Italian Invader
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Jessica Steele
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CHAPTER ONE
ELYN gripped the telephone and waited anxiously while the hotel telephonist rang her mother and stepfather’s room.
‘I’m sorry,’ the telephonist came back on the line to inform her, ‘they’re not answering. Would you like to leave a message? I can have it sent to their room for their return.’
The woman’s tone was pleasant, and somehow Elyn managed to hold down her rising sense of panic. ‘My name is Elyn Talbot. Would you ask either of them to ring me, as a matter of some urgency, please,’ she requested, finding an equally pleasant tone.
She replaced the phone, owning that, although she had always thought herself level-headed and not given to panicking, she was on the verge of panicking now.
She glanced at the pages of figures she had just re-checked for the umpteenth time, and suddenly felt the need to clear her head. She knew, as she slipped the pages of figure-work into her desk drawer and locked it, that things could not be worse. So it was with a vain hope that perhaps matters would not look so terrifyingly black when she returned that she shrugged into her coat, and decided to take herself off for a walk.
First, though, the need to share the dreadfulness of her knowledge took her in the direction of the design department where her gifted stepbrother worked. Not that Guy would be able to help in any way, but it was such a frightening burden to carry alone.
Had Samuel Pillinger, her stepfather and owner of Pillinger Ceramics, been anywhere around she would at once have gone to him to report that it did not look as if they’d be able to pay the staff wages at the end of the month, let alone their suppliers. But he wasn’t around. Even after she had warned him, yet again, how bad things were, he had still carried out his promise to take her mother to London for a few days’ break.
Break! They were broke, Elyn thought humourlessly, and turned the handle of the design section door and went in. ‘Guy not around?’ she asked Hugh Burrell, a man she had no liking for, albeit that he was quite good at his job.
Hugh Burrell didn’t like her either, she knew that. He had taken a dislike to her ever since that day a couple of years ago when he’d asked her out and she’d declined. Stuck-up, he’d called her. But it wasn’t that she was stuck-up, but that, apart from the fact that there was something about the sly-eyed look of him she couldn’t take to, she made it a rule never to date anyone from work. She had done so once, only to discover afterwards that the man thought that entitled him to special privileges at work.
‘He’s at the dentist,’ Hugh Burrell answered, his foxy eyes making a meal of her long honey-blonde hair and trim figure.
‘Thanks,’ she murmured, and realising that she was so worried that she had forgotten Guy had said at breakfast that he’d a dental appointment this morning, Hugh Burrell’s stare was making her flesh creep, and she walked out.
Ten minutes later, having made it to the parkland side of Bovington, she slowed her pace and, despite its being a cold October day, she sank down on to one of the wooden benches scattered about—and felt not one whit better for her ten-minute walk.
Worried she fretted again and again on how, from the beginning of the year, she had tried to warn Sam Pillinger about exactly how bad things were getting. But, like his son, more artist than academic, he’d either not believed things were as desperate as she said, or had decided, like Mr Micawber, that something would turn up.
But nothing had turned up. Though, when Elyn had insisted on going through last month’s figures with him, she had thought she was finally beginning to get through. ‘As bad as that, eh!’ he had commented, chewing thoughtfully on his pipe. But, when Elyn had been hoping he might add something constructive about how they were going to survive should the rumours be true that one of their chief outlets was going bust, all she got was his opinion that the rumours were just scaremongering. To which he had added a few bitter comments on how he blamed any failing of his own business on the newcomer, Maximilian Zappelli.
In point of fact, Elyn recalled, Maximilian Zappelli had taken over the ailing firm of Gradburns in the next town of Pinwich about two years ago—and promptly started to make it profitable! Signor Zappelli already had an extremely prosperous business in marble and mosaics in Italy, so Elyn realised he must have deemed that to have a ceramics connection in England would be a sound business move. In the process of making Gradburns a going concern, however, he had taken quite a chunk of Pillingers’ trade and, with Pinwich not ten miles away from Bovington, quite a few of their highly specialised staff too.
That in itself, Elyn felt, was reason enough not to like him. After all, Pillingers had trained them—and he had poached them.
A strand of fairness gave her a nudge to suggest that, since Maximilian Zappelli spent more time in Italy than he did in England, it was probable his manager was the one who had poached some of their key workers.
Seated on her bench, she sank her hands into her pockets in an irritated gesture, her beautiful green eyes staring unseeingly in front of her. That still didn’t mean that she liked Maximilian Zappelli any better! Not that she’d ever met him—or wanted to! But she knew his type. He’d been in the papers again only the other day. For an Italian, said to be living for the most part in Italy, he certainly had his share of publicity in the British Press, she thought sourly.
He hadn’t been alone, she recalled without effort. But then he never was! As if the picture was still in front of her she again saw the tall, dark-haired, evening-suited mid-thirties male with an elegant and beautiful female on his arm. Naturally he’d be squiring some woman around, and naturally she’d be beautiful—and naturally, she’d be a different female from the one he’d hit the headlines with the last time.
