A Midwinter Match Read online

  I just grunted. Now, with the grey light of the short day coming in, the panic of the night seemed stupid. Overblown. Of course, the effects of the tablets helped with the assumed calm, but even so. It was easier to see in the light, in all ways.

  ‘Fine then. We don’t want to be late. Nice to meet you.’ Zac reversed even faster away, when it looked as though Cav may want to continue talking about his bike. ‘But we ought to hurry.’

  The Discovery was parked at the end of the short driveway, blocking my Skoda. I frowned at it, and then him. ‘What is the deal with you and my car?’

  ‘Sorry, there was nowhere else to park. It’s fine, I’ll drive.’

  I frowned again. ‘But I…’

  ‘…Have control issues. I know. But it makes more sense, otherwise we’re going to have to play Car Shuffle and we’re already a little bit late.’

  Behind us, the front door opened and Cav appeared, pushing the bike. He was lycra’d up for a long ride but didn’t look beyond engaging Zac in more in-depth discussion, and we scrambled into the Discovery with almost indecent haste.

  Once we’d got in, Zac blew out a long sigh. ‘Seriously? You share a house with him? It’s like What We Do In The Shadows, only with bikes.’

  ‘They’re my friends,’ I said stiffly. I didn’t add ‘and it’s cheap’, because I really did not want questions about why I didn’t have a lovely little flat of my own.

  Cav cycled past and I gave him a little wave. I got ‘serious racing face’ in return.

  It crossed my mind then to wonder again about Zac’s ‘complicated’ living arrangements. Arrangements that let him drive randomly to Scarborough one evening, or spend a Sunday out for lunch without having to check in with phone calls. Maybe he was married and just had really good alibis. ‘Do you have your own place?’

  ‘Er.’ Zac raised his eyebrows at his own reflection. ‘Like I said, it’s…’

  ‘Complicated. Yes.’ Well, if he didn’t want to talk about it, that was fine. It meant that I could pull the same stunt on him.

  ‘You look tired. Were you out last night?’

  I looked at Zac’s reflection in the window as we drove. ‘Yes,’ I said, seizing on the explanation. ‘A late one, with Priya. She wanted a hand with some organising.’

  ‘The Matterhorn?’ he asked and for a second I was totally confused.

  ‘The what?’ Then I remembered that I’d told him she was a secret climber. ‘Oh. Um, yes. We were… looking at flights.’

  ‘She’s not going in the winter though, surely?’ There was a light in his eye, a slight curve to his mouth, and I turned and looked at him accusingly. ‘I can keep this up all day,’ he said, cheerfully. ‘I know perfectly well Priya is to rock climbing what I am to all-in wrestling, but I just want to see how far you’ll go to keep your story intact.’

  ‘You bastard,’ I said, without any real rancour.

  ‘Yeah, sorry.’ He was properly smiling now and I was almost winded by the sudden realisation that Priya was right, Zac was actually quite good-looking if you ignored the daft hairstyle and the unstructured clothes that made him look as though he’d been dressed by a personal shopper who thought he worked in TV.

  This was an uncomfortable thought. And also an unaccustomed one. My libido had fallen off the same cliff I’d imagined pushing Gareth off and I hadn’t really ‘noticed’ men since we had split up. Frankly, if my sex drive did have to come back, I’d rather it didn’t choose to come roaring in batting its eyelashes at Zac, of all people. The competition. The man who could see me out of a job. I breathed carefully.

  The secret is to breathe.

  In, out. Don’t give the panic headspace.

  I shuffled in the seat and did what I usually did when my anxiety began to rise, I stuck on a smile and brightened my voice. ‘Anyway, I ought to brief you about my family before you get the full effect. You’ve met Mum and Dad, and my sister, Eva, will be there with her two children. Her husband is a doctor who, I suspect, chooses to volunteer for on-call at weekends to get out of gatherings like this.’

  ‘Okay. I think I can cope with that. Dysfunctional?’

  ‘No, not in the slightest. Well, Eva is a bossy cow, but that’s older sisters. Her children are a bit wild, but she calls it “spirited” and my mother calls it “badly managed” and that’s about the limit of our dysfunction.’

