Barefoot in the Dark (16 page)

‘Sitting works for me,’ she agreed, leading the way across the bar and giving him an unrestricted view of her tautly-clad bottom as he followed. ‘If I have to walk much further in these I might just keel over.’ She sat down, slipping the bag from her shoulder and slipping one foot from her shoe. She had big breasts. Jack trained his gaze at his glass. ‘So,’ she said, crossing her legs and leaning down to massage her stockinged foot. ‘How’s things with you, then? You’ve been keeping a very low profile lately.’

‘I’ve been keeping busy,’ he corrected her. ‘I’ve got the two columns now, plus that series I’m doing for the
Mail
, plus there’s the show, of course.’

‘I do listen, you know,’ she said, straightening and tutting at him. She slid the other shoe off. ‘Often. I like hearing the sound of your voice when I’m working. And how is the lovely Patti?’ She re-crossed her long legs at the knee. Jack couldn’t help his eyes straying down her shin. A ski-run of smooth honey flesh.

‘Patti?’ he said. ‘She’s fine. Er. Lovely.’

‘And you?’ She inspected his face. ‘No developments there, then, I take it?’

Jack almost choked on his drink. The idea that he and Patti might get together romantically was about as ridiculous a notion as the idea that he and Hil might indulge in the odd quickie over her desk.

‘Er, no. No developments there,’ he assured her. Though there was really no need. She hadn’t thought so for an instant.

She was casing the joint, that was all.

By the time they were back at the car, Jack could sense that the input from his loins was fast gaining ground on the input from his brain. And what of it, he thought, as he clicked up the lock and opened the door for her. The only reason he’d been reticent about getting involved with Allegra was that he didn’t want to get
involved
with Allegra. The sort of cock-eyed, romanticised, faux-moral thinking that could have earned him a pedigree in lost opportunities with girls. With Hope Shepherd, for certain. Damn her. He hadn’t wanted to get involved with
her
either. Well, perhaps now was the time to stop worrying and start living. Danny was right. He did have a penis. Why the hell shouldn’t it direct operations for a while? A simplifying system all round. So many women. So little time.

They climbed into the car and he pushed the key into the ignition.

‘Allegra,’ he said, swivelling in his seat now to face her. ‘Are you doing anything Friday evening?’

She leaned across and planted a kiss on his cheek. ‘Jack,’ she breathed at him, just to the left of his earlobe. ‘I really, really thought you’d never ask.’

Chapter 17

Almost the last thing Hope would have wanted to see sitting on her desk when she arrived at work on Thursday morning was an A4 black-and-white picture of Jack Valentine’s face. The absolute last (since she was trawling her
bete noires
) would have been Simon wearing nothing but his pants and a come-hither expression, so she did suppose it could be worse, but, even as the lesser of two evils, what she was looking at now did not please her one bit.

‘What’s this?’ she asked Kayleigh, who was standing on a chair across the office, poking a watering can into the dessicated fronds of the spider plant on top of the stationery cupboard. Kayleigh paused in her pouring.

‘Hmm?’

‘This.’ Hope picked it up by its corner, almost reluctant to touch it. ‘This thing on my desk.’

Kayleigh climbed down from the chair.

‘That’s Jack Valentine,’ she said.

‘Yes, I know that,’ Hope said patiently. ‘But what’s it doing on my desk?’

Kayleigh shrugged. ‘I dunno. It’s a printout of the jpeg, isn’t it?’

‘What jpeg?’

‘The jpeg he sent through for the posters.’

‘What jpeg he sent through for the posters?’

‘The one he sent us. For us to put on the posters for the fun run.’ She climbed back on to the chair again and shrugged. ‘I dunno.’

‘Yes, but what’s it doing on my desk?’

Kayleigh’s expression became agitated. ‘I dunno.’

‘Well, who put it there?’

‘I dunno.’

Hope plonked her handbag on her desk. ‘Is Madeleine in yet?’

‘I dunno. I’ll – ’

‘No. Don’t worry. I’ll go check myself.’

* * *

Wednesday. Where had Wednesday gone? Oh, yes. She’d spent the morning helping Kayleigh collate the paperwork for the fun run registration packs and the afternoon stuffing the envelopes. Other than that it had been a blur. Thinking mournful and regretful thoughts about making such a fool of herself over Jack Valentine was occupying such a substantial part of her waking hours that she felt she was traversing life as if trapped beneath the surface of an iced-over pond. She had spent insane amounts of time on Tuesday evening dithering over whether to call him and apologise, except that she could think of little to apologise for except for having become almost debilitatingly obsessed by him.

