by Celia Walden
‘And they interview Christel?’
Maya laughed. ‘You’re funny. Can you imagine interviewing a two-year-old? She’s actually quite happy at our local nursery for the moment, but obviously Greenleaf is the Holy Grail.’
‘Obviously.’
‘Anyway, the whole thing’s been so stressful, what with all the groundwork you have to put in and the grovelling. They have so few spaces. But I finally got us this interview, and I’m counting on Jamie to do his charming thing and win them over.’
Tiny buds were sprouting in Alex’s mind. This was the kind of information she’d come for.
As Alex took a swig of water, Maya glanced at her hand.
‘I leave my wedding and engagement rings at home for classes,’ she pre-empted.
‘I should probably do the same. You’ve got to be sure you remember where you put them, though. My husband’s forever fiddling with his and leaving it in random places around the house. It’s my “pet peeve”, as you guys call it. Your husband – what does he do?’
Alex dodged a double buggy heading directly for her. ‘He’s in the city.’
She was pretty sure she’d never heard anyone follow up on that, very few people apparently either understanding or caring what went on there.
‘And you, Lexie?’
This was less easy. But they were approaching Turnham Green Terrace now, where Alex was hoping Maya might veer off home, and her eyes went to a woman laughing shrilly on her phone outside Space NK.
‘Marketing – beauty.’ As soon as she’d said it Alex realised how stupid it was. People who worked in the beauty industry didn’t look like her. ‘But I’m on the tech side of things,’ she explained, gesturing down at herself. ‘As you can probably tell.’
The two women had stopped walking now, having reached the top of the terrace, and Alex felt conflicting emotions: relief that the questions she was finding it increasingly hard to answer would stop, and annoyance at the realisation that she’d been enjoying Maya’s company.
‘Why do you do that?’ Unperturbed by the jostle of people heading out to lunch, Maya was standing on the corner, eyes narrowed. ‘Put yourself down all the time. You’ve been doing it all morning.’
‘I just …’ Alex gave up trying to find a flippant brush-off. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Sorry. Danish people – we’re direct.’
‘No.’ Again, Alex felt that Maya had a curious ability to see into her, spot the equivocations and the bravado. ‘Direct is … good.’
They were in everyone’s way, and probably absurd to look at, facing one another with babies strapped to their chests, but Maya didn’t move.
‘I was a pretty successful interior designer,’ she said. ‘You know, before.’ And this piece of information – with all the vulnerabilities it contained – hung there for a moment.
‘I could see that.’
Maya blinked twice. And shot through with sunlight, her eyes were a khaki green that was almost synthetic in intensity. She wasn’t just catalogue beautiful, Alex realised. There was more to it. And this too annoyed her. Jamie didn’t deserve anything rare or different.
‘I was planning on going back to work before this little one came along. But once you’ve been off for three or four years you’ve got to ask yourself what you’ve really got to offer people.’
‘I bet you’ve got plenty to offer.’
It felt like a long time since Alex had stood opposite someone who wanted something more. Only it wasn’t a man holding out for a kiss at the end of the night, and just before Maya opened her mouth to speak Alex realised what it was she wanted.
‘I’m starving. You don’t fancy lunch … at mine?’
‘Oh.’ This was so unexpected that Alex couldn’t think of a quick get-out.
‘That’s such a nice idea, but actually I have to be somewhere and Katie’s going to need her nap …’
Always just the one excuse. Wasn’t that what people said? Two and it sounds like lies.
‘Of course.’
There was that same flicker of hurt again, quickly covered up just like the first time. Which left Alex baffled. Maya could hardly be lonely, could she? Disappointed in the shit she married, maybe. But lonely? ‘Sorry. Next time!’ Alex had already started to walk away, but what she really wanted to do was run: away from Maya and her freakishly nonreactive child, away from the stifling wealth of these cafés and delicatessens selling dried turmeric and consolation prizes for their absent, cheating husbands. Away from her own pointless lies.