  I opened my mouth to ask him about his family, but then closed it again. I’d only get ‘complicated’ again, I was sure. I’d given him all he was getting about my lot and I’d briefed Mum on the phone not to mention anything about my recent past. Gareth, the breakdown, none of that was anything to do with Zac, except as a nice little opening for an interview that began ‘Ruby can’t cope with the stress of the job and I can do better’.

  Sunday lunch was fine. Better than fine, actually. I’d never realised before how much stuff got fired at me over the table and having Zac there formed a kind of barrier against the personal questions. I’d explained we were workmates until I was hyperventilating with desperation, but they’d all done the soft smile and knowing looks until I resorted to sulky silence and picking the pine nuts off my carrots. Mum knew I hated pine nuts. I had no idea why she persisted in putting them in.

  Eva spent the meal ‘performance parenting’, as she always did in front of strangers. It made a nice change from her usual ‘sitting on her phone and letting Mum and Dad manage Albie and Xavier’. The boys seemed slightly intimidated by Zac and his height and therefore didn’t riot quite as much as usual and we didn’t get gravy up the curtains. The special trifle was well received, especially by Dad, and Mum seemed, apart from the bruises, to have made an excellent recovery from her accident. The spaniels were still in disgrace and in the utility room.

  After lunch, we walked down the cliff to the beach, with Dad explaining how there used to be a caravan park and a corner shop between our house and the cliff edge, and now there was just a road, a small wood and then a severe plunge down towards the ocean, and a beach which contained some incongruous shelving units. It was a somewhat sobering conversation, especially since Dad did a lot of sound effects of the storm of 2013. Fortunately, though, today the tide was out and we could all distract ourselves from the seemingly inevitable journey towards entropy and decay by watching the two small boys poking seaweed with a stick.

  All in all, Zac and I drove back to York in a state of well-fed contentment.

  ‘They’re nice. I like them,’ Zac said, breaking the several-mile silence.

  ‘They have their moments, but they’re not bad.’ I rolled my head against the back of the seat. ‘Xav can be a bit much. I’ve suggested ADHD to Eva, but she won’t hear of it. I’m sure when he starts school he’s going to be flagged up.’

  ‘People don’t always want to hear their fears confirmed,’ Zac said, almost as though he wasn’t thinking about it. ‘Ignorance is bliss and all that.’

  I thought back to when I’d got together with Gareth. I’d introduced him to Priya and sat back to wait for her excited gushing praise, so when she’d looked at me directly for a minute and then said carefully, ‘He’s a bit of a player, don’t you think, Rubes?’ I’d ignored it. Rationalised it away as Gareth trying over-hard to make an impression. Being flirty was what he did. It was who he was.

  And when that turned out to be literally true, Priya had been kind enough not to point out that ‘she told me so’. She also skated over the fact that she’d repeatedly tried to alert me to the fact that Gareth probably wasn’t telling me the whole truth about what happened when he was working away, and I’d brushed it all aside. Underneath, I’d known exactly what Gareth was really like, but I’d tried so hard to turn him into the perfect boyfriend that I couldn’t acknowledge it, even to myself. That ignorance hadn’t led to bliss, though, had it?

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow then.’ Zac pulled up at the kerb outside the house. I was startled that we were back already, I must have been so lost in thought and conversation I’d missed
most of the journey. Cav had the bike upside down again and was doing something to the chain in the entryway. All the downstairs lights were on, streaming through the windows so the house stood in a pool of brightness, and we could hear Sophie singing, even from the car.

  ‘Don’t remind me. I’ve got a new client coming in, which is a bit annoying. I was hoping to cruise downhill to Christmas with everyone too busy to need me.’ I scrabbled under my seat for my bag.

  Zac looked ahead, without saying anything, while I gathered up my coat and put it on. Just before I opened the door to slither out into the cold of the evening, he put a hand on my arm. ‘The new client,’ he said. ‘It’s a lady called Miriam?’

  I stared at him. ‘How do you know that?’

  Zac sighed. ‘I don’t know what it is with this place, Ruby. Or whether they are trying to play games with us, divide and conquer or something?’

