Puppies Are For Life (15 page)

Nothing wrong with that, of course, incongruous though it may be; it was what happened next that had stunned him.

He had been standing against a wall, trying to look inconspicuous among the swarm of students hurrying to their lectures, and intending to make a dash for the entrance as soon as Julia had passed through it. He had planned to follow her movements inside the building if he could. But before he had been able to carry out his intention, a young man of about Julia’s age, who had been striding across the forecourt, suddenly caught up with her. And put a hand on her shoulder. And didn’t take it away again.

The two were laughing into each other’s faces as they entered the building together, obviously enjoying each other’s company and looking as happy as Larry. But Harvey had not been amused.

Slumping into his armchair he played the scene again. And again. It hurt him every time he did it, but he couldn’t help himself. Julia. With another man. Would you credit it?

Well, he decided, finally calling a halt, what was sauce for the goose …

His face unusually grave, he reached for the phone and dialled.

It was a man’s voice that answered; well-spoken but with traces of London in it, and definitely pinstriped.

Harvey looked down at his socks and dredged up his bank-manager’s accent. ‘I’d like to speak to Susannah Harding,’ he told her husband. ‘My name is Harvey Webb.’

‘You’re very late tonight,’ Paul called out when Susannah arrived home that same evening.

‘Well, I did phone to warn you,’ she shouted back at him from the lobby, where she was shedding her outdoor clothes. She put her head round the sitting-room door. ‘I told Katy I had to do some overtime. Katy, didn’t you tell Dad I phoned?’

‘Oh,’ Katy said, her eyes on the TV screen. ‘Sorry, Mum, I forgot.’

Susannah sighed heavily, but let the matter drop. To remonstrate further would be a waste of effort. She needed to go to the bathroom, run a comb through her damp hair and get her feet inside fluffy slippers. Then she might feel a bit more human. Oh, and she must give Harvey a ring; let him know her decision. If she didn’t give him an answer soon he might start making alternative arrangements for his bathroom wall.

She began to edge her way round the crowded room, stepping over Simon’s feet, avoiding the cat on the rug, and being careful not to knock into
Katy’s legs where they dangled over the arm of a chair. But as she was squeezing past the telephone table she noticed a message scribbled on the pad. The name Harvey was spread across one corner with the pen thrown down upon it. In the opposite corner a phone number stood on its head. She snatched up the pad and turned to face the family.

‘Did I have a call?’ she asked, her pulse beginning to flutter.

Katy’s eyes slid sideways. ‘Dad took it earlier on,’ she mumbled, raising the volume on the TV with the controller.

Susannah looked wildly at Paul. ‘When did he call? What did he want? Did he tell you what it was about?’

‘Yes.’ Paul paused to dip into a bowl of peanuts at his elbow and she now saw that they all had a snack of some sort: Katy a bag of Frazzles, Simon popcorn, and Paul the nuts. Even Gazza had a saucer of Kitbits on the hearth.

Paul began feeding himself the nuts one by one, tipping his head back like a hungry fledgling and crunching at aggravating length until each was completely gone. ‘Yes,’ he went on. ‘He phoned about two hours ago, I suppose. He was hassling you about this wretched mural; wanted you to get stuck into it as soon as you possibly could – like yesterday, from what I can gather –
if
you’d made up your mind you were going to do it, that is.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes. So I told him.’

‘You – told him – what?’ she said with ominous care.

Paul cleared his mouth again. ‘That you’d decided you couldn’t manage it, that you simply don’t have the time.’

‘But – but – how on earth could you say that? That’s not what I’d decided at all!’

Her tone must have cut through the languorous atmosphere of the sitting room, because the TV suddenly went dead. Then Katy and Simon slid simultaneously from their armchairs and melted into the walls. Susannah was left standing over her husband, quivering from head to toe.

Paul glanced up at her somewhat belatedly with a nut half-way to his mouth. ‘What are you so uptight about? It’s what we agreed last night.’

‘What
we
agreed?
We
?’ She stabbed a finger at her chest.

‘Yes! We discussed it all in bed … if you remember.’

