City Girl in Training

by Liz Fielding

  c. tell him to get lost and leave him standing on the pavement?

  d. let him take the taxi and wait for another one?

  e. walk?

  HAVING battled with the intricacies of the underground system, only going in the wrong direction twice, I finally emerged into the light of day. When I say light of day, I’m using poetic licence. What actually confronted me was the dark of a wet November evening.

  And when I say wet, I do mean wet. No poet needed. The rain, miserable icy drizzle that had perfectly matched my mood when I’d left home, had intensified to the consistency of stair-rods.

  In the country it would have been quite dark. But this was London where the neon never set; excitingly opulent shop windows and the rainbow colours of a million Christmas lights were reflected in the wet street, cutting through the gathering gloom.

  And there were people, hundreds and hundreds of people, all with somewhere to go and in a hurry to get there.

  I stood in the entrance to the underground, A-Z in hand, trying to orientate myself as impatient travellers pushed past me. On paper, it didn’t seem far to Sophie and Kate Harrington’s flat, but I was well aware that distance, on paper, could be deceiving. And my problems with north and south on the underground system had seriously undermined any confidence in my ability to map read. A taxi seemed like a wise investment and as I glanced up I spotted the yellow light on a cruising black cab.

  I’d never hailed a taxi before—in Maybridge taxis didn’t cruise for custom, you had to telephone for one—but I knew how to do it. In theory. I’d seen people do it on television often enough. You stood on the kerb, raised your hand and yelled ‘Taxi!’…

  I’d never make it to the kerb before it passed so I raised my hand and waved hopefully, but, realising that my self-consciously ladylike rendition of ‘Taxi!’ didn’t stand a chance of being heard over the noise of traffic, I tried again, this time yelling loud enough to wake the dead. I didn’t care. It had worked! The driver was heading for the kerb, pulling up a few yards ahead of me.

  Wow! Who was the mouse now? I thought smugly as I grabbed the handle of my suitcase and, towing it after me, I cut recklessly through the crowds who were charging along, heads collectively down against the rain. Before I got to the kerb, however, someone had already opened the taxi door and was closing his umbrella prior to boarding.

  ‘Hey, you! That’s mine!’ I declared, uncharacteristically tiger-like in my defence of my first London taxi, despite the fact that my adversary towered above me.

  The black silk umbrella he was holding collapsed in a shower of rainwater, most of which went over me, and the taxi thief glanced at me with every indication of impatience.

  ‘On the contrary, I hailed it before you even saw it,’ he said, giving me the briefest of glances. Brief was apparently all it took. After a moment’s astonished gaze, he muttered something beneath his breath that I didn’t quite catch—but didn’t for a moment believe was complimentary—and, with a look of resignation that suggested he was being a fool to himself, he stood back and gestured at the open door. ‘Take it. Before you drown.’

  Oh, no. This was bad. I could be mad at a man who nicked my cab, but I couldn’t take it if it was rightfully his, even if my need was clearly the greater.

  He did, after all, have an umbrella.

  But I was already so wet that no amount of rain would make any difference. As I dithered on the kerb, he was rapidly getting the same way. But it had only taken a moment’s reflection, a pause long enough for my brain to override my mouth, for me to realise that I had in fact seen him standing at the edge of the pavement in that moment when I’d looked up from the A-Z. That my own efforts to attract the driver’s attention from the back of the pavement had gone unheeded. Feeling very stupid, the tiger in me morphed back into mouse.

  ‘No, really,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry…’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake.’ He seized the handle of my suitcase, crammed with everything I might need for the next six months and weighing a ton, and tossed it into the cab without noticeable effort. ‘Stop wittering and get in.’

  ‘Would one of you get in?’ the driver demanded testily. ‘I’ve got a living to make.’

  ‘Maybe we could share,’ I said, scrambling in after my suitcase. My irritable knight errant paused in the act of closing the door behind me. ‘I’m not going far and you could…um…we could…’ He waited for me to finish. ‘At least you’d be in the dry.’

  Oh, heck. This wasn’t like the quiz at all. I wasn’t supposed to do the asking. But then the quiz wasn’t real life.

