His Girl Monday to Friday Page 9

  ‘Not at all,’ said Charles. ‘I’m thinking about what I’d do in his position. In his position I’d be out the door by now.’

  In fact, thought Barbara, maybe she should practise now when he wasn’t trying to brush her off.

  She put her mouth up and kissed him lingeringly. He laughed and kissed her back. There, that wasn’t so bad! She’d now had an extra kiss that he’d never meant to give her, she thought with satisfaction. In future years, when Charles was up to girl number 10,332, and Barbara had long since left the company, she could come back from time to time, walk into his office and kiss him before he could stop her.

  ‘Barbara,’ said Charles, ‘you’re lovely, and I could stand here doing this all day, but we’ve got a genius to pacify and a bid to pull together.’ His eyes were smiling at her again. ‘Could we get out Mike’s offer?’

  He stood behind her as he dictated the offer. Barbara typed it in and printed it out; he signed it with a flourishing scrawl and gave her a gleaming glance.

  ‘You’re a damned expensive addition to the team, Barbara,’ he said. ‘First you blackmail me into making an offer I should never have considered in a million years just to get you on board, and now you’ve got me throwing money at somebody who, till you came along, seemed perfectly happy with working for his keep.’

  ‘You thought,’ said Barbara. Her mouth still felt his kiss. Lovely, but that didn’t mean she had to stand for this kind of nonsense. ‘In my opinion,’ she said coolly, ‘I’ve already justified my level of compensation by intervening when you were about to lose one of the most valuable members of staff through sheer obstinacy. Not to mention getting this presentation into a form where it stands some chance of meeting the deadline…’

  She stopped talking, cowed by the unexpectedly grim look on his face. All the amusement had dropped away.

  ‘Yes,’ said Charles. ‘I never did get around to mentioning that, now I come to think of it.’ He gave her a measuring glance. ‘We need to talk about that when you get back from Mike’s office.’

  ‘Talk about what?’ said Barbara.

  ‘About the fact that you’re not just a probationary shareholder or a temporary secretary,’ he said. ‘Some things never change, do they, Barbara?’

  She couldn’t read the expression in his eyes, but just because she couldn’t read it that didn’t mean she had to like it.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she said.

  ‘You know damned well what I mean,’ he said. ‘Once wasn’t enough, was it? You’re still standing in the shadows, scared of the spotlight, bored with the things you’re stuck with if you stay out of the spotlight.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘You pretend being a secretary is enough for you, Barbara, but it’s not, is it? No wonder you can’t stick to it for more than a month at a time. Try it on a semipermanent basis and you’re climbing the walls in a couple of weeks and back to your old habits.’

  ‘That’s not fair,’ said Barbara. ‘I only did it because Mike didn’t have the time and I didn’t want him to get in trouble—’

  ‘With the result that the whole thing blew up in my face, nearly losing me, as you yourself pointed out, an irreplaceable member of staff.’ His eyes held hers. ‘You’re still an incorrigible ghostwriter, Barbara. Don’t you think it’s time you gave it up?’

  Barbara bit her lip.

  ‘Take that down to Mike,’ he said. ‘As you know, we don’t have a lot of time. But before we get down to business…’ he gave her a mirthless smile ‘…I think we’d better have a little talk.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  BARBARA took the letter downstairs. She found Mike sitting in his office, surrounded by half-packed boxes. He looked up at her grimly.

  Barbara handed over the piece of paper.

  ‘You know, it’s not a bad offer,’ she said. ‘But that doesn’t necessarily mean you should accept it’ The dark blue eyes sparkled. ‘Why should you put up with Charles? He’s impossible to work for. He knows you’re brilliant. If you go it’s the company’s loss. You could actually be better off working for yourself.’

  Mike was scanning the letter. He raised his eyes to the vivid face of the only person he’d ever seen give Charles Mallory his own back again.