Men like him—philanderer, Elyn had dubbed him—made her cross. The worst of it was that women fell for that sort of man in droves. She had no need to look further than her stepsister Loraine to know that.
Not that Loraine had ever met Maximilian Zappelli either, but Loraine seemed to have an inbuilt penchant for the Casanova type and lurched from one disastrous relationship to another.
Strangely though, Elyn mused, considering her mother had been through the same ghastly experience at the hands of a womaniser, she seemed to have little sympathy for her stepdaughter. Nor did Sam Pillinger seem to be able to cope with having his much indulged daughter weeping about the place. So it was left to Elyn to cope when Loraine wailed, ‘But I thought he loved me,’ and Elyn it was who soothed and sympathised—until Loraine was ready to pitch headlong into her next disaster. There was nothing Elyn could do but watch. But she knew the philandering type! And hated them! Never would she have any truck with a man of that sort. Her own father had been the same—all charm and no substance.
Elyn remembered her childhood as being a most bewildering time. She had been a quiet and sensitive child who loved both her parents, but who shrank into herself at the violence of their arguments. For either her parents were all in all to each other, or there would be raised voices with crockery flying. She remembered frequent other times seeing her mother distressed and alone when Jack Talbot would go off for weeks at a time—and recalled yet more rows, more tears and recriminations when, as always, he came back. Loving her father as she did, it had been painful to learn at an early age that life was much more peaceful when he was not at home.
She had been twelve years old when her father had again done a disappearing trick. It was the last time. Ann Talbot had divorced him, and Elyn, keeping her hurt to herself, had not seen him since.
Only much later had she learned of the many affairs her mother had forgiven him, of the many times she had believed in his protestations of love and how it would never happen again—until, after one affair too many, she had finally thrown in the towel.
Her mother had been working part-time then at Pillingers, the ceramic art manufacturers, and they had gone through an alarming period when her suspicion that maintenance due from her ex-husband would never materialise became fact. For an age they had gone through an absolutely dreadful and frightening time of scraping along to try and keep ahead of the bills, and never quite making it. They were still owing money when Ann Talbot managed to switch to a full-time vacancy at Pillingers, and she had continued to struggle to pay off their debts.
Things had started to look up, however, when some while later her mother introduced her to her employer, the widowed Samuel Pillinger, and shortly after that asked her how she’d feel about having him for a stepfather.
‘You’re going to marry him?’ Elyn had asked, wide-eyed, going on fifteen and romantic. ‘You’re in love with him?’
‘I’ve had love—you can keep it,’ her mother had replied coldly. ‘Sam Pillinger’s about the best bargain going, and it’s time I looked after number one.’
Elyn supposed she couldn’t blame her mother that she had toughened up a little since, dewy-eyed, she had gone into her first marriage, so she suppressed her shock and told her mother, ‘I want you to be happy.’
‘I will be,’ her mother had declared firmly.
A month later Ann had married her employer, and she and Elyn had moved out of their rented accommodation and into the large and rambling lovely old house where Samuel Pillinger lived with his fifteen-year-old son and seventeen-year-old daughter and Mrs Munslow, their housekeeper.
Although the new Mrs Pillinger gave up her job, she saw no reason whatsoever to dispense with Madge Munslow’s services, and in no time life at the Grange had settled down very pleasantly.
Elyn liked both her stepsister Loraine and her stepbrother Guy, and swiftly took to Mrs Munslow. Though it was Guy, a quiet and shy boy, with whom she spent most time. Loraine was finding the company of the opposite sex of much more interest than a pair of fifteen-year-olds.
In the next year Elyn grew fond of her new family, discovering her stepfather to be a kind man who, to her great relief, was true to his wife. A man who said little and believed in the work ethic.
That belief, however, did not extend to cover his daughter. Loraine was clearly his favourite, and was able to twist him around her little finger—she got away with murder! Loraine decided at sixteen that she’d had enough of school, and left. She decided, too, that she didn’t want a job or career—and, with her father happy to give her a generous allowance, did not seek one.
It was different for Elyn and Guy, though. When they were sixteen and thinking about careers, it was Samuel Pillinger’s view that they should forget about any further education nonsense and start building a career in the ceramic art world.
‘You want us to start work at the studios?’ Guy had asked.
‘Why not?’ his father had responded. ‘It’ll be yours one day, yours and Loraine’s. Elyn will have a stake in it too.’ He smiled in her direction. ‘Now, what I suggest is that you go through each department in turn, and...’
That conversation had taken place six years ago, Elyn reflected as she glanced at her watch and realised, just in case Sam and her mother had returned to their hotel and had been trying to contact her, that she’d better go back to her office.
They had, for the most part, been six happy years, she recalled as she headed back the way she had come. She and Guy had spent six months in each of the departments, from slip-room through moulding and modelling, firing and decorating, not forgetting the administration side of the business. Elyn had an outstanding ability where figures were concerned, and it was in that section that she shone.
