Playing Grace (14 page)

‘Nope, this isn’t working for me,’ he said, dragging the chair back to its original home and giving one of the legs a tap with his foot. ‘Too low – feel like I’m getting a lesson from a teacher. Don’t move,’ He collected his coat off the hook and was gone without any further explanation.

Grace didn’t know whether to be happy that he’d compared her to a teacher or not, but she was happy to be shot of him for a while. She started to create a page for him on the website.

It was barely a quarter of an hour later that she heard him coming back up the stairs. He sounded as if he were making heavy weather of the trip and when he appeared in the doorway of the office she could see why. He was carrying what appeared to be a torn and battered office chair with wheels. He lowered it to the floor and Grace saw the seat was slashed, the foam exposed.

‘What are you … ?’ she started to say and then remembered she was meant to be non-confrontational and deadly dull, so she simply watched as he got a roll of silver tape out of the pocket of his coat and with great gusto pulled a long strip of it free before tearing it with his teeth and starting to patch up the slashes in the seat. He worked quickly: rip, tear, stick, rip, tear, stick, his teeth white against the silver of the tape whenever he tore it. She quashed the thought that he was good with his hands – and mouth.

‘Saw it in a dumpster on my way in this morning,’ he said, twisting the chair around when he’d finished and proudly surveying his work.

To Grace, it was a battered old wreck made even worse by the fact its seat was now all silver tape, but he seemed pleased enough – the tape was back in his coat pocket, his coat was back on the hook and he was lowering himself on to the seat. He rocked from side to side and back and forth.

‘Great,’ he said and then he scooted the chair towards her and it came to rest with a bump that made her grab at the edge of her desk. He was laughing and she wanted to get the tape and wind it round his head. How much more of London’s rubbish was going to end up in her office?

‘That’s better, isn’t it?’ she said as if she really meant it. ‘What a good idea.’

‘You think?’ He cosied the chair up even closer. ‘Only I thought you might worry I was lowering the tone.’

‘Don’t be silly.’

She detected a slight narrowing of his eyes, but he didn’t say anything and so she resumed her explanation of how the office worked, ignoring how close his face was to hers now and how she could smell cigarette smoke on him as he’d presumably had a smoke on the way to the Skip of Plenty. She outlined how Gilbert invoiced for his hours, how he liked to be paid by cheque, and Tate said that would be fine for him too. They talked about work permits and tax details and he told her he had ‘a handle on all that stuff’: he’d been living and working in England for a while already.

Alistair was back. Grace willed him to notice the skanky chair but he was too puffed up with what looked like smugness.

‘What do you think of the new addition?’ he said, beaming.

Grace looked at Tate, who looked straight back at her.

Alistair had cocked his head as if trying to nudge a response from her. Surely he wasn’t expecting her to comment on Tate, give some kind of a verdict on his personality, right there in front of him?

It seemed as if he was. He was still tilting his head encouragingly in her direction.

‘I think …’ she began, casting around for an adjective that wasn’t pushy, brash or obnoxious, ‘I think he’s very enthusiastic.’

Alistair suddenly stopped beaming. ‘What on earth are you talking about, Grace? I wasn’t asking you about Tate.’ He actually tutted. ‘The idea! I was hoping you’d noticed that.’ He pointed to the tea tray and Grace saw for the first time that the old kettle had been replaced by a new one – same model, slightly shinier.

Tate started to laugh – not his normal laugh but a loud one from his belly – and as his seat was now rammed up against hers, she could feel his laughter vibrating up her body.

Alistair was looking aggrieved.

‘Sorry. I hadn’t noticed,’ she floundered. ‘I had a couple of cups of coffee with Bernice earlier, you see, so I didn’t
even …’ She knew she was waffling and decided the only safe thing to say was, ‘But that’s great, you know, that you managed to get a new one so quickly. I’ll go and fill it, shall I? Make a cup of tea?’

She escaped to the kitchen, giving Alistair’s desk a particularly scouring look as she went through his office. There didn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary on it.

