‘Hello, Joy,’ he said. ‘How lovely to hear from you this dull Monday lunchtime. To what do I owe this pleasure?’
Joy smiled. She found Simon’s overly gallant manners endearing. She knew they were a front, a façade to hide behind, lest anyone should work out what he was really thinking or feeling, but over the years they had become part of who he was.
‘Well, I’m sorry to bother you at work,’ said Joy, ‘but I’m ringing about Rachel.’
Simon sat up in his seat, alarmed. Had Joy intuited his inappropriate feelings about another of her daughters? Was she ringing to tell him to lay off her too?
‘Yes?’ he said cautiously.
‘It’s just that we haven’t heard from her for a while and that’s very unusual. She calls me most days – and I’ve left her lots of messages asking her to ring, but nothing. So I just wanted to ask whether she was in the office and whether she seems OK?’
Simon had a sinking feeling. He was fairly sure he knew why Rachel hadn’t called Joy, but was it right to tell her? It seemed like a breach of Rachel’s privacy to broadcast that she was furious because she wasn’t getting some money she’d been expecting, because Joy had persuaded Tessa to take the business away from Rathbones. And, also, he didn’t want Tessa to feel bad about it. Or Joy. This was tricky.
‘I haven’t actually seen Rachel today, Joy, and there are a few things I need to talk to her about. So why don’t I pop up to her office and if I think there’s anything for you to be concerned about, I’ll ring you back. So if you hear nothing, no news is good news and she’s probably just been busy.’
Which would give him more time to mull it over. At least, at a distance, Joy couldn’t pull that stunt where she laid her hand on him in some form of psychic communion. He’d sussed that one out. He couldn’t imagine what she got out of it, but there was no question the woman had an uncanny way of figuring out what was going on. He just hoped she couldn’t do it over the phone.
‘That sounds like a good plan,’ said Joy. ‘So in the nicest possible way, I hope not to hear from you.’
They ended the call and Simon ran up the stairs to the floor where Rachel’s office was. Glancing into the rooms on the way up he saw all his staff were either out to lunch – hopefully luring in new clients, probably not – or chowing down at their desks. But when he got up to Rachel’s office, she was tapping away furiously on her computer, not a sandwich or salad in sight, just a mug of tea.
‘Hi, Rachel,’ said Simon. He was about to ask her if she’d had a good weekend and just stopped himself, remembering how badly it had started. ‘Did you get your car out OK?’
‘Yep,’ she said, not relishing the reminder of that misadventure and really hoping he wouldn’t ask her about the rest of her weekend. An unwelcome sexual advance, which had wrecked one of the few good things in her life, followed by thirty-six hours under the duvet.
Rachel couldn’t understand what he was doing up there. If he wanted to talk to her he normally sent her an email asking her to come down to Sir’s office, or if he was feeling particularly pompous, he got his PA to call her. She certainly didn’t think he’d come up just to ask about her car and she wished he would just get on with whatever he wanted to say and naff off again.
She had work to get on with, trying very hard to recruit some more new business she could actually get the bonuses for. She had some good prospects on the go and she didn’t want to lose her thread.
Simon was still wondering what to do. Was it wrong to tell Rachel her mother had rung up, concerned about her? It seemed like he would be stepping over that line between work and family which she was so sensitive about.
Getting impatient, Rachel pressed print on the document she’d been working on and went over to the printer to wait for it. As she stood by the machine, with her back to him, Simon noticed that her skirt was hanging on her. It was slack around the waist and where it used to be so attractively filled with womanly shape at the back, it just hung loosely down.
It was funny it hadn’t really registered before, but now he thought about it, she had been looking thinner. That day Natasha had come in and Rachel had been on the floor with her butt sticking out, while having his usual pervy eyeful he’d noticed there was less of her.
The document emerged and Rachel went back to her desk, getting busy with the stapler and looking up at him questioningly. Her face was quite gaunt, he realised, and there were dark shadows under her eyes. Joy was right to be concerned about her. She looked like she wasn’t eating. Surely she wasn’t doing that fasting thing several of his chubbier staff members were on? She didn’t need to lose weight.
