Temporary Girlfriend

Elyss spent the evening doing some laundry, watching a half-hour of television and generally chatting to Louise. Victoria came home around eleven, but there was no sign of Nikki when they decided, tomorrow being a work day, it was time for bed.

Somehow, as Elyss saw in her mind’s eye Nikki sitting in the car outside Dave’s flat waiting for him to come home, she found sleep elusive. Oh, she did so hope Dave returned alone.

Elyss adjusted her position in her comfortable bed. She fleetingly recalled it was her bed from her old home, an elegant Georgian house that was gone now, like her father’s business.

She had worked in the company, had done so ever since she had left school. Her father had trained her in administration, and the more she had learned the more she had enjoyed the work she did. Being the boss’s daughter, however, had allowed her to be privy to the most confidential matters. Which was all to the good while the wholesale fruit importing business was doing well—but exceedingly worrying when it started to fail.

Elyss had seen the crash coming, and had tentatively broached the subject to her hard-working father. But he had only teased her for being a worrier over nothing. ‘It’s not unnatural for a company as large as ours to experience the occasional hiccup,’ he’d smiled. ‘Things will work themselves out, you’ll see. Er—meantime, not a word to your mother.’

Her father’s obvious confidence had quietened her worries. He had been in this business all his life, for goodness’ sake. What did she know!

So she waited, and waited for ‘things to work themselves out’, only they didn’t. And loath though she was to bring the subject up again, after a year had gone by and not only was business not picking up, but they were getting deeper and deeper into debt with the bank, she plucked up courage to question her father if there was anything they could do about it.

‘We’ll have to try and ride it out,’ her father had replied—only there was no confident smile this time.

They had not been able to ride it out. Month after month had gone by as the company had limped along. Their bank manager had tried to help all he could, but it seemed there were limits to his powers.

Elyss would never forget the afternoon when, his face grey, her father had returned from a meeting with the bank manager, and told her that the company was folding.

‘Folding!’ she’d echoed, leading him to a chair and sitting him down. He’d looked on the point of collapse when for the next half-hour they discussed the ending of what had been life’s blood to him.

They’d said nothing to the workforce. Shaken herself, but seeing that her father still didn’t look any better, Elyss had insisted on driving him home.

Because he was essentially a very private man, she made herself scarce while he went and revealed the truth to her mother. Elyss knew it would be a most humbling experience for him.

Her mother, though, like the wonderful person she was, was marvellous. Elyss, fretful in her room, was relieved no end to hear her father leave the drawing room and come out into the hall and call, his tone sounding much firmer than it had: ‘Come down, Elyss. Your mother—er—and I, want a family conference.’

Her mother had apparently sensed for some while that something was wrong. But when all her approaches to her husband to find out what had been brushed aside as pure imagination, she had started to consider all sorts of possibilities.

Although the news that the business had gone under was a fairly devastating shock, it was a tremendous relief that her husband had neither a mistress, nor some dreadful terminal illness he was trying to hide from her.

‘Well, the first essential is to try to see to it that we come out of this with as much honour as we can salvage,’ she stated proudly, and they were all agreed on that.

As they agreed about almost everything else to do with winding up the company. The only point on which they had a disagreement was when—their creditors by now baying to be paid—Elyss determined that the money settled on her by her parents on her eighteenth birthday should go into the family kitty.

‘Oh, no, I’m not taking that. It’s yours, its—’

‘It’s ours, Dad,’ Elyss interrupted him gently. ‘The house is going, and anything else of value. I’m part of this family. I shall take it as a personal insult if you don’t allow me to contribute.’

He huffed, he puffed, but the pride of not owing his creditors anything finally won. ‘You wretched child,’ he called her lovingly, ‘Come and give your old Dad a kiss.’

So they had settled all their accounts, and were left with nothing over; their only assets were three cars, not new but purchased in better times, and a small amount of jewellery, the value of which was mainly sentimental.

With the house sold and the purchasers wanting completion within six weeks’, all that remained was for Elyss and her father to find jobs and somewhere for them all to live.

It was then, after having had so much go wrong in their lives, that their luck began to turn. Quite out of the blue her mother had a letter from a firm of solicitors informing her of an inheritance from a distant relative.

With great excitement they had contacted the legal firm and the next day were in Devon inspecting the two-bedroomed cottage, sorely in need of modernising.

Anne Harvey finished her inspection of her dilapidated inheritance and took a deep breath. Then, as they stood in the wilderness of the large garden looking at the whitewashed walls of the rickety cottage, she calmly announced, ‘I should be quite happy to live here.’

