What Women Want

by Fanny Blake

  She was not disappointed. There wasn’t a moment of awkwardness as they introduced themselves, not a moment of hesitation as they weighed each other up. Lunch sped past in a haze of laughter and conversation with an undertow of sexual tension that had made itself felt almost immediately, only to intensify the longer they spent in each other’s company. The dishes of sea bass with garlic, ginger and soy, oven-roasted lamb with fiery spices, flourless chocolate cake with raspberry sauce came and went, eaten almost unnoticed. Wine glasses were topped up with a never-ending stream of Sauvignon Blanc as they got to know each other. Lunch bled imperceptibly into the afternoon so that when Bea looked at her watch to see whether it was time to return to the office she was astonished to find it was already four thirty. It had hardly seemed worth going back for an hour, particularly when she briefly considered the glum faces that would surround her as they waited for Adam’s axe to fall. Her decision was made in a nano-second. She was having a good time. Why stop? If questioned, she’d just say she’d been with an author.

  The graphic-design company in which Tony was a partner seemed to have little need of him either so, instead, they agreed that nothing would be nicer than to cross the river to Tate Modern. They wandered between the rooms, both of them less than half intent on the pictures on the walls. In the darkened space of a video installation, she accidentally brushed her hand against his. Did he too feel the jolt of electricity that had travelled between them? They emerged into the glare of the gallery, Bea feeling as though something in the world had shifted.

  Rather than seeing more, they decided to stroll along the South Bank, stopping to watch the river traffic, leaning over the stone wall by one of the Victorian wrought-iron street lights in the shade of the giant plane trees, dazzled by the sunlight on the water. It was unusual for Bea to feel so relaxed in a stranger’s company but, she pinched herself, she really did. Tony must have kissed the Blarney Stone several times before he’d moved to London. His flow of conversation was effortless and amusing, his attention flattering, his company diverting. Everything she could have asked for in a date. As they took themselves into a small tapas bar, it dawned on Bea where all this was leading. And lead there it did.

  The sex had been better than good, earth-moving, even. A half-smile slid across her face as she remembered how spontaneously and how well they’d connected. Her fear of embarrassment at getting her kit off in front of someone new had proved groundless. Tony hadn’t recoiled in horror at the sight of her body, stranger to the gym as it was. In fact, she seemed to recall, as her smile broadened, quite the reverse. Nor was she the inhibited sex-starved singleton she’d worried she might have become during the drought since Colin’s departure. To her surprise, she had found that her self-consciousness was disappearing with age.

  What was keeping him for so long? Her thoughts were taking her in one direction and one direction only, and she was aware that there were a good forty-five minutes or so that could be put to good use before they both had to leave for work.

  Not wanting to wake Ben by shouting, Bea edged herself out of bed, draping her faded but attractively Bohemian silk dressing-gown round her. Her attention was caught by the dust on the bedside table-top and the base of the light, all too visible in the sunshine leaking through the gap in the curtains. Not wanting Tony to realise her slummy side just yet, she grabbed the black cotton knickers she’d been only too pleased to abandon on the floor the night before and did a quick dust with them before hurling them into the laundry basket. Pleased with the result, she went to find him in the bathroom. To her surprise, the door was wide open. There was no sound of running water from inside, no steam misting the windows, as it did after the shower had been used. The blue and grey towels sat neatly folded, untouched. Turning to go downstairs, she noticed that Tony’s shoes were no longer where she remembered him slipping them off by the radiator in the hall. She couldn’t hear him opening cupboards, trying to find what he needed to make tea in a strange kitchen.

  There was a good reason for that, as she discovered when she reached the ground floor and could see along the hallway to the long kitchen. Tony wasn’t there. He had gone. Gone without waking her, without saying goodbye.

  Mystified, not to say disappointed, Bea decided to make herself a cup of tea to have in the bath where she would ponder this turn in events. Why would he have gone off without saying anything the night before? It didn’t make sense. Perhaps he had thought that mention of an early meeting the next day would interrupt the enjoyment of the moment. He had been right. She stood on her tiptoes and stretched, confident that he’d call her later in the day. Waiting for the kettle to boil, she began planning what they might do that evening. Or was that rushing things? But going that fast seemed to be working for Ellen, so why shouldn’t it for her?

