Free Playing Grace by Hazel Osmond

torch,’ she said, fumbling for her desk, andall at once being in the dark didn’t seem such a good idea. Someone was moving; she could hear them. She worked her way around her desk, her hands feeling clammy, and Gilbert started to whistle. He sounded as if he were still standing right where he had been when the lights went out. She listened again. Someone was definitely moving around – there was the scuff of a shoe, or a boot, on the carpet not far from her.
    ‘Remind me to take that kettle out with the rubbish when I go tonight, Alistair,’ she said, just to gauge from his answer where he was now standing.
    Exactly where he’d been before, judging by the uninterested, ‘Right,’ she got back.
    Pulse ricocheting about, she bent down quickly and grabbed the handle on the middle drawer and pulled. She felt for the torch and then squawked.
    Someone had just blown in her right ear.
    ‘What’s the matter now?’ Alistair called.
    ‘Nothing, nothing,’ she said, swiping through the dark off to her right with her hand, but only connecting with air. ‘I touched something sharp in the drawer. No damage done.’
    This time she managed to get the torch and held it in her not very steady hand to turn it on. In the beam she could see that Alistair and Gilbert were indeed wherethey had been when the lights went off, but Tate was closer to her desk. His face was a lesson in how to look innocent.
    She asked Gilbert to unplug the kettle again and repeated the whole process of carrying the chair out through reception before balancing on it to reach the fuse box. As she did, she listened to the flow of conversation between the three men. It stopped and started as if they felt a bit self-conscious talking into the dark.
    ‘So, what’s your background?’ Gilbert asked Tate, who replied, ‘Art Institute of Chicago. Then a gallery in New York for a few months …’
    Grace flicked the switch back up, the lights came on and she carried the chair back into the room.
    ‘Wanna hand?’ Tate said, nodding at it.
    ‘No, thank you. I can manage a chair.’
    ‘But not a kettle?’
    Grace was careful not to plonk the chair down and when she opened the drawer to drop in the torch, she did it gently. Years of training herself to keep the lid on her more extreme emotions were paying off.
    ‘Good job you had a flashlight,’ Tate went on, raising his eyebrows. ‘Can get pretty scary in the dark.’
    She ignored the subtext of that, even though all of a sudden she wanted to put her hand to her ear.
    ‘Oh, I’m prepared for most things,’ she said brightly and then wished she hadn’t as, rather than making her sound like Superwoman, she felt she had come across like a very old, faintly pathetic female Scout. The kind of person who carries a Swiss army knife around just in case anyone needs something gouging out of somewhere.
    ‘We depend on Grace to get us out of any mess,’ Gilbert said, making her feel worse. ‘So, you have matches. Please say you’re a fellow smoker? Normally I’m exiled in the yard alone. Be nice to have some company round the back.’ He left a beat. ‘If you’ll pardon the pun.’
    Yes, Gilbert was definitely flirting and Tate seemed to be flirting back in a kind of metrosexual way that was something else Grace knew she was going to grow to hate about him. Empty, easy charm. The worst kind.
    ‘Yup, I’ll keep you company,’ Tate said, ‘but I’m really trying to kick the habit. Cut right back in the summer, but now …’ He turned to Grace. ‘Guess you’ve never been a smoker?’
    ‘No, afraid not. And now, Alistair, sorry to interrupt, but there are a couple of things on your desk I’d like to talk to you about. Shall we?’
    She waved in the direction of Alistair’s office, which was always a tricky manoeuvre and meant you had to decide in advance whether to be literal and do a zig-zagging thingwith your arm to indicate the route into the reception area and back out again, or go for the