When She Was Bad (9 page)

‘I’m not asking you to skip work, just to get off on the dot of 5.30 to put a few nibbles and crisps out on tables. Amira and Sarah are off getting the present now so I can’t ask them to do it. And anyway, it is the kind of thing the departmental assistant traditionally does.’

Chloe flushed and bit down hard on her bottom lip.

‘Fine. If I have to. I’d better get back to work now then so I don’t get completely behind.’

She flounced off and Paula briefly closed her eyes, knowing she’d been tactless drawing attention to Chloe’s junior status. It wasn’t like her to keep blundering like this. She’d always been quietly attentive to other people’s feelings, earning herself, she hoped, a reputation for quiet diplomacy. But now she felt that she was constantly upsetting people.

Settling back down at her desk, she glanced across to Rachel Masters’s office. As usual, her new boss was intent on her computer, frowning at the screen. The dark-framed glasses gave her a permanently angry look.

Three-quarters of an hour later Paula’s anxiety levels were once again rising. Amira and Sarah still weren’t back from their shopping trip. Surely it couldn’t take that long. She’d told them to get some nice-smelling stuff – scented candles and bath oils, or failing that a voucher. It was just a gesture. But they seemed to have turned it into an epic expedition.

She sent an email to Charlie.

Any idea what’s happened to S&A?

His reply pinged back almost instantly.

No clue. Have they absconded with the money? You can get a long way on £72.38, an extra-strong mint and three weird foreign coins.

The clock on her computer showed 2.10. They’d been gone well over an hour. From the corner of her eye she saw Rachel Masters glance up before going back to her screen.

By 2.30, Paula felt clammy all over as if she’d been out running all lunchtime instead of sitting hunched over her desk. Finally, at 2.43, they returned. Amira was first, sliding into her desk which, luckily for her, was the door side of the office, followed by Sarah, trying to hide her coat from view so it didn’t look as if she’d just arrived back. Rachel Masters’s head remained bent and Paula started to unwind. She needed to get a grip! Trying to second-guess the boss’s erratic moves would just mean she was anxious all the time. She called up her calendar. She had a list of calls she had to make before leaving work today. Better get started.

Sarah looked over and caught her eye. She shook her head and mouthed ‘nightmare’. Paula raised her shoulders in a questioning gesture and Sarah reached inside her handbag and held up a small bag with a reassuringly expensive brand name emblazoned on the side.

Paula began working through her list, but she was only a third of the way down when Rachel Masters flung open the door of her office.

‘Sarah? A moment, please.’

Immediately the tiny ants were on the move again inside her, swarming around until Paula’s very veins itched. If Sarah and Amira were going to get into trouble for being late back from lunch, would they tell Rachel it had been Paula’s suggestion that they go out shopping for Gill’s present? Three minutes later, Sarah emerged from Rachel’s office clutching a white envelope, her face pale in contrast with her red-rimmed eyes. She resolutely avoided looking at anyone as she sat back at her desk, but as she put her hand over her computer mouse, Paula could see it shaking. She glanced over at Amira, who was looking uncharacteristically grim-faced. She shrugged her shoulders almost imperceptibly when she caught Paula’s eye.

But though Paula was braced for Rachel to come through her doorway and call for Amira, the summons never happened. Instead the afternoon ticked on in tense silence. A couple of times Paula tried to smile at Sarah, but the younger woman stared at her computer screen as if her eyes were magnetized to it. Finally, Paula snapped and emailed her.

Everything ok?

Twenty minutes later, the reply pinged back.

No. She has given me a formal disciplinary letter.

Paula stared at the words on her screen. In all the time she’d been working for the company there had only ever been a couple of disciplinary warnings and both for serious abuses. One a woman who’d taken so much stress leave half the office had never even met her, and the other a young man who’d started as a junior but clearly thought it beneath him and openly took time off to go for interviews and assessment days with other firms. Sarah had only been late a couple of times. And anyway, why hadn’t Amira been called in too?

The tense, bad-tempered afternoon seemed never-ending.

Finally, at 5.30, Chloe discreetly gathered her things together and stood up to leave.

‘You off, Chloe? Is that spreadsheet done?’

Paula hadn’t even noticed Rachel getting up, so her high-pitched voice came as a shock.