  ‘No, that’s not really true,’ he said. He smiled ruefully. ‘It’s one thing to have ideas and another to cash in on them. The commercial side drives me insane; it’s a discipline you have to impose on yourself or, rather, you have to impose it on yourself if you’re on your own, only I’d probably retreat into my home office and indulge in endless fine-tuning instead. I’d do it here if he’d let me get away with it.’

  ‘Well, obviously you must do what’s best,’ said Barbara. ‘But you don’t have to let him walk all over you. Charles is completely selfish and arrogant and he never thinks about anyone but himself; I can’t understand why everyone puts up with it.’

  Mike grinned. ‘Because he’s better than any of us, much as I hate to admit it You start explaining something to him and he’s there before you’ve finished the sentence. You’ve got a problem and before you’ve finished the question he’s got the answer. The last year or so has been hell, and I shouldn’t have let it get on top of me, but I’d rather work with Mallory than somebody with half the brains who worried about hurting my feelings.’

  Barbara sighed. She knew she should be pleased—after all, she’d done everything but throw the office desk out the window to get Charles to change his mind—but it was depressing to find Mike so ready to rejoin the fan club.

  ‘Well, shall I tell him you’ll reconsider, then?’ she said.

  ‘I’ll send him an e-mail,’ said Carlin. He sat down at his computer and his fingers began flying over the keys.

  Barbara sighed again. She would have liked to think Mike was telling Charles he’d have to think very carefully about the offer, and that he’d probably want a commitment from Charles to come personally and babysit once a week for six months just to make up for all that agony of mind. Something told her that was sheer wishful thinking.

  She left the office, her feet trailing. Charles was waiting for her. It would be just like the last time. She’d thought, once in a while, that he’d forgotten, or at least put it behind him—but he would never forgive her. He’d always hate her for what she’d done to him.

  She couldn’t face talking to him. She didn’t care if he was waiting for her; she needed moral support. Barbara turned her steps to the company cafeteria. Maybe three helpings of white chocolate peppermint mousse cake would help to take her mind off her troubles.

  She loaded her tray with five desserts and a cappuccino, then took it to a table and sat, staring at the tray.

  She couldn’t remember now what had given her the idea. It might have been one of the other times his school had sent home an exam on the honour system, and she’d watched him do a few questions then rush through the rest at random to finish in time to catch the FA Cup.

  Or it might have been the fact that she’d spent so much more time looking at his maths books than any of the others. His other books had been full of hard words, and if she asked him what they meant he just told her to look in the dictionary, but the maths books were full of numbers, and if she didn’t understand she could sometimes pester him into explaining because at least he couldn’t send her to the dictionary.

  It had been worth struggling with something so hard just to have him, every once in a while, drop onto the sofa beside her and tell her what a pest she was. ‘I never wanted to have a sister, Barbara,’ he’d say, ‘and now I know why.’ ‘You’re a bloody nuisance, Barbara. Run away and play with your dolls like a good girl.’ The green eyes would be laughing at her under the black fringe of hair, and then he’d look at the page and tell her what it all meant. Maybe that was why she’d done it.

  Or maybe it was because he’d gone out with Monica Lewis for two weeks, which had been a week longer than he’d ever gone out with anyone else, and Barbara had tried the only way she could think of to get his atten
tion. Well, if that’s what she’d wanted, she thought bitterly, it had certainly worked.

  Charles had come home one day with a maths exam which was supposed to have been done on the honour system. As usual, he’d gone through the problems he could do in five minutes or less, got bored and had left the paper on his desk. Then he’d gone out to spend the rest of the evening with Monica Lewis. He’d been getting consistent Cs and Ds on the work he’d bothered to do in the time he could spare from TV sport and serial girlfriends, and another C was about to join the ranks.

  He hadn’t bargained for the sister he’d never wanted.

  Barbara wasn’t supposed to go in his room but she sneaked in anyway, and there was the exam. She looked at it just to see what it was like, and there were lots of problems that Charles hadn’t bothered to do which he’d explained to her at one time or another. Now that Charles had gone off with Monica, he probably wouldn’t be back until early morning—he wouldn’t be doing any more work. Barbara had a brilliant idea. She could do all the problems he hadn’t done! She could copy his handwriting so no one would know, and then when he got an A she would tell him and he would be absolutely astounded!