‘What I came up for, Rachel,’ he said, with more of his characteristic assuredness, ‘is to ask whether you had time to have a spot of lunch with me today.’
She looked like she needed a good square meal and he was damn well going to make sure she had one.
Rachel hesitated. Her stomach rumbled. She’d eaten nothing since a bowl of plain macaroni with some nasty frozen spinach the night before. She was trying to feed herself eating only the food she had stored in her kitchen, leaving her precious cash in place to buy fresh stuff for the girls. She could go without lamb chops and salmon steaks and strawberries, but they couldn’t.
Her first thought was to refuse him, because it would mean making conversation for an hour or so, and with what had passed between them on Friday it would be hard to keep it off the Hunter Gatherer debacle. Ugh, no thanks. She was going to say she had too much work, but then the thought of food got the better of her. Meat.
‘That would be lovely,’ she said, her mouth watering at the prospect.
‘OK,’ said Simon. ‘I’m ready when you are, so come down to my office when you’re good to go. I’ll get a table at that little Italian I like around the corner.’
Lasagne. Tiramisu. Rachel felt her eyes start to prickle and pretended to be looking for something in her bottom drawer.
‘Right,’ she said, blinking hard a few times before coming up again. ‘Lovely. I’ll just finish this and I’ll be down.’
Simon headed back to his office feeling quite light-hearted at the prospect of lunch with Rachel. She would be far better company than any of the people he wined and dined for work, but he was still wondering what his duty was with regard to her mother. Clearly something was up with her daughter, but was it really his responsibility to talk to her about it?
The delicious smells in the restaurant made Rachel feel quite giddy and it was a treat to be eating out in a nice place, even if it was with Simon. He hadn’t seemed to have noticed that she didn’t take clients or journalists out to lunch any more. She went to their offices, or met them for a quick coffee.
She played it to them as not wanting to infringe on their busy schedules, but really it was because, although pre-approved lunch expenses were reimbursed, she didn’t have the credit to pay out for them in the first place.
Her colleagues would go swanning off to Chiltern Firehouse and the like with their clients, where they could get tables, because they went there in their own time as well. Rachel was increasingly hiding behind her lunch-is-for-wimps ‘too busy’ shield. And they’d stopped even asking her to join them for after-work drinks, because she always had an excuse to say no.
Looking round the room, nodding at a few antique dealers he knew, Simon’s heart sank when he saw his friend Fergus. He was the dealer he’d dropped a few of Tessa’s possibly Delft tiles off to the week before. He hadn’t been in the shop at the time, so Simon had been waiting to hear his verdict. He just hadn’t banked on it being when he was with Rachel. The last thing he needed her to be reminded of was his recent visit down to Hunter Gatherer.
But sure enough, just after they’d ordered – tagliata for Rachel, spaghetti vongole for Simon, just water to drink – Fergus came ambling over to their table.
‘Rathbone,’ he said, ‘good to see you.’
Simon made the introductions and braced himself. Sure enough, he went strai
ght into it.
‘I’ve had a look at those tiles you dropped in,’ said Fergus. ‘They’re very nice. Seventeenth-century Dutch, pretty good condition. How many would you say there were? I have a client who wants to use them as a skirting board, in the Flemish style, so she needs a lot.’
Simon tried to picture the crate to do a rough count, but then found himself with an all too clear image of himself and Tessa sitting next to it, the sun shining down, contentment in his heart. Thinking about her didn’t flick the crazy switch any more, but it did remind him of how much weird secret history he now had with Rachel’s family. What a mess.
‘There are quite a lot,’ he said. ‘At least sixty, I’d say, and all in one piece.’
‘I’d like to buy them,’ said Fergus. ‘Who has them? Anyone I know?’
‘It’s er, Rachel’s sister, actually. Tessa Chenery of Hunter Gatherer salvage, down in Kent. Do you know who I mean?’
‘No,’ said Fergus.