‘Not quite.’ Chloe’s cheeks were flushed. ‘I’ll come in early tomorrow and finish it off.’

‘Only I need it tonight. I did tell you.’

Chloe stood by her desk, uncertain. Finally she sat back down and turned her computer on again without speaking.

By the time Paula arrived at the pub where Gill’s leaving drinks were being held, she was twenty minutes late and her white shirt was sticking uncomfortably to the small of her back. The guest of honour was sitting alone at a table in the corner nursing a glass of white wine. To her surprise Paula found her eyes pricking with tears at the sight of her former boss. Suddenly those years with Gill seemed like a halcyon era.

‘Sorry. We couldn’t get away.’

Though it was only a week since Gill’s sacking, already she seemed like a stranger, or someone visiting from abroad after a long absence.

‘I was beginning to think you’d all forgotten about me already.’

Despite all the time they’d spent together over the last eight years, some of it in this very pub, Gill seemed ill at ease. Gone was the effortless camaraderie of the office, replaced by an awkwardness that increased as Paula put the bottle of house white she’d bought on the table and struggled to find something to talk about. The trouble was, she felt that bringing up anything to do with the office would be insensitive, given that Gill had so recently been sacked from there. And yet, what else did they have in common? Paula had met Gill’s husband, Martin, a few times at various functions. He was short and bespectacled and worked in a conveyancing firm based in St Albans. They’d had a few conversations, mostly about the nightmarishness of the North Circular and how much more house you got for your money outside the M25. But she’d never seen Gill in her home setting, never really socialized with her outside the official work dos. She knew she sang in a local swing choir and that she and Martin made an annual trip to Spain to walk the Camino de Santiago. But about Gill’s personal life – the things she loved, the things that made her cry, her disappointments, her regrets, her secret hopes – she knew very little.

‘I thoroughly recommend being a lady of leisure,’ Gill said now as they sat self-consciously at a table in the centre of their empty section. ‘Getting up late, going out for brunch, watching
Homes Under the Hammer
. I absolutely love it.’ Gill’s smile never moved as she spoke, as if it had been glued into place, and Paula felt a shiver of unease.

‘So you haven’t been applying for jobs?’

‘I’ve put out a few feelers – you know, just letting people know I’m available, but I’m not in a rush.’

‘Of course not!’ Paula’s own voice was unnaturally bright. She was relieved when the door burst open and Chloe came in accompanied by Amira.

‘Really sorry,’ said Chloe, hugging Gill tightly. ‘She wouldn’t let me leave.’

Paula remembered then that Gill had given Chloe her first ever job. There was a particular kind of bond formed when that happened, although Paula had occasionally wondered if it was entirely healthy.

Gill visibly perked up, her smile losing the fixed quality it had earlier.

‘What’s she like then? Come on, I want to hear all the gossip.’

‘Oh my God, she’s a total bitch.’ Paula had never seen Chloe so impassioned. She and Amira had poured themselves large glasses of wine from the bottle Paula had bought, and Chloe had already downed half of hers.

‘She’s not
that
bad.’

Paula looked at Amira sharply, not sure she could have heard her right, but Amira had her head bent, her glossy black hair covering her face.

‘She seems to be nicer to some people than others,’ Paula told Gill. ‘She favours a divide and rule style of management. For instance, Amira and Sarah were both late back from lunch but only Sarah got a bollocking. How come you escaped, Amira?’

Amira shrugged. Then asked: ‘How do you know – that Sarah got a bollocking, I mean?’

‘She emailed me about a disciplinary letter.’

The others gasped.

‘I don’t believe it,’ said Gill. ‘I haven’t even been gone a week.’ Her expression was one of concern, but there was an edge of excitement in her voice. ‘Actually, it doesn’t completely surprise me. I wasn’t going to say anything, but . . .’

‘What?
What?
’ Chloe, who’d already downed her first glass of wine, was impatient.

‘Well, a good friend of mine met someone who’d worked at Rachel’s last company. He wasn’t in her department but apparently it was not a happy ship.’

‘But I thought she was the golden girl there,’ said Amira. ‘I thought she’d turned the place around?’

Gill made a dismissive gesture.

