The Price of Love (3 page)

His face was like a grim mask, his hard, dark eyes staring straight ahead. The clerks whispered amongst themselves after he’d gone into his office and shut the door.

‘The boss looks as though he’s been up half the night.’

‘Yes, young Percy must be in a bad way.’

‘Do you think someone should ask him how his lad is this morning?’

‘Mr Carter would probably prefer it if you kept your heads down and got on with your work,’ Miss Yorke, who was Mr Carter’s secretary and also in charge of the general office, ordered. ‘If Mr Carter has anything at all to tell us about his son, then he will do it in his own good time,’ she added officiously.

A thin angular woman in her mid-forties, her thin mousy hair always in a tight roll in the nape of her neck, she had worked at Carter’s Cars since the day she left school and took a proprietary interest in guarding her boss’s privacy and well-being.

Lucy said nothing but the moment there was a lull on the switchboard she walked quickly down the room to Mr Carter’s office and tapped on the door.

‘Lucy Collins, whatever do you think you are doing?’ Miss Yorke demanded, staring over the top of her gold-rimmed glasses in stark disapproval.

Lucy ignored her. Her heart was thumping because she knew she had a nerve to approach Mr Carter without asking Miss Yorke for permission, so the moment she heard him say ‘Enter’, Lucy nipped inside and quickly closed the door behind her.

Mr Carter was seated at his massive mahogany desk concentrating on a ledger that was open in front of him. Lucy stood in front of his desk for such a long time waiting for him to look up that she wondered if he knew she was in the room.

When he did glance up, Mr Carter frowned heavily when he saw who it was standing there.

‘Well, Lucy Collins, what is it you want? I am extremely busy.’

‘I wanted to ask you how Percy was,’ Lucy stuttered, the colour rushing to her face.

‘Very badly burned and if I find out who it was who pushed him on to that bonfire, I will make sure that they are severely punished. You are quite sure that your brother wasn’t one of them?’

‘No, Sam most certainly wasn’t,’ Lucy said heatedly. ‘Sam was the one who pulled him off the bonfire, and his hands are now so badly burned that he isn’t able to come to work today.’

For several minutes Mr Carter said nothing as he studied her angry face.

‘Did Robert Tanner have anything to do with what happened?’ he asked.

‘Only in so far as he helped Sam to lay Percy down on the ground and then went with them in the ambulance to the hospital.’

‘You were there as well,’ Mr Carter said tetchily. ‘I suppose it could have been you who pushed Percy.’ His sharp dark eyes studied her face as he waited for her to reply.

‘You know quite well that I wouldn’t do anything like that,’ Lucy said flatly. ‘None of us know how Percy fell on to the bonfire. He wasn’t even supposed to be that close to it. Robert was in charge of the fireworks and Sam was making sure that all the younger kids kept well back so that no one would be hurt.’

‘Well, he didn’t do a very good job, did he, or Percy wouldn’t have ended up getting half burned to death,’ Mr Carter snapped. ‘He’s quite badly blistered, especially his forehead and the sides of his face, that it’s a mercy he hasn’t been disfigured for life.’

‘I’m very sorry to hear that, Mr Carter. I can well imagine how much discomfort Percy must be in because Sam is in terrible pain with his hands.’

‘A mere detail compared to what my son is suffering,’ Mr Carter stated bitterly.

Lucy bit her lip and remained silent. She could see that Mr Carter was very upset and she was aware that anything she did say he would manage to turn round so that she was the one in the wrong.

‘You’d better get back to the switchboard,’ he said dismissively. ‘Even if your brother isn’t fit to work I trust you are.’

‘Yes, Mr Carter.’

Lucy felt angry and humiliated as she made her way back to her seat. She could feel all eyes were on her as she walked through the general office and she knew Miss Yorke was waiting for an explanation but she was too choked to speak.

Once she was sitting down with her headphones on she tried to shut out the rest of the world as she dealt almost mechanically with the incoming and outgoing calls.

Half an hour later, when she put through a call from Mr Carter to Mr Fitzpatrick, who was in charge of the apprentice mechanics, she deliberately listened in and her heart sank as she heard Mr Carter tell him to send Robert Tanner to his office right away.

