The Grace Girls (48 page)

Sarah reeled backwards against a desk, shocked by both Heather’s attitude and the sudden movement of the big heavy drawer. Her usual confident demeanour had suddenly deserted her in the face of this cold, steely stranger who was nothing like the girl who had started w
orking here a few weeks ago. The girl who Sarah mistakenly felt she had the upper hand with. ‘I’m sorry . . .
’ Sarah said now, her voice stuttering and uncertain. She lifted her handbag and almost ran down the office in the direction of the Ladies’. Heather turned away, looking for her own handbag. Then she passed the little groups who were still loitering around the office and went downstairs. She joined the queue to get herself a cup of tea, which she brought back and drank sitting alone at her desk.

The rest of the morning passed in a fog of filing, weighing and stamping mail and typing out the most urgent letters and bills. Heather got through it all, applying the same tactics she had used for the first part of the day – doing one job at a time and not looking up from it until it was time to move onto the next.

Just before lunch, Mr Walton came across the office to speak to her.

‘Heather . . . would you mind stepping into my office for a wee minute, please?’

‘Not at all,’ Heather said. ‘I’ll just put these files back in place and I’ll be straight in to you.’ At the back of her mind Heather felt vaguely aware that it was unusual for Mr Wa
lton to bring members of staff into his room at
lunchtim
e. He usually went out on the dot for his own lunch. She wondered if there was some kind of a problem, but couldn’t imagine anything that it could be. He had been fine with her earlier on this morning and gave no indication of anything being wrong.

She shrugged to herself, unable to summon up enough curiosity or interest for it to worry her. Like the way she had worked all morning, she would deal with the situation when it arose.

The buzzer went again, signalling that it was one o’clock, and everyone started lifting jackets and coats and heading in the general direction of the door.

‘Are you coming with us for lunch?’ Marie Henderson, the quiet girl that Sarah always sat with, asked as Heather was lifting her handbag. ‘We’re going down to the Trees.’

Heather looked down at the floor. ‘Mr Walton wants a word with me, so I could be a wee while . . .’

‘We’ll wait if you want,’ Marie offered, looking back anxiously at Sarah, Danny and Maurice.

‘No,’ Heather said, cutting her off. ‘If I feel like coming I’ll catch up with you.’

Heather tapped on Mr Walton’s office and walked in.

‘Sit down, sit down,’ he said warmly, motioning to the comfortable leather chair facing his own.

Heather did as she was told and sat down in the chair. Then she waited.

He sat forward in his chair, resting his arms on the tooled-leather table, the fingers of both hands linked together. ‘I’ve asked you to come in because I’m a little bit concerned as to how you are . . .’ He halted. ‘Is there anything wrong, Heather? You don’t seem quite yourself.’

Heather looked up at him blankly, vaguely knowing she should say something – but quite, quite unable to find a single word.

‘Are you feeling ill?’ he asked now, in a concerned, fatherly way. ‘You don’t look yourself at all . . . several of the staff have said they’re a wee bit worried about you.’

Heather took a deep breath and finally found a small wisp of a voice. ‘I wanted to ask you if I could have the day off tomorrow . . . to go to a funeral. It doesn’t matter about the day’s pay . . .’

‘Of course,’ Mr Walton said quickly. He sat back in his chair. ‘Is it somebody close, Heather? A relative?’

A picture of Gerry suddenly swam into her mind and she felt all light-headed and strange.

‘It’s a boy,’ she whispered, vaguely wondering if she should have said man or lad. ‘He was my boyfriend up until I started work here.’

‘What happened?’ Mr Walton asked. ‘Was he sick?’

Heather shook her head. ‘It was a road accident . . . he got knocked down early on New Year’s morning.’

‘Good God . . .’ the office manager murmured. ‘That’s very tragic.’

Heather suddenly felt all dizzy; she took a big gulp of air, trying to steady her breathing.