‘Why, you’re brilliant!’ her stepfather had exclaimed when in no time she had caught up on his backlog of confidential paperwork. And from that day he had left her to take care of anything confidential and to learn all she could of office procedures, and gone back to spend a large slice of his time in his beloved design section where, this being an area where his son shone, he had set about teaching him all he knew.
As year by year someone either retired or left to work elsewhere, so gradually, and by dint of dedicated effort, Elyn worked her way to the top. She had owned to feeling a little startled at waking up one morning the previous year to realise that, at twenty-one, she was the one ultimately in charge of everything relating to administration.
She re-entered the gates of Pillingers and realised that, if her calculations were correct, there would be nothing for her to be in charge of! Sorely did she wish she had made a miscalculation somewhere—but she knew she hadn’t.
She decided against going to seek Guy out again. It was seldom that she went to the design section, and if anyone had heard a whisper about Huttons, their main outlet, going broke, then, knowing how rumours spread from department to department like wildfire, she didn’t want any speculative rumour starting up that she had urgently been trying to get in touch with the owner’s son.
Back in her office, her first action was to pick up the phone. ‘Any calls for me, Rachel? I had to pop out for a while.’
‘No, none,’ Rachel answered.
‘Thanks. Oh, can you give me an outside line?’ Elyn asked, as though she’d only then remembered that she wanted to make a call.
A minute later and Elyn was asking the hotel telephonist if either Mr or Mrs Samuel Pillinger was available.
‘Just one moment, please,’ the telephonist replied politely—and Elyn waited.
She waited quite some while, but only realised just how anxious and upset she was when she heard her stepfather answer, ‘Hello?’ and felt she could have easily burst into tears.
‘Sam, it’s me, Elyn.’
‘Hello, love. Just been reading a message from you. You’re lucky you’ve caught us. We only came back because your mother wanted to change her shoes. She...’
‘Sam, listen to me—it’s urgent,’ Elyn cut him off—if her mother’s feet were suffering from doing too much sightseeing then she couldn’t feel a hundred per cent sympathetic right now.
‘I’m listening,’ he invited.
Elyn took a deep breath, and while knowing that no one could possibly overhear, she stated quietly, ‘Keith Ipsley rang me this morning...’ She paused as she took another steadying breath. ‘Huttons have folded.’
‘Folded! Gone bust, you mean?’
‘That’s what I mean,’ she replied as evenly as she could.
‘But—but, we were expecting a cheque from them— My stars, they owe us thousands!’
‘I know. Which is why I rang them as soon as I got the tip-off. I’m sorry, Sam,’ she had to tell him reluctantly, ‘they’ve got the receivers in. We’ll be lucky if we get ten pence in the pound, and lord knows how long we’ll have to wait for that.’
It took him but seconds to digest what she had said, then he said what she’d been hoping he would say. ‘I’d better come home,’ he stated flatly, and as Elyn guessed her mother hadn’t liked the sound of that and had made some sound to remind him of her presence. ‘Er—do you want a word with Ann?’
‘Not right now,’ Elyn said gently, and said goodbye, to put down the phone knowing that, love her parent though she might, things were so grave at the Bovington end, she hadn’t the heart for idle chit-chat.
Elyn tried to immerse herself in some work in the following hours, but her thoughts kept returning again and again to the knock on effect of Huttons’ calling in the official receiver. Part of the amount outstanding from Huttons had been promised without fail for this week, and was needed. She supposed she should be grateful that Keith Ipsley, Huttons’ chief clerk, had felt so personally responsible that he couldn’t keep his word about that cheque that he’d had the decency to tip her off.
Not that she could blame him about his broken promise over the cheque. It wasn’t his fault that his firm had gone under. Poor man, things weren’t very rosy for him either. From yesterday being chief clerk at the reputable firm of Huttons, he was, from that morning, like the rest of the Huttons payroll, without a job.
When the stark reality hit her that she too, not to mention the rest of the Pillinger workforce, would be without a job unless by some miracle Sam could see a way out that she couldn’t, Elyn loaded her briefcase and went home. Knowing what she knew, she would have a hard time looking the tea girl in the eye, let alone anyone else.
She guessed that Sam would drop her mother off first, but there was no sign of his car on the drive. Elyn went to the kitchen where the big motherly-looking woman she had gown so fond of stood with her hands up to her elbows in flour.
‘What are you doing home?’ Madge Munslow looked up in surprise, a special smile of warmth on her mouth for the mistress’s daughter.
‘Playing truant,’ Elyn returned her smile, while a sick feeling hit her stomach as it dawned on her that there was every possibility that they wouldn’t be able to afford Madge for much longer. Oh, dear lord, Madge was past sixty, and now had extra help in the house, but who would take her on if they had to let her go? ‘In case neither my mother nor Mr Pillinger have phoned, they’re coming back some time today, not tomorrow, as planned,’ Elyn told her in a rush.
