‘She might not mean to gloat, but she’d find it hard not to say I told you so. She and Liza did warn me, you see. They told me what my husband was getting up to and I refused to believe them.’’But still—’
‘Anyway,’ said Pru, handing him his coffee and sitting down on the unmade bed, ‘that’s not the only reason. Dulcie’s still got her house. She doesn’t have to worry about money. I couldn’t bear to feel like the poor relation.’
Eddie shook his head.
‘You’ve had a rough time,’ he said gruffly. ‘I had no idea, until Dulcie told me.’
Cheers, Dulcie, thought Pru. What could she look forward to next, she wondered, charity fundraising? Collecting tins being rattled outside Sainsbury’s? Give generously to the humiliated wives appeal?
Save Pru from Poverty?
‘Here,’ said Eddie Hammond, ‘I’m sorry about the other day, in my office. I shouldn’t have doubted you.’
Pru took the cheque for fourteen hundred pounds. She bit the inside of her mouth and smiled a wry, lopsided smile. Maybe Dulcie wasn’t so bad after all.
‘Thanks.’
‘And I noticed your club membership had run out,’ Eddie went on, handing her a card made out in her name, ‘so I renewed it for you.’
Pru felt herself going red.
‘The thing is ... I can’t really afford ...’
‘You don’t need to,’ Eddie cut in brusquely. ‘It’s my way of apologising. I’m not usually that crass.’
Pinker still, Pru said, ‘Well, thanks.’
‘My pleasure.’ He cleared his throat and looked embarrassed. ‘That’s when you need somewhere to go, after all. When your marriage has just broken up.’
Pru giggled.
‘Now you sound like Dulcie.’
‘It’s what she told me last night,’ Eddie admitted. ‘Still, it seems to work for her.’
‘She’s man-hunting,’ Pru said simply. ‘I’m not.’
* * *
‘Bloody taxis,’ stormed Eddie half an hour later. He peered out of Pru’s second-floor window and yanked up the aerial on his mobile, jabbing out the numbers he had soon grown to know by heart. ‘Hello, hello? Yes, it’s me again. Where the bloody hell’s my cab?’
Pru, still in her dressing gown, watched him scowl into the phone.
‘I said Medwell Crescent, not Street! Just get on to him, will you, and tell him it’s Medwell Crescent. What? You mean he’s picked up his next call? So how long am I supposed to wait before someone—? No, I cannot hang on another twenty bloody minutes!’
The unsatisfying thing about a mobile phone is you can’t slam the receiver down. Eddie, ready to explode with frustration, did the next best thing and tried slamming the aerial down instead.
It snapped off.
‘This is silly.’ Pru dangled her car keys at him. ‘Here, go and sit in the Mini. It’ll take me two minutes to get dressed.’
‘Thanks,’ said Eddie when she dropped him at the railway station with two minutes to spare. The Mini might be a banger but Pru knew how to handle it. She was, he had to admit, an extremely good driver.
As he struggled to open the passenger door he joked, ‘Next time I need a lift, I’ll phone you.’
Pru wondered if it was sitting at the wheel of a car that gave her more confidence. She said, ‘Lots of people hire chauffeurs when they’ve been banned.’
‘I know.’ Eddie sighed. ‘But I don’t need a full-time chauffeur.’
‘You could do with a part-time one. My hours are flexible,’ Pru went on rapidly. ‘The people I clean for don’t mind when I turn up, so long as the job gets done.’
Eddie saw the quiet determination on her face. With that straight dark curtain of hair and those serious grey eyes of hers, Pru looked more like a schoolgirl than a grown woman.
She was painfully thin too, beneath the man’s dark-blue sweater – her husband’s presumably –
and those battered black jeans. ‘Are you volunteering?’
‘I need the money,’ said Pru bluntly. ‘You need a driver. I could do the job.’ Leaning across, she jiggled the handle Eddie hadn’t been able to get to grips with, and opened the temperamental passenger door. The train he was in a hurry to catch was just pulling into the station. ‘Quick or you’ll miss it. Look, think it over. If you want me, give me a ring.’
Eddie grinned. ‘If I want you ... ?’
‘Oh well,’ Pru went pink again, as he had known she would, ‘you know what I mean.’
‘Of course I do.’ He pulled himself together. ‘And I’ve already thought about it. How soon can you start?’ The enormous slate-grey eyes widened.
‘As soon as you like.’
‘Terrific,’ said Eddie, knocking the gearstick expertly into reverse. ‘In that case, back to Brunton to pick up the
