A/N: Follows directly from where Jess ran out of Greg's motel room!
Jess's reaction and swift exit at the mention of Felix Gleitner's name surprised Greg and threw him off balance. The boy's panicky departure was as sudden as it was unexpected. Everything had been going along so well between them up to that point, but once again Greg had seen a capricious transformation in the boy. Greg stood open jawed and rooted to the spot where he stood, staring at the closed door for several moments. A niggling doubt gnawed away at him that something was seriously amiss in Jess's background; possibly something sinister that he ought to expose before he got himself in too deep with the boy. Greg ran his mind over their conversations several times trying to identify what else might have caused him to run away. Each time he came up with the same answer. The single name - 'Gleitner .' He mumbled through closed lips to himself 'This Gleitner character needs to be checked out and soon!'
Jess's heart rending question came next to mind "Why Me? Why are you doing this for me?" It was a question for which Greg had no ready answer and now asked it of himself "Why am I doing this?"
He looked around the room that had held such a cosy, almost intimate ambience a few minutes before. In an instant it had changed into a cold, impersonal emptiness. Where Greg had seen warmth, joy and closeness only moments ago, he saw now only the shabby, worn tiredness of the room's appointments. He noticed for the first time, the brown-rimmed hole in the sofa's yellow, plastic covering; burned by a long extinguished cigarette. The room became alien to him and it made him shiver. Greg recognised that it was Jess's presence alone that gave it any positive character and that stretched to his reason for being here. But why? It was a question for which he had no answer. Greg looked again at the closed door through which Jess had abruptly left and it reminded him of another recently closed door.
His mind strayed back to the day of his latest divorce settlement. He had looked on the iron bound, oak door of the courtroom that had borne witness to countless arguments and miseries, which also included his own misfortunes. To Greg the courtroom door at that time had symbolised a barrier to his life that he had to break down or overcome and now it seemed that this closed door of his motel room was another.
Greg felt weak at the knees and sat down to cradle his forehead between his hands to think. He had run away from his problems then and it was tempting for him to do the same again. Once more he felt bitterness rise in his throat as he thought back on his second, failed marriage. It had been his wife's small, provincial, family recruitment business that he had joined and moulded with his ideas and energy to bring it to national prominence. It had been his enterprise and drive that had embraced the opportunities of modern technology to shape the company into one of the most prominent managed service contracts providers in the country; supplying temporary workers to major conglomerates across the length and breadth of the land. He had done that by preaching his particular business 'gospel' to greedy executive ears. They could avoid the legal obligations and heavy burden of costs associated with employing permanent staff by taking on all employees, except vitally important personnel, on temporary contracts; the strict laws that applied to permanent workers did not apply to temps.
He had built a system where major firms could outsource their recruitment to his company. His company, Bailey's, would fulfil the client's requirements from their own banks of registered workers and those of other agencies, whom Bailey's contracted to supply them with temps in those places where they had no offices of their own. It was recognised as a masterstroke of business enterprise. The client received exactly the employees they required, and only when and for as long as they needed them. They did not have to maintain an in-house staff payroll under the Bailey system. The client's central human resources department had only to reconcile and pay one single, monthly invoice to Baileys, who did all the rest. Since most of the temps came from other outsourced agencies, Baileys had little to do but reconcile the invoices submitted by the subordinate agencies and bill the client.
The family had applauded him, none more roundly than Ed Bailey, the bellicose Chairman of the company who welcomed Greg into his home and family when Greg eventually won the hand of Victoria; Bailey's eldest daughter. Even although he had married Victoria, Greg did not share the family's newest aspirations. Now that the family was more financially secure, the quest was to seek its social advancement. This caused an unspoken rift between them. The family left Greg out of the invitations they sent and received to various social functions for fear he would embarrass the family and thereby jeopardise their social ambitions. Greg did not fit the stereotypical mould of the slim, chinless wonders that inhabited the fox hunting community. In consequence, the family did not fully accept Greg as an equal. They drifted further away from him as they sought to become more accepted by the older, quasi-aristocratic families of the 'The County set.' The Bailey's believed, but never once mentioned to him, their fear that his abrupt, rough and ready manners, along with his disinterest in country pursuits would hold them back.
