Bittersweet Love - Cathy Williams [49]
‘I will.’
She walked out of the room quickly, and then out of the office, stopping on her way down to say goodbye to all of the people she had come to know over the years. Heaven only knew what they were thinking. No doubt there would be the usual speculative gossip as soon as she left the building.
It was only when she was outside that it hit her. The void of knowing that she would never see Kane Marshall again. It was almost as if the threads that had been holding her life together had suddenly been taken away, and had left her floundering and unsure. What was she going to do next? Oh, she would find a job, but the vastness of the space which Kane’s absence from her life created would be infinitely more difficult to fill.
She spent the afternoon on the telephone and realised very quickly that no job was going to match her salary. The following day she took herself down to all of the agencies and busied herself with the time-consuming business of filling in forms.
By the end of the week, she had been to several interviews, but nothing compared to working with Kane. It was an effort to keep reminding herself that she would just have to accept that that part of her life was gone forever.
Eric seemed bewildered by her decision.
‘But I thought that you enjoyed it,’ he said, perplexed. ‘I mean, up to a fortnight ago you were putting yourself out to entertain his clients!’
‘Exactly.’
‘Exactly?’
‘I woke up one morning and decided that a change was as good as a rest’
‘So now you’re out of work.’
‘Something like that,’ Natalie admitted. She must have sounded more depressed than she wanted to because later that evening she found herself in a restaurant with him, and his sympathy was so tangible that she found herself cheering up quite a bit.
Over their second bottle of wine, she was laughing much more than she would have thought possible in her frame of mind, and by the third bottle Eric had succeeded in coming up with a magnificent idea.
‘What,’ he said loudly, ‘about going to work for one
of your clients? Our people——’ was that a hiccup?
‘—do it all the time. Leave the profession and work for a client.’ He gesticulated broadly. ‘All the time.’
Natalie had never thought of that, but why not? On the Monday, she phoned one of her clients who had jokingly promised her a job if she should ever need one, and by Tuesday she was employed. She could have kissed Eric. Instead, she telephoned him and invited out to a meal.
‘Tonight,’ she said, ‘you name the place. After all, it was your idea.’
His voice was decidedly vague when he replied. ‘To-night’s a bit tricky, Natalie. What about tomorrow?’
‘I don’t know, Eric,’ she said, a bit deflated. ‘I’m not sure what time I’ll be back.’ They left it for some other, unspecified day, and Natalie promptly put it to the back of her mind.
Somehow, she thought a few days later, working for Tony Harding made her feel as though she had not lost touch completely with Kane. They were a small outfit, but an up-and-coming one, and her job involved doing quite a bit of nearly everything, from taking calls to dealing with customers. The money was meagre com-pared to what she had been getting at her old job, and the excitement of working for a leading company was absent, but in its place was the comfort of working for someone whom she had spoken to on the phone countless times, who showed her the ropes, and who left her to get on with it.
And, she had to admit, it was cheap on clothes. Because the office site was something along the lines of a warehouse, jeans were the order of the day. Her suits remained hanging in her wardrobe, reminders of other times. She could associate each and every one with Kane, some occasion, some incident. In the end she removed them to the wardrobe in the spare room simply so that they would no longer confront her on a daily basis.
She was updating their system of logging invoices, one of the projects which she had set herself from early on because the disorder