They really do need a PR campaign, thought Rachel. This was exactly the kind of git they needed to know about them. For a moment she found herself wishing she could help Tessa. She knew exactly how to promote them to pompous arses like this Fergus, who’d think they were scooping a bargain, and to cool people who’d aspire to emulate Tessa’s decorating style. It would be so easy to get Hunter Gatherer into Country Life, Interiors and ELLE Decoration. Possibly even Grazia and the Telegraph. And on all her key blogs.
But then she remembered all over again how her sister’s flighty decision, helped along by Simon, not to go with Rathbone & Associates after all had messed her up, short-changing her to the tune of £1000. Tessa hadn’t even had the courtesy to discuss the decision to bail out with Rachel first, or to ask her whether she would consider running the account after all, if Simon didn’t think he could do it. And she bloody well would have, to save the bonus.
So she had one astonishingly selfish sister, one unbelievably thoughtless one and a mother who just seemed to go along with whatever they did, regardless of how it impacted on her other child.
With all of that churning around in her mind, Rachel had stopped paying attention to what Simon and Fergus were saying and helped herself to another bit of deliciously crusty ciabatta out of the bread basket, dipping it in the saucer of viscous green olive oil.
She looked up again when she heard Fergus saying it was lovely to see her, or some such Chelsea smarm, and smiled back with equal insincerity. The bollocks.
‘Well, that was a lucky chance,’ said Simon, deciding now it had happened he would just have to brazen it out, pretend it was all business as usual. ‘He would have driven a much harder bargain if we’d been in his shop, but he’s had a couple of glasses of red. Loosened him up a bit. Your sister’s going to make a nice little wodge of wonga out of those tiles. We’ll just have to get them brought up here. Are you planning on going down to see them any time soon?’
‘No,’ said Rachel, delighted to see the waiter arriving with their food. If she was eating she couldn’t speak and she didn’t have anything nice to say at that moment. So, Tessa would be making extra ‘wonga’, thanks to Simon’s little visit, but nothing for little sis. How lovely. This really was getting to be too much.
Simon didn’t say anything else about the tiles. He’d always planned to get them couriered up to town anyway, it was just an opportunity to probe Rachel a bit. To see if the bonus disappointment was the reason she wasn’t phoning her mum. Seeing the expression on her face as she tucked into her food, he was now certain it was and felt even worse about it.
‘Now, Rachel,’ he said, after they’d both enjoyed a few more mouthfuls, ‘the reason I wanted to have lunch today was to apologise to you again for what happened with the new-business bonus you were expecting for Hunter Gatherer. It was jolly rough luck and not your fault it fell through and I feel really bad about it.’
Not as bad as I feel, thought Rachel.
She said nothing, just kept pushing the food in. She really did look half-starved. He never ate starters, but he wished he’d ordered one, so she would have felt free to. He’d have a pudding, which was something else he never ate, so she could.
‘So, the thing is,’ he continued, ‘I would like to give you a compensatory bonus. It won’t be as much – only £500 – but something.’
Rachel paused with her fork halfway to her mouth, then she put it back down on her plate. Five hundred smackers. That would be handy, especially if he could give it to her in cash, but she couldn’t help it, she felt horribly patronised.
‘It’s very kind of you, Simon,’ she heard herself saying, ‘but I wouldn’t feel comfortable accepting it. It would be very difficult if my colleagues found out I’d had a bonus and we hadn’t actually got any new business … and you know how things have a habit of getting out.’
And I don’t need your charity, because I’ve got an uncomfortable feeling you might have sussed out quite how badly I need the money, from the way I reacted on Friday when I heard I wasn’t getting it.
Rachel knew she was desperate, terrifyingly desperate, but she wasn’t going to let anyone else know that. Especially not him.
‘Oh, don’t be daft, Rachel,’ Simon was saying. ‘Fair’s fair, you did bring me the business …’ even if you did then complicate things by turning round and saying you wouldn’t manage it for me after all ‘… so you do deserve some kind of reward for that. It was my decision not to take it on, in the end.’