He felt only contempt for their ambitions in social advancement. They would still be nothing other than a very minor agency in a quaint southern market town in England without his energy and personal ambition. It was his drive and enterprise that gave them the wealth to engage in these upper-crust adventures. Greg himself had spent his every waking hour to advance the fortunes of the business. His overriding ambition was to make 'Baileys Managed Services' the biggest of its kind in the country. Ed Bailey, had been content to let him get on with it, and never once had Greg betrayed that trust. While Edward Bailey supped stirrup cups at fox hunt meets, and shouted 'pull' enthusiastically at Clay Pigeon shoots, Greg would be pounding the streets from meeting to meeting at all hours of the day and night.
He was away from home a lot, on which occasions Victoria would fill her time with horse riding and dancing in fashionable venues accompanied increasingly by the impecunious third son of an equally impoverished Earl. His lordship had recently put his ancestral home into the trusteeship of the National Trust, to avoid the costs of its upkeep, in exchange for private apartments for him and his family within the building and its grounds.
Greg despised these people whom he saw as indolent parasites belonging to a long past age, who lived off the backs of others and enjoyed totally undeserved rank and privileges in the modern world. His firm belief was 'A good day's work would do them all a lot of good - probably by killing them off.'
There was no chance of his wife's suitor ever inheriting his father's title, which would go eventually to his oldest brother, whilst he himself would remain 'The Honourable Mr. Palmer' for all of his life. Although there was no likelihood of Victoria ever becoming 'Lady Palmer,' her parents nevertheless quietly encouraged the discreet liaison of their daughter with her penniless, but well bred companion. So while Greg toiled relentlessly to bring home the largesse that maintained them in their luxurious lifestyle, his wife played away from home with this insignificant member of the junior aristocracy.
The situation couldn't last and had come to a head. It did so the night he came home in a celebratory frame of mind after landing the last of eight major banking contracts. He rushed into the family home, where he lived with Victoria, carrying a huge bunch of red roses and a bottle of champagne. Victoria had met him in the hallway. She received him and the flowers stiffly and without a smile. She dropped the blooms disdainfully onto a side table without even pressing them to her nose to sample their exquisite scent. Victoria brushed her hands as if by touching the bouquet she had soiled them. Without any expression of emotion she had turned on him, as casually as if asking him to buy her a postage stamp the next time he visited the Post Office, and had told him they would be divorced; because she wished to marry Henry Palmer.
She had stood in front of him, her face set like chiselled white marble and equally as cold. He felt rather silly holding out a bottle of Bollinger in front of him, unsure that he had heard his wife correctly or that she was not indulging herself in some crude, silly game. But she repeated her announcement and told him he would be sleeping in the guest room until the next day, when he should find himself alternative accommodation. She had turned abruptly on her heel. He remembered the sharp squeak it made on the marble flag-stone of the hall as she strutted away from him, snapping shut the door behind her. The squeak was an insignificant noise, but to Greg it served as a telling note of protest.
Before Greg could recover from the shock of this encounter or assemble his thoughts into a meaningful plan of action, Ed Bailey had come through the door and caught him by the elbow.
'Look at it this way old man.' He had said with an unctuous gravity. 'People make mistakes in life and people do change. It's just one of those unfortunate things. No use fighting it. It'll be hard at first, but there are no children and so that's a blessing. In the circumstances of course.'
Greg flopped into a chair. He sat listening to Bailey but not hearing his words. He watched the flowers he had brought, as their petals fell from the bouquet of roses onto the floor of the hallway following their rough treatment by Victoria. He gazed at them as they fell, like blood red tears, with the constant drone of Ed Bailey as accompaniment. There were no tears in Greg's eyes, but a burning anger building in his belly. He found his voice
'What about the business, what about ME and the business? And aren't you even going to ask me how it went today at the meeting with HSBC?'
Ed had patted his shoulder paternally and mumbled. 'Never mind about that now.'
Greg's thoughts now flooded back to the present moment. He felt the cold sweat in the palms of his hands as he stared at the motel room door through which Jess had left and shook those past, hurtful memories from his head. He felt clammy and in need of a shower again. But his mind was not quite ready to let go of the past just yet. It returned briefly again to those painful remembrances while he tried to sort out his present motivations and find an answer to Jess's question of 'Why Me?'
He and Victoria had not enjoyed a passionate relationship; it had always only been a dutiful liaison. In many ways they had been more like 'kissing cousins' than man and wife. For Greg, it had seemed the right thing to do to be married to her, because that meant he was married into the business as an integral part of it; that was his life. It was the loss of the business that he had created that bothered him much more than the loss of his wife, Victoria. He felt surprised that he did not miss her in the same way, as he seemed to be missing Jess right now. He covered his face with the palms of his hands and shouted through them.
"What the hell is happening to me?"