High Potential

by Ber Carroll

  Geoff hadn’t found it funny, and they had split up by the time the wedding came around. Katie received an invitation but sent her regrets. She didn’t know if Geoff had gone or not.

  Katie came back to the present when she heard Oliver ask, ‘Where’s the Ice Maiden?’

  He was talking to Jim, who had come over to their table.

  Jim sat down in Isabelle’s vacant seat. ‘She’s gone to her room to catch up on some work.’ He made a halfhearted attempt to defend his team-mate: ‘She’s not that bad. She just takes her work a little too seriously.’

  ‘More like a lot too seriously,’ Katie shot back.

  ‘Don’t you?’ Jim turned his dark grey eyes her way, the intensity of his gaze unsettling. ‘Aren’t you here because you want to become a partner?’

  ‘Yes,’ Katie met his gaze head on, ‘and so are you. And Oliver. But that doesn’t excuse Carole’s bad manners.’

  ‘Katie’s always right,’ declared Oliver, getting to his feet. ‘And I happen to agree with her in this instance. Carole needs to come down from her high horse. Now, I’m going to order another bottle of wine. Any preference for red or white?’

  ‘White,’ Katie and Jim answered in unison.

  ‘We’ve something in common then,’ said Jim when Oliver was out of earshot.

  She grinned. ‘White wine! Great – we can get drunk together.’

  He laughed and she laughed too, happy that he thought her amusing.

  I want more chances to make him laugh, she thought.

  ‘You seem to know Oliver fairly well,’ he commented.

  ‘We were friends –’ Katie faltered as she realised that she had subconsciously placed her friendship with Oliver in the past. She had regarded it as something that was lost along with Geoff. In that moment, though, she saw that Geoff and Oliver didn’t have to come as a package. ‘I mean, we are friends outside of work.’

  If Jim noticed something odd about her stumbled response, he didn’t say.

  ‘What time did you get back last night?’

  ‘Eleven,’ she said, thinking, Too late. You were gone from the bar.

  ‘You must be tired today.’

  ‘It’s my own fault. I need to learn how to say no to Neil. I can’t believe that I spent four hours behind the wheel last night!’

  ‘Four hours would almost get you from one end of Ireland to the other. What part are your parents from?’

  ‘Somewhere outside Dublin.’ She shrugged, feeling hopelessly uninformed about her family history. ‘I don’t know the exact town – they don’t talk about it a lot.’

  ‘Ask the next time you see them.’ He smiled. ‘Maybe I’ll know it.’

  ‘I will,’ she promised.

  Conversation between them was easy. She could have talked to him all night, told him everything about herself, her family, maybe even Geoff. But Oliver came back. The wine was poured. The conversation resumed and, while it was just as easy, it was much less personal.

  It was some time later that Oliver’s phone beeped with an incoming message. He picked it up from the table and read the text on his screen. ‘Bloody great – a meeting in the city on Friday evening. Crystelle will kill me when I tell her I won’t be coming straight home. It’s at times like these that I wonder why I ever became a lawyer.’

  ‘Why did you become a lawyer?’ asked Katie as she swirled the last of the golden chardonnay in her glass.

  ‘My dad suggested it. He saw how much money they made and thought it would be a good career for me.’ Oliver paused before delivering his punchline. ‘He apologises profusely every time he sees me now.’

  Relaxed from the wine, his story seemed hilariously funny, and their laughter drew the attention of the remaining patrons. When the laughter died down, Katie asked the same question of Jim.

  ‘Why did you choose law?’

  He shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘I wanted to do medicine rather than law but I didn’t get in. I was devastated at the time . . . but now that I know myself better, I’m not so sure I would have made a good doctor.’

  Katie added his response to the limited knowledge she had from the ‘two truths and one lie’ game on their first morning. Jim Donnelly had three sisters, listened to rhythm and blues, and loved soccer, rugby and every form of football there was.

  So far he’d made no mention of a girlfriend.

  ‘What a shame he is taken,’ Isabelle had said that night of the launch. ‘You and I can only admire from a distance.’

