‘Why ever not?’
‘She’ll want to know why I took you out for lunch and not her.’
‘Well, that is a good question, you know; why did you turn up at my office on the off-chance I’d be around?’
Their sandwiches were delivered to their table, along with their drinks. When the waitress had gone, Callum said, ‘Does there have to be a special reason to see you? Or are you saying you’d rather have prior notice? If so, I apologise, it really was just a spur of the moment thing.’
Seeing the look of disappointment on his face, and realising that she had sounded ungracious, Jenna immediately apologised. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean it to come out quite like that. It’s been one of those mornings.’
Which wasn’t strictly true, it was just the last hour that had upended her equilibrium. On her way to the lift to go out and grab something for lunch, she had been waylaid by a voice calling to her. It had been Blake Darnell and ever since the Punch and Judy encounter with him, he had developed a habit of popping up like a Jack-in-the-box. One minute he’d been invisible to her, as though he didn’t exist; now he was rarely off her radar. She’d asked around in the office to see what people thought of him, and the general opinion was that he was hot. A total hottie, if Emily, who also worked in the legacy department, was to be believed. But then as one of the few men – no, strike that, as one of the few heterosexual men in the office, perhaps that artificially upped his status amongst the heterosexual women.
Jenna knew she wasn’t imagining that he just happened to be passing her office yet again, or that he had formed a strange attachment to the Punch and Judy bequest and was interested to know what would become of it. ‘He doesn’t give a hoot about Punch and Judy,’ Emily said one day, ‘it’syouhe’s interested in. Trust me, I have a sixth sense for these things; he’s into you in a big way. Have you noticed his dreamy eyes?’
Jenna always found her encounters with Blake fraught with some kind of undercurrent, which in turn made her uptight and on her guard. In fairness to him, he never did anything actually wrong. She knew the problem lay with her, partly because she couldn’t help but wonder how she might regard him in another context, if they weren’t work colleagues. But she had made that vow to keep her private life completely separate from her work life, and she fully intended to keep it. She was a woman of her word, yes sir, she most certainly was.
‘What are your views on relationships in the workplace, Miss Fielding?’ Blake had asked her earlier when he’d stood next to her as she waited for the lift. He’d posed the question in the manner of somebody interviewing her for a job.
‘Depends what your definition of relationship is?’ she’d said, swatting the button to summon the lift.
‘Ah yes, Lawyer Girl, I was forgetting that fine legal brain of yours, the one that requires every i dotted and every t crossed.’
‘Hardly takes a fine legal brain to ask you to define something.’
‘But don’t forget, we on the floor above you are not blessed with common sense, or the gift of reasoning powers. No, we conduct ourselves in the dark arts of make-it-up-as-we-go-along and hope to God nobody sees through our transparency. The Emperor and his new clothes has nothing on Brand and Marketing.’
‘Oh, I think you can satisfy yourselves with the knowledge that the rest of us are much too busy dotting our i’s and crossing our t’s to give your transparency a second thought,’ she’d responded airily, giving the lift button another not so airy swipe.
‘How very disappointing. I had hoped that I had made more of an impression on you. Clearly I have to up my game. By the way, just as kettles don’t boil any faster for being watched, lifts never come any faster for having their buttons repeatedly thumped, no matter how bad-temperedly.Ciao, ciao!’
She’d watched him walk away, childishly annoyed that he always seemed to have the last word, leaving her to feel just like a whistling kettle with its lid furiously rattling and steam spurting out of the spout.What exactly is your game, mister?she wanted to shout at his retreating figure as he strode away, his head up, his arms swinging. As if she couldn’t guess!
When the lift finally arrived and she stepped inside, she realised with annoyance that thanks to Emily, she had now noticed his eyes – their colour hovered between hazel, warm caramel and burnished copper.
Her thoughts now back on Callum, acknowledging that it was a lovely surprise to see him and knowing that he seldom came to London, she said, ‘What brought you to the big old Smoke then?’
‘Oh you know, the usual, an appointment with my Savile Row tailor and a trip to my hairdresser in Mayfair.’
She laughed. ‘Of course, how silly of me.’
‘I’m crestfallen that you don’t believe me.’
‘You’d be more crestfallen if I did. I know you, Callum, I know you of old, you’d no more waste money on such things than I would. We’re two of a kind you and me, much too sensible for wilful extravagance.’
‘Bloody hell, how dull you make us sound!’
‘I didn’t mean to, it’s just that we’re grounded in the real world, aren’t we?’
‘That’s not what my parents said when I gave up university and took off to the Broads. They thought I was living in cloud cuckoo-land. The only ones really to respect my decision from the get-go were Alastair and Orla. Even you thought I’d lost the plot for a time, didn’t you?’
‘Only because I was concerned for you. But never mind all that, have you seen Alastair since that dreadful weekend? It’s crazy, but nearly two weeks on and I can still feel the awful tension of that moment when he told us of his plans. I woke up the next morning hoping Alastair would say that he’d been joking, that of course he’d never sell the house.’
Callum took a sip of his coffee. ‘Is that what bothers you most, no more Linston End?’
‘Now you’re making me sound horribly shallow. It’s not just about the house, it’s more a case of accepting that it’s the end of an era.’
‘You mean finally we have to accept we’re properly grown up, that our childhood is behind us?’
Jenna gave Callum’s question some thought while she chewed a mouthful of sandwich. ‘Maybe you’re right,’ she said at length, ‘and it is as simple and as selfish as that, an acceptance that it’s time to put away childish things.’
