Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [77]
Katherine’s thoughts ran away with themselves as she saw a bright, happy future unfold ahead of her. She’d go and live in England with her dad. Who needed a husband or a boyfriend when you had a father? He’d put a different spin on her past as well as her future, and she’d never mess up again, because she’d have the guidance of a man.
She lay awake fantasizing about what he was like. She bet he had an allotment. Englishmen of a certain age had allotments. He’d grow rhubarb for her. She’d sit with him, just the two of them, while he tilled the soil, and she’d tell him about her life, and he wouldn’t say much but what he did say would be full of wisdom. Male wisdom.
Or he might be really lively and cheeky, with a Cockney accent and funny sayings. ‘Stroike a loight, Kaffrin, me old choina,’ making his living ducking and diving. Legal ducking and diving, mind. No funny business. One less-than-respectable pillar of the community was enough in any set of parents.
Or perhaps he’d be a bit of a toff. Call her ‘m’dear’, his terse delivery not hiding the warmth he felt for her. Maybe he had other children but didn’t really get on with them and needed someone to take over the family accountancy business, and she’d arrive at just the right moment.
In her head her father became a combination of Arthur Fowler, Dick Van Dyke and Rumpole of the Bailey.
She barely considered that Geoff Melody mightn’t be interested in her. Her need was so great that she couldn’t contemplate it not being reciprocated.
It took her a long time to write the letter. She’d learnt that men don’t like to be faced with naked need, so she couched her desire to meet Geoff Melody in casual, no-strings-attached terms. She knew he would fix her, but there was no need to scare him away by telling him.
I will ask you for nothing, was the subtext.
Ten days after she sent the letter, Katherine received an envelope with an English postmark. Her father had replied! From the stiffness of the expensive cream stationery it seemed that Geoff Melody was more Rumpole of the Bailey than Arthur Fowler.
But the letter wasn’t from her father. It was from the executor of his will, informing her that her father had died from lung cancer six months previously.
While the end of her love affair had felt like a bereavement, her bereavement felt like the end of a love affair.
27
In the morning Katherine was anxious to get to work, keen to discreetly inspect Joe to see if there were any signs that he’d been up all night shagging Angie. But by the time she arrived at Breen Helmsford, she’d calmed herself down. He’d really seemed to be besotted with her, and she wasn’t convinced that that had entirely evaporated. Besides, he had integrity and decency – not the type to screw someone he barely knew.
And she felt no need to ponder why, if he had that much integrity and decency, she wouldn’t go out with him.
All anxiety was gone by the time she breezed into the office. When she saw Joe leaning against the wall by the coffee-machine, she couldn’t help smiling at him. Until a closer look showed him to be unshaven, dishevelled and very weary. He looked lots more than a day older.
She swept her eyes over him and noticed, in nightmarish slow-motion, that his clothes were the same ones he’d had on the day before. Could she be imagining it? She forced herself to check again. Oh, God! Exactly the same suit. Same jacket that he’d taken off yesterday afternoon. Same shirt whose sleeves he’d rolled up. Same tie that he’d loosened. A sure sign he hadn’t gone home.
A stillness settled on her. Her blood felt like it had stopped flowing, as though the shock had brought it skidding to a halt.
He didn’t return her rapidly disappearing smile. His brown eyes, which usually twinkled with warmth and puppyish good humour when he saw her, remained cold. Grimly he nodded at her, chucked his polystyrene cup in the bin and turned