Jill Mansell: Sheer Mischief

‘Hmm. Well, we’re pretty busy here at the moment. Maybe I could offer her a couple of evenings a week behind the bar.’

‘She wouldn’t do it,’ said Janey hurriedly. ‘Her feet, they’d ache .

Bruno shrugged, dismissing the suggestion. ‘Just a thought. But you’ll have to bring her down here one evening, I’d like to meet her.’

Of course he would. And she could only too easily imagine Maxine’s reaction when she, in turn, met Bruno Parry-Brent. They were two of a very particular kind.

‘I will.’ Janey tried not to sound unhappy, evasive. She had no intention of introducing them but Maxine had a talent for seeking out ... well, talent, and Trezale wasn’t a large town. It would surely be only a matter of time before she discovered Bruno for herself.

‘Oh come on, cheer up.’ He took her hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze. ‘We all have our crosses to bear. Look at me, I have Nina!’

Janey tried not to laugh. He really was disgraceful.

‘And where would you be without her?’ she countered. Bruno and Nina made an odd couple, certainly, but after ten years together they still seemed happy enough in their own way. It wasn’t something Bruno had ever discussed in detail but, as far as Janey could figure out, Nina didn’t ask any questions and in return he was discreet. Indeed, although he was such a notorious flirt, she didn’t even know whether he actually had affairs.

‘Where would I be without Nina?’ he repeated, teasing her. ‘Probably in big trouble, because she’d have a contract out on me.’

Janey burst out laughing. Nina was the most placid woman she’d ever met. She doubted whether Nina could even summon the energy to read a contract, let alone organise taking one out.

‘You’d be lost without her,’ she told him in mock-severe tones. Rising to her feet, she smoothed her pink skirt over her hips. ‘I’d better be getting back to the shop. Thanks for the coffee.’

Bruno grinned, unrepentant. ‘Thanks for the pep talk. If you bring your sister down here maybe I’ll be able to return the favour.’

‘Hmm,’ said Janey, renewing her vow to keep Maxine as far away from the restaurant as humanly possible. She could imagine what kind of favour he had in mind.

Maureen-from-Wimbledon wasn’t on the four-o’clock train.

Guy, who had cut short a session in the darkroom and driven hell for leather in order to reach the station in time, couldn’t believe it. If she’d missed the train at Paddington, she could have bloody well phoned and let him know, he thought furiously. And now what was he supposed to do, hang around on the platform and wait an hour for the next train to roll in?

But he hadn’t waited and the would-be nanny hadn’t phoned. By eight-thirty, when there was still no sign of her, he dialled the London number she had given him.

‘Oh dear,’ said Berenice, thankful that at least Ella, whom she had put to bed half an hour earlier, wasn’t there to witness his language.

Josh, who was used to it, wondered if this meant his prayers had actually been answered.

‘What is it, Dad?’

‘No wonder she was in such a hurry to come and live down here,’ Guy seethed, pouring himself a hefty Scotch and downing it in one go. ‘I’ve just spoken to her mother. The lying, conniving bitch was arrested this morning and charged with credit-card-fraud! This is all I bloody need ...’

‘Does that mean she isn’t going to be our nanny?’ said Josh, just to make absolutely sure.

Guy raised his eyes to heaven. ‘I knew that expensive private education of yours would come in useful one day. Yes Josh, it means she isn’t going to be your nanny.’

Hooray, thought Josh. Aloud he said, ‘Oh. So what are we going to do?’

‘Only one thing for it.’ It was Wednesday night, Berenice was getting married on Saturday and he had to fly to Paris for a prestigious calendar shoot on Monday morning. ‘We cancel Berenice’s wedding.’

‘You’ll have to answer it,’ said Maxine, when the doorbell rang. She was wearing bright orange toe separators and the crimson nail polish on her splayed toes was still wet. ‘I look like a duck.’

‘You look like a duck,’ Guy Cassidy remarked when Janey showed him into the sitting room two minutes later. Maxine, sitting on the floor with her bare legs stretched out in front of her, carried on eating her Mars bar. ‘Just as well,’ she replied equably. ‘It means your insults roll off my back.’

Mystified by his unexpected appearance on her doorstep, Janey said, ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

‘Thanks.’ He smiled at her and lowered himself into an empty armchair. To Maxine, whose attention was fixed upon an old re-run of Inspector Morse, he said, ‘Haven’t you seen this one before? Lewis did it.’

Her gaze didn’t waver from the television screen. With thinly veiled sarcasm she countered,

‘Who’s lying now?’ Janey fled to the safety of the kitchen.

‘Go on then,’ said Maxine eventually, when she had finished the Mars bar and dropped the wrapper on to the coffee table. ‘Tell me why you’re here.’

There wasn’t much point in beating around the bush. Guy said, ‘The job. If you still want it, it’s yours.’

‘You’ve been stood up, then.’

He nodded.

‘Gosh,’ said Maxine, her expression innocent. ‘You must be desperate.’

His mouth twitched as he allowed her, her brief moment of triumph. ‘I am.’

‘And here am I, such an all-round bad influence ..

‘You might well be,’ he replied dryly, ‘but your sister put in a few good words on your behalf and for some bizarre reason my son has taken a liking to you.’

‘And you’re desperate,’ Maxine repeated for good measure, but this time he ignored the jibe.

‘So are you interested, or not?’

‘We-ll.’ Tilting her head to one side, she appeared to consider the offer. ‘We haven’t discussed terms, yet.’

‘We haven’t discussed your funny webbed feet either,’ he pointed out. ‘But live and let live is my motto.’

Janey had been eavesdropping like mad from the kitchen. Unable to endure the suspense a moment longer, she seized the mugs of tea and erupted back into the sitting room.

‘She’s interested,’ she declared, ignoring Maxine’s frantic signals and thrusting one of the mugs into Guy Cassidy’s hand. ‘She’ll take the job. When would you like her to start?’

Chapter 6

Guy Cassidy was twenty-three years old when he met Véronique Charpentier. It was the wettest, windiest day of the year and he was making his way home after a gruelling fourteen-hour shift in the photographic studios where his brief had been to make a temperamental forty-four-year-old actress look thirty again.

Now the traffic was almost at a standstill and his car was stuck behind a bus. All he could think of was getting back to his flat and sinking into a hot bath with a cold beer. In less than two hours he was supposed to be taking Amanda, his current girlfriend, to a party in Chelsea. It wasn’t a prospect that particularly appealed to him but she had insisted on going.

There was no room to overtake when the bus came to a shuddering halt and began to spill out passengers. Guy amused himself by watching them scurry like wind-blown ants across the pavement towards the relative shelter of the shop canopies lining the high street.

The last passenger to disembark, however, didn’t make it. As her long, white-blond hair whipped around her face she struggled to control her charcoal-grey umbrella. At the exact moment the umbrella flipped inside out, she stumbled against the kerb and crashed to the ground.

Her carrier bag of shopping spilled into the gutter. The inverted umbrella, carried by the wind, cartwheeled off into the distance and a wave of muddy water from the wheels of the now-departing bus cascaded over her crumpled body.