To Tame a Proud Heart

by Cathy Williams

  ‘I see,’ he said with glacial politeness. ‘I still can’t see what that has to do with your resigning. Have you now decided that I’m so repulsive that you can’t bear to be anywhere near me?’

  There was deep distaste in his voice when he said that and she wondered whether he was thinking that she was nothing more than a rich young thing, utterly immature, who had thrown herself at his feet only to retreat hurriedly once the plunge had been taken. In the real world, she knew, they would shrug and carry on, with life settling back into its normal routine, and their one night together relegated to history.

  She couldn’t begin to know how to answer his question, and he stared at her, waiting, for such a long time that she eventually dropped her eyes and gave a small shrug.

  ‘Look,’ he said, and his voice was that of someone older and wiser addressing a recalcitrant child. ‘You’re a good secretary, and it’s taken me a hell of a long time finding one. Believe it or not, I’m not going to take advantage of you. We slept together once, but don’t think that I see that as some kind of perk to which I’m now automatically entitled.’

  He leaned forward. ‘Francesca, why don’t you open your eyes and wake up to the real world? Men and women sleep together for all sorts of reasons, and they make mistakes. Life carries on, though.’

  ‘I know that.’ So she was a mistake. He couldn’t have cut her deeper if he had pulled out a ten-inch carving-knife and run it through her heart. The pain was so intense that she had to take a deep, shaky breath to keep from collapsing.

  ‘You’ll have to find me a replacement,’ he continued, and she knew that she should be overjoyed that the situation had been resolved, but she had to bite back the tears. So this was how that subtle game of sexual courtship was played. In a game without love, indifference made retreat so easy.

  ‘Of course.’ She nodded, struggling to think of a suitable platitude that might restore her self-control, and discovering that platitudes were never around when you needed them. ‘Have you got any specifications?’

  ‘Someone,’ he said in a hard voice, ‘who is prepared to view the job as a long-term proposition.’

  ‘I’m sorry…’ she began, faltering, and he cut in harshly.

  ‘Forget it. If I’d known that you’d react to what happened between us in such a hysterical way, I wouldn’t have come near you.’

  ‘But you couldn’t resist, could you?’ Bitterness restored some of her spirit, and she looked at him without flinching.

  His eyes narrowed. ‘What the heck are you talking about now?’

  ‘Imogen ended your relationship and you just couldn’t resist sleeping with me as an afterthought, because you knew that I would be willing.’

  ‘So that’s what this is all about.’ He leaned back in his chair, looking as sympathetic as a cobra about to strike. ‘You’re quitting because of a case of severe pique.’

  If he had intended to make her feel ten years old, he couldn’t have succeeded more. She flushed and looked away, and he laughed under his breath. It wasn’t a pleasant sound.

  ‘No one likes to be used,’ she muttered.

  ‘You seem to enjoy every minute of it,’ he drawled. ‘Or did I misread the situation?’

  ‘I was a fool.’ If I was your mistake, she thought, then you can be mine—or at least that’s what I shall let you believe.

  ‘What were you hoping for after one night together, Francesca? Love and marriage?’

  That was so near the mark that she had to fight not to betray her emotions. ‘No. But I didn’t think at the time that I was a fill-in for someone else—someone who was no longer available.’

  ‘I’m not some kind of sex-crazed animal,’ he said coolly. ‘I wanted you and the feeling was mutual. We slept together. End of equation.’

  ‘And now you think that we can continue working happily together as though nothing had happened?’

  ‘Nothing has happened,’ he said. ‘But this is a pointless argument. I’m not going to persuade you to stay; you’ve already made your mind up and I have no intention of beating my head against a brick wall. There’s some correspondence still to be finished. Once you’ve done that, and, of course, found someone to replace you, you can leave.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, wondering what she was thanking him for exactly. For ruining her life? For treating her as a disposable object of desire? She knew that she could hardly blame him for that, not when she had so readily made herself available, no questions asked, no answers expected, but she did anyway.

  She stood up and let herself out, and immediately went to the cloakroom, where she had to fight down the desire to be sick. Again.

  When she got back to her desk he had gone, and there was a note with some instructions, and three letters to be typed.

  She ignored all of them. She telephoned the employment agency instead and lined up four interviews for the afternoon. Keep busy, she thought. Time enough to make misery your companion.

  It was with some uncertain relief that she found two of them proved very promising. One was a woman in her mid-thirties, who was returning to work after some years of rearing children, and the other was a middle-aged woman who had moved down from the north with her husband, who had had a company transfer. They both looked capable and easy to work with.

  As soon as Oliver returned at five-thirty that afternoon she told him.

  ‘Hire whichever seemed better,’ he told her, making his way past her desk into his office, and she spun around, astonished.

  ‘But don’t you want to see them for yourself?’

  He stopped at the door and looked back at her. ‘Trust your instinct,’ he said, with a cold smile. ‘It may have let you down in one department, but I’m sure it’s working well enough in others.’ And he closed the door behind him.

