True Colours Read Online Free PDF Page B

thistledown, heart-breaking blue eyes looking trustingly up into mine. I thought that the painful ache in my empty arms would surely kill me.
    At home I wasn’t encouraged to wallow in my wretchedness. ‘It’s over now, we’ll forget it,’ I was told. But I couldn’t forget. At night I’d cry myself to sleep in secret, stifling my sobs in the pillow as I agonized about my baby. In my heart I’d called her Carolyn. Where was she now? Would she be loved as I would have loved her? How could I bear the thought of her growing up in the belief that I’d abandoned her? But in the daytime there was no time for regrets or dreams of what might have been. I’d had a lucky escape, I was told. I should be grateful for a roof over my head and good Christian parents. Now it was time to grow up, to train for a job and start to earn my own living.
    I enrolled at the local college for a secretarial course. It was a new environment. My friends had gone – Sophie to sixth form college and Katie to some dead end job. I was too ashamed to seek them out. The other girls on my course seemed so young to me, so light-hearted and fancy free. They seemed little more than children and compared to them I felt a hundred years old. Occasionally one ofthem would invite me to join the crowd for an evening out, to a club or disco but I could imagine the scene if I dared to suggest it at home. I’d already learned that I was never to be trusted again.
    The three boys ate their tea in the kitchen, chattering to each other about the fête, about football and swimming and all the other things little boys are interested in. Soon Harry would have to say goodbye to his friends and try to make new ones, just as I had all those years ago, but he wasn’t shy like me. He had a friendly, gregarious nature and he had no shameful secret to cut him off from the rest. He surely wouldn’t find it a problem. Oh, I hoped so
much
that he wouldn’t find it a problem.
    I qualified well at the end of my course and worked for a year in an insurance firm. When I saw the job with Grayson Electronics advertised, I applied. It was an up-and-coming firm and although the job advertised was only temporary, the money was good and I thought that even as a temporary job it would look good on my CV. I was anxious to be earning enough money to be able to leave home and get a little place of my own. I didn’t think I had the remotest chance of getting the job and no one could have been more surprised than me when I got it.
    The outgoing PA, who was leaving to have a baby, invited me to have coffee with her during which she filled me in on ‘The Boss’.
    ‘Charles is a lovely man,’ she told me, leaning confidentially across the table in the little café round the corner from the office. ‘He’s a good boss, very kind and considerate, but he’s in the middle of a rather acrimonious divorce at the moment so you have to make allowances for his mood swings.’
    She told me she had loved the job and looked forward to returning to it when her baby was a year old. As it happened she never came back.
    When I began working for Grayson Electronics, Charles was in his late thirties. He was the archetypal romantic novel hero, handsome, tall and well built, his thick hair attractively streaked with silver. His dark eyes were shrewd, summing up people and situations quickly and on my first day as his PA, I couldn’t have been more nervous. When I made my third stupid mistake and wasclose to tears he smilingly put me at my ease.
    ‘It’s your first day, Frances. You’re not going to get everything right straight away,’ he said kindly. He explained that the reason he hadn’t engaged an experienced PA was that she would have had to unlearn her old boss’s ways and habits.
    ‘I need to train you to my ways,’ he told me. ‘Can’t do with someone who’s always telling me how they did things at her old firm and how much better it was. I don’t think you’ll find me too difficult