Authors: Unknown
That was until she returned to the living room with the tray of tea. She looked across at Teddy, so forlorn and unhappy, and unable to bear the sight of her sister looking so miserable, she glanced to the window and saw her beat up old A35 standing on the drive.
‘I could travel each day, I suppose,’ she said, not looking forward to the normally two-hour drive that would probably take three hours in her car, but warming to the idea as Teddy stopped crying for a moment and looked at her with hope in her eyes.
‘Could you, Gerry?’ she asked quietly. ‘I wouldn’t mind how late you got back provided you came home at night— I’d do all the work and have a meal ready for when you come in.’ Teddy was prepared to promise anything rather than be left on her own at night.
Gerry wasn’t sure the A35 would last the pace. It was on its last legs now, having only just scraped through its M.O.T. ten months ago. Her mind refused to wrestle with the problem of what to do for transport if the car didn’t pass its next M.O.T. test; she secretly knew it wouldn’t. Aside from the little trips out Teddy looked forward to at weekends, the infrequent bus service would make it impossible for her to get to and from work.
‘Do it, Gerry,’ Teddy was urging. ‘I’ll get up early with you in the mornings,’ she promised, ‘and it will only be for a couple of days—you said so yourself—and it’s light at nights now until after ten, so you won't be driving home in the dark.’
It was settled. Gerry had known that once she had told Teddy her idea there would be no backing down.
On Sunday she pressed her best suit. It had been a good one once. She hadn’t worn it for some time—but she wanted to look smart tomorrow when she met some of the staff at the London office, Teddy insisted she go to bed early that night, since in order to arrive at the parent company of Arrowsmith Computers in London for nine, she would have to leave Little Layton no later than six the next morning.
The suit she had pressed list night didn’t look anywhere near as smart as she had remembered it when she put it on the following morning. At one time it had fitted her snugly, but as she looked at her reflection in the mirror, Gerry saw that it now positively hung on her. She’d so wanted to look smart today too, she sighed. It couldn’t be helped, and anyway there were more pressing problems than the way she looked.
True to her word, Teddy was up to see her off, but only because she had made Gerry promise to wake her. And when Gerry said she couldn’t possibly eat breakfast at that unearthly hour, Teddy herself packed her a small parcel of sandwiches.
‘I’ll get back as soon as I can,’ Gerry promised as her sister came out in her dressing gown to the car with her. ‘Why don’t you go back to bed—you might get another hour or two before the twins wake up?’
With Teddy’s, ‘I think I will,’ ringing in her ears, Gerry let in the clutch and pulled off the drive.
She convinced herself as she tootled through hamlet after hamlet—not daring to take the A35 on the motorway and let herself in for untold expense if the car broke down —that she really enjoyed what she was doing. Crawford Arrowsmith would never know, and it was quite a treat to have the roads almost to herself. There were one or two steep hills en route she hadn’t anticipated, and she praised the A35 out loud—‘Good girl!’ she said as the old car responded to her coaxing, and made it every time. But she needed all her concentration when she neared London. The weekend had been spent in poring over old maps of Mark’s they had found, but even so the traffic here was thicker. She began to feel edgy when her watch showed her time was going on. Then, as she had planned last night, she found a place to park on the outskirts of London, and minutes later was boarding a tube that seemed to take a very short time to take her almost to her destination.
Gerry felt quite pleased with herself when she stepped through the wide impressive entrance of Arrowsmith Computers with fifteen minutes to spare. If the early start, the concentration required -on her driving, and the rush and bustle of London—so much a change from the sleepy backwater of Little Layton—had caused her temples to pound, she was going to be the only one to know it, she decided as she went up to the enquiry desk where a smart young lady was already on duty, and made her enquiry.
‘Ah yes—you’ll want Miss Langley.’ The girl smiled at her as if pleased to welcome a member from their Layton company. ‘I don’t suppose she’ll be in yet. If you’d like to take the lift to the rest room, I’ll tell her you’re here when she arrives.’
