The woman helped me choose some silver slip-ons, and also persuaded me to buy a matching bag, white socks and even a children’s perfume that smelt sickly like sweets. With the receipt, she added a packet of Love Hearts into the bag, which I removed as soon as I left the shop.
As I raced back to the office, I felt lighter, wishing I could go home early to give it to her now. Two fingers to you, Mira Entwistle, and to all your nasty judgements. How dare she check on us like that? She knew nothing about Rosie and me.
When I walked back into the office, swinging the pale grey shopping bag, my assistant gasped. ‘I love Coco’s. I bought my niece a little scarf in there once.’
I resisted the urge to unpick the sticker on the tissue paper to show her.
Lisa had impeccable taste. She wore black pencil skirts and silk blouses and very high heels, like a secretary in American romantic comedies. I had always felt rather plain next to her in meetings. My hair was cut well, but it never shone like hers, and my skinny legs got lost in my unfashionable suits. I resolved to make the time someday to take notes on where she bought her make-up and clothes so that I could refresh my tired, conservative wardrobe and buy some face creams or foundations that weren’t supermarket brand for a change.
‘I must be paying you too much, Lisa.’ I winked at her.
‘I wish,’ Lisa retorted, leaping up and following me into my glass office.
She reeled off a list of all the people who had called while I was out and stuck the Post-its on my desk next to the various aphorisms I had written on a cluster of neon pink Post-it notes:
Live life to the fullest!
* * *
If you don’t believe in yourself, nobody else will!
* * *
Carpe diem!
* * *
It always seems impossible until it’s done!
* * *
Failure will never overtake me if my determination to succeed is strong enough!
and so on.
‘Have you managed to find out what this “little chat” with Richard is all about?’
‘No,’ Lisa shrugged, and avoided eye contact.
‘Lisa?’
‘Don’t know a thing, honest.’ A crinkle arrived on her flawless young forehead. ‘Richard said two o’clock remember,’ she added, swivelling away to tap at her keyboard.
It was obvious that Lisa was holding something back. She and Richard’s secretary, Becky, were close friends, and wickedly indiscreet with each other.
‘You’re making me nervous,’ I said, pulling on my suit jacket, feeling the heat in the room suddenly, wondering whether it had been wise to spend all that money on Rosie. Redundancies were a daily occurrence these days.
‘Please don’t be late for him, will you?’ Lisa urged, waving me away with one hand.
Richard’s office was five floors up on floor twenty-five.
Floor twenty-five was very different to floor twenty.
The vast room was open-plan with rows of desks where the bankers sat in front of their huge screens, scrutinising indecipherable columns of numbers and talking heatedly into headphone receivers.
I recognised some of the men I had employed for the company: Matthew Willoughby – 32, First from Bristol, requested a salary way past his pay-grade, scored four out of five on the performance grades, letting himself down on ‘openness’; Jonathan Pressfield – 29, worked the trading floor from sixteen years old, just made redundant, two children to feed, three out of five, hence the redundancy. He wasn’t ruthless enough. I liked him. He made the team a happier place, which was why I had originally hired him, against Richard’s advice. I made a note to pass by his desk after this meeting to see how he was getting on.
Becky was not at her desk to act as gatekeeper to Richard, so I tried to lurk in plain view. Through his open door – the only door on the whole floor – he beckoned me in while still holding the phone to one ear. My throat felt tight and I wondered if any sound would come out when I said hello.
Did he look shifty? Did he look like a man who was about to sack me?
His hair was tamed into black, smooth waves across his skull. His cheeks looked buffed, as though he’d been given a rigorous face scrub from his mum, or his wife, who were probably interchangeable.
Richard wouldn’t look shifty if he was about to shoot me in the head.
He hung up. ‘Sorry about that. Hello Gemma, please, sit,’ he smiled, beckoning me over to the Chesterfield sofa, incongruous within the modern glass office.
I sat at the other end and crossed my legs, and then uncrossed them. The leather creaked.
‘So, how are the kids?’
‘Great, yes.’ I nodded, thinking ‘get the fuck to the point!’
‘Noah still playing tennis?’
To uphold good relations, Richard always held one key personal fact about his employees to trot out at appropriate moments.
‘His serves are better than mine,’ I replied.
‘Good lad! Right, well, let’s get to the point, shall we?’
Another nod was all I could manage.
He continued. ‘You’ve probably heard the rumours that Cathy is leaving us?’
My palms tingled. ‘Yes?’
‘We wondered,’ he began, jiggling his leather brogue in my direction, ‘if you would consider filling her shoes?’
His smile had hit his eyes now. A rush of pride overshadowed any of the practical considerations about my undeclared pregnancy and I sat up poker-straight, as though called to attention. Cathy Knowles was Head of Recruitment across Europe. It was a significant promotion. My salary would leap.
‘I would be delighted to,’ I answered firmly, trying to sound measured.
He clapped his hands. ‘That’s great news. Now, I can’t talk salaries or contracts yet, we’ll have to go through the proper channels, as you well know. We’ll be going ahead with the boring bloody process of advertising and interviewing externally, but I wanted to reassure you that, in my book, it’s just a formality. We don’t want to lose you to some headhunter while we fanny around with protocol, now, do we?’
‘No fannying around,’ I grinned. ‘Thank you very much for the opportunity. I’m really looking forward to the challenge.’ I was eager. My head spun. Although I knew the job wasn’t quite mine until contracts were signed, I couldn’t wait to tell Peter.
* * *
On the train back home, I thought practically about what a promotion would entail. I hadn’t been honest with Richard about the baby. I had been swept up in the moment, desperate to enjoy the accolade. The promotion was flattering. No, it was more than that, it was what I had worked fifteen years towards. But if he knew I was pregnant, I doubted he would want to ‘fanny around’ finding maternity cover for me. I had six weeks to declare it before the three-month mark. I had to work out what this new job would mean for the baby, for the family, for me.
It meant longer hours. It meant working weekends. It meant regular trips abroad. It meant much more stress. And it meant even less time with the children. This baby would be my third child to experience nannies when very young.
I didn’t know how to consolidate the two parts of me. The desire to make time for a pretty nursery clashed with my career ambitions. But hadn’t I been managing the balance of home life and work life relatively well so far? Tiredness and stress were facts of everybody’s life these days, weren’t they? Maybe I could ask to work from home one day a week. Delegate some of the trips abroad? Rosie would be taking her eleven-plus next year. She would grow out of her tantrums, surely, and she would be taking herself off to school on a bus or train, or she might even board.
I stopped. I was getting ahead of myself. Once Richard found out about the baby, he might change his mind. Either way, it would be months before I was officially offered the role. Some upstart from another firm might interview so well they wouldn’t be able to resist them. There was time to think about it, to work out the logistics, to talk to Peter about it. The train carriage shot through a tunnel and I shut down my ruminations, cutting them off like the tunnel had cut my view beyond the window.
* * *