Agent Provocateur

by Faith Bleasdale

  ‘I know.’

  ‘So, what are you going to do about it?’

  ‘She made me get involved. She chatted up this man while his friend tried to chat me up. It was awful. He had too much saliva and it was pouring down his chin, and he had this smirk which made me feel sick. I swear he was a psycho. I could have been killed.’ Betty hopes that her vast exaggeration of the truth does the trick.

  ‘Rubbish. It sounds like fun.’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t. She just did it to humiliate me. And it worked. This man was drooling, and he tried to touch me and, oh, it was so horrible and she could have stopped it but she didn’t.’

  ‘So I guess the lecture to the potential client was your idea of revenge.’

  ‘I guess.’ Betty is so sure that she is right, but it just isn’t coming across that way.

  ‘I don’t know what to say. You have worked here for years and you’ve always been the most reliable writer. Your work is always good. But now, well, I just don’t understand what happened.’

  ‘She hit me.’

  ‘She did? Hard?’ Fiona is tiring of the conversation.

  ‘Yes, hard. Fiona, I can’t explain it any more. We just didn’t like each other from the word go. She told me that she thinks all men are cheats and I told her that I didn’t agree and it went downhill from there. Fiona, I’ve got some good stuff here, and I’ve done loads of research. We could salvage a story from what we’ve got.’ Betty conjures up hope.

  ‘No way. I want a real profile of a real honey trapper and Nicole has told us in no uncertain terms that Grace is not a part of it any more. Which leaves us with a problem.’

  ‘You want me to find another honey trapper?’ Hope starts to fade.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh, right. Well, what then?’ Hope turns to fear.

  ‘Apologise.’

  ‘I am sorry.’

  ‘Not to me, to her. You have to apologise to Grace and get her to agree to finish the story. I realise that this will probably mean we have to add on a bit of extra time, but that’s not a problem.’

  Betty is white; she feels faint.

  ‘I can’t do that. Fiona, why don’t you put someone else on the story? They can talk her round. There is no way that she will ever accept me again.’

  ‘That’s what I thought at first, but then I realised that she will – if you persuade her you really are sorry and you mean it. Be sincere. Beg. Do whatever, but, Betty, you are going to finish this profile if it’s the last story you do.’ Fiona’s face looks the same as always but her voice conveys that she means business.

  ‘Or?’ Betty’s fear is wrapping around her intestines. It is here to stay.

  ‘Or, I am going to demote you. Not officially, of course, but you’ll be writing the worst features for the rest of your working life. You will cringe every time you see your by-line rather than be proud of it. You will never get a promotion and I personally will ensure that your working life is a misery.’ Fiona smiles after delivering her very calm speech.

  ‘Don’t you think you might be a bit harsh?’ Betty is truly terrified. And astounded. She cannot believe that Fiona is taking this so seriously. Her job really is under threat.

  ‘No. I do not. We are this close to being sued and if you cast your crazy mind back you will remember that it was my idea to do this feature and my idea to use Grace. The boss is always right, Betty. You should know that by now.’

  Betty realises that there is no way out. Fiona is stubborn, and she assumes Grace is too. She wants to burst into tears, run away, but she’s not a kid anymore and she can’t behave like one. She thinks of Johnny and wonders what he would say. She knows that he would tell her to apologise to Grace and then finish the story. She doesn’t want to be writing boring stories for the rest of her life, nor does she want to lose her job. She knows, however, that Fiona does not dish out idle threats.

  ‘Fiona, please don’t be angry. I just want to clarify the situation. Either I apologise to Grace and get the story back or you’ll ruin my life. I don’t suppose there is a third option?’ As she says this she cannot look Fiona in the eye so she re-ties the lace on her trainers.

  ‘No. Apart from quitting. If you want to resign I would be very sad but I’d accept it.’ Her deadpan face makes it impossible to gauge if she is joking or not. Part of Betty is sure that she doesn’t mean it a bit, but there is another part not quite brave enough to find out.

