Past Secrets

Faye breathed an inward sigh of relief at this rapid turn in the conversation. It meant she didn’t need to discuss the concept of Amber’s father waiting patiently for her in heaven. Not that he’d have waited. Patience had never been one of his virtues.

It was because saying he was there already would be a lie and now that Amber was older, it was getting harder and harder to lie. Adults lied to children all the time, little white ones for their own good. But time had turned Faye’s white lie into a giant black one and now she couldn’t stomach repeating it any more.

‘I think the whole problem with heaven is that nobody really knows anything about it,’ she said, copping out. ‘You’re supposed to believe even though you don’t know.’

Amber grimaced.

‘That’s what the whole faith thing is about,’ Faye added, feeling she was on shaky ground here. ‘Believing when you don’t know for sure.’ Like you’ve always believed me, she thought guiltily. ‘You could ask Stan. He studied theology.’

‘The thing is, you have one person who’s right for you, your soul mate, the one who’s waiting for you,’ Amber said. ‘But if they die, how can you meet another soul mate? There’s only going to be one person who makes you feel complete, who you can’t wait to see and talk to, right? Isn’t there? People say that, anyway,’ Amber added hurriedly. She bent her head to her book again.

A few more minutes passed by and Faye tugged listlessly at a couple of weedy plants, obsessing over her daughter’s vision of her dad happily waiting in heaven for Faye to turn up. Amber never needed to know, did she?

‘Ella said something totally crazy the other day, Mum.’ Amber broke the silence.

‘She said that maybe you have to pretend not to be independent and that’s what men like. That’s crap, isn’t it? Why should you pretend? I told her, Ella, you have to be you.’ Amber was earnest, sounding like a much-married matron explaining the ways of the world to a teenage bride.

‘That doesn’t sound like Ella.’ Faye knew her daughter’s best friend as if she were her own daughter. Like Amber, Ella was clever, sweet, responsible and had never caused a moment’s trouble in her life. ‘What’s come over her?’

‘Giovanni’s new girlfriend, that’s who,’ Amber went on. ‘Dannii. With two i’s and little hearts over each of them. The hearts are very important. She’s messing up Ella’s head and saying that the reason Ella and me don’t have boyfriends is because we’re too clever and too independent and guys don’t like that.’ Amber snorted dismissively.

Giovanni was Ella’s youngest brother and Faye had heard about this new girlfriend enough times for alarm bells to tinkle gently. Giovanni was in his second year in college, handsome like all Ella’s half-Italian family, and Faye knew Amber had a mild crush on him, despite the fact that she said he was boring. The appearance of an actual steady girlfriend was certainly a catalyst for Amber to realise this. Faye wouldn’t have minded if her daughter’s first serious boyfriend was someone like Giovanni: someone she knew all about and approved of.

‘Dannii’s OK-looking, I suppose,’ Amber conceded, grudgingly, ‘but she’s a pain and she’s round Ella’s house all the time talking this crap. She’s doing business studies, Mum, right, and when she’s with Giovanni, she behaves like she’s had her brain sucked out. You don’t get into business studies in college if you’re a moron, so I don’t know who she’s kidding. Well,’ she added gloomily, ‘Giovanni appears to be falling for it. Big dope. Dannii told Ella that Giovanni’s a really hot guy. You can’t say that to your boyfriend’s little sister! Your brother is so sexy. Yeuch. That’s disgusting. I can’t stand her. She hasn’t a clue about anything.’

Faye said nothing for a while. She gazed at her work so far. She’d definitely pulled up some genuine flowers along with the weeds. How was it that carefully planted flowers could be ripped up easily, while unwanted weeds needed incredible force to shift them?

‘If you act stupid with a guy, he’s only going out with you because of how you look,’ Faye said eventually.

‘Exactly what I said,’ Amber pointed out. ‘Oh, I suppose Ella was only thinking out loud. She couldn’t act dumb, anyway. She’s going to come top of our year in the exams.’

Talk of the exams made Amber stare wearily down at her maths book again. ‘That’s not love. Love is different. If any guy’s only interested in what a girl’s like on the outside, then he’s not what you want, is he?’

It was half question, half statement.

