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Laughing blue eyes.
Harriet was disorientated by a vague sense of déjà vu, but when she tried to pin down the feeling of familiarity her stomach began to squirm, prompting her to snap unwisely, ‘What’s so funny?’
He sobered. ‘Why, nothing, Miss Smith. I was just thinking, Miss Smith…’
His parody of her taunting servility was perfect. He was laughing at her! The squirmy sensation vanished as red mist formed in front of Harriet’s eyes. How easily he had vanquished her bold pretensions to sophistication! She throttled her rage, savagely willing her blush to recede. After months of listlessness these violent swings of emotion she was experiencing were slightly alarming. But at least they proved she was alive.
‘About your errant daughter, no doubt,’ she choked.
He inclined his head in mocking acknowledgement of her tacit surrender and remarked complacently, ‘Not errant. Far from it. Nicola has always been willing to be guided by me and I don’t think that this occasion is going to turn out to be any different…if it’s handled correctly.’
‘Which of course it will be.’ Her sarcasm was obviously too subtle, for it went right over his annoyingly smug head.
‘That’s up to you.’
‘To me?’ Harriet sat up straighter. Her handbag slithered unnoticed to the floor as she tensed against an unwelcome premonition. ‘What do you mean, it’s up to me?’
‘Nicola attends a school out of Auckland and normally during her holidays she goes away with my mother-in-law, Susan, but unfortunately Susan hasn’t been well recently. She visited her doctor on Friday and he’s suggested an urgent rest cure. She’ll be absent for most of the holiday but she doesn’t like the idea of leaving Nicola totally to her own devices for a fortnight, and neither do I.
‘Unhappily her three closest friends are holidaying with their families overseas and I have no other relatives that I can ask to fill the breach—Nicola threatened outright rebellion if I humiliated her by employing a nanny or teacher to look after her. However, I have to take some positive action to stop Susan worrying. She’s been an exemplary grandmother—has virtually brought up Nicola since she was five years old—and I won’t have her suffering the added stress of feeling guilty for putting her own health first this once.’
‘I still don’t see what all this has to do with me,’ murmured Harriet, her wariness increasing in direct proportion to his unprecedented expansiveness. He was marshalling his facts like a general amassing an army, their staunchly ordered ranks set to march ruthlessly over any hint of opposition.
‘You will. Nicola has always been a fair student but she arrived home at the weekend acting moody and rebellious. She says that she’s bored with studying and wants to leave school as soon as she legally can. On the other hand she freely admits that she has no idea what she wants to do with the rest of her life.
‘I hope it’s merely a disruptive phase she’s going through, a resentment of authority in general, but, just in case it’s not, this situation with Susan gives me the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone—keep Nicola fully occupied during the holidays and give her some experience of what it’s like to work for a living. I’d like her to find out for herself that without specialist skills or qualifications, or ambitions, a job can be just as unexciting and restrictive as school. I want to be sure that any permanent decision she makes regarding her future is based on reality, not some rosy-eyed vision of adulthood as all freedom and no responsibility…’
‘So you’re going to let her get a holiday job?’ Harriet guessed.
‘I’m going to give her one,’ he corrected her. ‘At Trident. And that’s where you come in.’
‘You want me to find something for her to do?’ Harriet said, relieved at the simplicity of his request. Her premonition had obviously been false.
‘I’ve already organised that. Filing. She’ll be transferring the old paper insurance records to the new filing system in the records room.’
Harriet nibbled her lip and grimaced faintly at the waxy taste of her new lip-gloss. ‘Filing? You mean that’s all she’ll be doing—shifting paperwork from one place to another?’
‘It’s a job that has to be done by someone, some time, and there’s certainly enough work to keep her busy for a couple of weeks.’
‘Yes, but wouldn’t it be more educational to give her duties in the general office so that she can see the variety of skills she might need—’
‘As Nicola herself has declared, she’s fed up with being educated,’ he said drily. ‘I’m giving her what she says she wants—a job commensurate with her skills.’
‘But filing day in and day out for two straight weeks!’ Harriet shuddered at the thought. ‘Even our office juniors get rotated on that kind of deadly dull work.’
‘Our office juniors are more qualified than my daughter,’ he pointed out.
‘Surely she can type?’ Since the advent of computers in classrooms, most children had at least rudimentary keyboard skills.
‘Yes, but she thinks it’s boring.’
‘Wait until she discovers the joys of filing,’ Harriet told him tartly. ‘She’ll be begging you for the thrill of typing.’
‘Exactly. Except she’ll have to follow office protocol like everyone else and go through the proper channels, so it’ll be Miss Smith she’ll be going begging to, not Daddy. You’ll be her supervisor while she’s here. In fact I want you to take her under your wing, treat her as if she was one of your protégées. Don’t take any nonsense—make sure she understands that you expect her to meet certain standards of work and behaviour, and don’t let her take advantage of the fact that she’s the boss’s daughter. At least not during office hours…’
Harriet listened with rising indignati
on as he blandly continued to expropriate her of her life.
