'I know what I need to know. Which is that he pays my wages,' I lied. There wasn't room in the British Library for the volume of information I wanted on Christopher Chase Esq.
'I guess,' said Jade doubtfully. Our speculations were cut short by the man himself, emerging from his office. Speak of the devil, as they say. Is he devil? Or is he angel? I think a blend of both. Oh, please, Lord, let me find out one day.
'Ah, Sophie. A word please,' he said. I could not deduce much from the tone. It was mild, but was it deceptively mild? Could I expect a tongue-lashing to rival anything Lassiter's canes could deal, or would he be sympathetic? I was a bit too spaced out to feel the fear as I stepped across his threshold.
'Thank you, Jade, just another ten minutes or so and then you can go home. I do appreciate this,' he said from the doorway. This sounded like a blatant attempt to guilt-trip me, so as soon as we were alone I began to blurt apologies.
'Hush.' He dismissed my outpourings with a wave of his hand, coming across to sit opposite me at his desk. 'Coffee?'
I nodded dumbly and watched him pour me a cup from the cafetière on the shelf behind him.
'Strong, I should think,' he said, hitching his eyebrows at me as he looked down his nose. I smiled nervously.
He pushed the cup and saucer across the desk and watched me sip for a minute or two, arms folded, before sitting back down.
'Sophie, is there something I should know about?' he asked at last.
I swallowed nervously, the coffee scalding my throat.
'I don't think so.' Except that I am being eaten alive by my maddening love for you, of course.
'Everything all right at home?'
'Fine.'
'Are you happy here?'
'Oh, completely.'
'Sure?'
'Positive. Why?'
'You aren't the woman I hired. You don't act like her or dress like her. You seem to have . . . lost yourself.'
'Oh, do I? I am the same person, I promise you.'
'You're exhausted. You haven't taken any leave since Easter. Take a week off, Sophie. Go to the coast, or the countryside, or just spend the week in bed if that's what it will take. I need you refreshed.'
'I'm fine,' I floundered, though I really wasn't. He wanted me to be a slut again? For . . . oh, I got it! The bar takings must have been down. That was all I was to him – a pound sign. A prostitute.
'You're not fine,' he insisted. 'I don't want to see you here after you finish this shift until next week.'
'Fine!' I said venomously. He gave me a startled and curious look. 'Whatever you say. You're the boss, after all.'
I set down my cup with a violent china clash and flounced out of the room.
'Jeez, Sophie, are you OK? Did he give you a hard time?'
'Go! Go home!' I said.
'Oh, right. See ya.' She left, with an uncertain backward glance at me. The words, 'Wouldn't wanna be ya' reached my acute ears despite the low muttering. Once she was through the door, I dropped to my knees behind the desk and began to cry all over the piles of leaflets underneath.
I took Chase's advice and got out of the city. Instead of photographing derelict factories and windswept underpasses, I captured bucolic scenes of sheep and cottage gardens. I ate cream teas in places with doilies on the tables and bought a National Trust season ticket. I wondered if I might be cut out for country living, imagining myself married to some rough-hewn son of the soil, frying freshly laid eggs on top of my Aga, wearing a Cath Kidston apron.
Chase would not be up for that, I was sure. Perhaps I just needed to adjust my fantasies, to let some other men into them. But the other men would not come. Chase blocked the way. I could keep him away during the day, warding him off with herbaceous borders and duckponds and elderflower cordial. But at night he seeped through the casement windows like toxic erotic fog, curling into my brain through my ears and nostrils.
'This isn't you, Sophie,' he would say in his rich, distinctive voice. 'Clean country air is for wholesome girls. You belong to the exhaust fumes and the roadside pizza stands and the cigarette smoke. You belong to the dark. You belong with me.'
He would lift my skirt and brace me against an alley wall or a railway bridge and have me in the street, his belt buckle jingling with each forward stroke, careless of the crowd of voyeurs that would build up around us. He had a lesson for me, and the lesson was that I was his.
It was no use. The longest holiday in the furthest-flung resort on Earth could not prise Chase off my consciousness. I might as well just get back to work. And order a new vibrator. Clearly I was going to need one.
A month later, I was grabbing a post-shift lunch in the bar. I was actually wearing a trouser suit for the first time in two years; if anything was symbolic of my new rule of chastity, that was it. Never more would I be felt up in the lift or bent over a washroom sink. One of my former 'client'/lovers was in the room, but he had learned not to approach me now. He peered moodily over his pint at me from time to time, but I ignored him and pretended extreme interest in the rocket salad on my plate.
