Accidental Mistress

The next afternoon she had returned home early to supervise the delivery of her new kitchen appliances and was flattening cartons in the front yard for the recycling collection when she was amu

sed to see Peter drive up in his yellow ‘runabout’.

‘I hope you aren’t going to put Jeff out of his job,’ she greeted him as he picked his way around the piles of builder’s debris that she had been assured would be cleared away at the end of the job.

‘He’s at the chiropractor’s. Disc bulge,’ he announced. ‘It’s not a patch on the Rolls, of course, but it’s quite a zippy little thing, isn’t it?’ he said, patting the roof with smug satisfaction. ‘I just thought I’d come around and see how things are going.’

After she had shown him around and given him a cup of tea, she walked him back to his car.

‘I haven’t taken you out of my will, you know,’ he said abruptly and she looked at him in consternation. ‘And I’m not going to!’

‘Peter—!’

‘I know, I know. You’re not my granddaughter. I know that. But I’ve thought about it, and I want you to know you’re as good as a granddaughter to me, even though we’re not related. As I told you I’ve got pots of money, and I’ve already had Robinson set up a separate trust-fund for Carol’s daughter whoever she might turn out to be. And if you’re worried about the boys, don’t be—I’ve told them all about it and they’re happy as Larry, both of them. Said you deserve it after all the strife I caused. But I’m not giving it to you as reparation or a bribe,’ he insisted as she opened her mouth, ‘I’m giving it to you because it makes me happy to think of you having it after I’m gone. You want me to die happy, don’t you?’

‘I don’t want you to die at all!’ she said, thinking that he seemed to have recovered a lot of his former spryness.

‘Then don’t put more stress on my ticker by arguing with me,’ he told her, deftly getting the last word. He looked back at the house, where the sounds of an electric drill and a nail-gun competed for supremacy.

‘No one better than Ethan’s crew at pulling a top-rate job together in record time,’ he said, nodding with pride. ‘That tow-headed one on the roof—Shorty—he’s been with Ethan since the day he started his first house.’

‘Ethan’s boys?’ Emily’s eyes jerked from Peter to the man hammering down sheets of corrugated steel roofing. ‘But they’re from an outfit called Jacad Construction. I presumed they’d got the job by offering the insurance company the cheapest quote—’

‘Jacad’s one of Ethan’s subsidiary companies. I think you’ll find he was the one who set everything up and rammed it all through so quickly. They’re top-notch specialists and usually charge like wounded bulls, so no way are they going to be the cheapest quote to some cheap-jack insurance company, not unless someone is subsidising their bills—’

Emily was shell-shocked into stammering confusion. ‘Are—are you saying that Ethan…?’

‘Did you ever talk to that insurance man again yourself?’

‘Well, no…Ethan said—Ethan said he’d handle it,’ she finished slowly, her eyes widening.

Peter nodded, his shock of white hair almost luminous in the sun. ‘And so he did. I also happen to know that he’s still battling the insurance people over the size of the indemnity. So that direct-deposit you were so happy about—I think you’ll maybe find it didn’t originate from any insurance fund.’

Ethan?

‘But—I don’t understand—why would he do that?’ she wailed. Just when she thought she had him all figured out, the man turned back into a riddle!

‘That’s a fascinating question. Why don’t you ask him next time you see him?’ said Peter, getting back behind the wheel of his car, having done what he came to do, hoping that his irrepressible desire to meddle wasn’t going to backfire on him again. Emily wasn’t his granddaughter, but he had high hopes she might still turn out to be a member of the family.

Emily waited impatiently until Shorty came off the roof and then subjected him to a pointed conversation, which confirmed that Ethan, and not her insurance company, had fast-tracked the reconstruction job, and the bills were all being sent to an offshore investment company, which, surprise surprise, was the same one that funded Ethan’s speculative building projects.

That night she forced herself to switch her mobile phone off and lay awake twisting and turning, fighting the urgent desire to check for messages every few minutes. In her mind she was going over and over the events of the past few weeks, inspecting each and every incident for new significance, wondering if it had been her own doubts and uncertainties she had been projecting onto Ethan, rather than accepting him as the man he truly was; expecting perfection when she was far from perfect herself. Her craving for stability in an inherently unstable world was foolish if it meant that she was rejecting the one thing that she wanted above all else. In trying to fit the small, jigsaw pieces of her broken life back together she had been ignoring the big picture. What she had been doing was conservation, not restoration. Conservation was about preserving an object in its existing damaged condition, restoration was about infusing that object with new and vigorous life for the future.

Once she had made up her mind she was actually able to sleep for a few hours, and early the next morning she phoned Dylan to ask if he still had the keys to Ethan’s house.

Only with difficulty did she stop him from inserting himself into the plan and embellishing it with outrageous ideas. Even then, when she met him down by the waterfront to pick up the keys, she was tempted to let down the tyres of his Porsche to stop him from following her onto the car ferry. In typical fashion he had dressed up in a double-breasted trench coat and hat, and sidled up to talk out of the side of his mouth as he passed her a slip of paper with the directions to Ethan’s house and security code.

‘Make sure you eat it when you’ve memorised it,’ he said. ‘You’ll notice I spread marmalade on the back to make it go down more easily.’

Sure enough there was a sticky blob that tasted of grapefruit when she licked it off her finger. He had obviously scribbled down the address at the breakfast table.

‘No invisible ink?’

He grinned. ‘I ran out of lemons.’

‘I hope you’re not going in to work like that,’ she said disparagingly, slipping the note into the pocket of the swirling green sundress that she thought would nicely blend in with the summer crowd on the island.

‘I thought I looked like one of those sexy spies you see in old-fashioned movies.’