Temporary Girlfriend

‘You work?’ he asked bluntly.

‘Yes.’

‘What do you do?’

‘I work, mainly in administration, in a wholesalers.’

‘Who?’

She did not like his questions. She did not want to tell him who she worked for. But, she realised, she didn’t have a choice. ‘Howard Butler and Company,’ she reluctantly answered.

‘How much do you make?’ Cheeky devil! It was none of his business! Though... She stopped short. Of course it was his business. If he was considering allowing her to settle her debt by instalments—which meant he would have to pay the garage bill out of his own pocket—then she supposed he had every right to assess whether she was likely to default on those payments. She told him how much she earned. She hadn’t expected him to be impressed. He wasn’t.

‘I’ve only been there a short while,’ she defended.

‘And Mr Butler was so kind in offering me the job, I don’t like to ask for more.’

His look said, More fool you, but he refrained from making such a comment. He enquired instead, ‘Is that your sole income?’

She felt embarrassed. Saul Pendleton was quick. He’d have worked out by now that she’d still be in his debt years from now. ‘Yes,’ she mumbled.

‘You live in a smart area,’ he stated. ‘Pay rent?’

Heavens above! Louise hadn’t been joking when she’d said he was a tough operator. Straight, resolute—and you did try to put one over on him at your peril! Elyss gave a shaky sigh. ‘Yes,’ she replied. She should never have come. Though what other way was there open to her? ‘But there are four of us,’ she added. ‘We each contribute a—’

‘All women?’ he cut in abruptly. What had that got to do with anything?

‘Of course!’ Elyss answered, a shade primly she had to own—but his tone nettled her.

‘And how long, even assuming I’m prepared to condone your criminal act,’ he inserted, ‘do you think you’ll be in my debt?’

He knew the answer to that as well as she. She gave him a defeated look. ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.

‘What do you think I should do?’ he tossed back, but did not wait for her to reply. He concisely stripped the whole issue down to one sentence. ‘You’re criminally uninsured and are ultimately responsible for damage to my vehicle to the tune of at least two thousand pounds. You’re not seriously suggesting, the criminal aspect apart, that I do nothing?’

She must have been in cloud-cuckoo-land to have ever accepted his invitation to come here tonight, Elyss realised. ‘I suppose not,’ she mumbled unhappily, aware that she had achieved nothing other than to discover that she was, financially, in far deeper trouble than she had estimated. That thought panicked her again. ‘I don’t suppose you could claim off your insurance company, could you?’ she asked in a rush.

Saul Pendleton studied her eager expression silently for a moment. Hope grew—and was knocked flat again when he replied, ‘I could. But, since I’d have to give them full details of the accident, I’m fairly certain they’d take you to court for the recovery of their money.’ Oh, Lord. She was in a mess whatever he chose to do. If he didn’t prosecute her then his insurance company would. He stood up, reaching for her raincoat. The interview, it was plain—with no conclusion reached—was over. ‘Leave it with me,’ Saul Pendleton decreed, holding her raincoat out for her to put it on. ‘I’ll think about it, and be in touch.’

Her spirits lifted. She turned, buttoning her coat, looking at him. Was there a chance? ‘Thank you,’ she said quietly, afraid to say more, afraid that he might change his mind, and that any small hope that they could come to some sort of an agreement would be gone. She turned towards the door, and he went with her into the hall. ‘You have my address?’ she thought to enquire, and wished she hadn’t. He’d think her stupid. Of course he had her address—he had commented on it being in a smart area. ‘Oh!’ she suddenly exclaimed as they reached the hall door.

‘Oh?’ he queried as she stopped dead and looked up at him.

‘C-could I ask you not to call at the flat?’ she asked anxiously, in no position to ask favours but...

‘I doubt I was proposing to do that,’ Saul Pendleton drawled. How was it that she could feel ready to beg while, at the same time, she also felt sorely inclined to stamp her foot down hard on his? He confused her; there was just something about him that affected her oddly. ‘But,’ he resumed, ‘if you’d rather I didn’t.’

Sarcastic swine. ‘Nikki.’ She didn’t want to explain—but who held all the aces? Certainly not her. ‘She’s—er—not coping very well at the moment,’ she elaborated. ‘She’s a bundle of nerves. It would take little more to...’