‘That’s what I think,’ Faye said decisively. This was safe ground: she’d been telling Amber to appreciate her worth all her life. ‘If he doesn’t love you for who you are, then he’s not the right person for you. Have you and Ella met any hot guys?’ she asked lightly. She’d love to ask if Amber thought she might fancy Giovanni.

‘No,’ said Amber hastily. If her mother hadn’t been so busy being thankful at the change of subject, she might have noticed just how hastily Amber had spoken. But Faye didn’t notice. She was pulling at weeds and she didn’t see the hint of red on her daughter’s cheeks.

‘Summer Street is not exactly awash with hot men my age.’ Amber fanned herself with her book as if the sun was responsible for the heat suffusing her complexion. ‘Ella’s road is just as bad. The whole neighbourhood’s full of nerds and middle-aged men with beer bellies who suck them in when we walk past.’

Savage but accurate, Faye thought with a smothered laugh. Amber and Ella’s teenage beauty made them a stunning pair, Amber all tawny hair and those spectacular eyes contrasting with Ella’s flashing dark Italian looks. Though they’d never have believed it, they were gorgeous – a scary prospect when you were the mother of one of them. But Amber was so sensible. Faye had taught her well. How not to make mistakes, how not to be led by other people. Except, Faye thought, she’d never explained to her daughter how her mother knew these lessons were so important.

‘The people from number 42 have sold up,’ Faye said breezily. ‘Who knows, a handsome father-son combo might have bought it.’

‘Doubt it. But hey, if you’re right, you could go out with the dad. Wouldn’t that be great?’ Amber was delighted. ‘You could come home and tell me all about it. And I’d laugh and warn you not to let him get past first base on the first date!’

Faye grabbed a nettle by mistake and gasped with pain.

‘Ouch. That was stupid,’ she muttered lamely.

‘It’s a serious subject, Mum,’ Amber said gravely. Just to show how serious, she sat up cross-legged and gazed at her mother, her face solemn. ‘I know how much you’ve given up for me but I’m an adult now and you can have your life back. I’ll be going to college. You need to do your own thing.’

The little speech sounded like one Amber had been working on for ages and Faye almost grabbed the nettle again for the comfort of physical pain against this shocking emotional stabbing sensation. She was meant to be urging Amber gently into the world, not the other way round.

Seventeen-year-olds were supposed to be too involved with their own problems to notice their mothers’. If Amber was urging her to get a social life, she must be a total basket case. Well, Faye’s own mother thought so, too.

‘Come on, Faye, don’t bury yourself. You’re not dead yet,’ Josie had said many years before, and it had triggered the one big row between them since before Amber was born.

‘Leave me alone to live my life my way! You don’t know what I want,’ Faye had said furiously.

She’d never forgotten what her mother had said. Josie hadn’t understood at all. This life with Amber wasn’t being buried: it was living peacefully and contentedly without the interference of any man.

‘I’m just saying think about it,’ Amber went on. ‘I’ll be gone and I’ll worry about you, Mum. I won’t be here so much and you’ll need to keep busy. And I don’t mean doing overtime,’ she added sternly. ‘I mean having fun. Getting out. Going on dates. Grace would love to set you up on a blind date at one of her dinners, you know she would. Sure, you’d probably meet a few men you’d hate, but you never know, you might find romance.’

Lecture over, she went back to her maths book, leaving Faye feeling that their roles had been reversed. She’d been the one receiving the lecture on life from her daughter.

Amber’s remarks had been running through Faye’s head since Saturday afternoon.

Climbing the steps to the swimming pool complex, Faye wondered, was this all normal teenager stuff: get a life, Mum, because I’m going to and I don’t want to worry about you. Or was there something else?

Faye went into the women’s changing room, switched off her music and changed into her plain black swimsuit quickly. She did everything quickly and efficiently.

‘Economical and precise,’ Grace said, which was high praise indeed because Grace, Faye’s boss in Little Island Recruitment, turned efficiency into an art form.

‘Economical and precise or obsessional?’ Faye wondered from time to time when she was interviewing in her office and saw candidates staring at her pristine desk with everything exactly at right angles to everything else. A cluttered desk meant a cluttered mind and Faye had never had time for a cluttered mind.

But didn’t it signify an obsessional mind if you arranged all your paperclips to lie lengthwise in their compartment in the desk organiser?

