Playing Grace (24 page)

Once Grace had got over the whiplash effect of going from lovesick Esther to haberdashery, she gave her opinion
on the tie-backs, sympathised with Bernice’s impending staff shortage and laughed inwardly at Tate scampering up the stairs like some kind of blushing virgin. Gilbert running away from Bernice, Tate running away from Esther.

She shrugged off the voice that asked her who she was running from and spent a while longer with Bernice, happy to bury herself in home improvements before steeling herself to climb the stairs.

‘You’ve had a delivery,’ was Bernice’s parting shot. ‘Some kind of cabinet.’

Alistair was playing with it when she arrived and showed her what it did, which largely seemed to consist of lock and unlock.

‘Just what we need,’ he enthused. ‘Anything sensitive can be put in here and that should cover us.’

Grace felt that he looked strung out again, not the manic kind that usually presaged a period of planting himself in her office and getting hysterical, but something less readable. He hadn’t even grumbled that she’d left the office unattended. He shepherded her out after a few minutes and almost immediately after appeared in her office in his coat.

‘Heading home,’ he said, ‘planning to take Emma out for an early supper somewhere nice. In fact, don’t stay too late yourself, Grace. I’ve checked the phone messages,
there’s nothing that won’t wait. Get yourself home soon; see if you can sort out your father.’

He did not have his briefcase with him and when he had gone, she went to his office and found the door unlocked, his briefcase abandoned under his desk. She picked it up and shook it, guessing it would be empty.

‘Think he’s hiding something?’ Tate said from the door, making her jump. ‘Playing around maybe?’ He came into the room. ‘Keeping the evidence in that baby?’ He patted the cabinet.

‘Not at all. I think he’s keeping in it what he says he’s keeping in it. And … was there something you wanted? I didn’t know you were coming back?’

‘Bet you didn’t,’ he said and wandered out of the room again.

Damn. She went to her office and there he was, sitting on his stupid chair. As soon as she turned on her computer, he scooted over so that he was sitting next to her.

‘You gonna be long? I wanna see how many reservations I’ve got for my next tour.’

‘No, of course not. I just need to check my emails.’

He didn’t budge.

‘Um, could you just give me a bit of privacy?’

‘Oh, those kind of emails, huh? Lovey-dovey stuff from Martin.’

‘Mark.’

‘Right.’ He rolled away before getting up and heading for reception. She heard him lie down on the sofa. ‘Give me a call when you’ve finished with the porn,’ he shouted.

She jabbed at her keyboard and arrived at her inbox. Three emails. Three sisters. She opened Aurillia’s:

I’ve rung Mum and she’s very upset. Says she thinks you and Dad are suggesting her and Jay are lovers, whereas she just wants to run a business. Really, Grace, how can you hope to understand Mum these days when you don’t even understand yourself any more? We do a fantastic course on refinding yourself (only £1569 inc. accommodation). Give it some thought.

Zin’s said:

Grace, I really think your negative experience has made you distrustful of what can be a liberating attitude to life – one which Mum may be on the cusp of exploring. Two men can work … look at me!!!! I will try to ring Dad. I have a poem that may help
.

Serafina’s was as self-absorbed as the others:

Sorry, but have you any idea what real problems look like? There are women out here who’ve never even experienced theatre before. You have no idea what a struggle it is to educate them in the arts. All power to Mum. Stop being so negative, Grace … sisterhood is for mothers too.

No surprise there then. And no help. The only bit of light relief was imagining her father holding the phone and listening to one of Zin’s interminable poems.

She saw Tate a second or two before his seat bumped against hers again.

‘Come on, Gracie, you’ll go blind. Save all that sex talk for the weekend. He’s a seismologist; you know he’ll make the earth move for you.’ He gave her chair a further push with his hands so that she rolled away into dead space. That was the moment when Grace feared something might explode in her skull if she did not get away from him.

‘Ooh, look,’ he said, tapping the screen. ‘My next tour is full up and … let’s see … how’s yours going?’ He made a regretful face. ‘Still a few short there, Gracie.’