  ‘OK, OK, so I apologise. But what if she refuses to carry on with the story?’

  ‘Then you persuade her. Bribe her. Do whatever you have to do. But get her back.’ Fiona turns to her computer screen and picks up the phone, indicating to a very green Betty that the conversation is over.

  Grace feels quite strange now she isn’t expecting to be watched. She goes back to wearing a tracksuit and no make-up. She spends an hour watching her fish in the morning after she’s fed them, rather than going straight to the office. When she does go to the office she picks up her emails and arranges her calendar. She has another job that evening. A job that the hateful Betty will not be attending. She smiles because although she was quite excited about being in print, she feels free. Free from condemnation. Free from the judgemental journalist. She feels bad for Nicole, who she knew was looking forward to the publicity, but then she feels good for herself, because she felt dreadful, insecure and nervous when Betty was around.

  She wonders if she has a mark where she hit her. She feels ashamed of that. Betty did push her too far but she hasn’t hit anyone since before she was sixteen years old. To behave the way she did showed an immense lack of control. Ever since she left school, no one has made her feel as bad as Betty did, but she still can’t quite work out why she allowed her to get so under her skin.

  She wonders how Betty’s day is going. Then she puts her out of her mind and calls Nicole. She wants to work harder, to make up for any disappointment she might be feeling.

  ‘How are you today?’ Nicole asks.

  ‘Better. Thanks for yesterday. I shouldn’t have lost it.’

  ‘We all do. Anyway, I trust you, Grace, and I know that this woman must have pushed you to make you feel that way.’

  ‘I’m sorry about the article. I know you were going to get huge publicity out of it.’

  ‘It’s not worth it, especially if she had spent the rest of the week driving my clients away.’

  ‘But I want to make it up to you. I want you to give me more work to do.’

  ‘Grace, you already work harder for me than anyone else.’

  ‘Then I’ll work harder.’

  ‘You don’t need to feel guilty.’

  ‘I know. The trouble is that I do and, Nicole, I really want to make things better.’

  ‘They’re fine.’ Nicole laughs. ‘Grace, you’re too sensitive at times. I am not angry with you, I’m angry with this Betty woman and I told her editor that.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She wanted to know if there was anything we could do to salvage the situation.’

  ‘And you said?’

  ‘Probably not. I told her that it was no longer anything to do with me, it was your call.’

  ‘You want me to go back and continue?’

  ‘No, I don’t. If yesterday is anything to go by, I want you to forget about it, pretend you’ve never met her. But I know that Fiona sounded determined, so don’t be surprised if they try to persuade you otherwise.’ Now Grace laughs. ‘In fact, Fiona seems to be more than a little concerned with this story. She said it was because she thinks that fidelity testing is a statement of feminism and she wants to run the best feature on it before any of the other magazines do. I didn’t tell her that it has actually been documented before, but I think she’s going to pull Betty by the hair and make her grovel or something.’

  ‘Maybe that could be fun.’

  ‘Grace, what are you thinking?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just know that for some reason she really got to me and I’d like to do s
omething about it.’

  ‘Honey, as I keep saying, it’s up to you.’

  ‘I’ll have a think and let you know if I get any inspiration. Whatever happens, this isn’t more important than the job.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  They turn their conversation away from Betty and towards the job that evening. It’s not one that Grace relishes, because it is slightly unusual, and although morals don’t score that high when catching cheaters, when testing men who haven’t cheated, they do bug her. The woman who has hired her is a divorcee who has been dating the man in question for only three months. She does not think he is cheating but she thinks he would do, and that thought is tearing her apart. Nicole has had numerous conversations with the potential client before she would agree to the job. Her conclusion was that the woman really needed to do this, otherwise she would destroy her relationship before it got off the ground. They both hope that he turns her down; that would make Grace’s day. Any man that turns her down would do that.