She stowed her navy skirt suit in a locker and pulled on a swimhat. She never looked at herself in the mirror like some women in the changing room, anxiously making sure they didn’t look awful in clinging Lycra or admiring a physique honed by laps.

At the age of forty, and carrying probably two stone more than she should, Faye was no fan of mirrors. They lied. You could be scarred to bits on the inside and look beautiful outside.

She walked out of the changing room, shivered under the cool shower for a moment, then slipped into the pool’s medium-fast lane where she pushed off into the water.

The Olympic swimming selectors were unlikely to be calling on her any time soon, but over the last six months she’d worked her way up to swimming sixteen lengths each time and she knew she was getting faster, no matter how unprofessional her forward crawl. She felt more toned too but that wasn’t the primary reason for the exercise.

What she loved about swimming was the solitude of the pool. Even if the lanes were full and every noise was amplified by the water, when her head was down and her body was slicing through the pool, she felt utter peace.

This was her time, time for Faye alone.

Six months previously, when she’d paid for the swimming complex membership, she’d realised it was the first time in seventeen years she’d indulged herself in something that didn’t directly benefit Amber. Even the CD player she used was an old one that Amber had discarded when she’d saved up her pocket money for an iPod.

The money she’d spent on the membership fee could usefully have gone somewhere else. Amber would need a whole new expensive kit for art college, and there would surely be trips to galleries abroad. There never seemed to be enough money for all the things Faye thought Amber should have.

But the pool had called to her.

‘I wish I was into swimming,’ Grace had begun to say on the days that Faye took an early lunch.

Grace and her husband Neil ran the recruitment company together. Grace regularly said they couldn’t have done it without Faye, and Neil, who actually worked very little, was smugly convinced its success was all down to him.

‘Swimming sounds so easy, swim, swim and the weight falls off,’ Grace had said.

Faye grinned, knowing that Grace liked the idea of exercise and the results that exercise provided but wasn’t that keen on actually doing it.

‘Is it better than running, do you think?’ Grace went on. ‘I’d quite like to run but I’ve weak ankles. Swimming could be the answer.’

‘You’d get bored in a week,’ Faye told her. Grace was a chataholic and got anxious if she hadn’t had at least four friends phone her a day in between her hectic schedule of business calls. ‘There’s nothing sociable about swimming. You put your head into the water and plough on. You can’t hear anyone and you can only see what’s ahead of you.’

It was like praying, she often thought, although she didn’t say that to Grace, who’d have thought she was abusing recreational pharmaceuticals. But it seemed like that to Faye – here it was only you and God as you moved porpoise-like through the water, nobody else.

‘Really? No Baywatch male lifeguards?’

‘I haven’t noticed any,’ Faye said drily.

‘Well, who needs a Baywatch lifeguard anyway?’ Grace said.

Which was, Faye knew, her way of moving on to another line of conversation. Because Grace, although happily married, had many fantasies about a muscle-bound hunk who’d adore her. It was strange when Faye, who’d been on her own for most of the past seventeen years, went out of her way not to notice men at all. She was with Billie Holiday on the whole men issue: they were too much trouble. And she’d learned that the hard way.

Lunchtimes could be busy in Little Island Recruitment because that was when staff from other offices got the opportunity to slope off, march into Little Island, relate the sad tale of their current employment and discuss the possibility of moving elsewhere where their talents would finally be appreciated. But today when Faye arrived back from her swim, damp-haired, pleasurably tired out and dressed in her old reliable M & S navy suit, reception was empty except for Jane behind the reception desk.

‘Hi, Faye,’ said Jane cheerily and held up a sheaf of pink call slips. ‘I’ve got messages for you.’

The office was very high-tech and designed to impress. Nobody could fail to be dazzled by the glass lift, the stiletto-crunching black marble floors, or the enormous modern-art canvas that dominated the reception. Faye thought the picture looked like what two amorous whales might paint if they’d been covered in midnight-blue emulsion and left to thump around for a while on a massive canvas. But having an artistic daughter, she understood that this was probably not the effect the artist had anticipated.

‘People are scared of modern art,’ Grace said gleefully when the painting had first been hung.

