Foursome (10 page)

‘Who Alex chooses to go out with is nothing to do with me,’ I say, trying to get back to the point. ‘But given that we are bound to keep having to spend a lot of time together maybe we need to try to work out a way to be friends.’

She sniffs. ‘We’re never going to be friends, Rebecca. But Daniel will still be Alex’s best mate and so we’d still all have to see each other even if we didn’t work together. I’d never get in the way of Alex’s friendship with Dan,’ she says, implying that she might well get in the way of his friendship with me, such as it is these days.

‘Fine,’ I say, giving up. ‘I’ve tried, OK?’

And I have. I’ve tried to atone for my sin, but she’s not going to let me. There’s nothing else I can do other than try to be nice, try to kill her with kindness. That doesn’t last for long.

‘Alex was right,’ Lorna pipes up as I am putting my coat on. ‘You’ve got self-esteem issues.’

I stop dead in my tracks. ‘Excuse me?’

‘He says you’ve always been insecure. He says that’s what makes you lash out at people. You think that you’re being funny, but no one else does. It embarrasses people. He says he hates being around you after you’ve had a few drinks.’

OK, that’s it. Resolution gone.

‘Oh really? And did Alex have anything else to say?’ I’ve gone from the defence to the offence. Supplicant to aggressor. She blinks momentarily like she’s nervous she’s woken a hibernating bear, but then she remembers that she holds all the good cards, or so she believes.

‘Yes, actually. He said he felt sorry for Dan. Backed into his small corner of the world because you never want to do anything new or meet anyone new…’

I’ve stopped listening because the scale of the betrayal, the slap in the face from someone I thought of as family, is overwhelming. OK, so she might be exaggerating. She might be embellishing to add to the hurt, but there’s no doubt in my mind that the heart of what she’s saying did indeed come from Alex. Did I really hurt him that much when I rejected him? I can think of no other reason why he’d want to punish me in this way. Lorna is smirking a victory smile and I want to wipe it right off her face. Forget trying to get along; I want to wound her like she’s wounded me. If she wants to play dirty, then so can I. I speak before I have a chance to censor myself, even though a small voice inside my head is already telling me to stop. Don’t. Say. It.

‘Is this the same Alex who keeps telling me he’s in love with me?’ I say, and then I stand back and wait, pleased to see I’ve got her attention. She gives a little snort of derision, but it’s not confident. I want to make certain she’s understood exactly what I’m saying.

‘The Alex who told me he’d been in love with me for years? On the day – the very day – he first asked you out. In fact he got in touch with you about an hour after I’d rejected him yet again. After I’d told him that there was no chance, I could never be interested and asked him to please leave me alone. Coincidence, isn’t it?’

She’s looking at me open-mouthed, trying to work out whether or not I’m bluffing. I’m relying on her having as many insecurities as me, even if they’re better hidden.

‘Didn’t you ever wonder why he just called you like that, out of the blue? Didn’t you think it odd that you’ve only been seeing each other for two months and he’s already telling you he loves you? Or do you really believe that you’re that irresistible?’

Lorna is red in the face. ‘You’re pathetic,’ she says through gritted teeth.

‘Am I?’ I say, secure in my victory.

‘As if Alex would ever fall for you,’ she adds, looking me up and down.

‘Why don’t you ask him?’

There’s nothing more to be said so I pick up my bag and sweep out of the room.

‘You know what?’ Lorna shouts after me. ‘Your real problem is that you have a complex about the way you look. You’re fat and unattractive and you can’t deal with the fact that I’m neither of those things.’

She screams this last sentence, determined to ensure that I hear every word, which, of course, I do but so does Mary who I find hovering on the doorstep as I open the front door.

‘Oh,’ she says. ‘I was…’

‘She’s in there,’ I say, indicating the room behind me.

‘It’s just… I’m meant to be meeting her for a drink and a chat, that’s all.’ Clearly Lorna had forgotten that she’d arranged to see one of her only clients in her rush to get away from me earlier.

‘Go on in,’ I say. I think about adding something like ‘we were just reading aloud from a new play’. Something that would explain the shouting and the personal insults that Mary must have just witnessed, but it sounds lame and untrue and, besides, why should I get Lorna off the hook. She’s Mary’s agent; she can explain why she was shouting things like ‘you’re fat and unattractive’ at a colleague. A subordinate, no less.

*

As I travel home on the Piccadilly line, it begins to sink in exactly what I’ve done. I don’t feel bad for losing my temper with Lorna. She asked for it. I tried my best to apologize to her and she wouldn’t accept. She goaded me and pushed me until I snapped and, to be honest, I would have had to be superhuman not to have risen to the bait.