  In my real life I didn’t offer to share taxis with tall, dark and handsome strangers. In my real life Friday evenings were spent handing Don his spanners as he talked endlessly about the intricacies of the internal combustion engine; a well-drilled theatre nurse to his mechanical surgeon. Comfortable. Familiar. Safe. Nothing to get the heart racing. Not the way mine was racing now.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  I told him and he raised his brows a fraction.

  ‘Is that on your way?’ I asked.

  After a moment’s hesitation, he nodded, told the driver where to go, then climbed in and pulled down the jump seat opposite me, sitting sideways, his legs stretched across the width of the cab, so that his knees and feet wouldn’t intrude on my space.

  He had the biggest feet I’d ever seen and as I stared at them I found myself wondering if it was true about the size of a man’s feet indicating the size of, well, other extremities…

  ‘You’re new in London aren’t you?’ he said, and I looked up. The corner of his mouth had kinked up in a knowing smile and I blushed, certain that he could read my mind.

  ‘Just this minute arrived.’ There was no point in pretending otherwise. I’d dressed for warmth and comfort rather than style. With nothing more glamorous than baby cream on my face—I’d chewed off my lipstick in the tussle with the underground—and my hair neon-red candyfloss from the damp, I was never going to pass as a sophisticated City-girl. ‘I suppose the suitcase is a dead giveaway,’ I said, wishing I’d taken a lot more trouble over my appearance.

  A tiger, according to my magazine, would always leave the house prepared to meet the man of her dreams. But how often did that happen? Besides, I’d left the man of my dreams in Maybridge. Hadn’t I?

  ‘And the A-Z,’ I added, stuffing it into my shoulder bag, alongside the treacherous magazine.

  ‘Not the suitcase,’ he replied. ‘It was your willingness to surrender a taxi at this time of day that betrayed you. You won’t do it twice.’

  ‘I won’t?’

  ‘They’re rarer than hen’s teeth.’

  Hen’s teeth? ‘Are they rare?’ I asked, confused. It seemed unlikely. Hens weren’t on any endangered list…

  ‘I’ve never seen one.’ Oh, stocking tops! The rain was dripping from my hair and trickling icily down the back of my neck. I suspected that it had seeped right into my brain. ‘But then I’ve never felt any desire to look into a hen’s beak,’ he added.

  ‘No one ever does,’ I replied. ‘Big mistake.’ And he was kind enough to smile, giving me ample opportunity to see for myself that his own teeth left nothing to be desired.

  In the dark and wet of the pavement I hadn’t noticed much more than the fact that my ‘tall, dark stranger’ was the requisite ‘tall’. Of course, when describing yourself as one point six metres was pure vanity, everyone seemed tall. But he was really, really tall. Several inches taller than Don, who was my personal yardstick for tall.

  And his voice. I’d noticed that, too.

  Low and gravelly, it was the voice of a man you just knew it wouldn’t be wise to mess with. Yet his impatience was softened by velvet undertones. Sort of like Sean Connery, but without the Scottish accent.

  Now I was sitting opposite him I could see that the ‘dark’ bit fitted him, too. I sat mesmerised as a drop of rainwater gathered and slid down the jet curve of an untidy curl before dropping into the tur
ned-up collar of his overcoat. And I shivered.

  Tall and dark. His skin so deeply tanned that he looked Italian, or possibly Greek.

  But he struck out on handsome.

  There was nothing smooth or playboy pretty about his features. His cheekbones were too prominent, his nose less than straight and there was a jagged scar just above his right eyebrow, giving the overall impression of a man who met life head-on and occasionally came off worst.

  That was okay. There was something about a cliché that was so off-putting. Two out of three was just about right. Tall, dark and dangerous was more like it, because his eyes more than made up for any lack of symmetry. They were sea-green, deep enough to drown in and left me with the heart-racing impression that until now I might have been dreaming in sepia.

  ‘Have you come far?’ he asked, in an attempt to engage me in conversation. Presumably to stop me from staring.

