In Office Hours

by Lucy Kellaway

  The shower stopped its racket and after a brief silence James emerged with the hotel’s white towel wrapped tightly around his midriff and his white flesh hammered rose pink by the pressure of the water. He was not looking at her.

  Bella studied his back with a queasy mixture of longing and profound embarrassment. Seeing someone almost naked who you are used to seeing in a suit was surreal. He turned and she looked at the dark hairs that sprouted from around his nipples. This is my boss, she thought. I have done something quite mad. I desperately want to do it again.

  – Hello, she said propping herself up on the pillows.

  – Good morning, James replied in his brisk, office voice.

  Bella’s happiness shrank and her feeling of dread spread.

  – I hope you’re feeling up to this morning’s session?

  He gave an awkward laugh.

  – I’ll be fine, said Bella.

  Her tongue stuck to the top of her mouth and her eyes were glued together with the previous night’s mascara. She pulled the sheet up over her breasts with a sudden prudishness that struck her as belated, given what had passed between them a couple of hours earlier.

  – Do you want to go back to your room to sort yourself out before anyone else is up? he asked.

  It was more of a command than a question.

  – OK, she said.

  This was horrible, she thought. Why couldn’t he kiss her, or touch her or say something nice? She put on her dirty, crumpled clothes and tiptoed along the corridor to her room with the floor lurching under her feet. There was a purpose to a hangover, she thought. It protected one from all thought except from the simple practicalities of putting one foot in front of another. The extent of the humiliation and misery that she was surely going to feel soon was, for the moment, in abeyance.

  She reached into her pocket for the room key, but it wasn’t there. She looked in her bag. And then knelt down on the carpet to rummage around, lifting out her purse, various bits of make-up, crumpled receipts and sweet wrappers, but still could not find it.

  – Good morning! Is everything OK?

  Bella looked up to see Jay, who had just come out of his room in a brand new white nylon tracksuit and seemed to be going for a run.

  – Yes, fine, said Bella. I’m just looking for something.

  – Catch you later, Jay said, cheerfully.

  Bella waited for him to go, then returned to James’s room and knocked gently on the door. By now he had got on his boxer shorts and black ankle socks and a crisply laundered shirt that he was buttoning somewhat laboriously. Bella looked down at his legs, which were white and rather slender. She badly wanted to put her aching head against his chest, and for him to put his arms around her and propel her back on to the bed, which, she noticed, he had smoothed out to make it look as if no one had been there at all.

  – I think I left my room key in here, she said.

  He frowned, then picked up his papers and looked under them. No key. He bustled around the room lifting things and putting them down again.

  – Think back to last time you saw it, he said in the tone of voice that a weary father instructs a child.

  But in this case, she couldn’t think back to last night. If she thought back, she remembered coming into the room, and sitting on the bed and giggling wildly. She remembered lying fully dressed on the bed, and now she did remember James saying: Bella, Bella, we must not do this, as he kissed her. The key might be in the bed, and she picked up the white duvet, averting her eyes from a series of pale stains on the sheet below. There was no key.

  – Reception will have a spare, he said. Let me know if you have any difficulty.

  I am having difficulty, Bella thought. I’m having difficulty with this whole weird situation.

  – See you later, she said.

  At breakfast Bella could feel the table swaying. Across the room she could see James calmly spreading jam on to his croissant, stirring his coffee carefully with a little silver spoon and listening politely to Jay.

  Bella had positioned herself next to Ben, who was eating his full English breakfast with relish. She tried not to look at the puddle of yellow oil that had formed around the button mushroom.

  – What time did you throw in the towel last night? he asked.

  Towel? The word stuck in Bella’s mind and with it the image of James emerging from the shower.

  – What time did you go to bed?

  – Um, I’m not sure. I think I left just after you…

  She looked at the bowl of fruit she had collected from the breakfast bar. She did not want to eat it.

  Jay got up from his table and clapped his hands together.

  – Good morning! Hope everyone is feeling fresh and ready to roll. We’re going to do an energizing exercise to get our creative juices flowing before we move into the kitchen. I want each of you to laugh. That’s it. Think of something funny and let it all come out!

  There was silence from the Atlantic Energy managers.

  – Come on, he said. Just start by going ‘ha-ha-ha’, and you will find that your body will connect with the humour and will unleash your endorphins.

  – Ha-ha-ha, they all started.

  Ben was the first to go off into genuine delighted giggles and after a surprisingly short time the others started hawing and guffawing. Despite her hangover, and despite the fact that she had just committed career suicide, Bella started to laugh and laugh and did not know how to stop. And then she turned and saw James standing slightly apart from his two dozen hysterically laughing underlings. He looked like the saddest man she had ever seen.

  Stella

  Stella settled down into her aeroplane seat and pulled the synthetic blanket over her. The trip had not been a success. The research and technology for which they had such high hopes was being conducted in three sheds with corrugated iron roofs. None of the scientists could agree on when the fuel would be able to be produced in sufficient quantity to make it viable.

  Stella was regretting her gung-ho enthusiasm to the board, and was wondering how best to break the news to Stephen that the company was proposing to invest £500m in slimy green stuff in a test tube that was probably worth nothing at all.

