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White-faced, Beth replaced her telephone receiver. She had spent most of the morning on the telephone, and the call she had just received from the Board of Trade had confirmed what she had already begun to fear. The factory...her factory...simply did not exist. She had been conned...cheated...
Beth sat down on the floor of the storeroom and covered her face with her hands. What on earth was she going to do? It was bad enough that she had wasted all this time reliving what had happened in Prague with Alex, reminding herself of...of things she just did not want to remember: the silent drive back to Prague, her decision the moment she reached the hotel to find somewhere else to stay, just in case Alex refused to accept what she had told him and just in case she weakened...just in case her emotions weren’t as uninvolved as she had claimed...
Then there had been her visit to the factory with the gypsy: the peculiar silence of the factory itself, the ramshackle untidiness of it, the overgrown car park, and then the oddly sumptuous office, with its dirty faded wallpaper and its completely contrasting heavily locked cabinets filled with that beautiful glass.
Beth winced as she remembered how nearly she had backed out of giving them an order when she had been told just how much glass she would have to take.
‘That’s far too much,’ she had protested. ‘I can’t afford to buy so much.’
In the end they had agreed that she could divide the order into the four different colours of glass, but she had still needed to go back to her new hotel and ring home, to persuade her bank manager to increase her overdraft facility.
‘I can’t increase it to that level,’ he had protested. ‘The business doesn’t merit it. You don’t have the security.’
Beth had thought frantically.
‘I have some security,’ she had told him, and it was true; she’d had the shares her grandfather had given her for her twenty-first birthday and an insurance policy that was supposed to be the basis for her pension. In the end her bank manager had agreed to lend her the money, secured by these assets.
She had returned home from Prague, jubilant at having succeeded in securing the order—and on her own terms. But her jubilation had been short-lived—rootless, really—and underneath it there had been a vast subterranean cavern of pain and loss which she had fought valiantly but hopelessly to deny.
‘It was just lust—just sex, that’s all,’ she had told Alex, but she had lied... Oh, how she had lied...to herself as well as to him. The tears on her face when she woke from her longing dreams of him and for him told her that much.
‘I love you,’ he had told her, but she knew he hadn’t meant it.
‘I don’t love you,’ she had said, and she certainly hadn’t meant that.
How was it possible for her to have fallen in love with him after all she had done to try to protect herself, all she had told herself...warned herself...? Beth had no idea, and in the weeks following her return she had been too exhausted by the pain of keeping her feelings at bay, too driven by the fear of what was happening to her, to look too deeply into the whys and wherefores of what had happened. It was enough, more than enough, just to know that it had. To know it and to bitterly, bitterly wish that she did not.
The only thing that had kept her going had been the thought of her glass, her precious, wonderful glass, and now, like the love Alex had claimed he felt for her, that too had revealed itself to be false and worthless.
Her telephone rang and she tensed. Twice since her return home she had received calls from Prague. On one occasion it had been the hotel, telephoning about a scarf she had left behind, and the second time it had been an anonymous caller who had rung off when she’d answered the phone.
‘Alex, Alex,’ she had cried out frantically, but she had been simply crying into silence.
‘Beth, it’s Dee...’ her landlady announced at the other end of the line. ‘Is it unpacked yet? Can I come round?’
Immediately Beth panicked.
‘No. No...’
‘Is something wrong?’
Beth bit her lip. Dee was too quick, too intelligent to be fobbed off with a lie.
‘Well, actually, yes...there is,’ she admitted. ‘The order isn’t—’
‘They’ve sent you the wrong order?’ Dee interrupted before Beth could finish. ‘You must get in touch with them immediately, Beth, and insist that they ship the correct one, at their own expense and express. Tell them that if they don’t you’ll be submitting a claim to them for loss of business. Did you stipulate on your contract that the order had to be delivered in time for your Christmas market? I know they’ve already delayed delivery several times.’
‘I...I have to go, Dee,’ Beth fibbed. ‘There’s another call coming through.’
What on earth was she going to do? How was she going to explain to Kelly, her partner, that because of her...her stupidity...they were probably going to have to close the shop? How could they keep it open when they didn’t have anything to sell? How could they continue to pay their overheads when they had no money? She had already received one letter from the bank, reminding her that they were expecting her overdraft to be repaid just as soon as Christmas was over.
There was no way she was going to be able to do that now. She knew, of course, that Brough, Kelly’s husband, was an extremely wealthy man, and no doubt he would be prepared to help them out, but her pride wouldn’t allow her to be a party to that. And besides, Brough was essentially a businessman, and Beth was under no illusions about what he was likely to think of her business capabilities once he knew what had happened.
Was she never going to get a thing right? Was she always going to be taken for a fool...was she always going to be a fool?
It was all too much...much too much. Beth bowed her head. She couldn’t cry. She was beyond that—way, way beyond the easy relief of tears—and besides, she had cried so many times since her return from Prague.