  Except that, clearly, it hadn’t. The rosy glow that had enveloped her on waking began to evaporate as realisation dawned. The bastard had legged it and, worse than that, he’d gone in the middle of the night with no explanation. She cast her mind back, trying to find one for him. Had he disguised his real reaction to her body? Had gravity, food, drink and childbirth taken the toll she feared? Should she have had the Brazilian she’d been meaning to endure and hadn’t quite got round to? Perhaps she was even more out of practice than she’d thought and it had showed. What had been so good for her might not have been so good for him after all. But he had touched her, reassured her, even complimented her.

  Puzzling over how someone could say the things he had without meaning them, her fury was compounded when she found the bathroom door locked. Could it be? Her hopes rose for a moment as she knocked – quite gently so as not to wake Ben. No reply. She tried again, louder this time.

  ‘What d’you want?’ Ben’s voice boomed through the glass panel.

  Disguising her disappointment, Bea yelled, ‘For God’s sake, hurry up. You know I’ve got to go to work.’

  Work. The day ahead rushed towards her, tsunami-like. This morning she was having her first official meeting with Adam to discuss ‘the future of the editorial department’. Being late was not an option. A headache that had until that moment been distant thunder on the horizon began to rumble unerringly in her direction.

  ‘Ben!’ she yelled again, rapping on the glass.

  ‘OK, Mum. OK.’ Ben unlocked the door and shambled out. ‘Chillax.’

  ‘If you say that to me once more, I’ll . . .’ For once words failed her as she pushed past him into the room that, minutes ago, had looked unused. Now it looked as if a whirlwind had blown through it. The pile of towels had been knocked to the floor beside an open magazine that lay half hidden by Ben’s discarded T-shirt and pants. The basin was dotted with black stubble, the razor left lying by the toothpaste tube, which was leaking into the soap dish. Bea started the shower and, with a heavy sigh, pulled off a bit of loo paper to mop up the splashes on the floor round the toilet where Ben had missed – again. No amount of asking, telling, shouting or begging seemed to make any difference. Every day started in the same old way, except that this one was even worse than usual, thanks to Mr bloody Castle.

  By the time she was strap-hanging on the tube, already wilting in the heat, Bea realised she had made a big mistake in the wardrobe department. The cotton shirt she remembered looking so great on her the previous summer and that had still looked great when she was standing quite still in front of the mirror this morning was now straining dangerously across her bust while her shoes, fashionably pointed, gripped the joints of both her big toes in separate agonising vices. However, her Nicole Farhi deep blue cotton jersey skirt was nothing short of perfect.

  The insult (which was how she now saw it) dealt by Tony Castle had insinuated its way to the back of her mind where it lay temporarily dormant as she concentrated on the morning ahead, going over how she was to protect her staff’s and her own jobs. Equally dormant were her concerns about how Ben might be spending his day and about her mother. She couldn’t afford to let anything or anyone deflect
her focus. As she saw it, everyone who worked with her did a valuable job and didn’t deserve to lose it. They were relying on her to speak up for them and she would.

  *

  With the shirt problem righted with a large safety-pin (unpleasantly reminiscent of a nappy-pin) supplied by one of her younger colleagues, and unable to feel her feet, Bea knocked on Adam’s door and went in to face the enemy as the ten o’clock reminder beeped on her phone.

  He barely glanced up. ‘Just one moment while I finish going through these figures.’

