Barefoot in the Dark (4 page)

‘Lunch, eh?’ said Patti, winking at Jack Valentine.

‘Hem hem,’ said Jack Valentine, on a rising note.

‘They don’t feed us much here,’ said Patti to Hope. ‘Do they, Jack?’

Jack Valentine winked back at her. ‘You’re on,’ he said to Hope. ‘Call me here later. OK?’ Then his put his headphones back on and the woman in the sweater came in to escort Hope out of the studio, leaving her with the impression that she’d missed some in-joke. These radio people were really very odd.

Chapter 5

It was apparent to Jack as soon as he got to the Hilton that to agree to meet Hope Shepherd there was a singularly bad move. Would she now assume that they’d be having lunch there? Or worse – he pulled back his cuff to take a look at his watch – be already in the lobby waiting for him? It was a distinct possibility.

Perhaps he should have been less firm in the matter of who was buying who lunch in the first place. When she’d called him, which she’d done that very same afternoon, she had been insistent that the meal would be on her, for the very sensible reason that it was she who wanted something from him and not vice versa. But he had countered with the less obvious but (to his mind) laudably honest point that if an attractive woman from a strapped-for-cash charity were to buy him lunch he would feel very uncomfortable about turning her down, should her proposal not be to his liking. Besides, he had added with what was turning out to be a possibly misjudged flourish, he would
like
to buy her lunch. Which had effectively ended the debate.

He had started the day in an unexpected and pleasingly buoyant mood. It had caressed him along with the sun-shaft that had tracked his little bedroom, and hauled him steadily from the mire of his early morning stupor, with the promise of spring, and new beginnings, and hopefulness, and the feeling that his new and better life was surely due to start. Until he stood up, at least, and found he had a headache. But only a two-can affair – very minor. All in all an excellent start to the day.

He had breakfasted on the one remaining Pop Tart (pausing only to make a note on the little wipeable memo on his fridge to get more before Ollie arrived later) and had toastered it to perfection. No bubbling brown scorch stripes raked down the front. No incendiary effect on his tongue as he bit into it. Jack knew Pop Tarts could not become a fixture in his life, but this small charge-taking exercise had pleased him no end.

As had the prospect of taking someone out for lunch. Despite Patti’s endless ribbing about shagging fairy princesses, he’d found himself rather pleased that Hope Shepherd was not a cardigan-clad worthy. That she had all the right bits and in all the right places. That she was normal and friendly and, well, so
nice
. But now he was all anxious again. It occurred to him that he could still, if he was quick, whiz into the Hilton and see if they had a table in the Razzi, but Hope Shepherd’s appearance, as a slim blur of charcoal hurrying across the concourse, effectively scotched that one.

‘Hello!’ she said, while she was still fifteen yards away, waving a gloved hand around as if she’d just picked him out at an airport arrivals hall. She was wearing a strange knitted grey duffel-coat thing that he wasn’t altogether sure what to make of, and knee-length high-heeled black suede boots, of which he approved unreservedly. A knitted black polo neck burgeoned from the top of the coat-thing, almost exactly the same colour as her hair.

‘Hello,’ he said back, altogether less explosively.

She drew level with him, plunging her hands back into the pockets of the coat. ‘Chilly, isn’t it?’

‘Very,’ he said. ‘But then it is January.’ He smiled. ‘So.’

‘So,’ she said back. ‘Where are we off to, then?’

She didn’t make any gestures towards the hotel, which made Jack surer still that he should have booked a table at the Razzi restaurant, despite its ridiculous name. She looked like she would sit well in their window, but he also decided that if he said McDonalds at this point, she would not bat so much as one of her thickly-lashed eyelids. She had no make-up on at all, as far as he could tell. He liked that.

‘I thought we’d go to Beano’s,’ he said, proffering an arm to guide the small of her back in the right direction.

‘Oooh, lovely,’ she said, moving off before his arm made contact. He dropped it self-consciously and fell into step.

‘You know it, then, do you?’

‘I went there for my divorce party,’ she said, turning to grin at him. ‘Got comprehensively wasted and took out an urn. I hope they’ll let me in.’

Jack had not had a divorce party. He’d just got comprehensively wasted at home.