Robert was in Mr Carter’s office for well over twenty minutes and to Lucy it seemed to be an interminable time. When he emerged he was white faced and looked extremely upset. Lucy longed to know what had been said but it was impossible to ask him at that moment.

As she watched Robert stride out of the office, his head held high, she knew she would have to contain her curiosity until they finished work at midday.

He was still looking very perturbed when she arrived at their usual meeting place about a hundred yards away from the showroom. As he fell into step alongside her he said nothing but as she slipped her hand into his he gave it a companionable squeeze, and when she looked up at him he returned her smile.

Even so she knew something was wrong and was impatient for him to tell her all that had gone on. She understood that he didn’t want to do so until they were away from all the other apprentices and clerks who had left Carter’s Cars at the same time and who were still within earshot.

‘How was Sam this morning?’ he asked.

‘He wanted to come in to work but Mam persuaded him he’d be better off at home. He agreed with her after he banged one of his hands as he was coming through the door.’

‘You told Mr Carter about it?’

‘Yes, but he said it was nothing to what Percy was suffering. He said Percy was in considerable pain because he was so badly blistered.’

‘He’d probably have been burned to a cinder if Sam hadn’t acted so quickly,’ Robert pointed out. ‘What gets me so mad is that instead of being grateful for what we did, Mr Carter more or less accused Sam of pushing Percy on to the fire.’

‘Or you! He asked me if you’d done it and when I said no, he had the nerve to ask if it was me,’ Lucy added with a mirthless laugh.

‘When he started accusing me I nearly told him that if his son wasn’t such a stupid bugger then he wouldn’t have been so close to the fire in the first place,’ Robert muttered.

‘I don’t suppose we’ll ever know why he was that close, not unless he tells us and, by the sound of things, he’s not well enough to do that at the moment.’

‘Even when he is feeling better he’s hardly likely to admit that he was in the wrong because he knows how mad that would make his old man,’ Robert said gloomily.

In this Robert was wrong.

Percy had always been something of a loner. When he’d first started school the other children had teased him and called him ‘four-eyes’ because he wore glasses and was afraid to join in any of the rougher games for fear of breaking them. Sam and Robert had befriended him. When he was about twelve and his father paid for him to attend a private school they still considered him a friend and let him go around with them at the weekends.

Although she had been Sam’s girlfriend since their schooldays, Patsy, with her long blonde hair, hour-glass figure and wide smile that made heads turn, was giggly and a born flirt and often led Percy on when they all went out together, even though she confided in Lucy that he was pretty dumb.

Nevertheless, it was Lucy whom Percy appeared to be attracted to, not Patsy. The two girls were the exact opposite of each other. Lucy was quiet and sensible, very slim with dark hair and eyes and a shy smile. Even though she made it quite clear that she wasn’t interested in him other than as a friend, it had been because he wanted to be in Lucy’s company that Percy had come to the bonfire night in Priory Terrace.

Patsy and Lucy had been working at Carter’s Cars more or less the same length of time. Patsy’s father, though, had paid for her to have shorthand and typing lessons so as well as occasionally helping out on the switchboard whenever they were short-staffed, Patsy also worked directly under Miss Yorke. Occasionally, when Miss Yorke was away, Patsy even acted as secretary to Mr Carter.

As soon as Percy realised that his father was blaming Sam and Robert for his accident he explained to his father that what had happened was his own fault.

‘I wanted to see what fireworks Robert had in the box and when I bent down to look at them my glasses came off and as I reached out to pick them up, I tripped over something lying on the ground and I fell forward on to the fire.’

It was a couple of days, though, before he told his father this and in the meantime Robert and Sam were regarded as the young villains responsible for the terrible accident by most of the staff at Carter’s Cars. Some people even went as far as to say that Sam deserved to suffer and that his badly burned hands were his punishment.

Once the true events came out into the open, then everyone was full of praise as well as sympathy for Sam and even Mr Carter said how brave he’d been.

Although Sam was fit enough to be back at work the following week, he wasn’t able to carry out his duties as an apprentice mechanic in the workshop. Instead, he was filling in his time running errands for Mr Fitzpatrick the engineering foreman and doing odd jobs around the car showroom that didn’t require any practical skills.

