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Her father had told her that she was too hard on herself; that she had simply, like others, ridden the crest of a financial wave which had retreated, leaving her high and dry. Maybe, but not everyone had been caught out by the roller-coaster of the sharp rise in the property market and its subsequent downturn.
Look at Daniel Jefferson, for instance. Her heart sank a little. She just hoped that she wouldn’t have to come into too much contact with him. It was perhaps illogical of her to feel so…so antagonistic towards him, so resentful almost, and it was also unlike her, but her normal good humour seemed to have become eroded over the last six months or so. She felt raw and vulnerable, unable to stop herself repeatedly going over and over what had happened, wishing she had seen what was coming and protected not just herself but those of her clients to whom she had given her services free of charge as well. Yes, it was a great pity she had not had the foresight that Daniel Jefferson seemed to exhibit to such spectacular effect. He obviously, unlike her, had an eye for a successful cause, she decided moodily.
Look at the way he had taken on the huge Vitalle conglomerate and achieved such a spectacular success…
She heard a door opening and the sound of someone moving about in the adjacent office, and quickly sat down at her own desk. Daniel Jefferson had obviously arrived to start on his day’s work.
What would it be today? she wondered bitterly. Some high-profile court case that would win him further acclaim; the preparation perhaps for a television interview? She had read in one of the papers how impressed the Press had been by the way he had handled his interviewers. Some people were like that, courting publicity, thriving on it. She remembered the small humiliating piece she had seen in the local paper describing the closing-down of her practice, pointing her out as one of the victims of the recession.
She had to put the past behind her, her father had told her gently, adding that there was no disgrace in having tried and failed; that he would rather she’d had the courage to do that and to admit her failure than had opted for the safety of a job in some large corporation.
But Charlotte couldn’t help remembering how proud her parents had been of her when she had first qualified. Somehow now she felt she had no right to their pride, and that she certainly had no right to the respect and trust of her colleagues.
While she was lost in these unhappy thoughts her office door opened. She tensed, blinking away the tears that had been threatening and struggling to stand up, cursing as she did so her straight, too short skirt.
‘Oh, Mr Horwich—’ she began, and then stopped, because it wasn’t Richard Horwich who was standing there, Richard Horwich whom she had naturally expected—forgetting Ginny’s words, in her state of confusion—to seek her out to tell her exactly what her duties were going to be. It was Daniel Jefferson.
CHAPTER TWO
‘I’MSORRY,’ Charlotte began to apologise, cursing herself for not looking at him properly before addressing him by the wrong name.
‘That’s all right,’ Daniel Jefferson told her easily. He was smiling at her, she noticed, a nice warm smile which for some reason increased her resentment of him, and her discomfort with herself.
‘I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you arrived. I was delayed on the way this morning, but Ginny will have shown you where everything is. I’ve arranged with Margaret Lewis, who’s in charge of our trainee solicitors, to come down from upstairs at half-past ten to take you up to the nursery to introduce you to them.’
‘The nursery?’
He smiled again.
‘Sorry. That’s what we call the room where the young trainees we have here work. Partially because they are trainees and partially because they’re housed on the top floor in what were at one time, when this was a private house, the actual nurseries.’
He stopped speaking and looked assessingly at her. Charlotte was immediately self-consciously aware of the almost brash Londonness of her appearance, and only just managed to resist tugging at the hem of her skirt. Was it her imagination or did a small smile really curl the corners of his mouth as he glanced at her? She could feel her skin beginning to burn.
It was all very well for him, she decided bitterly, with his expensive hand-tailored suit; she doubted that he had ever been so hard up that he couldn’t afford to buy himself clothes, even chain-store clothes, never mind the kind of things he was wearing right now. Well, let him deride her if he liked; she didn’t care. Only she knew that she did. Just as she cared that he was the one who was standing here instructing her rather than Richard Horwich…just as she cared that she had apparently been isolated from the rest of the staff and put in an office adjacent to his own.
Why? Was it because despite the apparent warmth of that smile he had really not wanted her here on the staff? Had he perhaps even objected to his partner’s hiring someone like her…a failure…a person who had not made the same resounding success of her career that he had so patently made of his?
Had she been put here in this solitary office on his instructions so that he could monitor her work…so that he could keep a check on her, because he did not trust her professionally? She suspected that she had.
Her pride, already lacerated by what she had endured, stung bitterly under this fresh assault.