Gerry found the rest room without too much difficulty. It was very little different from the rest room in Layton, except that it was larger and had a few more tables and easy chairs. She selected one of the chairs near to the door, and sank down into it gratefully, glad to be able to close her eyes for a few minutes.
‘Do I take it your hotel bed wasn’t so comfortable that you have to finish off your sleep here?’
Gerry woke up with a start. Crawford Arrowsmith’s voice had been the last one she had expected to hear, but it brought her round from her ten-minute nap quicker than anything else could have done. It was like having a douche of cold water thrown over her, she thought in a bemused way, as she hurriedly shock the remnants of sleep away. As she made to get up from the cosiness of her chair her hands went to her hair to check that it was still neatly in its bun. She felt at a decided disadvantage anyway without having to stretch her neck to look up at him.
‘Do you always dress your hair that way?’ Crawford was asking as she stood up, his personal remark causing her to glance at him. He was standing close to her and it unnerved her, so she took a step away from him while she gathered her scattered wits about her.
‘Are you suggesting I wear my hair flowing over my shoulders while I’m at business?’ She was rather proud of her cool tones.
‘It would be an improvement,’ he said shortly, opening the door indicating that she should follow him. ‘But then anything would be an improvement to the hideous style you favour at the moment.’
Because of his long strides she was forced to walk quickly to keep up with him as he turned a corner and strode out along another corridor, then through a pair of swing doors. She thought he had finished with the subject of her hair and began to wonder how she was going to cope with what this Miss Langley was going to show her today—it couldn’t be very much different from what she had been doing in Layton ...
‘I think you try to make yourself unattractive on purpose,’ he said, coming to a halt so suddenly she almost bumped into him.
‘I ...’ Again she stepped a pace away from him, and found herself staring up into cold grey eyes, whatever she had been going to say lost as the irritation she realised he was feeling with her showed in his face.
‘I think this fellow you’re living with is so unsure of you he makes you wear clothes that are too big for you— clothes that hide the curves beneath,’ Crawford Arrowsmith said so outrageously that Gerry almost exploded, would have done she knew, but for an unexpected gleam in his eyes that gave her the oddest idea that he was deliberately goading her, deliberately trying to get her to lose her temper. It was as if he was trying to find out what was on the other side of her, she thought, and couldn’t think why he should bother, other than that he was so arrogant he had to know what made everybody tick.
Not without difficulty, she swallowed her wrath. She’d known before today that he had an uncanny knack of making her forget her determination to be outwardly cool.
‘You can think what the hell you like, Mr Arrowsmith,’ she said sweetly. ‘If I choose to dress in ex-Army surplus it has nothing to do with you.’
She expected him to jump down her throat as her words reached him, but to her surprise, she espied a gleam of admiration in his eyes, and knew he wasn’t deceived by her sweetness.
‘Tell your lover the next time you see him that nothing can hide the beauty of your bone structure,’ he said to her growing amazement, adding coolly. ‘Your hair may resemble some schoolmarm from the nineteen-twenties, but scraped back from your face the way it is, it shows up your beauty to anyone with an eye for that sort of thing.’ He then continued to walk on, and Gerry was forced to walk on with him, while her mind tried to sort out whether he had an eye for ‘that sort of thing’, or if he was once more trying to get a rise out of her.
Then there was no time to draw any conclusion from what he had said, for he stopped as they came up to a door painted in the palest of greys, and walked in, and when she had followed he closed the door with a very definite click.
At the very least Gerry expected to see the unknown Miss Langley there. But on staring round the room, she saw there was no one there but their two selves. She looked about her as if expecting to find Miss Langley hiding in one of the corners while a definite conviction passed through her that she wouldn’t find Miss Langley here, because this office belonged not to her opposite number in London, but to the head of Arrowsmiths himself ... the man who was now leaning idly against the solid wood of the only desk in the thickly carpeted room with its pale green walls. The man who was now looking at her from across the space of a few yards, with a look in his eyes that said he had some very strong words to say to her— and if she wasn’t mistaken, she was going to be made to listen to every one of them.
‘I ... er ... thought you were taking me to see Miss Langley,’ she said after a long moment, hating the fact he had seen her swallow before she had found her voice.
