Blue with Black Dots (The Caprice Trilogy Book 2)

by Cole Reid

  “Well,” said Mark, “In seriousness, perhaps it’s better that you aren’t his student. Perhaps this is a better way for the program to proceed.”

  “It’s not so much about being his student or not,” said Georgia, “It’s about being unaffiliated with the University. Nita Harris happened to be his student. I’m sure there would have been the same indignation over him shagging another professor’s student. I don’t think he wants the reputation of preying on his female students or students in general, which is why it makes sense for me to be working here and not a student there. He kept a clean bill as a politician. Why would he want to suddenly give that up as a professor?”

  “He wouldn’t,” said Mark, “Good point.”

  “Where am I staying?” asked Georgia.

  “We’ll be there in just a moment,” said Mark.

  “Do I work tomorrow?” asked Georgia.

  “Yes,” said Mark, “You’re just going to do an orientation this week. It’s great for you to pick up some things this week because Thursday’s a half-day and Friday is off for Christmas Eve. I had a few suits ordered in your size. I know you’re without any at the moment.”

  “Well, it wasn’t required for being a university student,” said Georgia.

  Her home was a high-class apartment house in low-lying Isleworth, West London. The space suited her, a working girl. It had more space than her room in the shared flat with Evie and Deirdre. It was enough to keep organized. She already had three suits hanging in the closet. Black. Brown. Navy. Her apartment had no phone once again but to keep the wheel greased, she wanted to phone Owen. She didn’t know if he would answer. She hoped he wouldn’t because she didn’t have anything much to say. But she wanted to leave a message on his answering machine to let him know she got his letter and intended to maintain contact. Georgia found a phone box three blocks away and dialed the number on his business card. Owen did answer.

  “Owen Spice Consulting,” said Owen, “How can I help you?” It was his voice. The number must have been a second line in his home or office.

  “Owen,” said Georgia, dodging the word professor, “It’s Georgia Standing.”

  “Hi Georgia,” said Owen.

  “I wanted to say thank you for thinking about me and I do intend to keep in touch,” said Georgia.

  “I really do appreciate the phone call,” said Owen.

  “Your letter said you are in London frequently. I was wondering if you’re headed this way anytime soon,” said Georgia, “New Year’s maybe.”

  “London is great for New Year’s,” said Owen, “But I’ll be back in Leeds celebrating with some old mates from uni for New Year’s. We usually do a thing in Leeds every year.” Georgia thought about inviting herself but then thought against it. She knew the file. Owen still socialized with Karen, his ex-wife. He said they had a thing with old mates from university. She could interpret that. A party was a party. A thing was something else, which meant something was different. Georgia guessed it was Karen. A party was where he would take a date. A thing was where he’d go with his ex-wife. Georgia knew Owen and his wife started out as friends at university. Their university was in Leeds and they shared many of the same friends. It would follow that they were both invited to the same Christmas get-together. The file said they were still on very good terms. They lived together when they were married. They could stay together for a few days, when divorced. It wasn’t that far-fetched.

  “That sounds nice,” said Georgia, “That you keep in touch with friends, despite the distance. I could learn something from you.”

  “I am a professor,” said Owen. Georgia laughed.

  “Yes you are,” said Georgia, “I’ll tell you what. Let me give you a call after the holidays. I have to get used to my new job here in London. But maybe we could catch up in a few weeks. How does that sound?”

  “Sounds great,” said Owen, “Thank you.”

  “Thank you Owen,” said Georgia, “Talk to you later.”

  “Thanks for the call, Georgia,” said Owen, “Cheers.”

  The weeks didn’t give Georgia time to settle in. She started at Roizman & Todd days before the holiday break. Roizman wasn’t affiliated with the Agency. But Mark Miller had a relationship with the company. He was wanted as a partner before he decided that he preferred fund management over managing real estate projects. There were less variables with managing money because the goal was clear, generate returns. With real estate, things didn’t always mean what they should. Theoretically, the real estate business was about making money. In reality, there was a lot of ego. Having the most prestigious property or showiest designs was a big business in the City of London. Because of that, the real estate management business ran on stimulants and ego. Georgia realized from those first days before Christmas that she didn’t like the office at Roizman. The clients were too demanding. Georgia was put on the phone with clients from day one. She didn’t know the ropes and had trouble adjusting. She wasn’t shy but she was introverted, which made fielding calls from fast-talking clients, one-after-another, stressful. She worked until Christmas break and tried to keep the recommendation from Mark Miller in mind. She didn’t want to burn the relationship between Mark and Roizman because it was his relationship, nothing to do with the Agency.

