A man came into reception. He did not look much like Fat Charlie. He was darker, and he was smiling as if he were amused by everything—deeply, dangerously amused.
“I’m Fat Charlie Nancy,” said the man.
Rosie walked over to Fat Charlie and gave him a peck on the cheek. He said, “Do I know you?” which was an odd thing to say, and then he said, “Of course I do. You’re Rosie. And you get more beautiful every day,” and he kissed her back, touching his lips to hers. Their lips only brushed, but Rosie’s heart began to beat like Binky Butterworth’s after a particularly juddery lift journey pressed up against a chorine.
“Lunch,” squeaked Rosie. “Passing. Thought maybe we could. Talk.”
“Yeah,” said the man who Rosie now thought of as Fat Charlie. “Lunch.”
He put a comfortable arm around Rosie. “Anywhere you want to go for lunch?”
“Oh,” she said. “Just. Wherever you want.” It was the way he smelled, she thought. Why had she never before noticed how much she liked the way he smelled?
“We’ll find somewhere,” he said. “Shall we take the stairs?”
“If it’s all the same to you,” she said, “I think I’d rather take the lift.”
She banged home the accordion door, and they rode down to street level slowly and shakily, pressed up against each other.
Rosie couldn’t remember the last time she had been so happy.
When they got out onto the street Rosie’s phone beeped to let her know she had missed a call. She ignored it.
They went into the first restaurant they came to. Until the previous month it had been a high-tech sushi restaurant, with a conveyor belt that ran around the room carrying small raw fishy nibbles priced according to plate color. The Japanese restaurant had gone out of business and had been instantly replaced, in the way of London restaurants, by a Hungarian restaurant, which had kept the conveyor belt as a high-tech addition to the world of Hungarian cuisine, which meant that rapidly cooling bowls of goulash, paprika dumplings, and pots of sour cream made their way in stately fashion around the room.
Rosie didn’t think it was going to catch on.
“Where were you last night?” she asked.
“I went out,” he said. “With my brother.”
“You’re an only child,” she said.
“I’m not. It turns out I’m half of a matched set.”
“Really? Is this more of your dad’s legacy?”
“Honey,” said the man she thought of as Fat Charlie, “you don’t know the half of it.”
“Well,” she said. “I hope he’ll be coming to the wedding.”
“I don’t believe he would miss it for the world.” He closed his hand around hers, and she nearly dropped her goulash spoon. “What are you doing for the rest of the afternoon?”
“Not much. Things are practically dead back at the office right now. Couple of fund-raising phone calls to make, but they can wait. Is there. Um. Were you. Um. Why?”
“It’s such a beautiful day. Do you want to go for a walk?”
“That,” said Rosie, “would be quite lovely.”
They wandered down to the Embankment and began to walk along the northern back of the Thames, a slow, hand-in-hand amble, talking about nothing much in particular.
“What about your work?” asked Rosie, when they stopped to buy an ice cream.
“Oh,” he said. “They won’t mind. They probably won’t even notice that I’m not there.”
FAT CHARLIE RAN UP THE STAIRS TO THE GRAHAME COATS Agency. He always took the stairs. It was healthier, for a start, and it meant he would never again have to worry about finding himself wedged into the lift with someone else, too close to pretend they weren’t there.
He walked into reception, panting slightly. “Has Rosie been in, Annie?”
“Did you lose her?” said the receptionist.
He walked back to his office. His desk was peculiarly tidy. The clutter of undealt-with correspondence was gone. There was a yellow Post-it note on his computer screen, with “See me. GC” on it.
He knocked on Grahame Coats’s office door. This time a voice said, “Yes?”
“It’s me,” he said.
“Yes,” said Grahame Coats. “Come ye in, Master Nancy. Pull up a pew. I’ve been giving our conversation of this morning a great deal of thought. And it seems to me that I have misjudged you. You have been working here, for, how long…?”
“Nearly two years.”
“You have been working long and hard. And now your father’s sad passing….”
“I didn’t really know him.”
“Ah. Brave soul, Nancy. Given that it is currently the fallow season, how would you react to an offer of a couple of weeks off? With, I hardly need to add, full pay?”
“Full pay?” said Fat Charlie.
“Full pay, but, yes, I see your point. Spending money. I’m sure you could do with a little spending money, couldn’t you?”
Fat Charlie tried to work out what universe he was in. “Am I being fired?”
Grahame Coats laughed then, like a weasel with a sharp bone stuck in its throat. “Absatively not. Quite the reverse. In fact I believe,” he said, “that we now understand each other perfectly. Your job is safe and sound. Safe as houses. As long as you remain the model of circumspection and discretion you have been so far.”
“How safe are houses?” asked Fat Charlie.
“Extremely safe.”
“It’s just that I read somewhere that most accidents occur in the home.”
“Then,” said Grahame Coats, “I think it vitally important that you are encouraged to return to your own house with all celerity.” He handed Fat Charlie a piece of rectangular paper. “Here,” he said. “A small thank-you for two years of devoted service to the Grahame Coats Agency.” Then, because it was what he always said when he gave people money, “Don’t spend it all at once.”
Fat Charlie looked at the piece of paper. It was a check. “Two thousand pounds. Gosh. I mean, I won’t.”
Grahame Coats smiled at Fat Charlie. If there was triumph in that smile, Fat Charlie was too puzzled, too shaken, too bemused to see it.
“Go well,” said Grahame Coats.
Fat Charlie went back to his office.
Grahame Coats leaned around the door, casually, like a mongoose leaning idly against a snake-den. “An idle question. If, while you are off enjoying yourself and relaxing—a course of action I cannot press upon you strongly enough—if, during this time, I should need to access your files, could you let me know your password?”
“I think your password should get you anywhere in the system,” said Fat Charlie.
“Without doubt it will,” agreed Grahame Coats, blithely. “But just in case. You know computers, after all.”
“It’s mermaid,” said Fat Charlie. “M-E-R-M-A-I-D.”
“Excellent,” said Grahame Coats. “Excellent.” He didn’t rub his hands together, but he might as well have done.
Fat Charlie walked down the stairs with a check for two thousand pounds in his pocket, wondering how he could have so misjudged Grahame Coats for the last two years.