The Girl he Never Noticed

by Lindsay Armstrong

  ‘Helped along by being as bright as a tack.’ He said it almost to himself. ‘I gather you take time off between assignments?’

  She nodded. ‘I always try for a couple of weeks—not only to give my mother a break, but to be able to spend more time with Scout myself.’

  ‘So she still makes your clothes? Your mother?’

  ‘Yes. She made that jacket.’ Liz explained how she’d come to have it with her on the day of the cocktail party. ‘She actually made it for the part-time weekend job I have as cashier at a very upmarket restaurant.’

  ‘Your father would be proud of you.’

  ‘I don’t know about that.’

  ‘And Scout’s father? Any more sightings?’

  Liz shook her head but looked uneasy. ‘I’m wondering if he’s moved back to Sydney and that’s why he was at your great-aunt’s party.’

  ‘I can find out, if you like. But even if he has Sydney’s a big city.’ He flicked her an interrogative look.

  ‘No. No, thanks. I think I’ll just let sleeping dogs lie. Oh, look—they’re diverting the traffic. We could be just in time.’

  He seemed about to say something, then he shrugged and switched on the motor.

  As often happened when something came up out of the blue, things came in pairs, Liz discovered that same evening. She heard a radio interview with Scout’s father in which he talked mainly about the economy—he was an economist—but also about his move back to his hometown from Perth. And the fact that he had no children as yet, but he and his wife were still hoping for some.

  She’d flicked the radio off and tried to concentrate on the fact that her only emotion towards Scout’s father was now distaste—tried to concentrate on it in order to disguise the cold little bubble of fear the rest of it had brought her.

  The next morning her boss made an unusual request.

  She was tidying away the clutter on his desk, prior to a meeting with his chief of Human Resources, when he took a phone call that didn’t seem to be business-orientated.

  ‘Broke the window?’ he said down the line, with a surprised lift of his eyebrows. ‘I wouldn’t have thought he was strong enough to—Well, never mind. Tell him not to try it again until I’m there.’ He put down the phone and watched Liz abstractedly for a few minutes, and then with a frown of concentration.

  Liz, becoming aware of this, looked down at her exemplary outfit—a summer suit. Matching jacket and A-line skirt. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with it—no buttons undone, no bra strap showing or anything like that. So she looked back at him with a query in her eyes.

  He drummed his fingers on the desk. ‘Do you remember a song about a boomerang that wouldn’t come back?’

  She blinked and thought for a moment, then shook her head. ‘No.’

  ‘I seem to,’ he said slowly. ‘See if you can find it, please.’

  Liz opened her mouth, but she was forestalled by the arrival of his chief of Human Resources.

  Later that day she was able to tell him she’d found the boomerang song, and was rather charmed by it. ‘It’s a golden oldie. Charlie Drake was the artist,’ she said. ‘Not only wouldn’t his boomerang come back, but he hit the Flying Doctor.’

  ‘Excellent,’ Cam Hillier said. But that was all he said, leaving Liz completely mystified.

  Some days later he surprised her again.

  She was a bit preoccupied, because just before she’d left for work and had been checking her purse she’d found she’d inadvertently picked up a note meant for her mother. It was from an old friend of her mother’s who ran a dancing school, and it concerned the school’s annual concert. Would Mary be interested in designing the costumes for the concert? It would mean about three months’ work, it said.

  But Mary Montrose had penned a reply on the back of it.

  So sorry. Would have loved to but I just don’t have the time these days. All good wishes…

  She hadn’t posted it yet.

  Only because of looking after Scout could she not do it, Liz thought to herself, and flinched. But what to do? Scout spent two mornings a week at a daycare centre; more Liz could not afford. And those two free mornings a week would not be enough to allow Mary to take on a job she would have loved.

  Liz had replaced the note on the hall table, feeling jolted and miserable, and came to work.

  It was after she’d gone through the day’s schedule with her boss that he asked to see the next day’s schedule.

  Liz handed the diary over.

  He scanned it in silence for a minute or two, then said decisively, ‘Reschedule the lot.’ He handed the book back to her.

  Liz actually felt herself go pale. ‘The lot?’

  ‘That’s what I said.’ He sat back in his chair.