‘All in good rime, Miss Barton—all in good time. First of all, though, I think you and I need to have a little chat.’ She didn’t like at all the steel she heard lurking behind the mildness of his words. ‘Perhaps you would like to take a seat.’
Gerry
elected to take one of the two hard-backed chairs in the room, feeling suddenly the need to sit down as Crawford Arrowsmith continued to give her his cool appraisal. He made no move to take the seat behind the desk and she wished he would, for with him on her side of the desk —barely a yard away—he was much too close for comfort.
She tried composing her face into remote lines, adopting a ‘nothing you can say can upset me’ manner. But when the silence in the room lengthened and he still hadn’t said a word, she was forced by the very disturbance somewhere in her middle to look at him, and Hated that without so much as saying a word, he had the power to unnerve her. His slate grey eyes were boring into her and she knew she wouldn’t be able to take it much longer— any minute now she would be losing the temper that was rarely in evidence.
‘You—you said you wanted to speak to me?’ It that wasn’t pointed enough, she thought, hating that he was propped up against the desk and in a position to look down his straight nose at her, then he must be being deliberately obtuse.
‘How long is it since you had a check-up?’
What she had expected him to say she wasn’t sure, but that was the last thing that would have come to her mind. ‘You mean ...'
‘I mean when was the last time you saw a doctor?’
Oh heavens, she hoped he wasn’t going to go on about what he called her washed-out appearance. Arrowsmiths had their own medical unit—she had a nasty feeling if she didn’t give him the right answer to his question he would be bundling her along to see the firm’s doctor before she got as far as seeing Miss Langley.
‘As a matter of fact I was in the doctor’s surgery last week.’ She couldn’t help but feel smug as she trotted out that piece of information, safe in the knowledge that she had well and truly spiked his guns.
‘I see.’ He looked at her consideringly, to her annoyance seeming in no way at all put out. ‘And what was your doctor’s verdict?’
Still feeling she had scored one over him, she decided she could afford to be flippant. ‘He said I was as well as could be expected.’ She wished afterwards she had held her tongue. For with a speed she hadn’t anticipated he left the desk he had been so negligently leaning against and was standing over her, his hands gripping her shoulders with such painful intensity she thought her bones would break.
‘You’re pregnant,’ he accused, his eyes glaring down at her as though she had done him a personal injury.
‘I’m not!’ She tried to inject a light laugh into her voice, anything to ease the tenseness of the situation. But the laugh didn’t come off, as the fear his blazing look sent through her, cancelled every other emotion, ‘I’m not,’ she said again, when his hands continued to grip her in their punishing hold. ‘Y-you’re hurting me,’ she stammered, while wondering what on earth had got into him. It couldn’t matter a hoot to him whether she was pregnant or not other than that he’d have to find another P.A. to work for his cousin when he came to Layton.
Crawford Arrowsmith let go the brutal hold he had on her, and she would dearly love to rub her bruised shoulders, but something—she didn’t know what—stopped her. Perhaps it was because he was looking at her as though only then realising the pain he had inflicted on her —and for no reason she could think of she didn't want to make more of it than he knew it to be.
‘I’m ... forgive me, I ’ He didn’t finish what he was saying, but returned to being the overpowering, arrogant man she knew him to be as this time he went to the other side of the desk and took the seat facing her, as if only by having the desk between them would he be able to keep his hands off her. This disturbed Gerry more than if he’d gone to lean against the desk in front of her again. Although she couldn’t say with any truth that she was very close to anyone—other than Teddy and the twins of course —she hadn’t thought she aroused such feelings of dislike in anyone that they had to make a special effort to keep themselves from committing a physical violence on her. And it was so obvious that Crawford Arrowsmith didn’t like her that she felt almost like fainting as the impact of the effect she had on him hit her.
Before she had time to think further why it should bother her that he couldn’t stand the sight of her, she saw his blazing look had vanished, and he was now giving her the benefit of the coldest scrutiny she had ever encountered—which did nothing to detract from the very clear impression he had given her that he would rather have her room than her company.