‘I’m going now,’ she said. ‘So you’ll need to go too as I have to lock up.’ She did a quick tour of the office, left a note for the cleaner to give the toilet a good going over, checked all the taps were off, all the plugs out. He was
waiting for her in reception. She’d need to shake him off when they got outside; she wouldn’t even bother with an excuse this time. There was a large pit waiting for her if she wasn’t careful: a large pit with a sharp spike at the bottom.

Her mobile rang, which was perfect timing; it meant she didn’t even have to talk to him as they went down the stairs.

It was Emma, but Grace could barely hear her over the noise in the background.

‘You’ll have to speak up,’ she said.

Emma’s voice came through louder. ‘Still on for tomorrow?’

‘Of course. Straight from work. But where are you now? It sounds like a rugby match.’

‘Close. It’s Brent Cross shopping centre,’ Emma sounded weary. ‘Need to buy a birthday present and decided I might as well have a mooch round here for a few hours. Poor Alistair’s got another one of his tourism meetings till really late this evening – he says they’re going to be a regular Wednesday night thing – so I’m going to head back in a minute. Have an evening in on my own with a takeaway, watching a weepie.’

‘Everything all right?’ Tate asked, watching as Grace put
the phone back in her bag. ‘That was Al’s Emma, wasn’t it?’

‘Everything’s fine. Sorry, can’t stop. Need to go—’

‘Back to the office.’

‘What?’ She had stopped walking.

‘Weren’t you gonna say you needed to go back to the office? Get that magazine you bought for your dad? Must have left it up there ’cos I didn’t see it in your handbag.’

‘Uh, they’d sold out.’

‘No kiddin’?’

His face told her he knew she was floundering as clearly as if he’d written it on a note and Sellotaped it to his forehead. Her irritation at that put words into her mouth that she didn’t know were coming.

‘Actually, Tate,’ she said, ‘“kidding” ends with a “g” not an “n”.’

‘Yeah,’ he said, moving closer to her, ‘and “lying” starts with a great big “L”.’

‘I do have to go now,’ she said quickly, thinking that what he’d said was bloody clever and figuring out at last why his eyes were so disconcerting: they should be blue. With that face and that hair they should be sunny blue, the kind of eyes surfers had. Green ones made him into something else. But what?

She had got right to the bottom step when she felt a tug
on the strap of her handbag. She was on alert; that strap had misbehaved before.

‘Hang on there, pardner,’ he said in a pronounced drawl, and she wondered whether he was going to bring up the mock gunfight on the chair thing. Or was it a new test coming? He’d been circling her all day, making inroads with holding her hand and that ‘uphill’ stuff, then again at Acar’s. He was slowly sweeping away the sand to see what lay beneath.

It was gloomy in this part of the hallway, although further along was a rectangle of light shining through Far & Away’s glass door. Grace felt that if she could reach that light everything would be fine. She stepped down into the hallway, but all that happened was that, still holding the strap of her bag, he followed her and, with a nifty bit of footwork, ended up in front of her. So there they were, just a few inches apart and with the gloom seeming to thicken with every second.

‘What can I help you with?’ she said, her stomach feeling as if she were in a car that had just executed a really sharp turn. He didn’t speak straight away; there was just the gloom and the closeness of him and she tried not to look at his eyes or his mouth.

‘It’s what I can help you with, Gracie,’ he said, inclining his head towards her. ‘I can stop you killing yourself with all this nicey-nicey.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘There you go again.’

‘I’m not sure what you mean—’

‘Oh, come on, Gracie,’ he said with the kind of sigh someone gives when they had hoped the other person would see sense. Grace’s stomach now felt as if it were planning to fold itself into something smaller. ‘See, I know I’m bugging the hell out of you. In fact, I’m doing it more and more, just on purpose, to see what happens. I’m doing it so much I’m even gettin’ annoyed with myself. Yet there you are, just keeping right on bustin’ a gut to prove everything’s fine. Why would that be, Gracie?’

‘That’s just how I am. Unfailingly polite.’

‘Yeah? Really? God’s honest truth? Even when you’re doing the mime for a dickhead, in the dark? Learn that one from Serafina and her troupe out in the Philippines?’

The urge to check and see what his face was doing was too much. A quick glance at those green eyes made her stomach give up folding and start scrunching. It was a bad look he was giving her, a very bad look indeed. As if he understood the real her.

‘Jeez, Gracie, when I held your hand …’ he said softly and took in a deep breath, letting it out again without speaking.