  ‘But…’ Liz stopped and bit her lip. There were at least ten appointments in one form or another to be rescheduled. There were at least five major appointments amongst them, involving third, fourth and even fifth parties, so cancellation would produce a ripple effect of chaos down the line.

  She swallowed. ‘All right. Uh—what will you being doing tomorrow? I mean, what would you like me to say? Mr Hillier has been called away urgently? Or…’ She paused and gazed at him.

  That crooked grin chased across Cam Hillier’s lips, but he said gravely, ‘Yep. Especially said in those cool, well-bred tones. It should do the trick admirably.’

  Liz frowned. ‘I don’t sound—are you saying I sound snooty?’

  ‘Yes, you do.’ He raised an eyebrow at her. ‘Probably your private school.’

  She grimaced, and after a moment deliberately changed the subject. ‘Should I know what you are doing tomorrow, Mr Hillier, or would you rather I remained in ignorance?’

  He noted the change of subject with a twist of his lips. ‘That would be hard, because you’ll be with me. I’m going up to Yewarra and I need your help, I’ll be engaging staff.’

  ‘Yewarra?’ she repeated, somewhat dazedly.

  ‘It’s an estate I have in the Blue Mountains.’

  ‘The Blue…’ Liz caught herself sounding like a parrot and changed tack. ‘I mean—how long will it take?’

  ‘Just a day—just working hours,’ he replied smoothly, and shrugged. ‘Let’s leave here at eight a.m.—then we will be back in working hours. And come casual.’

  ‘You’re planning to drive up there?’ she queried.

  ‘Uh-huh. Why not?’

  Liz moved uneasily. ‘I prefer not to feel as if I’m low-flying when I’m in a car.’

  He grinned. ‘I promise to obey the speed limits tomorrow. Anyway, it’s a very good car and I’m a very good driver.’

  Liz opened her mouth to say his modesty was amazing but she changed her mind. As she knew to her cost, you could never quite tell how Cam Hillier was going to react in a confrontation…

  ‘So,’ he said, lying back in his chair with his hands behind his head, ‘only three more days before Roger is restored to our midst—completely recovered from his glandular fever, so he assures me.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said quietly.

  ‘And you head off into the sunset, Liz.’

  ‘That too,’ she agreed.

  ‘But we’ve worked well together. Oh—’ he sat up and gestured widely ‘—apart from the couple of times you’ve narrowly restrained yourself from slapping my face, and the day you threatened me with worse.’ His blue eyes were alive with satanic amusement.

  ‘I get the feeling you’re never going to let me forget that, so it’s just as well I am riding off into the sunset or something like that.’

  She was destined not to know what his response would have been, because the door of his office burst open and Portia Pengelly swept in.

  ‘Cam, I have to speak to you—oh!’ Portia stopped dead, then advanced slowly and ominously with that knee-in-front-of-knee model’s walk. She wore a simple black silk shift dress splashed with vibrant colours. She had a bright watermelon cardigan draped over her shoulders, and carried a la
rge tote in the same colour. Her famous straw-coloured locks were gorgeously dishevelled and her long legs were bare.

  ‘Who is this?’ she demanded as she gazed at Liz.

  Liz got up and took up the diary. ‘I work here. Uh—if that’ll be all, Mr Hillier, I’ll get back to work. Excuse me,’ she said to Portia, and left the room—but not quite quickly enough to miss Portia Pengelly uttering Cam Hillier’s Christian name in what sounded like an impassioned plea.

  They set off on the dot of eight the next morning.

  Liz had taken her boss’s advice to ‘come casual’ to heart. She wore a short-sleeved pale grey jumper with a black and white bow pattern on the front, and slimline jeans with a broad cuff that came, fashionably, to just above her ankles. She had a cardigan to match the jumper, a black leather bag, and pale grey leather flatties.

  He also wore jeans, with a denim shirt, and he slung a leather jacket into the back of the Aston Martin.

  They didn’t say much as he negotiated the traffic out of Sydney—with decorum, she noted, and relaxed somewhat—and headed west. Once they were beyond Penrith the road started to climb—and the Blue Mountains started to live up to their name.