‘Well, I’m glad somebody thought to let me know there’ll be two extra for dinner,’ Madge grumbled goodnaturedly. ‘Want a cup of tea, Elyn?’ she asked.
But suddenly Elyn was finding that she couldn’t look the housekeeper in the eye either, and, doing a swift about-turn, she waved her briefcase and said, ‘Can’t stop, I’ve some paperwork I want to go through.’
In her room Elyn exchanged her smart office suit for shirt and trousers and a light sweater, but, unable to settle to anything, she went to stand at her bedroom window. The house was set in its own grounds, but Elyn saw neither the well manicured lawns nor the avenue of beautiful trees. Her attention was rigidly on the drive, as she watched for her stepfather’s return.
In actual fact, though, it was Guy who returned first. She saw his car headlights, saw him pull round and on to the standing area, and, just in case he’d any plans to go out that night, she hurried down the stairs to meet him.
‘You’re in first—that’s unusual,’ he commented in friendly fashion when he saw her.
‘How was the dentist?’ she just remembered to ask.
‘Barbaric! You look worried,’ he said, coming closer. ‘What’s up?’
‘Huttons have the official receiver in.’
‘No!’
‘Straight up,’ she told him.
‘Strewth!’ he gasped. Then, ‘How will that affect us?’
There was no way of dressing it up, though he’d have had to have his head well and truly buried in the sand to have not heard something of the discussions she’d had at home with his father. ‘Badly,’ she replied bleakly. ‘Are you going out tonight?’
‘I was, but...’
‘I’ve contacted Sam, he and my mother will be here soon, I expect.’
‘Things must be bad if the old man’s agreed to cut short his break,’ Guy opined.
‘Can you stay in? It—er—might affect you more than any of us,’ Elyn suddenly realised, and saw, as Guy suddenly looked serious, that it had just dawned on him too that the ceramic art studios he had been led to believe he might one day part-own might not be his after all.
‘I think I’d better,’ he agreed anxiously.
Both she and Guy were downstairs in the hall when an hour later the solid front door again opened and Ann and Samuel Pillinger came in.
‘Get Madge to bring some tea into the drawing-room in ten minutes; we’ll talk in there,’ Samuel decided, as he and his wife went up the elegant staircase to freshen up.
‘They’re home,’ Elyn told Madge, but made the tea herself, and put four cups and saucers on a tray.
‘And thirsty, by the look of it,’ Madge quipped—and Elyn couldn’t bear to think of her home without her.
It was fifteen minutes before they were all assembled in the drawing-room. Elyn hadn’t thought for a moment that her mother would not be there, since she must be aware that her financial security was sounding shaky. Which was fine by her, but Elyn was quite relieved that her stepsister was at present away visiting friends. She was fond of Loraine, but felt that there were far more serious matters to deal with here than to have Loraine throw a fit if, as seemed likely, her allowance came under threat. Time to deal with that later.
‘I’ve checked,’ Samuel Pillinger opened, ‘and there’s no mistake. Huttons have gone under—taking our money with them.’ His solemn glance went to his wife, then to his son, and finally settled on his stepdaughter. ‘How do we stand, Elyn?’ he asked quietly.
Elyn cleared her throat. ‘We don’t,’ she answered huskily.
‘We fall?’
‘I’m afraid so,’ she agreed miserably, and, reaching for her briefcase, she got out figures which she had checked so frequently she knew them by heart. ‘I wish it were different, but it isn’t, and no amount of wishing can alter the fact that we can’t pay the staff wages, let alone our other commitments.’
‘It can’t be as bad as that!’ Guy broke in to protest.
‘If Elyn says it is, then it must be,’ stated his father. ‘Let’s have a look at your figures, Elyn.’
A full half-hour went by with the atmosphere in the room going from serious to gloomy to downright dejection. Though at the end of that half-hour they were all agreed, her mother included, that whatever else happened, the staff wages were top priority.
‘By tomorrow word will have got out about Huttons—you can’t keep a thing like that quiet,’ Sam declared. ‘But as yet no one knows the extent of credit we allowed them or the disastrous effect their going to the wall has had on us. I’m afraid, Guy, that you’ll have to go in to work tomorrow as if nothing has happened, while Elyn and I visit the bank, and solicitors, and anybody else I can think of who might give us a chance of clawing our way out of this damned hole.’
Up until then Ann Pillinger had stayed silent, but, as Elyn glanced over to where her mother was seated taking everything in, she was startled by the harshness of her expression and the vehemence of her words as she erupted suddenly, ‘It’s that damned Italian’s fault! If that Zappelli man hadn’t pushed in and bought out Gradburns, we’d never be in this fix!’
Again Elyn’s innate sense of fairness struggled to the surface. While she held no brief for the wretched continental philanderer, she didn’t think in all honesty that he had ‘pushed’ in. So far as she was aware, no one else had made a bid, and Gradburns, so she’d heard, had snatched at his offer.
Though before she could give voice to her thoughts, Sam Pillinger was already agreeing with his wife. ‘You’re right, my dear. Damned interloper!’ he muttered feelingly.