‘You see,’ she went on in the strained stringy voice, feeling that she should explain it fully for some reason, ‘he was trying to catch up with me. He wanted to see me home . . . He was crossing the road and then a taxi came flying round and didn’t see him . . .’ She felt immediately guilty, telling it as though it was the taxi-driver’s fault – but she couldn’t tell him that Gerry was drunk and that in all probability it was his own fault. That just seemed too cruel an explanation to voice.

Mr Walton’s head was bobbing up and down, indicatin
g that he understood. ‘Of course you can have the day off, He
ather,’ he said, standing up. ‘It’s perfectly understandab
le that you’d want to go to the funeral . . .’

Heather stood up quickly now and the dizziness suddenly increased along with a whooshing noise in her ears. She bent down to retrieve her handbag from the floor and suddenly the green flowery carpet seemed to be moving up towards her.

‘Are you all right, Heather?’ Mr Walton said, moving quickly around the table towards her.

‘I’m fine,’ she replied. And then everything suddenly went black, and Heather Grace keeled over in a dead faint on Mr Walton’s office floor.

Chapter 51

Looking back on it, Heather could never really remember the journey out to her Auntie Claire’s house in the taxi or how it was decided that she should actually go there instead of going home.

When she came round in Mr Walton’s office, Muriel Ferguson and some of the older women were standing around her, talking to her in encouraging, gentle voices. She had tried to sit up, but as soon as she did, the dizziness and the spinning in her head started again. This went on for quite a while until she was able to sit up and drink a cup of sweet tea and force down two digestive biscuits.

She had a vague recollection of people coming in and out of Mr Walton’s office to see how she was. Danny had stood at the office door with a shocked look on his face, asking her if she was feeling OK and Sarah had come over and knelt beside her, saying she hoped she felt better after she got home and how sorry she was about the stupid argument they’d had. She’d also gone on to say something about Gerry and the funeral, and Heather had felt suddenly sick when she realised that the whole office must have been talking about it.

She remembered Mr Walton asking her if any of her family had a phone, and how long did she think it would take her father to drive out and collect her. Then he had asked her if she knew anyone nearer, maybe someone related to her, who lived in Glasgow. Sarah had butted in then, suggesting that Heather might like to come home with her, she explained how Heather had stayed a night over Christmas and how her mother and father would be delighted to have her.

Mr Walton thanked Sarah for her kind offer, but said they would have to let her family know and then decide wha
t to do. It had been decided from the onset that, whatev
er happened, Heather was in no fit state to go home on the train or the bus alone.

Heather knew she must have given somebody the little card she had tucked in the back of her purse with Claire’s address and phone number on it, because Muriel Ferguson had given the card back to her in the taxi after she’d shown it to the taxi-driver.

‘This looks like it!’ Muriel announced in a high, almost excited, voice, as the taxi came to a stop outside a detached granite two-storey house on a tree-lined avenue. It was set back off the road on a rolling incline, with several sets of s
teps running up through neatly trimmed gardens on eith
er side. She turned to Heather. ‘You did say you’ve never b
een out to your aunt’s house before, didn’t you, Heathe
r?’ she checked again.

How strange she’s never visited here
, Muriel thought, but deduced the aunt and uncle had only recently moved into the area. But as she looked at the fine-looking house and all the others around it, she found it even stranger that Heather hadn’t bragged to everyone in the office about her aunt who lived in the big house in Glasgow.

Heather nodded – her head still fuzzy and sore from where she’d banged it on the office floor when she fainted. ‘I’ve never been out here before,’ she confirmed. ‘So I’m sorry I can’t direct you.’

The door of the house opened and a slim dark-haired figure in a sweater and neat jeans came rushing down the steps. ‘I’m Heather’s aunt – is she all right?’ she called out in a clear Irish tone.

Muriel Ferguson had got out of the back of the black cab first when the driver had come to open it. ‘She’s improving,’ she said, nodding her head gravely. ‘But she’s not been at all well at work.’ She stepped away from the vehicle and lowered her voice so that Heather wouldn’t hear her. ‘She’s fainted several times . . . kept going in and out of consciousness.’

