‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but I can’t.’
A surprised Lesley Thornton smiled weakly and slowly nodded, and then she gathered her composure and said, ‘Oh well, I tried.’ She turned and walked away, and for a week or so her icy silence in his presence made him feel uncomfortable. And then he told Annabelle what had happened and his life changed. During the nightmare week in the Travelodge, Lesley began again to smile in his direction, having heard the rumours of his changed circumstances. But once he moved into the flat in Wilton Road, and studiously refused to meet her eyes at work, or reply to her email messages with anything but the tersest of responses, their frosty relationship was once again re-established.
Clive Wilson begins.
‘Keith, Keith, Keith. What have you got yourself into now?’
Clive Wilson is the chief executive of the council, and effectively his boss, and these days he works increasingly closely with his boss. However, he has come to understand that Clive Wilson loves only Clive Wilson and the thrill of wielding both actual and imagined power. He is generally quite good at reining in his smug bonhomie, but occasionally he gets a glint in his eye and crosses a line, at which point his tone becomes both over-friendly and admonitory.
‘Tell me, Keith. Why would she want to do this to you?’
‘I wanted to break it off and I suppose this is her way of trying to slap me in the face.’
‘And, as it were, shoot herself in the foot.’
‘Well I don’t know if she’s bothered about that.’
‘Quite.’
Clive Wilson steals a glance at Lesley, whose detached demeanour betrays no emotion, and then he rocks back in his chair.
‘She’s been a researcher in your department for three months now, right?’
He nods.
‘And how long has your affair been going on?’
‘It’s not an “affair”. That makes it sound like there’s been some kind of secretive thing to it. We’ve been having a relationship. It’s all there in the emails.’
Clive shakes his head and stands up. He turns and walks a few paces, then he stares out of the window.
‘Well, Keith it’s a bit of an awkward one.’ He turns around to face him. ‘What do you want me to do about this? I can have a word with her and tell her not to wash her dirty linen in public or something like that, but I don’t think I’ve got any grounds for dismissal.’ He laughs now. ‘I’d have the bloody unions all over me like a Bangkok rash.’
‘Technically,’ says Lesley, corkscrewing her body around to face Clive, ‘she hasn’t done anything wrong. She’s been stupid, yes, but she’s obviously feeling hurt and rejected.’
‘Well I don’t know what she’s got to be hurt about.’
For the first time, Lesley looks directly at him. She uncrosses, then crosses, her legs and he can hear the rasp of her tights as she does so.
‘Well maybe you should find out.’
Clive Wilson takes his seat again.
‘Lesley’s got a point there, Keith. Maybe you should talk to her and try and bring her to her senses.’
‘According to Ruth, she’s not come into work today. I can go and see if she’s at home.’
‘Have you called her?’
‘No point. I know her. She won’t answer her phone. I’m pretty sure I’ll have to go round and see her.’
‘Good.’
‘What’s good about it?’
Clive laughs now. ‘Take it easy, cowboy. We’re all working to get a resolve here.’
Clive stands again, but Lesley remains seated and with her right thumb she nervously pops the nib in and out of a cheap office biro.
‘Let’s have a drink and a chat at the end of the day, Keith. By then you should be able to reassure me that everything is fine, okay?’
The walk from the tube station to Yvette’s house has lost whatever thrill it once possessed. Without the prospect of a sexual encounter, he can now see that this part of London is bleakly suburban, and even the temperature seems to have dropped a few degrees in the space of twenty-four hours. It is positively freezing, but he resists the urge to draw further attention to himself by donning the sunglasses that he likes to wear when walking these less than friendly streets. Today, he doesn’t care if people see him staring back at them, he just wants to get this business over and done with, and then hurry back to the office. It suddenly occurs to him that from Colin’s point of view, not contesting the terms of the divorce and leaving his estranged young wife in a mortgage-free terraced house might have been the price he had to pay to escape this dreadful location. He crosses the road and can see that Yvette’s blue curtains are closed. He presses the annoying bell and then waits. He presses again and although he is tempted to open the letterbox and demand that Yvette stop messing about and come down and talk to him, he knows that there is little point in becoming aggressive. He backs up a little along the crazy-paved path and looks at the upstairs windows to see if there is any movement of the thin curtains, but nothing stirs. He closes the gate behind him with a clatter, and then pauses to let a young woman, who is wheeling a child in a pushchair, pass by. He knows that he is imagining it, but he is sure that the young woman looked at him disdainfully. He watches as she wrestles the pushchair down off the pavement and crosses the road, before moving on purposefully in the direction of the local park. Eager to flee the site of what is fast beginning to feel like a crime scene, he walks quickly away from Yvette’s house and back in the direction of the tube station. He knows full well that at the office his colleagues will have spent the greater part of the day studying the one hundred and twenty-seven emails, and he will most likely have already become the elderly Lothario at the centre of a dozen risqué jokes.
Clive Wilson returns from the bar and slides into the chair opposite him. He hands him a glass of Pinot Grigio.
‘There you go, mate. Bottoms up.’
Clive tips his own glass of red to his mouth and swallows deeply, and then he places the half-empty vessel on the table between them.
‘So how about going on leave for a while? It’ll give us a bit of time to work out what to do about the girl.’
He looks quizzically at his boss but says nothing in reply.
‘Come on, old man, she works for you. It isn’t going to be easy with the two of you in the same office.’
‘Why not send her on leave? How come you’re asking me to step aside?’
‘Whoa, hold on a minute. This is paid leave, Keith. No hint of censure or anything like that. We can even call it a research break.’
‘And what about her? Doesn’t she even get a rap on the knuckles?’
‘Lesley’s going to sit down and talk with her. Better if it comes from a woman. She’s going to make it clear to her that she’s bang out of order and that whatever the emotional distress that she might be feeling, she has no right to copy your private emails to the whole department.’
‘And that’s it?’ He stares at his boss, who shrugs helplessly. ‘Oh come on, she was attempting to humiliate me.’
‘Undermine you, perhaps. I can work with that, but I’m not so sure about the humiliation thing. Look, give it a few weeks and then maybe it will have all blown over and you two can re-establish some kind of working harmony.’