by Maeve Haran
For a split second he considered telling her about the circulation figures and dismissed the idea. He was being a selfish shit. This was her big moment. What she needed was a clear head, not having to worry about the problems her husband ought to be able to sort out on his own. Smiling, he pulled her to him to kiss her, noticing at the last minute her shiny red lipgloss.
‘Now what would Bogey have done about lipgloss?’ He leaned towards her threateningly.
Laughing, she ducked away, but he grabbed her, serious suddenly.
‘Now just listen to me, kid. You’re brilliant and you’re beautiful. Just remember that. And you’ll walk all over Claudia. Now off you go. And don’t forget to call me and let me know how it went.’
Basking in the warmth of his love she felt her confidence start to flow again. She stopped at the door and blew him a kiss but he’d already retreated under the duvet and was fast asleep. Still smiling, she ran down to the waiting cab, her nerves forgotten.
As she settled back into the minicab’s furry seat she asked the driver if he’d mind turning down the radio. If she quietly read her notes for twenty minutes she’d be ready. But the driver took her request as the cue for a cheery chat.
‘Nice day, eh?’
‘Very nice. Look, do you mind if –’
‘Metro Television, eh? I ain’t heard of that one. Who’re they then?’
‘A new company. We’ve just won the franchise from Capital TV. We take over in three months.’
‘Bloody good thing too, crap they put out. You know what’s wrong with TV?’
Oh God, he was going to give her his views on television. Today of all days.
‘They never watch it, TV people don’t. Never sit down and really watch it like us poor sods at home.’
‘If you don’t mind I wanted to . . .’ Liz attempted to interrupt him. She couldn’t stand much more of this. ‘Look, I’ve got some urgent reading to do. I’m afraid I really do need to get down to it.’
Keep calm, she told herself, sooner or later he’ll have to stop talking. But she was wrong. By the time they reached the Metro TV Building by Battersea Bridge Liz was at screaming point, her nerves in shreds. As he stood holding the door open for her the wretched man was still giving his views on competitive scheduling and the lack of Nature Programmes. Liz swung out of the car so fast she caught her tights on the door and ripped them.
By the time she got to her office it was nine-fifteen and she was almost hysterical. Viv, her secretary, always first at her desk on their floor, was already putting the coffee on.
Liz flopped into a seat. Wordlessly she pointed at her ripped tights, the only pair she had with her. Claudia would have had a spare pair in her drawer, six spare pairs, along with the dildo and whip she no doubt kept for subduing male colleagues. All Liz had was an aged Slim-A-Soup and one of Daisy’s dummies.
Liz looked at her secretary in astonishment. Viv was peeling off her pale beige Le Spec tights in full view of the mercifully empty office.
‘Here you go. Just as well I’ve been on the sunbed. Your need is greater than mine, as they say. The only way I’m ever going to be Programme Controller is if I buy a video and do it myself at home. This is your Big Chance.’
Viv pulled her skirt down over her long legs and put her shoes back on. ‘And if you want the secretaries’ view, we reckon Conrad’s had it up to here with Claudia Jones, she’s been pushing him too far in and out of bed. And Andrew Stone’s so wet we don’t believe even Conrad would give him the job. So we reckon you could be in with a chance.’
Viv strode off bare-legged to pour them both a coffee, leaving Liz speechless. How on earth did the secretaries know all that? Five minutes later Liz did a twirl in beige pinstripes with matching Le Spec tights. She sensed her nerve returning with every sip of the hot coffee. Feeling calmer and clutching her carefully planned speech, she was finally ready to go up to Conrad’s office.
In the lift she found Andrew Stone reading a newspaper cutting, looking even more nervous than she was. Poor Andrew. He was one of those men who sweated like Richard Nixon taking a lie detector test. She knew that his handshake would be soft and damp and that his breath would smell faintly of curry, even though he’d brushed his teeth. No wonder his wife had left him.
