Read Online The High Flyer by Susan Howatch - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Susan Howatch
Tags: Fiction
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spouting nutterguff. When Tucker the Temp buzzed me with the bad news I wanted to shatter my oak desk with a karate chop.
“Excuse me, Ms. Graham,” he said over the intercom, “but there’s a call for you from a Mrs. Sophie Betz. I remembered you said Betz was your married name so I figured this could be someone you might want to talk to, but I did say to her that I thought you’d just left for a meeting, so—”
“Terminate her,” I said, and severed the connection.
VIII
I sat there, examining the fingernail I had broken by clenching my fists too hard, and thought idly how wonderful it would be to have Tucker as a permanent personal assistant, almost a pseudo-spouse, a male equivalent of Kim’s doting long-time PA Mary Waters who had followed him to Graf-Rosen just as Jacqui had followed me to Curtis, Towers. But could I really trust a heterosexual male not to make a sex-mess if he were put in the position of being my chief pamperer, crisis-fixer, gofer and hitman? Probably not. Yet it was becoming increasingly tempting to massage Jacqui out of my life and try.
I hit the intercom. “Hey, Tucker! Get in here.”
He was planted on the carpet in front of me in less than ten seconds, white shirt glistening, black shoes gleaming, terminally dull tie toning with his irreproachable charcoal-grey suit. The office serf as male slave, obedient to his lady’s every whim—this glorious pipe-dream of every stressed-out female high flyer was now miraculously incarnate in my office. At least something in my life was currently going right.
In a voice mild enough to signal my appreciation I said: “Thank you for handling that call. Mrs. Sophie Betz is my husband’s ex-wife and she’s been harassing me for some time. If she calls again you can say straight away that I’m not available.”
“Right.” He thought for a moment. “Is she likely to try to storm your office?”
I respected him for having the intelligence to ask this horrible but necessary question. “Probably not,” I said. “I suspect she’d be reluctant to make such a public exhibition of herself, but on the other hand if she’s nuts anything’s possible.”
“Maybe I should know what she looks like so that I can repel any invasion.”
“Well, I’ve never met the woman, but I understand she’s fat, fiftyish and frumpish with tightly waved grey hair.”
“In that case she’ll be easy to spot once she crosses the threshold of Curtis, Towers.”
We exchanged poker-faced looks but I knew at once that we were both silently making the same observation. The dinosaurs at Curtis, Towers, unfettered by laws forbidding age discrimination, tended to pressure any female into resigning at the first sign of a varicose vein. No wonder pantsuits were becoming so fashionable.
“Anything else, ma’am?”
“No. Wait a moment—yes. Could you get Mrs. Lake of Blue Lake Catering on the phone? She’s booked to do a dinner-party for me on Friday night and as it’s now Wednesday afternoon I think it’s time I made sure she’s not planning to serve mad cow.”
He vanished.
By this time Tucker had woven himself seamlessly into his new environment and was proving to be an object of considerable interest to the fluffettes. Later I was to overhear him being discussed passionately in the ladies’ loo when an argument broke out about whether his hair should be classified as chestnut brown or darkest red. The freckles visible across the bridge of his nose favoured the darkest-red party, but this faint spattering of pigment was reckoned by the chestnut-brown crowd not to indicate the presence of the red-hair gene unless his forearms were similarly mottled. Speculation then took place about how Tucker could be persuaded to expose his forearms, and Shana, the office shag-queen, was driven to declare rashly that she would discover the colour of his pubic hair, but pride went before a fall and Tucker remained chastely veiled in his white shirts and dark suits. I
“Excuse me, Ms. Graham,” he said over the intercom, “but there’s a call for you from a Mrs. Sophie Betz. I remembered you said Betz was your married name so I figured this could be someone you might want to talk to, but I did say to her that I thought you’d just left for a meeting, so—”
“Terminate her,” I said, and severed the connection.
VIII
I sat there, examining the fingernail I had broken by clenching my fists too hard, and thought idly how wonderful it would be to have Tucker as a permanent personal assistant, almost a pseudo-spouse, a male equivalent of Kim’s doting long-time PA Mary Waters who had followed him to Graf-Rosen just as Jacqui had followed me to Curtis, Towers. But could I really trust a heterosexual male not to make a sex-mess if he were put in the position of being my chief pamperer, crisis-fixer, gofer and hitman? Probably not. Yet it was becoming increasingly tempting to massage Jacqui out of my life and try.
I hit the intercom. “Hey, Tucker! Get in here.”
He was planted on the carpet in front of me in less than ten seconds, white shirt glistening, black shoes gleaming, terminally dull tie toning with his irreproachable charcoal-grey suit. The office serf as male slave, obedient to his lady’s every whim—this glorious pipe-dream of every stressed-out female high flyer was now miraculously incarnate in my office. At least something in my life was currently going right.
In a voice mild enough to signal my appreciation I said: “Thank you for handling that call. Mrs. Sophie Betz is my husband’s ex-wife and she’s been harassing me for some time. If she calls again you can say straight away that I’m not available.”
“Right.” He thought for a moment. “Is she likely to try to storm your office?”
I respected him for having the intelligence to ask this horrible but necessary question. “Probably not,” I said. “I suspect she’d be reluctant to make such a public exhibition of herself, but on the other hand if she’s nuts anything’s possible.”
“Maybe I should know what she looks like so that I can repel any invasion.”
“Well, I’ve never met the woman, but I understand she’s fat, fiftyish and frumpish with tightly waved grey hair.”
“In that case she’ll be easy to spot once she crosses the threshold of Curtis, Towers.”
We exchanged poker-faced looks but I knew at once that we were both silently making the same observation. The dinosaurs at Curtis, Towers, unfettered by laws forbidding age discrimination, tended to pressure any female into resigning at the first sign of a varicose vein. No wonder pantsuits were becoming so fashionable.
“Anything else, ma’am?”
“No. Wait a moment—yes. Could you get Mrs. Lake of Blue Lake Catering on the phone? She’s booked to do a dinner-party for me on Friday night and as it’s now Wednesday afternoon I think it’s time I made sure she’s not planning to serve mad cow.”
He vanished.
By this time Tucker had woven himself seamlessly into his new environment and was proving to be an object of considerable interest to the fluffettes. Later I was to overhear him being discussed passionately in the ladies’ loo when an argument broke out about whether his hair should be classified as chestnut brown or darkest red. The freckles visible across the bridge of his nose favoured the darkest-red party, but this faint spattering of pigment was reckoned by the chestnut-brown crowd not to indicate the presence of the red-hair gene unless his forearms were similarly mottled. Speculation then took place about how Tucker could be persuaded to expose his forearms, and Shana, the office shag-queen, was driven to declare rashly that she would discover the colour of his pubic hair, but pride went before a fall and Tucker remained chastely veiled in his white shirts and dark suits. I
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