Playing Grace by Hazel Osmond Read Free Book Online Page B

up and slowly follow her to the door.
    ‘Right, last chance,’ he whispered. ‘I am going to put my bet on Alistair screeching, “Grace, I appear to have a spare trouser leg and keep toppling over.”’
    Despite trying to maintain a disapproving expression, she laughed at the picture of Alistair with both feet crammed down one leg of his chinos. Gilbert laughed too before placing one hand flat on the door and one on his forehead, suggesting it enabled him to tune into what was happening inside the office.
    ‘No, no,’ he said in a stage whisper, ‘I was wrong about the trousers … hang on, it’s coming through, yes, what he’s actually going to say is, “My God, Grace, we haven’t paid this bill, the bailiffs could arrive at any minute to strip the place.”’
    With that, Gilbert put both hands on the door handle, turned it and let the door swing open.
    ‘My God, Grace,’ Alistair’s voice called out, full of fret and worry, ‘we haven’t paid this bill. They could cut the electricity off at any minute.’
    ‘Ah, so close,’ Gilbert said, and then stepped aside to let Grace enter the office before him.

CHAPTER 4
    Grace believed that everyone had a distinguishing characteristic. Whenever she thought of Alistair, she thought of paper – he was always waving it about, stuffing it in his pockets or sifting through the drifts of it that accumulated on his desk. On rare occasions he would even get to grips with writing on it. Today he was clenching an envelope in one hand and a couple of sheets of paper in the other and there was more, in a rough roll, protruding from the pocket of his chinos. Grace recalled the paper crane Mrs Hikaranto had given her and smiled. Alistair, her origami boss.
    ‘The brown stuff’s really going to hit the fan, Grace,’ he was saying, thrusting the papers towards her. ‘Except there won’t be any power for the fan, so it’ll just—’
    ‘Slide to the floor,’ Gilbert said behind Grace.
    Alistair’s colouring, already stormy, darkened. ‘Yes, thank you, Gilbert. This is no time for your mordant wit.’
    Gilbert came into the reception area and shut the front door behind him, which meant Grace had to tuck herselfin between the leather sofa and the coffee table. The reception, with its art magazines and designer lamps, was furnished to impress clients, but was not spacious enough to accommodate Alistair and his two staff when Alistair was ‘achieving orbit’. This consisted of standing with his feet planted wide apart in the centre of a room while brandishing whatever was offending/upsetting him at the time. As he was fairly bulky to start with, and brandishing was accompanied by finger jabbing, Grace and Gilbert were often corralled into a tiny portion of the space not laid claim to by their boss.
    ‘Perhaps if you just let me see what you’ve got there,’ she said, soothingly, ‘I’m sure—’
    ‘It’s red, I tell you, Grace. Red.’
    It took her a moment to realise that he was talking about the colour of the bill, and not that he’d run his eye over it and she needn’t bother.
    ‘How in God’s name has it got this far, Grace?’ Alistair’s voice was getting louder, rising in pitch. ‘Why didn’t you bring it to my attention earlier?’
    There was a sound of barely concealed exasperation from Gilbert at the way nothing was ever Alistair’s fault, even though he opened all the post and was meant to pass Grace anything that needed action. It was a system that could have worked smoothly if Alistair didn’t have the organisationalskills of a drunken gorilla. Sometimes Grace imagined he dealt with the post by standing in a corner of his room with his eyes closed and hurling it in the direction of his desk. While Grace tried to work around this by surreptitiously tidying up when he was out of the office and actioning things she found mouldering in the far reaches of his room, sometimes something important would elude her. This could be due to a mishap,