was an extremely business-like former headmistress who went by the curious name of Regina Pole. I liked her; she was outspoken, with a delightfully old fashioned air about her, though I had my reservations because she’d had no experience in running an HR department.
Phil persuaded me to take her on.
“She’s run a school, what more do you need? She’s controlled a thousand teenagers and countless staff, all on her own. As far as the mechanics of actually running a department go, we can teach her that. Get Erin back for a week to give her a crash course.”
He was right, of course. I also liked her because she was a spinster, and I got the impression she’d lived a solitary life. Phil thought she might be a lesbian; I thought she was just one of those who don’t attract love of either gender. I saw myself in her.
Will was keen because I was doing my bit for ageism, too; Regina, or Reggie, as she liked to be called, was fifty-five going on sixty-four. The sort of woman who would never consider dyeing her grey hair and probably thought Botox was some little known element on the periodic table.
Already Lanchester Estates was a very different place. I needed fresh blood in Marketing, though, and Phil said he knew a couple of people who’d fit the bill perfectly, from his time in London.
“I’m talking ace motivators who can really deliver,” he said. I told him to stop sounding like a cheap recruitment executive, and bring them along to join the party. Jane kept me informed of the opinions of the staff, via the ever alert ears of Susan, but although I registered the noises of disapproval (mostly about my giving plum jobs to Phil’s friends) I cared even less than I had before I went to Spain. I was making the company mine. I was making it ours; I wanted us to marry, have children, pass it on to them.
I knew I couldn’t rush him. I hated those couple of evenings a week when he stayed at the cottage in the village. Hated them. I never went down there.
In early October I took him to stay with Mum for the weekend. I’d been putting it off because I knew that a weekend in Framlingham with Mama wouldn’t compare with fun on the Costa Brava, but Norfolk was beautiful in the early autumn, and Phil charmed her.
Before we left, Mum took me to one side and said, “don’t crowd him, but keep an eye out. Don’t let him do what your father did to me. Don’t let him break your heart.”
I listened to her, and when he suggested we call in on Erin in Norwich on the way home I didn’t protest. I hated the way he looked around her trendy riverside apartment, with its varnished floorboards and kitsch 1960s-inspired furniture, and told her she’d turned a show home into a work of art. I hated the two of them drinking margaritas on her balcony while I drank lemon tea, because I’d been stupid enough to say I’d drive. I hated her peachy, twenty-one-year-old skin and glorious chestnut hair, now with tones of russet, like the autumn leaves on the trees overlooking the river. It tumbled over her shoulders and down her back like a shampoo advert, whereas I’d noticed my first grey hairs and the rest, never abundant, seemed to be getting thinner. But I didn’t say anything. I smiled, and on the way home I agreed with my beloved that Erin was looking wonderful, and I didn’t complain when he said he would stay at the cottage that night; he just wanted to eat a sandwich and fall into bed, he said.
If he wasn’t with me, I hurt.
I had to make him mine, completely.
He talked about our future with great enthusiasm, so I thought, why not push it along a little? This made sense to me. I was thirty-five. In less than five years I would be forty, and I didn’t even know how fertile I was. My mother had suffered terrible problems with conception and carrying a child. What if Phil and I married in a year or so, then I spent four years discovering I was the same? I couldn’t bear the thought of never cementing our love with a child. He’d said he always imagined himself as a father one day. He’d had a happy childhood, and liked the idea of a family of his own. What if he found himself in only his thirties, saddled with a woman of forty who couldn’t give him children?
I couldn’t be my mother. I wouldn’t be my mother.
Aside from anything else, what was the point of being mistress of Lanchester Hall if there was no one to fill all those empty rooms?
The Monday after we’d been to Framlingham I nipped home at lunchtime to set the scene, then insisted we leave the office early. I’d already told Pat to make herself scarce. I instructed Phil to sort the wine out while I undressed, then, swathed only in my white silk kimono, I went down to get him and led him upstairs to the bathroom which I’d transformed into an exotic haven of candles and fragrant oil, filling the room with wafts of sexy patchouli and romantic rose.
I wanted the conception of our first child to be something special.
“Wow, I’ll never moan about Mondays ever again.” Phil said, as he slid down into the warm, foamy water, wine glass in hand, and I mentally thanked whichever one of my father’s wives had insisted on the installation of the film-star-style round, raised bath. “I feel like a Roman god!” he said, laughing and pulling me to him. I kissed him so deeply, then held him off, taking large sips of my wine. I knew I should taunt and entice, like Erin did, but the sight of his face, smiling at me in the warm, apricot light of the candles was too much.