Still absorbed in his article, Andrew suddenly realized that they were on the fourth floor and that Liz was getting out. He made a rush for the door just as it was closing. But it was too quick for him and he stood there trying to prise it apart, like Woody Allen playing Clark Kent, while his folder fell to the floor, scattering notes and cuttings all over the lobby.
‘Oh Jesus!’ he yelped, ‘those are supposed to be in the right order!’
Hearing the panic in his voice, Liz gave him a quick smile of sympathy and helped him to pick them up.
As they scrabbled on the floor the lift doors opened again and Claudia stepped put. Suddenly the lobby was filled with the heady scent of Giorgio, as brash and impossible to ignore as Claudia herself. Bloody Claudia! How did she always manage to find you at a disadvantage?
‘Hello, Lizzie darling. Hi, Andrew. Don’t get up.’ Claudia stepped round them, her four-inch heel narrowly missing Andrew’s hand. Her short dark bob gleamed as she sashayed past them in a bright-red tailored suit with gold buttons. Her lips and nails matched it exactly.
And worst of all, Liz thought furiously, as an admiring sales exec held the door open for her to pass regally through on her way to Conrad’s office, her hands were empty. No folder. No cards. Not even a Filofax. She was going to make her presentation without a single note!
Liz handed Andrew the last of his cuttings and tried not to feel dashed. That was exactly what Claudia wanted. She’d felt so unreasonably proud at reducing her notes to a single sheet, then Claudia swans in with it all in her head. Blast her!
Keep calm! You’re the one with the ideas, not Claudia. Claudia only knows about how to screw agents and massage stars’ egos. David’s right. Claudia couldn’t dream up a strategy for the network to save her life.
Liz smoothed down her linen skirt, which was now wrinkled and creased from bending, pushed a strand of hair out of her eye and held the double doors open for Andrew in case he dropped everything again.
Outside Conrad’s office, Claudia sat sipping a cup of black coffee, her legs in their sheer black stockings folded demurely to one side, looking exactly like the illustration from one of those infuriating articles about who would have the top jobs in five years’ time.
The door opened and Conrad stood there. ‘We’re ready for you now, Claudia.’
Claudia calmly put down her cup and stood up.
Watching her retreating back Liz noticed that there wasn’t a single crease in her suit and felt a stab of furious jealousy. If only Claudia would put a foot wrong, forget her lines, suggest some ludicrous programme idea, fail to understand about marginal costing, betray some kind of humanity!
But Claudia wasn’t human. She was an alien in a red suit who had every move programmed, calculated, planned. If you ripped off that self-satisfied face you’d probably find not blood vessels and bone but wires and terminals.
As Claudia closed the door, Liz offered up a silent prayer. She hardly ever prayed and she didn’t suppose that God would greatly approve of her sentiment. But she said it anyway.
Dear God, if there is a God . . . just this once . . . please . . . let Claudia fuck up!
From the smile on Claudia’s face when she emerged Liz deduced that her prayers had not been answered. It announced, simply but subtly, that Conrad and the Board had found their Programme Controller, and that any other interviews would simply be for form’s sake.
‘How did it go?’ Liz heard herself asking, against her will.
‘Not bad. Not bad at all.’
Liz knew that was Claudia for Why don’t you bow out now, you poor schmuckss, to avoid embarrassment? and tried to concentrate on remembering what she was going to say.
She didn’t have long to
wait. The door opened again and suddenly it was her turn to be rotated slowly on the spit while Metro’s Board threw barbed questions at her tender flesh.
There were five of them altogether, all male and, apart from Conrad who was in shirtsleeves and red braces, they looked grey and Cityfied. Money men. Everyone said it was the accountants who ran television these days. The highest accolade was no longer winning an award, but coming in under budget.
As he sat her down she was struck again by Conrad’s presence. He might be small but you always knew when he’d come into a room, even before you saw him. It was as though the energy quota somehow soared. Conrad gave the impression of millions and millions of atoms packed into too small a body, all of them bursting to get out. You felt you could warm your hands by him.