  I felt a kind of fear prickle up my back. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because they aren’t playing fair with either of us. I know they want us to kind of compete for the job, but they should realise that we don’t work the same way and they shouldn’t be trying to compare our working methods.’

  ‘Is that what they’re doing? I thought they were just seeing which of us was most successful at getting people back into work.’ I knew there was a slight smugness in my tone. I’d got Taylor into work, Samantha onto a training course, these both counted as successes. As far as I’d heard, Zac hadn’t managed to place any of his clients yet, and Bob was bombarding us with emails saying he’d been unfairly treated.

  Zac looked at me, almost sadly. ‘It’s never that simple,’ he said, and I wasn’t sure if he was speaking from insider knowledge or whether he was trying to unsettle my complacency. ‘It’s all about whose face fits. Who’s going to work best with the new model for the company.’

  ‘Going forward,’ I put in, because I was still fairly sure that I came out ahead, however they were judging us.

  He smiled. ‘Moving in any direction.’ Another sigh. ‘Only, Miriam used to be my client. I worked with her for nearly a year in the old place.’

  ‘And you’re not taking her up again?’

  He shook his head. ‘Miriam is… difficult. I just hope they haven’t decided to pass her on to you to…’ he tailed off.

  ‘To, what? What sort of difficult?’ I felt the anxiety give a tug, but then my pride cut in. ‘I am trained, Zac. I didn’t just wander into this job after a previous work experience stint in Boots.’

  Zac looked straight ahead. A small black cat was creeping along the pavement on a mission of its own among the ice-shiny slabs and overhanging frost-stiffened foliage. ‘I don’t know. I’m just a bit worried that they’ve already made their decision about who goes and who stays and they may be playing games with us.’

  I thought of benign Michael, who’d always kept a hand of jelly on the tiller of YouIn2Work. Playing games, apart from mannered hands of Bridge, didn’t really seem his thing. But then I remembered the Grey Man and Beehive Woman, who could, presumably, talk him into anything, including using jargon like ‘going forward’. Before they’d arrived, he would just have said ‘in the future’. Like a normal person.

  ‘Like giving me a difficult client to show up that I’m not all that?’ I didn’t know whether to feel insulted, afraid or slightly exhilarated. Whether Those Above thought that I’d be so easily defeated, or that they were giving me a challenge to live up to. ‘What sort of difficult is Miriam?’

  He shrugged. ‘It’s hard to say. She was difficult about appointments, wouldn’t turn up for weeks and then came in every day for a fortnight and when I pulled her up about it, she stropped off and made complaining phone calls for about a year. She’s confrontational, loud, stroppy, won’t listen to suggestions – all of that, and, yes, I realise that, among our clients, that hardly makes her a standout, but… Well. Just be careful.’ Then he smiled. ‘I really did enjoy lunch today.’

  He clearly felt he’d said everything he wanted to on the subject of work. Well, that was fair enough, even though I did suspect that he was trying, ever so slightly, to scare me. I’d dealt with difficult clients before. I opened the door. The sound of Sophie’s murdering of ‘Oh Little Town of Bethlehem’ grew louder. ‘Thank you.’

  I meant it. After all, by giving me a heads-up, Zac may have just ruined his chance of having the upper hand in the competition for our position.

  ‘Goodbye, Ruby.’

  The Discovery slid slightly as it pulled away. The roads were icy again this evening. It wasn’t just the cold cutting through me, though, as I shivered on the pavement; the thought that YouBack2Work had already made its decision about who would stay and who would go left me with a feeling as empty as the bleak dark that arched overhead.

  Plus Sophie’s voice was slicing the night like cheese wire.

  As I’d been forewarned, I got into work early the next day. Early meant I’d been able to get the car into the car park, so I pulled with abandon into one of the spaces usually occupied by Payroll. To hell with it. I could be assertive too. There was no sign of Zac’s Discovery yet.

  Priya was just tucking her little car into its usual space as I got out, and she waved to me. ‘Blimey, you’re early. Good weekend? I hear you and Zac went for Sunday lunch?’