‘Do you think you’ll be comfortable in here?’ he asked her now. ‘I know you’re used to working on your own, so hopefully you won’t find the isolation too much of a bugbear. Of course, normally the communicating door will be open.’
He nodded to a door set into the wall, which Charlotte belatedly realised must connect his office with hers.
Her bitterness and her resentment nearly choked her as she listened to him. Did he really think he actually needed to watch her while she worked?
She could feel her fingers curling into her palms, her nails digging into her hands as she fought the temptation to tell him what he could do with his job. She must not, could not, give way to that temptation. She tried to concentrate on that awful burdensome overdraft, on the kindness and generosity of her parents. She was not in a position where she could afford to turn her back on a job…any job…no matter how much she might detest its provider.
Not that he had actually given her the job. She could just imagine it now, she decided bitterly. She could just visualise what must have happened when Richard Horwich had announced that he had offered the job to her.
Richard would have had to show him her CV, of course, and it was all there…she had held nothing back, feeling that it would be dishonest to do so.
During the interview Richard had questioned her very closely about the failure of her practice, and she had answered him frankly and honestly.
She could well imagine how angry a man like Daniel Jefferson must have been when he had learned she had been offered and had accepted the job.
He was speaking to her again and she forced herself to concentrate, her face an icy mask of remoteness as she listened to him.
‘I’ve prepared 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 Jefferson started up in practice here just after she had qualified, when she was unable to get work with any established practice. A very adventurous step for a woman in those days.’
‘Lydia Jefferson?’ Charlotte questioned. ‘Then she must have been…Was she related to Daniel Jefferson in some way?’
‘His great-aunt,’ Margaret confirmed. ‘She had been retired for several years when I first came to work as an office junior, but she still took a very strong interest in the practice. In fact it was she who first encouraged me to take my own articles and to qualify. She and Daniel were very close. When he was quite small, still at junior school, she used to bring him down here with her sometimes.
‘She had very strong views on women’s rights to control their own lives and she was vehement in her support of the underdog. Daniel is very like her in that. Much more so than his father, who, although kind, was much more the traditional stereotype of the country solicitor.
‘Daniel was a brilliant student and many people thought he should have opted to become a barrister, but he was always determined that he wanted to work here, continuing the tradition established by his aunt.’
‘But surely now with all the publicity surrounding the Vitalle case he must at least be tempted to take advantage of his success and perhaps move the practice to London?’
Margaret shook her head.
‘Oh, no, Daniel would never do that,’ she told Charlotte calmly. She said it so positively and with such faith and affection that Charlotte felt her resentment against Daniel Jefferson surge rebelliously inside her. It was all right for him. He had had everything handed to him on a plate. All he had had to do was to qualify and then to step into the comfortable world waiting for him. A world laboured for by a woman…
A woman who had succeeded as she had not, and against far greater odds, Charlotte reminded herself miserably as they reached the top of the stairs and Margaret Lewis opened a door on the landing.
Inside the large sunny room eight people sat at desks working. The room buzzed with the hum of computers and electronic equipment. All along one of the shorter walls were racks containing the familiar packages of papers and legal briefs tied with pink ribbon.
It was obvious immediately that the people in the room were extremely busy and yet the atmosphere was one of relaxed happiness, a young woman leaning over the shoulder of a male colleague, teasing him about something as she helped him with a query.
There was, Charlotte recognised, a bright-eyed quality and an enthusiasm about the occupants of this room that said how much they enjoyed their work, and there was also an alertness about them, an eagerness that she recognised as the kind of enthusiasm possessed by those who were the best of their peer group.
Without knowing any of them, she immediately knew that these trainees were all of them high achievers, quick, intelligent, hard-working, much as she had once been herself, but they had something she recognised that she had never really had: they were free of the anxiety that had plagued her almost from the moment she had set up her own practice.
If they knew about her professional history they were certainly not showing it, as Margaret introduced them to her and they reacted with what appeared to be genuine warmth.
One or two of the boys eyed her short skirt appreciatively, but no one displayed any antagonism or unpleasantness towards her.
‘Bless ’em,’ Margaret commented after she had closed the office door and was standing on the landing with Charlotte. ‘They’re a hard-working lot, but inclined to get a little high-spirited at times. Daniel believes in giving them as much responsibility as they can handle without overburdening them, and I must admit it’s a recipe they seem to thrive on. What we prefer to do is to assign someone to a specific case, so that he or she can see the whole thing through rather than merely acting as a clearing house for the mundane background work.
