Working Wonders (31 page)

The receptionist stared at them blankly. Arthur could feel sweat breaking out on his forehead. Oh, God.

‘You are all required upstairs,’ said the receptionist. Then she closed her mouth and walked out.

At first there was silence, as people tried to take in what she’d just said. Then pandemonium, as everyone tried to scramble to the door to follow her.

‘If they’re going to make us work together, I’m going to get Sandwiches to bite off the bollocks off every single one of you,’ said Sven loudly to Ross’s team as they left the room.

The room looked exactly as they’d left it. Again, the three judges sat at the far end of the table, with only d’Aragon rising to greet them. He smiled an unpleasantly tight smile, like a crocodile.

‘Welcome back,’ he said.

Arthur looked at Ross, who was looking at him. Then he moved his glance to Gwyneth, who looked away.

D’Aragon briefly looked at his notes. ‘We have considered all of the proposals,’ he said. ‘And we have explained to the other teams why we will not be proceeding with their applications.’

They weren’t going to appoint two cities, were they? No, that would be impossible – far too expensive. It was much more likely they were going to have to share – some kind of Midlands/South festival thing. Oh, boy, that was going to be terrible. How was he going to work with that man?

He realized d’Aragon was talking again.

‘We were impressed by both of your … very different applications. After much discussion –’ He paused. Neither of the other two judges did as much as look up. ‘We have decided that we need to see a bit more before we choose between you.’

Arthur breathed a huge sigh of relief inside. At least they hadn’t lost outright. Deep down he had been really worried that this was a particularly cruel way of awarding the contract to Ross whilst they had to watch. On the other hand, he had also hoped that it might have been going their way … and now there were more hoops to jump through.

‘We’ve decided to see – we need to see what you’re made of. This is a huge contract, and it’s worth millions of pounds to your cities. We need to know it’s in safe hands.’

Arthur blinked, trying to get a grip on what was coming.

‘We’re sending you both off on a management training exercise. In Wales. You’ll both have an objective, and you’ll be playing against each other. It’ll be specially designed to be mentally and physically tough, and at the end of it we’ll know what kind of teams we’re dealing with. And that will decide it.’

The room was quiet as both sides digested this. Then Ross thumped Dave’s massive arm. ‘Great!’ he said.

‘Absolutely,’ said Arthur stoutly. ‘That sounds like a great idea.’

‘Will there be running?’ said Sven.

‘There will be running, finding your own food and shelter, solving problems, and you’ll have to fight each other … with paintballs, of course.’

‘Shouldn’t be a problem,’ said Ross levelly.

‘Absolutely not,’ said Arthur.

Sven and Sandwiches gulped.

‘Excellent. Would your two leaders like to shake on it?’

Arthur put his hand out. Ross grasped it, reluctantly.

‘Let battle be joined,’ said d’Aragon, mildly.

Arthur took a deep breath. It was now or never. Lynne, he thought ruefully, would be proud of him. He walked up to Gwyneth.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, off the bat.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Gwyneth. Arthur was vividly reminded of the tight ice queen who’d first walked into his office.

They looked at each other.

‘Is that all?’ said Gwyneth. She gathered up some files and prepared to leave the room.

‘You mean so much to me, I can’t tell you.’

She looked up, her heart beating unsteadily. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Really?’

Arthur took another deep breath. ‘I’m in love with you, Gwyneth. I love you. I do.’

Gwyneth froze. Even though she’d thought about it – a lot – she hadn’t been expecting this. This was … this was more than anything.

‘You what?’

‘I know. It’s a lot.’

‘It’s a
lot
? You’ve gone from nothing to a million miles an hour!’

‘Yeah …’

‘I mean, couldn’t you have started with a flirtatious text message and worked your way up?’

Arthur couldn’t think of anything else to do but stare at her with a mute appeal. Her shock was making her sarcastic, and she was well aware of this.

‘I mean, Christ, Arthur – what have you been doing?’

‘But … I didn’t want to make it really horribly obvious … and I didn’t know and … Oh, God.’

