Past Secrets

‘You’re more than exacting,’ Faye interrupted, feeling cold rage course through her. She’d planned to do this the official way, but it was clear that Brooks needed the unorthodox approach. ‘Let’s put it this way, Mr Brooks, if we were offering sports massages, I believe you’d be the client insulting our therapists by asking for a massage with a “happy ending”.’

‘What?’ exploded out of him again, and Faye grinned to herself. ‘Happy ending’ was code for a massage with sexual services included, the sort only available in red-light districts.

‘How dare you…?’

Probably nobody had ever talked to William Brooks this way. She knew his sort: a bully. And, importantly, she now knew some even less pleasant things about him.

‘We have our reputation to consider too, Mr Brooks,’ Faye went on, the vein of ice evident in her tone. ‘And we’ve been hearing stories from the staff we’ve placed with you, stories that neither of us would like to hear repeated. You see, we place temps in the equality agency too, and with some of the city’s top legal firms, and we can’t have any hint of scandal associated with our company.’

‘What are you implying?’ he roared.

‘We’ve placed a lot of staff with Wilson Brothers too,’ Faye went on. ‘They’re one of our best customers and actually handle our legal affairs, so if there was any, shall we say, unpleasantness, we’d naturally go to them.’

This time, there was an audible indrawn breath at the other end of the phone.

Wilson Brothers was a law firm where the senior partner just happened to be William Brooks’s father-in-law. The unspoken message was that Mr Wilson would be fascinated to learn of his son-in-law’s fondness for touching up his assistants.

‘How about we pretend we didn’t have this conversation, Mr Brooks,’ Faye went on, ‘and we’ll resume our search for a PA for you. However, if and when we do find one, I shall be in constant communication with her and I assure you, I expect any Little Island person to be treated with the utmost respect and dignity. I’m sure you agree that bullying and sexual harassment cases can be so messy and time-consuming?’

‘Oh, yes,’ blustered William Brooks but the fight had gone out of him. ‘I’ll talk to you again, Mrs Reid,’ he muttered and hung up.

Result, thought Faye, leaning back in her chair, relieved. She knew that what she’d done was unethical and that Grace would have had a coronary had she overheard, but sometimes the unorthodox approach was required and this time, thankfully, it had worked. She’d never had a problem thinking outside the box when it came to business. And being tough was second nature to her now.

Some people thought it was being hard-nosed, but it wasn’t: it was self-preservation.

She’d tried to instil that and a sense of personal power in Amber.

‘You are responsible for you,’ Faye used to repeat mantralike. ‘It’s not clever to be led by other people or to do what you don’t want to do, just to fit in. You have the power to do and be anything you want and to make your own choices. Believing in yourself and in your own power is one of the most important things in life.’

‘Ella’s mum says to behave like a little lady, not to hang around with rough boys in the park and that if a stranger tries to get you into a car, to scream,’ Amber reported when she was younger and her friends thought Faye’s ‘be your own boss’ mantra was cool. ‘But Ella thinks your rules are better. I told her you were a feminist because you never let anyone walk all over you. It’s because Dad’s dead, I said. You had to be tougher because we were on our own.’

Faye spent an hour on paperwork, then returned her emails, by which time her eyes were weary from staring at the screen. She fetched another coffee, shut her office door firmly, kicked off her shoes and lay down on the couch for a few minutes. She was tired today. The reason still worried her. Amber had woken her up at three the night before, talking loudly to herself in her sleep, saying, ‘No, I will not!’ firmly.

Faye had stood at her daughter’s door in case this middle-of-the-night conversation became a nightmare, but it didn’t. Amber muttered ‘no’ a few more times before turning over and falling back into a silent sleep.

Amber had been prone to nightmares when she was a small child and Faye, who couldn’t bear to think of her darling lonely and frightened in her bed, would carry the pink-pyjama-clad little girl into her own room.