‘But...’ Elyn didn’t get very far before, to her surprise, her stepbrother chipped in.
‘He took some of our best staff too!’ he complained acrimoniously.
‘And our best customers...’ Sam joined in, and for the next ten minutes, while Elyn stayed silent, the other three resentfully took Maximilian Zappelli apart.
When later that night in bed she was visited by a wisp of something akin to guilt because she had not once spoken up in honest defence of the man, Elyn dismissed that wisp of guilt out of hand. Speak up for him, for goodness’ sake? Her thoughts flitted back to the dreadful predicament Pillingers were in—and devil take it, she fumed, her family were right! Why on earth should she defend the womanising Latin!
Thoughts of Maximilian Zappelli were far from her mind the following morning. Mr Eldred, the bank manager, had heard of Huttons’ demise, and wasn’t at all happy about her stepfather’s bright idea of increasing their overdraft.
‘Then how am I going to pay the staff their wages at the end of the month? Tell me that?’ Samuel demanded.
‘You have three weeks until then. Might I suggest you take a look at your share portfolio?’ Mr Eldred hinted.
‘Sell my shares?’
They came away from the bank with Sam Pillinger muttering darkly about having done business with that particular bank for donkey’s years, but where were they when you really needed them.
A man of honour, he considered that the wages bill should have top priority, and had given instructions that his shares should go. But as the week went on, the situation became totally hopeless when other suppliers of Huttons, who were still reeling from the shock of knowing that they were not going to be paid, refused to supply Pillingers until their outstanding accounts were settled.
The writing had already been on the wall, but, having made a valiant effort to keep his company, Samuel at last had to admit defeat. But it was an honourable defeat in that when, on the last day of October, the firm closed down, having sold everything he possibly could sell at short notice but without a penny to call his own, he had managed to avoid bankruptcy, and owed no one.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Elyn murmured gently as she stood with him and Guy saying goodbye to each member of their workforce in turn as they filed by.
‘Me too, Dad,’ said Guy, in the lull. ‘What’s to do now?’ he asked, and although Elyn herself had been wondering the same, she was still staggered by his reply.
For, ‘Have a bit of a rest, then start up again,’ she distinctly heard his father reply.
‘Start up again!’ she exclaimed, and as both father and son stared at her, ‘We haven’t the money, Sam, to start up anything!’ She tried to make him see. ‘We don’t have any money to live on, to...’ She broke off, realising that, artist that he was, artist that his son was, neither of them, even now, had fully grasped the reality of the situation. She tried another tack. ‘I rather thought that, having sold all the movable equipment here, you—er—might be thinking in terms of selling the kilns, the buildings, the...’
‘What?’ he exclaimed, astonished. ‘Sell—for the Italian to buy! Never!’
As far as Elyn was aware, Maximilian Zappelli wasn’t remotely interested in the Pillinger building. Though rather than provoke Sam by saying as much, when none but the most insensitive must see what a painful day this must be for him, she stayed quiet while he went on, ‘My father started this firm—I’ll get it going again, just see if I don’t!’
The subject was dropped when Hugh Burrell came into view. Sam held out his hand, his little speech of regret at the ready. But his hand was ignored, as he was ignored, as Guy too was ignored. Hugh Burrell did stop in front of Elyn, however, his sly eyes giving her the once-over. ‘Thanks for the Christmas present!’ he said nastily and, while it registered with Elyn that losing his job so close to Christmas hadn’t made him any nicer a person, it also registered that this man resented her—and bore her a grudge. She was glad she would never have to see him again.
It was a sad day for all three of them, but eventually they locked up the building and went home. They went in their separate cars, but arrived at the house in convoy.
‘Was it so bad?’ she heard her mother gently greet Sam, and felt proud of her parent that, unlike his daughter, she was being far more supportive now the blow had actually fallen than she had at first shown.
‘I need a stiff drink,’ she heard him reply—and saw a sulky-looking Loraine, who had been told her allowance wouldn’t be there in the bank on the first of the month as usual, came out into the hall.
‘And I desperately need a little money, Daddy,’ she told him soulfully.
At once Ann Pillinger’s gentle tone fell away. ‘Then get yourself a job, and start earning some!’ she slammed at her.
‘Daddy!’ Loraine wailed—but, perhaps for the first time in his life, Sam didn’t seem to hear her, and went into the drawing-room with his wife.
The idea of finding herself a job was ever present in Elyn’s mind, even if her stepsister had no such intention. The thought of debt began to prey on her mind, but, scan the papers though she might, Elyn saw nothing locally that paid very much. She did spot a couple of jobs in London which she could do, and which paid extremely well. But, since her aim was to earn enough to be able to put something into the family coffers, it would be defeating the object if she worked away from home and had to pay out half her income on rent and living expenses in London.
Her best talent lay in administration, she recognised that, but such jobs, in either Bovington or Pinwich, were few and far between. She took to looking for jobs in any other field, but anything unskilled paid unskilled wages.
