Someone Like You (16 page)

It was nearly lunchtime before David James, who had interviewed Hannah in the firm’s city-centre office for the job, arrived. ‘He’s been busy with the Dawson Street office but he still drops in here from time to time,’ Gillian revealed, searching for her frosted pink lipstick when Mr James’s Jag pulled up outside the door.

He doesn’t drop in often enough, Hannah felt, looking around the rather run-down premises which was a total contrast to the stylish Dawson Street branch. There, the minimalist look ruled with architect-designed furniture, modern prints on the walls and an air of discreet wealth simmered gently in the background.

The Dun Laoghaire branch of Dwyer, Dwyer & James looked like somebody’s idea of an elegant office circa 1970.

The walls were coffee-coloured, the seats for clients were the sort of low squashy things fashionable when Charlie’s Angels were famous the first time, and big brown felt screens divided up the private bits of the office from the public bits. The address was prestigious but the office was a shambles.

In between Gillian’s monologues, Hannah had been wondering whether she’d made a huge and hideous mistake in giving up her nice job for this place. Dwyer, Dwyer & James were a big, powerful firm and she’d felt it was a step upwards to work for them as office manager. But this branch was like the office that time forgot.

David James, tall, strongly built and with the sort of commanding presence that reduced the place to silence, walked in, shook hands with Hannah, said he hoped she was settling in and asked to see her in the back office. He threw a raincoat on to the back of a chair and pulled off his suit jacket to reveal muscular shoulders straining under a French blue shirt. He was quite handsome really, she realized. She hadn’t noticed it at her interview; she’d been too nervous. But there was something attractive about that broad, strong-boned face and the sleek salt-and-pepper hair. He was probably in his early forties, although the lines around his narrow eyes made him appear slightly older. Immaculate in his expensive clothes, he somehow looked as if he’d be just as at home wielding an axe to chop wood in the wilderness as wielding a Mont Blanc pen in a swish office. He certainly had the colour of someone who liked outdoor pursuits. Not a man to mess with.

‘Have you spoken to my partner, Andrew Dwyer, yet?”

he asked, settling himself into a big chair, not looking at her as his eyes raked over the papers on the desk that required his attention.

‘No. Gillian has been filling me in,’ Hannah said.

A flash of brief understanding passed between them, David’s dark eyes glinting.

‘Ah, Gillian, yes,’ he murmured. ‘It’s not really suitable for Gillian to be doing two jobs. That’s why I’ve hired you. I’m sure you’re wondering what you’ve done, coming from the Triumph Hotel to this place.’

That’s exactly what Hannah had been thinking but she was too clever to show it. She kept her face carefully blank.

‘This was our first premises and it’s ten years since I left,’ he said.

Hannah was surprised. Listening to Gillian, you’d have thought Mr James had been gone from Dun Laoghaire for a mere six months.

‘My nephew Michael set up the Howth office eight years ago and he was due to come back here to take over but personal reasons prevented him doing it. I didn’t have the time to sort this place out. Things have gone downhill here recently since the other Mr Dwyer died. There’ll be a lot of changes and I thought we needed a good manager for the place. I need someone who can get on with the existing staff and be able to work with any new ones. That’s why I hired you. I know you’re a hard worker and I like your style, Hannah.

‘We never had an office manager before. Gillian ran the office when it was a small concern, but we’ve barely been ticking over for a long time. We need a proper office manager, someone who can keep us running smoothly, getting auction brochures printed,
etc.
From the point of view of security, we need someone who is always aware of where the agents are. When you have people on their own show mg houses, you have to be security conscious. I want the female agents to be contacted every hour to make sure they’re safe. I’m very confident that you can do it.’

‘Thanks,’ she said briskly.

Now, if Donna Nelson’s back, perhaps you could send her in. I need to have a talk with her.’

Hannah was glad she was working directly with David James. Direct and blunt, he clearly didn’t waste any time chatting. He was just the sort of person Hannah enjoyed working for. With someone like him, there’d be no need for extraneous conversations about the state of the weather or how strong the office coffee was.

