‘Useful!’ exclaimed Barbara, at a loss for words to express her fury.
‘We’re having some difficulty with the minutes,’ he said coolly. ‘The young woman who was helping us was overoptimistic about her linguistic abilities. We’re taping everything, but you can see why we’d like a written record.’
‘Too bad,’ said Barbara.
Charles scowled. ‘Look, you’ve said you’re looking for work.’
‘I never said I wanted to be a slave.’
‘We were planning to pay you,’ Charles said sarcastically. ‘Look, I’ll give you what we’d have paid the agency—a hundred pounds if you stay today, five hundred to stay the week.’
‘Done,’ Barbara said gloomily. She followed him back across the hall.
The men around the table were all in a bad mood. They were tired of talking business in languages not their own about things they didn’t entirely understand. They looked with mingled irritation and appreciation at the girl at the door, her slim figure set off by a dark blue shift dress. Charles sensed the change of mood in the room. He glanced down at Barbara, seeing her suddenly as if for the first time. She was spectacular all right—but completely infuriating. They wouldn’t be so appreciative, he thought irritably, if they knew what a little hellcat she was.
Barbara frowned up at him, trying to make out the odd look on his face. Probably just wishing he’d negotiated her out of her lunch-break, she thought. She shrugged, closed the door and followed him down to his end of the table where she took a seat beside him.
Barbara took up a pad and pencil. Five men burst into argument at once, and part of her mind threw itself into disentangling the various strands. But she was sitting at Charles’s elbow and her whole body seemed to be aware of the fact that he was only a couple of inches away.
If she looked down at her pad she’d suddenly find that her eyes had refocused on something more interesting a foot or so from the pad—the long, powerful line of his thigh, the muscle straining against the businesslike dark grey of his trousers. Or, if she looked up to identify a new speaker, she would see out of the corner of her eye the close-cut black hair and aquiline nose of the man beside her, and she would find herself waiting for him to speak just so she could look at him without pretending not to.
Then he would speak, and it would be a relief to turn her head. She’d turn her head, and the brilliant green of his eyes would dash over her like a cold, careless ocean wave, leaving her shivering inside, struggling to get intelligible shorthand on the page.
In spite of these distractions, she managed to make some sense of the proceedings. She soon discovered that the meeting was running into real difficulties; the second language of most of those present was German, but there were two who spoke English, another two who spoke French and one who knew Italian. A complicated system of translation, in undertones, out of the various languages into German, or from German into one of the others, was going on. She couldn’t imagine what the transcription of a tape of this was going to be like.
It also became clear to her after a while that the man who was helping out the Italian speaker was slightly misrepresenting the drift of the discussion and the speaker’s responses, whether deliberately or unintentionally she wasn’t sure.
Half an hour went by. At last, hesitantly, she put a note in front of Charles. He nodded, and wrote, ‘We’ll break for coffee—take over afterwards.’
It occurred to Barbara that if they were going to break for coffee this would be a perfect opportunity to tell him what a swine he was, but something kept her silent. Perhaps it was the hapless Italian-speaking Czech. She thought the Pole who was helping him out was taking advantage of him, and if she left he’d have no one to help him. So she organised coffee, and when the second session began she sat beside him and took over the task of translation. It soon became apparent that he was an important player in the discussions. A number of points which had been agreed earlier were reversed, and everyone began to get very annoyed.
At last Charles called a halt to the proceedings. They would, he said, adjourn until the following day.
The men filed out of the room, talking animatedly—and for the most part angrily—in their native languages. Barbara began putting her notes in order.
‘Charles!’ she exclaimed suddenly. ‘I’m an idiot! I just went on translating Italian to German—but I could have just translated from Czech! It’s been a few years since I read Colloquial Czech, but I’m sure I could have done it—at least some of the time.’
‘I’m glad you didn’t, though,’ he said. He stood up and stretched, then turned to her and raised an eyebrow. ‘You’ll probably disapprove of this, but you may be more use to me if people don’t know how much you know. They’re likely to be a bit more open among themselves if they don’t realise you understand.’
Barbara was about to start arguing about this when she realised what was going on. ‘It doesn’t matter whether I approve or not,’ she said curtly, ‘because I am not going to work for you. Didn’t you get my message?’
‘Oh, I got it,’ he said. ‘I could have wrung the girl’s neck for not putting you through. You could have been here half an hour earlier.’
‘If I’d got through,’ said Barbara, ‘I wouldn’t have come.’
‘Then it’s just as well she didn’t put you through, isn’t it?’ he said with a shrug.
Barbara remembered something else. ‘What on earth did you say to that poor girl?’ she demanded.
‘I can’t remember. Something colourful, I expect.’ A pencil snapped between his long, clever fingers. ‘For God’s sake, take that look off your face. Do you have any idea how much time and money went into setting this meeting up? She said she knew French and German, and then turned out to be totally incompetent. What do you expect me to do—give her an A for effort?’
‘I expect you to be abominably rude,’ said Barbara. ‘When are you ever anything else?’
‘Oh, I can be quite nice when I choose.’
‘Yes, when you want to seduce someone,’ Barbara said scathingly.
‘If that’s what you think, I’d better be very rude to you. I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong idea,’ he remarked, throwing his papers into his briefcase and closing it.
‘I certainly wouldn’t think anything as ridiculous as that,’ she retorted.
The speed of her reply made the slight pause which followed all the more noticeable. ‘What’s ridiculous about it?’ He looked at her inscrutably. ‘You’re very beautiful. You must have seen they couldn’t take their eyes off you.’
Barbara was suddenly short of breath. ‘I thought you didn’t want to get involved with your secretary,’ she pointed out
‘I thought you weren’t going to be my secretary. Looks like I can seduce you after all.’ He’d looked weary at the end of the meeting, as well he might, with the prospect of the whole thing to do again the next day—but now a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.
‘No, you can’t,’ she said curtly. ‘You can call my agency and tell them you don’t need me any more so they’ll find me another job.’
‘But I do need you.’ He scowled. ‘If you don’t type up those notes no one else is going to be able to, and God only knows what the meeting is going to be like when we pick up the threads. Finish the week, anyway—at least you’ll be quids in.’
Barbara was silent. She hardly knew which was worse—his infuriating, foul temper or the careless, easy charm which found its mark so surely.
‘Look,