his sinewy forearms. She looked away, idiotically ruffled by his blatant masculinity.
Al’s office turned out to be a smart little affair, at odds with the rough-and-ready atmosphere outside. There was a small wooden desk, on which a computer terminal lay at rest and on another thin desk which protruded at right angles from this, were a fax machine, two telephones and several files, neatly stacked. The carpet was thick and cream and the walls were painted an unusual shade of green that gave the room a pleasant, leafy atmosphere. Robert took the chair behind the desk and gestured for Melissa to take a seat on one of the two facing him.
She had already removed her coat and draped it over the back of the spare chair. Now, she waited in silence, hands folded on her lap, legs crossed, for her boss to fill her in on whatever he had summoned 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!’
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