In Office Hours

by Lucy Kellaway

  So to have an affair with anyone would be wrong. To do it at work would be even more wrong. I am powerfully aware that to involve myself with a direct report is extremely unprofessional, and dangerous to my career.

  I really don’t want to go on reading this, thought Bella. I have so much more to lose than you. I could get fired, lose my income and have no way of supporting my daughter. Who also matters to me more than anything else in the world, only I don’t feel the need to go on about it.

  Fortunately, from the general tenor of your message, you seem to agree that what happened was an error.

  But I didn’t mean that, Bella wanted to shout. It wasn’t an error. It was lovely.

  So where do we go from here? One option would be to get you moved to another department. If that is your wish, I will ensure that you get a position that will stretch you professionally in the way that you deserve.

  However, it is my strong preference that you continue to work here in ER. Not only do I have every confidence that you will continue to do an outstanding job, I have a more selfish reason for wanting you to remain here. It is as simple as this, Bella. I enjoy working with you.

  Last night, Hillary was watching a DVD of My Fair Lady. I wasn’t paying attention, as I was much preoccupied by work and, if I’m honest, by thoughts of you. However, I did sit up and listen when Henry Higgins says, ‘I’ve grown accustomed to her face.’

  Please forgive the sentimentality, but the line struck a chord with me.

  This was better, though Bella wasn’t sure she saw herself as Eliza, any more than she saw him as Higgins. But then she read on to the end.

  Perhaps you would let me know your views on this. I have no right to expect you to say yes, but if you do it will make me very happy indeed.

  Finally, Bella, I wanted to say sorry. If this incident has resulted in pain or embarrassment, I sincerely apologize.

  Kindest regards

  James

  When she had got to the end, Bella went back to the start and read the message a second time and then a third. Each time it left her with a different feeling. On one reading it was the coldest, most alienating message one could ever receive. Full of pomposity and written as one might write a business memo. She could not imagine ever writing a message to someone whom she had had sex with and signing it ‘Kindest regards’.

  On another reading it was a hugely selfish message, all about his love for his family and his need to do the right thing, with not even the most glancing mention of her needs. Yet on a third reading it seemed quite different.

  This man wanted her, if not as a lover, then as someone to have close by. He had, he said, lost sleep over her. He could not offer her anything, but he did not want to lose her. It wasn’t much of a deal, and the long-term prognosis was not good. It was something she knew that she ought to give up. But it was something that she couldn’t. He says I have Marmite eyes, Bella thought. He says he can’t stop thinking about me. He has grown accustomed to my face. And I have grown accustomed to his.

  After the third reading, Bella had talked herself round to a feeling of relief and optimism. She had not lost the job, and she hadn’t altogether lost him either. Clearly they could not repeat what had happened in the hotel, but there would still be a tension between them that would be exciting, but not dangerous. She would concentrate her energies on being professional and enjoying the job. She would understand that he genuinely liked her but would expect nothing further from him. That would be best for her – and for him. Everything, she thought, would work out fine.

  Stella

  For the sixth night in a row Stella had barely slept.

  She had lain in her bed tense and wakeful, with Charles slumbering beside her.

  At first she had felt pure excitement – a drug so intense that it made sleep impossible. But around 3 a.m. the excitement started to change: now it wasn’t just joy and anticipation. It was doubt, and fear too. This was madness. It was too dangerous. And it was wrong. She was not an adulteress. It wasn’t in her nature.

  At 3 a.m., she had got out of bed and sat in her nightdress on the stairs. I am going to send him a text saying I can’t do this.

  She got her mobile from her briefcase, but there was a text from him sent at 2 a.m.

  Can’t sleep. Why do I have to wait another 5 and a half hours?

  With all her heart she typed out a different message from the one she had planned to send:

  And I can’t either. Now it’s only 4 and a half xx

  She went back to bed and closed her eyes and tried tensing and relaxing every muscle in her body, but it was a long and dull business, and halfway through the second leg she got bored and her mind found its way back to Rhys again. At 5.30 she gave up on sleep, got up and ran herself a bath. As she lay in the hot water she looked at her body, not as something that she had lived in for forty-four years but as something she hardly knew. A body of that age was an odd thing: viewed in some lights and from some angles it was passable, in others it was not. Lying under the water her stomach was flat and smooth, but as she bent down to take out the plug it hung down in a dangle of loose flesh. She dried herself and rubbed the expensive body lotion that Charles’s mother had given her for Christmas into her skin. Then she put on the black lace knickers that she had bought a few days earlier in New York. She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. She had never owned such things before, and when she had tried them on in the shop – over her own pants for hygiene’s sake – she thought they might look sexy. Now, looking at her wired body in the early morning light, the pants looked pathetic – desperate, almost. She took them off and put on plain white knickers instead that had gone a touch grey from too many washes. They were better: it was undignified to look as if she were trying.

  At 6.45 she woke Finn, who was lying sprawled diagonally across his bed in sleep so deep he appeared to be in a coma. She kissed his lank hair.

  – Time to get up, she said.

