by Emma York
“No, I did not do this.”
“Are you lying to me?”
“No, Charlie, honestly I’m not. I was thinking about exploiting the land but things have changed. I want to preserve it. I’m different now. You were right.”
“So Stempel Co. is not accepting bids from oil companies?”
“I hadn’t even heard about that. Hold on. Give me two minutes.”
I made a phone call to my people and took no time at all to work out the truth. I hung up with an anger starting to bubble up inside me. I’d been played. “It was Senior. He sorted out the small print. I trusted him. He’s given himself the rights to drill there no matter what I do.”
“Are you sure?”
I nodded. “There’s nothing solid but if we can get him to confess it’s him, we should have enough to stop the contract dead, take him to court and bleed him dry. He's not a rich man, he can't fight forever.”
“Richard Senior isn’t bright enough to do this on his own.”
“That’s just what I was thinking.”
“Someone on your staff must be working with him. Any ideas?”
“I’ll get back to you on that. For now, keep it quiet. We don’t want them running before we catch up with them.”
I put my hand out and we shook. “I thought it was you,” he said. “I really did.”
“Not anymore,” I replied. “And you can thank Jodie for that. I’ll be in touch.”
I got home to find my bed empty. Jodie wasn’t there. I shouted for her and heard footsteps downstairs. Running down I almost crashed into Gwyneth who was waiting for me. “Where’s Jodie?” I asked.
“Took her million and left.”
“What? But we’ve got four more days yet.”
“I came in and she was screaming at me, demanding the money. Said she’d earned it after putting up with your bullshit.”
“Are you serious?”
“Don’t worry. She knows the terms. She promised never to contact you again. She also said not to contact her or she’ll tell everyone what you did. I assume you know what she means?”
I tried to process what she’d told me. Was that the only reason she’d come back. Had she played me like Senior had? Was it possible they were in on it together?
“I’m going into my study. No calls.”
“Of course, Sir. I am sorry if I should have done something to stop her but maybe this is for the best and-”
I shut the door on her. I needed to be alone. I sank into my desk chair and put my head in my hands. This was what happened when I opened up my hear to someone, when I thought I had something special. I’d been played for a sucker by someone in a different class to me.
The warning signs had been there. She’d acted so well in front of Tomlinson. She was clearly just acting in front of me as well.
What about last night? About agreeing to the date? Well, that was obvious too. She came back long enough to get her money and as soon as she had it, there was no need for me anymore.
I picked up the phone. “Terrance? I want you to hire someone to look into Richard Senior. Have you still got that private investigator’s number? Good. Find out all you can about him and this shell company. I’ll email you the details and for now, keep this to yourself. Understood?”
I hung up and closed my eyes. Time to shut down again. The cold bastard was back. Emotions were for suckers.
The deal was done but I might be able to claw back some dignity, stop Senior from taking the oil out of the land. Jodie might have screwed me but I still couldn’t spoil the landscape she loved. I just couldn’t do it.
The next few days consisted of nothing but work. While I waited for Terrance to get back to me, I caught up on the deals that had waited while Jodie was here.
I watched films alone again. I slept alone again. I tried not to care but it weighed heavily on me. I thought about ringing her but what was the point? She’d only laugh at me. All I needed was for confirmation her and Senior were in on it together and then I’d know never to trust anyone ever again.
About a year later, I found myself up in the attic looking for an old file and stumbled over the Charles Dickens stuff. I’d forgotten I was supposed to look for that for her. It felt like a lifetime ago when we discussed it, back when I knew what happiness was.
I sat flicking through letters, silhouettes, a few empty inkwells, one of the bottles from the blacking factory where he’d worked as a boy.
At the bottom of the box I noticed an envelope I hadn’t spotted before, tucked in the corner, same color as the box.
I pulled it out. Inside was a pile of yellowed papers. I set them down in front of me and began to read.
FIFTEEN - JODIE
It had been a year since I last spoke to him. I had counted every single day. The anniversary of being thrown out of his house. Coming to Annie’s only to be thrown out of her apartment as well.
What a year it had been. I only had to close my eyes and I could vividly remember that last day. The night we had made love. I had lost my virginity and it had been perfect. I remembered falling asleep in his arms, no idea what he'd given me in return for taking my innocence.
I woke up in the morning and he wasn’t there. I had been awoken by a knock on the bedroom door. “Come in,” I said.
It was his secretary, Gwyneth. “Good morning,” she said, carrying in a tray of breakfast things. Toast was piled high and a steaming mug of coffee was soon in my hands as I sat up in bed, keeping the blankets high to shield my naked chest from view. “How are you today?”
“Good. Where’s Mr Stempel?”
“He is out for the day but I have been authorised to make the payment of one million pounds to you.”
“I haven’t been here the full week though.” I remember how disappointed I felt. The money didn’t matter anymore. What mattered was spending time with the man I’d fallen for. Not just fallen but skidded down and down at lightning speed into love without any hope of applying the brakes. I could still feel his touch as Gwyneth held out the check towards me.