  Katie was desperately wishing that Isabelle had got it wrong when Jim asked, ‘And you, Katie? What made you want to become a lawyer?’

  ‘I never wanted to be a lawyer,’ she told him. ‘Right from the outset I wanted to be a partner.’

  ‘Oh, excuse me!’ exclaimed Oliver, rolling his eyes.

  ‘It’s not like that.’ She grinned.

  ‘Well, how is it?’ asked Jim.

  ‘It goes back to school. One girl’s father was a partner in a law firm. Let’s say it set the standard for me.’

  They talked their way through a second bottle of wine. At ten-thirty the bar staff began to collect glasses and wipe down tables.

  ‘Time to call it a night,’ Oliver declared, stretching as he got to his feet.

  Katie also stood up – reluctantly, for she still hadn’t asked Jim a fraction of what she wanted to know about him.

  ‘Goodnight,’ she said. ‘See you in the morning.’

  Outside, she buttoned up her jacket against the wind and began to walk across the yard towards the residential block. Her thoughts were so fiercely focused on Jim that she didn’t realise the voice calling ‘Katie, Katie!’ was for real. But the hand that caught her arm was real and she stopped dead in her tracks.

  ‘You forgot these,’ said Jim, holding out her packet of Dunhills.

  ‘Thanks,’ she mumbled, disappointed that her cigarettes were the only reason he had come dashing after her.

  In the following silence, Katie felt her eyes drawn to him until they locked into his stare.

  ‘You’re a very talented lawyer, Katie Horgan,’ he said softly. ‘You set the standard – don’t ever forget that.’

  Katie was so taken aback that she didn’t set him straight. The girl in school, Lindy, had been her friend. Her father was a lovely man who had given Katie holiday work while she was at university. Her first mentor, he’d shown her how satisfying it was to build your own practice and balance quality service with financial success. Over a few summers he’d channelled Katie’s unbridled competitiveness and talent into a specific goal: to reach partner by the time she was thirty-two years old. The family lived in Melbourne now but Katie still kept in touch with both Lindy and her dad. She hadn’t told them yet how close she was to becoming partner and achieving the goal.

  Katie should have lost no time in assuring Jim that she wasn’t trying to measure up to anyone else’s standards, but his eyes were holding her in a weird kind of spell. She quite simply couldn’t speak while he was looking at her like that.

  ‘Goodnight,’ he said, ‘again.’

  She watched him go.

  You set the standard.

  What a lovely thing to say, even though he had got the wrong end of the stick entirely.

  Katie looked at her reflection as she waited for her call to be answered. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes bright. Rose would have known instantly that something was different had she been face to face with her daughter.

  ‘Hello?’ Rose’s voice sounded wary when she eventually answered the phone.

  ‘Mum, it’s me.’

  ‘Katie! What are you doing calling at this hour?’ she scolded, and then asked, ‘Is everything all right, love?’

  ‘Everything’s fine. Just wanted to say hello.’

  ‘How’s the course going?’

  ‘It’s good – interesting – but hard work.’

  ‘Has anyone been fired yet?’ asked Rose.

  ‘It’s not The Apprentice, Mum,’ replied Katie
with a laugh. ‘But to answer your question, no. Nobody will be eliminated until the end of the year.’

  ‘Right.’ Rose gave a muffled yawn. ‘Well, it’s late. I should be going to bed, and so should you. I suppose we’ll see you at the weekend?’

  ‘Hold on, Mum,’ Katie cut in. ‘What’s the name of the place you come from in Ireland?’

  Not surprisingly, Rose didn’t answer.

  ‘Mum? Are you there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Rose wasn’t making it easy. She never did. However, this time Katie wasn’t going to give up.

  She repeated the question slowly. ‘What’s the name of the place where you grew up?’

  Rose answered with another question. ‘Why do you need to know that at eleven o’clock at night?’

  ‘Because somebody asked me. Jim Donnelly. He’s on the course, he’s Irish.’

  She knew she had Rose in a corner. There was no way she could avoid answering, other than to hang up. If they had been at home she would have rushed off to attend to some minor but suddenly urgent task.