  In Clemmie’s room she tiptoed across the clothes, bras, tights and bags that were strewn all over the floor to the bed. Asleep, her daughter looked as she had looked when she was about four. Stella bent over and touched the scar on her eyebrow from when she had fallen off the slide in France.

  – It’s quarter to seven. Come on darling, I’ve got to go now. See you tonight. Don’t go back to sleep.

  Clemmie opened her eyes and gazed at her mother groggily.

  – OK, she said. Bye.

  – I love you, Stella said.

  She didn’t usually tell her children she loved them, she viewed it as slushy and self-evident. But at that moment, despite what she was about to do, she felt how strongly she did love the two of them and wanted to point it out.

  Stella did not wake Charles, but put on her coat and stepped out into the dark morning.

  She felt no guilt about what she was about to do. Her life felt quite simple. She was going to Seven Sisters and she was going to see Rhys. On the tube she could not read. She counted the stations from Euston, to King’s Cross, Highbury and Islington, Finsbury Park, and then, at last, Seven Sisters.

  Rhys opened the door and this time took her in his arms. They stayed like that swaying, their bodies touching all the way down their length in the open door with the smell of old frying coming from the flat below. Rhys’s skin was slightly damp from the shower.

  Still holding on to her tightly, he led her into the bedroom.

  – Come here, he said, sitting on the bed and pulling her down.

  Stella found herself resisting, wishing that she was anywhere else than in the bedroom of this young colleague. This time her fear was purely physical. She had not had sex with any other man than her husband in nineteen years. No other man had seen her undress. To show her body now to a man seventeen years younger, a man whose girlfriends were young and beautiful, filled her with terror.

  – I don’t know if I can do this, she whispered into his ear. I haven’t bonked a man apart from Charles since I was twenty-five.

/>   – Bonked? Is that what you call it? he asked, laughing.

  – Well, what do you call it? she asked.

  – Shagged. Fucked. I dunno. But whatever, I’m frightened too, he said. I’ve never done this when I was sober at 7.41 in the morning.

  Gently he took off her skirt, but got the zipper jammed and so she had to do it, and then when he saw her white underpants, he laughed again.

  – You are beautiful, he said, but your pants are awful.

  And she laughed too, and was no longer frightened, and lay on this young man’s Ikea bed, on his cheap polycotton duvet, and kissed him with an intensity so frightening and a happiness so sharp that she thought she might die.

  Stella’s phone was ringing. It was in her bag by Rhys’s bed. She put out an arm and picked it up. It was Nathalie.

  – Where are you? Your 10 o’clock visitors are here. Are you at the gym?

  – No. Yes, said Stella.

  She instinctively pulled the duvet up over them, as if Nathalie could see her naked body locked against Rhys’s.

  – In fact, she went on, I haven’t got to the gym yet, there’s been a slight problem at home –

  She looked at Rhys and pulled a face. He was planting kisses on her shoulder and up her neck.

  – But I just called you at home, Nathalie said doubtfully.

  – It’s a problem with my mother … it’s not serious … I’ll be forty-five minutes.

  – See you later, said Nathalie.

  Stella hung up.

  – Shit, shit shit, she said.

  – You are a crap liar, he said. And you’ve gone bright red.

  He tried to enfold her in his arms again, but she stood up. She hated being late, she hated missing appointments. Hurriedly she got dressed, while Rhys lay in bed looking at her.

  – I would like to keep you for ever, he said. Like a ferret that I have in my pocket that I can get out and stroke.

  – A ferret? said Stella. But they have horrible pointed noses. And don’t you keep them up your trouser leg?

  – That would be fine too, he said, laughing.

  Afterwards in the taxi Stella buried her nose in her jacket, which smelt of him. She felt exhausted and ecstatic. I’m an adulteress, she thought. She whispered the word to herself but it meant nothing. I don’t care about anything except for this. I am free from care. This is why people make such a fuss about sex, she thought. There is the moment when all of life becomes one moment. When everything else disappears. She remembered reading somewhere that having sex with someone you love releases the same chemicals in the brain that are produced by heroin. How long, she thought, how long will it be before I get another fix?

  Bella

  Bella’s desk had moved some thirty feet along the corridor as a symbol of her new, enhanced status. This meant she was out of Anthea’s line of vision and so could type at her computer without being observed. But now that she was free from Anthea’s banal observations she found she missed them. She was quite isolated, her desk a little island in an open-plan sea with no one to talk to without getting up and moving.

  Today, in particular, she wanted company. All day she had been trying to reply to James’s message, but all her words seemed wrong.

  In an hour and a half of drafting she had come up with messages that were too needy, too angry or just too intimate. So she settled for something brief:

  Hi James –

  Thanks for your message, and sorry it’s taken me so long to get back. Yes I would like to carry on as your researcher. Thanks for apologizing, but I don’t think you have much to apologize for. It is me who should be sorry for sending that stupid message. And I didn’t mean what I said about either the chest of drawers or the sex. I was trying to be hurtful because I was feeling bad.

  Bella

  But then she thought that she should not refer to what had passed between them. And she did think the chest of drawers was weird. And she also thought that he did have plenty to apologize for, so she didn’t see why she should let him off the hook. And maybe she shouldn’t begin ‘Hi’, as he had started with ‘Dear’.