Yesterday had been a little better. She would come out the other side of all this nonsense a stronger and better and altogether less screwed-up person.

Madeleine was sitting in her office eating a banana and flicking through
Elle Decoration.

‘What’s this?’ asked Hope, yanking aside the chair that was holding the door open, and letting it sigh shut behind her.

Madeleine swallowed gracefully.

‘What?’

‘This picture.’ She thrust it in Madeleine’s face. ‘It was on my desk.’

Madeleine grinned at her.

‘Oh
,
that. I just thought it would bring a little ray of sunshine to your morning’s endeavours. I’ve been working on ideas for the poster. It’s rather nice, isn’t it? These publicity photos can be so cheesy. He’s very photogenic, isn’t he? His face is, anyway. I’ll have to take your word for it about the rest.’ She laughed.

Hope cringed. ‘Yes, but where did you get it?’

‘He emailed it to me.’

‘When?’

Madeleine closed the magazine and shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Monday? Tuesday? No. It couldn’t have been Tuesday. He was here for the meeting on Tuesday, wasn’t he? Monday then. Yes, it was Monday I spoke to him. Why? Is it important?’

‘Monday?’ It came out as a squeak. ‘You spoke to him on
Monday
? Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’ She grinned at Hope again. Then folded her arms and winked. ‘God, of course. Is that it? Well, don’t you worry your little head about it, sweetie. I didn’t say anything to him. Though why you insist on all this cloak and dagger palaver, I –’

‘You definitely spoke to him on Monday?’

She nodded.

‘On the phone?’

She nodded again.

‘Did you phone
him
?’

‘Nope. He –’

‘So he phoned
you
?’

‘Yes!’ Madeleine eased the last knobble of banana from its skin and popped it into her mouth. She chewed on it as she spoke. ‘Well, no, of course he didn’t. It was you he wanted to speak to, naturally. But you weren’t here, so I dealt with it.’

‘Dealt with what?’

Madeleine flipped the banana skin back into shape and lobbed it into the bin. ‘With the jpeg, of course! He didn’t have our email address. What’s the –‘

‘Oh, God. Did he leave a message for me?’

‘No.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Well, only to let you know he’d called, of course.’

Hope sat down before her legs had a chance to give way beneath her. ‘But you
didn’t
let me know! God, Maddie, you didn’t let me know!’

‘Hope!’ Madeleine said. ‘Remove your hands from your face and stop groaning like you’re giving birth to a wardrobe.’

Hope removed her hands from her face and stopped groaning. What was the point? What was the bloody point?

‘That’s better,’ said Madeleine. ‘Now. What the hell is the matter?’

‘The matter is that I have just made a very serious error of judgement and I think it might be sensible for me to hand in my notice at this point as I have to go and kill myself. Now.’

‘What?’

‘Or Kayleigh.’

‘You can’t kill Kayleigh. She’s on a government youth training initiative and it wouldn’t go down well with the trustees. You can’t kill yourself, either. I’m way too busy to have my number two drop dead on me. Now, pull yourself together. Here. Have a banana. And tell me what in heaven’s name the problem is.’

Ten past seven and Hope’s problem was simple. What to do with three containers full of gunk (bolognaise, chicken Marengo and goulash, according to the stickers) before heading off to Suze and Paul’s.

She wrenched irritably at the first till it gave up its contents and they fell, with a guilt-making but nevertheless satisfying plop, into the bin. But how much more satisfying, she thought, as she picked up the next one, if she’d not agreed to go there at all. She could no more stomach Suze right now than her interminable culinary creations.

Hope had never really got on with Suze. Though it was a truism that you didn’t get to choose your relatives, Hope had always assumed that her brother, who was nice, would marry someone else who was nice. Why she’d blithely assumed this, she thought now, was a mystery. Iain was a low life. And she’d married
him
.

