Barefoot in the Dark (25 page)

Chapter 26

She’d known the day was coming, of course. It was written in her diary. He’d even phoned the office yesterday, to re-confirm the time. Yet when Hope first entered the conference room she had to steady herself against the door frame to stop herself fleeing the place and jumping on a bus to Land’s End. There was no question of trying to fight it. Here he was and she was utterly, hopelessly in love with him. But she didn’t know what to do about it, because she wasn’t joining any queues.

She plastered what she hoped was a friendly, workaday smile on her face and took her place next to Mr Babbage at the table. Jack, who had evidently slipped in with Madeleine while she’d gone off to photocopy an extra agenda, was sitting opposite her and smiled back with similar urbanity. Yet there was something unreadable in his expression. She busied herself with her notes.

The meeting – which was to be their last before the day itself – soon stilled her frantic pulse. There was just so much to do. Still the warm-up aerobic session to be finalised, the St John’s Ambulance stand to be organised, a consignment of cereal bars for the goody bags to chase up and a new batch of race numbers to get printed. And the timings, of course. Item five.

‘So,’ Madeleine was saying, ‘my feeling would be for us to convene at the main gazebo at five-thirty, latest, you think? By then we should have assembled and warmed up the runners, and it’ll give us time – sorry,
Jack
time, to –’

‘Hang on,’ said Jack, flipping through the pages of a bulky black diary he had on the table in front of him. ‘It was starting at seven, wasn’t it?’

‘No, six,’ said Madeleine equably.

Jack consulted a page and glanced across the table at her. ‘I have seven here.’

‘You do?’ said Madeleine. ‘Oh.’

‘That’s the old time,’ said Hope. ‘Remember?’

Jack turned, still smiling nicely. ‘Oh? Remember what?’

He was looking straight at her.

‘We had to change it, didn’t we? The police.’

‘What about the police?’

‘There’s a concert at the CIA that night. They won’t close the roads after seven. It was all in the email.’

Jack’s eyes hadn’t left her face. ‘What email?’

She felt her face fall. ‘The email we sent you about the time change.’

‘Doh,’ said Mr Babbage, cheerily. ‘I thought things were going too well!’ He picked up a fruit shortcake and started munching on it.

‘Is it a problem?’ asked Madeleine.

‘
What
email?’ Jack said again.

‘The email I sent you,’ said Hope, becoming flustered, riffling through her memories. She
had
sent him the email. And followed it up.

But he was shaking his head. ‘I definitely didn’t get an email from you.’

‘Well I certainly sent one. I did ask you to confirm, but when I spoke to your secretary –’

‘I don’t have a secretary.’

‘Whoever she was, then.’

Madeleine looked from one to the other. Then back at Hope, somewhat pointedly, the ‘whoever she was, then’ hanging between them all like the breasts of a lap dancer at a tea party. ‘Is it going to be a problem, Jack?’ she asked again.

He closed the diary and pinched his fingers together over the bridge of his nose. He looked tired.

‘Well, yes it is, frankly. I’m in London that day. I had planned on getting back for six-thirty.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Mr Babbage, reaching for a second biscuit. Jack shot him an irritable look. Hope had never seen Jack look irritable before.

Madeleine switched on her brightest and most apologetic smile. ‘I’m so sorry, Jack,’ she said smoothly. ‘It’s entirely our fault. We should have followed it up more carefully. Bit hectic round here right now, as you can imagine.’ She glanced at Hope, waiting for her to follow suit with platitudes and kittenish smiles of appeasement. Which Hope dutifully did. Madeleine clasped her hands in front of her. ‘I’m sure we can work around it. Your contribution is very valuable, Jack, but I know you’re a busy man. If the worst comes to the worst, we can always have someone else start the race and you can come in and do a big closing speech or something instead.’

Jack was shaking his head. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘Hold off for the moment. I’ll see what I can do first, OK?’

‘Well, that’s very kind of you, Jack,’ said Madeleine warmly. She batted her lashes at him. ‘Are we forgiven?’

‘Forgiven,’ agreed Jack, and Hope could feel his eyes on her. She kept her own trained on the biscuits.

‘Look,’ he said, once the room had emptied and Madeleine, who was rolling her eyes at Hope behind Jack’s back, had pulled the door shut behind her. ‘I’m sorry about that. I didn’t mean to upset you.’