As yet none of them had had the heart to tell Madge Munslow that they could not afford to keep her, and, as November began to draw to a close and, beside an assortment of bills arriving, another pay-day for the housekeeper loomed, Elyn started to feel desperate.
If the rest of the family were busy looking for paid work she would be surprised. But with Guy seeming to adopt his father’s ‘something will turn up’ attitude, and Loraine—between loves at the moment—mooning about the place, and Elyn’s own mother seeming to have joined the ‘something will turn up’ brigade too, Elyn was starting to get quite cross with the lot of them. That afternoon she went out and sold her car.
‘What on earth did you do that for?’ was the astonished reception that news brought over the dinner-table.
‘Because Madge will need paying in a few days’ time, and a few other day-to-day running costs will require paying too,’ she answered.
‘I didn’t ask you to sell your car!’ Sam declared proudly, and all at once Elyn wasn’t cross any more, but upset that she had hurt his pride.
‘I know you didn’t, Sam,’ she assured him gently. ‘Just as I didn’t ask you to buy me that car for my eighteenth birthday—but you did. Anyhow,’ she found a light note to tease, ‘I’m sure one of the first things you’ll do when you’re on your feet again will be to buy me another one!’
That crisis of bruised feelings passed, but as November gave way to December Elyn started to grow desperate again. She had got a good price for her car, but with that money being the only money available among all of them, it was going down at an alarming rate.
Elyn was in a desperate frame of mind when a day or so later, as she scanned the early afternoon edition of the local paper, she saw a job that not only paid well but was within daily travelling distance. Her initial reaction on seeing who the firm was, though, who were advertising for someone to take charge of a statistics section, was to quickly go on to the next advert. But, having scanned every other ad in the situations vacant column without seeing a thing that paid remotely as well, nor sounded half as interesting, she glanced back again, and again, to the advert.
Her family would go mad if she so much as applied, much less was successful and actually got the job. But the money was excellent, and—she nibbled anxiously at her lower lip—money was what they needed, quite frantically—and nobody else was bringing any in.
But I’m not a statistician! She started to get cold feet, and talk herself out of it. Nonsense, said an inner female that was made of sterner stuff, she was highly numerate and could read a balance sheet as easily as she could read a novel—so what was difficult about statistics?
On that note of bravado she grabbed up the phone in her room and quickly dialled the number, and as a voice said, ‘Good afternoon, Zappelli Fine China,’ she felt as if the words were screaming through the whole house.
Feeling like the worst kind of traitor, Elyn stamped down hard on such feelings. They needed money! For goodness’ sake, get on with it. ‘Good afternoon. Personnel, please,’ she requested.
As simply as that she was put through and, having stated her business, in next to no time was sitting staring at the phone back on its cradle. She had an interview at eleven o’clock tomorrow morning! She had an interview at Zappelli’s!
It had fully been her intention to acquaint her family with what she had done at dinner that evening. And indeed, she opened her mouth several times to do just that, but each time her courage failed her. There’d be hell to pay, she knew that, and she suddenly decided that, since her paper qualifications for the job were next to non-existent, there was every likelihood that she wouldn’t get the job, so there was no point in upsetting everyone needlessly.
Calling herself a coward, she later went upstairs to her room, having half decided that, since she was more certain not to get the job than to get it, she wouldn’t turn up for interview in the morning after all.
She did, of course. It seemed like a point of honour somehow that, having made the appointment, she should go through with it. Dressed in one of her good business suits, she let herself out of the house at ten o’clock the following morning. It took her fifteen minutes to walk to the railway station, and, after a wait of ten minutes, she caught the train which would put her down at the next stop. She alighted ten minutes later in the town of Pinwich.
Zappelli Fine China was a further ten minutes’ walk away from the centre of town, but she was in plenty of time, and had no need to hurry.
She arrived to keep her appointment with a Mr Christopher Nickson with five minutes to spare, and was not kept waiting more than a few minutes beyond the appointed time. ‘So sorry to keep you waiting, Miss Talbot,’ the young man apologised pleasantly, clearly liking what he saw as he escorted her to his office. ‘Now,’ he began once they were seated, ‘are you currently employed?’
One of Elyn’s earlier causes for a feeling of discomfort had been that once they knew that she had anything to do with Pillingers the interview would stop there, but there was no way of avoiding it. ‘I worked for Pillingers,’ she began. ‘Mr Pillinger is...’
‘Ah yes, one or two of the Pillinger people have started here,’ he interrupted with a smile as he confided, ‘I moved up from Devon last month, and only started here myself on the first of December.’
From then on Elyn started to relax. Since he was not a local man—and since Talbot was a common enough name, so clearly he did not know of her connection with Pillingers—if things went badly—and suddenly she started to want as well as need the job—then neither he nor anyone else would be any the wiser.
‘Now—’ he resumed, and went on to give her more details of the job, and to ask if the job still appealed and if she thought she could do it.
