The room feels musty and still, as if no one has been in for a while. The sun is beating in through the open blinds of the south-facing window. Whereas Gillian’s office was cold, his is hot. The faintest trace of his musky aftershave lingers in the air, and there’s a wilted bunch of red roses in a glass vase on his desk. Who gave him those? He hasn’t wasted any time, has he? A burst of anger drives her courage. She turns on the computer and logs on — it still recognises her password — finds the HN Invoice file and presses PRINT. On Marc’s cabinet next to the coffee machine a small printer-copier whirrs into life.
‘Violet?’ His voice startles her.
She turns. Her heart thumps. There he is, standing in the doorway, watching her. How long has he been there? How much has he seen?
‘Marc …’
‘Violet, I’m glad you’ve come. Look, we need to talk. Will you have lunch?’ A new frown has gathered between his eyebrows, and the line of his mouth is hard, but he is still formidably good-looking. She’d almost forgotten.
‘I’m sorry, Marc. I was just looking for something. I can’t come for lunch.’
‘Come on, Violet, I owe you an apology. Just a little lunch won’t hurt.’ His smile twinkles. ‘I promise not to bite.’
‘No … I … I’m busy.’
‘Busy?’ He frowns. ‘What are you doing in here, Violet?’
‘Oh, just … printing something off. Some personal stuff.’ He’s still staring in that disconcerting way. She can feel the blood rushing through her head. ‘I uploaded it on here because I haven’t got a printer at home. I know I shouldn’t, but …!’ She shrugs and performs a little hopeless giggle.
‘Personal stuff?’ He sounds incredulous.
‘Am I interrupting something?’ A woman’s voice.
Gillian is standing there watching them with cool eyes.
Violet winces. It must look as though she went straight from their meeting to find Marc in his office. In other words, it looks bad.
‘Not at all, Gillian! Are we still on for lunch?’ Marc steps forward, smiling; his expression has switched instantly.
Watching their exchange of looks, Violet realises how little she knows about them. Marc and Gillian were an item for years. Does Gillian still have feelings for him? Was she foolish to trust her when she blabbed on about Marc and the invoices?
While Marc turns towards Gillian, she quickly gathers the four invoices from the printer and slips them into her bag.
‘Of course. We need to catch up.’ Gillian’s eyes are now resting on her. ‘And you, Violet, will you join us too?’
‘I’m sorry. I’d love to, Gillian, but I have to … prepare for a job interview.’
So those two had already planned to have lunch together! She sees in their faces that they have secrets going way back. In a flash it dawns on her that she doesn’t belong here: not in this triangle, not in this environment.
As she leaves Marc’s office, she feels their eyes following her as she walks back to the lift. Outside on the pavement, she hurries away from the GRM building, gulping in lungfuls of cool fresh traffic fumes.
On the corner near the traffic lights is a newsagent, where she makes a copy of the GRM re-invoices she has just printed off. She puts the originals in an envelope and posts them to Gillian Chalmers at GRM. The copies she folds into another envelope to take with her to Nairobi.
Then she catches the 55 bus to join Laura for lunch.
Berthold: Odessa
In spite of her execrable command of English, the story Inna told me over lunch was not without interest. She was born, she said, mournfully munching her tuna and lettuce sandwich, in a part of Moldova that bordered on to Ukraine, and while she was still a baby — she was coyly unspecific about her age — in the spring of 1941, when the Romanian army joined the Axis pact and invaded, her mother had fled south with her to Odessa, where she had been left in the care of her grandmother, who lived in a vast decaying mansion divided into apartments. At the end of their road the Black Sea glimmered between the trees, and a tall statue looked down over a magnificent flight of steps that connected the town to the port. According to Inna, this was a statue of the Duck of Richard Lee, which surprised me somewhat as Richard Lee is the Brentford FC goalkeeper, but some judicious googling threw light on the confusion.
‘Do you mean the Duc de Richelieu?’ I asked, wondering how a Frenchie had ended up with a statue in this iconic Black Sea port.
‘Aha! Duck of Richard Lee! Governor of city. Odessa was full up with foreigners and Jews!’
Her grandmother, whom she described as a small lady with a coil of silver hair wound around her head, informed her that the German Empress Catherine the Great had founded Odessa a century and a half ago, when the glorious Imperial Russian Army captured Crimea and the surrounding coastal areas from the barbarous non-believer Turks, and added, jabbing with a stern finger, that if she did not go to bed immediately the Turks would come back and cut off her fingers with a scimitar. At other times, the threat came from the empire-building British or the false-hearted French, who had bombarded the city during the Crimean War.
The fear of these wicked foreigners kept little Inna awake at night. Despite its high ceilings and tall windows, the apartment in Odessa was gloomy and dimly lit, with semi-defunct chandeliers, mouldy brocade drapes, long corridors and fearsome dark closets. Her grandparents had once had the whole apartment to themselves; her grandfather had been an ophthalmologist at the Filatov Institute, but after his death her grandmother had shared it with a reserved middle-aged couple called the Schapniks, who occupied two rooms at the back from which they seldom emerged except for their interminable morning expeditions to the shared WC.
Then, in August 1941, the invading Romanian army swept south and besieged Odessa. Despite the assistance of the glorious Black Sea Fleet harboured nearby in Crimea, the city surrendered to the Axis forces. Inna learned all this later at school. At the time, the main thing she noticed was the noise, which she thought was summer thunder, and the disappearance of the Schapniks. When she asked her grandmother where they had gone, her grandmother muttered something about Jews being taken away. At that time Inna did not know what a Jew was; nor did she find out until much later about the massacre of some thirty thousand Jews in Odessa, who were rounded up and shot or burned alive in two October days in 1941.
One day, a boy appeared in their flat — a lean, shaven-headed boy with dull grey eyes and trousers several sizes too big. It seemed that he had been hiding in the school, and had followed her home. He sat silently at their big mahogany dining table and wolfed down two bowls of cabbage soup, moving his spoon so fast that Inna’s eyes only took in a blur of green and silver, and the quick movement of his pink tongue around his lips when he had finished.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked in Ukrainian.
He looked at her blankly. She tried in Russian, and received the same empty stare. What a rude person, she thought; and then she had the idea of asking in Moldovan, which was now tucked away in a back drawer of her mind where childhood things were stored. At once his face brightened into a smile. He told her his name was Dovik Alfandari, he was nine years old, and he had come with his family from Romania to Odessa. A tear trickled out of the corner of his eye, leaving a pale trail in the patina of grime on his cheek.