Chapter 7 #2
“Mummy gave me a plaster.” She pointed to a garishly colored Band-Aid with a picture of a cartoon character.
“That looks like an awesome Band-Aid,” Lucy said, and Eva giggled.
“She said you had a funny accent,” Eva’s mother said with a little laugh. She looked like Eva, with an elfin face and wispy blond hair. “You’re American.”
“Actually, I was born in England, but I know I don’t sound like I was. And I thought you guys were the ones with the funny accents.”
Eva’s mother laughed, and Lucy smiled, her heart lifting. It didn’t take much to get her to start hoping again.
“We don’t get many Americans around here,” Eva’s mother said, and stuck out her hand. “I’m Andrea.”
“Hi,” Lucy said, and shook her hand. “Lucy Bagshaw.” She remembered what Eva had said about not having a dad, and wondered if she’d ever get to know Andrea well enough to hear her story.
They chatted all the way into school, and her bad mood had cleared away with the clouds by the time she arrived in the office. Maggie pressed a mug of tea in her hand and gave her a wink. “I told Mr. Kincaid you were in the loo when he asked where you were.”
Lucy grinned back. “You’re a saint, Maggie Bains.”
“I just don’t want you to get fired on your second day,” Maggie replied with an answering smile.
Lucy took a much-needed sip of tea and sat down in front of the computer. The children were coming into the office with the morning registers; Maggie had explained yesterday that two children from every classroom brought the morning registers to be logged into the computer.
Now Lucy took them with a smile for each of the children, from the too-cool-for-school Year Sixes to the brand-new kindergarten—or Reception, as they called it in England—pupils, only four years old, who held out the registers with wide eyes and trembling hands.
Around her the school was humming to life; Maggie had set the photocopier whirring away, and teachers were dashing in and out of the staff room with piles of papers and mugs of tea.
A hassled-looking mum brought in a late Year Four and then gossiped with Maggie across the opened glass partition for the better part of half an hour.
Lucy hunted and pecked her way through the registers, logging each present, absent, or tardy with painstaking slowness.
She knew her way around a computer when it came to design and graphic art, but spreadsheets were her nemesis and she always seemed to be leaping to the next box before she’d filled one in completely.
Alex, thankfully, had not left his office, although Lucy had discovered that if she leaned forward in her seat and craned her neck, she could see him at his desk through the window of his office that overlooked the front hall. Not that she would do that.
The still-hassled but more cheerful-looking mum had left and Maggie had bustled back to the photocopier, taking out a stack of parent letters before glancing over at Lucy.
“Are you still on the morning register?”
“Sorry, I’m a bit slow with these spreadsheets.”
“I don’t suppose it really matters. There’s not too much to do, is there?
” As if to prove her wrong, the phone rang and Maggie snatched it up with a cheery, “Good morning, Hartley-by-the-Sea Village Primary.” She paused for a moment, her forehead wrinkling in a frown, and then launched into a lengthy description of the current issues with the school’s boiler.
Lucy turned back to her computer screen.
She’d just gotten to Year Three when she stilled, her gaze trained on the middle of the year’s register. Kincaid, Poppy.
Surely not. Kincaid had to be a fairly common last name. Or maybe Alex had nieces and nephews at the school. Juliet had told her, on that beach walk, that everyone here was related one way or another, and if you weren’t, then you were an offcomer, no matter how long you’d lived here.
“Are you an offcomer?” Lucy had asked, and Juliet had smiled grimly.
“I’ll always be an offcomer,” she’d said.
Maggie hung up the phone with an exasperated sigh and turned back to the photocopier. “Maggie,” Lucy said, and she looked over her shoulder.
“Yes, love?”
That was something that would take some getting used to: near strangers calling you love. Although, actually, Lucy kind of liked it. “Does Mr. Kincaid have relatives at the school?”
“Relatives?” Maggie let out one of her booming laughs. “You could say that. His daughter Poppy is in Year Three. Sweet little thing, poor soul.”
Lucy swiveled in her chair. “Poor soul?”
Maggie’s expression tightened briefly and she flashed Alex’s closed door a wary glance. “No mum. Alex’s wife died nearly two years ago now, only a few months after they’d come up from Manchester.”
He was a widower? Lucy stared at Maggie, unable to form a response. She’d assumed Alex Kincaid was one of those aggressively single men who was your common commitment-phobic workaholic. He hadn’t seemed married, and as for being a father . . .