‘You didn’t upset me.’

‘I think I did.’

Hope shrugged. ‘OK, then, yes. You did upset me.’

She knew she sounded haughty, but she just didn’t know how to
be
with him any more. She wished she didn’t have to see him at all. He was grinning at her now. ‘Secretary, eh? Chance would be a fine thing.’

Hope began gathering up the agendas. ‘Look, I
did
email you. And I also spoke to a woman, and I expressly asked her to get you to call me if there was any problem with the new time, OK? And you didn’t.’

‘Well, of course I didn’t. I didn’t get the message, did I?’

‘Fine.’

‘Fine.’ But his look said otherwise, and for a fraction of a moment she wondered if he was going to say something about her own track record of not getting messages, but he didn’t. She blushed, nevertheless. She felt suddenly tearful. He picked up the last of the agendas and handed it across the table to her. ‘When was this, anyway?’

‘When I was there doing the interview last week.’

‘So why didn’t you just come and ask me?’

Hope slipped the pieces of paper between the covers of her file, and closed it with a snap. ‘I tried to. But you were off out having lunch with someone, I believe.’

She hadn’t realised there would be anything so pointed in her voice when she started to say this, but it had come along for the ride. He’d clearly heard it. He narrowed his eyes.

‘“
Off
out”?’

‘Off out.’

He looked irritable again. ‘Oh. Right. Which makes it my fault you didn’t get the message to me then, does it?’

‘Look, I left a message in the confident expectation that it would reach you. Because I was told it would. But it didn’t. That’s hardly my fault.’

‘Which makes it my fault?’

‘No! But that doesn’t mean it was
my
fault, OK?’

How was this happening? How was she standing here feeling so cross with him? It wasn’t his fault any more than it was her fault, but it
wasn’t
her fault. And now she’d evidently rattled him.

‘Look,’ he said, his habitual good humour gone, it seemed, for good. She’d never seen him so short-tempered. ‘You left a message telling me to get back to you
only
if there was a problem, right? Which, I’m sorry, but is frankly a cock up waiting to happen. If you’d left a message asking me to confirm either way, then this wouldn’t have happened. That’s all.’

His eyes flashed turquoise darts at her.

‘Don’t patronise me,’ she said.

He rolled his eyes. Then pushed both hands across his forehead and up over the top of his head.

‘Right,’ he said coldly. ‘My cue to leave, I think.’ He raised one eyebrow fractionally then nodded again.‘Tell Madeleine I’ll call her.’

And he left.

Damn her, damn her, damn her, he thought, as he nosed out into the late-afternoon traffic. He had been so looking forward to seeing her. It didn’t matter that he’d already as good as cocked it up with her. Didn’t matter that she hadn’t been in touch. He knew that if he could just see her face-to-face that he’d be able to tell straight away how things really were. See beyond her pronouncements that she didn’t want to see him. Get some hint of whether there might be any point in – Jesus! He slammed his palms against the steering wheel. Was this God’s doing, or something? God’s way of punishing him? But for what? Just what had he done to deserve all this crap? He felt seriously fed up. More than that, he felt justified in being seriously fed up. Which was novel. Forget the endless pep talk he kept giving himself. He should just let himself feel fed up and be done with it, and stop pretending he was happy when he wasn’t. A red Fiesta cut him up at the Gabalfa roundabout, and then proceeded to get in his way.

‘Fuck you too!’ he roared. Which should have made him feel better. But as he drew level he could see the driver was an elderly lady, so he only felt worse.

He checked the time. He was supposed to be collecting Ollie from Lydia at six-thirty, to take him to a friendly over in Grangetown. It wasn’t much past four. There was nothing to rush home for. He had purposefully left an end-of-the-day window in his diary in case there’d been a chance with Hope, but now it was fit for little other than jumping out of. Decided, he signalled right instead of left at the next junction, and headed back to the studios.

It wasn’t so much the fact of the administrative cock-up, but her being so riled about it. Off out to lunch, eh? Shit. It was so obvious. It spoke volumes. He tried to recall which day it was that she’d been in to do the PM show, but failed. All he knew was that he’d heard about it after the event, and been pathetically upset that he’d missed her. Perhaps he should have called her then. Kicked his precious pride into touch. But hell, was he really up to another bloody knock-back? Didn’t he have enough on his plate right now?