‘Oh, God,’ repeated Gwyneth.

‘Please,’ said Arthur. ‘I mean, I thought it was obvious.’

‘You assumed,’ said Gwyneth. ‘And now I don’t know what to think.’

‘
Please
,’ said Arthur. ‘Come to Wales. That’ll be great. We’ll get a chance to be together. It’ll be really good …’

‘I’m not sure I should be under canvas with you right at the moment,’ said Gwyneth.

Arthur looked at her, his face creased with disappointment. ‘But the team needs you … I need you …’

Gwyneth backed out of the room. ‘Yes … yeah … let me …’

Words failing her, she fled.

Arthur stared after her. Maybe, it occurred to him, he didn’t really understand women.

Mixing a man deep in thought with a dirty Landrover and several hours’ driving in the pitch dark into completely unknown territory was, Marcus thought, a terrible idea, as the vehicle hit another seemingly enormous puddle in the road and bounced the occupants of the back seat up and down. Sandwiches yelped under his yellow mackintosh.

‘
How
,’ said Marcus, ‘is that dog going to get up Welsh mountains? He’s got legs the size of a chicken’s.’

‘Just like the rest of us,’ said Sven. ‘Very, very slowly.’

Arthur was clenched over the wheel in front, cursing the driving rain that was throwing itself against the windscreen. It might have been February, but the weather showed no sign of granting them any mercy at all. He was struggling to remember what it was to have a sunny day.

‘Bugger it!’ he shouted into the windscreen. ‘It’s all mud. I can’t see a damn thing.’

They had graduated from the motorway to A roads, and now they were trying to make their way along various strands of mud in the pouring rain through Wales, where none of them had ever been – except Gwyneth of course, and she wasn’t there. She’d taken the day off, for God’s sake. She’d told him she’d ring to say whether she was coming, but she never did. And then when it had been time to go, Rafe had disappeared on another of his mysterious errands, shouting that he’d follow them in his own car later on.

They’d left the office at five – this was to be a weekend event and it was important, the very strict letter that had arrived had said, that they spent a typical week at work beforehand, as the programme would ‘push their mental and physical strength to the limit’.

Arthur fully suspected Ross’s gang would have been at a health farm all week. He was feeling perilously close to his emotional limit as it was, but he gritted his teeth and pushed his face even closer to the windscreen, splashing the car through the great holes in the road and trying not to knock over any sheep.

The mood in the back of the Landrover wasn’t much more cheerful, as everyone thought about what lay before them. Only Marcus, it had turned out, took any regular exercise whatsoever, and Arthur wasn’t convinced that trainspotting counted as exercise anyway. Rafe was fit of course, but Rafe was mysteriously not with them, and without his jolly demeanor and optimistic attitude, the rest of them were feeling very flat and full of trepidation about whatever lay ahead. Arthur, in particular, realized how much he’d come to rely on Rafe to buoy up his own moods. The brochure which had arrived, and been passed around many times, was fairly clear about what was required – ‘EXCELLENCE in team building and FIRMNESS in its goals’ – without exactly saying what was about to happen to them. There were lots of pictures of stern-jawed men climbing hills and achieving things. They were all worried about it.

Cathy had been particularly downcast. Even now, she was sitting mute in the van with a pair of trainers on. Arthur hoped these weren’t the closest thing she had to hiking boots.

‘CHALLENGE your DEEPEST FEARS and GROW to a higher PLANE!’ the brochure had said. It made it appear suspiciously like a cult.

‘By doing what?’ Sven had said worriedly. ‘I don’t like vegetables very much. Do you think that will come up?’

‘Could be almost anything,’ said Marcus, studying the brochure. ‘This thing is a masterpiece of doublespeak. Now I must get back to re-tabulating the commercial projection analysis.’

‘It says, “Bring lots of clothes you don’t mind getting wet,”’ said Sven unhappily. ‘I’ve just bought Sandwiches that duffel coat.’

‘Yeah, well, it makes him look like Paddington Bear with long ears,’ said Gwyneth who was passing. ‘It’s not a good look. You should have stuck with the Burberry.’

