Stephen frowned.
– Stella, he said. I’m not asking you to do anything that you aren’t comfortable with. But I think the Russian situation is slipping away from us. And so we need your project both to support the share price and to provide a competing, more upbeat narrative. Can I leave it with you?
– Yes, said Stella. Of course.
– I’d also like you to sit in on this morning’s meeting of the divisional directors. Ask Jackie to give you the briefing papers.
As Stella got up to go, she said: What the hell is that barrel doing downstairs?
The CEO’s face darkened.
– What do you mean? It enables every visitor into this building to track the daily movements in Brent crude and in AE shares and buy into what we are trying to achieve …
– Oh yes, said Stella hastily. I quite agree. I just thought the barrel itself was a little, well, a little literal.
– Stella, he said. I know that you share my passion for the arts. But this is an oil company. It’s not an art installation.
Yes, I’m aware of that, Stella thought to herself. She smiled and left.
Stella took her place around the table with the twelve top operations managers.
– Gentlemen, said Stephen. And lady, with a pointed look at Stella. Before we get cracking, just to say that I’ve asked Stella to join us at these meetings in her new capacity of Chief of Staff. I know she’ll have a lot to contribute.
Wrong, thought Stella.
– Congratulations, said the head of Exploration and Production, leering at her. He took off his jacket and Stella noticed that sweat had made the light blue of his shirt dark under his arms.
She tried to concentrate on the first item: an update on a programme to raise safety standards at all refineries. The investment project, she heard, had run into difficulties and was now ahead of budget and behind deadline. But this made no sense to her. She could still feel the impression of Rhys’s kiss, which, instead of fading, was if anything getting stronger. He had left a faint scent on her skin. She longed to leave the meeting and go out and see him at his desk. She thought of his head bent over his desk, and of his little birthmark and of his hands with their bitten nails.
Had she ever felt like this about Charles? It was so long ago she couldn’t remember, but she thought not. She had been happy and excited and proud to have landed someone so handsome and clever and eligible as her husband. But it hadn’t been like this. She hadn’t been possessed.
Stella’s BlackBerry was flashing, and she held it in her lap pretending to be studying the handout that the head of downstream oil had just passed around. The message was from Rhys.
Dearest S Can you come to my flat this evening? I have been having some very improper thoughts about you. PLEASE say yes. Hurry up out of that meeting Rxx
A blush of pleasure spread over her face. The thought that Rhys was in the grip of a similar desire seemed miraculous. She hugged the thought to herself, oblivious to the meeting that was grinding on around her.
She simply typed:
Yes.
There was no battle with her conscience. He had asked her to come, and she was going to. Never mind the jet-lag. Never mind the fact that she was supposed to be going to a lecture on the economics of oil extraction from deep waters. Never mind the fact that she really should get home to see her children. This was bigger than all of it.
Seven Sisters was a part of London that Stella had often driven through on her way to see friends in Suffolk, but had never visited before. Rhys had assured her that the fastest way to get there was by tube and had drawn her a map to guide her from the station to his flat. He had gone straight home from work while she had gone briefly to the lecture and had stood at the back of the hall with his map in her pocket and her heart in her mouth.
She emerged into the night air at Seven Sisters, and went past a boarded-up kebab joint and a shop with rotting bananas in front of it. She almost ran, feeling outlandish in the cashmere coat she had bought at Bloomingdales two days earlier.
Number 23 Wilton Rise was a three-storey Edwardian house that had been subdivided into flats. A neglected front garden was given over to weeds and council recycling boxes filled with bottles.
Now that she was here, outside his front door, all the certainty that she had felt in the meeting had drained away and had been replaced by fear. What am I doing, she asked herself.
The top bell had a plastic sign next to it that said WILLIAMS – PRESS HARD. The sight of his writing made Stella feel a little calmer, and she pushed the buzzer. The door clicked open and she entered a dark hall that smelt of damp and frying. From upstairs she heard his voice calling: You’ve got to come all the way up to the top.
Stella ran up the five flights of stairs, arriving short of breath at an open door at which Rhys was standing. I can’t do this, she thought. She made no movement towards him, and he made none towards her.
He had changed out of his suit and was wearing baggy low-slung jeans and a ribbed cardigan with a zip. Clemmie’s boyfriends wore similar outfits. But the detail that moved her more was that his feet were bare. A long white toe stuck out from under the frayed denim. This was more intimate, more embarrassing, than if he had been naked. It said: I am at home here. This is where I belong.
And this, thought Stella, is where I don’t belong. She looked down at her own shoes with their inch and a half patent heels and at her black trousers with the neat crease along the front.
– What a delightful flat, she said.
– Don’t, said Rhys. It’s crap. I’ve been to your place … you could fit the whole thing into your front room.
– Yes, but we bought it ages ago – we got on to the property ladder long before prices started to go up.
What was she doing? She had come to this godforsaken place to visit a man whom she had thought about obsessively for months, who this morning she had kissed wildly and passionately in a taxi, and now here she was discussing the property ladder.