  Rude, but at least it gave Bea time to sit down and assess her surroundings. In the couple of days he’d been there, Adam Palmer had made his mark, insisting that he take over Stephen’s office from day one. Not a popular decision with the rest of the staff, who felt that after so long with the company Stephen hardly deserved to be so humiliated. He, however, had been unbothered by the move. ‘What does it matter to me, Bea? It’s just an office. I’ll be out of here in a few weeks. I can see that he wants to make an impression and, let’s face it, I did have the best office in the building.’ Over the weekend, Stephen had moved into a smaller one on the other side of the open plan. Now that the axe had fallen, a change had come over him. Already, he looked like a man with a weight removed from his shoulders. He no longer wore a slightly anxious, distracted expression, as if something terrible was about to happen unless he did something to divert it. All those budgetary worries he had carried about with him for years had been parcelled up and passed on to Adam. He had been in the office as little as he could get away with as he silently prepared his exit. Bea was already missing his ready friendship.

  She looked across the empty table to the bookshelves, where Stephen’s accumulation of Coldharbour’s titles had already been thinned so that the recent better-selling ones were standing face out to impress any visitor. Beside them were a select few that Adam had presumably been responsible for at Pennant, all having had an enviable stint on the bestseller list. Nothing like driving your success home where it’s not wanted, thought Bea. On the walls he’d hung a couple of modern prints and on his desk stood a large, framed snapshot of an attractive woman, all blonde pony-tail and cheekbones, and a freckle-faced curly-haired boy of six or seven.

  So, like attracts like, thought Bea, as at last Adam looked up from his papers. She saw a lean aquiline face with steely grey eyes that appraised her for a moment before a slight smile was allowed to cross his lips. Beneath his casual but expensive striped open-necked shirt there was the suggestion of a well-worked-out body. A copper wristband sat just below the dark leather strap of his square-faced TAG Heuer watch. As he stood up to walk round the desk to join her at the table, she couldn’t help noticing his jeans (with a crease), silk socks and soft tan leather loafers.

  ‘So, you’re Bea Wilde.’ Far from unfriendly, his tone was more matter-of-fact.

  Bea braced herself. ‘Yes. I’m the publishing director, as I think you probably know.’

  ‘I certainly do.’ He leaned across the table towards her and got straight to the point. ‘Would you say you’ve done a good job here?’

  ‘Yes, I would.’ Bea’s hackles rose in preparation to defend herself.

  ‘Let’s see. What was the last book you were responsible for that made the bestseller list? Remind me.’ He leaned forward. No smile now.

  ‘Jan Flinder’s A Certain Heart.’

  ‘My point. That was spring last year. Why nothing since then?’

  ‘You know as well as I do that that’s an impossible question to answer. We’ve had a couple that made it close, others we had high hopes for. But everyone knows that publishing’s not an exact science. If it was we’d all be rich.’

  ‘Of course I know that. But, these days, one would hope for more success on a list than you’ve had here.’ Adam smacked the palm of his hand on the table as he stood up to pace the room. For a few moments, he stared out of the wide plate-glass window across London. Then he turned to her. ‘We’ve got to do some drastic housekeeping. I’ve been going through the figures and, of course, talking everything through with Piers. He agrees with me that we have to reduce our overheads if we’re going forward. There’s no alternative but to lose the slack from every department.’

  Bea’s stomach plummeted but she kept looking straight in his eye. This was what she’d been dreading. ‘What are you suggesting?’

  ‘Redundancies.’

  ‘But we need everyone we’ve got in Editorial,’ she protested. ‘There are only six of us. There really isn’t any slack. Everyone’s working to their full capacity.’

  ‘I know that. So I’m also proposing that we cut down the number of titles we publish per year. I want you to do fewer better. You won’t need as many staff.’ He tapped his chin with a manicured finger.

  Already Bea was running through the people in the department. Stuart and Jade were indispensable. As for Alice, the managing editor who commissioned a few of her own non-fiction titles, and the two assistants, Becky and Warren, Bea couldn’t reward their loyalty and enthusiasm by putting them out of work.

  ‘I really don’t think we can do without any of them. Stuart and Jade—’

  She was about to start justifying everyone’s employment when he cut her short. ‘The decision’s been taken, I’m afraid. I want you to lose two members of your department.’

  ‘Two!’ Bea’s breath was taken away. ‘I can’t do that.’