‘It can be intimidating,’ Faye pointed out bluntly. ‘But this one’s a bit dull, to be honest.’

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ sighed Grace. ‘But it says we’ve arrived. We’ve come a long way from that awful dive of an office we started out in, remember.’

Faye remembered. Ten years ago, Faye had been broke after a series of dead-end jobs, and was desperately trying to get her foot on an employment ladder that didn’t involve late-night bar work. She’d been so grateful to Grace for taking a chance on her in the fledgling recruitment business she had made sure Grace never regretted it. Nobody in Little Island worked harder than Faye. The two had forged a professional friendship that grew stronger every year.

‘The ex-barmaid and the ex-banking queen, who’d have thought we’d make it?’ Faye used to say, smiling. She didn’t let many people past her barriers, but Grace was one of the few. What if Grace was a social butterfly, was married to the obnoxious Neil, and could air-kiss with the best of them? Despite all that, she was a real person. True, kind, honest. Faye trusted her, which made Grace part of a very small and exclusive club.

‘You should say “ex-beverage administrator”,’ Grace chided. ‘Besides, you should have been running that bar. If you’d had the childcare and the opportunity, you would have been.’

Grace knew Faye’s history and how she’d worked in dead-end jobs so she could take care of Amber herself. She knew most of Faye’s secrets, but not all.

Faye took her messages, walked past what was now dubbed ‘Flipper Does Dallas’, went up to her office and got ready for the afternoon meeting.

At three in the afternoon, on Mondays and Wednesdays, there was a staff meeting in Little Island Recruitment. Grace said it kept everyone in touch with what the whole company was doing.

They’d been holding it for nine years and it was a marvellous idea because it made every single member of staff feel both personally involved in the company and valued by it.

‘We’re only as good as our last job,’ Grace would remind the staff at the meeting, where there was always a buzz of conversation, until the apple and cinnamon muffins came in. ‘This is the think tank where we come up with ideas to improve what we do.’

The staff all believed the idea for the meeting had been Grace’s. After all, she’d been a banking hotshot for years before starting up the agency, and could write a book on how to get ahead in life.

It could be called Who Moved My Emery Board? joked Kevin who was in charge of accounts. Grace’s nails were things of beauty: ten glossy beige talons that clacked in a military tattoo on the conference-room desk when she was irritated.

Clack, clack, clack.

In fact, Faye had suggested the staff meeting shortly after she joined.

Grace felt that some benign presence had been on her side the day Faye walked into her life. Grace may have been the one with the financial acumen and the qualifications as long as her fake-tanned arms, but Faye was the one who’d made the agency work.

On this afternoon, nineteen members of staff sat around the conference table and worked their way through the agenda.

Today’s meeting focused on the few sticky accounts where the jobs and the jobseekers didn’t match. There were always a few. Little Island had an ever-growing client roster, with just three companies who created the problems, people for whom no applicant was good enough and who went through staff faster than Imelda Marcos went through shoe cream. Chief among the difficult clients, known as VIPs, in-house code for Very Ignorant People, was William Brooks.

It was wiser to transfer a call from him by saying, ‘It’s Mr Brooks, one of our VIP clients,’ and risk being overheard, than to say, ‘It’s that horrible bastard from Brooks FX Stockbroking on the phone and I’m not talking to him, so you’d better.’

William Brooks, the aforementioned company’s managing director, was yet again looking for a personal assistant. This was his third search in six months, the previous two assistants having decided to leave his employment abruptly.

Little Island also supplied temps, and only that morning, Faye had been on the phone to Mr Brooks’s current temp who said she was giving it a month more, ‘Because the money’s so good, Faye, but after that, I’m out of here. He’s a pig. No, strike that. Unfair to pigs.’

‘We have no PAs on our books that will do for him.’ Philippa, who was responsible for Mr Brooks, scanned through the file wearily. ‘Out of last week’s interviews, we found two wonderful candidates and he doesn’t like either of them. I don’t know what he wants.’

‘I do. He’s after a Charlize Theron doppelgänger who can type, operate Excel and doesn’t mind picking up his dry-cleaning or listening to his dirty jokes,’ said Faye.

