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‘Thank you.’ She gave a smile, just a little one because she wasn’t sure where this was heading.
‘So I’m not faffing about any longer interviewing people, will you be my new PA on a permanent basis?’
He made it sound like a proposal.
‘You’ll be getting paid more than you get as a temp, plus you’ll have all the company benefits, pension, holiday, life insurance, sick pay etcetera, though I’d appreciate it if you stayed well. I don’t like paying people for sitting at home watching telly.’
Polly opened up her mouth but no sound came out. She’d hoped he’d take her on but never presumed he would.
‘Well?’ Alan prompted her.
She found her voice quickly then, knowing patience wasn’t his strong point.
‘I’d be delighted,’ she said.
‘Good. I’ll have HR do all the forms and so on but as from Monday you’ll be on the payroll. Now bugger off and have a nice weekend.’
And she did bugger off and had a more than nice weekend. And the following Monday started off a wonderful phase in her life, because being Alan’s PA became so much more than a job for her. He treated her more like a young trainee, destined to follow in his footsteps. He talked to her about his customers and the problems they were having or what they needed from him and when she sat in on his meetings, taking notes, she absorbed so much information at the same time. Alan nurtured her interest and one day, after she’d been there a couple of years, she walked in to find a brand new desk had been put in place of her old one – one of the poshmahogany ones all the execs had. ‘I’m making you my assistant,’ he said. ‘More pay, two more days holiday but you’ll be ready for them because I’ll work you, lass.’ And he did and she loved every minute of her increased responsibilities. They were golden days and she missed them terribly.
Polly took Jeremy a coffee, then exited his office, dropped into her chair and made ahuffnoise that cleared all the air out of her lungs.
‘You look royally pissed off,’ said Sheridan.
‘I am very pissed off,’ came the reply.
‘Anything to do with that portrait?’
‘Everything to do with that portrait.’ Polly could feel the increased pace of her heart underneath her ribcage. ‘Storage,’ she humphed. Alan’s daughter was offered the portrait when he died and she didn’t want it so it stayed on the wall. Alan once told her that they had a fractious relationship. She was stony-faced at his funeral, sitting with his equally stony-faced ex-wife, an older and younger version of each other. Polly had cried buckets. She knew that parent–child relationships could be complicated, blood ties no guarantee of affection, because she hadn’t got on too well with her own mother. She’d been manipulative and self-centred, but Polly couldn’t believe that Alan would be anything other than easy for a daughter to love.
Alan only spoke about his family once to her. It was Christmas and they’d been working late and had stopped for a break: tea and canteen sandwiches in his office. She couldn’t remember how they’d got on to the subject but he’d told her that he’d divorced his wife years before, though if he’d known he’d have lost his daughter too, he’d have put up with the loveless state of his marriage. He always hoped the poison she dripped in their daughter’s ear would eventuallybe neutralised by her own judgement as she grew up, but it never was, and that haunted him. She didn’t want to know him, though she was quite happy to be acquainted with his fortune: the pony, the private school, the new car when she passed her driving test, the house he bought for her twenty-first birthday.
‘I always liked that picture,’ said Sheridan. ‘He looked a nice man. Was he?’
‘He was great, unless you were an idiot,’ replied Polly with a fond smile. ‘He was a brilliant man. Beyond kind.’
He gave her as much time off as she needed when her mum played up. For as long as she could remember she’d been forced into acting as her own parent’s parent. No wonder she went off the rails at sixteen and ended up pregnant on that holiday in Benidorm. Maybe it was an unconscious cry to call her mother to arms, but if it was, it didn’t work. Her mother wasn’t any support to her through any of it. Even when she finally let go of her tiny stillborn daughter and handed her to a waiting nurse, all she could remember was her mother sitting there dry-eyed and saying, ‘Well it’s for the best.’
Then she got the job here and working became her salvation; it gave her the energy to deal with her many responsibilities at home. And Alan Eagleton’s presence was like a lit, scented candle in a life that was darker than it was light.
‘He was lovely. So well respected,’ Polly went on. ‘Everything a man should be.’
‘You sound like you’re talking about your dad. Or a lover,’ said Sheridan, tossing a Ferrero Rocher over the desk division.
Polly never knew her dad. Her mother only knew him for ten minutes. But no, she didn’t think of Alan as a fatherfigure, despite the vacancy. Nor did she think of him as a lover, but she thought she did love him, even though she wasn’t sure what sort of a love it was. She couldn’t ever see herself in bed with him, but she could visualise them going out for dinner, her arm linking his, talking into the wee small hours, locking the door against the weather and enjoying each other’s company in front of a roaring fire and a good TV drama. It was a love that defied a pigeonhole slot and when he had died, it had felt as if she had lost one of the closest people in her life. She still missed him. It didn’t hurt any less, just less often.
‘What happened to him?’ asked Sheridan.
‘He had a heart attack at home. His cleaner found him. He died alone and he shouldn’t have. He was too loved, too gregarious for that. He was barely buried when his daughter sold the firm to Charles Butler, and the rest is history. Very few of Alan’s people stayed. And Charles, for some reason, really took to Jeremy.’
‘How can anyone take to Jeremy?’ Sheridan stuck out her tongue.
That made Polly laugh a little.
‘Jeremy’s very good at smarm and Charles likes to be flattered, plus he wanted some continuity in the company, someone who knew Alan’s ways.’
‘Like you, you mean.’
‘Yes, but I’m a woman. So it was Jeremy he elevated to be his MD, leaving him in charge so he could play golf and just poke his head in every so often to see how things were running. They made me apply for my own job, well, at least a role that was… much reduced, as was the pay.’