Having your baby sleep with you when you were a lonely, affection-starved single mother was probably against every bit of advice in the book, Faye knew. But she needed the comfort of her little daughter every bit as much as Amber needed her. The sweetness of that small body, energetic little limbs still padded with baby fat, gave Faye strength. No matter how tough life could be, she’d go on for Amber. Her daughter deserved the best and Faye would provide it, no matter what.

‘Mama,’ Amber would mutter in her lisping, babyish voice, and fall into a deeper sleep, taking up half the bed by lying sprawled sideways.

‘Mama, how did I get here?’ she’d say in wonder the next morning, delighted to wake up in her mother’s bed. And Faye would cuddle her tightly and they’d giggle and tickle each other, and the nightmare would never be mentioned.

Now, Amber didn’t have nightmares, just the odd restless night when she had a lot on her mind, like exams or last year’s school play where she was in charge of painting the scenery and used to sit up in bed murmuring about more Prussian blue paint for the sky.

She was probably suffering from the most awful exam stress, Faye decided, as she sipped her coffee. There were only weeks to go, after all.

If there was anything else worrying her daughter, she’d know, wouldn’t she?

Except that recently, she was beginning to think it was easier to understand total strangers searching for the perfect job than work out what was going on in her daughter’s mind.

CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_97a293aa-b97c-5405-8314-cb664f6eda4f)

One hundred and fifty miles away, Maggie Maguire didn’t know what impulse made her go home that afternoon instead of trekking off to the gym. Karma? Fate? Destiny twirling a lazy finger in the human world?

Unexpectedly getting off work early meant she could have had a rare meander around Galway’s shops before taking her normal Wednesday evening Pilates class. But some unknown force made Maggie walk past Extreme Fitness, bypass the lure of the bohemian boutiques, and go home to the apartment she shared with Grey. A modest third-floor flat, it was her pride and joy, especially since she’d gone ahead and painted the tiny cloakroom’s wall tiles a mesmerising Indian Ocean blue.

‘You can’t paint tiles,’ Grey had said, lounging against the door of the cloakroom, barefoot and jean-clad, as Maggie sat on the floor and read the instructions on the tin. Grey had the sort of shape that lent itself to lounging: long, long legs, a lean torso and an elegance that made women stare, admiring the swept-back leonine hair, strong, patrician face and intelligent eyes that were the same colour as his name.

‘You can. It says it right here.’ Maggie peered at the instructions, her nose scrunched up. Her auburn hair was held up with a big clip, but bits still straggled wispily round her freckled face. Maggie could have used cement as a hair product and red wisps would still have escaped to curl around her face.

Grey said he loved her hair: it was unruly, wild, beautiful and unpredictable. Like her.

After five years together, Maggie believed him, even though his last three girlfriends before her had been Park Avenue-type blondes with sleek hair, sleek clothes, push-up bras and shoe collections organised by Polaroid. Maggie’s shoe collection was organised by age: old cowboy boots at the back of the wardrobe, new ones at the front. Her clothes were rock chick rather than chic, faded Levi’s being her must-have garment. Being boyishly slim, she didn’t have enough boob to fit into a push-up bra. And nobody looking at her pale freckled face with the silvery cobalt-blue eyes that showed exactly what she was thinking could have imagined Maggie having even a grain of Park Avenue Princess hauteur.

Alas, she’d have loved to be such a creature: icily cool without a hair out of place, and could never see that her wild russet beauty and eyes that belonged to an ancient Celtic warrior queen were far rarer and more precious than high-maintenance blonde glamour.

‘And this is the last bit of beige in the whole place. It’s got to go,’ she’d added, opening the tin of paint and breathing in, as if the salty tang of the sea would drift out, scenting the air with memories of a foreign beach.

