Sleeping With The Boss

‘A fair amount.’

‘You’re not very forthcoming on this chap of yours,’ he said idly. ‘Can’t have been a very interesting job. How long were you there?’

‘Three years.’

‘Three years! My God, he must have been a methodical man. Three years on a book! And one that wasn’t even completed by the time you left.’

‘Oh, yes, he was terribly methodical.’ That was the truth. Henry had indeed been very methodical, despite a charming inclination to side-track down little paths, little reminiscences that brought his recollections to life. ‘And, of course, he wasn’t writing all the time.’ If Victor thought that she had been having an affair with this mysterious stranger, then let him. He should never have assumed that she was fair game as far as his curiosity was concerned anyway.

‘No, I guess he had to work occasionally? To pay the bills?’

‘He did work in between, yes.’ She paused, leaving his unspoken assumptions hanging in the air. ‘Do you mind if I have a quick look at the file on Highfield House?’

Victor glanced at her with a quick smile. ‘Sure. Good idea. You can tell me what you think. We never got around to that, if I recall.’

‘So we didn’t,’ Alice agreed. She stretched back, just managing to grab hold of the file, and began to leaf through it, grateful that Victor was driving and couldn’t read the expression on her face as she scanned the photographs of Highfield House.

It hadn’t changed. The grounds looked as immaculate as she remembered them. There was a picture of James, standing with his back to the house, leaning elegantly against the side of his Land Rover, and her heart gave a little leap of unpleasant recognition. It was difficult to define any sort of expression on his face, but he appeared to have changed very little. Some weight had settled around his middle, but it did very little to detract from the overall impression of good looks. Was he married now? Victor had said nothing to intimate that he was. No Mrs Claydon had been mentioned. On that thought, she snapped shut the folder and returned it to the back seat.

‘Well? What are your thoughts?’

‘It’s a large place. What does the owner expect to do if it’s opened to the public?’

‘Restrict his living quarters to one section of the house. Shouldn’t be too difficult in a house of that size.’

‘I can see why he might need the money,’ Alice said, injecting as much disinterested speculation into her voice as she could. ‘Must cost an arm and a leg running a place that big. The grounds themselves look like a headache. Heaven only knows how many gardeners he would need to employ.’

‘Not as many as in the past. I gather, from the covering letter that was sent, that quite a bit of the land has already been sold off. Still, there are still two formal gardens, including a rose garden, a miniature maze and a small forested area.’

Alice remembered the forested area well. She used to enjoy walking through it in the early evening, after they had stopped working. In spring it was quite beautiful, with the trees coming into bloom, and in autumn the leaves lay like a rich russet carpet on the ground. The three years she had spent there seemed as elusive as a dream, yet as clear as if she had been there yesterday.

She worriedly bit her lip and hoped that James would not overreact when he saw her. If she played her cards right, she might even manoeuvre to confront him on her own, when Victor was safely tucked away somewhere. That way, she could tell him to keep quiet about their relationship, that she had moved on from the past and she did not need reminding of it. He had always, she thought reluctantly, been a very decent sort of person. Things had ended on a sour note but in retrospect that had been mainly her fault. Reading too much into a situation. Not understanding that wealth preferred to stick to its own.

She felt faint with humiliation, even now, as she remembered the surprise and dismay on his face when she had mentioned marriage, commitment, a long-term solution, the apology in his voice as he’d stammered through his explanation. That he wasn’t ready to settle down. Oh, he liked her well enough, and he was basically too decent to say outright what had been written all over his face: that as a long-term proposition she simply was not suitable.

Alice rested her head back against the seat and could feel her heart hammering madly in her chest. She hadn’t thought of that traumatic conversation in years. At first, she had been able to think of nothing else. Every word had burnt itself into her brain until she had thought that she was going mad, but gradually, over time, she had made herself think of other things whenever the temptation to dwell on it had risen inside her.

She had learnt to reduce the entire episode to a philosophical debate. It was the only way that she could put it behind her. It had altered her whole approach to the opposite sex, she had sealed off her emotions behind locked doors, and that was how it would have stayed if fate had not intervened. If Victor Temple had been more sympathetic. She heard him dimly saying something to her and she murmured something in response.

‘What the hell does that mean?’ he asked harshly, breaking into her reverie, and she pulled herself up with a start.

‘For God’s sake, Alice! What turn-off are we supposed to take? That map’s in front of you for a reason!’