‘Oh, I remember it very well. Discussing it, that is – if your pouring cold water on everything can be considered having a discussion. We aired the matter, certainly, but never for one moment did I consider turning down the job. That much was perfectly clear.’

‘But –’

‘Well, obviously it wasn’t clear to
you.
But of course you only see what you want to see; you always have. The proverbial ostrich in the sand,
you
are. And how you had the bare-faced cheek to go
over my head like that and discuss
my
business with
my
client … well, it really beggars belief!’

She stormed off into the studio and banged the door. Snatching up the wall-phone she jabbed out a number.

Calm down, she told herself, smoothing her hair and gulping down breaths of air. I must sound normal by the time Harvey gets to the phone.

But her efforts at normality were wasted: an endless ringing tone was all she could get.

‘Mum!’ Simon whispered loudly from the door. ‘You’re going to wake Justin if – oh, you already have. Now he’ll be up all night.’

‘Mind if I come in, folks?’ It was Jan calling now, from the kitchen.

Susannah sank on to a stool.

‘Ah, there you are.’ Jan came into the studio – but not without some difficulty; she was dragging a large cardboard carton behind her, and making heavy weather of it. ‘I felt I simply had to go out and get you this. So Frank and I ran over to that big Argos they’ve just opened up – you know the one?’ She looked up guiltily. ‘I’m afraid we’ll have to juggle the cars round again for the morning … but you ought to have one of these, you know. Before there’s a nasty accident.’

‘A fire guard.’ Susannah’s voice was faint. ‘How lovely. You really shouldn’t have troubled …’

‘Thanks, Ganjan – I mean Jan,’ Simon said. ‘It’s absolutely perfect. Look, Justin, what a lovely fire guard! Your Great Ganjan went and got it for you.’

Paul appeared on the scene. ‘You must let me reimburse you,’ he said, a hand plunging into his pocket. But the pocket held nothing but a handkerchief so he just stood there looking uncomfortable.

‘There’s no need for that right now,’ Jan assured him. She looked round at the ring of faces; how stiff and stilted they seemed! Susannah looked about to commit murder; Paul equally so. Simon seemed embarrassed for them both, while Katy could be seen hanging back doubtfully in the sitting-room doorway. Things seemed to have gone from bad to worse in just one day. She smiled at them all awkwardly in turn and rapidly excused herself.

‘Fancy a game of Happy Families?’ Frank teased her when she reported her findings to him. He pretended to reach for a pack of cards from the shelf where they stowed a few games.

Jan couldn’t raise the smallest smile. ‘You can keep your feeble jokes to yourself, Frank May. I’m beginning to wish we hadn’t come home, honestly I am. And that’s no laughing matter.’

Katy slumped down on the bed and looked at her stack of possessions – three boxes and two carrier bags containing all her worldly goods. Andrea had finally turned up with them late that afternoon – and with Spike in tow.

They hadn’t stayed long, and it was pretty obvious why: Katy had fancied Spike herself and had been working on him in London but now, would you believe, it seemed that he and Andrea
were wrapped up in each other. To be fair they’d tried not to flaunt it but it had shown all the same. So that put the lid on keeping a link with the London lot. There was no place for Katy there now.

And to add insult to injury Andrea had seen fit to pass comment on Katy’s hair, just as they were getting into Spike’s car.

‘Nobody’s wearing it like that any more,’ she’d hissed, presumably thinking she was doing Katy a kindness by keeping her up to date – now that she lived in the sticks and couldn’t possibly know about such things.

‘So what?’ Katy had found herself snapping back. She was aware that the style had gone out of fashion some time ago, but it had taken her a while to cultivate the extra odd length and she was reluctant to part with it. ‘The whole idea is to be different, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, but –’ Andrea had shrugged; she’d had no answer to that.

Katy nudged one of the carriers with her toe. Two bags and three boxes wasn’t much to show for a lifetime.

She got up, snatched the dressed doll off the window-sill and tossed it on to the top of the wardrobe. In its place she arranged her collection of CDs, tapes, cosmetics, and baby spider plants. That was a bit better. But even when she’d unpacked everything and found new homes for it all, black despair still enveloped her.