They’d bought the apartment two years ago and the previous owners had been keen on beige, beige and more beige. It was like living in a can of mushroom soup, said Maggie, who’d grown up in a quirky house on Summer Street where her bedroom had been sky blue with stars on the midnight-blue ceiling. Dad had been going through his planetarium phase and the stars had been in their correct places too. Ursa Major and Ursa Minor would not be the wrong way round when Dennis Maguire was in charge.

The cloakroom in the Galway apartment was the last room Maggie had painstakingly redecorated. Now it was all cheery blues and whites, like a small beachside restaurant from their last holiday, a glorious, special-offer week in the Seychelles. Holidays had been off the agenda for the past few months as they were broke but Maggie had an almost physical longing for the feeling of sweltering sun toasting her skin while her toes wriggled in sand.

We need a break, she thought as she stepped out of the lift on to their floor. Sun, sand and no conversations with irritated students when they’d discovered that the very book they needed for that night’s rush-job essay on Greco-Roman funerary practices wasn’t in its place.

Grey was a politics lecturer and Maggie was one of six librarians in the vast, modern Coolidge College library, a job she loved because it allowed her mind to wander over many varied subjects from medicine to literature. The downside was that pre-exams the stress levels of the students went up and people who’d spent six months working on the formula for the perfect Long Island Iced Tea to fuel a party suddenly required actual research materials for their courses. And Maggie was the one they got mad at when the research material in question was booked out by someone else.

‘But, like, I need it today,’ a radiantly pretty brunette girl had said only that morning, slim fingers raking through her hair, which irritatingly made her look even better. What hair product did she use? Maggie wondered briefly but didn’t ask.

Instead, she said, ‘I’m really sorry but I can’t help you. We’ve only two copies and they’re both booked out every day for the next week. You’ve got to make arrangements in advance with some textbooks.’

‘Well, thank you very much,’ snapped the girl sarcastically. ‘You’ve been a great help, I must say.’ And she marched off in high dudgeon.

‘You can’t win ’em all,’ commiserated her colleague Shona. ‘Still, she’s not like the back of a bus, so she can always sleep with her prof if the going gets tough.’

‘Shona! That’s so sexist. I thought you were reading The Female Eunuch?’

‘I did and it’s marvellous, but I’m on to the new Jackie Collins now. I know Germaine Greer wouldn’t approve, but I’d have slept with my prof if it’d have improved my degree,’ countered Shona wistfully. ‘He was sex on legs, so it wouldn’t have been a hardship.’ Shona’s degree had been in European Literature. ‘When he talked about the Heart of Darkness that was in all of us, I swear, I felt a shiver run right down my spine into my knickers.’

Shona was, in fact, happily married but she was an irrepressible flirt and batted her eyelashes at every passing cute guy, despite many weary conversations with the head librarian about appropriate behaviour in the workplace. ‘Just because I’ve eaten doesn’t mean I can’t look at the menu,’ was her motto.

Fortunately her husband Paul, whom she adored and would never cheat on, was merely amused by all this.

‘Professors don’t have sex with students, except in the fevered imaginations of people like you,’ Maggie retorted. ‘Besides, she’s in third-year history. Have you seen Prof Wolfowitz? Brilliant, yes. Beddable, no. He is totally bald except for that one eyebrow. Every time I see him, I want to pluck a few of the middle hairs out and give him two eyebrows instead of one.’

‘Maggie, Maggie,’ sighed Shona. ‘The eyebrow is immaterial. Sleeping your way to success has precisely nothing to do with how good-looking the powerful person is. You may wear scuffed cowboy boots and a tough attitude, but you’re Haven’t-a-Clue Barbie at heart. You don’t have a calculating bone in your body – apart from the one hot Dr Grey Stanley puts there, of course.’ Shona laughed like a drain at her own joke.

Maggie groaned. She was used to Shona by now. They’d become fast friends from the moment they’d met on Maggie’s first day in the library, where she discovered that her new friend’s second degree subject was indubitably Teasing: Honours Module. Now Maggie leaned over and swatted Shona on the arm with her ruler. ‘Brat.’