‘Sorry.’ She studied the map, not having a clue where they were, and eventually, when she asked him, he pointed out their location with an ultra-polite precision that only thinly veiled his irritation with her.

She was never like this at work. Usually, he had only to ask something once and she caught on, competently carrying out his instructions. But then, her head had never felt as woolly as it did now.

‘Look,’ he said, after she had stumbled out their route, frowning hard in concentration because her brain just didn’t seem to want to co-operate. ‘I don’t know what the hell happened up here, but it was years ago. Haven’t you managed to put it behind you by now?’

‘Of course I have,’ she said quickly. ‘I’m just a little rattled at coming back here after all this time.’

‘Must have been quite a miserable business if it’s managed to keep you away from your home for so long.’

Alice could feel her defences going into place. She had been a private person for such a long time that the ability to confide was alien to her. And anyway, Victor Temple, she thought, was the last person on earth she would wish to confide in.

She glanced across at him and wondered whether she would have been susceptible to that animal charm of his which other women appeared to find so irresistible, if experience hadn’t taught her a valuable lesson.

Hard on the heels of that came another, disturbing image. The image of him in bed, making love to her. She looked away hurriedly. Thank heavens she was immune to his charm, she thought. If James had been a catastrophic mistake, then the likes of Victor Temple would have been ten times worse. He was just in a different league, the sort of man destined to be a danger as far as women were concerned.

She licked her lips and put such silly conjecture to the back of her mind.

‘He probably doesn’t even live in the area any longer,’ she heard him say.

‘Who?’

‘The man you had your affair with. The one you were working for.’

She knew that he was taking a shot in the dark, and she opened her mouth to contradict him, then closed it. Let him go right ahead and think that. It suited her.

‘I can’t imagine you having a wild, passionate fling,’ he said with slow, amused speculation. He looked across at her and their eyes met for a brief moment, before he turned away with a little smile on his lips.

‘What sort of time scale do we have for this project?’

‘Not a very adroit change of subject, Alice.’

She could discern the laughter in his voice and was unreasonably nettled by it. Just as she had been earlier on. He had categorised her, stuck her on a dusty shelf somewhere. Another spinster-to-be, past her sell-by date. Age had nothing to do with it but, reading between the lines, she was, to him, so unappealing sexually that she disqualified herself from the marriage stakes.

‘I don’t have to explain my private life to you.’

‘Do you to anyone? Is there another man in your life now?’

‘No, and I’m quite happy with the situation, as it happens.’

‘Really?’ He was enjoying this conversation. She could hear it in his voice. ‘I thought all women wanted to get married, settle down, have children. Keep the home fires burning, as they say.’

Alice winced inwardly at that.

‘Not all, no. This is the twentieth century, in case you hadn’t noticed. There are lots of women around who prefer to cultivate their working lives.’ She had never spoken to him like this before, but then their conversations had never touched on the personal before. Or at least not this personal. On a Friday he might ask her, in passing, what plans she had for the weekend, but he had never shown the least interest in delving any further.

‘I think that’s something of a myth,’ he said comfortably. ‘I personally think that most women would give an arm and a leg for the security of a committed relationship.’

Alice didn’t say anything, not trusting herself to remain polite.

‘Wouldn’t you agree?’ he persisted, still smiling, as if pleasantly energised by the fact that her common sense was struggling to hold back a desire to argue with him.

She shouldn’t say anything. She knew that. She should bite back the urge to retort and, if she had to speak, should take refuge in something utterly bland and innocuous.

‘You seem to find ones who don’t want committed relationships,’ she was horrified to hear herself say.

‘What on earth do you mean?’

Alice wished that she could vanish very quickly down a hole. She had gone too far. There was nothing in his voice to imply that he was annoyed, but he would be. Cordial though he could be, he kept a certain amount of space around himself and barging in with observations on his private life was the most tactless thing she could have done. He was her employer after all, and she would do well to remember that. She could have kicked herself.

‘Nothing!’ She almost shouted it at him in an attempt to retrieve her remark. ‘I didn’t mean anything.’

‘Oh, yes, you did. Go on. Explain yourself. I won’t fly into a fit and break both your arms, you know.’

Alice looked warily at him, the way she might have looked at a tiger that appeared friendly enough for the moment, but could well pounce at any minute.

‘I—I was being sarcastic,’ she stammered eventually. ‘It was uncalled for.’

‘Right on at least one of those counts, but, before you retreat behind that cool facade of yours, tell me what you were thinking when you said that. I’m interested.’