  I sighed. Gossip ran faster through our offices than the smell of tuna sandwiches. I was used to it and knew it would be dead before the day was out. ‘The rumour mill has got its wheels in a twist. He came for lunch with my family.’

  Priya bounced. ‘Did your mum do her special trifle? I love her special trifle. I must get the recipe. Anything to wean Nettie away from the spinach whirl.’

  ‘Yes.’ I sighed. ‘Mum did her special trifle. And Eva and the boys were there.’

  Priya made a face. ‘And Zac’s still speaking to you?’

  ‘They were restrained.’

  ‘What by, industrial-strength duct tape?’ The boys were, as Priya said, another nail in the coffin of her reproductive drive. ‘Anyway, you’ll be pleased to know that you’re practically married to him now, by the office staff anyway, and they may throw you together into a mistletoe-lined room, if you aren’t careful.’

  I couldn’t help but grin. Priya was so desperate for me to settle down and come round for drinks and dinners with her and Nettie in a couple. She said me coming on my own made the house look untidy.

  We walked in together through the front door. Karen wasn’t even on Reception yet, although there were noises from the office of coats being hung up and computers switched on. It was still almost dark outside, a sulky sun slowly painting the Minster a gloomy grey as it rose.

  Priya’s office was snug and warm. She gave me two squares of slightly moist chocolate and I perched on her desk while she fired up her machine and sorted through the endless series of Post-it notes that she’d left herself on Friday, stuck all over the surface of her desk like a very easy jigsaw.

  ‘Zac thinks they aren’t playing fair with our… with my job.’ I nibbled at a corner of the chocolate.

  ‘Well, they do seem to be taking their time, don’t they?’ Priya was bustling about in the cupboard, sorting out biros. ‘Presumably they must know how both of you work by now.’ She turned around to face me, her hair swinging. ‘Although office gossip has it that Zac is fancied by over half the female staff, and his going may cause a backwash of oestrogen and eyeliner that carries us to the brink of destruction.’

  ‘So, he’s going?’ I felt suddenly cold. ‘Really?’

  ‘I dunno. I’d have thought they’d do the deed pretty fast, once they decide. Save a salary, and all that. So maybe it’s not a done deal?’

  ‘But that’s the word on the grapevine – that it’s him, not me, to leave?’

  Priya patted my arm gently. ‘That’s what you want, isn’t it?’

  I suddenly couldn’t eat the rest of the chocolate and slipped it into my pocket. Priya would only ask awkward questions if she thought the potenti
al of Zac leaving made me go off my confectionary. I left her sorting out her work for the day and went next door into the shared office. Zac’s computer screen was surrounded by tinsel and there was a photograph I’d never seen before in a frame on his desk. A wedding picture, of a very pretty woman in a very overblown dress on the arm of a man who must be Zac, although it was hard to tell without the startled hair and jeans and jacket look. He had the sideways smile and the square chin, the dark eyes and the lanky height, but, I realised now, I hardly ever looked at Zac’s actual face.

  I picked up the photograph in its wooden frame. The woman really was very pretty, in an understated way that spoke of hours in the make-up chair. The man, Zac, was smiling down at her with a look of mischief and incipient recklessness, as though they were both about to shout ‘FOOLED YOU!’ and tear off the wedding finery to reveal ordinary clothes, then fall about laughing. There was also a tenderness in the way the couple looked at one another.

  I put the picture down, carefully squaring it up exactly where it had been. Had Gareth and I ever looked at one another like that? Probably not. Whenever I’d looked at him, he’d seemed to be doing something daft, pulling a face or trying to see if he was growing hairs out of his nose like his dad. There had, I reflected, usually been much more exasperation than affection in any exchanged glances.

  And, just like that, I realised I no longer missed Gareth, as if the gentle smiles in that photograph wiped out the image of him that I’d built in my mind. He wouldn’t have held my arm like that, for a picture. He’d have had one hand on my bum and been trying to look down my cleavage, or been making stupid jokes that wouldn’t even have made the ‘cracker selection’. What did I really miss about him? A presence, someone to share the bills with, someone to cook for – and had he ever cooked for me? No, what I really missed was having a boyfriend. Not the man himself, just the role filled.