In Office Hours

by Lucy Kellaway

  As part of a global reorganization of Atlantic Energy, Stella Bradberry is to step up to the newly created role of Chief of Staff. She will report directly to Stephen Hinton and will play a key role in shaping the company’s strategic direction.

  In addition she will retain her leadership of the economics department. Stella is an exceptional performer within the group, and I look forward to working with her more closely. I know she has broader skills that will benefit the group going forward.

  James stopped reading and said: Come on, Bella. Let’s go out for a drink. And we can celebrate your new job.

  – I don’t know if I can, she said. I’ll have to call the childminder. And I haven’t accepted it yet.

  – And I’m going to tell you why you must.

  Stella

  – I’ve been thinking about this, and I’ve got the solution.

  Stephen’s voice was excitable; he was talking so loudly that Stella had to hold her mobile away from her ear. He was in Norway and she was in the changing-rooms at House of Fraser by London Bridge.

  She was fighting to do up the zip of a pair of jeans that had a motif of diamonds on the back pockets.

  – The answer is for you to take the new job – and to retain your existing one too. Obviously we will need to get you more assistants. But you are a first-rate economist, and I want you to continue to have a department to manage. I have high expectations of you, Stella.

  Stella, who had been looking over her shoulder in the mirror to see whether the jeans accentuated or disguised the sagging of her bottom, sat down heavily on a dainty little stool.

  As she listened to Stephen’s words she was suddenly clear in her mind: she did not want the job. She had too much work to do as it was; indeed at that very moment she should not have sneaked off shopping but should have been finishing the Monthly Outlook.

  – Well, she said slowly. Although I’m really flattered –

  – You deserve this, Stella. Well done. We’ll get the announcement out today.

  – I’m not sure whether –

  Stephen interrupted her:

  – We’ll discuss the details when I’m back. I must go now, I’m getting a helicopter to take me out to one of our platforms to rally the troops. Complete waste of my time, don’t know why I allowed myself to be talked into it. Catch up later.

  And I don’t know why I have just allowed myself to be talked into a job I don’t want, thought Stella.

  – How are you getting on in there?

  A young assistant was standing outside the curtain. Stella pulled the curtain back, and asked her: Do these jeans look ridiculous on me?

  – Oh no, not at all. They look great on you! said the shop assistant.

  – But don’t they look as if I’m trying to be young? Surely diamonds are meant to grace the bottoms of twenty-year-olds and not forty-year-olds?

  – I’ve sold these jeans to customers much older than you. Most twenty-year-olds can’t afford them.

  Stella looked at the price tag, which said £169, and thought she was probably right. So she decided to buy the jeans and, as she peeled them off, she thought that in the space of five minutes she had let her boss steamroller her into a job that was too big and the shop assistant steamroller her into a pair of jeans that were too small.

  She scooped up the jeans along with a wraparound dress and an oyster satin blouse and took them to the till. The dress was clinging jersey material and Stella had felt self-conscious in it, but decided to buy it anyway. The blouse had tiny pearl buttons and was by far the most feminine item of clothing she had ever bought.

  Feeling light-headed with her purchases, she got a cab back to the office. On the way she called Charles, but he was not picking up so she sent him a text.

  I’m taking the job.

  He texted back:

  Vg

  Stella crept into her office trying to hide the two large House of Fraser bags she was carrying. She wasn’t sure why she felt so guilty about going shopping for an hour and a half in the middle of the afternoon, given what long hours she worked and how she almost never skived, but she still did. She was just tucking the bags away behind the coatstand when Rhys came in.

  – I’ve accepted the job, Stella said.

  – Yes!

  He ran up and down on the spot in a parody of delight, and his enthusiasm infected her. Maybe this would be the best of all worlds, she thought. Maybe the thing that was wrong with her, the reason that she was behaving in such unpredictable ways, was that she was bored. A new job might be just what she needed to be more herself again.

  – Have you been buying yourself a present to celebrate? he asked, eyeing the bags. What did you get?

  – Oh, nothing, said Stella.

  – It doesn’t look like nothing. Can I see? I love shopping.

  – Well, I don’t. I usually hate it, said Stella. And no, you can’t see.

  But Rhys had got out of his chair and walked over to the bags. As he did so, Beate walked past the glass door and looked in enquiringly.

  – Leave my shopping alone, Stella said in a mock commanding voice.

  Rhys laughed.

  – Shall we go out for a drink to celebrate?

  Stella pictured herself wearing the new dress, sitting on a stool and having a glass of champagne with Rhys, and was wondering whether she could say yes when her phone went.

  – Mum, where are you?

  Clemmie was sounding aggrieved.

  – I’m at work, said Stella.

  – But you said you’d get home early to help me rehearse for Twelfth Night. Have you forgotten?

  – Of course I haven’t, said Stella, who had, for the first time ever, forgotten a date with her daughter. I had to finish something, but it’s all done. I’ll be home in twenty minutes, I’m leaving right now.

