LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER TWO

      THE following week was a nightmare. The pace at work was frantic. It seemed as though hundreds of clients had all decided to descend upon them at precisely the same time. The phone hardly stopped ringing, and the meetings were endless. Victor could exist indefinitely on a diet of no sleep—his stamina was amazing—but Alice could feel her nerves shredding as she trudged to meeting after meeting, taking notes, writing up minutes and in between catching up on everything else.

      Portugal and sunshine seemed like months ago. And it didn’t help matters that Highfield House hung over her head like a dark cloud, full of the promise of thunder.

      Her capacity to remember amazed her. All those years ago, and still she could recall entire conversations with James Claydon, as though they had taken place the day before. And it seemed as though each passing hour added another little snippet of recollection, another small, bitter memory of the past she had spent four years trying to forget.

      On the morning they were due to travel up, her nerves had reached such a point that she felt physically ill when she went to answer the door to Victor.

      He had decided against having his chauffeur drive them and as she pulled open the door she saw, immediately, that he had not dressed for work. No suit. In its place, dark green trousers, a striped shirt and a thick cream woollen jumper over it. Alice looked at him, taken aback by his casual appearance, and after a few seconds of complete silence he said sarcastically, ‘I do possess the odd change of clothes.’

      ‘Sorry.’ She bent to pick up her holdall, which he insisted on taking from her, and then followed him out to his car—a black convertible Jaguar which breathed opulence.

      ‘There really was no need for you to wear a suit,’ he said as she settled into the passenger seat. ‘This is supposed to be a relaxing three-day break. We’ll stroll round the grounds—’ he started the engine and slowly manoeuvred the car out ‘—have an informal, guided tour of the house so that we know which rooms will lend themselves to the most flattering photographs, discuss the history of the place.’ He shot her a quick, sidelong look. ‘No power meetings. I’ll expect you to make some notes along the way, naturally, but that’s about it.’

      ‘I didn’t think,’ Alice said, glancing down at her navy blue outfit, the straight-cut skirt and waist-length jacket, and the crisp white shirt underneath. The sort of clothing that was guaranteed to make the most glamorous woman totally asexual. She had chosen the ensemble deliberately. She supposed that she would meet James at some point during their stay, very likely as soon as they pulled up, and she needed the sort of working gear that would put her in a frame of mind that would enable her to cope with the encounter.

      With any luck, he might well not recognise her at all, though it was highly unlikely. She had changed during the past four years, had cut her hair, lost a fair amount of weight, but most of the changes had been inside her. Disillusionment had altered her personality for ever, but physically she had remained more or less the same.

      She tried to picture him, after all this time and with so much muddy water stretching between them, and her mind shut down completely.

      ‘I hope you’ve brought something slightly less formal than what you’re wearing,’ Victor told her. ‘We don’t want to intimidate the client. Which reminds me. There’s a file on the back seat Read it. It contains all the background information you need on him. Might find it useful.’

      Alice hesitated. She had debated whether she should tell Victor that she knew James, or at least had known him at one point in time. After all, how would she explain it if he greeted her with recognition, as he almost inevitably would? On the other hand, she had no desire to open that particular door because Victor would edge in before she could shut it, and then subject her to a barrage of questions, none of which she would be inclined to answer.

      In the end, she’d decided that she would go along with the premise that she didn’t know their client from Adam, and if James greeted her like some long-lost friend, then she would simply pretend that she had forgotten all about him; after all, it had been years.

      Years, she thought on a sigh, staring out of the window and making no move to reach behind her for the file. Four years to rebuild the life he had unwittingly taken to pieces and left lying there. Four years to forget the man who had taken her virginity and all the innocence that went with it and for three years had allowed her the stupid luxury of thinking that what they had was going to be permanent.

      She could remember the first time she had ever laid eyes on him. It had been a wet winter’s night and she had been working for his father for almost a month. Despite that, she had still not seen most of Highfield House. There had been just so much of it. Rooms stretching into rooms, interspersed with hallways and corridors and yet more rooms. And of course Henry Claydon, wheelchair-bound, had not been able to show her around himself.

      She could explore, he had told her, to her heart’s content, and had then proceeded to pile so much work onto her that she had barely had time to think, never mind explore the outer reaches of the house.

      She had loved it, though. Sitting in that warm, cosy library, surrounded by books, taking notes as the old man sifted through files and documents, watching the bleak winter outside settling like a cold fist over the vast estate and beyond. So different from the tiny terraced house in which she had spent most of her life before her mother died. It had been wonderful to look outside and see nothing but gardens stretching out towards fields, rolling countryside that seemed to go on and on for ever.

      She had grown up with a view of other terraced houses and the claustrophobic feeling of clutter that accompanied crowded streets. Highfield House was like paradise in its sheer enormity. And she’d loved the work. She’d loved the snatches of facts, interspersed with memories, which she had to collate and transcribe into a lucid format, all part of a book of memoirs. She’d enjoyed hearing about Henry Claydon’s past. It had seemed so much more colourful than her own.

      She had been working on, alone, in the study, when James Claydon had walked through the door, and against the darkness of the room, illuminated only by the spotlight on the desk, he had appeared like a figure of the night. Long, dark coat, dark clothes. And she had fallen in love. Hopelessly, madly in love with handsome, debonair, swarthy James Claydon.

      ‘Do I get an answer to my question?’ Victor asked. ‘Or do you intend to spend the entire journey with your head in the clouds?’

      ‘What? What question?’

      ‘Oh, good heavens,’ he muttered under his breath, ‘you’re as good as useless like this. I hope you intend to snap out of it sufficiently to be of some help to me on the trip. I don’t want you drifting down memory lane when you should be taking notes.’

      ‘Well, I did ask whether I might be excused from this particular job.’

      ‘So you did. And you never gave me your reason. Is it the house? You lived around here, didn’t you?’

      Alice looked at him, surprised that he would remember a passing detail on an application form from eighteen months back.

      ‘Well? Didn’t you?’

      ‘Not very far away,’ she admitted reluctantly. It had. been her first job after her mother died,

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