In the kitchen she halted when she saw that the bottom half of the Chinese lady who was in her room was taped to the wall as if she were climbing up it. One of her feet had a dirty old piece of material wound around it. She peered closer. In pencil, Tate had written on the wall,
With one bound, she was free
.

Grace took a long time to fill the kettle and wondered if Alistair and Tate had made some kind of pact to drive her up the wall too?

When she got back, Alistair was saying something about Tate trying to build up to three tours a week.

Grace nodded enthusiastically. That still meant two completely Tate-free days. It was essential to look on the bright side.

Alistair retired to his office again and only reappeared to tell her he would post Gilbert’s cheque out to him. He had his briefcase clutched tightly against his body as if he feared being mugged, even in his own office.

‘See you around three,’ he said and was gone.

Grace was relieved of the burden of having to talk to Tate any further by the phone ringing. He watched her take the booking from a couple interested in Gilbert’s next visit to the Renaissance Masters and then another for three people wanting to join her tour of the Wallace Collection (French Art, 1700–1800). When she put the phone down she asked him if he wanted to answer the next call.

‘You know what?’ he said yawning, ‘pretty early start for me this morning. Might just get back to you on that answering the phones thing. Gonna put my head down for a bit.’

She had to clamp her mouth shut not to let
Whaaaaat
? escape.

He ambled through to the reception and she heard him lie down on the sofa. When she leaned forward she could see his feet through the open door, ankles crossed and resting on the arm. WITH THOSE STUPID BIKER BOOTS.

She felt three warring urges: one to point out politely to him that at any minute a client could come in; one to stay calm and say nothing; and yet another to go and give his stupid great feet a hearty shove.

She tried to take her mind off his barefaced cheek by catching up with her emails again. There was a new one from Emma asking her if she was all right, to which,
truthfully this time, she replied that she had parent problems and her father was staying with her, so their planned pizza evening was looking even more attractive. There was also an email from her mother headed up ‘
If you knew how I’ve suffered
’. She found her finger itching to press the delete button, but opened the email and scrolled through it just in case it might contain any hint about what was happening with her dad. It was the usual “scream” of consciousness, tripping from one point of martyrdom to the next and seeming to take as its theme the way that neither Grace nor her father understood what a sensitive person she was. Grace was not sure how this could be as they’d had to hear her tell them that for years. She noticed as she sent it to the recycling bin that the email had been copied to her sisters. Great. Any time now she could expect three more emails expressing sisterly concern and offering the usual range of bizarre advice.

She immersed herself in creating some emailers to announce Tate’s arrival and amending the leaflet copy ready to send out to the printer after Alistair had checked it through one last time. As she worked she was pleased to discover that the second or third time she glanced out at Tate’s biker boots, the stab of indignation was cutting nowhere near as deep as it had – after all, Tate asleep was
better than Tate awake. She just had to get used to him being around. Him and his dismembered Chinese woman.

The phone rang again.

‘Hey, Gracie,’ a laconic voice drifted in from reception, ‘you wanna start mentioning my tours to whoever calls? I know they might be wantin’ you or Gilbert, but you never know, once they hear about mine, they’ll probably change their minds.’

‘Yes. They might,’ she replied.

She took two phone calls in quick succession after that and did manage to interest one person in Tate’s tour. Tate’s tour! Why couldn’t he have a normal name so that you didn’t have to make it really clear that it wasn’t a tour of the Tate, but by a guy named Tate? Even his name was irritating.

When she put the phone down the second time, she could hear Tate talking to someone. She went out to reception to find two young Austrians eyeing Tate uneasily as he chatted away to them horizontally.

She suggested they come through to her office.

‘See ya,’ Tate said and closed his eyes again.

Grace managed to sweet-talk the couple into a tour of the Royal Academy, but she would not have been surprised if, as soon as they left the office, they cancelled the credit card payment. The woman had been sitting on Tate’s seat
and when she stood up to leave, she had to give her skirt a fierce tug to free it from a section of tape that had come unstuck. After they’d left, Grace took a pair of scissors and tidied up the chair as much as it was possible to tidy up something that had known a lot of backsides and been living in a skip until a couple of hours ago.