  Bella

  At Le Coq d’Argent James and Bella sat facing each other by the window with a view over the grey slate roofs of the Bank of England. Between them was a bottle of champagne in a silver ice bucket.

  James raised his glass.

  – To your brilliant career, he said.

  Bella laughed.

  – It hasn’t been very brilliant so far, she said.

  – You puzzle me, he said. I don’t understand why you are where you are. You speak fluent Russian, you are so bright and enterprising. Why aren’t you running the world?

  Bella took a large swallow of her drink, feeling the bubbles lift her up.

  – Do you really want to know? she asked.

  He said he did with such a show of sincerity that Bella started to tell her story. There were quite a few versions of this story, each one more or less true but designed for a different audience. There was the version she told herself at night, which was toughest on herself. There was the one she told her friends, in which the romantic and dangerous elements were played up. And then there was a flatter, somewhat bowdlerized version, one suitable for a boss.

  She told him how her father, who ran his own business building upmarket Barrett homes, had set his heart on his clever daughter not only going to university – something that he had never done – but going to Cambridge. However, Bella had disappointed him by not getting the grades.

  – Oh?

  James looked surprised. With the confidence and lack of imagination of someone who had always got A’s himself, he could not understand how others might not have managed it.

  – I didn’t work hard enough, she explained.

  What she did not say was that by the time she was sixteen she had stopped working altogether. Every lunchtime she had gone to the park behind the school and smoked weed with Shorty, who was both the tallest boy in the school and the most dissolute. She just scraped passes at A level and was lucky to have got into Bangor to read Russian.

  – Dad thought this was a total disgrace, said Bella.

  – I assume he’s got over it by now, said James.

  – I don’t know. I haven’t had a proper conversation wit
h him for five years.

  – Blimey. Why not?

  And Bella explained that her mother had told him to pack his things when she found that his increasingly frequent trout fishing trips were actually excursions to a luxury new-build in High Wycombe, where he was shagging the accounts manager from his office.

  Bella didn’t say that her mother had done a little digging and found that Suzy from accounts was the latest in a succession that had included Chloe, who had headed the sales team, Joanne, from marketing, and – briefly – Janice, the receptionist at the show home.

  James sat forward.

  – So you haven’t forgiven him?

  Bella shrugged.

  – Well, I suppose I’ve forgiven him for shagging this other woman. But I haven’t forgiven him for being a completely crap father.

  In fact he hadn’t been quite as absent from her life as Bella liked to make out. She had barely seen him in recent years but had seen some of his money, which came into her bank account every month and helped her pay the mortgage.

  – So did your mother throw him out at once?

  – Pretty much, I think. I was at college by then. They had a bit of counselling, but then Mum got a private detective and found he had been lying about lots of other things too. So then she kicked him out, and since then she has put all the energy she used to put into looking after him, into squeezing every last penny out of him.

  – Did you take your mother’s side?

  – No, not really. She has issues of her own. She took it in her stride that I never finished my degree, but her main disappointment was that I didn’t meet someone rich or titled. She used to go on and on about how the daughter of a friend of hers went to Bristol and at the freshers’ fair picked up some chinless wonder called Sebastian who turned out to be the grand-nephew of some Duke or other, and they never looked back and they are getting married and blah blah blah.

  James tipped some more champagne into her glass and more into his.

  – And so you didn’t meet a Sebastian at Bangor?

  – No. I met Xan. The students in my year all seemed young and nerdy and I thought I was too cool for them. Xan was a second-year student from Belfast. He was much more – intriguing – than the other guys and he had this great gravelly voice. He and I used to drink, and though I used to get quite drunk, he would get quite out of control.

  James kept her gaze, raising the glass to his lips and putting it down again. He seemed to be sucking the story out of her. Bella was telling him more than she had planned to but was enjoying her confession. She didn’t want to stop.

  – By the end of the first year I was pregnant. At first I didn’t realize and I went off to Russia with the other students, and it was there that I found out. I flew home to have an abortion – but when I got back I found I couldn’t do it. Even though I was only nineteen, I really wanted the baby. Xan said he did too. I didn’t go back to Russia and dropped out of college and moved in with him in his student room. He never went to lectures and he spent the whole day smoking skunk with his mates. The place was filthy, and I couldn’t deal with it. So I moved back home with Mum and had Millie on my own. I’m not complaining – I mean, sometimes it’s hard but we are very happy the two of us and I can’t really imagine it now any other way. Xan has been in my life and then out. He’s still using, is a danger to himself and to Millie, and I’ve had to get a court order to stop him from seeing her.

  James took another sip of champagne, swilling it around in his mouth before swallowing.

  – I’m sure I would have cracked and broken – you’re clearly made out of strong stuff, he said.

  Bella was starting to feel exotic and heroic; as if he, by some trick of the light, had made hers a story of moral victory rather than a humdrum tale of police stations and lawyers’ bills (paid for by her father, as it happened).