So successful was my pretence that I did not even notice Chase crossing the room towards me until he had slipped into the seat opposite and adjusted his glasses for maximum staring-down-nose impact.
'Who are you?' he opened, somewhat confusingly.
'Um, Sophie Martin, your receptionist, last time I checked.' I hoped he wasn't having some form of brain seizure.
'Are you though?' No, it wasn't a brain seizure. He was making a point. He wanted to talk about me! I wanted to talk about us, but this was a start.
'What is the point you are making?' I asked, as politely neutral as I could be. 'Have I done something wrong?'
'No, no, nothing wrong as such. But when I hire a person, it's because they have particular and special qualities. I want those qualities to be sustained throughout their employment.'
'And . . . what were those qualities then?' I asked, holding my breath for his reply.
'Don't you remember?' He gazed at me wistfully; my heart began to pound. 'It was nothing to do with your telephone manner or your filing skills, was it?'
An ugly obstruction in my chest made my voice come out wrong. 'You hired me because I was good for business. You hired me to whore for you.'
'Sophie, no!' he said, obviously alarmed that I might burst into tears. Not without foundation – I was even more alarmed than he was at the prospect.
'What then?' I managed to blurt.
'Sophie, listen to me. There aren't many people in this organisation I would retain after they had accused me of being a pimp.' He smiled self-deprecatingly. 'But you are one of them, and I want to tell you why. Now, I don't know what has happened to change you. I don't know and I don't want to know.' He gave me a very significant look. He did know. 'The quality I hired you for, and which seems to have fled lately, is joie de vivre. A certain sparkle. A swing in your walk. A sense that you would be fun to spend time with. The customers relate to that. The ladies want to share cocktails and dirty stories with you; the gentlemen want to take you to bed. It works.'
'What if I don't want the gentlemen to take me to bed?' I felt stubborn. I did not want to hear this, unless he was about to declare himself as one of those gentlemen.
'What if you do?'
He had steepled his fingers and laid his head on one side.
'What if I do? I don't understand.'
'You used to,' he said bluntly. 'And now you don't. Have you, if I might ask a personal question, Got Religion?'
I snorted. 'I think not.'
'Right. So why the Born-Again Virginity? You seemed a woman who was at one with her sexual appetites, Sophie. And now you don't. It saddens me to see it.'
'Perhaps I'm looking to direct my sexual appetites towards just one person,' I said pointedly.
'Well, perhaps you are,' said Chase without missing a beat. 'But what if that one person never materialises? Will you, as the girl in your current favourite song says, throw your life a
way on a dream that can't come true?'
I had to take a deep breath. This was all a little too close to the bone.
'Who says he'll never materialise?'
'Oh, nobody is saying that, Sophie. But sometimes people are prevented from following the path they really want to take. Sometimes there is too much standing in the way.'
He looked, for a moment, achingly sad. I thought about asking him if he was married after all, then thought better of it. Keep things cryptic, make no personal admissions, and perhaps we can maintain our fragile fantasies.
'Yes,' I said softly. 'I see what you mean. But some people want their future partners to wait for them. Or at least to be a little less . . . excessive . . . than I have been. Some people think an interesting sexual history devalues a woman.'
'A person like that would be wrong for you, Sophie,' he said. 'Some people love a confident, adventurous, experienced woman. Given half a chance.'
'Given half a chance,' I whispered an echo. Oh, Chase. Whoever she was, I hoped she was worth it.
He sat back, unclasping his hands, raising his voice a little. 'I suppose what I'm saying, Sophie, is that you should do what you like. Enjoy yourself. Get that twinkle back in your eye. I won't think any less of you, and neither will this shadowy future lover of yours.'
He stood abruptly and stalked away to his office. The rocket salad was getting limp, the small appeal it had had to begin with rapidly diminishing. I twisted the weedy strands with my fork, thinking over what Chase had said. It made sense.
Whether there was any prospect of ending up with him or not, it was likely I had a long wait ahead of me. Maybe an eternal one. What kind of waiting room would I most want to kick my heels in? An austere bunker full of copies of didactic texts? Or a pleasure garden designed to my own specifications?
I went home and put the trouser suit on eBay.
My next shift started at two the next day, but I had an hour or so to kill beforehand. I leant against the arched entrance to the bar and looked over the heads of the drinkers, searching for familiar faces. If I smoothed a hand across the front of my pencil skirt I could feel the telltale bump of a suspender snap. My ankles thought they had come home at last, back in heels that made them work their little tendons and sinews. A red-haired banker I had given head to a few times looked over and caught my eye. I fluttered my fingers in a flirtatious little wave and winked. Maybe it was his lucky day. Maybe it wasn't. I hadn't decided yet. But whatever I decided was fine. My pleasure was my business, just as it should be.