  ‘Portmarnock,’ was the grudging response that came down the line.

  ‘Portmarnock,’ Katie echoed. ‘Thanks, Mum, I’ll ask Jim if he knows of it.’

  Chapter 9

  ‘And the winning team is . . .’ Angela paused for effect. ‘Team 1, Jim and Carole, with five-million profit and eight-dollar share price! Team 2, you had an okay result . . . Team 3, well . . .’

  There was nothing positive that Angela could say about the results of Team 3. Both the profit and share price had fallen. Katie tried to look as though she didn’t care.

  David was very despondent when they returned to the room across the hall.

  ‘Maybe we shouldn’t bother doing anything today,’ he said. ‘We would have done better had we spent all day yesterday down at the bar.’

  His despondency made Katie feel even more weary than she already was. She had got up at five to work on her presentation. It had taken ages to download Claudine’s pictures and put the right text around them.

  She rubbed the furrows on her forehead and muttered, ‘Our investment in the education market made a big dent in our results.’

  ‘Well, let’s not throw good money after bad in our Year 2 budget,’ was David’s answer.

  ‘No, it’s important to stay true to our strategic plan,’ Katie argued. ‘The education market is our long-term strategy . . .’

  David chewed the top of his pen. He seemed to need to do that in order to think. ‘Okay, I’m with you. Let’s continue to pour money into education. Either we fall flat on our faces again or our profits will go through the roof.’

  ‘Okay.’ Katie was relieved that they seemed to be getting faster at making decisions. ‘Now, is there anything we can learn from the results of the other teams?’

  David ran his finger down the summary page. ‘Team 1 pumped all their money into training. I think we could do with being more people-focused this year.’

  ‘Good point.’

  They spent the rest of the morning planning a restructure for the X Company: reviewing staff profiles, promoting, hiring and firing.

  ‘I’m rather enjoying this,’ said David. ‘Being the one who pulls the strings rather than being the puppet at the end of the line.’

  By lunchtime, the restructure was complete.

  ‘Thanks for that tip on the education market,’ Oliver commented when Katie sat down at the lunch table.

  ‘Oh ye of little faith!’ she retorted.

  ‘Planning a strong gallop towards the finish line?’ asked Jim, a smile playing on his lips.

  She smiled back. ‘Yes. Prepare to be flattened.’

  The connection with him seemed to get stronger with every smile, every word. She was longing for the time when she would be able to talk with him alone again.

  ‘There’s nothing quite like Katie in full gallop!’

  ‘Or nobody quite as smart-alecy as you, Oliver Thame.’

  ‘What training courses are we going to sponsor?’ asked David, settling back into his seat after lunch. ‘I like the sound of this project-management one.’

  Katie wasn’t ready to put her nose to the grindstone just yet.

  ‘David,’ she said, remembering the discussion from the previous night, ‘why did you do law?’

  His face reddened, as if she had caught him with his hand in the cookie jar. ‘Because it was expected of me.’

  ‘By whom?’

  ‘My father’s a Queen’s Counsel: Kenneth Smythe. You may have heard of him.’

  ‘Of course I’ve heard of him! He’s a legend in constitutional law. I should have guessed he was your father.’

  David, however, didn’t seem all that proud of his old man.

  ‘I’m an embarrassment to him.’ His voice was hoarsened by bitterness. ‘Ten years as a senior associate – a rather mediocre performance by his only child, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t say.’ She was about to add that there was nothing wrong with being a senior associate but stopped herself just in time; something told her that David was sick of being patronised.

  ‘He gets frustrated by me,’ said David. ‘When I was a child he used to try to have highbrow conversations with me. Then he would become irritated when I didn’t get it. I irritate him even more now. Unfortunately, I didn’t inherit his brilliant genes . . .’

  For the second time in as many days, Katie felt sorry for David.

  ‘Why don’t we go down to the bar,’ she suggested. ‘Find a table next to the fire and work through this budget over a glass of wine.’

  ‘Sounds like a good idea to me,’ he said and gathered up the paperwork.