But Maya wasn’t giving up that easily. ‘Wait. Lexie.’
So she did, listening as Maya breathlessly begged her to ‘come back to the house and have lunch and a glass of rosé in the garden with me. Because it’s the nanny’s day off, and the truth is that as much as I love this little one, I’m going to lose it if I don’t get some adult conversation.’
And when she was done, Alex smiled. It was risky and wrong. It was insane. Yet she heard herself say, ‘OK – I’d love to see where you live.’
CHAPTER 14
JILL
‘Can you keep your voices down?’ Jill hissed at the small group assembled outside her office. ‘I’m on a conference call to Doha and I can’t hear a bloody word.’
‘Sorry.’
Paul had the good grace to apologise, but Jamie just threw her an irate glance. ‘Or speak as loud as you want,’ she muttered, shutting the door, ‘but maybe in your own offices?’
It was clear that something had gone very wrong, though, and as Jill wound up the call, inserting the only line of Arabic she knew as a slightly flubbed final flourish, she had a grim realisation what it must be: Minerva.
They’ve passed? she emailed Jamie. And his reply pinged back within seconds: Yup.
Jill stared at the unapologetic one-word message wondering when and why the man she’d thought of as both a loyal colleague and a friend for years had not only lost all respect for her, but decided she was the enemy.
It had been a week since Jill had received the anonymous email, and in that time she’d examined and re-examined every word and turn of phrase, even getting up in the middle of the night to cross-reference the dates and times on the message thread with the meetings on BWL’s intranet calendar. Neither Jamie nor Paul had been in meetings at the precise times those messages had been sent. Another quick search through her inbox had also revealed that Jamie had never used ‘YKW’ in conversation with her.
There was one last option: Paul. But looking across the floor into his office now, where her partner was bent over a site plan, Jill felt reticent. Just showing him the exchanges would make her look insecure in his eyes – as though Jill secretly feared she had been struck down by the ‘senile sixties’. It might even plant the seed of her being past it in his mind. The two men were buddies, too, and had become closer since Paul’s marriage had fallen apart, with him preferring to run over the torturous details of his divorce with Jamie than with her – something Jill had welcomed, until now. If he did recognise Jamie’s vicious words as those emailed to him months ago, would he even admit to it? Or would he remain loyal to his male colleague?
Having ricocheted between absolute conviction that the email was genuine to the certainty it was either fake or doctored and back again over the past few days, Jill had decided to end the madness earlier that morning and call Tara from IT into her office.
‘It’s a bit of a sensitive one, this, so it’s going to have to stay completely between us,’ she began hesitantly, before launching into it – the whole business had already taken up too much of her time. ‘You’d better just come over here and have a read.’
As the young woman stooped over her screen to read the email thread, Jill watched her reactions. Her mouth twitching a little with embarrassment at the words she’d read, Tara straightened up and turned to her boss: ‘You want to know who sent this? Because that’s not going to be easy.’
Jill flashed back to Alex’s feverish eyes that night in the pub �
�� ‘All I’m talking about is giving him a little push’ – and Nicole’s semi-smile as she murmured the words ‘stealth power’. With either or both women surely behind Jamie’s D-list humiliation, wasn’t it possible that the email was a similar stunt? But if it had been written and sent to remind Jill of the pub pact she’d reneged on, they were going about this all wrong. Far too much had been drunk and said that night, and although Jill was still in shock over what she’d learned about Jamie and aware that she couldn’t now ignore his behaviour, there had to be a better way of dealing with him than the puerile plan they’d come up with.
‘All I really want to know, Tara, is if it’s genuine: if the messages were written as they appear, or whether they could have been, well, edited.’
‘That I may be able to do. You’ll give me a couple of hours?’
The phone rang and for a moment she hoped that it might be Jamie calling to apologise and assure her she’d misjudged him on this and everything else. ‘But the number on the phone display, she realised, was her own.
‘Stan – everything OK?’
‘Yes and no, love. But I don’t want you to worry. There’s been a fair amount of pain and dizziness since early morning. Dr Jacks seems to think the best thing is to go down to the hospital.’
