The Crystal Cage Read Online Free Page B

and A’s Reading Room for you.’
    ‘I’m glad you enjoyed it,’ he said, and I don’t think he was joking. I went to put the phone down and then ‘Hey, Grace, are you still there? Where do you think I should start with de Vere’s?’
    I took a deep breath. ‘Kelly’s first to confirm they
were
architects.’
    The unvoiced question hung in the air. ‘Kelly’s Post Office London Directory of 1851,’ I said crisply and rang off.
    * * *
    I left Hampstead underground station and turned into Heath Street. Sometime during my journey the weather had transformed from warm sunlight to cold splinters of rain that sliced their way determinedly through an inadequate jacket and short skirt. The walk home seemed interminable, and I arrived at Lyndhurst Villas cascading water. Oliver darted out into the hall as soon as he heard the key, but my drowned state seemed to pass him by.
    ‘Where on earth have you been?’ was his greeting. He didn’t wait for a reply. ‘I’ve been trying to get you all day.’
    I felt myself bristling but said as reasonably as any sodden person could, ‘I mentioned last night that I was working at the V and A today.’
    ‘You had your phone switched off.’ His tone continued accusatory.
    ‘The museum has a strict policy, you know that.’ I was trying to stay patient, but my pressing need for a hot shower was beginning to triumph.
    ‘What I do know was that I wanted you and you weren’t available.’
    His neck was mottling to a dusky red, which was always a sign that he was seriously upset. He liked me to be on call and felt entitled to my attention. I had one more attempt at placating him.
    ‘Oliver, I’m sorry, but I had no idea you were in desperate need of my services.’ It came out rather more sarcastically than I intended.
    ‘Your services, as you call them, are exactly what I needed. And I’ve had to wait for hours to get them.’ He pursed his lips. Very early in our relationship, his ex-wife had been anxious to tell me that Oliver was a ‘petulant’ man and on a very few occasions I’ve had to agree. This was one of them.
    ‘So, what is it?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Why have you been trying to contact me?’
    ‘I’m moving the Gorski earlier than I expected. The present show at Newcastle is closing—it was never a good choice and done against my advice. The upshot is that we need something else to fill the gallery and pretty damn quickly.’
    ‘And?’
    ‘And I was depending on you to make the necessary arrangements. Except you weren’t around to make them.’
    His harping was getting hard to take. He seemed determined to relegate me to an employee who’d fallen down on her duties. But I was still keeping a tight rein on my temper.
    ‘I’m sorry you were inconvenienced,’ I said as mildly as I could, ‘but I’m not your PA. I do have a job of my own.’
    He actually sniffed. ‘If you can call it a job.’
    ‘What exactly do you mean by that?’
    ‘I mean that it’s not serious, darling.’ He saw me looking shocked and tried to bluster his way out, while managing to dig an even deeper hole.
    ‘It’s a casual thing, temporary.’ He waved his hand around as though dismissing the very notion that a job existed.
    ‘In other words, it’s nothing work,’ I finished for him. ‘Why don’t you say it? But then you were opposed to my taking the job I really wanted, even though you paid my student fees for years.’
    His face was annoyingly calm. ‘I saw you had great promise and I was happy to help you fulfil it, but we agreed when you were offered the post at Sussex that you wouldn’t have been happy there. Universities stifle creativity.’
    ‘You agreed,’ I corrected him angrily. ‘And what’s so creative in researching mundane houses for people with too much money? Or, for that matter, in project managing exhibition schedules?’
    I caught sight of myself in the rococo mirror carefully placed to reflect two milk-white cherubs sitting face-to-face on the