her to say.
At least the slightly wild look had vanished from his face. At this moment in time, an unpredictable boss was something she could do without. In some of her more introspective moments, it occurred to her that there was something sad about her inability to cope with any shows of excessive behaviour. Hysterics, drunkenness, passion, intensity, they all fell into the same uncomfortable category, one that she was not equipped to handle. Restraint had been her mother’s guiding principle and while a part of Melissa resented the limitations that placed on her behaviour, she was incapable of changing it.
‘So,’ he drawled, leaning back into the chair, which obligingly tilted back, affording him ample room to stretch his denim-covered legs onto the side of the desk. He linked his fingers together behind his head and proceeded to stare at her.
‘What do you think of my schoolyard friends?’
Melissa looked steadily at him. ‘They seemed very likeable.’
‘My perfect model of restraint,’ he said lazily, his eyes half closed as he continued to survey her. ‘Do you ever shed your secretarial garb?’ he enquired.
Melissa stared blankly at the wall behind him. This amused, frankly insolent line of enquiry was something she thought he had left behind a long time ago. When she had first started working for him, he had been intrigued by her personality. Intrigued that someone who was only twenty-two could be so self-contained, so cool, so collected.
He had seen nothing amiss in probing into her private life, asking questions about her likes and dislikes, her past, her background, even her sex life. It hadn’t taken her long to inform him that her personal life had nothing to do with him, after which he had ceased peppering his polite see-you-in-the-morning chitchat with seemingly innocuous but bitingly curious questions about what she would be getting up to later on.
‘Okay, okay!’ He raised both his hands in a mock gesture of defeat. ‘I forgot. Remarks like that are strictly off limits! I can tell from that frozen look on your face!’ But he was grinning, unperturbed by the fact that her face had remained rigidly unyielding. ‘Work,’ he carried on. ‘I would have saved this for tomorrow, but as you know I’m off to New York in the morning and won’t be back for a week, and this can’t keep.’
‘You could have telephoned me with your instructions,’ Melissa pointed out.
‘True. But it would have spoilt the surprise.’
A little thread of alarm shot down her spine. She didn’t like his use of the word surprise nor did she like the expression on his face when he said it. He looked quietly satisfied.
‘What surprise?’ she volunteered tentatively. Surprises were something else she didn’t much care for. How much her mother had to answer for! Without a husband, Melissa had always known that life couldn’t have been easy for her mother, not least because the past had made her bitter and suspicious of other people and their motives.
Having watched her marriage finally crack under the weight of her second husband’s rampant womanising, she had seen it as her divine mission to instil in her daughter a healthy disrespect for anything roughly resembling impulsive behaviour. Impulse, she was fond of saying, had been the downfall of your stepfather. Impulse, she would preach, shaking her head and pursing her lips into a thin line, had been the devil in disguise.
In fact, recklessness, in Melissa’s mind, had come to rank as a grievous sin, punishable by something vague, unformed but definitely awful. By the time adulthood had arrived and with it an ability to put things into perspective, her mother had died and was beyond the reach of questions, and her daily homilies had turned into ingrained truths, stronger than reason and more frustratingly powerful than logic.
‘There’s a little job in the offing,’ he said, watching her. ‘Have you got a current passport?’
‘You know I have,’ Melissa answered, at a loss to know why she had to be called halfway across London to be told this.
‘A good friend who can look after your flat for a while? You know, feed the goldfish, water the plants, et cetera.’
‘I don’t have any goldfish.’ She gave him a perplexed frown. ‘Just like I don’t have a clue where this is leading. I’m sure the plants can survive for a couple of days anyway.’
Ominously, he sat forward and rested his chin on the tips of his joined fingers. ‘The time scale is a little broader than that,’ he informed her. ‘A couple of months rather than a couple of days. And guess what, here’s the really big surprise, you’re going home. Back home to Trinidad. A chance to relive all those great childhood memories.’ He sat back with an expression of triumph on his face. ‘Now how’s that for a surprise!’
CHAPTER TWO
MELISSA had ten days in which to arrange the technicalities of putting her life in England on hold for two months, and in which to contemplate the essential difference between surprise and shock.
Surprise, she could have pointed out, is when you open the door to your flat, thinking that the world has forgotten your birthday, only to be welcomed by all your friends and the sound of popping champagne corks.
Shock, on the other hand, is when your boss tells you that a gem of an idea which he’s been nurturing from seed for months, little expecting it to ever really go ahead, has taken root, that his little gem of an idea involves an island you barely remember and rather wouldn’t in any case and that you’ll be going there with him on business.
‘You never mentioned this to me,’ was all Melissa could find to say after he had made his announcement.
‘Excuse me while I reach for my hankie so that you can mop up your tears of delight at my little bombshell.’
Bombshell, she had thought, was the operative word, even though she had kept a steady smile on her face while she tried to formulate a few reasons why she couldn’t possibly go with him.
Trinidad, sun-soaked, slow-moving, lush paradise, belonged to her past. When she thought of it, she could barely conjure up memories of all those years she had spent there between the ages of five and eleven, when her stepfather had been posted on the island with the oil company for which he had worked. All she could remember were the rows between her parents. Long, bitter arguments that seemed to rage from one day into the other, with small breaks in between. As she had got older, the reason for the rows had become clear and with understanding came a new, deeper reason to run and hide from the shouting and the angry accusations and counter accusations.
She always felt that her aversion to confrontations stemmed from those childhood experiences when the raised voices of her mother and her stepfather had been enough to reduce her to a curled ball taking refuge in the corner of a room somewhere.
Of course, those memories were a secret, private place she shared with no one, least of all her boss.
‘I couldn’t possibly leave the country for months on end,’ she had objected.
‘It’s eight weeks, not months on end.’
‘What would happen to my flat?’ She had only been a few seconds into her objections and she could see that already his temper was beginning to fray at the edges. ‘I wouldn’t feel happy about leaving it unoccupied for months.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because