She threw herself back on the bed. For two pins
she could take the entire contents of the Disprin bottle that had just rolled out of a shoe. Wait a minute though – forget the two pins. She wouldn’t need them where she was going, would she?

The sleeping-bags rustled as Susannah crept past.

‘Oh, so you’re awake?’ she said.

‘Nnngh.’

‘Well, I don’t know why I’m tip-toeing about anyway; you ought to be getting up.’

Simon unglued his tongue from the roof of his mouth sufficiently to mutter, ‘Why?’

As if he had no child to feed, no reason to stir himself! But Susannah’s patience had worn thin by now – with her whole family. Last night had been the giddy limit; not just because of Paul’s incredible nerve and Jan’s well-intended interference either.

To be fair, Paul had attempted an apology. At least, that was what she had supposed it to be. With hindsight it might have been another opportunity to point up her failings. Whatever, Paul had found her in their bedroom soon after Jan had left, where she had gone to be alone, and asked her if she wanted some pancakes.

‘Pancakes?’ she’d repeated, puzzled.

‘Yes, we’re making some in the kitchen. You – er – there didn’t seem to be any dinner.’

Just as she had suspected: they had been sitting around waiting for her to come home and make them all a meal. Peanuts had just been the hors d’oeuvres.

‘I don’t want any, thank you,’ she said primly, though her stomach, with unbelievably bad timing, let out a groan. It must have been the thought of lemon juice and sugar, plus the smell drifting up from below.

‘But you haven’t eaten anything.’

‘I’m simply not at all hungry,’ she’d insisted, and he’d shrugged and gone downstairs. She’d got into bed soon after that, resolutely not thinking of pancakes and, quite surprisingly, had slept the whole night through.

‘Well –’ Susannah began bustling round the sitting room in an attempt to straighten the usual mess – ‘are you going to get up and feed that baby of yours or are you going to lie there and let him starve?’

‘Mum, he isn’t even awake yet.’

‘He … isn’t he?’ She stopped tidying to listen. And could hardly believe her ears. There wasn’t a single sound. Trust Justin to sleep in when she had decided not to be on duty.

She hurried into the kitchen, which looked as though it had been used as an all-night café, and began to clear debris from the sink.

‘Mu-um …’ Simon said, coming up behind her.

She turned to find him hugging himself against the cold that tended to steal into the room when
the boiler went down overnight. ‘Mum, I’ve been wanting to talk to you, you know.’ Well, why not, he thought, rubbing sleep from his eyes? Jan had been very helpful and would keep her promise, he knew that, but she might not get around to seeing Natalie for a while. Perhaps his mother would.

‘Have you, dear? About what?’ Susannah reached distractedly for a tin of cat food and flipped off the plastic lid.

‘About us of course – me and Natalie.’ He looked down at his big bare feet and stroked Gazza with one of his toes. ‘I thought you’d know what to do about her, and all that.’

Susannah looked from the cat food, to her son, to the spoon in her hand. Talk about bad timing! ‘Well, of course we must have a chat. But couldn’t it wait till this evening?’

‘Well, actually, I’ve already had a talk with Jan … and she’s promised to go and see Natalie. But I thought it might be better if
you
went. You see …’

Simon quickly filled his mother in on all the things he had discussed with the oh-so-sensible Jan, unwittingly overwhelming her by the sudden avalanche of his problems. She hadn’t guessed the half of it; she had thought it no more than a little tiff that would soon blow over.

‘I’ll … do whatever I can,’ she said, swallowing hard when he’d finished. And she would, she told herself. She’d sort Natalie out before Jan could put in an oar, even if it killed her.

‘Oh, thanks, Mum, you’re a wonder.’ Simon gave her a hug. ‘I thought you’d say you couldn’t possibly; you wouldn’t be able to find time. You’ve never got time for any of us these days, have you? Katy was only saying so yesterday.’

Susannah opened her mouth to protest, but Simon went on.

‘We didn’t tell you we went for a drive yesterday, did we? Jan gave us some petrol money. And Katy wanted to go and look at Windy Ridge, so that’s where we went.’