  She thinks back to the second time she thought she was in love. It was after she started working in her secretarial role. There was a girl there, another secretary, called Helen, who took Grace under her wing and took her out. Helen was her best friend for ages. Her first ever best friend. She took Grace to a wine bar (it was the first time she had ever been to anywhere other than a pub or a nightclub, although she didn’t betray this) and Grace met Ben.

  Grace left many things behind when she left home. One was the upbringing. Although her accent was not exactly polished, she listened to people speaking and she thought about her words before she enunciated them. Now she comes across as well-spoken but that took her a few years to master. Helen (a girl from a middle-class background) taught her about hair, make-up and anything else she needed to know.

  When Grace met Ben, she was a different Grace from the one who had been engaged to Dave. She still believed her personality was the same, if not a little more composed, but everything else had changed. Ben was gorgeous, with curly brown hair that flopped over his face, big hazel eyes and an ‘orgasm’ smile (Helen’s evaluation). Grace believed she fell in love at first sight. He was wearing a smart suit, and it turned out he worked in the same industry. Helen went over to him and his friend and started speaking to them, leaving Grace, amazed at her confidence, speechless. However, they were invited to join them, and finally Grace found her voice, although it was still on the quiet side.

  Helen discarded Ben’s friend after a week, but by then Grace had submerged herself in her feelings for Ben. She had never met anyone like him. He was educated, professional, had been to private school (or it may have been public, but Grace did not understand the difference), he had lived in the country, and now had a well-paid job, a nice car (BMW), and was only twenty-six. He also was the first man to treat Grace in that way. He took her to dinner (and not the Harvester) and he sent her flowers – huge, huge bouquets rather than carnations from the petrol station. For her birthday (they had been together for six months) he bought her earrings, expensive earrings, and he took her for her very first trip abroad, to Paris.

  She was so excited about travelling abroad and she made so many lists that she packed three times before she was satisfied. However, she had to hide the way she really felt behind a cool exterior. Grace had never managed to stop feeling ashamed about where she was from, so she didn’t tell. She made her life out to be average, so people wouldn’t ask too many questions. She longed to jump up and down, and shine on the outside the way she felt inside, but she didn’t. She maintained an aura of cool.

  She realised many things about herself when she was in a relationship with Ben. The first was that she was actually quite a snob although she had no grounds to be. When she was younger, she always fantasised that she was swapped at birth by accident, and although she was not the type of child to imagine that her parents were really the king and queen, she did think that they had only one child and they lived in a house with a garden. She was convinced that this was the case because she never felt as if she fitted in to her family, not the way her sister and brothers did. She always felt different and she believed she was. When she met Ben, although her childhood fantasies had long fled, she still knew that for some reason her new life was more natural to her than her old one ever had been.

  She believed with all her heart that she loved Ben and she would do anything for him. She often did – cooked, cleaned, had the most imaginative sex, wore sexy underwear, bought him porn. She was the perfect girlfriend. Which is why, after a year, when he finished their relationship, she thought she was going to die.

  It felt different from how it had gone with Dave. There were no parallels to be drawn. There were two different girls and two different relationships. This was total despair, complete desolation, incomprehension and grief. She was beside herself; she had no idea what to do. She panicked that her old life would be coming to get her because Ben wasn’t just a man, he was a symbol of the new improved Grace. Ben had ended their relationship for no good reason. He just decided that he didn’t want commitment. Grace retracted into herself and wondered what was wrong with her. First Dave stole her money, and then Ben broke her heart – what was it with her? No matter how much Helen tried to reassure her that that was men for you, Grace refused to believe her. She believed the problem was her. The only thing she could do was to protect herself, so she covered her heart with a suit of armour and she started thinking about herself again.

  What annoyed her was that she had achieved so much in the post Dave period, and then she lost herself again with Ben. She was determined not to become a bitter, cynical woman, but she was also determined to make her life good for herself. The reality was, of course, that she didn’t believe she would ever love anyone else but Ben. It did not take her long to realise that she did not love him, but what he was, but instead of liberating her, this realisation made her even more depressed.