But the one thing that I should have kept to myself, that I never should have told anyone if I wasn’t going to tell Dan, was that Alex had declared himself in love with me. I’m not so much worried about how that piece of information might make Lorna feel as I am about Dan. I made a decision to keep Alex’s declaration – Dan’s best friend’s betrayal – to myself, and having made that choice the only other thing I had to do was to stick to it. It was one thing not to tell Dan at the time. It’s a whole other issue for him to find out about it months later because I’ve blurted it out to someone else. I try to decide what to do next. I could go home now and tell Dan right away. ‘Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention it but a couple of months ago Alex told me he was in love with me. He asked me to leave you. I don’t know why I didn’t think to tell you before. It must have slipped my mind.’ He’d want to know why I hadn’t told him at the time, though. He’d feel like Alex and I had been secretly colluding behind his back somehow, keeping the truth from him. He’d be devastated by Alex’s disloyalty. Their bond precedes even mine with Dan. It’s indestructible. Or so he’s always thought. I can’t be the one to take that away from him.

I try to work out the odds of him finding out if I don’t tell him. Lorna is obviously going to go straight to Alex and accuse him. But there’s no way Alex is ever going to want Dan to find out. And I imagine that Lorna is going to be conflicted between her desire to hurt me and her reluctance to tell a story that, after all, paints her in quite a humiliating light.

By the time I get to Caledonian Road station I’ve decided to take my chances. If Lorna is so vindictive that she’d be prepared to hurt Dan – who has never been anything other than sweet and welcoming to her – then I will simply tell him the whole truth. I’ll sell Alex down the river because, actually, I’ve realized I have no reason to protect him any more. He’s betrayed me in the most fundamental way. If we ever were really such close friends as I thought we were, then we certainly aren’t any more.

Dan is happily supervising the kids’ homework when I get in, rather later than usual. He’s letting them have the TV on while they do it, which he always does, although he knows I don’t approve. I decide to let them get away with it. I’m hit by a wave of love for my little family so strong it nearly flattens me. I put my arms round Dan’s back and kiss the top of his head five or six times in succession.

‘What was that for?’ he says.

‘No reason,’ I reply, but I don’t let go of him.

14

There’s an eerie calm in the office next morning. I don’t know what I was expecting. That Lorna would come at me like a banshee, scissors in hand, or that Joshua would call me in to say that this time I really had overstepped the mark, but everything seems pretty much like normal. Lorna is a little red eyed, like she hasn’t slept much but we edge around one another, not speaking, not even making eye contact, which suits me just fine.

The great day has come for her to move into her new office. Melanie asks me if I’ll help pack up Lorna’s stuff and I oblige, slinging everything into boxes like a possessed woman. The quicker she moves the better for me. By lunchtime she’s gone.

Today is also the day that I have decided to select the likely candidates from the applications we have received. I need an ally. I have already weeded out and discarded the no hopers but the pile of potentials is still too large. Sitting in blissful solitude I read through them all carefully, looking for clues. Anyone who seems too pleased with themselves gets put straight on the reject pile. As does anyone who comes across as too ambitious. Joshua and Melanie are looking for some continuity. They want someone who will be happy to remain an assistant for at least three or four years, not just someone who will use us as a stepping stone to greater things. I have to keep reminding myself that it’s important I look for someone who will make Joshua and Melanie happy as well as me. They need to be bright, willing, friendly and eager to learn as well as sane, able to listen and with a BMI of more than twenty-two.

By the end of the day I have made a shortlist of five and I’ve called them all and arranged for them to come in and be interviewed.

The idea is that I will give them a sort of pre-interview, ostensibly to explain the ins and outs of the job (‘You’ll be doing general office duties, answering the phone as well as working exclusively to Cruella de Vil in the next room there.’) but really so that I get to check them out. Then I’ll send them through to meet with Joshua, Melanie and, of course, Lorna. They all sound quite nice on the phone and I feel a momentary blip of guilt that one of them will be sentenced to work for the boss from hell, but I manage to get over that pretty quickly. I leave for the night feeling optimistic. What’s more, Lorna and I have managed to pass a whole day without exchanging a single word and the company didn’t fall to pieces, Joshua and Melanie didn’t even notice and everything has been done that had to be done. I’m desperate to know what happened last night, whether Alex and Lorna have had a fight about my bombshell, whether it’s just confirmed to them that they are right to unite against me or whether he’s managed to convince her that I was just making it up, but I can never ask.

*

I’ve completely forgotten that it’s William’s big day. The first time since he has been at secondary school that he’s invited a friend home. He and Sam seem to be doing some kind of chemistry experiment in the kitchen while Zoe, huffy that she had to walk home from school in the company of two – as she puts it – freaks, rather than just the usual one, is holed up in her room texting furiously.

‘Hi,’ I say to Sam. ‘I’m William’s mum.’