She supposed it shouldn’t change how she viewed him, but it did.
She couldn’t keep sympathy from swelling inside her at the thought of him coping alone with a daughter.
Although maybe he had a girlfriend, one of those glossy, coolly competent women who also managed to be kind and lovable with a little girl.
She turned back to the register, her fingers hovering above the keyboard as she squinted at the screen and tried to figure out how to get to the next box on the table.
The return button? Tab? She pushed both and watched as a box disappeared and another enlarged, just as Alex Kincaid came into the office.
He frowned at her computer screen and she gave him her sunniest smile. “So, as you might have guessed, my word processing skills are a little underdeveloped.”
“That’s a spreadsheet application, not a word processing program,” he answered, and she wondered if his wife had minded his anal-retentive behavior. Widower, a little voice whispered inside her. Widower and single dad.
“I think I just proved my point. Now if you wanted me to design a brochure for the school, I could do that, no problem.”
Alex’s frown deepened. “We’re a state school. We don’t need brochures.” He pronounced it bro-shurs, putting equal emphasis on both syllables.
“Just a thought,” Lucy murmured, and he brandished a piece of paper at her.
“I have a draft of an e-mail here. It’s to the board of governors. There’s a meeting next week, and I need them all to receive the agenda. Could you forward this to the board? The addresses should be in the contacts folder on the e-mail server.”
“I probably can manage that,” Lucy answered. E-mail she could do.
“Thank you,” he said, his voice terse, and he turned to head back to his office.
“A bunch of us are going to the pub tonight,” Lucy called after him. The words popped out of her mouth before she could think better of them, or consider her motive. “Just for a drink after work. Why don’t you join us?”
Slowly he turned around. He looked, Lucy thought, rather dumbfounded by her invitation. “Thank you, but I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Why not?”
“People like to relax at those kinds of social occasions,” he answered stiffly. “If I was there, they wouldn’t be able to.”
“Because you’re the boss or because—” She stopped suddenly, biting her lip. Behind her Maggie had stopped shuffling papers and was clearly listening to this exchange with avid interest.
“Because?” Alex prompted, his frown fast becoming a scowl.
“You’re a bit . . . stern,” Lucy allowed, and Maggie suppressed something that sounded like a cross between a cough and a laugh. Alex stared at her for a long moment and Lucy wondered if she was about to get fired.
“Only a bit?” he finally said, and to her amazement his mouth quirked upwards in the tiniest of smiles. Lucy stared at him in shock, and then grinned back. Alex Kincaid had actually made a joke.
“Enjoy your night out,” he said quietly, his expression back to its usual stony stare, and he returned to his office, closing the door behind him.
Shaking her head again, Lucy turned back to the computer and from behind her she heard Maggie rustle papers.
“Now, that was interesting,” Maggie said, and Lucy decided not to ask what she meant.
An exhausting but fairly productive day’s work later, Lucy was closing down the office, the children having all spilled out of the school an hour ago, and was ready to head to the pub with a few of the teachers.
Maggie had taken off after lunch, claiming Lucy could handle everything that came her way, although Lucy wasn’t convinced of that.
She’d managed to disconnect three calls—two of them meant to go through to Alex—and logging the afternoon register—something she didn’t see the point of—had taken the better part of an hour.
At half past two Alex had come out of his office to inform her he would take his own calls. Meekly, Lucy had agreed. Transferring calls was not turning out to be one of her skills.
Now Diana, the red-haired Year Five teacher, waited for her by the door. “So how are you finding Cumbria?” she asked as they left the school together.
Lucy thought of the endless rain and wind, her sister’s glare and ensuing silence. “I like it so far. I think.”
“So what made you come all this way, then?” Diana asked as she buttoned up her coat. The wind blowing off the sea felt like it was straight from Iceland, which, considering their location, it probably was. “I know you have a sister here, Juliet, but it’s an awful long way from America.”
“I was at a loose end, and I thought I’d like a change.” Diana nodded, and thankfully didn’t press. Lucy imagined telling her, or anyone, the full, unvarnished truth. “What about you?” she asked. “You don’t sound like a local, either.”
“Not precisely. I’m from Carlisle.”
“And your husband works in Manchester?”
Diana grimaced. “Yes.”
“He couldn’t get a job up here?”