  Liz had read somewhere that their distinctive blue haze was the result of the release of oils into the air from the forests of eucalypts that cloaked their slopes. She’d further read, though, that they were not so much mountains but the rugged ramparts, scored and slashed with gullies and ravines, of a vast plateau.

  Whatever, she thought, as the powerful vehicle chewed up the kilometres effortlessly and the road got steeper, they were awe-inspiring and yet somehow secretive at the same time, cloaked in their blue haze. And indeed they had proved to be. Until 1994 they’d kept in their remote and isolated valleys the secret of the Wollemi pine—a living fossil said to date back to Gondwana and the time of the dinosaur.

  It was when they’d almost reached their destination that he said out of the blue, ‘What’s your next assignment, Liz?’

  She grimaced. ‘I don’t have one yet. But I’m sure something will come up,’ she added. ‘It’s just hard to predict at times.’

  ‘How will you manage if something doesn’t come up for some time?’

  Liz moved restlessly. ‘I’ll be fine.’ She paused, then cast him a cool little look. ‘Please, I do appreciate your concern, but I think it’s best left alone. I’ll be gone in a couple of days and it’s difficult for me—for both of us, probably—to remain professional if this keeps cropping up between us.’

  ‘Professional?’ He drove for a mile or so. ‘That flew out of the window, in a manner of speaking, before any of this “cropped up”.’

  Liz frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  He took his eyes off the road to look at her just long enough for her to see the irony in his eyes. ‘Narelle was right. We’re not cut out to be only employer and employee. There is, Ms Montrose, not to put too fine a point on it, a kind of electricity between us that started to sizzle right here in this car outside my house almost two weeks ago. Or perhaps even earlier—that day in the office when you put on your magic coat and let down your hair.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  LIZ’S MOUTH fell open.

  ‘And it continued the next morning in the lift,’ he added, as he changed gear and they swept round a corner. ‘In fact it’s never gone away—despite your best efforts to kill it stone-dead.’

  It struck Liz that they had driven through the pretty village of Leura with her barely noticing it, and were now on a country road. It also struck her that it was impossible to refute his claim.

  She stared down at her hands. ‘Look,’ she said, barely audibly, ‘you’d be mad to want to get involved with me. And vice versa.’

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw that crooked grin come and go before he said, ‘It doesn’t work that way.’

  ‘If we’re two sane adults, it should,’ she replied coolly. ‘You can make choices, can’t you?’

  He changed gear again and slowed down. ‘On the virtually nothing we have to go on? It’d be like a stab in the dark.’ He turned the wheel and they coasted into a driveway barred by a pair of tall wrought-iron gates.

  ‘Is this it?’ Liz asked.

  ‘This is it.’ He pressed a buzzer mounted on the dashboard and the gates started to open. ‘Welcome to Yewarra, Liz.’

  For a moment Liz felt like escaping—escaping his car, his estate and Cam Hillier himself. She fleetingly felt overburdened, and as if she were entering a zone she had no control over.

  Moments later, however, she was enchanted as he drove slowly up the gravelled driveway.

  Beneath majestic trees there were beds of white and blue agapanthus. There was flowering jasmine and honeysuckle climbing up jacarandas bursting into pale violet bloom. There were gardenias and roses. It was a glorious riot of colour and perfume.

  She turned to him, her face alight with appreciation. ‘This is just—beautiful.’

  He grimaced. ‘Thanks. In a way it’s a tribute to my mother. A tribute to her love of gardens and her innate sense of refined living that somehow survived the often harsh life she shared with my father.’

  He pulled up beside a fountain. The house beyond it was two-storeyed and built of warm, earthy stone with a shingle roof. The windows were framed in timber and had wrought-iron security grids. The front door—a double door—was beautifully carved with a dolphin motif and had curved brass handles.

  ‘The house isn’t bad either,’ she commented with a wry little smile. ‘Did you build it?’

  ‘No. And I’ve hardly done anything to it. Well, I changed that,’ he amended, and gestured to the fountain. ‘It was this rather nauseating circle of coy naked ladies clutching plump cherubs.’

  What stood there now couldn’t have been more different. A bronze dolphin leapt out of the water, cascading sparkling droplets.