Interested, she thought suddenly, and unlikely to be offended because she was just his secretary, and when you got right down to it her opinions would not matter to him one way or the other. She felt stupidly hurt by that.

‘Okay,’ she said with energy. ‘You said that most women want commitment. In which case, how do you feel about breaking hearts when you go out with them and refuse to commit yourself?’ This was not boss/secretary conversation. This was not what they should be talking about. They should be discussing the route they were taking, the weather, holidays, the cinema, anything but this.

‘I give them a great deal of enjoyment.’

Alice could well imagine what nature of enjoyment he had in mind, and more graphic, curiously disturbing images floated into her head.

‘Well, then, that’s fine.’

‘But would be more fine if I slotted a ring on a finger?’

‘Not for you, I gather.’

‘Or necessarily for them. What makes you think that they don’t tire of me before I have a chance to tire of them?’ He looked across at her and grinned at the expression on her face. ‘Well, now, I expect I should take that as a compliment.’ Which made the colour crawl into her face, because she knew that he could see perfectly well what she was thinking. That he was the sort of man a woman could not possibly tire of. When, she wondered in confusion, had she started thinking like that?

‘I recognise where we are now,’ she said. She closed the map on her lap. ‘We should be coming into the town in about fifteen minutes. Highfield House is on the other side. I can show you which signs to follow.’ She stared straight ahead of her, and before he could return to their conversation she began talking about the town in great detail, pointing out places she remembered as they drove slowly through, covering up the lapse in their mutual detachment with a monologue on the charms of the town she had left behind.

As they headed away from the town and back out towards the countryside, she began mentally bracing herself for what lay ahead of her.

The sight of Highfield House, rising up in the distance like a matriarch overlooking her possessions, made her feel faint with apprehension. Her voice dried up.

‘Impressive, isn’t it?’ he murmured, misreading her sudden silence.

‘Yes, it is.’

‘And you can breathe a sigh of relief. We’re out of the town now and I take it there were no sightings of your past...?’

‘No. No sightings.’ Breathe a sigh of relief? If only!

CHAPTER THREE

THE car pulled smoothly up into the huge courtyard outside Highfield House and Alice fought the urge to slide very low down into her seat, so that she would not be visible to whoever happened to approach them.

Which, as she saw with a great wave of relief, wasn’t James, but a girl of about nineteen, dressed in a pair of jeans and a jumper and holding a duster in one hand. She pulled open the door, stood there with one hand on her hip, and waited for them to emerge. Alice wondered what had happened to the staff who had been in attendance when Henry had been alive. There had been a middle-aged couple who had lived in permanently, and three cleaners who came in twice a week, in addition to the gardeners and a cook.

Victor was the first to open his car door and as he walked up to the house Alice hurriedly sprang into action and flew behind him, sticking on her jacket in the process.

Up close, the girl looked even younger. Her yellowish hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and she was chewing gum.

‘We’re here to see James Claydon,’ Victor said, and was met with frank, adolescent appraisal.

‘Not here.’

‘And where is he?’ he asked stonily.

‘Gone to the vet’s with the dog.’

‘The blasted man could have called and asked us to drive up another day,’ he muttered darkly to Alice, not much caring whether the girl at the door heard or not.

‘A bit of an emergency, it was,’ the girl explained helpfully, straightening up. ‘Anna, that’s the dog, got into some bother with one of the fences out towards the paddocks and the vet said to bring her down immediately. He should be back, he said, in about forty minutes and in the meantime I’m to show you where you’ll be staying.’

She had now turned her frank appraisal to Alice, but after a few seconds she resumed her fascinated inspection of Victor, who had stuck his hands in his pockets and was scowling.

‘Brought any bags?’ the girl said brightly, and Alice smiled at her. It wasn’t her fault that she had to deliver a perfectly acceptable message to someone whose tolerance level of other people was close to zero. It had also cheered her up, momentarily, not to be confronted with James.

‘In the car,’ she said. ‘Shall we fetch them?’

‘And I’ll show you up. By the way,’ the girl said, focusing a little more on Alice and steering clear of the gloweringly silent Victor, ‘I’m Jen. I come up here to clean twice a week.’

‘Must take you for ever,’ Alice said as Victor strode towards the car to get their bags. ‘I’m surprised there aren’t any...staff...’ What on earth happened to all of them?