  Still, she marvelled at how very little she minded. Only a few weeks earlier she would have viewed this as a calamity. Now it was all she could do to type a few briefing notes into her laptop, close it and think of Rhys.

  She was exhausted. The thought of Rhys was incompatible with sleep. His image threw her into a state of physical and emotional anxiety that made her rigid with wakefulness. In the last seventy-two hours she had had a total of seven hours’ sleep, and now she drank a large glass of red wine and took a temazepam and fell into a drugged slumber from which the stewardess shook her awake four hours later.

  Stella made her way groggily to the aeroplane toilet – sticky and evil-smelling after so many hours of constant use – and saw in the mirror a thin, tired woman with red eyes and one swollen eyelid. The inside of her head felt hot and dry. She brushed her hair, which the static in the cabin had plastered down on to her scalp, and brushed her teeth. Thank God he isn’t coming to meet me, she thought. I could not bear him to see me like this.

  She went back to her seat and looked out at the baggage handlers driving their lorries in the grey London morning and at the line of huge metal birds linked to the airport by their bendy umbilical cords. Stella usually liked coming back home, and was always happy at the thought of seeing her family again. But this time she had just one thought: this is where Rhys is. She imagined him now, in his bed, asleep. What did he wear in bed, she wondered. Did he sleep on his back or on his side? What did he like for his breakfast? Did he snore? How could one desire someone so much, and yet know so little about them?

  The passport queue moved briskly, and she picked up her suitcase and hurried out to the taxis. She would go home and have a shower and change and get into the office for her meeting at 10.30.

  She saw him first. Or rat
her she saw his sign first. He was standing alongside the Kurdish taxi drivers and tour operators, a tall fair man in a sea of dark ones holding up little signs. His sign was huge and held with two straight arms high above his head. GORGEOUS GREEN GODDESS, it said. It was written in fat felt pen on a large piece of cardboard.

  His face was deadpan. He looked at her seriously.

  – Hello, he said.

  – I told you not to come.

  But in her chest her heart was thumping wildly. She wanted to shout for sheer joy.

  – That isn’t a particularly nice response. I got up at five to do this.

  He took her case, and led her towards the taxi rank.

  – God, she said. The trip was a disaster. I really don’t see this technology being ready for us to exploit within the next fifteen years, if that. The founder would not let me talk to the scientists directly, their own economist was ill and so I was just given a sheaf of papers and shown a couple of outdoor algae ponds.

  She was gabbling, her eyes fixed on the raincoated back of the man in front of them in the taxi queue. She was aware of Rhys standing beside her, looking intently at the side of her face, but she didn’t trust herself to turn towards him.

  He touched her cheek with the back of his hand.

  – Don’t, she said.

  Eventually they reached the front of the queue and climbed inside a waiting taxi.

  – Stella.

  She let him pull her towards him so that her head was against his chest, and through his shirt, jacket and overcoat she could feel the beat of his heart.

  – Stella –

  He drew her face towards his and kissed her. The kiss was tentative at first – clumsy and halting. The voice inside Stella’s head that had been saying no was silenced. She felt there was nothing else in the world at all: just the inside of the taxi and her and Rhys. She closed her eyes as he kissed her and then opened them to see his hair cut short by his ear and his birthmark, which struck her as being a thing of great beauty. She touched it gently.

  – This is like the movies, he said.

  Stella laughed.

  – What’s so funny? he said.

  – What is so funny, she said, is that I’m happy and I’m going to let myself be happy just for these few minutes until I get out of the taxi and think about the rest of my life, she said.

  That wasn’t exactly what had made her laugh. It was his saying something so sweet and innocent – and so wrong. This was not like any movie that she had ever seen: a young man in bad shoes in a clumsy and desperate embrace with a jet-lagged oil executive nearly two decades his senior.

  He kissed her again, moving his leg round so that he knocked over her briefcase.

  Stella looked up and saw the driver’s eyes briefly scan her through his rear-view mirror. What did he think, she wondered. He looked away quickly, showing no particular interest. Evidently he had seen more surprising things in his time. The thought was vaguely comforting.

  Rhys was touching her hair and looking at her as if he had never seen her before. She reached out her hand and ran it over his face and lips and kissed him with a light-headed despair.

  The traffic on the M4 was stationary, but the taxi lane was moving, and for once Stella regretted it. She thought of the scene in Madame Bovary, when the horse-drawn cab drives around and around Rouen with the curtains drawn so that Emma and the dashing young law student can make love in the back.

  – Stella, he whispered into her ear.

  Her name sounded lovely on his lips.

  – Will you come back to my flat?

  – I can’t. I’m scared.

  – Don’t be, he said, holding her face in his hands.

  – But even if I wasn’t scared, I still can’t. I promised the children that I’d see them before they go to school and make them pancakes.

  The cab pulled up in Camden High Street, in front of an electrical shop.

  – You must get out here, she said. I’ll see you later.

  Rhys stood on the pavement and winked at her. He looked, she thought, like a truanting schoolboy.