‘Every poodle, basset and badger has
Burberry
,’ Sven had said. He himself was wearing an ACDC t-shirt, a Hawaiian shirt and some suspiciously out of season shorts.

‘Marcus! Map read!’ shouted Arthur now.

‘I told you before,’ said Marcus. ‘You need a fixed position to map read from. If you’ve no idea where you are, you can’t work out how to get somewhere else.’

Arthur cursed again and drew up at a pub. Then he looked at the mutinous eyes of his colleagues and drew away again, to a howl of disappointment.

‘No!’ he said. ‘We stop there and we will never leave. Listen, I think this is shit as much as the next man, but we’re doing it, and not only are we doing it, we’re going to win.’

‘Yur …’ said the back seat.

‘So, we’re going to have to get a positive mental attitude about this.’

‘He’s been reading the brochure again,’ said Sven.

‘We’ve got to get there by ten o’clock and it’s … well, it’s quarter past ten, so this is not going well, okay? We
have
to win this.’

‘If only we could win it by watching
Friends
and eating pizza,’ said Cathy dreamily. ‘I’d be great at it.’

It had been an unusually blue and unclouded day for February. As usual, Gwyneth was hoping that the river might help her. Her mind was in tumult. After all, she’d thought they were just starting out, or worse, that it was just a brief affair … Memories of other brief office affairs she’d had came back to her, nastily, and she squirmed.

But suddenly, everything had jumped forward. And now … how did she feel? A smile played about her lips as she remembered the way he had come out with it … how he looked asleep … the trip to Denmark … and if she wanted to go to Wales, it was probably too late …

Suddenly, someone loomed up ahead of her. She couldn’t see him as the sun came dazzling through the leaves.

‘Hey hey!’ he shouted.

Gwyneth put her hands over her eyes. ‘Yes?’

‘It’s me,’ said Rafe, grinning like a naughty schoolboy.

‘You normally run around parks shouting “hey hey”?’ said Gwyneth incredulously.

‘Nope, only today! What are you up to?’

‘Now?’

‘Yes.’

Gwyneth shrugged. ‘Having life debates with myself, I suppose.’

‘Forget that,’ said Rafe. ‘You have to come with me. Just for a minute. I’ve got something you’ll really like to see, I promise.’

‘Um …’

‘Look, I’m on my way and I see you. It’s fate. You have to come. Like – hey hey!’

‘That great, huh?’

‘Hey hey!’

Gwyneth followed him out over the common, shaking her head and smiling. His enthusiasm was contagious.

They headed down a maze of backstreets into rundown areas along the railway track that Gwyneth had never seen before.

‘Where
are
we going?’

They ended up in some kind of goods yard filled with tumbledown sheds.

‘Spooky, isn’t it?’ said Rafe.

‘I’ll say. What the hell are we doing here?’

‘Follow me,’ he said, delving into his pocket and taking out a strong torch.

‘Oh my God!’ said Gwyneth. ‘It’s … it’s FABULOUS!’

‘I know,’ said Rafe, his smile cracking open his face. ‘Sorry. I can’t be modest about this. Aren’t they fantastic?’

‘So this is where you’ve been sneaking off to all this time?’

‘No, sometimes I was sneaking off to build the cress maze.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ said Gwyneth.

‘But mostly this.’

‘Well, congratulations. You’ve done … I mean, are they going to work?’

Gwyneth had tentatively – and with some eye to her heels – followed Rafe into one of the warehouses. There, Rafe had lit some large oil lanterns and the light had fallen on what he’d been building.

‘They were just rotting away in here. Can you believe that?’

Three ancient shapes loomed out of the gloom. They were original trams, with the railings intact on the front and old advertisements for long-dead products visible on the sides. Except, as you looked at them closely, you could see that the wood had been highly polished, and they had recently been painted a rich dark hunting green. The brass bell at each tram’s back had been buffed up and the dull metal shone. They even smelled new – of varnish and leather.