False Step

by Veronica Heley

  ‘Exactly my point! Max’s predecessor in the constituency begged him to take her over when he retired, but as a secretary, she’s about as much use as a … a feather duster. She’s out of the Ark. Those files …!’

  ‘They’re all over my sitting room floor. I can’t move! I’m sure the whole lot could go on one memory stick.’

  ‘And he ought to have a new laptop and printer—’

  ‘And that Wi-Fi thingy, what’s it called?’

  ‘But will he listen to me? No way!’

  Bea sighed. Hamish had settled down to sleep on her foot, but she reached across to pat Nicole’s arm. ‘You and me both. We can see through the big, successful Member of Parliament, to the stubborn little boy within … a little boy with turned-in toes, crying for his beautiful wife.’

  Nicole was shaken. ‘Then why hasn’t he called me, or come round?’

  Bea took a risk. ‘He has tried. Have you been out a lot?’

  Nicole nodded. ‘He could have written, or left a message on the answerphone.’

  ‘Too ashamed, I suppose. Too scared.’

  ‘Silly boy.’

  ‘I know. You might be amused to hear that he’s run away from Lettice, by moving out of his office so that she can’t get at him. I think he hopes your sister will find some other person to target.’

  ‘Some hope.’

  ‘Can you think of another way to handle her?’

  Nicole stared at Bea, and through Bea, and didn’t reply. The phone on the table rang, and Nicole picked it up, eyes down, excluding Bea from the conversation.

  Little flirt, thought Bea, trying not to listen to the ensuing chat. Nicole wriggled and giggled, examining her fingernails. Shot Bea a look, and giggled again. Trying the age-old make-him-jealous lark.

  It might succeed with some people, but probably not with Max, who at bottom lacked self-confidence. Ouch.

  Bea bent forward to put her coffee cup on the table. As she leaned back, so Hamish jumped on to her lap and snuggled into the crook of her arm. Bright eyes looked up at her through his ‘fringe’, begging her not to throw him out into the cold again. She liked the feel of his warm, wriggling body against her. She and Piers had only ever had the one child, and Hamilton hadn’t been able to … ah well.

  Nicole shut off her phone call. ‘Sorry, but I’ve got to throw you out. A lunch date out in the country.’

  Bea was persuaded to her feet. ‘Anyone I know?’

  ‘I wouldn’t think so. Did you have an umbrella? It’s raining again.’

  ‘I’ll manage. But about Max …?’

  ‘Oh, tell him … I don’t know. Tell him to do his own dirty work.’

  Bea thought Nicole had a point there. Out on the landing, Bea realized she was still cuddling Hamish, so had to press the doorbell again, in order to transfer him back to Nicole. Hamish gave a sharp ‘yip’ of disappointment, which made Bea hasten her footsteps on the way to the lift.

  Back at the ranch …

  Bea opened the front door to hear her telephone ringing. Knowing that Oliver and Miss Brook were up at the Kent house, and Maggie out on another job, Bea negotiated the obstacle course of furniture and carpet, and arrived in the sitting room only to hear Max’s ancient secretary answer the phone. ‘Mr Abbot’s office … no, this is not a domestic agency. This is the private phone for Max Abbot—’

  Bea snatched the phone from Miss Townend’s hand, disregarding her indignant squawk. ‘The Abbot Agency here. How may I help you?’

  The phone quacked at her. Confused dot com. Umbrage was taken in large doses. Over and out. The caller rang off.

  Bea replaced the receiver, trying to exercise patience. There was no sign of Max. There was dust everywhere. Eeeek! The phone had felt gritty. She dusted off her fingers, noting that the chairs and settees needed a good vacuuming before she could sit on them again. Those builders …!

  ‘How dare you!’ Little Miss Townend was so angry she almost spat at Bea. ‘This line is exclusively for the use of Mr Abbot. If you wish to use the telephone for agency purposes, then you must go downstairs and do it there.’

  Bea had an impulse to seize the woman by her bony wrist and force her to walk downstairs to view the chaos there. Crumps and bashes from the efforts of the workmen below shook the house. Couldn’t Miss Townend hear them? Or hadn’t Max briefed her properly?