  So she telephoned the agency, told them which of the two she had decided to take on, arranged a starting day, contacted the personnel department, and then remained working for another hour, busily doing as much as she could because she now had the impression that Oliver wanted her out sooner rather than later. He had tried to keep her on, and, having failed in that, had washed his hands of her and her infantile scruples.

  Well, that suits me fine, she thought to herself, banging away on the keyboard and wishing that it was Oliver Kemp’s head.

  He left shortly before she did, nodding briefly in her direction, and when she next glanced at her watch it was after six-thirty and she was feeling light-headed and ill with hunger.

  She stopped off at the supermarket—or rather at what optimistically called itself a supermarket when in fact it was little more than a corner shop with a stock supply of the most basic tinned food, and a selection of vegetables that always looked as though they had seen happier days.

  It was only later that night, after she had consumed a large, hastily prepared meal and was lying in bed, that her wayward thoughts began to take a different direction. By the time she fell asleep she knew that she would have to leave the company the following day if possible.

  Francesca arrived at work late the next morning—the first time since she had started—and immediately went into Oliver’s office, after knocking and pushing open the door.

  He was on the telephone and he pointed to the chair facing him, carrying on his conversation, his voice clipped and authoritative. She watched him surreptitiously, imprinting on her mind for ever the taut lines of his body, the curve of his mouth, the wintry grey-blue of his eyes. And she wondered.

  ‘Yes,’ he said to her as soon as he had replaced the receiver.

  ‘I’ve found a replacement,’ she told him without preamble. ‘A youngish woman with two small children. She’s been out of the workforce for a few years, but I gave her an impromptu typing test and she sailed through it. She’s worked in this sort of field before, though it was a long time ago, but she’s bright and enthusiastic and I think she’ll catch on without too much difficulty.’

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘J
essica Hines. She’ll start tomorrow.’ Francesca paused and looked at him in the eye. ‘I’ve brought everything up to date, and I thought that if I spent the rest of the week showing her the ropes I might make Friday my last day.’

  He shrugged and said, ‘Sure.’

  She stood up, ready to leave, but before she could turn the handle of the door he was standing next to her. He leaned against the door, looking down at her. When she breathed, she breathed him in—that masculine aroma that was as powerful to her senses as incense.

  ‘I’m not around for much of the week,’ he said in a low voice, ‘so I want to say something to you before you go now, in case the opportunity doesn’t arise again.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Look at me,’ he commanded, and she steeled herself to do it, to raise her eyes to his.

  ‘I don’t want you to leave here thinking that the only reason I made love to you that night was because I was suffering from a broken heart and I needed a bit of female companionship.’

  ‘There’s no need to explain anything to me,’ Francesca retorted, with a spark of bitter anger in her voice.

  ‘Yes, there is. Emotionally you haven’t grown up, and this is the sort of thing that you could dwell on until it assumed proportions way beyond control.’

  ‘Thank you for being so thoughtful,’ she said sarcastically, wincing at the unintended insult. The fact that he had not meant to offend her by describing her as a child at the beck and call of her emotions only made the offence worse.

  ‘What we did that night was totally spontaneous. When I touched you I wasn’t touching Imogen in some maudlin, nostalgic way.’

  ‘You loved her, though.’

  ‘Is that a question or a statement of fact?’

  ‘An observation.’

  He didn’t answer that. Instead he said, angling his head away from her, ‘I would rather you didn’t leave.’ There was a dark flush on his neck and a certain harshness in his voice that made her realise that he was uncomfortable. Was this the first time that he had ever asked anyone to do something; the first time that he had not told, knowing that he would be obeyed?

  He had risen through life the hard way, had never had doors opened for him. He had had to open them all himself, and in the process he had become accustomed to forging forward, to taking steps that needed to be taken in order to gain what could be gained.

  She felt a powerful, searing pang of sheer wanting—wanting to listen to him, to stay in a job she enjoyed, to feed her addiction to him. But, of course, all that was impossible. Youthful optimism had been shed for ever, and now she couldn’t even really remember how she could have nurtured any wild hopes that he would one day love her if she persevered hard enough.

  ‘I can’t stay,’ she said flatly, and he pulled back, shoving his hands in his pockets.

  ‘Fine. In that case I won’t keep you further.’ He walked back to his desk and sat down. ‘You have a list of my meetings for the rest of the week,’ he said briefly, not looking at her but flicking through a file on the desk and extracting bits of paper from it. ‘I shall be out for most of the day, but if you need to talk to me I’ll be accessible on my mobile phone or at the client. You can arrange for me to have lunch with Mrs Hines tomorrow. I should be able to manage that.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Good. You can go now.’

  He hadn’t looked at her once, even though she stupidly knew that she was hovering a bit by the door.

  ‘That’s all, Francesca,’ he said, looking up, and she nodded and left his office.

  Well, she thought, sitting down in front of her computer terminal, that’s that. Life goes on. Time heals. There were countless clichés she could think of and none of them gave her a scrap of comfort. What she saw ahead of her wasn’t life carrying on, or time healing. It was a dark tunnel—because everything had changed, and it was as if she had now found herself in a strange new world where she no longer knew the rules. What was going to happen now?