“You are bound by the contract terms. You are never to return to this house. You are never to contact Mr Stempel or anyone associated with him. You are never to speak of what happened during your stay here. In return here is your check.”
I looked at her hand and then up at her. “I don’t want his money.”
“It’s yours. Take it.”
“Does he really want me to go?”
“Told me himself. He just wants you gone from the house before he gets back. He never wants to see you again. A taxi has been called. It is waiting outside for when you’ve finished your breakfast.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Then I shall wait outside while you dress. You’ll find your original clothes in the wardrobe.”
She pointedly left the check on the bed but I didn’t touch it. He wanted me gone. I’d been a bloody fool. I should have guessed. All that niceness was just to get me into bed. Now he’d done it, he didn’t even have the balls to tell me himself that I was to go. He wanted to pay a million pounds to screw me. Well screw him.
I got dressed without crying, feeling as if nothing I had felt was correct, as if the rug had been pulled out from under my feet. This was what happened when you trusted men? I never would again.
Gwyneth escorted me from the building like I was a criminal. I left the check on the bed. I couldn’t take his money. I had all I needed which was the knowledge that he wanted nothing more to do with me.
I got to Annie’s to find her in the process of loading her stuff into a van. “What’s happened?” I asked as I stopped in front of the building.
She put the box she was carrying down onto the pavement before answering. “I thought I’d got away with hitting Ryan a bit too easily. Evicted just like you. We’ve got today to get everything out.”
“Where are we supposed to go?”
“I’m going to stay with my mom. I’ve already taken your stuff over there. It’s all
crammed into the garage. She’s parked her car on the street to make room. You can stay in my old bedroom with me. It’ll be like being kids again. One long sleepover.”
Which is exactly what happened. For a year we lived together in her room. It was small and cramped but we coped. It became more cramped as I started to get bigger and even more cramped when two sharing became three.
I managed to get my job back at the museum. Alan Brears had heard that I was the reason they had the Flambert painting on display and personally hired me back. Everything was as it had always been there except with a new painting in the Milton room. It took pride of place in the very centre, all the other pieces repositioned to better give it room to breathe.
It felt strange to look at that painting. It was still beautiful but now under the surface were other feelings. One was the surreal knowledge that it could have been hanging on my bathroom wall. I could have sold it and kept the money for myself, been a multimillionaire.
I only had to look at the amount of people enjoying it to know I’d made the right decision in telling him to bring it here.
The painting wasn’t the only gift Mr Stempel had given me. The other gift had become apparent when I missed my period. I took the test with Annie and her mom watching and together we all burst into tears when it showed up positive. “I’m pregnant?” I asked, waiting for them to tell me I wasn’t.
“Yep,” Annie replied. “Now will you tell him?”
“Sorry can we talk about this first? I’m having a baby. I can’t believe I’m having a baby.”
“You’ll make a good mom.”
“I never planned on being a single mom.”
“Neither did I,” Rebecca said, stroking Annie’s hair. “Sometimes life throws you a curve ball and sometimes it throws you an Annie.”
When she was born I named her Dora, keeping the Dickens tradition alive even though Mr Stempel wasn’t involved. I still couldn’t call him Nick, it felt wrong.
Dora was the most angelic baby you could imagine, causing me almost no trouble. I was on maternity leave with her when I went back to the museum. Annie was guarding the Flambert painting.
“Another couple of months and we’ll have enough saved to pay the deposit on a place of our own,” she said when she saw me.
We’d decided we didn’t want to rent again if we could possibly avoid it. With her mom taking no money for us, we’d been saving like mad all year and almost had enough.
I could have had the money we saved and ten times as much if not more just by taking the check. I couldn’t do it though. I couldn’t take his money. That would have proved that I was nothing more than a purchase, like the painting or the land.
I was paid while on maternity leave and I got another few months with Dora before going back to work. I wanted her to appreciate the culture around her from the first moment and we regularly went to the museum together once I could walk easily after the birth. At sixteen weeks she was starting to giggle a lot, blinking up at the paintings in a way I could have sworn was filled with understanding.
Mr Stempel still hadn’t been seen. There was a newspaper next to me on the bench and I glanced down at the headline. He’d missed the latest government meeting he was supposed to attend and several social functions. Rumour had it he’d become a Howard Hughes type, locked away in his mansion, not taking calls, not accepting visitors. Good for him. He could count his millions while I raised our child.
They’d said he had enough money to know everything about everyone. Did he know about Dora? Did he even care? He could have got in touch anytime but had chosen not to. Maybe he had checked up on me and found out where I was living and with a baby. He was probably too ashamed of me.
He wasn’t my problem anymore anyway. Dora was all I cared about and she was getting ready to feed, starting to grumble in her carrier. I stroked her tiny head and shushed her, saying bye to Annie before heading to the baby room.