  So she tried yet again.

  Dear James

  Yes I would of course like to go on being your researcher. And don’t worry about the rest; it’s all fine.

  Bella

  This was better. Though she did want him to worry. And it wasn’t entirely fine.

  So she made a third attempt.

  James – yes, I would like to go on being your researcher.

  Bella

  But she couldn’t really send that. It was too short. No, she would wait until he had a moment on his own and go and talk to him.

  This was harder now, as she had to get up from her desk and walk twenty paces to where she could see into his office. From there she could also be seen by Anthea, who was watching her antlike to-ing and fro-ing with a suspicious interest. Each time Bella looked his chair was empty. On the fourth visit he was back, and she knocked and was waved in.

  – I’ve been trying to write you a message, she said, her voice sounding high and tight.

  – Oh?

  He smiled at her with a vague and slightly detached air.

  – But it wasn’t coming out right. All I wanted to say is that I have decided that I would like to stay as your researcher.

  – Good, he said. That’s great.

  He nodded briefly and went back to his computer.

  Bella turned to leave his office, feeling let down. After all that agonizing, after all that dissection of his message and crafting of hers, to be greeted with a brief smile and pat on the head was curiously deflating. If it was going to be like this, she’d rather go back to being a PA for someone else. All that stuff about longing for her and thinking about her and crap about My Fair Lady was drivel. He clearly didn’t mean any of it.

  Stella

  – Sorry, said Stella to the Iranian economist who had now been sitting outside her office for almost an hour. I had a family emergency.

  He nodded politely.

  Stella gestured for him to sit down, and as she took her seat she noticed a faint but unmistakable smell of sex, of her and Rhys and of both of them together. She shifted her chair slightly further away and carried on with the meeting.

  Afterwards and back at her desk, she signed on to her Hotmail account. There was a message from him, as she had known there would be.

  Dearest dearest loveliest sexiest ferret

  Hello. I miss you.

  Can I see you NOW NOW?

  Rhys xxx

  (and a few more) xxxx

  Stella smiled at her computer screen.

  Dearest R

  No you can’t. Not now. Get on with your work. SXX

  She applied herself to some numbers. She might have had no sleep, but she was filled with a crazed energy and so did not sense that Rhys had got up, walked across the open-plan office floor and come into her office and was standing by her desk.

  – Hello, he said.

  He was standing too close to her.

  – Hello, she said.

  They stared at each other.

  – I need to kiss you, he mouthed at her.

  He had his back to the glass wall, but she was facing it, so if anyone had looked in they might have seen that her complexion was high and that she was staring at him with an intensity that did not belong to a manager talking to a trainee.

  – Step back, she said. You are too close.

  He edged very slightly closer towards her.

  – Rhys, she hissed. Don’t.

  – I’m not going to leave this room, he said, until you have agreed to meet me in the lift.

  – That’s mad, she said.

  – No it’s not. The south side lifts. No one uses them. I’ll go there now and you follow in five minutes. Get into the one closest to the swing doors, and I’ll be in it.

  He turned around and walked out of the office.

  Stella looked at his departing figure. Precisely four and a half
minutes later she got up from her desk, walked past Nathalie, past Beate and past half a dozen other members of her team, through the swing doors to the bank of lifts. A man was standing there who Stella knew by sight but not by name. He had already pressed for the lift and they waited in silence. The button pinged, heralding the arrival of a lift, but it was the one furthest from the swing doors. The man got in, but Stella held back. He looked at her quizzically, and Stella said that on second thoughts she wanted to go down, not up. The doors shut on his puzzled expression.

  Stella called the lift again. This was utterly mad; she could not do this. Just as she was about to turn tail, the other lift pinged and the doors slid open and inside was Rhys, looking at his shoes, the very model of unconcern. She held back for a second, and he, sensing her hesitation, moved his hand a little towards her.

  With no idea that her mind had willed it, she stepped into the lift and as the doors slid shut was in his arms. She inhaled his smell and pressed her mouth hard against his. She slid her fingers in between his shirt buttons and felt his skin, which was warm and smooth. As the lift began to slow, they sprang apart and each stood frozen against its opposite walls.

  The doors opened at the ground floor and the group treasurer was standing there, clutching a cup of coffee he had got from the canteen.

  – Hi, he said to Stella, stepping into the lift as the two of them got out.

  – Hi Evan, Stella replied, the desperate normality of her tone ringing false in her ears.

  – Do you think he noticed anything? Rhys asked.

  – I don’t know, she said. And I don’t care.

  They pressed the button to go back up and the other lift arrived, empty. When the door closed he held her face between his two hands.

  – Stella, he said. This morning was the happiest I have ever been in my whole life. I love you.

  Stella closed her eyes with joy. When she opened them she could see an endless line of the two of them locked together, reflected in the lift’s double mirrors. She a tall, thin woman smiling inanely, he a young man, half an inch smaller, looking at her with earnest solemnity.

  – We look a mad pair, she said.

  – I don’t care, he said.

  *