  The phone rang again. Presumably the caller thought he or she might have misdialled the first time, and was trying again.

  Bea got to the phone first. ‘The Abbot Agency. How may I help you?’

  ‘Well, thank goodness for that. I just got through to some idiot, a crossed line, I suppose.’ The caller was the social secretary of one of their oldest clients, who wanted a butler, and wanted one straight away. Someone had let them down … a large party expected that weekend … the agency had always been so helpful in the past … could they help? Bea cast her eyes around the room, but of course Oliver and his laptop were elsewhere, the office computers were sitting on the dining room table, but hadn’t been booted up that day, and she couldn’t access their records quickly.

  ‘Give me your number, and I’ll ring back in ten minutes, see what I can find for you.’

  She put the receiver down but kept her hand on it. Miss Townend glared, making darting movements towards the phone and back again. Bea’s steady gaze kept Max’s secretary from actually wrestling Bea for it. Bea rang Oliver’s mobile, and within seconds he was giving her some numbers to try. She wrote them down, with care, recognizing a couple of the names and giving them a starred rating. This client deserved the best.

  ‘Before you ring off … how are you and Miss Brook getting on? Are you nearly through? Did Ms Cunningham turn up? Don’t forget to give her the keys before you leave.’

  ‘Nearly finished. Should be back within … oh, half an hour. Will report then.’

  Report? He made it sound ominous.

  She depressed the receiver, and started to find her client a first-rate butler for the weekend. Little Miss Townend retired to the fireplace, arms crossed across thin, bony chest, indignation in every line of her.

  Tough! thought Bea.

  The second man she tried was able to do it and, luckily for all concerned, had presided at a successful event for the client on a previous occasion. She gave him the details, rang the client’s secretary to confirm, and put the phone down.

  It rang again. Miss Townend started forward, but Bea was quicker. ‘The Abbot Agency. How may I help you?’

  ‘Tcha!’ said Miss Townend. With little jerks of her head, she put on her coat, hat and gloves, collected her handbag and said, ‘I really cannot be expected to put up with this. Please tell Mr Abbot that I will return when conditions are back to normal. He knows where to find me.’ She left in high dudgeon.

  Bea thought, Good! The phone kept ringing, and she took notes, trusting that Oliver would be back when he said he would be, and could then take over. Halfway through one phone call, she heard the front door slam, but it wasn’t Oliver. It was Max.

  ‘Hello, where’s Miss Townend?’ was his greeting, cutting through Bea’s explanation to a new client of what they might or might not be able to do to help them.

  ‘Gone home,’ said Bea, putting the phone down and making yet another note for Oliver. ‘She was cross because I had to use the phone.’

  ‘You didn’t upset her, did you?’

  ‘Probably.’ The phone rang again, and Bea answered it. A tearful young nanny, who’d been pawed by the client’s husband and wanted out. Bea clicked her tongue against her teeth. Properly trained nannies knew how to deal with that sort of thing. The girl sounded a trifle on the young side to have been exposed to that sort of pressure. If Bea could have got at their records, she could have checked exactly how young the girl was. ‘You’d better come in to the office straight away. I shall need you to make a formal complaint …’

  A hurricane of tears and cries of, ‘Oh, no, I couldn’t! You can’t ask me to do that!’

&nbs
p; Ahha, thought Bea. Was it six of one, and half a dozen of the other?

  Max towered over her, mouthing, ‘Get off the phone!’

  She smiled up at him, mouthing back, ‘In a minute.’

  The front door opened and closed again. This time it was indeed Oliver, with Miss Brook in tow. The tearful girl said, ‘I can’t talk now,’ and rang off.

  Max said, ‘What I want to know is …’

  Oliver appeared in the doorway and jerked his head at Bea. ‘A minute?’ Oliver didn’t pull rank without reason, so this was serious.

  Bea said, ‘In the kitchen, in five.’

