she had at one time excelled in French and Italian, and had scraped through with a pass mark in Spanish and German. So what else did a multilingual secretary need?
Watching Ellen Rothwell expertly deal with telephone calls, take notes in rapid shorthand and then calmly and charmingly sort out what seemed to be some sort of a problem, Colly realised that there was a lot else to being a secretary. And what experience of being a secretary did she have? Absolutely none!
She almost got up then, made her excuses, and bolted. Then she remembered why she wanted this job that paid so much. Very soon she would be homeless. And she, who had never had paid work in her life, desperately needed some kind of well-paid employment.
It hurt that her father had left his will the way that he had. His twenty-eight-year-old widow had inherited everything; his daughter nothing. He had a perfect right to leave his money and property to whoever he cared to, of course. But she, his only child, his housekeeper since the last one had walked out seven years ago, was now about to lose the only home she had ever known. Not that it felt like home any more.
Colly had been little short of staggered when, just over two years ago now, her dour, often grumpy parent had gone all boyish over the new receptionist at his club.
The first Colly had got to suspect that he was seeing someone was when he’d suddenly started to take an interest in his appearance. She’d been glad for him. Her mother had died when Colly was eight—he had been unhappy for far too long.
Her pleasure for him had been tinged with dismay, though, when a short while later he had brought the blonde Nanette home—Nanette was about forty years his junior! ‘I’ve been so longing to meet you!’ the blonde twenty-six-year-old had trilled. ‘Joey has told me such a lot about you.’
Joey! Her staid father, Joseph, was Joey! For his sake, Colly smiled and made her welcome and tried not to see the way Nanette’s eyes swept round the room taking inventory of anything valuable.
Had Colly secretly hoped that her father would still be as happy when Nanette backed away from whatever sort of relationship they had, then she was again staggered when, far from the relationship ending, Nanette showed her the magnificent emerald ring Joseph Gillingham had bought her, and declared, ‘We’re getting married!’
For the moment speechless, Colly managed to find the words to congratulate them. But when, adjusting to the idea that Nanette was to be mistress of her home, Colly mentioned that she would find a place of her own, neither her father nor Nanette would hear of it.
‘I’d be absolutely hopeless at housekeeping,’ Nanette twittered. ‘Oh, you must stay on to be housekeeper,’ she cooed. ‘Mustn’t she, darling?’
‘Of course you must,’ Joseph Gillingham agreed, the most jovial Colly had ever seen him. ‘Naturally I’ll continue to pay you your allowance,’ he added, with a sly look to his intended, making it obvious to Colly that her allowance—not huge by any means and which, with increasing prices, went to supplement the housekeeping—had been discussed by them.
The whole of it left her feeling most uncomfortable. So much so that she did go so far as to make enquiries about renting accommodation somewhere. She was left reeling at the rent demanded for even the most poky of places.
So she stayed home. And her father and Nanette married. And over the next few months her father’s new ‘kitten’ showed—when her husband was not around—that she had some vicious claws when things were not going quite her way. But she otherwise remained sweet and adoring to her husband.
Living in the same house, Colly could not help but be aware that Nanette had a very sneaky way with her. And within a very short space of time Colly was beginning to suspect that her new stepmother was not being true to her Joey. That Nanette plainly preferred male company to female company was not a problem to Colly. What was a problem, however, was that too often she would answer the phone to have some male voice enquire, ‘Nanette?’ or even, ‘Hello, darling.’
‘It isn’t Nanette,’ she would answer.
Silence, then either, ‘I’ll call back,’ or, ‘Wrong number.’
Colly could not avoid knowing that Nanette was having an affair when some months later she answered the phone to hear an oversexed voice intimately begin, ‘Who was the wicked creature who left me with just her earrings beneath my pillow to remind me of heaven?’
Colly slammed down the phone. This was just too much. Nanette, who was presently out shopping, had, so she had said, been out consoling a grief-stricken girlfriend until late last night.
When a half-hour later Nanette returned from her shopping trip Colly was in no mind to keep that phone call to herself. ‘The earrings you wore last night are beneath his pillow!’ she informed her shortly.
‘Oh, good,’ Nanette replied, not in the slightest taken aback to have been found out.
‘Don’t you care?’ Colly felt angry enough to enquire.
Nanette placed her carriers down. ‘What about?’
‘My father…’
‘What about him?’
Colly opened her mouth; Nanette beat her to it.
‘You won’t tell him,’ she jibed confidently.
‘Why won’t I?’
‘Is he unhappy?’
He wasn’t. Never a very cheerful man, he seemed, since knowing and marrying this woman, to have had a personality transplant. ‘He’s in cloud-cukoo-land!’ Colly replied.
Nanette picked up her clothes carriers. ‘Tell him if you wish,’ she challenged, entirely uncaring. ‘I’ve already—tearfully—told him that I don’t think you like me. Guess which one of us he’s going to believe?’
Colly very much wanted to tell her father what was going on, but found that she could not. Not for herself and the probability that, as Nanette so confidently predicted, he would not believe her, but because he was, in essence, a much happier man.
So, awash with guilt for not telling him, but hoping that he would not blame her too much when, as he surely must, he discovered more of the true character of the woman he had married, Colly stayed quiet.
A year passed and her father still adored his wife. So clearly Nanette was playing a very clever game and he had no idea that his wife had a penchant for flitting from affair to affair.
That was until—about six months before his sudden totally unexpected and fatal heart attack—Colly first saw him looking at Nanette with a little less than an utter doting look in his eyes.
He appeared only marginally less happy than he had been, though, but did during his last months spend more time in his study than he had since his marriage.
Her father had been a design engineer of some note and, though in the main largely retired, she knew from the top executives and first-class engineers who occasionally called at the house to ‘pick his brains’ that he was highly thought of by others in his specialised field.
And then, completely without warning, he died. Colly, in tremendous shock, could not believe it. She questioned the doctor, and he gravely told her that her father had suffered massive heart failure and that