‘Yes, on both counts,’ she told him, truly seeing nothing difficult in the work he had outlined, and the mathematically inclined part of her raring to have a crack at it.
‘Great,’ he smiled, and, picking up a pencil, ‘If you could just give me a list of your qualifications—just for the record, then...’ He looked up and broke off. ‘Is something wrong?’ he enquired.
‘I don’t have any qualifications,’ Elyn had to confess, adding quickly lest he should terminate the interview there and then, ‘But I know figures. I’m good at them!’ This was no time for false modesty. ‘If you’d like to give me an aptitude test or something of that sort, I’m sure I could prove that.’
She caught the train back to Bovington knowing that Christopher Nickson had been delighted with the results of the test which, after about half an hour of scurrying around, someone had worked out to give her. His promise to be in touch though, had left her not knowing whether she had the job or not.
For that reason, and believing that if they did have an applicant with paper qualifications she could say goodbye to the job, Elyn decided against saying anything to her family about having gone for the interview. There now seemed little point in needlessly causing a family upset.
Trusting that Christopher Nickson would be in touch as he had promised, be it only to say she had not been successful at interview, she stayed near to the telephone over the next couple of days. If anyone was going to ring announcing themselves as ‘Zappelli Fine China here’, then she wanted to be sure that she was the one who took the call.
Even though her hopes had started to fade, she was all set to stay near the phone on the third day too. But as her stepfather ambled into the breakfast-room sifting through the morning’s post he’d picked up from the hall en route, she was suddenly made startlingly aware that Zappelli Fine China were not going to telephone. Because suddenly her stepfather had halted stock-still and after studying the top envelope in his hands, he looked straight at her and demanded fiercely, ‘What the hell are Zappelli’s writing to you for?’
Oh, dear, she thought, her stomach churning, and as her stepfather came and thrust the envelope at her she saw that the postage frank was emblazoned ‘Zappelli Fine China’. This was something she hadn’t thought of. ‘I—er—hmm,’ she coughed, ‘I—um—applied for a job there.’
‘You did what?’
‘Well, I probably didn’t get it,’ she offered lamely.
‘Really, Elyn!’ her mother exploded.
‘That’s loyalty!’ grunted Guy, and, with the exception of Loraine who wasn’t down yet, the family en masse fell about her head.
She had known there would be a row, to put it mildly, and for five minutes she put up with one after the other going for her. But then she started to get annoyed. ‘It’s all right for you to go on, Mother,’ she cut her parent off in the middle of her what-an-ungrateful-creature-you-are monologue, ‘and I’m sorry I’ve had to do what I’ve done, but we can’t just sit here forever waiting for something to turn up. Bills have to be paid somehow, and I just can’t sit around adding to that debt without trying to do something about it. I know Zappelli is a dirty word, but their money’s clean and they pay well. And,’ she went on quickly when it looked as if her stepfather might erupt again, ‘as I said, I probably didn’t get the job anyway.’
‘Perhaps you’d like to read your letter and let us know, so we can all wave a flag,’ Ann Pillinger sniffed sarcastically.
Without enthusiasm, Elyn slit the envelope. Only then did she realise how very much she wanted the job. But as she unfolded the single sheet of paper and discovered that she had indeed got it, she felt none of the elation she might earlier have felt.
‘I start on the second of January,’ she stated flatly.
Her stepfather ignored her completely. ‘Would you pass the toast, Ann?’ he requested.
Elyn loved her family—but damn the lot of them, she fumed when fifteen minutes later she took herself off for a walk. It was like a funeral parlour back at the house. Heavens, you’d have thought she’d committed some cardinal sin!
She wouldn’t have been at all surprised to have seen the curtains drawn, the house in mourning, when she returned an hour later. She supposed she’d better go in and make her peace.
Her stepfather was just coming out as she went in, and to her horror it seemed as though he intended to walk by her without a word, ignore her! ‘Still hate me?’ she asked him in a rush.
He stopped, paused, then looked her straight in the eye. She bore his look without flinching. ‘Are you going to take that job?’ he asked.
Steadily, she looked back, ‘Yes,’ she replied quietly, ‘I am.’
She waited, fully expecting him to retort something pithy, but somehow she just couldn’t back down. It might seem a crime in his eyes, but they needed the money. But then, to her relief, ‘Who could hate you?’ he grunted gruffly. ‘Your motives are the best, I know that.’
‘Oh, Sam!’ she cried, and hugged him, and felt so much better when he hugged her back before he went meandering on his way.
Christmas passed quietly, with her mother thawing to her just a little, but with her stepbrother still very put out because she was joining a firm who he bitterly believed had played a major part in the demise of a firm that one day would have been his.
Elyn spent some of January the first, the national holiday, in pressing some of her good quality working suits, and in generally checking her wardrobe and making sure she had everything ready for the morrow.
She had not expected anyone to wish her luck the next morning, nor did they, but as she got up from the breakfast table, to her pleasure and surprise, she heard her mother say, ‘Elyn, I’ll run you to the station if you like.’