Gillian was dying to know how she’d got on.

isn’t Mr James a pet,’ she sighed. ‘His marriage broke up and he’s never really got over it. I mean, he went out with a few women, but nothing worked out. I think he’s lonely, don’t you sense it too?’

What Hannah sensed was that Gillian would have given poor hubbie Leonard and the talented Clementine the push if she could have comforted Mr James in a very unplatonic way.

By close of business, she’d met all the firm’s agents and had liked Donna Nelson best of all. A rather chic woman with a dark bob, navy suit and an efficient air, she was obviously very wary of Gillian and had greeted Hannah with a guarded smile that said, She’s been telling you all about me, hasn’t she}

Hannah responded with her warmest smile and said pleasantly: ‘Perhaps we could have a chat during the week and you can tell me how you’d like your calls handled.’

‘That would be great,’ Donna said, looking pleased.

Probably sick and tired of Gillian’s sharp manner with clients, she was relieved to find someone who knew how to answer a phone without cutting the nose off someone.

Business didn’t appear to be brisk, but Gillian’s put-on phone voice, as frosty as her lipstick, wouldn’t have enticed cold callers to put their homes for sale through Dwyers.

One caller looking for Donna received a particularly sharp remark: if she has time, she’ll get back to you.’

‘Personal call,’ Gillian said disapprovingly, hanging up.

Hannah said nothing again but vowed that when she had sole charge of the office, things would be vastly different. No receptionist she’d train would ever be so rude on the phone.

David James had chatted to her briefly before he left the office that afternoon, balancing his big frame awkwardly on the edge of her desk.

‘How are you getting on?’ he asked.

Beside her, Hannah could feel Gillian sitting up straight in her office chair, hoping to be noticed.

‘Fine. I think I’ll have the hang of it in a few days, although it’s easy enough to lose calls on this switchboard.

The one in the Triumph was more modern and more efficient,’ she said frankly.

This time, she could sense Gillian bridling with shock that a new employee had dared say such a thing to the boss, but David James merely nodded.

‘We’ll talk about it,’ he said. ‘Goodbye.’

‘You’re the forward madam, I’ll say that for you,’ sniffed Gillian when he was gone.

‘You said exactly the same thing about the switchboard earlier,’ Hannah reminded her gently, ‘I was merely telling him.’

‘Mr James doesn’t want to be bothered with things like that,’ hissed Gillian.

Hannah said nothing.

She’d felt pleased as she drove home that evening, pleased that she had made the right choice in moving jobs and confident that she’d do well there. Bloody Harry and his ill-timed letter had ruined that sense of pleasure.

She went into her flat, threw her coat on the hanger and opened the letter.

Dear Hannah,

How’s it going, babe? I Hope you’ve taken over the entire hotel business in Dublin by now. Knowing you, you have.

I’m still trekking around South America. Just spent a few weeks in BA (that’s Buenos Aires to you, babes).

‘Babes!’ she snarled, grinding her teeth fiercely. How bloody dare he call her ‘babes’?

I’ve been travelling with some guys and we’re planning another month here before we go to Chile …

She read lines and lines of chatter about odd-jobbing as a tourist guide and how he’d got a few shifts in an English-language newspaper the previous month. It was all surface stuff; nothing personal, no hint as to why he was writing to her for the first time in a year. It wasn’t as if she’d wanted a letter. Not now, anyway. In the first month after he’d left, she’d have killed someone for any news of Harry. Just a postcard or a phone call to say he missed her and wished he hadn’t left. If he’d phoned to beg her to visit him, she’d have downed tools and hopped on the first plane to Rio de Janeiro. It was immaterial that she’d thrown him out of the flat when he first announced that he was leaving her to travel abroad, immaterial that she’d roared at him for being a spineless coward who was terrified of commitment and that she never wanted to see or hear from him again. Ever. Because she missed him so much.

And for the first time in her life, Hannah had discovered that when you adored someone and missed them so badly you woke up in the middle of the night screaming out their name, you still wanted them back, no matter what they’d done or said.

Without even reading the final page, Hannah folded the letter carefully and stuck it in a drawer in the kitchen.