  ‘It’s the only way I can make the numbers work. If you’re unable to help, then perhaps you should think about your own position. I’m only interested in keeping people who’ll work with me, not against me. Think about it. We’ll talk again in a couple of days or so.’ He looked at his watch, then returned to his seat behind his desk and his papers, indicating that the meeting was over.

  Bea was reeling from the brutal no-nonsense approach that she’d just encountered. Gone was Stephen’s gentle old-fashioned all-around-the-houses method of broaching something unpleasant. He’d hated upsetting his staff – but (Bea failed to dismiss the disloyal thought) the company might not have been in such a mess if he’d adopted a more leader-like approach.

  As soon as she was back in her office, Stuart and Jade made a beeline for her.

  ‘What’s he like? Is he as tough as they say?’

  ‘Well, let’s just say he apparently learned his management style at the knee of Genghis Khan.’

  ‘What’s he going to do to the editorial department? He’s bound to want some changes, isn’t he?’ Jade’s anxiety betrayed itself in her quieter-than-normal voice.

  ‘Bea, you have to tell us what’s going on.’ Even Stuart, normally bothered by nothing, had dropped his customary laid-back manner.

  ‘Nothing’s going on.’ Even to hint at what had been said at this stage wouldn’t be in anyone’s interests. ‘All he wanted was a rundown on the staff and to go through the upcoming programme. That’s it. As soon as there’s something to tell, you two will be the first to know. Promise.’ She was surprised to discover that she hadn’t dropped the childhood habit of crossing her fingers to excuse herself when telling a lie. Just as long as they hadn’t noticed.

  The rest of the day disappeared as she caught up with correspondence, put together editorial notes on a manuscript whose author was coming in the following day, talked to the publicity and art departments about the approaches they were taking to a couple of her books, and dealt with all the day-to-day business of an editorial department. Whenever possible, she avoided speculative conversations with anyone about the future of the company.

  Only when she had closed her front door, thrown off her shoes, poured herself a glass of red plonk and sunk into her deep red sofa, eyes shut, did she take time to concentrate on her first conversation with Adam. A tad disenchanted with her career she might be, but not enough to throw in the towel right now. And there was something about this ruthless management style that she found exciting. His macho approach was outrageous, but she was curious to see if he was all he was cracked u
p to be and whether he would be able to deliver. If he could, then perhaps she wanted to be a part of his new team. If he couldn’t, it would be interesting, and maybe she would survive him. The challenge he presented was one she couldn’t possibly duck. Adele was right. However, sacrificing two members of her staff, none of whom had shown anything other than enthusiasm for their jobs, was an almost impossible demand. She sat there wrestling with the problem, convinced that a bit of lateral thinking was all that was needed to solve it. Not so.

  The front door slammed as Ben crashed in, hurling his bag on the floor and himself towards the kitchen, yelling, ‘What’s for supper?’

  Her ‘Hi, Ben. Good day?’ went unheard. Putting her work life to one side she concentrated on making a bowl of pasta and a green salad for them. Annoyed that she refused to let him eat his on his knees in front of the TV, Ben refused to answer her questions with anything other than grunts and monosyllables until he’d finished. Then he disappeared into the sitting room, dragging his bag behind him and muttering something about ‘Bloody parents.’ None the wiser about his life, Bea cleared up while returning to her previous musings, still getting nowhere.

  Salvation came when the doorbell interrupted her ever more circular thoughts. Surely Tony Castle hadn’t come back for more. She stood to give herself a quick once-over in the mirror on the kitchen wall. Mmm. Could be worse. She ran her fingers through her hair in an attempt at windswept-and-interesting, then turned the dimmer switch to a more flattering level without quite switching the light off. Taking a deep breath and pinning on her most winning smile, she walked down the hall and flung open the door.

  Chapter 9

  ‘I’m sorry to arrive out of the blue, but I know you’re cross with me.’ Ellen stood on the doorstep, looking expectant, with a bottle of wine in one hand and a brown and white box that Bea instantly recognised with delight as being from Artisan du Chocolat.