She extricated the contents from the other containers, then threw them all into the sink and trained the hot tap on them. She didn’t not like Suze – she considered it a failing to decide not to like people like them. There was almost nothing Hope did that Suze did not appear to know how to do better, or, if not better, at least more efficiently, from wallpapering an alcove to making guacamole, to getting toddlers to consume Brussels sprouts. It was only in the losing-of-husbands stakes that Hope had the upper hand and this, of course, made Suze doubly irritating; since Iain had left she’d adopted – or, more accurately, grown into – a whole new set of facial expressions, ones which made it clear that had Hope been just that little bit more like Suze in the first place Iain’s infidelities would never have happened.
per se
. You should try to like everyone, shouldn’t you? But in Suze’s case, it was taxing. This was partly because Suze was everything Hope was not (tidy, well organised, possessed heaps of bloody Tupperware) but mainly because she was also one of those women who seemed to want to make it their life’s work to organise those women who were not

But families being families and Hope being Hope she had nevertheless agreed to go and have dinner with Paul and Suze, on account of lacking plausible excuses not to, or indeed, sufficient nerve to just say no. Or, indeed, to tell Suze that her perfectly prepared delicacies were now gently defrosting in Hope’s bin. She added washing-up-liquid to the containers in the sink. Not a good day.

Earlier, she had explained all to Madeleine, tearfully, and in some detail. Including the bit about telling Jack how she wasn’t going to let her heart have unprotected sex with strangers, which made her howl uncontrollably until Madeleine – who was by now laughing like a drain and going ‘Priceless! Priceless!’ – grabbed her by the wrists and threatened to shake her. She had then made a resolution to ring Jack and apologise. That being the only sensible way forward, as Madeleine saw it. But as the day wore on it felt less and less like an option. What on earth would it achieve? He would just think she was even madder than he must do already. And not only mad, but a stalker. Were she him she was quite sure she’d never want to speak to her again. She didn’t want to speak to her again, for God’s sake. The bottom line was that she could hardly unsay all the dreadful things she’d said to him, could she? And even if she could, she wasn’t entirely sure she didn’t, deep down, believe most of them. OK, so he
had
called her on Monday, but what difference did it make? Had she taken the call would she have felt different? Any happier with her actions? Any less insecure? The water bubbled and frothed and she attacked it with her washing-up brush. Did she want to run such a gauntlet? No. When you totted things up, she had made every single move in his direction, and the thought of it still made her blood run cold. Forward was not a directional option. Of that she was almost certain.

If only she could stop replaying and re-writing the script all the time. In her ideal scenario he would have had her home number, and he would have rung her on Sunday, and they would have arranged to meet up again – hell, even
on
Sunday – why not? – and he would have reassured her that no, there was absolutely nothing wrong with her leaping on top of him in such a bestial fashion on their first proper date – which wasn’t a date anyway, because he hadn’t even asked her to come round – she just
had
– which was… no, no, no! NO!

No. He would have reassured her, would have told her he was just itching to be leapt on in a bestial way, and she would have fallen into his arms and then they would have made love again and everything would have been all right and she wouldn’t be feeling as if she’d done something wrong, because she’d be too busy feeling like her life was about to turn around just a little and that there was now A Vestige of Hope.

Or not. Wouldn’t she still be writing the script of their ending, even before their relationship had begun?

She finished washing the Tupperware, then rinsed and dried it. But what about
him
? The actual scenario was that he probably turned up on Tuesday worried that she’d snubbed him – what with her not leaving a note or anything on Sunday, and then not returning his call on Monday, and then – oh, God, it was all so obvious now – all that smiling at her and seeming so unsure of himself and bashful and asking her if she was doing anything on Saturday and looking so crestfallen when she’d – oh, it was just so awful it made her want to staple her tongue to the top of the kitchen table – and God, she’d been so, so, so, well – damn, it, frosty. She shovelled the boxes into a Sainsbury’s carrier. Late already. She’d have to get her skates on.

Yes. Frosty. He was right. It was the only word for it. She
had
been frosty. And she’d been so hell-bent on letting him know how little she thought of men – of him – Christ, what made her think all those things? – and all he’d done wrong was to fail to have her home telephone number, and the misfortune to have called the office while she was down in bloody Queen Street with Mr sodding bloody Guttridge from the wretched bloody printers.

She snatched up the carrier. It was all just a mess.

Half an hour later, and she still felt no better. She parked, messily, outside Suze and Paul’s tidy front garden and stomped up the drive, drenched in gloom.