‘For heaven’s sake, why?’ And what had that to do with anything right now?

Simon jerked a shoulder. ‘She just did. Anyway, we sat outside the house, just looking at it, and wishing we were still there. We were happy in that house, Katy and I. So were you and Dad. You didn’t argue like you do these days, and –’

‘Simon …’ Susannah shook her head, bewildered as to why he had seen fit to bring up such a topic at quarter past six on a dark November morning. And she despaired that her offspring seemed so ill-prepared for life that all they could do was look back. Where was their grit, their drive, their ability to cope? Was life so much more difficult these days? She had always thought that a happy family background was enough to set children up for dealing with practically anything, whereas all it had seemed to succeed in doing was over-protect them. Oh, parenthood was impossible.

‘We’ll talk about all this later,’ she promised him
guiltily. ‘I’m sorry, Simon, but … we will. Here, give this to Gazza, would you? I really have to fly.’

Susannah glanced round the office before lifting the receiver. Private calls were frowned on unless they were absolutely essential, in which case you were supposed to get permission, though nobody did. Well, she could just imagine Duffy’s reaction if she were to ask if she could phone a man about a mural: he’d blow a gasket.

As she listened to the ringing tone, she pulled a print-out of that week’s dummy pay-slips towards her and flipped straight to her group of shift-workers. Their statements looked a bit odd with the same amount of money being shown twice. But hopefully the men would realise that the two amounts cancelled each other out and only appeared like this for record purposes. Hunching over them she pretended to work. Fortunately no one was close enough to hear what she would be saying on the phone. Even Molly was out of the office at the moment, giving blood.

A woman came on the line. Thrown, though she should have been prepared for Harvey’s wife to answer, Susannah gabbled that she needed to talk to Harvey. Urgently. But he was out at the moment, apparently; Julia didn’t say where. ‘Would you tell Harvey I’ll call him later?’ Susannah said.

‘But
not
on the office phone,’ a voice came from behind her as she replaced the receiver. ‘And
not
during office hours.’

Susannah looked up to find Mr Duffy peering down at her with grim disdain.

‘Mrs Harding,’ he said, ‘do you think we could have a quiet word?’

As soon as they were in his office Susannah offered to pay for the call. But he batted her words to one side.

‘It’s not just a matter of the phone call, is it?’ Gravely he wagged his head at her.

‘Then what –?’

‘What?’
he repeated incredulously.

‘Yes, what?’ She was supposed to be a mind-reader?

Duffy stood in front of her with his mouth open, two old gravy stains below the knot in his tie. ‘Well now, you had your statements in front of you; you tell me. Or were you so engrossed in your conversation that the penny failed to drop?’ He went to sit in his chair, tipped himself back in it and fixed her with cold eyes. ‘Perhaps “pennies” might be more appropriate in the circumstances. And rather a large number of them too.’

Realisation came to Susannah like an icy hand on her spine. The statements had looked odd for a very good reason: they were wrong.

And it simply wasn’t fair. She had tried so hard with the wretched forms, filling them in with the utmost care to get the figures right, and what had she forgotten, for all that? To mark the debit box.

‘A plus and a minus cancel each other out,’ Duffy lost no time in reminding her, ‘whereas a plus and
a plus means we have forty-three overpayment cases on our hands. Or, to put it another way, forty-three men who’ll be getting money in their banks to which they are not entitled, and from whom we’ll have the devil’s own job recovering it – especially with Christmas nearly upon us. They’ll hang on to it for dear life, even though they know they can’t keep it for ever. So you see, Mrs Harding, it isn’t only a question of cheating the company out of money for a phone call. Heaven knows what Management are going to say when they’re presented with all this.’

It was at that point in the interview that Susannah discovered she couldn’t give a tinker’s cuss what Management might have to say. She couldn’t care less about the error. In fact, she couldn’t care less about the job, and hadn’t for a long, long time.

It was strange, but not caring was so much easier than caring, and far from hammering her into the ground, Duffy’s words were having the effect of lifting weights from her shoulders. A bubble of recklessness enveloped her and would have floated her to the ceiling if it hadn’t been for that one degrading word ‘cheating’.
That
kept her feet on the carpet.