‘I might just as well stay home,’ he complained when his father commented about it one evening.

‘You make the best of it, son,’ his father advised. ‘Seeing that you’re not fit to do your job, Mr Carter could have stood you off with no pay, remember. As it is, he’s paying your wages in full even though you’ve had two days off this week to go to the hospital to have your dressings changed, so think yourself lucky.’

‘He’s probably only doing that because he feels guilty about accusing me now that he knows it was Percy’s own fault.’

‘Well, keep quiet about it; you can’t expect him to admit he was mistaken, now can you? As it is, he’s been saying how brave you were so that’s an accolade in itself.’

‘He should admit he was wrong to blame me for doing such a stupid thing,’ Sam argued.

‘Robert was accused as well as you and he’s not had Mr Carter praising him or saying how brave he is,’ Lucy chipped in.

‘That’s enough,’ Mr Collins said firmly. ‘Mr Carter is a good boss and it’s only natural that he was extremely upset that such an accident should happen to his son. Let’s hope the lad is better soon and out of hospital and that things get back to normal. Have they told you how long it will be before your bandages are off, Sam?’

‘Probably sometime next week,’ Sam mumbled. ‘Mind you, they also said that it might be a bit longer before the new skin is strong enough to stand up to oil and grease. I hate having to be the errand boy around the place. I only hope that I’ll be able to catch up with the other apprentices after all this time.’

‘Of course you will, it’s only a matter of a few weeks,’ Lucy assured him. ‘All you need to do is ask Robert and he will tell you about anything you’ve missed.’

‘I was wondering if I ought to go and see Percy,’ Sam commented thoughtfully.

‘Whatever for?’ Lucy asked in surprise.

‘To see how he is and to thank him for owning up that the accident was his own fault. I did ask Patsy to tell him but she said she forgot to do so.’

‘How could Patsy tell him? Percy hasn’t been into the office since the accident.’

‘She’s been visiting him in hospital. I would have thought you knew.’

‘No.’ Lucy frowned. ‘Patsy’s never said a word to me about it. How strange.’

‘I think she said that Mr Carter asked her to do so to try and cheer Percy up because he is so depressed about everything.’

‘Well, she’s kept very quiet about it and that’s not like Patsy. Usually she would be boasting about it,’ Lucy observed dryly.

A week later when Mr Carter summoned her to his office, Lucy wondered what was wrong and whether it had anything to do with the fact that Sam was still not able to resume his full duties as an apprentice mechanic.

It can’t be that, she told herself as she took off her head phones and checked in the little mirror in her handbag to make sure that her hair was tidy. He wouldn’t talk to me about it, he’d see Sam himself.

‘It will be at least another two weeks before Percy is allowed out of hospital,’ Mr Carter told Lucy when she reported to his office a few minutes later. ‘He has asked if you will go and visit him, so you can leave an hour earlier this afternoon in order to do so.’

Lucy stared at him in surprise, wondering why she was being asked to do so. Knowing how Percy felt about her she wondered if she dared refuse.

As if reading her mind, Mr Carter said, ‘Percy has requested it. He seems to need to see someone his own age to cheer him up and he said there was something he wanted to talk to you about. I can’t allow both you and Patsy Warren to have time off, of course; she will have to take over the switchboard this afternoon so that you can leave early. She’ll probably welcome the break; she’s been in to see him every day since his accident.’

After she’d promised Mr Carter that she would go and see Percy that afternoon Lucy went back to her switchboard feeling very uneasy. She didn’t really want to go and see him because she knew he had a crush on her and she didn’t want to do anything that might encourage him in any way.

Since Mr Carter was telling her he wanted her to go and was giving her time off, she had no alternative but she didn’t think that Robert would be too happy when he heard about it and there was no way she could keep it from him.

She was also concerned about being late home because her mother would be wondering where she was. Without asking Miss Yorke for permission she put a call through to the showroom and asked Mr Fitzpatrick if she could speak to Sam so that she could tell him where she was going and her mother wouldn’t be worried when she didn’t arrive home at the usual time.

Lucy was shocked at how ill Percy looked. Without his glasses he looked quite different; not nearly so studious or owlish. His face was bandaged and there was a metal cage over the bed to support the bedclothes and keep them from touching his body.