My Fair Man. Jane Gordon

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СКАЧАТЬ to learn his name. ‘Look, Jimmy, here’s my address, my phone number, my name. You can reach me any time on my mobile, and there is a day office number and a home number. Think about what I’ve said and call me …’ She handed him a card, which he reluctantly took.

      As she left she heard his friends begin to tease him about her interest and she wanted to cry. For the tragedy of his life and her own stupidity in imagining she could save him from it.

Chapter Three

      In the days that followed, Hattie made it a habit, on her way home from work each evening, to detour via the streets of Covent Garden on the off chance of running into the boy called Jimmy.

      But he seemed to have moved on or moved pitch because although she saw many other homeless people camped out in doorways near the big theatres she didn’t see him.

      She did, though, encounter one of the two men who had been with him on the day of her ill-fated proposition and she attempted to persuade him to pass on a message asking Jimmy to contact her.

      But still there was no sign or word from him. In desperation on the Thursday afternoon she took two hours off work in order to visit the offices of the Big Issue in the hope that they might be able to help her to reach him. But they were very nearly as suspicious of her motives as Jimmy had been himself, although they did eventually agree to leave a message pinned on their notice board.

      Her mood of desolation was beginning to irritate Toby who was, in any case, totally against the idea of her rising to the bait of Jon’s bet. Her tender-hearted concern for others had been one of the things that had drawn him to her when they had first met, but nearly six years on, at a time when he was beginning to enjoy unexpected professional acclaim, he regarded her continued devotion to lost causes as naïve and unrealistic. Lord knows he was himself a devoted socialist – well, at any rate an ardent supporter of the ideals of New Labour – but he did not relish the idea of cluttering their lives – let alone their flat – with this latest sociological experiment of hers.

      Besides, he was in the middle of a major case involving one of the biggest corporations in the country and he felt that he was in far greater need of support and sympathy than Hattie. Although they enjoyed what he claimed to be an equal relationship he secretly retained many of the attitudes and values of his own middle-class parents and believed that the female role in a partnership should be far more domestically rooted and nurturing than that of the male. He shouldn’t have to come home, as he had tonight, to an empty flat and fridge. Some innate sense in him thought that Hattie’s priorities were wrong, that she should put his comfort before that of the redemption of some hopeless stranger, and that his life should be more like that of his father’s – a man whose role at the head of a respectful household Toby now privately envied.

      He recognised, of course, the dramatic difference between his father’s circumstances and his own. Their flat did, in fact, belong to Hattie, having been bought, several years before, with some of the income from her trust fund. His own flat – kept on but rented out after they had moved here – was a substantially less impressive property, so unimpressive that currently he was having trouble finding a tenant for it. So while his own mother had been dependent on his father (which probably did encourage a greater degree of respect) Hattie was a woman of independent means. But just because she wasn’t dependent on him for a roof over head didn’t mean that she could ignore, as she persistently did, the domestic details of their life. That weekend he was hosting, at Hattie’s apartment, a small dinner party for the more important people involved in the important case at work. And although the food was being prepared by discreet caterers – Hattie had no interest in cooking – he was concerned that in her present distracted state the dinner would be a disaster.

      This feeling of doom was compounded by her arriving home, that Thursday night, at nine thirty with a bleak expression on her face, after having been on yet another hopeless search for her homeless boy.

      ‘Oh Toby,’ she said in a dejected voice, ‘it breaks my heart to see all those poor people with nowhere to go. I must have spoken to a hundred of them tonight and some of them looked so lost.’

      ‘Hattie, at the risk of sounding like Jon I really do think it’s time you gave the homeless issue a rest. I appreciate your concern, I know you’re anxious to prove him wrong, but for Christ’s sakes can’t you just get a life?’

      ‘I have a life, Toby,’ Hattie said coldy as she made her way through to the stainless steel kitchen in search of food.

      ‘There’s nothing in the fridge, Hattie. It might have been nice – after the day I’ve had – to have come home to something. A piece of hard cheese, a crust of stale bread, a rotten apple …’ he sulked.

      ‘Look, Toby, I just haven’t had time for any of that this week. And actually I haven’t had such a brilliant day either. I’ve got a particularly difficult case on my hands at the moment,’ she said, thinking of the little girl, Lisa, who had – when she wasn’t searching for the homeless man – occupied her thoughts in the past week.

      ‘Spare me the details, Hattie. The only way I could have got your attention in the last few days would have been to turn up at one of those soup kitchens with a sign round my neck saying “Homeless and hungry”. That way you might have offered me a little sympathy and I’d have got a hot meal …’

      It wasn’t difficult for Toby to make Hattie feel guilty and inadequate. And even though it did flash through her mind that Toby himself might have nipped into M&S on his way home from work, she turned to him with a remorseful expression and put her arms round him in a placatory way.

      ‘I’m sorry, Toby.’

      ‘Look, Hattie, I’m going through a bad time myself at the moment. Saturday night’s very important to me and I want you to help me with it—’

      ‘Saturday night?’ Hattie asked blankly.

      ‘The dinner, darling. For the Chairman of UCO and all those involved in the case. You know how important it is to me – the first time I’ve hosted something for business at home. Surely you haven’t forgotten?’

      ‘Of course not. I’m sorry,’ Hattie said, although, in fact, the events of the last week had put his dinner completely out of her mind.

      ‘I want you to be the perfect hostess on Saturday, Hattie. In the morning we’ll have to go shopping – flowers, candles, a dress that will fit the occasion. You will be co-operative, won’t you?’

      ‘Of course,’ she said, offering him her most radiant smile.

      Toby ordered a takeaway and they ate it whilst he gave her brief biographical details of the guests he had invited to the dinner and offered her – in a ten-point note he had carefully written out – various suitable topics of conversation. Hattie looked at the list with growing alarm. She knew very little about any of things Toby had deemed acceptable – the Millennium Dome, the redevelopment of the Opera House, EU economic policy, cars, Bill Gates, cricket, rugby, shooting (hadn’t they banned shooting?), skiing and trout fishing.

      ‘I’m not sure I’ll be able to say a great deal, Toby,’ she said.

      ‘Well, try and read up on those things. The Chairman is a member of Lords and heavily into field sports,’ he said commandingly.

      He was very relieved that Claire was going to be there, in her capacity as the corporate СКАЧАТЬ