OK, so it had been dishonest of her to make the phone call; but talk about the pot calling the kettle black!

‘Cheating,’ she said, with jerky nods of the head. ‘Do you plan on telling Management about that
too? Well, perhaps you’d better show them the Flexi print-out while you’re at it. They might be interested in an entry on the print-out that appears under the letter D.’

Duffy’s gaze met hers. His mouth fell open and stayed there, confirming Susannah’s wild shot in the dark – wild, because only he normally saw such print-outs. But a sudden vision of Duffy lurking around the Flexi machine had sprung into her mind, and with it had come the notion of what he had probably been up to. Not watching over his staff and keeping them up to scratch as they had all naturally concluded, but fiddling the system himself!

‘Everyone in the office knows you spend an hour and a half in the pub each lunch-time,’ she went on. ‘What Management hasn’t cottoned on to – yet – is that you key yourself out and in again for exactly the obligatory half-hour
before
you swan off to the pub. You’ve been cheating the company of an hour of your services each day, for years and years. And
that
makes my overpayments pale into insignificance.’

Duffy chewed over these facts for a long time. Susannah could almost see cogs grinding inside his ugly head.

Finally he said, ‘Well, I’ve got proof of your inadequacy, haven’t I? But where’s your proof against me? A print-out can’t prove anything; everything looks fine on that. You’d need witnesses prepared to support your story – for “story” is all it is.’

Susannah saw too late the impossibility of her case. Everyone in the office moaned like hell about injustices until given an opportunity to do something to put them right; then they stuck their heads in the sand. And of course they couldn’t afford to put their jobs on the line the way she had done.

Duffy was smiling grimly. He had always resented her working here for pin money, she felt, when the less well-off could have had her job. And now he could do something about it. ‘I think you’ve just about made it impossible for us to work together in future, don’t you? Looks like one of us had better walk away from all this. And it sure as eggs won’t be me.’

The Old Dairy looked as quiet and deserted as the rest of the village normally did, mid-morning on a week-day.

Would Harvey be at home, Susannah wondered, sitting at the kerb in her car. She chewed the thumb of her glove. He simply
had
to be there. And he must be persuaded to let her do the mural. No doubt he was fed up with being messed around, first by her own prevarication, and then by Paul’s negative response to him on the phone, but she was now desperate to retrieve the situation. Throwing away her job at C & G as she had just done would not go down at all well at home. But if she could tell Paul that at least she had work of a kind …

Wrapped in the same cloud of unreality that had transported her from Duffy’s office to her desk,
from her desk to her car and all the way home to Upper Heyford, she climbed out on to the pavement and let herself in at the Webbs’ white picket gate.

Her first timid knock went unanswered; her second, more resolute one, brought Harvey to the door with a newspaper in his hand and a pencil tucked behind one ear. The accommodation now partly revealed behind him was open-plan, and it was instantly apparent that she had disturbed his coffee break.

‘Oh,’ she said, her eyes drawn to the steaming mug he’d left balanced on the arm of a chair, ‘I do hope I’m not intruding.’

His face had relaxed into a smile on seeing her. ‘Actually you’re a welcome relief,’ he assured her, stepping to one side as she transferred herself to his doormat. She stood shivering inside her coat while he shoved the door shut with his shoulder. ‘Care for a cup of coffee? There’s plenty left in the pot.’

‘Please!’ She nodded nineteen to the dozen. Coffee was something she badly needed right now. Her nerves were so strung up following the morning’s drama that she could barely control her limbs.

But watching Harvey’s easy, confident movements as he made his way over to the breakfast bar she wished she hadn’t agreed to the cup of coffee – appetising though it promised to be since the smell of fresh-ground beans hung in the air. Being here
alone in this attractive man’s company – and for all she knew alone in the whole village – an uneasiness was stealing upon her. Cautious by nature, and having spent most of her life with one man, she was not at all sure of this one’s trustworthiness. She resolved to gulp down the coffee, get her business over with as soon as possible, and quickly make her escape.