‘Since this morning? Why didn’t you say?’
‘I’m telling you now, love.’
Stan had always been unflappable, and perversely the cancer only seemed to have made him more so, imbuing him with a sort of fatalistic tranquillity that, far from reassuring Jill, secretly drove her mad.
‘OK. Give me forty minutes and I’ll be there.’
‘No, no, please don’t come. I promise I’ll call as soon as we’re done, and actually on the Prostate UK site it does say that this can happen.’
‘I thought we said Dr Google was off limits?’
On the far side of the office, Jill spotted Jamie coming out of the lift with one of the blended iced coffee drinks he liked. All these years she’d logged his sweet tooth with fond amusement. Now that he should be keeping his head down and desperately trying to make up for his mess, it struck her as outrageous that he should be idly nipping out for a frothy treat.
She watched as Jamie wove his way through the marketing section, stopping by the desk of a pretty, almond-eyed brunette in a cornflower-blue summer dress. She had an Italianate surname, Jill remembered, something sexy and exotic, and one of those hoisted upper lips that kept her mouth in a kind of permanently sensual semi-gape. But instead of looking pleased by Jamie’s attentions, Jill noticed, the girl looked uncomfortable.
‘I’d rather be at the hospital with you.’
‘I know you would. But I’m telling you, I don’t want you to come, and the cab’s here so I’ll call from the hospital.’
‘Make sure you do. Make sure you call the second you’re …’
But Stan had hung up.
Jamie was still chatting to the brunette, every so often reaching for something from a packet on her desk – throwing it up in the air and catching it, seal-like, in his mouth. Without taking her eyes off him Jill filled a glass with Evian from the bottle she always kept on her desk and downed it in one.
Looking at Jamie now was like looking at someone in one of those ‘face warp’ apps her teenage niece had once made her and Stan try. There he was: familiar yet ghoulishly twisted. And was he preying on that girl, just as he had Nicole, right there in front of everyone? Had she really been so blind all this time?
Propelled by the force of her anger, Jill yanked open her office door, striding past a surprised Kellie – ‘You’ve got the valuation guy calling in two minutes!’ – and headed in an unwavering diagonal towards Jamie.
The girl spotted her before he did, and the unwelcome image of herself as some kind of aged schoolmarm on the warpath did nothing to calm Jill down.
‘Jamie?’
He turned, surprised but also, she thought, slightly defiant. ‘Jill.’
‘Do you have a moment?’
She’d been in some testing professional situations over the years and until now had always found it easy to keep her cool. That it was somehow deemed OK for young women to behave emotionally at work these days, as though their sex alone excused it, was baffling to her. Jill could count on one hand the times she’d raised her voice in the office, and she’d certainly never allowed any further physical signs of upset to show.
Just the other week she’d thrust an FT article about crying in the office being an ‘acceptable human reaction most often succumbed to by high achievers’ beneath Stan’s nose, and they’d both laughed at the idea of her openly weeping in the conference room. ‘You’ve never been a crier even in private,’ he’d said. And whilst it was true that she hadn’t shed a tear when he was first diagnosed, Jill was glad Stan hadn’t seen her the day after all his tests. He’d been laid out in his hospital bed, his waxy face turned towards the window as the oncologist talked about the ‘multidisciplinary team’ that would be a part of his life moving forward, and the immediate side effects of both his medication and the radiotherapy: the initial ‘tumour flare’ he might experience, the bone pain, back pain and blood in the urine to watch out for. And she’d nodded and joked her way through it before ‘nipping to the loo’ where she’d leant her forehead against the tiled wall and cried out a single sob so violent it had left her shaking.
‘I do indeed have a moment,’ Jamie came back with, his smile tight, and Jill was glad for that at least. If he’d said they couldn’t talk now, in front of the girl, Jill would have taken it as a challenge.