  At first everything went according to plan. Charles returned to the house in the early hours of the morning, woke late and came down to breakfast just as Barbara was leaving for school.

  ‘Looks like I’ll have to be fashionably late again,’ he said indifferently, taking his time over coffee. Papers were coming out of his file every which way—it was obvious he hadn’t looked at them. As Barbara soon discovered, the paper was indeed a dazzling improvement on the efforts to date of the school’s most unsatisfactory student, Charles ‘Could Try Harder’ Mallory.

  The first sign of trouble came the following afternoon. Charles was off somewhere with Monica; Barbara was at home, killing time, when the phone rang. She picked it up at the same moment that her father picked up upstairs. It was the head of Charles’s school.

  ‘Hello, Giles, it’s Robin. Look, we’ve got a bit of a problem here.’ There was a short pause. ‘It’s about Charles’s maths exam. As I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, he hasn’t been applying himself all year, and now we’ve got a fourteen-carat A paper out of thin air. His teacher tells me it’s simply not possible that this could be his own work. It’s the same paper you set last year when you were taking that class. I know how careful you are, Giles, but the question does have to be asked—is there any chance he could have got at the answers in your desk?’

  Barbara’s father had many good qualities, but neatness was not among them—his desk at home was a chaos of jostling papers. ‘As far as I’m aware, the answers are locked in my filing cabinet,’ he said doubtfully. ‘I might have had them out on my desk, but if he could find them there he’s a better man than I am…’

  ‘Right, well, I think that’s all I need to know,’ was the ominous reply. It was obvious to Barbara that the head was privately convinced that Charles had cheated. There was only one thing to do.

  The next day Barbara headed for school on her bike. As soon as she was out of sight of the house she headed for Charles’s school. She locked her bike in front of the building, presented herself at the office of the head and explained, her cheeks hot with embarrassment, what she had done.

  The result was not at all what she had expected. The head summoned Charles from a class. In came Charles in his James Dean black T-shirt and jeans, his black hair falling over one eyebrow and his green eyes bored and defiant.

  ‘I gather you’re aware, Mallory, that your performance on the maths exam has raised questions of cheating.’ The head looked at him severely. ‘I could not in any circumstances condone dishonesty, but if you came across the answers in Giles’s papers I can at any rate understand that you might have yielded to a moment’s temptation. It’s quite another matter, however, when you try to shift the blame to a child.’

  Charles raised an eyebrow. ‘I’m afraid I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about,’ he said. ‘Sir.’ He shrugged. ‘I hadn’t realised standards had fallen to the point where a D raised questions of cheating.’

  Barbara burst in with a flood of explanation. ‘It didn’t get a D,’ she said. ‘It got an A. I did all the problems you didn’t do, just the way you explained them to me. It was easy, and now he won’t believe me.’

  The head said indulgently that her loyalty was very touching, and he said severely to Charles that they could not condone this kind of behaviour and that he faced suspension, if not expulsion, from the school.

  ‘My life is in ruins,’ Charles said in tones of exaggerated horror. ‘What have I done?’

  ‘It’s no laughing matter,’ the head said angrily.

  ‘I think it’s an absolute scream,’ said Charles. ‘I don’t give a toss about the school, but I didn’t cheat and I’m not leaving for something I didn’t do.’

  The head folded his arms across his plump chest. ‘Fair enough, Mallory,’ he said, with an appearance of openmindedness, but Barbara knew something bad was coming. The head was fat and bald and even his secretary didn’t look at him. Charles had only to walk into a room for all the girls’ heads to turn. If he walked down a corridor girls hid in doorways just to watch him go by. Barbara could just tell the head hated him.