– Do you want a drink? he asked.
He went into his tiny strip kitchen and started opening cupboards.
The room smelt powerfully of Pledge and Cif. The sofas and the tables she recognized from the Ikea catalogue, which she had thumbed through last year when they were fitting up their house in France. On the table was a stack of lads’ magazines. FHM, GQ and Men’s Health. She looked at them and laughed.
– Do you read this stuff?
– Yes, he said.
– Why?
– Because I’m a man, and because I’m twenty-seven. What do you read, Saga?
Stella laughed, and started to feel a little easier. He came back from the kitchen with two large glasses of red wine and a tube of sour cream Pringles. He picked up his glass and Stella saw that his hands were shaking. He sat down, not next to her but on the armchair.
– Thank you for coming, he said.
– That’s OK, she said. This is nice wine.
He asked if she would like to listen to some music, and she said yes. He fiddled with his iPod, which started to play something quite unfamiliar.
Stella put a Pringle in her mouth, but couldn’t swallow it and took a gulp of the wine, which made her cough. Rhys came over to the sofa and patted her between the shoulders and she closed her eyes. Slowly he moved his hands up from between her shoulders and started to rub her head. She felt as she had at fourteen, when she had gone around to the house of a boy she had had a crush on. They had sat side by side on his bed and he had put on JJ Cale and had rolled a joint and she had kissed him. The kiss had filled her with exultation of what was happening, but terror at what it would lead to.
– I can’t have sex with you now, she said.
– I know, Rhys said. It’s OK.
– I’m scared.
But what she was mostly scared of now was not sex, though she was scared of that too. She was scared about wanting him so much that she would never be able to go back to finding her old life enough and being happy
in it. This fear sat there glinting like a knife, but for now there was so much happiness, too, that it coated it with a cladding of light polystyrene packaging and made her think that the knife was safe. No one was going to get cut.
Rhys kissed her again and pushed her down so that they were lying side by side on his cream leather sofa.
She put her hand under his T-shirt and felt his back, his skin almost as soft as the skin of her children. She chased this comparison away. She lay in his arms kissing him and wanted to stay there, doing that, for ever.
Stella looked at her watch. She had been there for fifty minutes already and had to begin the long trek back to Primrose Hill.
– I have to go, she said.
– I’ll take you to the tube.
Out in the street, he put his arm around her as they walked along and Stella again had the weird sensation that he was her first boyfriend and she was doing this for the first time. No one will see us, she thought, not here. Their strides were different, his long and languid, hers short and brisk, but he adjusted his to make it fit hers, and they hobbled along.
At Seven Sisters station he wrapped his arms tightly around her and kissed her again.
– I don’t know what’s happening to me, she said.
– You are wasting away because you’ve had nothing to eat.
He produced a Twix from his pocket.
– There you are, he said.
Stella got back to find Charles watching Newsnight.
– Did you have a nice evening? he asked.
– Not especially. The speech was tedious, and then I got cornered by this guy who was a marine biologist and who had interesting things to say about the Russian whales and so we went out for a drink, we went to Soho House, and I’m starving because all I’ve had is nuts – is there any dinner left? And also did you know that Stephen is on my case about this green petrol thing?
Stella knew that talking so much was unwise. She knew that you were meant to stick as closely to the truth as possible. But she also knew that she must keep on talking to remind herself who she was and to root herself in her real life. And in any case it didn’t matter what she said to Charles, as he wasn’t listening anyway.
She sat down on the sofa. The BBC’s economics correspondent was standing in front of a moving chart which kept on changing colour.
– I’m tired, Stella said.
– Night, he said absently.
Bella
Bella’s first impulse had been to sign on to his email account from her computer and delete the message. But as she was no longer his PA, a prompt had come up saying ‘Access denied’.
She got up and went towards his office, but found the door closed and James inside with a couple of visitors. Through the blinds she could see him talking calmly and wondered if this meant he hadn’t seen it. But then he looked up, and seeing her hovering, turned his head and looked the other way.
When the meeting was over and James had led the two men out of his office, Bella seized her chance, went to his computer and looked at his inbox. Hers was sitting there close to the top in black, showing that he had opened it. She pressed ‘delete’, and as she did so Anthea came in.
– Can I help? she asked officiously.
Bella said that she was just helping James with a computer problem. Anthea raised an over-plucked eyebrow but was prevented from expressing a view on the matter by the arrival of James himself.
– Bella is fixing your computer, said Anthea in a voice tight with disbelief.
James looked at her coldly.
– Thank you, how kind, he said.
– It seems to be working fine now, Bella said.
Back at her desk, Bella wrote another message:
Dear James
I did not mean to send you that email, and I did not mean the things I said in it. I was angry and upset, but I now see that was ridiculous and unprofessional. Please forgive me.