‘Looks like your honey-glazed almonds have been spared.’ He smirked down at the girl. ‘Although I may just nick one last one?’ Tossing it up in the air, Jamie extended his neck, catching the nut in his mouth. Then he took a small bow. ‘Jill, have you met Sophia? She joined us from the Manchester office in March.’
But all of this was somehow power play that Jill didn’t have time for. Giving the girl an impatient nod, she motioned towards her office. ‘Shall we?’
Nothing more was said until they reached the conference room, where Jamie held the door for her in one of the excesses of gallantry that she had once found charming but now suspected were fake: all part of Jamie’s general duplicity.
‘Water,’ he gasped, setting down the dregs of his frappé and pouring himself a glass of her Evian. ‘This stuff makes me thirsty.’
Jill chose to remain standing while he drank. And when Jamie was done he turned towards her with a quizzical smile: ‘What exactly is your problem, Jill?’
‘My problem?’ she asked, trying to conceal how shocked she was by his tone.
‘Yes.’ He sat down, legs apart.
‘I was going to ask you the same thing. We’ve just lost a major client, and I get nothing but a one-word email from you.’
‘Not lost, Jill. They’ve passed on one deal.’
‘OK, fine, and let’s see if they come back to us for another.’
‘I can promise you they will.’ Leaning back in his chair, Jamie lifted his hands behind his head, expanding his chest.
Jill couldn’t let the smugness pass. ‘How?’ She walked briskly around the desk to face him but didn’t sit down. ‘I’ve always admired your confidence, Jamie, but there’s a point at which it just becomes rashness. I’d told you your D-list was a bad idea, but you wouldn’t listen. And I have got to be kept in the loop more.’ The sound the flat of her palm made against the desktop startled her: this wasn’t her; she didn’t behave like this. ‘I mean, you didn’t even think to come and tell me when the O’Ceallaighs passed earlier.’
‘It was only a few hours ago.’
‘They came into the office?’
‘No.’ A shadow crossed his face. ‘No, there was a misunderstanding and … anyway, this time it was their fault.’
Only now did Jill finally sit. ‘What was their fault?’
‘They thought we were meeting at their offices, but we had it scheduled for here�
��’
‘Wait a second – you messed up again?’
‘No, Jill. They got it wrong. It said right there on the intranet calendar that the meeting was here at BWL.’ He shook his head. ‘It doesn’t matter. We had a conference call instead.’
‘I find it hard to believe it didn’t matter. Either way, I, like Paul, would quite like to know about these things the moment they happen.’
‘Can I finish?’
‘Please.’
‘Trust me, nobody feels worse about Minerva than I do. But all I can do now is try and line up another buyer for—’
‘Right.’ Jill couldn’t help herself. ‘So concentrate on that, not some girl in marketing.’
‘Sorry?’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘Erm.’ He made a show of putting his hand to his chin in puzzlement. ‘Not sure I do. Seriously, do you hear yourself? Her name is Sophia. And I thought you were the one always saying we should make the newbies feel welcome.’
‘I don’t give a damn what her name is right now.’
The silence that followed might have morphed into something more hostile had a soft tap on the glass behind her not interrupted them.
‘Sorry, Jill – it’s your husband again,’ her PA mouthed. Of course, she’d muted her phone.
‘Thanks, Kellie.’ She stood. But all of a sudden, Jamie was beside her, his sheeny brown eyes full of compassion.
‘Stan OK?’
She nodded, but he’d spotted her hesitation.
‘Go and be with your husband.’
Then Jamie did something he’d only done on a handful of occasions over the years: he hugged her. And rather than squirm, which Jill might have done even half an hour earlier, she felt some of her anger drain away, and found herself hugging him back. These were testing times for them both, so testing for her that she had put everything into question: even him.
He’d been set up with Minerva, that much seemed obvious. And why trust Nicole or Alex over someone she knew far better than either of them, let alone an email that had clearly been sent by someone with a revenge-filled agenda? That she’d actually asked Tara to look into it now filled her with shame. She would tell her to forget the whole thing, then she would go and check on Stan.