Claire stood there listening with a very concerned look on her pretty face. ‘She’ll be fine now, we’ll get her straight into bed.’ She moved towards the taxi, and then got into the back of it beside her niece while Muriel spoke to the taxi-driver, checking that he would wait a few extra minutes to allow them to get Heather safely into the house.

‘How are you, Heather?’ Claire asked gently, patting her niece’s hand. ‘Are you feeling a wee bit better? Are you well enough to walk up to the house?’

Heather nodded her head very carefully. ‘I’ll be fine,’ she told her aunt in a weak voice. ‘I walked out to the taxi from the office.’

‘Come on then,’ Claire said, smiling encouragingly at her niece, ‘we’ll get you out now and into the house.’

‘I’m really sorry for being a nuisance,’ Heather told her as she followed her aunt out of the low taxi door. ‘I feel really silly for fainting in the office.’

‘You’re not the first, my dear,’ Muriel told her in a chirpy voice, ‘and you won’t be the last.’

Five minutes later Heather was propped up on the cream and wine and blue paisley-patterned velvet sofa in her aunt’s house with the deep-buttoned back and arms. She had two blue-tasselled cushions under her head and a fluffy eiderdown on top of her.

‘And you don’t need to worry about a thing, I’ll let th
em all know back at Seafreight that you’re safe and sound,’ Muriel said in her officious voice. Then, when Claire ran out to the kitchen to bring in some logs to brighten up the fire, the secretary glanced around her, taking in the expensive but discreet furnishings and the tastefu
l cream and beige walls, hung with a mixture of classic Glasgow and Edinburgh prints and several original watercolour and oil paintings. There was also a large framed photograph of what looked like a family standing at the front of a simple, white-washed farmhouse out in the country.

Muriel’s gaze flitted to the white marble fireplace, which had a coal fire burning in the grate, and then at the mahogany table at the window, with the large oriental vase filled with cream and orange lilies. To one side of the vase there was a silver-framed wedding photograph of Heather’s aunt and her older-looking husband and on the other side a small religious statue. On closer inspection, she recognised it as the Sacred Heart – a well-known Catholic symbol. Muriel Ferguson was Church of Scotland herself, and didn’t have any close friends of any other denomina­tion, but she did have an aunt in a nursing home in Paisley with a Catholic friend who had lots of these kind of statues.

Muriel was most impressed by Heather’s relatives living in such an elegant place and more than a little surprise
d. It was quite obvious from her respectful attitude that Heather came from a very decent hard-working family, and Muriel presumed from the things that she’d
heard the girl say about her mother sewing and the father being a school caretaker that they were fairly ordinary. But this particular strand of the family were not quite so ordinary. They were obviously of a different standing – they had to be to be living in this particular part of Glasgow.

She was amazed that Heather hadn’t let it be known that she was so well connected – Muriel certainly would have. She had learned the importance of status long ago. What was the point in keeping social advantages like this to yourself? People only treated you as they saw you, Muriel thought, so it was most important that they should know all the facts. Claire came back in carrying a basket of small logs. She sat it down at the side of the fire then, after giving the glowing coals a good poke, she proceeded to throw half a dozen logs into the middle of it.

‘I’ve turned the radiators up as well,’ she told Heather. ‘I don’t want you getting cold on top of everything else.’

‘It’s lovely and warm in here already,’ Heather said, thinking how luxurious it was to have central heating in your own house. Apart from small electric fires for emergencies, they only had coal fires back in their house and if you didn’t keep your eye on them in the winter, it was absolutely freezing.

Claire offered Muriel tea or coffee, but the secretary declined, saying she would love nothing better than to sit down and relax in such a lovely room, but unfortunately work and the taxi at the front door beckoned. Another time, she told Claire, when she wasn’t under pressure from work.