‘Hmm,’ he butted in, and did nothing to raise himself in Elyss’ popularity stakes when he grunted, ‘In which case you should never have let her have your car!’ This was a lecture she didn’t need! He opened the door and walked her to the lift. ‘I’ll contact you when I’ve given your problem some thought,’ he pronounced. And that was that.

Elyss made her way back to the flat in a disconsolate frame of mind. Saul Pendleton was treating the matter as her problem rather than his. Which, since he wasn’t the one with the threat of court action hanging over him, it was, she supposed dejectedly. But, given that he’d said he would give her problem some thought, the nearer she got to her flat, the more she realised that, as clever as he was, he would not be able to come up with any solution. Nikki might have been the one who crashed into him, but it was her car, and it was she, Elyss Harvey, who hadn’t had that car covered by insurance.

The rest of the week dragged by, with Elyss camped near the telephone every evening, ready to snatch it up should it ring. It rang on Tuesday for Victoria, on Wednesday for Louise and on Thursday Elyss’s mother telephoned for a chat.

‘Everything all right?’ her mother asked.

‘Couldn’t be better,’ Elyss replied—there were just some things you didn’t worry your parents with.

On Friday evening she and Louise went with Nikki who had a doctor’s appointment. Dr Lowe had been her GP for years, and Nikki was in his surgery for some while. She seemed a little better for having a chat with him, and was keen to start taking the medication he had prescribed.

The weekend dragged by, with Victoria out most of the time and either Elyss and Nikki, or Louise and Nikki, or sometimes all three of them, walking and talking together.

Elyss rang her parents on Sunday, but that was the only time she touched the telephone that weekend. It rang, but the calls were never for her.

She went to work on Monday morning realising that she was going to have to get an additional job. She couldn’t do evening work because she never knew how late she was going to have to work at the office. But, except once every five or six weeks, when she travelled down to Devon, her weekends were free.

She had been at her desk for an hour, getting deep into some work and putting to the back of her mind her plans to hopefully find work as a barmaid, a cleaner, a chauffeuse—she was ready to do anything—when the phone on her desk rang.

‘You’re through,’ she heard Peggy the switchboard operator say—then there was silence.

‘Hello?’ Elyss enquired.

‘Pendleton,’ replied the voice she had been hearing in her sleep.

She was shaken. She had been waiting for his call. For a week she had been waiting for his call. But not for a moment had she thought he would ring her at her place of work! It threw her. ‘What are you ringing me here for?’ she asked without thinking.

‘You’d prefer that I didn’t?’ he enquired silkily.

She took a steadying breath. Circumstances decreed that she swallowed her ire. ‘No, no,’ she denied. ‘It’s just that I rather supposed you’d ring me at home when you’d—er—er—come to...’ Her voice petered out as her throat went dry. He must have decided what he was going to do!

‘I had an idea your flat was out of bounds,’ he drawled.

‘You’ve—um—got a point there,’ she agreed evenly, though he wasn’t to know that if Nikki was about, then, the moment Elyss knew it was Saul Pendleton calling, she had planned to take the phone to her room and have her conversation with him in private. Louise and Victoria, however, were acquainted with the fact that she was awaiting this particular phone call. ‘You’ve-er...’ Oh, what on earth was she hesitating about? There could be only one reason why he had phoned. ‘You’ve reached a decision?’ she asked, and clutched hard onto the phone receiver as she waited to hear what was to be her fate.

She was no further forward after—being nowhere near as shy as she was when it came to blunt talking—he abruptly told her, ‘I don’t intend to discuss it over the phone. We’ll have dinner tonight.’

Oh, will we? Oh, what a man he was for rattling her! Just like that: ‘We’ll have dinner’, and he expected her to jump at the chance! She was about to tell him that she was very fussy about whom she deigned to dine with—why should he think he’d cornered the market on blunt talking?—when it very quickly dawned on her that he was right. If he said jump, then she jolly well had to jump.

‘Very well,’ she accepted politely, as any well brought up young lady might.

‘I gather you’d rather I didn’t come to your flat to collect you?’ Clearly he had never doubted but that she would accept.

‘You gather correctly,’ she replied evenly.

‘I’ll send a taxi. Be ready at eight.’

He was gone. End of conversation. ‘Be ready’—end of story, no debate. What was it about this man that made her go from controlled to confused, from hot and anxious to cross and ready to stamp on his foot? Never had she met a man who could so easily raise her hackles. But then, she wasn’t used to being bossed around—it was hard to take. However, she faced it: she was just not in any position to do anything about it.