  Angela collected the budget allocations at six and said she would announce the results by eight.

  ‘Two hours free,’ said Isabelle, clapping her hands with girlish glee. ‘It’s our last night – let’s make it one to remember!’

  They boycotted their unread emails, unanswered voicemails and the all-important partner presentations and went straight to the restaurant. Katie and Jim gravitated to the same side of the table.

  ‘After you,’ he said and pulled out a seat for her.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I asked my mum,’ she said when he sat down. ‘She grew up in a place called Portmarnock. Do you know it?’

  ‘It’s an outer suburb of Dublin city,’ said Jim. ‘It’s very nice – has a lovely beach and one of the best golf courses in the country.’

  Katie wanted to know more. ‘Do you know anyone who lives there?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘What’s Dublin city like?’ she asked next.

  ‘Jam-packed with character: paperboys, buskers, jaywalkers, winos, cobblestone laneways, modern shops in old buildings, Guinness signs outside pubs, live music inside . . .’

  His words were so vivid that she had no problem picturing it. Just listening to him speak about his country seemed to go some way to satiating the nagging curiosity that she had. She realised then that part of Jim’s attractiveness was that he was Irish. And he was willing to answer her questions. Unlike Rose and Frankie.

  ‘Do you miss living there?’ she asked when he paused.

  ‘Yes and no . . .’ His face took on a more serious expression. ‘It sounds funny, but one of the things I miss most is the singalong at the end of a night out. And of course I miss the family, not just the immediate family but the extended aunts, uncles and cousins. I’d never have to go to the Yellow Pages to look up a plumber or an electrician. Somebody always knew somebody who knew somebody.’

  The waiter came around with the wine.

  ‘Red or white, madam?’

  ‘White.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘White, please.’

  ‘Cheers,’ said Jim so quietly that the others couldn’t hear.

  ‘Cheers,’ she whispered back.

  She searched for something to say. Something safe. She remembered where they had dropped the conve
rsation before the waiter came. ‘What don’t you miss about Ireland?’

  He smiled at her crookedly. ‘The weather. The bad roads. The fact that people’s curiosity comes ahead of their sensitivity. Everything is up for discussion, nothing is sacred.’

  She gave a little laugh. ‘That certainly makes me Irish, then. My nosiness drives my mother insane . . .’

  ‘I can certainly see that you have the capacity to drive someone insane, Katie Horgan.’

  This time it was in his tone as well as his eyes. There was no mistaking it: Jim Donnelly was flirting with her.

  They were still at the dinner table when Angela arrived at eight.

  ‘Angela!’ Oliver exclaimed and jumped to his feet as if she was a long-lost friend. ‘You’ve been working too hard. Sit down. Have some of this excellent wine.’

  Angela, nonplussed by the attention, unwound her red scarf from her neck. ‘Yes, well, a glass of shiraz would be nice.’

  Oliver got her a seat and asked the waiter for a clean glass.

  ‘Teacher’s pet,’ Katie said under her breath as he passed by. Rediscovering their friendship had been the best thing about this week away. Bar Jim.

  Angela waited for her well-deserved glass of red before announcing the winner.

  ‘Well, the results of Year 2 were rather unexpected. But there is a clear overall winner . . . and that is Team 3.’

  ‘Yes!’ shouted David and banged his fist triumphantly on the table. ‘Yes, yes, yes!’

  Katie grinned at him.

  Carole, looking decidedly pissed off, asked, ‘Did Team 3 win the whole thing or just Year 2?’

  ‘The whole thing,’ answered Angela. ‘Their results in Year 2 surpassed your performance over both years. The education market took off big-time.’

  ‘I knew it.’ Katie gave Oliver an I-told-you-so look as Angela handed the result sheets down the table.

  ‘Look at the profit you made in education,’ Jim remarked as he studied the results. ‘And it returned nothing in Year 1. What made you decide to invest in it again?’

  Katie hesitated in her reply, unsure whether she should be fully honest or not. Jim was looking at her intently, waiting for a response. She lowered her voice so only he could hear.