  So she worked hard, and ignored her misery for two years. Then it resurfaced, and instead of having a man as a culprit she left her job and became an infidelity detective.

  Ben was her last serious relationship. She couldn’t trust men, she didn’t understand them, she wasn’t good enough. All these reasons kept relationships, meaningful relationships, away. Also, she believed that Ben was the first real love and was up there on the top of her podium. He wasn’t going anywhere. Especially as he gave her the perfect excuse to keep other men out.

  Her phone rings and she answers it.

  ‘Hi, it’s Betty.’ Now Grace could have predicted a number of people that might phone her today, but Betty would not have been on the list. She smiles because it is a surprise and she is in the mood for surprises.

  ‘What do you want?’ Just because she is smiling does not mean she needs to be civil.

  ‘I need to talk to you.’

  ‘About what?’ Grace hopes that Betty is squirming. Betty hopes that Grace burns in hell.

  ‘What happened between us. I really regret it.’

  ‘Do you?’ Grace tries to sound bored.

  ‘I do. Can we talk?’

  ‘Well, I’m a bit busy at the moment.’

  ‘Can we meet? It might be easier face to face.’

  ‘I’m not sure that’s a good idea. Remember what happened the last time we were face to face?’

  ‘I know. That’s what I need to talk to you about. Please, Grace.’

  Grace likes the begging tone that has entered Betty’s voice. Meeting up might be fun. ‘Sure.’ She figures that if she capitulates quickly, Betty will think she is so reasonable. Lure the enemy into a false sense of security.

  ‘Really? When?’

  ‘Tomorrow. Meet me for breakfast.’ Grace rattles off the name and address of a café that she likes and hangs up.

  What a turn up, she thinks, Betty grovelling for a meeting. After her conversation with Nicole, Grace expected this. She didn’t expect it quite so soon, however. Betty’s boss has made her do this, and she probably hates every
minute of it. This makes Grace love every minute of it. She is going to enjoy herself. After all, she deserves it.

  Betty’s face is so red when she replaces the handset that Hannah is giving her a funny look.

  ‘What?’ Betty screams.

  Hannah goes into a mock cower. ‘You look like you’re about to explode.’

  ‘Well, I fucking well might fucking explode. Shit, it’d be easier than having to apologise to that bitch.’

  ‘So why do it?’

  ‘I have no choice. Either I apologise or rot in crap story hell.’

  ‘Ah, not much of a choice.’

  ‘No, hell or hell.’

  ‘Is she really that bad?’

  ‘Worse. And the thing is that she is going to enjoy this. Shit, I haven’t been this humiliated in years.’

  ‘Just think, though, as soon as you get this story, then you will never have to see her again.’

  ‘True. It’s just a shitting shame that Fiona is so set on this. God, I wish someone else was covering it.’

  ‘Betty, you’re turning red again.’

  ‘I’m going to get some water. Maybe I’ll drown myself while I’m at it.’

  ‘You couldn’t do that. What about Johnny?’

  ‘No, you’re right. I might be having a bad time but at least I have him.’ Betty smiles. ‘And we’ve got this party at the weekend, so maybe I can get over myself long enough to enjoy it.’

  ‘Well, I’m looking forward to it anyway.’

  ‘So am I,’ Betty lies.

  She was fine about the party last week. She and Johnny were having fun organising it, and she spoke to people she hasn’t seen since her wedding. But all seems tarnished now. And she blames Grace for that.

  A breakfast grovelling and then finish the story and never see her again, just as Hannah said. That is a positive thought, and one that she will hang on to as tightly as she can.

  Then her life, the life she is so happy with, can go back to how it was pre Grace.

  Grace carries on without giving Betty too much thought. But when she does, it is with frustration that she realises she still has no idea what she will do to get her own back, or even if it is worth it.