Beyond All Reason. CATHY WILLIAMS
tell her,’ Abigail said. Poor Janet. Ross Anderson had a knack for making people nervous, and Janet was no exception. The last time she had a meeting with him, she made the mistake of forgetting some of her brief and had had to endure his barely contained impatience while she attempted to sort through her things for the relevant information.
‘What the hell’s the matter with you?’ Ross had asked her afterwards, when Janet had finally left the office, with an expression of relief on her face, and Abigail had looked down at her notepad where she had been jotting down the relevant points of the meeting.
‘Nothing,’ she had said, which had made him scowl darkly at her.
‘She should have made sure that everything was prepared before she came in here.’
‘She’s human.’
‘I’m human,’ he had pointed out irritably, ‘but that doesn’t mean that I drift in and out of my meetings in a state of semi-chaos.’
Abigail had looked up at him wryly, and he had snapped, with a dark flush, that he was not obliged to justify his behaviour to her anyway.
He stood up now, glanced down at his watch and said that she could expect him some time after lunch.
As usual, after he left, the office seemed peculiarly empty and very restful. She worked steadily for the next two hours and then sat back with a little sigh of weariness.
She would have her lunch now, she decided, a yoghurt and some fruit, and she would try not to spend the next half-hour analysing her relationship with Martin. She enjoyed his company, he enjoyed hers and they felt comfortable with one another.
She peeled off the top of the carton and relaxed back in her chair, swivelling it around so that she was staring out of the window, although the view was hardly inspiring. Grey sky, grey tops of buildings, grey strip of road in between the buildings, and to the right an isolated, lonely green blob which constituted the nearest park. Sometimes she wished that she had never chosen London as a place to live, but it offered the best jobs and in a way she had become quite accustomed to its crowded streets and frenetic pace. Every time her mother travelled down from Shropshire to visit, she made a point of telling her daughter how silly it was to live in London when she was a country girl at heart, a description that always left Abigail feeling that by country girl she meant boring yokel. And that in itself was enough to guarantee that she stayed put, right where she was, in her tiny flat in North London.
She had just finished her yoghurt when the office door swung open and Abigail looked up to find herself staring into two very blue eyes.
‘May I help you?’ she asked, and for a while the other woman didn’t answer. She simply prowled around the office, the bright blue eyes scanning everything, until she found herself opposite Abigail’s desk.
‘You are Ross’s little secretary, I take it?’ Her voice was as cold as her eyes. ‘I’m Fiona St Paul. Perhaps Ross has mentioned me.’
‘No, I’m afraid he hasn’t.’
Since the other woman had no compunction about observing her, Abigail returned the scrutiny with one of her own. Fiona St Paul was very tall, very slender, with the smooth, sleek lines of a model. Her blonde hair was cropped short and her skin had the porcelain fairness that hinted of Scandinavian blood. Her voice, however, was very upper-crust English.
‘No,’ she said coolly, ‘I don’t suppose he would have. Not to you, anyway. Can you fetch him for me?’
‘Mr Anderson isn’t in at the moment, I’m afraid,’ Abigail said without too much regret.
‘Well, when will he be back?’ The scarlet lips were pursed with irritation.
‘Some time this afternoon.’
‘Some time? Some time? Could you be more specific than that?’
Abigail tried to smile politely and failed. ‘No,’ she said bluntly, ‘I cannot be more specific than that. Perhaps I could get him to call you when he returns.’
‘Yes, my dear, you most certainly could.’ She sat down on the chair opposite the desk and crossed her legs elegantly. She was wearing a pale blue silk suit and a thick, camel-coloured coat. ‘And could you call me a taxi? It’s absolutely tipping down outside and I can’t quite face standing out there trying to hail one.’ She inspected her nails, which were the same shade of scarlet as the lipstick.
This, Abigail felt very tempted to point out, is not part of my little secretarial duties, but she picked up the receiver and after a brief conversation managed to secure a taxi to arrive outside the building immediately.
‘Jolly good,’ Fiona said, standing up and brushing down her skirt. ‘And don’t forget to tell Ross that I dropped by and that I’ll see him tonight for the theatre.’ With that, she left the office, leaving behind her a waft of expensive perfume.
No wonder, Abigail thought, that he had had no hesitation in informing her that he would not be running late today. She gazed at the computer terminal and wondered at which stage this particular romance was. She had not heard mention of Fiona St Paul before but that didn’t mean that she hadn’t been on the scene for at least a couple of months. She certainly ran true to type as far as Ross’s women were concerned. Tall, elegant, self-assured. She switched on the computer terminal and thought of Martin.
‘Just your type,’ her mother had gushed when she had first met him four months ago.
‘Ordinary, you mean?’ she had asked drily, because her mother’s implied insults no longer drove her into paroxysms of self-conscious embarrassment the way they once had as a teenager.
‘Nice and stable,’ her mother had returned. ‘You don’t want to lose your head over a man you wouldn’t be able to keep. Remember that last fiasco of yours.’
It had been a mistake telling her mother about Ellis. She had immediately delivered a lecture on the impossibility of an ordinary girl handling someone like him. Never mind that she had never actually met Ellis Fitzmerton. That, according to her mother, had been a minor technical detail, and certainly not enough to stop her announcing her views on the subject.
Nice, stable Martin, Abigail thought now. She was very fond of him and when she had accepted his marriage proposal one week ago, she had done so safe in the knowledge that he would be a good husband, someone on whom she could rely. They had only been seeing each other for a matter of six months, but she knew that she felt relaxed and comfortable with him and that was what love was about, she was certain. He had been such a pleasant change from the suave, deceitful Ellis with his promises and declarations which had lasted all of six weeks, until the girlfriend she never knew he had returned from her glamour trip round the world, bronzed, beautiful and ready to resume where she had left off. Oh, the declarations had certainly gone by the board then, she thought bitterly. Love? Marriage? He had looked at her white face with wide-eyed incredulity. ‘You must have misread the signals, sweetie.’ He had shaken his head sadly, ruefully, pained at the thought that he might have given her the wrong ideas.
Martin was far too decent a human being ever to play games like that. She frowned and felt that little niggling worry which she immediately swept to the back of her mind.
It was after four when Ross swept back into the office. He paused by her desk and she reeled off his telephone messages, then she said, glancing down at the typed letters, ‘By the way, you had a visitor. A woman by the name of Fiona St Paul. She said that you’d know who she was.’
She thought of the other woman, that chic elegance wrapped up in expensive designer clothes, every nail manicured, every strand of hair firmly in place, and she felt an uncustomary jolt of jealousy. How ridiculous, she thought, with an uneasy inward laugh.
‘What did she want?’ Ross asked, slinging his coat over the spare chair and shrugging out of his jacket.
‘She expected to find you here,’ Abigail said. ‘She was disappointed that you weren’t in.’
‘Get her