‘Thanks,’ she accepted readily, eager to put an end to the cold war. She felt better than ever when at the station before she got out of the car, her mother, never a very demonstrative person these days, leaned over and kissed her cheek. Elyn knew it was not a kiss in parting, but more a kiss of forgiveness.
On that cheerful note she made her way to Zappelli Fine China. Her work team were a couple of people round about her own age. Diana Kerr was a plain but pleasant young woman, and Neil Jennings was a thin young man, with a love, it soon transpired, of potholing.
Elyn was used to having loads of responsibility and fell into the role of head of department quite naturally, and in no time at all the three were working together harmoniously.
When at around eleven that morning the phone on her desk rang, Elyn stretched out her hand automatically without taking her eyes off her work. Given that it was new surroundings, it was as if she had never been away.
‘Elyn, it’s Chris, Chris Nickson,’ he announced. ‘How are you settling in?’
‘Settled already is the answer to that, I think,’ she smiled down the phone.
‘Good. I should be free in about ten minutes. I thought it might be an idea if I took you on a tour of the place. How does that sound?’
‘I’ll look forward to it,’ she told him, and replaced her phone feeling that it would make for more efficient management if she knew just where in the vast building each department lay.
True to his word, Chris Nickson arrived ten minutes later, and they left the office she shared with the two others, and he took her around to introduce her to the heads of the other departments.
In view of his remark at her interview about one or two of the Pillinger people starting there, Elyn fully expected to bump into at least a few of the people she knew. That she did not, however, was soon explained when Chris informed her, ‘We haven’t got a full workforce in today. A good few of them applied for an extra day’s holiday. In view of the hours they put in when we have a rush order, Mr Orford, the manager,’ he explained, ‘was pleased to meet them halfway.’
‘I see,’ Elyn smiled, unable to remember the last time Pillingers had had a rush order. But, as they entered the design office, all such thoughts abruptly left her. Because it was in that office that she saw someone that she did know from Pillingers!
‘Good morning,’ Chris Nickson said generally to the two men and a woman at work there, as they went through to the chief designer’s office.
There was a general response from two of them and Elyn offered her own ‘good morning’, but Hugh Burrell, still bearing a grudge, she noted from the cynical, unsmiling, sly-eyed way he looked at her, said not a word.
Elyn made a mental note to give the design section a wide berth, and subsequently finished her first month at Zappelli Fine China with that small incident the only thing that was in any way unpleasant.
Chris Nickson had asked her out a couple of times, and she liked him, but, since any date with him meant him calling for her, she wasn’t too happy about introducing him to her family, when any one of them was bound to say something derogatory about the firm he worked for.
She went to work on the first of February, outwardly looking as smart as paint, but feeling inwardly more than a little bit frazzled. Loraine had fallen for yet another of the Don Juan types that drew her like a magnet, and had again come out of the relationship licking her wounds.
‘It’s just not fair!’ she had sobbed, and Elyn had been up with her half the night trying to get her to calm down.
Which, while Elyn was as keen as ever to get her teeth into some really absorbing work, made her not at all keen to meet any of that philandering type.
Not that she ‘met’ the owner of Zappelli Fine China exactly. It was more that she bumped into him. He was coming out of one door as she was going in and, bang, she came up against something solid. She rocked, but before she could lose her balance, in an instant a pair of strong firm hands were there on her arms to secure her.
Feeling slightly shaken, Elyn stepped back and, although fairly tall herself, looked up, and found herself looking straight into the cool, all-assessing dark-eyed gaze of a man she would know anywhere!
His photograph didn’t do him justice, she observed at once as she took in Maximilian Zappelli’s olive skin with a hint of bronze, his strong dark-as-night hair and aristocratic features. She made to go round him, and he let go of her—but not before he’d done a quick appraisal of her own fine features.
My stars! she fumed as his glance swept over her long honey-blonde hair, flawless complexion, and on to her suit with its expensive label. The man was a woman-eater!
‘Excuse me, signorina,’ he murmured, his apology for nearly knocking her off her feet sounding deliberately seductive, she thought, and as her insides, for the first time ever, did a quite idiotic somersault, she counteracted that she was in any way affected by the womaniser, and politely, if a touch arrogantly, she tilted her head a fraction and stepped past him.
She was first in at her department, and she was glad about that, because—and it was so ridiculous she could hardly believe it—she was shaking from the encounter. Without any trouble she recalled those dark liquid seductive eyes, recalled his barely accented English in those two words ‘excuse me’, and suddenly she was glad of her mother’s experience. Glad of the experiences of her stepsister. Because, had she not known that there were such men around, she would have felt quite vulnerable. And she wasn’t vulnerable, she knew she wasn’t.
She got some work out of her desk drawer, but felt strangely on edge—so much so that she found she was hoping that this was just a fleeting visit by Signor Zappelli to his Pinwich factory. She wasn’t afraid of him, of course, she scoffed. But somehow she felt she would rather not see him again.