But how the hell had he not picked up her email?

He slipped into the office to a chorus of the usual derisory cheers.

‘Good grief, Jack? Is it Christmas?’ someone quipped. Helen. The bloody junior. He ignored her and went over to his sometime desk. There was the usual plethora of junk on it, plus the junk from the desk beside it which had spilled across. He sat down and went through the pile methodically. Two weeks back was pre-historic in BBC paperwork terms. Nothing. He turned his attention to his out-tray. There was plenty in there – there always was. He often wondered what happened to all those endless bits of paper he signed. Nothing again. And then he saw something pink at the edge of another document. A Groovy Chick post it, which was some stupid researcher’s idea of getting in touch with her inner child. What was it with women that they had to adorn every desk-top with cuddly toys and Snoopy Mugs and Bob the Builder bloody stationery? He peeled it off and turned it over, already knowing what it said.

Please call Hope Shepherd @ heartbeat if any probs with 6pm start.

Well, damn, frankly. Damn and blast it. Why the hell didn’t these people realise that writing a message on the back of another message was just plain stupid? Stupider still when it was on a bloody post-it and the message was on the side with the glue. It was stuck, ironically, on the back of a memo about emotional intelligence at bloody work.

But that didn’t explain about the email.

He switched on his terminal and scowled at his reflection. There were umpteen emails, of course, which he scrolled through irritably, right back to the middle of January. But nothing from Heartbeat. And then something occurred to him, and he clicked on his address book. Scrolled through it. Heartbeat’s email address wasn’t listed. Of course. When he’d emailed the publicity jpeg he’d done it from Hil’s terminal. Of
course
. Because she had all the mug shots on hers. Different screen name.

Different email address.

‘Look, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, OK?’

The phone had rung nine times before Hope had picked it up. He’d almost put it back down. She sounded out of breath.

‘I beg your pardon?’ she said.

‘You were right and I was wrong and I’m sorry. I went back to the office. I found the note. I found the email. I found –’

‘You did all that?’

He couldn’t gauge anything from the tone of her voice. ‘Yes. I did all that,’ he said.

There was a very long silence. ‘You didn’t have to do that, Jack,’ she said eventually.

‘
And
I re-jigged my meeting in London.
And
I re-booked my train.
And
I will be there for five-thirty. And I’m sorry, Hope.’

‘Oh, God, you don’t need to be,’ she said. Her voice, all of a sudden, sounded animated. ‘It
was
my fault. You were absolutely right. I should have double checked. I should have done it the way you said, and I shouldn’t have got so bloody uppity about it. And I certainly shouldn’t have told you not to patronise me. You weren’t patronising me at all, and I wish I hadn’t said that.’

He cursed himself for having been so short.

‘I really hate that I upset you, Hope.’

Another silence. Was she taking notes or something? He couldn’t fathom her. He heard her exhale. ‘You didn’t upset me, Jack. Really you didn’t. It’s just that it’s been such a hard couple of weeks and there’s just too much to do, and my sister-in-law has been in hospital and my mum’s staying there at the moment, so I’ve got the most God-awful logistical difficulties with the children right now, and I don’t know whether I’m coming or going, and I’ve just been so – so –’

She stopped speaking. Abruptly. And breathed heavily out instead. ‘Oh dear,’ he said, wanting to kiss it all better for her. ‘Is she OK?’

He heard another long sigh at the other end of the phone. He wondered what she was doing right now. He wanted, he realised, to stay on the phone and listen to her forever.

‘Oh, she’ll be fine. But, really Jack, you don’t want to know. Believe me, you do
not
want to know. Anyway,’ she seemed to be winding herself up to tell him anyway, but no. ‘Jack,’ she said suddenly. ‘
I’m
the one who should be apologising. You go out of your way to fit us in and all I do is bitch and grouse and… ’ She laughed a shy little laugh. ‘And send you stomping off in a huff.’

‘I wasn’t in a huff.’

‘You were in a serious huff. You had every right to be. Has it been a big hassle? I mean, you have so much on, and –’

‘It wasn’t a big hassle.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘I’m sure. Did you get much grief at work?’

‘Not at all,’ said Hope firmly. ‘Maddie’s a friend.’