  I was jerked back to reality. ‘Oh…um …no. Not really. From Maybridge. It’s near…er…’ I struggled for a coherent response. I was used to having to explain exactly where Maybridge was. People constantly confused it with Maidenhead, Maidstone and a dozen other towns that began with the same sound, but my mind refused to co-operate.

  ‘I know where Maybridge is,’ he said, rescuing me from my pitiful lapse of memory. ‘I have friends who live in Upper Haughton.’

  ‘Upper Haughton!’ I exclaimed, clutching at geographical straws. Upper Haughton was a picture-perfect village a few miles outside Maybridge that had outgrown its agricultural past and was now the province of the seriously rich. ‘Yes, that’s it. It’s near Upper Haughton.’

  The mouse in me wanted to groan, bury my face in my hands. Wanted to go back five minutes so that I could keep my big mouth shut and let him steal my taxi. His taxi.

  But the tiger in me wanted to write my name and telephone number on a card and murmur ‘call me’ in a sultry voice. Since he must by now believe I was at least one sandwich short of a picnic, it was perhaps fortunate that I didn’t have a card handy and was thus saved the embarrassment of making a total fool of myself.

  Instead, I glanced at my wrist-watch, not because I wanted to know the time—I had no pressing engagement—but to avoid looking into his eyes again.

  ‘We’re nearly there,’ he said. Then, ‘Are you staying long? In London.’

  ‘Six months,’ I said. ‘My parents are travelling…Australia, South Africa, America…and they decided to let the house…’ I was ‘wittering’ again and, remembering his impatience, stopped myself. ‘So here I am.’

  ‘While the cat’s away?’ he suggested, with another of those knowing smiles.

  Clearly he hadn’t had any trouble spotting that I was a mouse. Fortunately, the taxi swept up to the front of a stunningly beautiful riverside apartment building, terraced in sweeping lines and lit up like an ocean liner, and I was saved the necessity of answering him. For a moment I sat open-mouthed at the sight while, apparently impatient to be rid of me, my companion opened the door and stepped out, lifting my case onto the footpath. Then, gentleman that he was, he opened his umbrella and handed it to me as I followed him, before turning to speak to the driver while I dug out my purse and found a five pound note.

  ‘Put that away,’ he said as I offered it.

  ‘No, really, I insist,’ I said. I couldn’t let him pay my fare. He didn’t bother to argue. He just closed the taxi door, picked up my suitcase and headed for the front door, leaving me with a five pound note in one hand and his umbrella in the other. The taxi drove off.

  ‘Hey, wait…’ I wasn’t sure whether I was shouting at the driver, who clearly hadn’t realised he still had a fare, or Mr Tall, Dark and Dangerous himself.

  I’d been warned about the security system on the front door. You had to have a smart card, or ring the bell of the person you were visiting so that they could let you into the building. TDD bypassed the system by catching the door as someone left the building, and was now holding it open. Standing in the entrance. Waiting for me to join him.

  He wasn’t going anywhere, I realised.

  ‘While the cat’s away…’ he’d said.

  And my memory instantly filled in the blank. ‘The mouse will play.’

  And I hadn’t denied it.

  Did he think I couldn’t wait to get started? Expect to be invited in? Offered…and I swallowed hard…coffee? Had my invitation to share the taxi been completely misunderstood?

  I realised just how rash I’d been. Naïve. Worse…just plain stupid.

  I’d allowed this man whom I’d never met before, whose name I didn’t even know, to give the driver the address. I hadn’t heard what he’d said and, too late, it occurred to me that I could be anywhere.

  And who’d miss me?

  I’d actually told him that my parents were on the other side of the world, for heaven’s sake!

  How long would it be before Sophie and Kate Harrington raised the alarm when I didn’t arrive? When I’d spoken to Sophie, she hadn’t been exactly enthusiastic about me moving in. In fact I’d got the distinct impression that she, like me, had had her arm painfully twisted.

  She certainly wouldn’t be dialling the emergency services today. Or tomorrow. Not until Don called, anyway…

  Anticipation of his agonised realisation that I might not even have got on the train, that my disappearance might be entirely his fault for not seeing me off, made me feel momentarily happier.