  Miss Brook moved into the room, as if she were on wheels. She was probably as old as Miss Townend, but unlike that poor lady, Miss Brook was still firing on all four cylinders. She had the calm demeanour of someone who never let trivialities disturb her. She was a monument to a proper secretarial training, and ancestors who had been suffragettes and manned telephones at secret intelligence hideouts during the Second World War. She terrified weak-kneed clients but Hamilton had thought highly of her and she could be trusted never to betray a client’s confidence, no matter how high profile they might be.

  ‘Good morning, Mrs Abbot,’ she said, removing the cover of the computer on the dining table. ‘Good morning, Mr Max.’ Of course she’d known him since he was a small boy.

  He muttered, ‘Good morning,’ back.

  Miss Brook ran her finger along the table, and pinched in her lips. ‘Dust is very bad for computers.’

  The phone rang again, and Bea said, ‘Good morning, Miss Brook. I’m delighted to see you. I’m sorry about the dust. Maggie will deal with it when she gets back. Can you take over for a bit? I’ve got a list of people here, queries … can you access our records from there? You can? Oh, bless you. If you can sort some of this out, I’d be eternally grateful. Max; a word in your ear.’

  He was huffing and puffing, going red. Max wasn’t getting the attention he felt he deserved as a Member of Parliament and head of the family. Max needed a kick in the pants and Bea felt she was just the person to give it to him. She took his arm and led him over to the window overlooking the garden. Her patience game had long since disappeared, of course. She hoped Max had bothered to put the cards away properly, because if he hadn’t and had lost one she was going to make him go to Harrods and buy another double pack. So there!

  ‘Now what?’ Arms akimbo.

  Bea raised her eyebrows. ‘So how are you today, Mother? Thank you, Max. I’m not too bad, even if I did spend half the night worrying about you, and the morning with Nicole, trying to make out that you aren’t quite as stupid as you’ve made yourself out to be. Nicole would like you to do your own dirty work. Her words, not mine. She might be disposed to listen to you if you talk to her yourself, but flowers, tickets to the theatre, whatever, would probably be helpful.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘And get yourself a new secretary. No, better still, ask Nicole to get you a new secretary. I can provide you with the names of various secretarial agencies. Nicole should vet your staff in future. Miss Townend has, I’m sure, been a wonder in the past, but that’s it. She is the past. You must take the poor woman, out for a meal, butter her up with compliments, make sure she has whatever she is due by way of pension, and send her home to look after her dear mama. It’s time for you to move on.’

  ‘Mother, my understanding, when I moved in here, was that—’

  ‘I don’t know what you imagined you’d get here, apart from a bed for a couple of nights while you sorted things out with Nicole. You cannot run your office from this room. That phone is mine, and cannot be co-opted for your use. Understood?’

  He’d gone purple in the face. Oh dear. Had she gone too far? No. It had to be said. If she relented now, he’d take full advantage of her weakness and she’d be back to square one.

  She put her hand on his arm, and went on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. ‘There’s a good boy. Now, you go out and get the biggest bunch of flowers you can, and a huge box of chocolates—’

  ‘Nicole doesn’t eat chocolates.’

  She shook his arm. ‘No, but I do, silly. The flowers are for Nicole, and the chocolates are for me. Right?’

  Was he going to cry?

  Big boys don’t cry. Or, they’d better not. She was running out of patience.

  ‘Now, I’d better get back to work. Oliver’s got a problem to discuss with me.’

  He put his hand over hers, on his arm. ‘Mother, where did I go wrong?’

  When you married Nicole, was the right answer. But not the right answer for him. ‘These things happen, dear. Chin up. We just have to muddle through as best we can.’

  Lily Cunningham gulped down the whisky and shuddered. The events of the morning had taken more out of her than she’d expected.

  Well, it was done and the future looked a lot brighter than it had when she got up this morning.

  She stood in the centre of the living room, looking around her. How many memories this room held for her! She couldn’t have been more than two years old when Uncle Matthew first sat her on his knee in the big chair, and sang her a nursery rhyme. How well she remembered playing him her first piano pieces; aged five.

  Damaris used to try to scare her by jumping out at her from behind the coat rack in the hall. Well, Damaris hadn’t lived in this house all that long, had she? A couple of years at most. Whereas she, Lily, had been coming here all her life.