‘Pleased to meet you,’ he says, holding out his hand stiffly for me to shake, which I do, but then I don’t really know what to say so I settle for, ‘Well, don’t make too much mess,’ and leave them to destroy my beautiful Italian marble worktops.

With no children for company and no kitchen to start dinner in, I sit by myself in the living room waiting for Dan to come home. I’m not particularly good at being on my own when I have things on my mind. I have a tendency to brood and to dwell on all my failings and the many ways in which my charmed life could implode. By the time Dan walks through the door I’m almost desperate to know what, if any, fallout there’s been from my set-to with Lorna.

‘Have you spoken to Alex today?’ I say as casually as I can, having forced myself to wait for him to get changed and grab a beer from the fridge. (Seen through the partially opened kitchen door: two small boys covered from head to foot with what looks like flour and something ominous bubbling away on the cooker.)

‘No,’ he says, and he pops his can and, feet up, picks up the newspaper and starts to read.

So that’s that. For now.

For a couple of days Lorna and I carry on in the same state of denial – not of the problem between us but of each other’s existence. We speak only when I have to put a call through to her. She says ‘hello’ and I say ‘so and so is on the phone’. I don’t even wait to hear if she wants to take the call or not, I just put them straight through. I’ve barely clapped eyes on her either. Now that she has her own office she rarely seems to leave it except to shut herself in with either Joshua or Melanie or, I assume, to go to lunch. Obviously all question of us sharing the lunchtime duties until her replacement arrives has gone out of the window because that would mean us communicating and that’s not about to happen any time soon. So I have taken to sticking the phones on to voicemail and running to the sandwich shop in the alley round the corner to grab something to eat at my desk. I know the end is in sight.

Today is interview day. Five women and one man are coming in to give it their best shot. They’re a mixed bunch – a mother returning to work, two recent graduates, a financial advisor who wants to start again in a new direction, a redundant PA and an older woman whose youngest child has just gone off to university leaving her feeling adrift in the world. Actually, I’m not sure what Joshua and Melanie will make of that last one. I have a feeling they’re expecting some young thing they can mould. But I strongly believe you have to give everyone a fair chance, regardless of age or experience. You never know what valuable skills you might unearth.

The first, Marie, turns out to be a little disappointing. She’s the mum trying to get back into work now that her daughter has gone to school – a situation so like my own that I’m desperate to like her, but she has an Estuary whine with the added pseudo Australian implied question mark at the end of every sentence which, I think, would send me crazy after a couple of hours. She seems keen enough, but she’s also a bit dull. I get the feeling she’d be as happy working in an accountant’s office as for a theatrical and literary agency and I think it’s important that whoever gets the job be as in love with our world as we all are. As I send her through to meet the triumvirate I mentally cross her name off the list. Then comes Annie, the financial advisor who is a bit up herself and who doesn’t make me feel confident that she’d really take kindly to being asked to make a cup of tea, and Amita, the recently redundant PA (executive PA as she reminds me several times like I’m supposed to know the difference) who seems like a know-it-all. I imagine she would have a rigid code about what exactly was and was not in her job description (cue Phone Wars 2). Several times she says things like, ‘That wasn’t how we did it at MacReedy’s,’ which is the insurance company she worked for, and I have to bite my tongue to stop myself from saying, ‘Do you know, I couldn’t give a toss how you did things at MacReedy’s, actually.’ When I show her the filing system – which I agree might leave something to be desired – she says, ‘I’ll have to reorganize that,’ and I decide I hate her.

I’m trying to explain to her that the way things work here is the way we all like it when the phone rings. I’m having to answer all the calls while talking to the candidates and, in a way, it’s helpful because it gives them a good idea of what’s involved in the job. I set up an audition before their very eyes. I take a call from someone at
Reddington Road
who tells me that one of their writers has keeled over sick and they’ve decided – for this read they’re desperate and everyone else is busy – to promote Craig to writing a real episode. I deftly sidestep a call from someone at a casting newsletter, which takes money from our acting clients in return for supplying pointless information on projects that are barely even half ideas yet, let alone starting to cast. No, I tell them, none of our writers or directors have anything interesting in the pipeline. One slip, let one piece of premature information go, and the office will be inundated for weeks with photos and CVs from hopeful actors and actresses looking for a non-existent job. After each call I talk through what just happened with whoever I’m with and the best way to deal with it. The fourth time I’m just relieved that I can stop listening to Amita tell me how crap we all are.

‘Let’s see what this is,’ I say, enjoying my role as mentor. ‘Mortimer and Sheedy,’ I say into the phone in my best sing-song voice.

‘So, are you happy now?’ a man’s voice barks at me in such an aggressive tone that it takes me a moment to work out who it is. Alex. I’m so taken aback by how angry he sounds that I don’t say anything. I’m aware of Amita looking at me.

‘No point trying to pretend you’re not there,’ he growls after a moment’s silence. I snap back to life.