‘I really do have to go.’

‘What happened, Gracie?’ he said suddenly, touching her arm.

‘Um … what happened when?’

‘Between that photo and now? What happened to that girl?’

‘She grew up,’ she said steadily, despite the thrumming in her throat that she swore should have made her voice tremble.

He nodded as if thinking about that. ‘Maybe,’ he said finally, ‘or maybe she closed down. Someone hurt you, Gracie?’

She was glad it was too dark to really see his face because that meant he couldn’t see hers either, but now the silence between them seemed loaded and as it continued, it weighed heavier and heavier on Grace until she just had to speak.

‘It was thirteen years ago,’ she said. ‘I expect you’ve changed a lot since you were sixteen.’

His laugh came to her out of the gloom. ‘Yeah, I’ve got more childish.’

That laugh wrapped itself around Grace and she felt a skittering of something across those dormant nerve endings, closely followed by her brain telling her to get a grip and then, unbelievably, he was walking away from her.
She had expected him to press home his advantage, niggle further. Ah, here it came – he was stopping.

‘OK, OK,’ he said, ‘I guess you’re not going to tell me a thing about yourself, so I’ll just tell you something about me …’ He was speaking into the gloom without turning to face her and she realised that he hadn’t been walking away from her, but towards the comfort of saying something serious in the dark. For the first time since he had exploded into her life like a paintball, she saw there was vulnerability under all that swagger and self-belief.

‘You were wrong at Acar’s,’ he said. ‘I’m not
very
happy with Bebbie. Haven’t been for a long time. Keep trying to tell her – won’t listen.’

She didn’t want that information from him, was determined to kick away the bridge he was trying to build between them by giving it to her.

He had reached that patch of light and just at the edge of her consciousness she became aware of sounds on the other side of that glass door and of the conversation she’d had earlier with Bernice. As he moved on, the door of Far & Away
s
prung open and there was Esther.

‘It
is
you,’ she said in that washed-out voice of hers. ‘You couldn’t just spare me a few minutes? There’s something I don’t understand about access to the actual Machu Picchu site.’

Grace feared that if Esther kept running her tongue along her bottom lip like that, she’d need a lot of lip salve to put it right.

‘Well, I’m kinda in a hurry …’ Tate began and again Grace saw what he looked like when he was unsure of himself. He seemed so young. He was looking past Esther into her office and it was obvious that he understood Bernice was not there. ‘Yeah, kinda in a hurry,’ he repeated. ‘I’m meeting these friends down the road, I should go or they’ll wonder where—’

‘In the White Hart?’ Grace stepped forward. It was a name she’d heard Joe and Corinne mention as a place they liked to go.

The way that Tate said, ‘Ye-ah,’ suggested he knew what she was about to do.

‘That’s no problem then,’ she continued heartily. ‘I go right by there on my way home. I’ll just tell them you’re going to be what, quarter of an hour, half an hour, late, Tate? Don’t worry, you just toddle off and help Esther. Take your time.’

Tate’s forlorn expression as he walked into the room ahead of Esther kept Grace feeling buoyant all the way to the street door, until the reality of what she’d done kicked in. Now he’d know he’d got to her with that conversation in the gloom.

As she pushed open the door, she thought of how he was doing the same to her and how she couldn’t trust herself not to let him come right in.

CHAPTER
20

Alistair turned on the heater in his office and pressed himself against it until he felt less chilled. The building was cold and empty; he’d waited a full half hour after he’d calculated that everyone would have gone home – even that miserable bugger of an ex-father-in-law on the top floor.

Still, the coast was definitely clear now. He took out his key and unlocked the cabinet, removing the tea lights he’d bought earlier. Once he’d placed them around the office and lit them he turned out the main light, leaving on just the desk lamp. Much better. A softer atmosphere. It might be an office, but it didn’t have to look like one. He went back to the cabinet and got out the earrings, his mouth drying. But it was the shoes that made his pulse really race. Bought this afternoon, more than he’d ever paid for any shoes for anyone, he lifted them out of their box one by one and put them on the desk. Not too high, not too pointed. Stylish, like she was. He couldn’t wait
to see her walk in them. She had a way of swinging her hips that … well … that did it for him.