Walking in Darkness by Charlotte Lamb Read Free Book Online

teacher’s pay it’s tough surviving, especially if you have kids.’
    ‘Have you got kids?’ he asked, and she knew he was teasing her and laughed.
    ‘No, of course not. Have you?’
    ‘No wife, no kids,’ he shrugged. ‘As my mother never stops reminding me.’
    ‘She wants you to get married?’
    ‘She’s fixated on becoming a grandmother. Why do women get obsessed with these stages of life? First they desperately want to get married, then they want children, and as soon as the children grow up they want grandchildren – why can’t women just let life surprise them?’
    ‘We have a sense of the right order of things, I suppose,’ she said, taking the question seriously. ‘A sense of the natural rhythms of life.’
    ‘But not you? You don’t want marriage and children yet?’
    ‘First I want to enjoy my job,’ she said frankly. ‘That’s why I left teaching. I didn’t like doing it, and I wanted a better life, it’s so tiring being poor, really poor, never having any money left over from the bare essentials. Have you been to my country? Eaten our food? Grey slabs of meat, potato dumplings, almost no green vegetables or fresh fruit except at prices very few people can afford. And you have to ration your shampoo, can’t afford to go to a hairdresser, have to keep wearing your clothes for years – it wears you down, you feel you’re endlessly struggling, you get very depressed.’
    ‘The Czechs I’ve met always seem very cheerful, though.’
    ‘We’re free now – of course we’re cheerful and we have hope, at last. We can look forward to a better life soon. But few of us earn enough. That’s why, when Vlad offered me a full-time job with the agency, working abroad, I jumped at it. He had begun to realise it was no longer enough just to take stories from other sources, he was selling the agency material all over East Europe by then and he needed his own staff out in the field finding stuff with an East European angle.’
    ‘He sounds like a live wire. I once worked for a guy like that, the year I went into television. He was a documentary producer, Bernie Stein, he was never afraid to take chances, whatever the risk. Men like that don’t come too often.’
    She nodded, liking the warmth and affection in his eyes. ‘Vlad is one in a million,’ she agreed, and they smiled at each other, united in their feelings for these giants from their past.
    ‘Is this the first foreign country you’ve worked in?’
    ‘No, I was based in London first, for a year, but I travelled if ever a story came up elsewhere in Europe. I had my own car for the first time, too.’ Her eyes were a wide, bright blue with pleasure. ‘Only a second-hand Mini, it’s true, but it was mine! You have no idea what that felt like, to own my own car.’
    ‘Oh, don’t I? I worked my butt off to earn enough to buy my first old banger. I was still at school and had half a dozen different part-time jobs that last year, just to save up to buy a car. I worked in a store, sweeping floors and burning trash; I cleaned houses, I washed up for a local French bistro . . .’
    ‘Your parents couldn’t afford to help?’
    ‘They aren’t rich, although we were never poor, either. But they were going to have to help me out while I was at college. I decided not to ask them for a car.’
    Sophie read the stubborn lines of his mouth, the pride in the set of his head and felt a sense of kinship. Americans always seemed to her so rich and spoilt, used to getting what they wanted when they wanted it. This man was different. She could understand this man.
    ‘You must have felt great when you finally had the money!’
    His smile flashed out. ‘Ten feet high. I bought an old blue Thunderbird; the chassis was beaten to hell but a friend re-tuned the engine for me and it lasted me two years. I loved that car more than any car I’ve had since.’
    ‘That was how I felt seeing all the places in Europe whose names I’d heard all my life but