  Georgia spent her holiday alone in London. She had family she could call but she stuck with protocol. She simulated the honey-suckle ham that was standard at her uncle’s house with sliced cuts of deli meat. She made ham sandwiches with lettuce, tomato and mayonnaise. She drank her black tea on Christmas morning and watched Christmas programming on a small-box television set, bought from a nearby second-hand shop. The TV was the one appliance that was missing in the apartment that she had to purchase. The fridge worked and she had deli ham leftovers. The fridge kept her in the deli meat game for most of her holiday. She stayed inside and didn’t get much exercise so she didn’t need many calories to sustain herself. Mark called her the day after Christmas. It was Sunday. Mark apologized for her spending Christmas alone. Georgia didn’t mind it. It was life in the field and she understood. Mark told her he would have invited her over to spend time with his sister and her family but Agency protocol forbade it. Once again, Georgia understood. But Mark did say he got good early feedback from his contact at Roizman. He said it to brighten Georgia’s mood. It didn’t work, not because she was lonely over the holidays but because she wasn’t exactly sure where she stood with Step Down. She wanted the V-sign, a victory. But it was one thing to follow the program as planned and come up short. It was entirely different now that she made the unilateral decision to move to London—away from her objective.

  It wasn’t necessarily the case that Georgia had moved away from the objective. It depended on the definition of the objective. The Agency had initially defined the objective as Owen Spice. Hoping he’d want some time away and Georgia with him, the Agency’s theory was that he’d invite her to Leeds for relative privacy. Georgia didn’t do anything but redefine the objective. For her, Owen’s flat in Leeds was the objective. In her scenario, he wouldn’t invite her there. Instead, he would suggest it as the most convenient place for them to meet. And it was. She had taken control from Owen. It just hadn’t paid off yet.

  Georgia started her next week at Roizman on Monday, December 27th. Things had calmed down since her first few days on the job. She didn’t get ordered around as much. She thought she remembered it worse than it actually was. She found out on Wednesday the team had been told to be strict on her to see if she’d come back, after the short week. It was a hazing process but it wasn’t anything worse than the Agency put her through. It wasn’t even close. Compared to her actual job, working at Roizman was easy. She took on a semi-secretarial role. She was in charge of answering the phone and phoning clients with responses to inquires. The daily mail wasn’t delivered to the office; it was delivered to the building. Every company had a box on the ground floor and had to send someone down to collect the mail. Georgia was the newest hire
, which made it her job. She had to communicate orders to suppliers and make restaurant reservations for group partners, business and personal. It was menial work but she did it with zeal, usually missing from new-hires. It wasn’t the job itself that made her walk and talk straight. It was the confidence her managers at the Agency had shown in her. They could have easily told her to continue at Strathclyde and kept her there, for another semester. But they took the report from the field seriously.

  Georgia’s second week at Roizman was also short. Friday was New Year’s Eve so the office worked a half-day. There was a short toast off before they would report back to work on Monday during the New Year. Roizman hosted a New Year’s party at a hotel four blocks away but Georgia thought it better not to go. She was new to the job and wouldn’t gain anything by socializing with other staff members, at least not in her mind. It wasn’t a job in the normal sense. She wasn’t trying to go career. She already had one but she didn’t know where she stood with it.

  Georgia spent New Year’s weekend the same way she spent Christmas weekend, alone in her apartment. She stretched and did push ups and sit ups reminding herself that she hadn’t looked after her physical conditioning in quite some time. The exercises were harder than she remembered. It made her think about the differences between the boys and the girls. They had different standards. The boys had to run a metric mile in under 5:08 minutes. The girls had to do the same in under 6:18 minutes. Georgia’s fastest time came in at 6:06, slowest over all—boys and girls. But she did it. When she first began, she couldn’t do it. Her first time trial clocked in at 6:37. She improved her personal best by thirty-one seconds. It was the second best improvement aside from Bryan, who went from 4:56 to 4:11. But she pedaled the idea around in her mind that it was unfair for the program to force both the boys and the girls to perform at such a high level of physicality. She had no way of knowing but she felt the boys were assigned to much different tasks. If her imagination were anywhere near reality, then the boys were using their conditioning somewhat regularly. She had spent the past few months reading in a library; attending classes and drinking at pubs. High school was better training than what the Agency had given her. She became a good marksman with her assigned Browning 1955 but she hadn’t fired a shot since the day the Director told them they were done. This was fieldwork for her, alone in a nice apartment. It wasn’t terrible but it wasn’t what she expected. It was boring, boring like reality.

  She started again at Roizman, Monday, January 3, 1977. She didn’t want to seem like she wanted things to move forward so quickly but she did. She avoided her own impulse to call Owen and gave him time to settle in. She had no idea how he spent his New Year’s holiday but for an ex-MP she figured he’d need time to recover.

  She did her best to focus on her work, the increasing responsibility. She was allowed to sit in on conference calls. The conference calls were recorded. The irony was that Georgia was responsible for transcribing the recorded conference calls. Her assignment from the Agency was to retrieve meeting minutes from Owen. Roizman assigned her to produce the same. She almost laughed as she played back the conference call through her studio quality headphones. She could stop and rewind the cassette as often as she needed. She was in a room by herself, used for transcribing. She had a table and chair, a cassette player and a typewriter with extra sheets of blank paper. There was also whiteout, for mistakes. There was a manila folder and a permanent marker so she could label the minutes when she was done transcribing. It was the most jocular task she had been given since being briefed. She came back to seriousness when she was almost finished transcribing. She realized she hadn’t gotten anywhere close to the meeting minutes that she was looking for. The irony turned to frustration. She decided not to wait two weeks. She would call Owen on the weekend.