Husband and daughter stared at her. But it was her husband who, clearly adoring his wife, commented quietly, ‘You always were an optimist, old love.’

Conversation on the drive home consisted almost entirely of the three of them moving to Devon, and of how much the modernisation of the cottage they could carry out themselves. Also, what sort of job prospects did father and daughter have in the Devonshire village, which was miles from anywhere?

They had left their Georgian home very early that morning. They returned to find that the postman had delivered a letter bearing another piece of good news. One of Elyss’s father’s few remaining premium bonds, which he had held for years and forgotten about, had come up.

The money which the premium bond had yielded was not a vast amount, but enough to ease the strain of these last few months. Although once the general euphoria they had all felt at this piece of good luck had worn off, Elyss’s father was all for giving the money to her, to go towards replacing the amount which she had insisted on putting into the kitty.

‘No way,’ she’d declared firmly. ‘You’ll need all of that to put the cottage back into—’ She broke off, a sudden thought coming to her. The idea of her father going to work for someone else after all his years of being his own boss had seriously worried her. ‘Unless... You know, if you were really, really careful, I reckon you could eke that money out and live on it until you’re old enough to start drawing your pension. You wouldn’t have to get a job and...’

‘Elyss is right!’ her mother took her up straight away. Clearly she had been experiencing the same worries as her daughter about her husband working for someone else. ‘I’ve got all the clothes I shall ever need, and provided we don’t hold any outrageous parties...’ she tossed in to lighten the atmosphere. They had never gone in for wild parties, and more than a half dozen people in the cottage would make it overcrowded.

Her husband smiled, and Elyss could see that her father was taken with the idea. He had a good year’s work in front of him licking the cottage into shape. ‘That would give me a chance to look at the wiring. And the plumbing—and that ceiling that looks as though it might fall down at any time.’

‘It would be nice to have you home all day,’ Anne Harvey smiled. And, least her husband thought her soft, she added, ‘If you were very good, I’d even let you help me with that jungle of a garden!’

It seemed settled, but the next day, while her parents were discussing where Elyss was going to sleep until the ceiling in the bedroom she was to have was fixed, Elyss saw the advert for a fourth person to share a flat.

At first she paid only scant attention to it. But when she began to wonder about her chances of finding a job in Devon—she had very good experience in administration and in assisting in the running of a company, but not a single solitary paper qualification to prove it—she started to realise that she might do better looking for work in London. It would be a wrench leaving her parents, of course. But... It was then that she started to believe in the saying, ‘Everything comes in threes’.

For it was luck, pure and simple—the third piece of luck for them as a family—that within the next hour Howard Butler telephoned. He was a fruit and vegetable wholesaler who had dealt with her father for as long as she could remember.

‘Good morning, Mr Butler. Did you want to speak with my father?’ Elyss enquired.

‘Not this time. It’s you I want to talk to,’ he stated, and went on to tell her how he was having a few office problems and needed somebody who knew what they were doing to come and sort things out. ‘I was about to advertise, while at the same time wondering who in the trade I might be able to poach.’ Plainly he had no compunction about head-hunting. ‘When it suddenly struck me that you—who must know the business inside out—might not yet have started looking for a new job.’

‘Um, I haven’t, actually,’ Elyss said, starting to feel quite excited.

‘I couldn’t pay as much as your father paid you, but if you’d like to come and...’

‘You’re suggesting I come for an interview?’ She couldn’t believe it!

‘I shouldn’t think there’s any need for that. I observed you at work when I visited your father’s office. The job’s yours if you want it—starting the first of next month.’

Heavens! Elyss did some rapid thinking. It was certain she was going to have to get a job. There was absolutely no way she was going to live off her parents in Devon while she looked around for work. ‘Er—may I think about it?’ she enquired, feeling she should say yes straight away, but also feeling sensitive as to how her parents were going to take the news that she might not be going to Devon with them.

‘Let me know tomorrow,’ Howard Butler agreed, and, experiencing a mixture of emotions, Elyss put the phone down and turned round to find both her parents watching her.

‘What was that about?’ her mother asked promptly.

Elyss looked from one to the other—it still seemed incredible that something like this should just fall into her lap. ‘I—er—think I’ve just been—er—to coin a phrase—head-hunted.’ She laughed. It was ridiculous. ‘That was Howard Butler. He’s just offered me a job!’

Ridiculous or not, everything moved quickly after that. Her parents did not want her to stay behind when they left, but neither did they want to stand in her way. However, they wanted to know where she would live. And it was then that Elyss remembered the advert for a fourth person to share.

‘Ring now,’ her father suggested.

‘The tenants will be out at their places of work,’ her mother stated.