She didn’t want to think about Harry. She didn’t want to remember what he even looked like …

Eleven years ago, he’d been attractive in a studenty way.

Dark hair that reached his collar and curled madly when it got wet; bluey grey eyes that turned down at the corners and made him look constantly forlorn, and that wide, mobile mouth that could smile so mischievously. He always wore big jackets and baggy trousers that looked two sizes too big for him. But then, that was part of the charm of Harry Spender: his little boy qualities made women want to mother him.

Hannah had mothered him for ten long years, from the moment they’d met in McDonald’s and he’d spilt his milkshake all over the uniform she wore as a beauty counter assistant in Brown Thomas.

‘OhmiGod, I’m so sorry, please let me help you clean it off,’ he’d said, his face a picture of innocent remorse as they both stared at the remains of a strawberry shake dripping steadily off Hannah and on to the floor.

And she’d gone with him in the direction of the toilets, not even nervous about going off with a strange man, even when he came into the ladies’ with her and insisted on using loo paper to soak the shake off.

She should have refused him when he asked her out for a drink that evening. But then, Hannah was her mother’s daughter and, at the age of twenty-seven, she was still young enough to be impressed by someone who actually wrote for the Evening Press.

At home in Connemara, the Campbell family had only ever read two newspapers: the local paper the Western People and the Sunday Press. She’d grown up with it, had watched her mother put the previous week’s paper at the bottom of the chickens’ coop when they were hatched under the kitchen table; had laid it on the floor so that the men coming home from working on the farm wouldn’t muddy the floor with their filthy boots. To go out with someone who worked for the same group, well!

Of course, when she finally met Harry, court reporter extraordinaire, Hannah’s mother hadn’t been that impressed by him despite his job. But it was too late then.

Hannah loved him and could already see herself walking down the aisle with him, radiant in white something or other, smiling for the official photo which would appear in that Sunday’s paper. Together for richer for poorer, for better for worse. Hannah loved that idea, the notion of stability, security.

Marriage hadn’t been on Harry’s mind. ‘I’m a free spirit, Hannah, you’ve always known that: I thought that’s what you liked about me,’ he’d said as she stared at him slack jawed the day he told her about South America.

‘Yes, but up till now your version of being a free spirit meant going to music festivals, buying Jimi Hendrix albums and not paying the phone bill until they threaten to cut us off!’ she shrieked, when she finally found her

voice.

Harry shrugged. ‘I’m not getting any younger,’ he said.

He was the same age as Hannah. ‘I don’t want to waste my life. This trip is just what I’ve been looking for. I’ve been stagnating, Hannah. We both have.’

That was when she picked up his leather jacket and threw it out the front door. ‘Leave!’ she yelled. ‘Leave now, before you waste any more of your precious life. I’m so sorry I was a waste of time and contributed to your stagnation.’

She hadn’t seen or heard from him since. He’d left there and then, and slipped back in to pack up his stuff the following day when she wasn’t at home. Rage and fury had possessed Hannah as soon as he was gone, and she’d immediately moved out of the flat they’d shared into another smaller, nicer place, using their deposit money to buy a new bed and sofa. There was no way she was sleeping on the bed she’d shared with that bastard. If he wanted his share of the money back, he could sue her. He already owed her ten years of her life, not to mention all the cash she’d loaned him over the years because he frittered his salary away.

For a year, nothing. And now, out of the blue, came a letter. On the first day of her new job, Hannah sat for a moment at her kitchen table, staring into space. Then she wrenched open the drawer and read the rest of the letter.

Two paragraphs from the end, Harry got to the point: ‘I’m sure you’re wondering why I’m writing, Hannah. But you can’t cut someone out of your life when you ‘we spent ten years with them.’ Oh yes you can, she hissed at the letter.

I’m coming home in a few months and I’d love to see you. I’ve kept in touch with what you’re up to, thanks to Mitch. He gave me your new address.

Damn Mitch, cursed Hannah. One of Harry’s old colleagues, she’d told him where she was living when they’d bumped into each other in the supermarket a few months ago.

I’d love to see you, Hannah, although I’m not sure if you’d want to see me. I’d understand it, but I hope you don’t still feel bitter.