Beano’s was the kind of restaurant that Cardiff was sprouting all over the place these days. Achingly trendy, full of braying office workers. The kind of restaurant that tried to sell you onion marmalade and shrink-wrapped biscottis, and alarming-sounding mustards full of bits of twig. But the guy who ran the place knew him and could be relied upon to gush. Hope, who looked agreeably impressed by all this, studied her menu enthusiastically, going ‘hmmm’ a lot and nodding.

‘So,’ he said again, noticing with some alarm that the word had become a pre-cursor to many of his conversational openers of late. As if he were on
Question Time
or trying to organise a group of cub scouts. ‘Your fun run.’

She smiled at him over the top of her menu.

‘Our fun run,’ she said, nodding. ‘In actual fact, I’m not sure ‘fun run’ is quite the word we should be using. It’s five kilometres, and there’s a bitch of a hill half way through. We don’t really want to encourage any cardiac arrests, do we?’ She giggled delightfully. ‘But yes. That’s what it is.’

The waiter, a brisk antipodean in a long leather apron, brought glasses of iced water. Jack picked his up and took a long swallow. ‘So,’ he said. ‘What’s it in aid of, exactly?’

She hugged her menu and leaned forwards.

‘Well, you know what we’re about, presumably.’

‘Er… heart disease?’

‘Exactly. Though in its broadest sense. I mean, we are about raising money for heart disease – well, not
for
heart disease, of course. We don’t organise food drops of saturated fats or anything. Ha ha. But more for the support of families whose lives have been touched by heart disease, which is slightly different.’

‘Sort of “if you or a member of your family has been affected by any of the issues raised in this programme” type of thing, then.’

She picked up her glass and sipped from it, nodding.

‘Exactly. I mean, we do give a lot for research, but our more high-profile activities are all about one-on-one support. We handle a lot of individual cases. You know, support for families when, oh, I don’t know, someone has to have bypass surgery or something. Financial support. Respite care. That sort of thing. It’s a very broad remit. But that’s not my area really. I’m in fundraising, of course.’

‘Of course. And this is a fairly ambitious fundraiser, by the sound of it. And your baby, I take it?’

She beamed at him. ‘
Exactly
,’ she said again. Jack was enjoying the novelty of being in the company of someone who leapt on everything he said with such enthusiasm instead of saying ‘well, no’, or ‘not quite’ or ‘hmm’.

‘So, Cinderella,’ he said. ‘Where do I fit in?’

Her handbag did not look like the kind that would house anything more bulky than a purse and a lipstick, but it clearly did.

‘Excuse the scrawl,’ she said, unfolding several creased sheets of A4 and simultaneously shunting various condiments out of the way. ‘And ignore the back. They’re old scripts from
Pobol Y Cwm
. One of the girls in the office gets them for scrap.’ The waiter returned and wanted to know, though clearly not desperately, what they wanted to have for their lunch.

‘I’ll have the – oh, sorry. Are we having starters?’ she asked. Jack nodded. ‘Right. The goujons with the chilli jam to start and for my main course I’ll have the goat’s cheese and caramelised onion tart. It’s a starter as well,’ she added, presumably just in case the waiter wasn’t fully conversant with the contents of his own employer’s menu, which Jack had to concede was a possibility, ‘but I’ll have it for my main course – oh, in fact, thinking about it, instead of the chilli jam do you think I could just have some mayonnaise? That’s with the starter, OK? Thanks.’

Jack hoped the waiter did shorthand. ‘Tortillas and dips and double egg and chips, please,’ he said.

‘Fat chips or skinny chips?’ asked the waiter, still scribbling.

‘Fat chips.’

‘Good choice,’ observed Hope. ‘Cutting down the surface area, that’s the thing.’ She grinned again. For someone so immersed in the less palatable end of the healthcare spectrum she seemed a very jolly person. She seemed to be perpetually on the verge of emitting a big, throaty laugh.

‘Anyway,’ she went on, sliding a finger over her notes. Her nails were not coloured but very shiny. ‘You probably already worked out that having taken on such an ambitious project – and it is ambitious for us, I can tell you, because we’re only a very small charity – what we really need to secure, to get it off the ground, is some serious backing from a nice well-heeled corporation and a big name, of course, to get us noticed.’

‘A “big name”, eh?’ He raised his fingers to put it in quote marks. ‘But no luck as yet?’

She shook her head.

‘But then you lost your trainer and figured what the hell. A bird in the hand… ’

She did laugh now, a big boomy laugh that filled up the airspace between them and made her hair jiggle in little scythes around her chin.

‘Er… exactly,’ she said.