‘If such a person existed, she wouldn’t want to work for a fat, balding executive who goes through secretaries faster than I get through Silk Cut Ultra,’ Philippa said with feeling. She hated William Brooks. The only person who seemed to be able to handle him was Faye, who somehow made William rein in the worst parts of his personality and who stared him down into submission. Philippa wished she could glare at men in the steely way Faye did. Mind you, the steely gaze seemed to scare guys off too, because in the years Philippa had known Faye, she’d never had a man around. She couldn’t imagine Faye with a guy, anyway. There was something about Faye, something about the look on her face when the computer repairman came in and flirted with everyone in the office, which suggested Faye was one of those women who had no interest in men.

‘It’s a prestigious account,’ Faye pointed out gently. ‘We’ve made a lot of money out of Brooks FX and having them as clients looks great on our prospectus. William is the fly in the ointment but it would be sensible to work with him.’

Recruitment was a delicate balance. Finding the right person for the right job didn’t sound too hard in principle, but, as Faye had discovered during her ten years in the industry, it could be impossible in practice. The right person in the right job might suddenly realise that her boss (sweet on recruitment day) was a control freak who insisted on just two loo breaks a day, didn’t allow hot drinks at the desk in case coffee spilled on the keyboard and thought that paying a salary meant he owned her, body and soul.

‘The right PA for William Brooks exists,’ Faye said. ‘And we’ll find her.’

‘Only if someone comes up with a PA robot,’ muttered Philippa. ‘They won’t complain if they get their bums pinched.’

‘He’s pinched somebody’s bum?’ This was news to Faye. Difficult clients were one thing, sexual harassment was another.

‘Well…’ Philippa squirmed. She wasn’t supposed to say. The second assistant they’d placed with William had phoned her up in tears.

Faye looked grim. ‘Tell me. Chapter and verse.’

Philippa told her and gained some satisfaction from the steely look on Faye’s face.

‘You’ll talk to him?’ Grace asked warily, also seeing the look.

‘I’ll talk to him,’ Faye agreed.

The women around the table grinned at each other. Mr Brooks was about to be taken down a peg or two. If only they could witness it, but they wouldn’t. Because Faye was so famously discreet.

After the meeting, Faye poured herself another coffee and shut the door to her sanctum.

She loved her job. Recruitment suited her perfectly because it was about placing the right person in the right job and to a woman who liked the towels in her airing cupboard folded just so and in the correct place, it was very satisfying indeed. People were not towels, but life might have been easier if they were.

Over the years, she’d discovered that the main skill was interviewing potential employees and working out whether a certain job and company would suit them. With no training whatsoever, Faye turned out to be a natural at it.

‘It’s like you can work out precisely what sort of person they are from just twenty questions,’ Grace said admiringly.

‘Yes, but you’ve got to know which twenty questions to ask,’ Faye said. She was justifiably proud of her ability, if a little amused. It was odd being successful in business by seeing through people’s façades to the character within, when the biggest problems in her private life had come from being unable to do just that.

‘It’s easy to suss people out when you’re not involved with them,’ she added. ‘You might never have met them before but it’s possible to gauge fairly soon whether someone is hard-working, easy-going, anxious, a team player, whatever.’

In the early days, they only recruited secretarial staff and the competition was vicious, but the combination of Faye’s talent and Grace’s business savvy meant the company took off. Then, there would have been no question of dropping difficult clients: they needed everyone they could get. But not any more, as William Brooks was about to find out. Recruitment was a small business where everybody knew everybody. Faye phoned a couple of her old colleagues, now with other agencies, and asked what the word was on William Brooks. Fifteen minutes later, she hung up the phone a lot wiser.

After a moment or two of deep thought, she dialled the number for Brooks FX. She was put straight through to Mr Brooks, probably because he thought she bore news of a suitable PA with the required Miss World physique.

‘Well,’ he snapped. ‘Found anyone?’

‘I’m not sure Little Island is the right recruitment agency for you,’ Faye began blandly.

‘What?’ He was instantly wrong-footed, she knew. Few agencies could afford to turn down business.

‘As you know, we work with Davidson’s and Marshal McGregor.’ She named the two biggest stockbroking firms in the country, both of which could buy and sell Brooks FX with the contents of their petty cash boxes. ‘And we have excellent relationships with both those companies, but you do appear to have peculiar requirements, Mr Brooks.’