  – That’s ridiculous, she said. I’m sure you wouldn’t have cracked. When you have children you can’t afford to crack.

  As soon as Bella had said this she wished she hadn’t. She thought of James’s wife, who did have children and had cracked. The same thought had evidently occurred to James, who got his BlackBerry out of his pocket and checked it anxiously.

  – So, she said, changing the subject, I suppose you were always successful, right from birth?

  – My story, he said, is really rather boring. I went off to boarding school when I was eight, then Winchester, Cambridge to read law, decided I did not want to be a lawyer, and got a job at AE straight out of university. I married someone I met at university. We have two lovely boys. And that’s it. My whole life.

  As he said this James’s face changed: he looked distant and distracted. Was it that he was reminded of the importance of his home, Bella wondered. Or was it that he was depressed by the predictability of his life?

  She looked at her watch.

  – I should really go soon, she said.

  – Stay, he said.

  He brushed her hand lightly, and his hand felt smooth and warm on the back of hers.

  – I can’t, she said. I’m already plastered and already too late. I must go.

  – And we haven’t talked about the job, he said. But we can do that tomorrow. Shall I get you a cab?

  – No, she said. I’ll get the tube.

  – I’ll come with you.

  Together they went down the escalator at Bank station and he waited with her on the northbound platform, even though his own way home was south.

  High Barnet 2 mins, said the indicator.

  – You don’t have to wait, Bella said, wishing he would go.

  – It’s a pleasure, he said.

  The train clanged on to the platform, and the doors opened.

  – Thank you for the drink, she said. See you tomorrow. She turned to him, and suddenly and most unexpectedly, he gave her a hug.

  Bella got into the tube carriage and sat down. As the train pulled away he was looking at her and smiling. Bella could still feel the pressure of his hands on her back.

  Stella

  It was Stella’s first day in her new job, and she had decided that with this new beginning must come an ending. She was going to stop this thing – this flirtation – with Rhys. He was taking up too much space inside her head. When she was at home she saw him in her mind’s eye still sitting at her kitchen table, where he had sat three weeks earlier. In the office she saw him leaning against the door, and when he wasn’t standing there in the flesh (as he was for an inexplicably large fraction of the day) she made excuses for him to come and talk to her.

  And now he not only emailed her during the day but had started doing so at the weekends too. The last Saturday, after a party to celebrate her parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary, she looked at her BlackBerry in the cab on the way home and there was a message, sent at 23.34, that said just one word.

  Drunk.

  – What are you laughing at? Charles had asked.

  – Nothing, Stella had said.

  But it wasn’t nothing; it had become something. Never mind the fact that the evening had been lovely – her entire family gathered together at the Orangery restaurant in Holland Park. Stella – as the richest member of the family – had insisted on paying for the whole event, and they had been grateful. And Charles had given a speech which had been generous and witty, and Stella’s mother, who hardly ever showed any emotion, had laughed and then, when Charles had said that his parents-in-law’s marriage was a thing of beauty, dabbed at her eyes with the stiff linen napkin.

  But the significance of this big event had been eclipsed in Stella’s mind by this one stupid word. She felt thrilled and agitated that he was thinking of her at nearly midnight on a Saturday night, and that he needed the courage brought by alcohol to let it show.

  And later that night she had had a strange dream in which she had been in the office and both Charles and her father had been there. Rhys had asked her to dance, and the two of them had done slow dancing around the photocopiers and paper recy
ling bins while Charles and her father looked on and clapped in time with the music. She woke up the next morning still feeling his touch from her dream, and knew that this flirtation was not something harmless that brightened up the working day.

  It was an obsession and it must stop.

  I’m going to tell him nicely that things between us have got too close, and that it’s unprofessional, she thought, as she put on her new, clinging dress. I’m doing something that is not only dangerous, it is pathetic and undignified. Emily is quite right. I’m a forty-four-year-old pre-menopausal wife and mother, getting excited about emails from a young ambitious boy who is flirting with me because I’m his boss.

  That morning Rhys was sitting at his desk waiting for her, as he now was every morning. Stella walked straight past him into her room. He got up and followed her in.

  – What’s the matter? he said.

  – Nothing, she said, not looking at him. It’s just that I’ve got a very busy day – it’s my first day in the new job.

  Rhys ignored this.

  – I’ve got something for you. I made it for you last night.

  He handed her a CD with a sheet of white paper covered in his writing, a neat, backward-sloping script.

  – I wanted to give you some songs I thought you might like. You could put it on your iPod now and listen on the flight.

  – I don’t have an iPod, Stella said, trying to ignore the surge of pleasure that was racing through her body.

  He laughed.

  – Why doesn’t that surprise me? Do you have a CD player, or is it steam wireless at your place?

  – It’s kind of you to have done this, but I don’t think I should accept it.

  – Why not? It’s just a CD. You’ll probably think all the songs are total crap, but I like them.

  – Rhys, she said. It’s not just about this CD. In fact I really don’t think we should email each other any more except when it is on strictly work matters.