  ‘I’m prepared to believe you simply never happened to be interested enough to work to your ability,’ said the head. ‘All the same, you must admit it’s unfortunate your interest happened to revive in circumstances where you could have had outside assistance, however unintentional.’ He smiled. ‘I think I owe you the chance to clear your name beyond the shadow of a doubt, Mallory. I’ll ask your teacher to draw up a new exam with questions that haven’t been on any of the past papers. We’ll arrange an invigilator, and you can sit the exam—let’s see, I think we can have everything in place in a couple of weeks—we’ll say a fortnight from today.’

  Charles gave the head a single cool green look. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘But I’m not setting foot in the place until you’ve apologised for throwing around unsubstantiated accusations. I’ll come back for the exam and your apology. Come on, Barbara, I’ll take you home.’

  He left the room without waiting for a reply. Barbara followed him down one long corridor, and another, then out into the sunshine. He strode off down the street, not waiting for her; she forgot about her bicycle, running to catch up.

  ‘Charles,’ she said breathlessly. ‘Charles, wait!’ When he stopped impatiently, his eyes blazing, she gasped out, ‘But why don’t you let me take the exam and then they’ll believe me? I told them you didn’t tell me to do it but they didn’t believe me!’

  It had never occurred to her that they wouldn’t. She’d thought she had only to confess, but of course she’d never been the kind of child who dazzled adults with impressive vocabulary and brilliant marks. ‘Could try harder’ was the best her teachers could say of her, too. Naturally, no one thought a twelve-year-old with bad marks could be behind the mysterious A any more than they thought a lazy eighteen-year-old could be.

  Charles looked down at her with cold fury. ‘What a fantastic idea,’ he said sarcastically. ‘Then everyone will know I didn’t cheat—I just got a twelve-year-old to do it for me. Why don’t you just mind your own business, Barbara? Find someone your own age to play with and leave me alone.’

  He stalked on ahead without speaking to her. And somewhere in the half-hour between the school and the house he changed. He went to the store and bought a two-week supply of some kind of athletes’ meals. He took them up to his room, and for two weeks the family didn’t see him.

  He managed, somehow, to cover two years’ work in two weeks. He went back to the school to take the new exam and got an A. Then he left the school, said goodbye to Barbara’s parents and went to London. From what she could gather, he applied the same single-minded ruthlessness to his life that he’d applied to the make-up exam. He set up his own business. In the first year he cleared £100,000, in the second a
quarter of a million. By the time he was twenty-five he was worth about £5,000,000.

  Charles came back sometimes to visit her parents, but he never talked about the reason he’d left. In fact, he never really talked to Barbara again, except as part of general conversation. He got richer and richer, and he went on changing girlfriends on a weekly basis, and he never forgave her.

  Barbara looked gloomily at her five desserts. She just couldn’t eat them somehow. Now she’d have to go upstairs and Charles would give her a freezing look and tell her to mind her own business and go away and leave him alone.

  At last she stood up. Better get it over with. She left the cafeteria, dragging her feet, and headed for the lift.

  About an hour after she’d left Charles’s office she trailed back in again.

  Charles was pacing impatiently up and down.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ he snapped. ‘I got a delirious e-mail from Carlin forty-five minutes ago. I told you to get back up here.’

  Barbara stopped at the door, hugging her elbows to keep herself from shaking. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry I ruined your life, Charles. I’m sorry about the exam. I never meant it to work out that way. You were going out with Monica Lewis and I thought you’d be impressed.’

  Charles stopped in mid-stride. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ he said.

  ‘I know you’ll never really forgive me,’ said Barbara. ‘I know it was a terrible thing to do. I just didn’t think.’

  Charles gave her a rather strange look. ‘It was a terrible thing to do,’ he said, with a rather rueful smile, ‘but it didn’t exactly ruin my life, you know. I was so bloody bored at school—I was too damned lazy to do anything you didn’t have to do, and the things we had to do were too easy. I could have gone on for years that way, not knowing what I could do. Those two weeks were a trial by fire, all right, but at least they made me see what I could do when I put my mind to it—at least they made me see I was wasting my time.’