  •••

  The phone rang but wasn’t answered. It was a cold Saturday but she didn’t want to stay in Isleworth, partly because Owen hadn’t answered his phone. There was an overdue call from Mark, who hadn’t checked in with her since the New Year. She had literally nothing to report because she hadn’t talked to Owen since before Christmas, on December 19th. It was Saturday, January 8th. There were two weeks that Mark would consider blank. Nothing moved forward. Georgia had to do everything in right amounts. If she were too forward with Owen, he might pull back. Something made her think her managers didn’t see it that way. Owen wasn’t a party boy. He was a focused man. It wasn’t going to be the kind of thing that he would pursue as a passive fancy. If Owen wanted Georgia, he wanted her active in his life or nothing at all. He was self-contained. He drank while reading political anthologies in his own corner, in his own pub. He didn’t display the characteristics of a man overly concerned with what people thought of him. He did life on his terms. He didn’t let himself get drawn into things. That’s how he had done it as an MP. That’s how he maintained the approval of his constituency. If Georgia were to draw him in, she had to do it without him noticing. That meant infrequent phone calls. She did what any self-respecting twenty-four year old, with a new job, would do. She went shopping. She passed several phone boxes on her way to the city center. Georgia spent most of her morning going in and out of shops on the east end of Pont Street. Even though it was the middle of winter. London was dry. There should have been some form of precipitation hitting the ground at some point during the day but there wasn’t. The sun even made a brief appearance in the early afternoon. The weather and the purchase of a wintergreen sweater, a new scarf and a faux-leather weekender bag put Georgia in a better mood. She thought she would need the bag assuming Owen invited her to Leeds for the weekend. She decided to splurge a little more. Her agency salary was meager but she’d be earning a little more when her money from Roizman was remitted to her. She went to a cake shop and tried a chocolate mousse with mint, apparently made in-house. She spent time flipping through a lifestyle magazine and enjoyed the feeling of being off grid. She couldn’t be reached by Mark or Owen. The Director himself couldn’t have reached her. She was at a small café on Pont Street and hadn’t announced it to anyone. It didn’t mean she was no longer an agent in play. It meant she didn’t have to feel like one. She didn’t have to make excuses for herself about her lack of conditioning. The chocolate mousse didn’t help anything but that was partly the point. She didn’t want to think about herself as agent. She was twenty-four. She had a starting job in the City of London, and she shopped on the weekend. To her, that sounded about right. Before going home, Georgia stopped by a beauty supply store and bought a DIY hair dye kit—auburn color.

  Georgia let another two weeks go by before she tried to call Owen again. He no doubt noticed she had already tried to call him. She decided to let him wait. If he wasn’t there to pick up the last call, let him wait a while for the next one. He did. She did.

  It was Friday, February 4th, the next time Georgia phoned Owen. Mark had called her the last two weeks wanting a progress report. The conversations were short. Mark had a firm hand but had trouble making demands. Georgia insisted he trust her. He did but he was her manager. The program had to have the appearance that he was on top of things. He made sure she called Owen sooner rather than later. This time he did answer the phone.

  “Hi,” said Owen.

  “How are you?” asked Georgia.

  “I’m good,” said Owen, “I was wondering when I’d get to hear from you.”

  “I called a few weeks back,” said Georgia, “Just to see how things were; it being New Year’s and all.”

  “Yeah,” said Owen, “I could have been hung over lying in a ditch somewhere.”

  “You know how to party,” said Georgia, “I remember.” Owen laughed.

  “Sorry, I missed your call before,” said Owen, “I was busy getting everything sorted out for my lecture series this spring. I have two courses, which is three lectures a week. I just wanted to shuffle and make sure all my notes were where they needed to be and I was checking a lot of journals to update information. It’s
a lot of time in the library so I was away from a phone for the majority of the time after New Year’s.”

  “Sounds like some of the skills you’ve learned as an MP have paid off,” said Georgia.

  “How do you figure?” asked Owen.

  “Well you seem to want to have the right information at your finger tips,” said Georgia, “That’s useful for an MP. Some professors have given the same lectures for so many years they don’t care to update themselves.”

  “That’s true,” said Owen, “Sadly, it’s to the detriment of their students.”

  “You treat your students like constituents,” said Georgia, “As if they could vote for you, which they can’t but it makes you a better professor that you seem to want to serve their interests.”

  “You know something?” said Owen.

  “What?” said Georgia.

  “I never actually looked at it that way,” said Owen.

  “How were you looking at it?” asked Georgia.

  “I looked at it as if that was the job,” said Owen, “If I’m going to talk about companies and corporate structures, well a company is a living thing. So it’s good to take the pulse every now and again. It’s even true with companies that have gone bankrupt. Sometimes they emerge from bankruptcy and go on to have quite the profitable business. So you can’t just go with what was true from four years ago. A lot can happen in four years, especially when you’re talking about a company. You’ve got due diligence ahead of you always.”