“You look beautiful,” he said, “put that wine down,” and within moments I’d wrapped my long legs around him, drawing him into me; I needed to feel that moment when our child came into the world, as I knew he or she must that night, because surely my mother’s God wouldn’t deny me what I needed, so badly.
“You’re amazing,” my beloved told me later, as we lay, exhausted, on the fluffy white rugs of the bathroom floor. “My slick executive girlfriend, with the inner tiger, eh?”
The night was so perfect I couldn’t believe it wouldn’t happen.
It didn’t.
Two weeks later, I discovered I wasn’t pregnant.
It was a terrible blow, but I told myself not to get disheartened.
Once or twice a little voice in my head said, he thinks you’re on the pill. Shouldn’t he know what you’re doing? I ignored it. I couldn’t give him the chance to say no, let’s wait. I knew that once I
got pregnant he would be delighted; I was only giving nature a little helping hand, wasn’t I? Millions of women did the very same thing, every day.
I looked up sites on the internet about increasing fertility. I read all I could find on the subject.
We would have other nights like that special Monday, and always at ovulation time.
Never mind the business, it could take care of itself for a while. Hadn’t I done enough to get it back on its feet? I had a new project. Never before had I been so set on anything.
I looked up New Age sites, too. I sent away for fertility charms. If they used to work for women in the Dark Ages, who was to say they wouldn’t work for me, now?
Jane and Will both said to me in voices heavy with insinuation that people thought I was taking a backseat and giving Phil, my ‘advisor’, too much control of the company. I could hear the inverted commas round the word ‘advisor’, too.
“He’s not just my advisor, he’s my husband,” I told Jane, and she looked at me a little strangely. I’d forgotten; he wasn’t, not yet. I laughed and said, “well, I hope he will be soon, anyway.” and winked at her, so she wouldn’t think I was barmy.
The ferocity of my love for him scared me, sometimes. I couldn’t think about anything but him. We’d be sitting at home watching television, but I’d be unable to concentrate on the programme. I’d gaze at his face, study its angles and expressions, and I’d want to devour it. Sometimes when we made love I left bite marks on his skin; he said he loved my passion, but I think it scared him a little, too.
I wondered if this deep emotion had always been inside me, waiting for the right recipient. I’d wasted a little on Emil, but the rest, all of my heart, body and soul, had a new custodian. My Philip. I was glad I’d never truly loved before, that I’d saved myself for my destiny.
I remembered how, when I was feeling a bit down in the dumps after Emil left, Hannah gave me a piece of advice. She said, “think back to how you were before he was here. Life wasn’t so bad, was it? Well, you’ve just gone back to that. That’s all.” And although not entirely satisfactory, it did help. Once the memory of sweet Emil faded, my life just carried on.
If I ever lost Phil, though, I knew I could never, ever carry on. I was so happy, but so scared. I had to get pregnant. A child born of our love could only deepen the bond between us.
“I love my new life!” he told me, often, and we would laugh and kiss. I would make him even happier, happier than he ever could have thought possible.
Phil made the suggestion that we throw a big Christmas party for the staff. Jane was in my office when he said it, and she nodded, whooped, and clapped her hands above her head.
“Excellent idea, if I may say so,” she said. “Listen to the man, Isabella! Time to give something back to the staff. We’ve stopped them pilfering the post-it notes, and cracked down on personal phone calls—let’s give them a proper party to show we’re not all bad.”
I sat back in my chair, held my hands up, and laughed. “Okay, okay! Phil’s the boss!”
He came and stood beside my chair, his arm around my shoulders. “Jane, tell her I’m not.” I looked up at his lovely face, laughing; he looked particularly handsome that day in a grey Armani suit and a Paul Smith shirt he’d bought only the weekend before.
“I do try,” Jane said, a little drily. “Okay, Susan and I will get on the case. Are we going to have it in the meeting room, or hire somewhere?”
“Hell, hire somewhere!” Phil said. “What about that posh hotel, where we go for dinner? The Winchester? Do you think we’ll still be able to get in there so late in the day?”
Jane rang them up straight away. Yes, they said, their ‘celebration suite’ was still available on Wednesday, the fourteenth of December only. I wasn’t surprised they had a free night; the price quoted made me wince.
“Book it!” Phil said. “Let’s push the boat out!”
And because Phil was so excited by the idea, and because Jane, Susan, Will, Cecilia, and virtually everyone else thought it was such a good move politically, that was what we did. Phil told the girls not to stint on the catering, and provide a band, a DJ, the full works. We had to pay over the odds for everything because we’d left it so late. The three of them ceased all other work as they planned the staff party to end all staff parties.
I panicked every time I looked at how much it was costing, but was told to leave it all to them.
The big party, to give my popularity a boost and show the staff how much the management appreciated every one of them.