  The pleasure was short-lived, however, swamped by instant recall of a lifetime of my mother’s awful warnings about the inadvisability of taking lifts from strangers. And with that thought came relief.

  My mother, even from thirty thousand feet, came to my rescue as, pushing the five-pound note into my jacket pocket, I gripped my attack alarm. It was just a small thing on a keyring and I’m ashamed to say that I’d laughed when she’d given it to me, made me promise I’d carry it with me while I was in London. But, as she’d pointed out, I’d need a new keyring so it might as well be this one…

  I sent a belated—and silent—thank-you heaven-ward before forcing my mouth into an approximation of a smile and looking up at the man I’d decided was tall, dark and dangerous. As if that were a good thing.

  ‘You really didn’t have to see me right to the door,’ I said, trying on a laugh for size. It wasn’t convincing.

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ he assured me, ‘if I didn’t live in the apartment next door to you.’

  ‘Next door?’ He lived in the same block? Next door? Relief surged through me and I very nearly laughed.

  ‘Shall we get inside?’ he said coolly. He’d clearly cottoned on to my unease and was offended. ‘If you’ll just close the umbrella—’

  In my hurry to comply, I yanked my hand out of my pocket and the keyring alarm flew out with it.

  I made a wild grab for it and as my fingers closed over it I felt the tiny switch shift. I said one heartfelt word. Fortunately, it was obliterated by a banshee wail that my mother probably heard halfway to Australia.

  Startled by the blast of sound, I let go of the umbrella, which, caught by a gust of wind, bowled away across the entrance and towards the road. TDD—his patience tried beyond endurance—swore briefly and let my suitcase drop as he lunged after it. It was too much for the over-stressed zip and the case burst open in a shower of underwear. Plain, white, comfortable underwear. The kind you’d never admit to wearing. He froze, transfixed by the horror of the moment, and the world seemed to stand still, catch its breath.

  Then reality rushed back in full colour. With surround sound.

  The rain, the piercing, mind-deadening noise of the alarm, the red-hot embarrassment that was right off any scale yet invented.

  I was gripping the keyring in my fist, as if I could somehow contain the noise. There was a trick to switching it off—otherwise any attacker could do it. But I was beyond rational thought.

  TDD’s mouth was moving, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying and finally he grabbed my wrist, prised op
en my fingers and dropped the wretched thing on the footpath. Then he put his heel on it and ground it flat. It seemed to take for ever before the sound finally died.

  The silence, if anything, was worse.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said when the feeling came back to my ears, but my voice came out as little more than a squeak. A mouse squeak and heaven alone knew that at that moment I wished I were a real mouse—one with a hole to disappear down.

  ‘Wait here,’ he said, and the chill factor in his voice turned the gravel into crushed ice. Well, it wouldn’t take a genius to work out why I was holding an attack alarm. He’d surrendered his taxi to me, refused my share of the fare, and I’d reacted to his kindness as if he were some kind of monster.

  As my abused knight errant disappeared into the darkness in search of his umbrella, I knew that I should go after him, help him track it down. I told myself he’d probably prefer it if I didn’t. That was what the ‘wait here’ had been all about. A keep-your-distance-before-you-do-any-more-damage command. Besides, I could hardly leave my knickers scattered across the entrance to this unbelievably grand block of flats.

  I captured a pair that was about to blow away and stuffed it into my pocket. I knew I should wait for his return, apologise abjectly, offer to pay for any repairs. After all that wasn’t any old cheap-and-cheerful bumbershoot. The kind that it didn’t matter much if you left it on the bus. The kind I regularly left on buses.

  Gathering the rest of my scattered belongings, I reasoned that waiting was not necessary. He lived next door. I could put a note through his letterbox later. I sincerely believed that when he’d had a moment to think, calm down, he’d prefer that.

  Which was why I stuffed my clothes back into the case as fast as I could before sprinting for the lift.

  Sophie Harrington took her time about opening the door. I stood there with my case gripped under both my arms to prevent the contents falling out, wishing she’d hurry up.