In the ninety or so seconds that followed, Jack found himself in the unusual and rather enjoyable position of being with someone who was plainly hoping the ground would swallow them up. She was only joking, really she was. Though if she was being scrupulously honest she never much listened to Radio Wales, so no, she didn’t actually know who he was before she met him, but someone called Simon, who was apparently in the accounts department where she worked, did listen to his show and said it was very good. And that it wasn’t true that she’d tried lots of people and they’d all turned her down, because they’d not actually got to that stage in the planning yet. (She was blushing by now.) But that she had to concede that had they got to that stage in the planning then, no, she wouldn’t have thought of him because how could she when she’d never heard of him? And, truth be known, she’d already composed a sort of list in her head and she’d thought she might approach the woman who did the weather on HTV – you know, what was her name, Emma… Emma Hepplewhite, that was it. Not because she really knew who she was either, but because her mother went to flower club with her mother and thought she might be able to swing it for her, but then she had lost her trainer and he’d found it and picked it up and Madeleine – who was the boss there, apparently – had come up with the idea that it being a trainer and their fun run being, well, a fun run, the two things went rather well together and this would be a perfect opportunity to get someone big-league on side, and perhaps some sustained radio coverage in the build up, and therefore more in the way of sponsorship perhaps than they would otherwise, and… and…

‘And… well,’ she said at last, grinding to a halt and still slightly pink around the cheekbones. ‘That’s me. Dig me a hole and I’ll fall in it for you.’ She laughed again, this time in a less voluble and rather pleasingly embarrassed way. And Jack knew at that moment that he had the upper hand. He hadn’t articulated to himself how or when having the upper hand in this encounter was going to benefit him specifically, just that not being on the back foot in a conversation with a member of the opposite sex – and one in black suede boots, moreover – was an exceedingly pleasant position to find himself in.

‘So,’ he said, clasping his hands together on the table and smiling benignly at her. ‘What do you want me to do, exactly?’

Jack had, in the last two years, opened a village fête, an out-of-town designer outlet mall, a school science block (though that didn’t really count, as it was Ollie’s school), a dog training outfit and a garden centre. Oh, and he’d given a speech at the Cougar’s prize-giving evening, but that didn’t count either, as it was Ollie’s football team. Hardly an illustrious list, particularly given that five years and a morning slot earlier, he had been receiving requests to do such things almost weekly. Still, a fun run was a first.

She was consulting the handwritten list on the table in front of her. There were a row of little squiggled asterisks acting as bullet points down the side of the page.

‘We were rather hoping,’ she said, ‘that we could get you on board. We’re going to be producing the publicity material soon – you know, the flyers and sponsorship forms and so on?’ Jack nodded to indicate that he did. ‘And we’d love it if we could put a picture of you on the front, with a quote, perhaps – you know, that sort of thing. Valentine. Hearts. And… well. Hmm. Anyway. Obviously I don’t know where the BBC would stand on things financially, but, I mean, we really are the bottom of the heap as far as charities go – heart disease just isn’t sexy, I’m afraid – and they do do Children in Need, don’t they, so they wouldn’t have any objection to supporting the event through your show, would they?’ Jack said he didn’t think they would. ‘And there’s the event itself, of course. We’re pencilled in for an early evening start, but that’s still negotiable. I mean, we’d be anxious to fit in with whatever suits you best. Assuming you’d be… well. That’s about the size of it.’ She smiled hopefully at him.

‘I’ll have to think about it. Check my schedule and so on,’ he said. ‘But that all sounds do-able on the face of it.’

‘Does it?’ She looked pleased. ‘And we’d like you to present the prizes and so on.’

He nodded.

She’d got to the end of her list by now and was just folding it up when the waiter brought their starters. The polo-necked top had turned out to be a dress. A soft, short thing – there were several inches of leg between the hem and the boots – which was unadorned bar a thin gold chain necklace with a chunky ring hanging from it.

She wasn’t twenty-seven, she wasn’t blonde, she wasn’t leggy. On the other hand, Jack found himself musing as he studied her, she
was
rather pretty. And she was rather sweet too. ‘So,’ he said, this time with absolute conviction. ‘How long have you been divorced?’

‘Oh God oh God oh God’ said Hope, pulling off a boot. ‘What a prat.’

‘Was he? I always thought –’

‘Not Jack Valentine!’ she said with feeling. ‘Me! He must have thought I was the doziest, most irritating person on the planet.’