  She didn’t want to think about it. Not now. Not yet. There would be time enough for that.

  Not for the first time she desperately wished that her mother was still alive. She could share most things with her father, but what she was going through now needed a woman’s wisdom. She could understand for the first time why her father had felt compelled to try and make up for her mother’s absence from her life, why he had felt guilty that although he could give her a lot it would never be enough.

  The following day Jessica came, bright and keen and like a breath of fresh air.

  Oliver had her in his office briefly, but he was virtually on his way out. It was enough time, though, to leave quite an impression on Jessica, who emerged, sat next to Francesca at the desk, and said in a slightly shell-shocked voice, ‘He’s awfully overpowering, isn’t he?’

  ‘You’ll get used to it,’ Francesca replied, reaching for the top file on the desk and spreading it open between them. She didn’t want to talk about Oliver Kemp.

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said tonelessly. She wondered whether she really would have if she had needed the job and the money as desperately as Jessica needed it. Her husband was a painter and decorator—a job which depended largely on all sorts of things beyond his control—and he was finding work thin on the ground at the moment. The money that Jessica earned would be vital to their standard of living.

  ‘He may work you hard,’ Francesca said, brightening up her voice—after all, there was no point in spreading doubts and tarnishing the other girl’s enthusiasm—‘but he’s very fair and he’s very patient at explaining things.’ Bit of an exaggeration, that last one, but she said it anyway, and it seemed to have the desired effect of relieving some of Jessica’s anxiety.

  They worked non-stop for the remainder of the day, apart from the break when Oliver took Jessica to lunch, and by the time Friday rolled around enough had been explained so that Francesca could make her departure without thinking that she had left someone floundering in the deep blue sea.

  At five-thirty she found herself taking her time with her coat, taking her time looking around the office for the last time, hoping that Oliver would stride in so that she could have one last look at him before he vanished out of her life for ever. But there was no sign of him.

  She had hardly seen him at all that week. Meetings had kept him out of the office most of the time, and when he had been around he had liaised with Jessica, with Francesca only a background presence, there to clarify bits and pieces.

  She was leaving the building, hurrying in the direction of the Underground, when Helen appeared from nowhere—materialised, Francesca thought with an inward groan of despair, like a vampire.

  ‘How are you?’ Helen asked, falling into step with her.

  ‘Fine,’ Francesca said tightly. It wasn’t anywhere near the truth, because she had never felt worse in her life, but the question was not one that required a truthful answer. As with most things that Helen said to her it was a prelude to something altogether nastier.

  ‘Sure? I don’t believe you!’

  ‘That’s fine by me.’

  They had arrived at the station and they both joined the queue for tickets. On a Friday night, at rush hour, the place was packed, and the crowds, the harsh fluorescent lighting, Helen’s presence there at her elbow all combined to make Francesca feel giddy and sick. She could feel Helen’s sharp little eyes on her, watching the sudden pallor of her skin.

  ‘I hear that you’re leaving,’ she said conversationally, and Francesca didn’t say anything. ‘What brought about that sudden decision?’

  Francesca wished that the queue would move a bit faster. There were at least fifteen people ahead of her, and naturally the man at the counter, as luck would have it, was taking an inordinately long time because he couldn’t find his wallet.

  ‘Still—wise, I suppose,’ Helen said conversationally. ‘I’d have done the same. He only slept with you because you were there at the right time in the
right place.’

  There was a thread of bitter envy in her voice. Helen must know, Francesca thought, that Oliver Kemp was simply not interested in her, was probably totally unaware of her existence, in fact, but that didn’t stop her from taking a malicious delight in spoiling what she saw as a relationship she could have had.

  ‘A girl’s got to have her pride. What are you going to do now?’

  ‘Get another job,’ Francesca said shortly. The man had at last found his wallet, after what seemed like an all-out search through every nook and cranny of his overcoat, suit jacket and briefcase, and the line was moving swiftly forward. Thank God.

  ‘But will you be able to?’ Helen asked softly from behind her, and Francesca felt her body stiffen in alarm. What did that mean?

  ‘There are lots of vacancies for secretaries,’ she said, still feeling that dreadful flutter of alarm move around inside her.

  She paid for her ticket, turned around, and said, in a final parting shot, ‘I should forget Oliver Kemp if I were you. He’s not interested in you and he never will be. You’re wasting your time.’

  ‘So we’re more alike than you care to think, then?’ Helen said, but her eyes were hard stones. ‘Still, best of luck with what you move on to do.’ She smiled that feline smile. ‘And I know you’ll be pleased to hear that your leaving has made way for me.’

  ‘What are you talking about now?’

  ‘Oh, nothing really. Nothing that affects you now, anyway. Just that I saw Oliver today and I managed to persuade him to let me take over your job. After all, my typing may need a bit of home improvement, but I do know an awful lot about the company, and I do know an awful lot about the clients. Jessica is going to slot into my old department. He’s going to tell her on Monday.’ Sly eyes gleamed from under heavily mascaraed eyelashes. ‘Wasn’t it sweet of him to give me a go?’