But as Conrad introduced her to Metro’s Chairman, Sir Derek Johnson, and two of the other members of the Board, she found her eyes drawn to the fifth man in the room. He was tall and suave in a City sort of way, not the Porsche and carphone variety, but the sort who still wore navy chalk-stripe suits, subtle ties, and believed in keeping their promises. Liz hadn’t known there were any of them still left.
He seemed somehow familiar and she was so busy staring at him that she didn’t hear the names of the two men in suits Conrad had just introduced to her. Finally he got round to the fifth man.
‘Here is our most recent appointee to the Board, one of the square mile’s rising stars, financial whiz-kid and daring venture capitalist, Mark Rowley.’
Liz felt her neck go blotchy and red as it always did when she was suddenly embarrassed. Mark Rowley! It couldn’t be the same person! With frightening clarity the memory of a night sixteen years ago flooded back to her in painful detail.
She’d met Mark Rowley at a dinner party not long after meeting David for the first time in Oxford. Mark was twenty, like she was, a public schoolboy who’d just joined Lloyds, polite, shy, repressed. Mark didn’t seem very interested in the City, his only enthusiasm was for his hobby and passion, the Territorial Army. He was quiet and intense, completely at odds with David who was burning to be a journalist and despised anyone who did a job they didn’t like, especially a public schoolboy who got his kicks playing soldiers.
But then Mark had asked her to a ceremonial dinner for his regiment at the Goldsmiths’ Hall and she’d accepted. David had been livid when he’d heard and she’d enjoyed his jealousy.
She hadn’t much liked Mark’s friends, to her they seemed stuffy and boastful, but she’d liked Mark. She was touched by the way he didn’t hide his pride in her, kept smiling delightedly that she was on his arm. Yet, at the same time, to her twenty-year-old eyes, there was something about his gaucheness and innocence she found off-putting, as though he might not know how to kiss. And she’d found herself wondering if on the way home he would make some clumsy pass.
And then after dinner they’d come out into the beautiful courtyard, Mark’s friends and officers chatting on the pavement before they got into their cars to leave. She’d been vaguely aware of a battered Mini drawing up, Van Morrison blaring on its stereo. Without looking at the wild curly hair or the challenging blue eyes, she knew David was behind the wheel.
And in an act of cruelty she still regretted, she had said good night to Mark and climbed into the car. Looking through the back window as he stood on the pavement, his friends standing round either embarrassed or laughing, she saw a look of hurt that had stayed with her over the years.
He’d completely changed of course. The gauche shyness had long been buried under layers of cultivated charm. The public schoolboy who’d got his thrills from lying out on Salisbury Plain on manoeuvres was into corporate raiding now. For a moment Liz wondered if it was the same person. After all he’d made not the slightest sign that he recognized her.
And then Mark looked in her direction, his gaze holding hers momentarily, before he scanned the other people in the room. He gave no sign of recognition but she knew it was him. And beneath the veneer of sophistication she sensed that he remembered that night with even greater clarity than she did. Quickly she looked down at her notes.
‘So, Liz,’ Conrad’s voice cut through her memories, ‘why don’t you hit us with your strategy for the network?’
Keeping her eyes glued to Conrad’s Liz managed to find her voice. And as she outlined her proposals for drama and comedy and her plans for current affairs and documentary, she could feel her enthusiasm begin to cut through the stiff formality of the occasion and she even won the odd smile of encouragement. What’s more they really seemed to be listening and she could tell from their questions that they were taking her seriously. She breathed a silent sigh of relief.
‘Fine, Liz,’ Conrad finally cut in. ‘I don’t think there’s any question that you’re very impressive creatively speaking but television in the nineties is going to be tough. Independent television doesn’t have a monopoly of ad revenue any more. We’re fighting on all sides: the BBC, video and now satellite is beginning to take a big bite of the cherry. We’ll only survive if we can be competitive.’ He paused and she knew the big one was coming up. ‘Tell me, Liz, what kind of programme budget would you have in mind? Roughly speaking, of course.’
Liz tried desperately to keep her finger off the Erase button in her brain, born of broken nights and continual tiredness, which sometimes blanked out what she was going to say at crucial moments. After all, she’d been expecting this. She’d spent half of last night with a calculator so that she’d know what she was talking about.