  Liz stared at it. ‘Do dolphins have any special significance?’

  He considered. ‘It’s not inappropriate for someone whose roots go back to a seafaring life, I guess.’

  Liz thought of the paintings in his office in Sydney. ‘But you’ve come a long way since then,’ she offered quietly.

  ‘A long way,’ he agreed. But, although he said it easily enough, she thought she detected the faintest echo of a grim undertone.

  At that moment the front doors flew open and a small boy of about five stood on the doorstep, waving excitedly at the same time as he was restrained by a nanny.

  Liz’s eyes widened. ‘Who…?’ she began, and bit her lip, not wanting to sound nosy.

  ‘That’s Archie,’ Cam Hillier said. ‘He’s my sister’s orphaned son. I’ve adopted him.’

  He opened his door and got out, and Archie escaped his nanny’s restraining hand and flew over the gravel, calling, ‘Cam! Cam—am I glad to see you! Wenonah has had six puppies but they only want to let me keep one!’

  Cam Hillier picked his nephew up and hugged him. ‘But just think,’ he said, ‘of the five other kids who’d love to have a puppy but couldn’t if you kept them all.’

  Liz blinked. She’d assumed his nephew Archie would be older. She certainly hadn’t expected to see Cameron Hillier so at home with a five-year-old…

  ‘I suppose that’s true,’ Archie said slowly. ‘Oh, well, maybe I won’t mind.’ He hugged Cam. ‘Are you staying?’

  ‘Not tonight,’ Cam said, but added as Archie’s face fell, ‘I’ll be up for the weekend.’ He put the little boy down. ‘Archie, meet Liz—she works for me.’

  ‘How do you do, Liz?’ Archie said with impeccable manners. ‘Would you like to see my menagerie?’

  Both Cam and the nanny, still standing on the doorstep, opened their mouths to intervene, but Liz got in first. ‘How do you do, Archie? I would indeed.’

  Archie slid his hand into hers. ‘It’s down this path. I’ll show you.’

  ‘Not too long, Archie,’ Cam said. ‘Liz and I have work to do.’

  Archie’s menagerie was in
a fenced-off compound not far from the house. There was netting stretched over the top, and there were shrubs growing within and without to shade it. Old hollow tree trunks lay inside. The paths were gravel. He had rabbits in hutches, and a family of guinea pigs in a marvellous cage fashioned like a castle, with climbing wheels and slides and bells. He had a white cockatoo with a sulphur crest and a limited vocabulary—‘Hello, cocky!’ and ‘Oh, golly gosh!’ He had a pond with a small waterfall and slippery stones, with greenery growing through it all and six frogs enjoying it. In another pond he had goldfish.

  ‘Did you do all this?’ Liz asked, rather enchanted, surveying the menagerie and thinking how much Scout would love it.

  ‘No, silly. I’m only five,’ Archie replied. ‘Cam did most if it. But I helped. Here.’ He handed Liz a guinea pig. ‘That’s Golly, and this one—’ he drew another one out of the castle-like cage ‘—is Ginny. She’s his wife and they’re all the kids.’ Archie pointed into the cage.

  ‘I see,’ Liz replied gravely as she stroked Golly. ‘So where is Wenonah? And her puppies?’

  ‘Down at the stables. Wenonah can be a bit naughty about rabbits and things. She likes to chase them. But I’m going to train the puppy I get not to. Thing is—’ his brow creased ‘—I don’t know whether to get a boy or a girl.’

  ‘Perhaps Cam can help you there? He might have an idea on the subject.’

  Archie brightened. ‘He usually does. Now, this is something special—my blue-tongue lizard!’

  ‘Oh, wow!’ Liz carefully put Golly back and sank down on her knees. ‘Oh, my!’

  That was how Cam found them some time later, both Liz and Archie on their knees and laughing together as they tried to entice Wally the blue-tongue lizard out of his cave.

  Liz looked up and got up, brushing her knees. ‘Sorry, but this is fascinating. I was just thinking how much Scout would enjoy it.’

  ‘Who’s Scout?’ Archie enquired. ‘Does he like animals?’

  ‘She—she’s my little girl, and she adores animals at the moment.’