Taking Dictation
I have become quite friendly with Rachael over the months since my first taste of the tender mercies of Dr Lassiter. She has taken to catching a later train home and joining me for a drink in the bar, or a coffee behind the Reception desk if I can't get away. She revels in showing me her marks, and gives me a wince-inducing blow-by-blow account of proceedings before we move on to more general chit-chat, or sometimes more specific discussion of the fascinations of Dominance and Submission.
'How did you know?' I asked her one rainy Monday afternoon, watching the streaming smoked glass from a corner booth in the bar.
'How?'
'Yeah, how. And when? When did you know?'
'I always knew,' she said laconically. 'Well, deep down, at least. Maybe not on the surface.'
'So what brought it to the surface?'
'Ah, it's a long story.'
'My shift finished ten minutes ago. I have all evening.'
'Oh, so do I. OK then. You sure you want the full story?'
'I always want the full story.'
'OK. Two more vodkatinis and then I'll begin.'
Rachael took a year out after graduating and decided to earn a bit of Interail cash by temping at the tax office. It was the most boring job imaginable – tons of photocopying on an ancient machine that didn't even have a collate facility, so she had to put the hundreds of twenty-page booklets together by hand, day in day out, week in week out. On the plus side, this was highly conducive to daydreaming, so while the copier flashed and hummed she was on the battlements of a Castilian castle, or eating moules marinière on the Breton seafront. Usually in these daydreams she had wandered off without the gaggle of girlfriends she was planning the trip with. She would find herself lost and alone in the streets of a medieval walled city, or on an isolated beach, or a terraced vineyard that stretched for miles beneath a mellow sun. And this was where He would turn up. He might be a Carlos or a Jean-Pierre or a Giovanni, but he would always have a Southern European goldenness about him; he would taste of sunshine and olive oil. Dark curls, broad shoulders, strong features, passion, seduction . . . and, most importantly, a cute accent. She longed to be called 'Cherie' or 'Bella' or 'Guapa'. 'Luv' was just not doing it for her.
At lunchtime she would bolt from the office as quickly as possible and eat her sandwich on a bench overlooking a war memorial. Anything so as not to have to associate with the dreary drone-boys of the Inland Revenue, in their cheap suits and stinking aftershave, with their dull chatter about Beckham and Oasis in their horrible accents. Why did English boys have to be so unappealing? She was born in the wrong country, she mused, biting into her tomato and basil focaccia. The two boyfriends she had had at university had been nice enough, but without the rudiments of finesse. One of them had bought her flowers, once, but the most romantic gesture she could usually expect was a portion of chips in curry sauce after the clubs kicked out. The men around here would have to raise their game, she decided grimly, or she was going to marry an Italian man and leave them to their football and beer. (She conveniently airbrushed the Italian passion for soccer out of her fantasy.)
Then it would be two o'clock, and time for more copying and collating, over and over, hour in hour out, until doomsday. Except for that one day, a Thursday, when everything changed.
Paul Everett was the Senior Executive Officer, the final destination for the buck in this neck of the tax woods. Rachael had no opinion of him really, except that he was too boring to even look at, but luckily seemed to like her. He had given her the job, at least, so he must do. His fond indulgence seemed to have left him today, however, for he was looking distinctly rumpled.
'Rachael, did you make up these booklets?'
She squinted at them: Distraint Procedures 32a(1987).
'Er, yeah, I think so.'
'There's a problem with them.'
'No, there isn't.'
For the first time, Rachael noticed the power of his eyes, which seemed to turn her to stone with the intensity of their glare.
'Come with me,' he said finally, once his astonishment at being defied by a temporary Admin Assistant had abated. She shrugged and followed him past the rows of dusty desks and plastic trays to his office door. Why did offices have to be so drab? She thought continental European offices would be different; full of greenery with light tiling and a smell of freshly ground coffee.
Everett's office was a little better, she supposed, but still everything was that muted grey-brown except for the hospital-green walls. These places were designed to strip the colour from your soul, she thought. What she didn't realise was that she had thought it out loud.
'I beg your pardon?' Paul Everett was discomposed, frowning at her.
'Oh!' Her hand slapped her mouth. 'I didn't . . . sorry.'
'Perhaps you'd be happier working somewhere more . . . vibrant.'
'No, honestly!' she gabbled. The civil service might not pay very well, but it was easy work that made no mental or physical demands on her. If she left she'd have to get bar work or waitressing – all that running around. So stressful.
On Demand Page 12