It could have been a marvellous evening.
Would have been a marvellous evening, if everyone had shown up.
Phil had the idea of sending personal invitations out to every member of staff, down to the kitchen porter in the canteen. Yet again, we were quoted an alarming price because we wanted them in a hurry.
I heard that many were found in wastepaper bins the same day we issued them.
I think only half the invitees attended. There was masses of food left (Susan sent it off to a shelter for the homeless), and because there were not enough people the evening never really got going. I kept waiting for the big surge as they all arrived, but it never came; our guests arrived in dribs and drabs, too many leaving as soon as they’d had their fill of the food and free drink. Susan, Jane, Erin and some of the bimbos in General Accounts made a real effort to get the dancing started, dragging men up to the floor, while Phil and his marketing friends did the rounds, making sure everyone was constantly supplied with drinks from the free bar, but the atmosphere remained as flat as my chest.
Worse of all, everyone patronised me. No one actually dared admit that it was a failure. Everyone pretended to be having a great time, so why did they all push off well before midnight? By eleven, the room was starting to look decidedly empty. A free bar, and they still left early.
“It’s because it’s a school night,” Jane told me, as I watched a group of said bimbos from General Accounts slipping out of the door with the guys from IT.
“They’re going on to a club,” I said, “I heard one of them say.”
They were all getting tanked up at my expense then going on somewhere else to party the night away.
The next day, Phil asked Jane to find out why the turnout had been so low. She sent her scouts out, and the answer came back thus: last year we got written warnings instead of Christmas bonuses, and no office do. She can stuff her party.
Aside from Phil’s friends, none of the Sales and Marketing department attended. Many of them kept in touch with, and had stayed away out of loyalty to, Tim Wyatt, who was taking us to a tribunal for unfair dismissal.
“We’ll just have to chalk it up to experience, and move on,” Phil said.
He’d planned a memo about it with lots of pictures of everyone having a brilliant time, but neither of us even wanted to look at the few photos we’d taken.
The whole event had cost us thousands, and all it had done was make me look foolish.
At least the drinks party in the boardroom on Friday the twenty-third was as satisfactory as ever, and it felt so good giving my speech with Phil at my side. I promised that next year I would continue what I had started, ensuring that Lanchester Estates prospered, along with those loyal to its management.
If anyone was dubious about my promises, I didn’t want to know.
Christmas itself was perfect. Erin decided to spend it with her Hever relations, so at least I didn’t have to worry about her shimmying about the place in sexy Christmas dresses. I decorated the drawing room to make it a snug, fairy-tale paradise for us, and we had the most beautiful day. On Boxing Day, though, Phil became restless; I wanted to keep him happy, so we organised a buffet lunch party for the twenty-ninth. Again, he insisted we spare no expense. Again, it cost a packet.
Aside from the usual handful of people, I felt ashamed I had no others to invite.
“I never had much time for socialising,” I explained to Phil. “I was always so tied u
p with work and the family.”
“Don’t worry, I understand,” he said. “Actually, I’ve got pally with a few people down the pub; is it okay if I invite some of them?”
When had he got to know them? On the evenings he stayed at his cottage, he gave tiredness as the reason. Not so tired he couldn’t make a detour to the pub often enough to create a social circle all of his own, evidently. I envied him the ease with which he made friends.
The twenty-ninth came, and villagers I’d known by sight only for years, and with whom I had no desire to become acquainted, greeted Phil at the door as if they were bosom pals. They looked round the place and made comments about what a treat it was to be invited to Lanchester Hall. I didn’t want them there. I felt as if they were invading our life, my home. Daddy’s old games room, rarely used these days, became like an annexe of the pub with Phil and his new chums playing snooker in there. In the drawing room their wives and girlfriends sat together drinking my gin and vodka; some of them hardly even bothered to make conversation with me. I couldn’t relax, and I didn’t want them putting their glasses on our furniture. I felt as if I’d provided a boozy knees-up for a bunch of freeloaders.
That night I dreamt that the house was being broken into, and the floors were collapsing beneath me.
My bubble of happiness began to deflate with the coming of the New Year.
My period started on New Year’s Day, a Sunday, and the next day Phil was restless again. He went out for a ‘quick pint’ and didn’t come back.
Worst of all, he didn’t invite me to go with him. He rang up Ian, one of his new friends from the Ragged Staff, and said he was just off for a lunchtime drink. He felt the need for a bit of ‘guy talk’, he said; I’d only be bored, they’d be gabbling on about football and Formula One.
I had bloody awful period pains, so I got Pat to light a fire, curled up on the sofa and read a book. I fell asleep; when I awoke it was dark, and I was still alone.
I rang him, he didn’t answer his phone.