  Presently the taxi stopped outside 7 St Mark’s Square, and Stella, who until a few days ago had found her life within it happy and uncomplicated, climbed the York stone steps, passed through the sentry of twin clipped bay trees, and went inside.

  Bella

  Bella was at her desk in the office trying to draft a message. It had been twenty-eight hours since she had risen from his hotel bed, and during that time she had gone through a cycle of emotions. Embarrassment. Dread. Anger. Self-reproach. Longing. Humiliation. And then, as she sat at her desk pretending all was perfectly normal, anger again.

  The team-building session in the kitchen had been farcical. She had been assigned the vegetable-chopping detail, and her unsteady hands would not chop the turnips and squash into sufficiently orderly cubes. She had cut her finger and had watched the red blood stain the white turnip and thought she might be sick. An Elastoplast was found and she sat to one side, useless. James meanwhile was making pastry, a job that he applied himself to with great solemnity. Mostly he had his back towards her and at one point she caught his eye and he gave a thin smile. But otherwise, nothing.

  Now Bella was looking at a blank screen. She started to type slowly.

  Hi James

  This is a bit awkward, but I just wanted to say sorry about what happened. I was really drunk, and I know that isn’t an excuse, but I wondered if we could put it behind us? From your silence in the last day and a half I get the idea that you regret what happened and that you are cross with me for my role in it. As I said, I am sorry.

  Bella paused, and then went on typing, faster now.

  That’s crap. I’m not sorry. And what I’d like to know is WHY are you so cross with me? It’s all very well for you to shag your new researcher and then to pretend it never happened. But how the fuck do you think that leaves me feeling?

  And another thing: how is it ok for you to be giving me Van bloody Morrison CDs and take me out for champagne and pretend to be so interested in my life one minute and then ignore me the next? I used to have a lot of respect for you, but I now have NONE. You are a creep and a weirdo with your silly little chests of drawers – and it was horrible shagging you – it’s certainly not an experience I want to repeat so you need have no fear on that score …

  – Bella.

  James was looking down at her.

  Flustered, she clicked on the message to make it disappear.

  – Have you got a minute?

  She got up and followed him into his office. He gestured to her to sit down, but remained standing himself. Seeing him, Bella didn’t feel cross any more. He looked so awkward that she felt a desire to put her arms around him and kiss him. Instead she crossed her legs and waited expectantly.

  – Two things, Bella, he said at last. First, can you let me have all the slides for the investors’ presentation? Please make sure they contain the most up-to-date oil production figures. Can you also check with Stella and see if we’ve got the latest forecasts? And one other thing.

  Here it comes, thought Bella.

  – I want to start a database on the website of all the good environmental things that we are doing globally. At the moment there are many initiatives being carried out at country level and departmental level, but I would like a one-stop shop where they can all be accessed. Can you bring all the files together, so I can give them to our web designers?

  – Sure, she said.

  And then he walked around to his desk, and she didn’t exist any more.

  Bella went back to her desk and wanted to cry. She had been an idiot. He was an arsehole. Led by lust and now he just thought that he could go on as before. Had he not enjoyed it?

  Her screen had gone to sleep. She clicked on it to bring it back to life, and there in the middle it said:

  Message sent to James Staunton.

  Oh my God, thought Bella. Jesus Christ.

  Her heart started to
beat wildly and she could feel herself flushing a deep crimson. She had been so flustered she must have pressed ‘send’ instead of ‘delete’. She had never, ever meant him to see that message. It was just a way of getting it all out of her system. She looked at the message again. She had just told her boss that he was a creep and useless in bed. It didn’t get much worse than that.

  Stella

  Stella walked into reception and there, just through the swing doors and in the middle of the marble atrium, was a large barrel sitting where there had been a bank of orchids in steel containers. It was mounted on a black granite plinth and seemed to her slightly vulgar and monumentally stupid. On it in red neon was the oil price – $148, +$4 – and the share price – 1120, up 59p.

  She got out of the lift on the twelfth floor and walked towards her desk.

  – Good trip? Nathalie asked.

  – Tiring, said Stella.

  Did she look odd to Nathalie, she was wondering. She felt as if her mouth must be looking funny, bearing the imprint of Rhys’s lips. If she could still feel them there herself, surely there must be an outward sign? For the sake of saying something, Stella said:

  – Hideous thing in reception. Is it some dreadful scheme of James’s? I thought he had better taste.

  Nathalie looked at her oddly.

  Oh God, thought Stella. She knows. But then her PA said in a normal tone of voice:

  – Stephen wants to see you now – didn’t say what, but it’s important – he’s got a window between 11.20 and 11.30.

  Stephen was on his mobile, but beckoned her to come in. He was frowning and nodding into the phone.

  – How was the trip? he asked.

  She made a face, and tried to remember. So much had happened since she had landed at Heathrow five hours earlier.

  – I think there are some fairly serious issues, she said slowly. I fear we need to revisit the entire project. The technology is far less well established than we had been led to believe. They have done small controlled experiments, but there is no sign that it is going to work on a mass level. If you ask me to call it I don’t think it should be worth anything at all in our share price at the minute.