a list of the cases I most urgently need your help with. I thought it might help if you spend a few days familiarising yourself with the files. They cover quite a wide spread of things.
‘I don’t know whether or not Richard explained it to you, but this was originally a small country practice. No one here has ever specialised in one particular field. We prefer to deal with whatever comes our way—rather like GPs. It’s my belief anyway that a good spread of work makes for a far more interesting work-load, and where we feel that something is beyond our scope we either refer the client on, or, if we feel we can do so, we take it on with the proviso that the client can seek other advice if he or she feels that we aren’t doing a good job for them. It may be old-fashioned but it suits us, and I’ve found I’m not too keen on specialising in one particular field.’
Charlotte could feel her face burning. Did he have to remind her of her own folly in concentrating on all that conveyancing? She wanted to tell him that she had had no alternative; that she had simply not had the time to expand her field of operations…not with the property market so active and then with all the work she had taken on without any payment because she had felt the cause to be worthwhile.
Bevan had been furious with her about that. They had argued about it constantly, but she had pointed out to him that it was her time and that she had the right to give it freely if she wished. And even if she had not made any money she had had the gratification of knowing that she had been able to help people who otherwise would have had no chance at all of getting justice. Going to law was an expensive business, and not everyone was eligible for legal aid.
‘This is a new departure for me,’ Daniel Jefferson was saying. ‘I’ve never worked in such close collaboration with anyone else before, apart from when I was newly qualified, when I worked for my father. He’s retired now, of course.
‘However, I have to admit with the work-load I have at the moment I do need a qualified assistant.’
An assistant! She had been employed as Daniel Jefferson’s assistant. Charlotte bit the inside of her mouth to prevent the sharp protest she could feel bubbling in her throat erupting vocally. Nothing had been said to her about working exclusively for Daniel Jefferson when she was offered the job. On the contrary, she had assumed that she would be one of a team of junior qualified solicitors working for the practice in much the same way as qualified solicitors worked for the legal departments of large companies. They would, she had imagined, do all the dirty work while Daniel Jefferson creamed off the glory.
To discover that she was going to be working exclusively for him and under his direct control had come as a very unpleasant shock.
The temptation to challenge him to reveal the truth instead of cloaking it with pseudo-flattery, and to admit that, far from believing she could be of any real help to him, his real purpose in having her installed here in the office next to his own was because he simply did not trust her almost overwhelmed her.
It galled her more than she could bear to admit to realise what had happened. If only she could afford to give in to the demands of her pride, to tell him that she had changed her mind and that she no longer wanted his job and to walk out of here with her head held high.
But she couldn’t. She had no option but to grit her teeth and give him a frosty little smile.
She was, after all, a mere employee…and he was the mighty Daniel Jefferson, and if he dictated that she was to spend her working life making coffee and posting letters there was damn all she could do about it.
All at once the misery and the frustration of the last few humiliating months boiled up inside her in a fierce surge of emotion directed at the man standing opposite her.
It was all right for him. He, no doubt, had never put a foot wrong, never made a mistake, and he had certainly never suffered the humiliation of losing almost everything…career…home…lover…
Not that she and Bevan had actually been lovers in the physical sense, oddly enough. After his passionate and fervent pursuit of her he had become so engrossed in reorganising her career and her image that somehow there had never seemed to be any time for them to actually become lovers. Whenever they went out, it had always been with a crowd of Bevan’s friends, high-profile men and women from the same world he himself inhabited, who talked coolly of burn-out and ‘yuppie flu’ and who seemed to take the view that finding time to develop personal relationships was somehow something that did not fit into their plans for their lives.
Charlotte had gone along with it because…because Bevan had swept her off her feet, she admitted miserably.
She heard Daniel Jefferson asking if there was anything she needed.
If there was anything she needed…Yes, she needed her self-respect back, she thought bitterly. She needed to salve her pride, to feel that people believed in her, that they trusted her professional ability. She needed all those things and more, but she was not going to get them from this man.
She gave him another cold, tight smile.
‘No, there’s nothing I need,’ she told him carefully. She fully understood what he had said to her. If he would give her the list of files he wanted her to study…
She was damned if she was going to ask him where to find the files, she reflected ten minutes later.
The list had apparently been on his desk and when he had opened the communicating door so that he could go and collect it she had been surprised to discover that his office was not a bit as she had imagined. The furniture was slightly old-fashioned, comfortable easy chairs either side of a fireplace, a heavy partners’ desk in front of the window and, most incongruously, a large wooden box of children’s toys in one corner.
‘I find them useful when I’m dealing with divorce cases,’ he told her, seeing her look at them. ‘Very often if I’m acting for the woman she brings her children with her. It helps to distract them.’
What she hadn’t seen in his office, though, had been any evidence of any filing cabinets.
Perhaps she could ask this Margaret Lewis when she met her, or perhaps she could ask Ginny the receptionist.
The communicating door was still open. Charlotte longed to close it, to shut herself off from the man working in the adjacent room, the man who trusted her so little that he had had her placed here under his visual jurisdiction, but even such a small choice as closing a door was not hers to make, she fumed bitterly. She was an employee now, dependent on the whims and the commands of others.
At half-past ten she heard a knock on her outer office door. When she got up to answer it the woman standing outside introduced herself as Margaret Lewis.
She was in her fifties, tall with thick strong hair and a warm smile.
If she shared Daniel Jefferson’s lack of faith in Charlotte’s professional competence she certainly wasn’t betraying it, and as she accompanied her up the stairs Charlotte felt herself begin to relax slightly, for the first time that morning.
‘We’re quite a small, close-knit unit here,’ Margaret told her as they went upstairs. ‘I like to think that it comes from the firm’s originally being started by a woman.’
‘A woman!’
Charlotte paused on the stairs to stare at her.
Margaret smiled.
‘Yes. Lydia