‘No, really,’ said Rachel. ‘I’m chasing up a lot of leads at the moment and I’m confident I’ll soon reel some of them in. So when I do bring in new business which actually starts paying you, then I’ll be happy to take the bonus I’ve earned.’
Simon was nonplussed. From her reaction on Friday he’d gathered she’d been relying on the money. When he’d been down at Tessa’s she and Joy had spoken about how hard it was for Rachel, bringing up the girls and paying the mortgage on her own, even with the help she got from her ex-husband. Why was she being so silly about this?
For a moment he considered telling her about his own financial worries. He’d had an email from the accountant that morning advising him that he definitely did need to make at least two members of staff redundant, or move the office.
With the greatest reluctance, he’d decided on the redundancies and it would have been such a relief to be able to talk to someone about it apart from the accountant. Someone who would understand the nuances of the situation, with insight into who they could most easily manage without – and who could most easily manage without the job.
He had no intention of giving anyone sleepless nights over mortgage payments, if he could possibly help it, but it was still a horrible position to be in. He felt like an executioner.
Both of them were relieved to have a distraction when the waiter came over to ask them if they wanted pudding. Rachel ordered the tiramisu and felt like a child having a treat tucking into it, every creamy spoonful a joy. Why had she just turned down Simon’s generous offer? she asked herself. Was she going nuts as well as broke?
Five hundred pounds would have kept her going with day-to-day expenses for a month, although paid into her bank account, it would just have disappeared into the black hole of her overdraft, so it was pointless anyway. It was cash she needed. The one useful thing she had done at the weekend was to make a list of other things around the house she could sell, and she’d already started putting them online.
But it had been generous of Simon to make the offer, she had to acknowledge that and, for a tiny moment, as she looked up at him spooning in his fruit salad, she was tempted to tell him about her situation.
He had such a good business head, he might be able to give her some useful advice and she remembered that softer side of him she’d seen, that strange day down at Tessa’s, playing skittles with the kids.
He could be a total arsehole in the office – he had a reputation for it in their industry – and it had always suited her to keep the boss in a box marked
‘The Enemy’ wherever she’d worked, but she had to admit it, Simon did have a decent, kind side.
‘Thanks for lunch, Simon,’ she said, placing her spoon down next to her very thoroughly emptied bowl. ‘It was really nice of you to ask me.’
He was glad to see that a good meal had made a difference. She looked much more like her old self, than the drawn, harried Rachel he’d seen lately. Then she smiled at him in a way that made him feel something like a flutter in his heart. He looked at her pretty face, as she settled back contentedly in her chair, and made a decision.
‘You know, Rachel,’ he said, suddenly, ‘in the few months you’ve been at the company, you have become my most valued member of staff.’
It was time to be real about something. He was sick of filtering everything he said to her. Bone tired of it.
‘In that short time I’ve really come to rely on you. Your energy and enthusiasm have lit up the whole office. And I think, in your own way, you actually care as much about the business as I do, which means a lot to me. It can be very lonely being the boss, you know.’
Rachel was completely taken aback. She’d never heard Simon talking in such a personal way before and he’d been so nice about her. It was almost too much.
‘Thanks,’ she said, blinking a couple of times, in case her eyes got any ideas about welling up. ‘That means a lot to me. I do love my work, it means everything to me – apart from my girls, it’s the most important thing in my life – and I love working for your company, it’s the best in the business.’
‘I’m glad we agree about that,’ said Simon, laughing and sounding more like his usual arrogant self, but now she’d seen the softer side of him, it didn’t piss her off so much. She could see it was partly ironic, or some kind of self-defence mechanism. He was a complicated man, there was no doubt about it, but over time he was beginning to feel a little bit more like a working friend than the big bad boss man.
‘This has been great, Rachel,’ he continued, ‘I think we should start having lunch regularly and every time you bring in new business, we’ll have champagne – and you’ll get your bonus as well, of course.’
Secret Keeping for Beginners Page 29