  One of the photographs on the mantelpiece was missing. That was alarming. Where had that gone?

  Also the little shepherdess. And the silver jug.

  She could guess who’d taken them. How dare she!

  They belonged to the house and must be returned, straight away. The agency had been responsible for everything in the house, so the agency must get them back.

  She glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece but it had stopped. The house lay quietly around her. Accepting her as the new and rightful owner.

  Lily Cunningham ran her fingertips across the dusty lid of the piano, and grimaced. Houses needed to be looked after.

  Now it was hers, she’d have to see to it. What was that Polish cleaner’s number? She must look it up in Uncle Matthew’s address book.

  Ten

  Tuesday noon

  Bea went to find Oliver in the kitchen, but stopped short in the doorway. Three very large men were sitting around the table, eating sandwiches and drinking from her teapot. Also, her biscuit tin had been opened and the contents depleted.

  ‘Hope you don’t mind, missus,’ said the largest and baldest one. ‘Maggie said to help ourselves.’

  ‘Care to join us?’ asked a curly-headed young man, whom Bea guessed was Maggie’s latest heart-throb.

  Bea looked at her watch. Maggie had hoped to be back by lunchtime, but had obviously been delayed. ‘How are you getting on? Is there anyone down there at the moment? I thought I’d better see what’s happening.’

  The large man lumbered to his feet and escorted her down the stairs. The sheet which had been hung over the staircase in an attempt to keep the dust from rising all over the house, had been hitched to one side and secured that way with a manky floorboard. No wonder the house was dusty. Bea twitched the sheet free so that it hung over the stairwell again.

  ‘Sorry about that. The lads are up and down the stairs all the time, carrying stuff, and the sheet gets in the way.’

  The chaos downstairs was unbelievable. Floorboards were up, plaster was down, wiring hung in bunches from bare brick walls. In what had been her own office, two of the panes in the French windows had been broken.

  ‘Looks worse than it is,’ said the large man, with a cheerfulness that Bea found appalling. A technical disquisition followed, which Bea only half understood. What she did understand was that old buildings needed to be watched all the time, or they’d disintegrate and make work for bricklayers, plumbers, electricians, glaziers and decorators. Stunned by science, she agreed to everything he was suggesting, and retr
eated to the kitchen in need of a restorative … and of Maggie, who might not be much cop on a computer keyboard, but understood the large man’s terminology. And what was that about replacing the carpet? Her dear husband Hamilton had chosen that carpet, and she’d always liked it.

  In the kitchen she found Oliver doing something about lunch. From being completely helpless in that area, Oliver was now, amazingly, beginning to learn basic catering. He lifted a couple of mugs out of the microwave. ‘Cup of soup do you, Mrs Abbot? I thought we might have taken it into the garden, but it’s raining again.’

  ‘Let’s try my bedroom,’ said Bea, gratefully clutching her mug.

  Oliver followed her up the stairs and took a seat on her dressing-table stool while she perched on a small armchair in the window. She rather wished he hadn’t chosen tomato soup, because if it spilled it would stain everything in sight. She told herself to be grateful for whatever it was he’d given her.

  The soup was hot. Good. ‘How did it go this morning?’

  He was looking down into his soup, up at the ceiling, out at the sodden garden. Why wasn’t he meeting her eye? ‘All right, I suppose. Miss Brook is out of this world. She’d brought a digital camera with her, and a dictation machine. It was her idea to photograph everything. She seems to know by osmosis whether a piece of furniture is worth something or nothing. When we reached the basement I got each costume out and photographed it while she dictated a description. It didn’t take us that long.’

  ‘You did a good job. Then you gave the keys to Mrs Frasier’s friend and came away?’

  He examined the few drops of soup left in his mug. ‘She wasn’t there when we arrived. She didn’t come till we were nearly through. She let herself in with her own set of keys and then … you’ve told me enough times that we don’t have to like our clients, but that we can pick and choose whether to take them on.’ A long pause. ‘I don’t think – no, I’m pretty sure that you wouldn’t have taken Ms Cunningham on as a client.’