Tate continued to sleep through more incoming calls and the outgoing ones she made to the various hotel concierges who regularly pointed their guests in the company’s direction.

‘Oh, yes, he’s very challenging and dynamic,’ she assured them while looking at his lifeless feet. ‘It’ll be a fascinating tour.’

Whenever she felt the irritation levels rising and considered how satisfying it would be to push his feet off the arm of the sofa, she reminded herself that he would love that. As a distraction, she went and tried Alistair’s door and found it unlocked. She had a quick look in the post tray. Nothing of interest and then, on a whim, she picked up his phone and rang Julie, the woman who acted as secretary at the Chamber of Commerce meetings. When Grace said she was just checking if there was any paperwork on these new client confidentiality rules, it was obvious that Julie didn’t know what she was talking about. Grace winged it, not wanting to drop Alistair into anything, but
just before she finished the call, Julie said, ‘Do you think you could subtly mention to Alistair that he needs to ring us in future if it looks like he’s going to be late for a meeting? We hung on and waited a good ten minutes for him before we gave up and got on with it. Just as well really, seeing as he never made it until Any Other Business.’

Grace put the phone down more worried than she had been when she had picked it up. Why had Alistair lied about new regulations that didn’t exist? And about going to a meeting of which he’d only caught the tail end?

This time she determined to ‘accidentally’ nudge Tate’s feet as she walked through reception and to hell with the consequences – except his feet weren’t there. They were up on her desk and he was lounging back in her seat, on the phone.

‘Yup. Just started today, so, as I said, if you like your art edgy, give me a shot. If you like the same old, same old, try one of the others.’ He swivelled in the chair and gave her a wave. ‘Alrighty then.’ He sat up and put his feet to the ground and, with the phone trapped between his ear and his shoulder, placed his hands on the computer keyboard. ‘Here we go, firing up the machine. So, what are you called? Real name, mind you, no aliases.’ There was more of his laughter and Grace had to walk out of the
room again. She sat on the sofa and listened to him being too familiar, too pally, altogether too unprofessional. It became apparent that the person booking the tour was Australian as at one point Tate said, ‘Streuth,’ in a mock Aussie accent and there was more laughter. She heard him taking the credit card details, telling the person to slow down with the numbers – didn’t they know he was American and didn’t speak Australian? Grace coaxed the magazines on the table into a neat pile, picked them up and gave them a good hard tap to make sure they were all perfectly in line. There were ways of doing these things, of speaking to the clients. She heard him put the phone down. She slapped down the magazines.

‘Another four people for my tour,’ he shouted through to her. ‘I bet you I can get it up to five days a week.’

‘Wouldn’t that be great?’ she called back.

She braced herself to go back in and face him, but there were more people coming up the stairs. She hurriedly gave the cushions a rough plump up.

‘Good morning,’ she said as the door opened and immediately knew that these were Tate’s friends and not potential clients.

‘Hi, we’re looking for Tate,’ a girl with an addiction to kohl said, and Grace wondered if it was the same stick of kohl that Tate had used on his eyelids. The girl bounced
herself down on the sofa, her black coat and black tights merging with it so that all that really stood out about her was her purple Doc Martins.

‘Yeah. Tate.’ That was from an intense-looking, thin guy with a beanie hat pulled down low over his eyes. He was hugging himself through his black leather bomber jacket and looked as though he had been asleep only minutes before.

The third person who came in through the door simply said, ‘Tate, baby,’ in a honeyed drawl, and as Tate came into reception she enfolded him in her arms. Grace did a bit of female stocktaking that went: long blonde hair, size 10 body, suede pelmet skirt, legs of an attractive racehorse. There was a fair amount of kissing of both women and some strange, high-fiving, low grappling hand stuff with the guy.

Tate turned to Grace. ‘Hey guys, this is Gracie,’ before counting off, ‘this is Joe, Corinne and Bebbie.’ Handshakes did not seem to be in order and so Grace just did a curl of her hand.

‘Gracie does tours of the old guys, for the old guys,’ Tate said, and his visitors assumed a range of expressions of which pity seemed to be the unifying theme. ‘Likes her art in a frame, don’t you?’ Tate said, addressing her directly.