'Oh he'll come... Are you free?... Good.' He pulled a 'phone from his pocket, spoke to Tom, and without giving me time to reflect made the arrangements. Having more or less accused me of taking advantage of Tom, how odd that he should suddenly decide to bring us together the next day. We went downstairs, and refusing a lift to the underground station I left him in the porch waiting for one of his vans to collect him.
Since Andrew had prevented me from allowing normality to return over a few days before speaking to Tom again, abandoning all caution I rang him shortly after arriving home and asked him to meet me in Chiswick that evening. From that weekend the part of my life not on hire to Lindler & Haliburton underwent a complete change. Tom and Andrew took joint first place in my social life, and earlier friends, haunts and habits became marginal. As before the two 'compartments' of my world, that of Lindler & Haliburton and my life outside work, remained largely separate. I found them reasonably manageable like that.
***
At work on Monday my new happiness survived the morning's onslaught of telephone enquiries and e-mail messages, and in the afternoon Peter's antagonism at long last ended.
His secretary rang to say that he wanted to see me immediately in his office. He had successfully enticed a major high street retailer away from a rival accountancy firm, and asked me to assess urgently what work would be needed on our computer network to enable us to take on their accounts. The volume of overseas transactions made special software for handling currency conversions and foreign tax regimes essential.
Of the five people in the information technology unit who might have been called on to share the burden, one was on holiday, another on a training course and a third off sick. For the rest of the week half of my time was spent in Peter's office working through sheaves of documents with long tables of figures sent over by the new client. Fortunately Peter's experience with a US oil company before joining Lindler & Haliburton made him very knowledgeable about overseas trading. We drew up a list of issues for discussion with the new client's representatives, worked through lunch hours and stayed on late, determined to be well prepared at a crucial meeting with senior men who had the final say over the new arrangements.
Our conversation was entirely about business until on Friday evening he asked me to go with him for a drink to a local pub. This invitation was not to be refused, a sure sign of my return to favour. To my relief he did not mention what had happened during the trip to France, but talked mostly about Caroline, saying how the company she worked for was having problems recruiting and retaining information technology staff and being forced to rely more and more on self-employed consultants from agencies. Lindler & Haliburton had so far largely avoided trouble by increasing pay in line with rates elsewhere, but he wanted to know if I thought the trend was going to prove irresistible. I did not give him any hint that freelance work might be a future possibility for me and gave a vague response.