‘Her results were good but she upset a lot of people and something happened that got her into trouble with her bosses but he didn’t know exactly what.’

Paula got the distinct impression Gill was relishing dishing the dirt on her successor. It made Paula’s muscles clench uncomfortably. Somewhere inside her, those armies of little ants were on the move again.

Charlie appeared by the table clutching a fresh bottle of wine. Sarah was just behind him, her eyes puffy and red-rimmed.

‘Come back, Gill. We need you,’ he said, sinking to his knees in mock supplication.

‘You OK?’ Paula asked Sarah in a low voice as the others laughed.

She shook her head. ‘Not really. I’m not going to stay long. I only really came to say hi to Gill. I need to get back to the boys.’

‘I don’t understand though. Why you and not Amira?’

‘Wish I knew. Although Rachel had already had a go at me for being late, don’t forget. And maybe she just doesn’t like me.’

‘I’m sure that’s not—’ Paula broke off to stare open-mouthed at the door.

‘Oh my God!’ came Chloe’s high clear voice to her right.

‘What?’

Sarah, who’d been facing Paula, now turned around to see what they were all looking at, just as Ewan approached the table, closely followed by Rachel Masters.

15
Ewan

‘She asked me where I was off to. I couldn’t lie, could I? And then she said it sounded like fun and stared at me. I felt sorry for her. It’s not easy being new.’

Ewan was getting annoyed. Why were they all making such a big deal of it? So Rachel wasn’t the most popular person in the office. She was having to make difficult decisions. That’s why she’d been brought in. And at least she was being upfront about it, instead of saying one thing to their faces and something completely different behind their backs like everyone else seemed to do.

When Ewan first joined the company, he’d been excited about working in a department that was almost exclusively female. He liked women, plus he imagined he had a better chance of rising through the ranks more quickly in a female environment. He’d reckoned without the culture of passive-aggressiveness that ruled the office. While Gill and Paula appeared calm and mild-mannered and reasonable, he soon learned they were also totally intractable. When Ewan came up with suggestions for ways to improve some of the frankly archaic systems in place in the office, they’d thanked him and made encouraging noises and then never mentioned any of them again. And when he’d pressed them, they smiled and said how pleased they were he was coming up with ideas . . . and then added something that made it clear his idea was dead in the water. The office politics were a minefield – no one saying what they really meant, no one allowed to raise their voices. Having to preface every sentence with ‘I understand where you’re coming from’ or ‘I respect your opinion’ and always you knew there was that great big BUT coming. At least Rachel just came out and said it.

‘You didn’t have to invite her. Didn’t you think about what it would be like for Gill? The woman took her job. Her seat was still warm.’

Ewan had rarely known Sarah get angry. Her face was blotchy and her red hair around her face was stringy with sweat as if her skin was overheating.

‘You can’t blame Rachel for that,’ he said. ‘She didn’t ask for Gill to be fired. She was offered a job and she took it. Same as any of us would have done.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ Sarah retorted.

They were at the bar buying more wine. After all the fuss she’d made about having to leave early, Sarah didn’t seem in any hurry to go. Instead she’d spent the last half-hour talking to the sales team who were gathered around a different table.

‘It’d look bad if I left,’ she told him. ‘Rachel will think it’s because of her.’

This was just what Ewan hated about working in a female-heavy environment. Everyone second-guessing what other people might be thinking. Why couldn’t Sarah just do what she wanted and then if there was a reaction she could deal with it, and if not, then no problem?

‘Actually, Ewan,’ Rachel was calling across from the table. His stomach liquefied when she said his name. ‘Could you get me a vodka and tonic? I can’t do pub wine, I’m afraid.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ Sarah muttered under her breath.

Rejoining the main group at the table, Ewan could sense the hostility coming from the others. He wasn’t the world’s most sensitive bloke, he knew that, but even he could feel the tension. Gill was wearing that fake smile he recognized from various meetings over the years where things weren’t going to plan. Paula was perched awkwardly on her seat as if she was sitting on a pineapple or something. She looked hot and bothered. Probably she wasn’t used to going out at night, he supposed. She was getting on a bit now. Fifties? Sixties even? Seeing her next to Rachel was like putting an aged, slightly manky pet cat next to a cheetah.