Barefoot in the Dark by Lynne Barrett-Lee Read Free Book Online

it?’
    She beamed at him. ‘ Exactly ,’ she said again. Jack was enjoying the novelty of being in the company of someone who leapt on everything he said with such enthusiasm instead of saying ‘well, no’, or ‘not quite’ or ‘hmm’.
    ‘So, Cinderella,’ he said. ‘Where do I fit in?’
    Her handbag did not look like the kind that would house anything more bulky than a purse and a lipstick, but it clearly did.
    ‘Excuse the scrawl,’ she said, unfolding several creased sheets of A4 and simultaneously shunting various condiments out of the way. ‘And ignore the back. They’re old scripts from Pobol Y Cwm . One of the girls in the office gets them for scrap.’ The waiter returned and wanted to know, though clearly not desperately, what they wanted to have for their lunch.
    ‘I’ll have the – oh, sorry. Are we having starters?’ she asked. Jack nodded. ‘Right. The goujons with the chilli jam to start and for my main course I’ll have the goat’s cheese and caramelised onion tart. It’s a starter as well,’ she added, presumably just in case the waiter wasn’t fully conversant with the contents of his own employer’s menu, which Jack had to concede was a possibility, ‘but I’ll have it for my main course – oh, in fact, thinking about it, instead of the chilli jam do you think I could just have some mayonnaise? That’s with the starter, OK? Thanks.’
    Jack hoped the waiter did shorthand. ‘Tortillas and dips and double egg and chips, please,’ he said.
    ‘Fat chips or skinny chips?’ asked the waiter, still scribbling.
    ‘Fat chips.’
    ‘Good choice,’ observed Hope. ‘Cutting down the surface area, that’s the thing.’ She grinned again. For someone so immersed in the less palatable end of the healthcare spectrum she seemed a very jolly person. She seemed to be perpetually on the verge of emitting a big, throaty laugh.
    ‘Anyway,’ she went on, sliding a finger over her notes. Her nails were not coloured but very shiny. ‘You probably already worked out that having taken on such an ambitious project – and it is ambitious for us, I can tell you, because we’re only a very small charity – what we really need to secure, to get it off the ground, is some serious backing from a nice well-heeled corporation and a big name, of course, to get us noticed.’
    ‘A “big name”, eh?’ He raised his fingers to put it in quote marks. ‘But no luck as yet?’
    She shook her head.
    ‘But then you lost your trainer and figured what the hell. A bird in the hand… ’
    She did laugh now, a big boomy laugh that filled up the airspace between them and made her hair jiggle in little scythes around her chin.
    ‘Er… exactly,’ she said.
    In the ninety or so seconds that followed, Jack found himself in the unusual and rather enjoyable position of being with someone who was plainly hoping the ground would swallow them up. She was only joking, really she was. Though if she was being scrupulously honest she never much listened to Radio Wales, so no, she didn’t actually know who he was before she met him, but someone called Simon, who was apparently in the accounts department where she worked, did listen to his show and said it was very good. And that it wasn’t true that she’d tried lots of people and they’d all turned her down, because they’d not actually got to that stage in the planning yet. (She was blushing by now.) But that she had to concede that had they got to that stage in the planning then, no, she wouldn’t have thought of him because how could she when she’d never heard of him? And, truth be known, she’d already composed a sort of list in her head and she’d thought she might approach the woman who did the weather on HTV – you know, what was her name, Emma… Emma Hepplewhite, that was it. Not because she really knew who she was either, but because her mother went to flower club with her mother and thought she might be able to swing it for her, but then she