‘I’m busy, Alex.’

‘You got what you wanted, OK? Lorna’s finished with me.’

I should be elated. Surely this is the answer to all my prayers. But I never intended to be the root cause. I don’t want to be the one who gets the blame for my wish coming true.

‘I’m sorry, OK?’ I start to say, my voice lowered, but he’s not interested in my side of the conversation.

‘You’re a vindictive bitch, Rebecca,’ he says. ‘I hope you can live with yourself.’

I want to say, ‘Hold on, did you or did you not tell me you were in love with me and had been forever on the same day you first asked Lorna out? Did you or did you not ask her out just to spite me? So don’t ask me to believe that I have been responsible for breaking up the greatest love story ever told,’ but Amita is looking at me expectantly so, of course, I can’t. Instead I say, ‘I can’t talk about this now. We’ll discuss it all when you’re feeling a bit more rational,’ and I put the phone down.

‘Are you allowed to have personal conversations in the office? We never were at MacReedy’s. It was deemed to be unprofessional. Quite right too, in my opinion,’ Amita says pompously, and I hate her even more.

I try to get back on track, but I’m so rattled by the venom in Alex’s voice it’s hard to concentrate. Luckily I am saved by Annie’s departure. Melanie shows her out and then I introduce Amita and sit back down to wait for the next one to arrive. Melanie and I have been going through an elaborate thumbs-up/thumbs-down ritual behind each of the candidate’s backs and this time I jerk my thumb down several times like a vindictive Roman emperor, trying to convey just how unsuitable Amita is.

Amita is followed by the first of the two graduates, Nadeem, who is desperate, he tells me, for a break into the industry. He loves theatre and he’s completely in awe of the whole place. I like him. I like graduate number two, Carla, as well. She’s quiet, keen to learn, unsure of what direction she wants to take, but interested enough in what we do to give off a very positive vibe. Neither of them has any experience of anything, really, but they both get a tentative thumbs-up as they go in.

But it’s Kay I really warm to. I’ve done her a disservice assuming she was about to be pensioned off. She’s only in her mid-forties I realize when she walks in; she just had her children early. In her twenties, before she had her first child, she worked briefly in a theatre box office. She didn’t much like the job, she tells me, but she loved being able to sneak in and see all the new productions. She never really thought about a career because she had always known she wanted to have kids and stay at home to look after them. Now she feels like she’s got no purpose in life. No longer needed as a mother, marriage long since over. She wants to put herself first for once and work in a field she knows she’ll love. She doesn’t care how lowly the duties, she just wants to feel part of something again. She’s down to earth and smart. I find myself wanting to burst into tears all over her and tell her the ridiculous mess I have got myself and everyone else into. I feel like she could be a friend. I can see myself sharing the reception with her very happily. My thumbs are up almost before she’s even turned her back.

Once Kay has gone Melanie, Joshua and Lorna closet themselves away with the door shut and it’s all I can do not to put a glass against it and listen. I’m desperate for them to want to know my opinion and, thankfully, Melanie still values me enough to come out and canvas it.

‘We’re stuck between Kay and Amita,’ she says. ‘We thought you might be able to help us make up our minds as you seemed to have pretty strong opinions on both of them.’

God, Amita’s in the running? How did that happen? I go through to the other room. Lorna won’t even look at me and, after my conversation with Alex, I’m nervous of catching her eye too so the atmosphere is even more tense than before.

‘Well?’ Joshua says. ‘What did you think?’

I measure my words carefully. ‘I like Kay,’ I say. ‘She seemed bright and motivated. I think we’d get on,’ I add. Surely they don’t want to bring in anyone else I’m going to be feuding with.

‘And I got the impression you weren’t so impressed with Amita,’ Melanie says. I nod. I need to make sure that whatever I say comes across as a negative rather than a positive.

‘She’s rather…’ What? Efficient? Experienced? Conscientious? ‘… I got the feeling she might be a bit of a job’s worth,’ is the best I can come up with. ‘I’m not sure she’d be happy to muck in and do whatever was needed.’ Mucking in has always been a big deal at Mortimer and Sheedy.

‘Mmm, that’s what we were afraid of too,’ Joshua says, and I assume the ‘we’ means him and Melanie because she nods. ‘You were keen on Amita, though, weren’t you Lorna?’

Great, now I’ve unwittingly pissed all over another of Lorna’s bonfires. It doesn’t surprise me that she favours Amita, though. She wants a high-powered assistant; it’ll add to her status.

‘Yes,’ she says, and I’m forced to look at her so as not to seem rude. I’m shocked by what I see. I’m used to red-eyed, newly single Lorna, but this version looks like she has been crying for days. Either the tears or lack of sleep have forged little dark gulleys under her eyes. I’m not sure that she has any make-up on and her hair is a mess. Guilt makes me look away again.