‘When you come to start work on Daniel’s files you’ll find inside the cover the name of the trainee assigned to that case, and any work you want doing you can either instruct the trainee concerned direct or, if you prefer, you can route your instructions through me.
‘I realise that for the next few days, until you find your feet, you’re going to be tied to your desk and the files, but once you’re properly settled in it might be nice to have lunch together one day.’
‘Yes, I’d like that,’ Charlotte told her with genuine enthusiasm. ‘There is one thing you could help me with,’ she added. ‘Where exactly do I find the files?’
Margaret smiled at her.
‘Come with me.’
As she headed back downstairs she told Charlotte that when Lydia Jefferson had first decided to set up her own practice she had bought this house with a small legacy, and thanks in the main to Daniel’s insistence it had stayed much as it was rather than being converted into a modern soulless environment behind a classic faa¸de. ‘However, as we’ve expanded we’ve grown progressively short of space, and the files or at least Daniel’s files are now housed in what originally was a large walk-in airing-cupboard.
‘Here they are,’ she told Charlotte as they stopped on the next landing. She opened a door into a small oblong room, its walls lined with shelves filled with files.
‘Dead files are stored in the basement. These are only current cases.
‘We operate a simple system. They are kept here in alphabetical order, and if you find that one is missing chances are either that Daniel has it out or that one of the trainees is the culprit. I have tried to institute a system whereby everyone logs the files they take out, but I’m afraid so far it’s proving a little difficult to implement.
‘If there’s anything you want to know, or any help you need, just give me a ring, or pop up and see me. I’m on extension 241,’ she told Charlotte.
Thanking her, Charlotte headed back to her own office. At least Margaret wasn’t antagonistic towards her, but perhaps that was because as yet she did not know the truth about her.
As she stepped into her office Charlotte heard Daniel call out to her.
‘Could you come into my office for a moment, please, Charlotte?’
Reluctantly she did so.
He was seated behind his desk, and while she stood in front of him, seething with resentment and misery, she was painfully aware of the contrast between them.
He looked up, smiling at her; a smile he had no doubt used to good effect for the television screens, she reflected sourly. Surely his teeth were too white…too perfect…but then she noticed that one of his front ones was slightly chipped. Oddly that cheered her up a little. So Mr Perfect wasn’t entirely perfect after all.
‘Here’s an addition to the list of the files I’d like you to familiarise yourself with,’ he told her. In order to take the list from him she had to step closer to his desk, so close that she caught the faint clean scent of his skin. He wasn’t wearing after-shave; that was quite definitely merely soap she could smell. She scowled. One of the things she had never wholly cared for about Bevan was his addiction to a particularly strong male cologne. Nothing she had been able to say to him had ever convinced him that she found it more of a turn-off than a turn-on.
‘Help yourself to a cup of coffee,’ she heard Daniel telling her, ‘and then pull up a chair. I’ll give you a brief résumé of each of these cases, and then I’d like you to read through the files and give me your professional opinion of the strengths and weaknesses of each case.’
Fortunately she had her back to him as he spoke, having turned at his first words to see where she was supposed to get her coffee from. A coffee filter jug and heater stood discreetly to one side of the toy box, complete with china mugs and everything else, and as she focused on it she felt her backbone stiffen. What a mammoth ego the man had, she fumed as she poured herself some coffee. What was he trying to do—test her…as though she were a child sitting a spelling test? And then swiftly on the heels of this angry thought came another and more disturbing one. What if it was some kind of test? If she failed it…if her judgements on his cases did not exactly coincide with his, would he use that as further means of her incompetence and seek her dismissal?
She shivered a little as she added milk to her coffee, a mental image of her most recent bank statement reminding her of how important it was that she kept this job. The salary was excellent, and it was close enough for her to be able to live at home. And no matter how much such dependence on her parents hurt her pride, there was no getting away from the fact that until she had cleared that overdraft she simply could not afford to pay rent and she most certainly could not afford a mortgage.
The bank had been very understanding; they had offered her extra time to repay the overdraft, but her pride had jibbed at that. She wanted it reduced and repaid as quickly as possible. And besides, as her father had pointed out, there was the burden of the heavy interest payments.