She’d always known that programme ideas would be the easy bit. They were her strength. But money was the acid test. You could be Steven Spielberg but if you didn’t have the financial skills of an accountant, you wouldn’t get the job.
She looked round the serious pin-striped group and it struck her that they weren’t really interested in television. All they cared about was the bottom line, how much profit Metro could keep once it had disposed of the tiresome job of making programmes. Television was just another commodity to them, like property or stocks and shares. Only Conrad had ever worked in television, if you could call producing gameshows that made The Price Is Right look sophisticated working in television.
She knew they wanted a figure, a ballpark at least. And she also knew that it would be crazy to give it to them, a hostage to fortune she’d bitterly regret if she got the job.
‘I know times are tough, Conrad, but boxing myself into a corner at this stage would be stupid. Let’s just say the figure would be realistic.’
It was a fudge and they knew it.
She sensed that the interview was at an end. Conrad stood up. ‘Thank you, Liz, that’s most helpful.’
She got to her feet and shook hands. Mark Rowley still hadn’t given the slightest acknowledgement that they knew each other. Liz began to wonder if perhaps it wasn’t the same person after all.
Andrew smiled at her sympathetically as she came out. Claudia had gone, presumably to alert the gossip columnists of her imminent success.
It was only when she was halfway down the corridor that she realized she’d left her bag in Conrad’s office and cursed herself for her ridiculous female obsession with carrying it around everywhere.
She listened at the door to make sure it wasn’t an embarrassing moment, her hand poised to knock. Through the thin partition walls, which were a source of annoyance to all who worked at Metro and which everyone said were the result of Conrad employing the cheapest contractors because they gave him a kickback, she heard them discussing her performance. To her surprise the reaction from everyone seemed to be favourable. Except one person.
In his measured suave tones, Mark Rowley was announcing that he thought she was a bullshitter.
Liz stood rigid with fury. From his tone she could tell that she hadn’t been mistaken. He was the man she’d snubbed all those years ago. And he had a long memory.
Her first instinct, born of her dislike of confrontations, was to forget her bag and leave. And then
she wondered how she could possibly tell David that she’d run away.
Without even knocking, she opened the door and strode in, leaving them no time to adjust their conversation.
‘Hello again, gentlemen. Please excuse me. I forgot this.’ She reached down and picked up her bag. ‘And may I say one thing?’ She glanced round the group keeping her tone deliberately pleasant and even. ‘I am not a bullshitter.’ She smiled. ‘Of course I would say that, wouldn’t I? So there’s only one way to find out. Give me the job.’
She reached into her bag and pulled out the sheaf of figures she’d been working on last night and placed them in Mark Rowley’s hands. ‘Here’s a detailed breakdown of the budget I need to make Metro the top TV station in London. Anything more I’ll raise myself from sponsorship and co-production.’
As she reached the door she turned and smiled.
‘See. No bullshit.’
In the Ladies, Liz splashed cold water in her face and tried to calm down. What did it matter that she’d made a fool of herself and broken every rule in the book by walking back in there? She wasn’t the type to be Programme Controller anyway. She’d admitted it to David and it was the truth. The last few days had been a fantasy. The world of boardrooms belonged to people like Claudia who would walk all over people and Mark who could bear grudges and exact his pound of flesh sixteen years later. And they were welcome to it!
Maybe she’d go home and have lunch with Jamie and Daisy. She needed a breath of fresh innocent air to blow away the anger and outrage that were still boiling inside her.
‘Who wants to be Programme Controller? Eyeee . . . don’t!’ Sounding not at all like Frank Sinatra in High Society, Liz’s secretary tried to comfort her with coffee and a doughnut that looked like a dieter’s entire daily calorie allocation. Liz smiled gratefully and reached for the phone to dial home. Blast! The answering machine was on and her own voice, much posher than she knew it actually to be in real life, invited her to leave a message. She asked Susie to call back if they were going to be in for lunch.