'Any one of you,' he answered. 'I'm having a party on Saturday if all or any of you want to come.'
'We'd love to!' Yancie answered for the three of them. Greville threw wonderful parties.
They chatted for a few minutes more, and Yancie, having managed to stay cheerful enough while talking to him, felt immediately guilt-ridden once she had put the phone down. She didn't like the feeling.
Fennia came home in low spirits too-her mother hadn't wanted to know. Yancie did her best to cheer her, telling her of Greville's phone call and party invite. `Did you tell him?'
'That I'm suspended? I couldn't.'
Astra came out of her study and, when Fennia volunteered to make some coffee, it was Astra who insisted on making it.
All three of them went into the kitchen.
'Greville's having a party on Saturday we're invited,' Yancie told her.
'Just what I could do with,' Astra declared. `Thanks for taking the call-I was up to my ears in complicated calculations. Did you tell him?'
Yancie knew her cousin didn't mean had she accepted for the three of them. `I couldn't,' she admitted, and was plagued all night when her guilty conscience kept her awake. Greville had always been there for all three of them she owed it to him, after all he had done, to keep her job.
Fennia's duty in going to try to put things right with her mother reminded Yancie the next day-not that she needed any reminding-that she had certain duties too. And, though she didn't think of her stepfather as a duty, she went, by public transport, to see him.
Her journey was extremely bothersome in that it involved a tube, a train and a bus. Though when her very pleased-to-see-her stepfather said he wanted her to come home and to forget about the car 'trouble', that he'd buy her another one, Yancie found she could not accept.
'You're a darling,' she smiled, giving him a hug, `but I couldn't.'
'Not even to make me happy?'
'Oh, don't!' she begged.
'I'm sorry,' he apologised at once. `I never thought I'd resort to emotional blackmail. Come and tell me how your job's going. Your mother rang wanting to speak to you, by the way.'
'You didn't tell her I was working!'
'What-and get my ears chewed off for my trouble?' He chuckled. `Coward though I am, I let her think you were still living here.' He thought for a moment, and then added, `Have you seen her lately?'
'Not for a week or so,' Yancie replied.
But Ralph was patently anxious. `What shall I say if she comes here looking for you?'
Yancie full well knew, her mother being a law unto herself, that she would turn up at her ex-husband's home if the idea occurred to her. 'I'll go and see her,' Yancie decided.
'Since you've obviously got the day off, you could go today,' Ralph Proctor hinted. `You could take my car.'
Yancie looked at him and grinned. `You're scared,' she teased. `Scared she'll call.'
'Heaven alone knows where I got the nerve to ask her to marry me. Nor, when our marriage ended, found the nerve to insist you live with me.'
'You've got it when it counts,' Yancie told him softly.
She stayed and had lunch with him, his housekeeper seeming a very pleasant woman.
And after lunch, his suggestion that Yancie borrow his car seeming a good one, she drove to her mother's imposing house some ten miles away to visit.
'You didn't ring to say you were coming!' Ursula Proctor greeted her a shade peevishly. Yancie's mother was fifty-two but could easily have passed for ten years younger. She was beautiful still, so long as everything went her way. Today, on seeing her daughter unexpectedly, her mouth tightened expressively. `I shall be able to spend fifteen minutes with you I've an appointment with Henry. You should have phoned. I'm not here just waiting on the remote off-chance that you might drop by when the whim takes you, you know. And what are you doing with Ralph Proctor's car?'
Yancie guessed that Henry was probably her mother's hairdresser. After ten minutes with her, however, Yancie knew exactly why neither she nor her stepfather had mentioned to her parent that not only was she living elsewhere, but that for a few weeks she'd had a job. It was not so much cowardly as making for easier living. Her mother had the ability to carp endlessly about matters which other people took in their stride.
After returning her stepfather's car Yancie made her way back to Astra's apartment partly wishing that she hadn't left it that day. While her mother hadn't seemed particularly pleased to see her, her stepfather had. He wanted her to go back to live with him and for her to use the allowance he was still insisting on paying into her bank. But she couldn't. How could she possibly-how could she possibly return? It was just beyond her to touch a penny of his money after what Estelle had said.
Pride demanded she earn her own money from now on. The only problem with that was that she didn't have a job-and nothing she had seen in the situations vacant column which she was capable of doing was work that she wanted. Added to that, for all her stepfather had apologised for attempting emotional blackmail, Yancie was awash with guilt because she felt she couldn't go back to living in her old home with him. When she added all that guilt to how she had let Greville down after he had obtained that driver's job for her, Yancie's spirits sank even lower.
She owed it to Greville to try to hang onto her job. After his efforts on her behalf he didn't deserve that she should tell him-and soon knew she must-that she had been suspended. Suspended, too, not by her immediate boss but by none other than the top man himself!
She wanted that job, she truly did. Because the hours could be somewhat erratic, the job paid well. Oh, if only she wasn't' suspended! Oh, if only she had some other reason she could give other than she had gone fifty miles out of her way-leaving aside her cutting up the top of the top brass in the process-to-deliver a spare kettle to Wilf Fisher's mother.
At dinner that night Fennia and Astra were interested in hearing about her day. Yancie told them of her visit to her stepfather, and, because Fennia was having difficulties with her mother, made light of the not very good reception she'd had from her own. And swiftly changed the conversation.
'How about your day?' she asked her cousin. `Did all go well at the nursery?'
Fennia's reply was that they'd had a near disaster when one of the toddlers, who was inseparable from her fluffy elephant called Fanta, had mislaid it. `Poor mite, she was inconsolable-she'd never have gone to sleep tonight without it.'
'But you did find it?'
Fennia's smile said it all. `I was nearly in tears myself when Kate decided to inspect the backpack of one of our little trouble-makers.'
'And all was revealed?'
'He'd got his own soft toy-but he wanted Fanta.'
Yancie got up the following morning, said goodbye to her two cousins when they went off to work, and tried not to think of the notion which had come to her and which returned to pick at her again and again. It was unthinkable, she told herself-frequently.
And yet time, which had never previously hung heavily on her hands, was doing so now. Between them the cousins kept the apartment immaculate, so, having done what few chores there were, Yancie had plenty of time in which to wonder, Would it be so very wrong? And, for goodness' sake, who was she hurting?
No one, came the answer. The moment was born out of nowhere and before she knew it she was picking up the phone and dialling the Addison Kirk number.
'Veronica Taylor, please,' she requested firmly, when the phone was answered, and in next to no time she had Thomson Wakefield's PA on the line asking if she might help her. `Oh, hello,' Yancie said cheerfully, while quite well aware that Veronica Taylor must know she'd been suspended, not prepared to flounder before she got started. `My name's Yancie Dawkins; you may remember I saw Mr Wakefield last Friday-I wonder if I could have a word with him?'
'I'm afraid that's impossible.'
Drat! Yancie dug her heels in. Suddenly it was of paramount importance that she speak with the man that day. `If he's in a meeting, perhaps you'd ask him to call me back,' she requested. Silence at the other end, and somehow Yancie gained the impression that men as busy as the boss of Addison Kirk were not noted for ringing the hoi polloi from the lowly transport section. That thought annoyed her who the dickens did he think he was? She
