‘Any up-side?’ asked Chris.
‘Oh, yes,’ I replied. ‘Plenty.’ I thought of my beautiful sons and felt my spirit lift. ‘But I’ll leave that for the parents to describe. They’ll do it best.’ I picked up the treatment I had prepared and handed it to Barry. ‘We want it fast, colourful, daring, and I think BBC1 should be the target.’
Chris frowned. Barry gazed thoughtfully at Kyoto RIP.
‘Minty, thanks,’ Barry said. ‘Not quite convinced, but I’ll think about it. We’ll talk.’
‘Think massive audience,’ I urged. ‘Trust me.’
Chris came into my office as I was shifting my papers into order. He closed the door and leant against it. ‘I wanted to chew the cud about a few things, Minty.’
‘Sure.’ I clicked off my computer screen. As I did so, I noticed that my wedding ring was much looser and a vein running down my hand stood out in relief. Not a good sign. Film stars had hand lifts for less.
‘You heard we got the Carlton deal for the documentary on the Pope?’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Should boost the quarterly figures.’
‘Is that what you wanted to talk to me about? If so, can we do it tomorrow? I have to get home.’
Chris levered himself away from the door, and perched against my desk. Suddenly my small office was very cramped. The hazel eyes gleamed. You’ve had a tough year, Minty.’
His kindness was unexpected, and I was still having trouble with kindness. It tended to reduce me. ‘Yes. But I’m coming to terms with it and making my way.’
I needn’t have wasted my energy: Chris’s kindness was merely a vehicle for other considerations.
‘Minty, it might be better if you were working for a bigger organization, which would have more slack for someone in your predicament. A very real predicament.’
There was no point in getting angry. If I was to survive at Paradox until such time as I wished to leave on my own terms, I could not be angry. ‘Are you suggesting this or telling me?’
He smiled gently, and I could not decide whether it was genuine or not. ‘Friend to friend, in this business it doesn’t help to have additional pressures. A company as tight as Paradox needs to know it’s functioning optimally with no unnecessary drag. You need to know, when a problem arises, that there’s no problem in dealing with it, if you see what I mean.’
‘Sweet of you, Chris,’ I murmured.
In the old days, I would have deployed sex – which Nathan fell for. I would have opened my eyes, looked up from beneath the lids, and have made sure my cleavage was in the correct line of sight. I might have said, ‘How nice of you to take an interest,’ which would have introduced a faint chime of promise, sufficient to push Chris off the track. I’m not saying that I’ve come to despise such tactics, or would never use them again, only that sex took time and the boys would be waiting for me.
Instead I placed the last of my notes in my bag and fastened it. ‘Chris. Perhaps it would be better not to pursue this conversation. If you’re trying to suggest that, as a working mother, I’m a liability, it could get you into trouble.’
No fool, he backed off at once. ‘I was only thinking of you,’ he said.
On the way home, I passed Paige’s house. The front garden was ultra-smart because the gardener had recently completed the autumn spring-clean. ‘You can’t call it a spring clean,’ I had pointed out to Paige, when I phoned her the previous day.
‘I can call it what I like,’ was her reply.
‘Has Martin been to see you?’
Paige bristled. ‘I wish you wouldn’t interfere.’
‘And?’
‘He’s here at the weekend. But I’m not taking him back, Minty. As I told you, I’m far too busy with the children to be married.’
The scene when I got through the door of number seven was much as I had pictured it. Eve had collapsed into a chair in the kitchen and a small riot was going on in the boys’ bedroom. One of Eve’s hands lay on the table, so white and thin that it alarmed me.
First, I tackled her. ‘Look,’ I said to the slumped figure, ‘this is no good. It’s been going on for months, and you haven’t got properly better. You need to go home and see your family.’
She raised her face from her hands and I was star-tied by the light in her eyes. ‘Go back?’ She gulped a lungful of air – as if she was already breathing in the scents of river and mountains, of her home.
That decided it. ‘You must go home for two weeks, see your family, rest, then come back.’
‘I get coach.’ Eve hauled herself to her feet, and her smile was pure joy. ‘I telephone. Now.’
‘No, it’s a two-day journey both ways. You must fly.’
‘The moneys.’
A stack of quick-fire calculations snapped through my brain. Eve needed a break. She needed her mother. Four days in a coach was not a rest. I needed Eve well and strong, as she herself wished to be. ‘I’ll pay your air fare, and you must go as soon as we can arrange it.’
As I went upstairs, preparing for riot duty, the rest of the calculation slotted into place. What with the hit my finances had taken with the loan to Poppy, Eve’s air fare equalled a reduction in the Christmas-present list. It definitely put paid to the haircut, and the cost of her replacement would, no doubt, see off any strictly unnecessary seasonal frivolity. But that, I supposed, was what ‘unnecessary’ meant. You could do without it.
It was the day before Christmas Eve, the kind of day that paraded a weak sun as a joke. I eased the car into the parking slot and got out. It was very cold and I zipped up my fleece, powder blue, then turned up the collar. I could smell frosted leaf mould and the faintest whiff of frying fat coming from a van selling snacks parked further up.
I was relishing the moment of freedom, and allowing my mind to drift, before I took up the slack in the reins and pulled them tight. Moments such as these kept me sane.
I was contemplating getting back into the warm car when a smart silver coupé drew up and parked in the space beside mine. One of the passenger doors flung open and Lucas tumbled out. ‘Mum!’
He was followed closely by Felix. ‘Mum!’
Both were clutching picture books with an illustration of a dinosaur on the front. I knew this because Felix virtually pressed his into my face.
A figure emerged from the driver’s seat in a tweed jacket, black trousers and boots. ‘Hi,’ said Rose.
She locked the car and, boys in tow, we moved off in the direction of the pond.
‘Lucas didn’t eat much lunch,’ Rose reported. ‘He was too excited. There was an exhibition about Tyrannosaurus Rex. The model ate model prey and snapped its jaws. Lucas was transfixed, and Felix… Well, I’m not sure he liked it much.’
‘Was it crowded?’
‘Was it crowded!’
We circumnavigated the pond once, and that was enough. It was scummy and the council’s attempts to landscape it had only gone so far before the money had run out. It was too cold. By mutual consent, we retraced our steps to the cars. ‘What are you up to?’ I asked Rose.
‘After Christmas I’m off to see Hal at the farm. I haven’t seen him for weeks.’ Her face registered anticipation and pleasure. ‘After that Vietnam, I think. There’s a piece I’ve got to do.’
We stood by the cars. ‘Thank you so much for taking them today,’ I said. ‘I’m so grateful.’ I fished out my car key, which had become attached to a piece of chewed bubble-gum, which I had confiscated recently from Lucas. Rose extracted her key from a brilliant green lizard-skin handbag and zapped the lock. ‘Next time I’ll take them to the zoo. When it gets warmer.’
We leant towards each other, and an awkward second elapsed as we clashed cheeks and exchanged the lightest of kisses.