Bella
She sent it, though she knew it would do no good. She had been given one chance to make something of herself and she had blown it. Three days earlier her future had looked brighter than at any point in the last eight years. She had been promoted out of the PA ghetto. She had a boss who rated her and was looking after her. But then she had got drunk and made a fool of herself. She had done, as Karen had said so woundingly, that clichéd PA thing of shagging her boss. Maybe she would have got away with that, but now he had seen the email he would no longer want her working for him. She would have to go back to being a PA for someone else.
Stella
In the Tuesday morning meeting Stella and her team sat around the table telling each other what they were working on. Stella was good at keeping these meetings short, and never let any of her team talk for more than a minute or so.
But today she could not focus on what any of them were saying. She had had so little sleep that she was hardly functioning. Every time she had closed her eyes, Rhys had been there in the dark. Now here he was, sitting three spaces away from her. She could not see his face; all she could see were his arms on the table. He had taken off his jacket and had rolled up his sleeves to show his wrists. She looked at his hands and thought how yesterday they had touched her skin. She looked at the soft hair on his forearms and at his nails, which were bitten to the quick.
– What is the time frame on this project? someone was asking her.
Without any idea of which project was being referred to, Stella said: We need to keep the momentum up – an answer that seemed to do the trick.
Afterwards the others left and Rhys loitered, taking an implausibly long time to collect his papers. Stella too seemed incapable of leaving the meeting room. The two of them stared at each other across the table.
Rhys said: I have to kiss you.
– You are mad, she hissed.
– I know, he said. When can you come back to my flat?
Stella longed to be in his flat right then. She wanted to be back on his sofa. More than that, she wanted to be in his bed. The doubts she had had the previous night had gone: when you felt something this strongly, she reasoned, it could not be wrong to do it.
– Tomorrow morning, she said. I have nothing until 11 a.m. I’ll invent a breakfast meeting and will try to get to you by 7.30. Is that too early?
Rhys looked at her and said: Four in the morning would not be too early.
He sauntered back to his desk and Stella watched him go, looking at the back of his jacket and at the firm backs of his legs and wondering how it was possible to be quite so undone.
She sent a message to Nathalie saying:
Fyi: Forgot to put in the diary – have got breakfast meeting with some people from Defra. Then will try to go to gym. Won’t be in till 11.
In twenty-two hours she would be in Rhys’s bed. She did not know how to make the hours pass until then. She opened her laptop to look at the US notes.
She had been asked to make the petrol project look more positive than it was, but she had no stomach for it. Perhaps she could downplay some of the negative factors a little, but she was not going to lie about this. She was doing enough lying as it was.
Bella
All day Bella had waited for a reply and at five o’clock, just as she was thinking about going home, a message arrived from him, sent from his personal email account.
Dear Bella
I have, of course, read the email that you did not mean to send. At first I was angry, as it seemed not just undeserved, but – forgive me – childish and somewhat petty.
Forgive you? thought Bella. Why should I do that? It’s not petty to mind about being shagged and then cast aside.
However, I have thought about it further, and I see that you are right to be angry with me. What I did was not merely unprofessional, it was irresponsible.
Can I try to put events into a context that might make it a little easier for you to comprehend what must have seemed like puzzling behaviour from me?
Whatever, she thought.
From the first time you walked into my office, Bella, when I saw your Marmite eyes flash at me, I found you unbelievably alluring.
Marmite eyes. Bella liked that.
But when you started working for me I came to admire other things about you too. Your humour. Your quick-wittedness. Your originality, and your own breed of intelligence – which leads you to insights that people with ten times more experience frequently miss.
A feeling of warmth spread through Bella’s body.
And then, at Theakstone Lodge, we had both had too much to drink. One could say that was all it was, a drunken and undignified act. I am sorry if, judging from the remark in your email, you did not enjoy it.
Oh, but I did, thought Bella.
However, from my point of view, that is not sufficient explanation. I am old enough not to leave behind every last vestige of sense just because I have had too many glasses of indifferent Chilean Merlot.
No; what happened between us was something that I had longed for.
Over the past weeks I have been thinking about you far more than I ought. That evening I had been deeply impressed by you, by your beauty and your vivacity.
I was moved by the objects you showed the team. And I am sorry if you thought my chest of drawers ludicrous – I am aware that many people see them in this light.
The alcohol simply served to silence the voices that counsel me against acting on my desires towards you. I think you may have gathered by now that my wife has not been well. She has for many years suffered from a depressive illness that at times is more severe than at others. The last few months have been hard for her.
I am keenly aware of my duties to her, and of my love for her.
Bella drew back from the screen as she read these words. What makes you think I want to know how much you love your wife, she thought.
She is doing a wonderful job in bringing up the boys, bravely dealing with her illness. She does not deserve to have as a reward a husband who cheats on her.
And then there are the boys. My sons matter to me more than anything else in the world, and I am not prepared to act in a way that could cause them harm. I simply cannot play Russian roulette with their happiness.
In Office Hours Page 15