That evening I left Dora with Annie’s mom for a couple of hours. Annie wanted to go to Paddy’s. She said she had some good news for me and we needed to celebrate. I was happy to join her but my heart ached to be away from Dora. I was also intrigued as to what the news was as she’d only hinted in her text message to me.
I got to the pub to find her already ordering champagne. “Can we afford that?” I asked.
“Guess what you’re doing when you come back to work?”
“What?”
“Setting up our educational outreach group, getting kids into history.”
“What? How did you arrange that?”
“They got a big donation last week and they’re using it to set you up. The funding is all in place, they just need you back to organize it.”
I heard a slow clap behind me and turned around to see Gwyneth sitting at one of the tables, listening in to our conversation. “Congratulations,” she said, a drunken sneer on her face. “Aren’t you the lucky one.”
“Gwyneth?” I replied. “What are you doing here?”
“They’ll shaft you just when you think it’s all doing fine,” she said, ignoring my question. “If I were you, I wouldn’t celebrate too soon.”
She’d clearly been drinking for a long time, empty glasses spread out on the table in front of her. “Who’s that?” Annie asked.
“She’s Mr Stempel’s secretary.”
“Was Mr Stempel’s secretary,” Gwyneth replied. “Until I went into business with Richard Senior. There’s another man who bullshits people. Always men. Never trust them. It’s too late to go back though. If I were in your shoes, I’d take that funding and run off with it. Spend it on something fun. Who cares about other people? They only screw you over. Oi! Another drink over here.”
“I think you’ve had enough,” the bar tender called over to her. “Maybe you should think about going home?”
“Home? I can’t go home. I haven’t been there for months but it’s too late now isn’t it.” She got unsteadily to her feet and weaved slowly towards the door. “They all screw you over,” she said, pushing the door open and vanishing into the street.
“Well, that was interesting,” Annie said. “What do you think she was talking about?”
“No idea and it’s nothing to do with me anymore.”
“Well said.” Two glasses appeared in front of us. Annie held one up. “To the future.”
“To the future,” I replied, whilst glancing across at where Gwyneth had been sitting. I toasted the future but I was thinking about the past.
SIXTEEN - NICK
It was the first time I’d been out of the house in nearly a year. Cutting myself off hadn’t been an instant thing. Over a period of weeks I found it easier to work from the study, to spend my evenings in the cinema. Sitting watching other people have their happy endings made it easier to deal with the fact I didn’t get one.
I started living vicariously through the movies, switching off from the outside world. I dealt with business via email and phone, I didn’t bother going out. There didn’t seem much point. Not without her.
She never got in touch. I could have rung her but I knew the truth, she had taken the money and run. That was what the deal always was. I had no right to expect anything more. Didn’t stop it cutting me deep though.
Leaving the house for this meeting had been made easier by Tomlinson. He had filled me in on exactly why I needed to attend in person. One final meeting to hopefully resolve everything about the land deal. I knew most of it.
Tomlinson had sold the land to me. My lawyer, Richard Senior, had fiddled the contract in his favor, wanting to drill for oil and keep the profit for himself, despoil the pristine environment that we wanted to protect.
Tomlinson had managed to stall him all this time with one legal wrangle after another and finally we had the trump card we needed to play.
Tomlinson and his lawyer, Alec Hillaby, had pulled out all the stops, no expenses spared to get to this point. Tomlinson was on the far side of the table when I entered his boardroom. To hi
s left was Hillaby, papers laid out in a neat line in front of him. “Nick,” Tomlinson said as I entered, getting to his feet. “Good to see you. How are you? You look pale.”
“I’ve been worse. Did you mean what you said on the phone. Is it really sorted?”
“We shall see, I suppose. What do you think, Alec?”
“I think with this piece of paper in front of me, we have a fighting chance to end this once and for all.”
“What is that?”
“Come and read it for yourself.”
I sat down in the empty seat and read through the papers while we waited for Senior to arrive. He came swaggering in ten minutes later, looking blissfully unaware of what we had.
For the last couple of months, he’d been chipping away at each obstacle in front of him and he knew that sooner or later we’d run out of ways to stop him drilling. All he had to do was bide his time.
“I hope this isn’t another attempt to appeal to my good side,” he said as he sat down. “I haven’t got one.”
“We’ll keep this short,” Hillaby said. “We want you to rescind all rights to the land that you claim were granted you by Mr Stempel here. We want you to crawl away and hide under whatever rock you came out from and never come back.”
“That’s all you’ve got? Why did I waste my time coming here?” He was already getting to his feet.
“If you don’t,” Hillaby continued, “we have sworn testimony here that you have illegally altered not just the contract provided in this case but more than a dozen other contracts for work dating back more than a decade.”
“Bullshit,” Senior replied. “You’re bluffing.”
“Do you know a Gwyneth Bonner?”
“Never heard of her.”
“That’s funny. She’s listed as being an employee of yours up until three months ago.”
“I have a lot of employees. I don’t know the names of all of them.”
“This one you should. She was Mr Stempel’s secretary.”
“Not ringing any bells.”