‘Used to be. God, I hate chewing-gum after a while.’ She removed a piece of tissue from her jeans pocket, folded the chewing-gum inside it, and returned it to her pocket. ‘But now there’s just me, and of course the gardeners. Actually, it’s not too bad. I only have to clean part of the house; the rest is closed off. And James, that’s Mr Claydon, isn’t fussy. In fact, he’s hardly up here. Comes and goes. You know.’

She led the way up the stairs, relishing the break in whatever it was she had been doing, chatting interminably the whole way up and finally depositing them in their bedrooms.

‘I’ll be seeing you later,’ she said cheerfully to Alice, who looked around her room, grateful that it had not been her old one.

‘What?’ She looked vaguely at Jen.

‘I’m here for a couple of days. Cooking, you know.’ She propped herself against the door-frame and grinned. ‘Home economics was the only thing I did well at school. My cooking’s a darn sight better than my cleaning.’ She flicked the duster unenergetically at the door-frame as though swatting a fly. ‘More fun, too.’

As soon as she had disappeared, Alice positioned herself by the bedroom window and sat on the windowseat, staring out. The house, she thought, hadn’t changed internally at all. It didn’t seem as though even an ornament had been rearranged. But thoughts of the house were not on her mind. She wanted to wait for James. As soon as his car pulled up, she intended to run down to meet him so that she could steer him clear of mentioning anything to Victor that might indicate that they once knew each other. That, she decided, had the saving grace of both safeguarding a part of her life which she had no intention of exposing, and doing away with the awkwardness of a meeting neither of them would have wanted.

She had rehearsed the conversation in her head a million times by the time the Range Rover pulled up outside. It seemed like for ever, but when she looked at her watch she realised that it had been under forty minutes.

For a few seconds she watched as he got out of the car, released the dog from the boot; then she headed down the stairs quickly, taking them two at a time and looking around to make sure that she wasn’t being observed by Victor.

Why, she wondered, did it matter so much whether Victor found out about her past or not? Everyone had a past and nearly everyone’s past had a skeleton of sorts in it.

But, for some reason, it did. For some reason she found the idea of him knowing too much about her unsettling. It was as if some part of her suspected that if the distance between them was eroded, then something would be unleashed, although she wasn’t sure what.

She almost ran into James as he was tossing his jacket over the huge mahogany table in the hall. He spun around at the sound of her footsteps, no doubt expecting it to be Jen, and whatever it was he had been about to say became a strangled gasp of shock. They stared at one another, speechless, and finally he said. ‘My God! Alice Carter! What on earth are you doing here?’

Confronting your fears was always easier than fearing the confrontation. Alice looked at him and thought, He’s just a man, a jigsaw piece in a puzzle that has its place amongst all the other pieces. And her memories of him had somehow given him a status that reality, now, was quickly dissipating. He was neither as tall nor as good-looking as she had remembered. He looked weaker than she remembered, less of a force to be reckoned with. She hardly even felt bitter now, although time might well have succeeded in accomplishing that.

‘I have to have a word with you, James,’ she said urgently, glancing over her shoulder.

‘But what...what are you doing here?’ He looked dazed.

‘In the kitchen,’ Alice said, grabbing his arm and halfpulling him in the general direction of the kitchen.

She half-expected to find Jen there, relaxing with a cup of coffee and probably smoking a cigarette, but when they got there it was empty. She looked around her, struck by the familiarity and the strangeness of it all. The same weathered bottle-green Aga, the same solid wooden units, the same huge pine table, even. Nothing was out of place. It looked as though it was seldom used, as no doubt was the case if what his cleaner had said was true.

‘I can’t believe it’s you, Ali,’ he said, regaining his power of coherent speech. ‘My God, you’ve changed. You’ve had your hair cut!’ He made it sound as though, in four years, having one’s hair cut was a reckless adventure.

‘Sit down, James.’

He sat down and continued to stare at her in the manner of someone who was looking at a ghost. The fact that he had been caught off guard also helped to boost her confidence. She had spent days agonising over what her reaction would be when she finally saw him for the first time in years, dreading the memories that would surface. A sense of purpose had melted all that into the background.

‘You look great,’ he said, observing her with the same boyish enthusiasm that had won her over in the first place; except now it did nothing for her at all. Oh, he had been enthusiastic all right, until it had come to the crunch. Was it any wonder that her impressions of men tended to be a little jaded? If and when she ever found a man, she would make sure that he was a solid, dependable type. Charm was something that she would steer well clear of.

‘I’m here with Victor Temple,’ Alice said, cutting short any temptation he might have had to go over old times. ‘I work for him.’

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