The Cinderella Reflex (7 page)

As if on cue the door swung open again and a tall, blonde woman stepped into the café. Helene knew straight away that it had to be Paulina. Everyone else in the café was lounging around in scruffy jeans, their feet on their backpacks. This woman was clutching an expensive briefcase and was dressed in designer gear – a caramel-coloured suit, navy silk shirt and, like Helene, wore killer heels. Her ash-blonde hair was poker-straight, and a gold chain glistened against her throat. She looked mid-thirties, Helene reckoned. Forty if she was having Botox.

“Paulina?” Helene stood up.

The other woman crossed the room in a flurry. “And you must be Helene!” She air-kissed Helene on both cheeks. “It’s so good to meet you at last. It’s so difficult to get to know someone without seeing them face to face.” She sat down in the chair opposite. “Sorry I’m late – and also for being a bit of a pain these last few days. But Jack has given me such a tight schedule I have no option but to work from six each morning!” She placed her phone on the table between them. “It will bleep when it’s time for my next appointment.” She threw her eyes heavenwards at the sheer busyness of her life.

So your time is precious, Helene interpreted the business-speak rapidly. She’d better get cracking if she was to find out all she needed to know.

A pleasant-faced waitress took their order – carrot cake and a latte for Paulina, black coffee for Helene. They chitchatted about what was in the news headlines for a bit and then Helene decided to go for it.

“So, Paulina. Have you ever worked with a radio station before?”

“No! But it’s
so
exciting. Neither has Jack, actually, so it’s a bit of a learning curve for both of us.”

Great, Helene thought. They didn’t have a clue what they were letting themselves in for. Maybe she could make herself indispensable.

“If I knew exactly what your end goal is I might be able to help,” she offered. She couldn’t help wondering why someone like Jack McCabe would be interested in a tiny, local station in the first place, but she knew enough not to ask outright. Better to try and tease things out as diplomatically as she could with Paulina.

“Well, my focus on the project will be to help relaunch Atlantic 1FM as a major player in the media market – rebrand it totally. That’s if Jack finally decides to buy in, of course. Which I think will depend on whether he gets the licence to take it national. But if he does decide to go ahead, it will be a case of hitting the ground running. I know from working with him on other projects that once he makes up his mind Jack doesn’t waste much time.”

The waitress returned with their order and Helene was momentarily distracted from her mission as she watched Paulina fork a huge piece of carrot cake into her mouth. Clearly the concept of Size Zero was not something that kept this woman awake at night.

“So how did you meet Jack?” she asked finally. She sat back, preparing to extract any useful information from the vague, non-committal answers Paulina was bound to give her. But to her astonishment, Paulina happily launched into the story of her life so far.

She explained how she had started out as a young gofer in a large PR organisation, but had decided pretty early on that the only way for an ambitious woman to avoid the glass ceiling was to set up on her own. After that she had been lucky, she said, and had been in the right place at the right time.

Right, Helene thought, keeping a fixed smile on her face. That was the mantra of every successful business person she had ever interviewed. She hadn’t believed any of them. The only way to get on, Helene believed, was to be ruthless yourself and to protect yourself from other ruthless people. It was that simple.

Still, she listened attentively as Paulina continued her story. Jack had been an early client of hers and, as his star had risen, he had brought Paulina along with him, using her for his own projects and also helpfully passing on her name to his many and varied contacts.

At this stage of her life, Paulina revealed, she was as successful as she wanted to be, really. She had enough money in the bank and enough smart investments (made, naturally, on the shrewd advice of Jack) that she could walk away from the business now if she wanted to. She had lost some money during the crash, everyone had. But she still had enough to be a lady of leisure.

“But why would I want that?” she asked, finishing her cake with relish. “I mean, I’d do this work for nothing if I had to!”

Helene smiled understandingly and slid a mushroom-coloured paper file across the table. “You wanted a profile of Ollie Andrews’ show. I haven’t finished it but you’ll get the gist of what it’s all about from this.”

She watched as Paulina opened the file and scanned through her report rapidly, her eyebrows rising quizzically as she read.

“He doesn’t seem to be doing so well, does he?” she murmured.

“Well, we’re taking steps to improve that,” Helene said quickly. “We’ve had a new producer working with Ollie but I am now going to be much more hands-on in overhauling the whole programme. We have a new agony-aunt slot coming up which I think will be a massive success. And …” she paused – time to mark herself down as something more than just a back-room person, “I myself am doing a
Ten Years Younger
feature. Reporting on all the new scientific methods women and men are using to keep themselves looking younger. Both those slots should attract advertising.”

“Right,” Paulina said absentmindedly, still scanning the report. “Well, there’s no harm in going ahead with all that for now. But I have to say that if Jack does buy in he will be looking towards a complete shake-up. He will be looking for someone to take the station on to the national stage. Someone with the X-factor, y’know? And, so far, I am not sure if Ollie Andrews is that person. Are you?”

“Well, we’re working on Ollie,” Helene said quickly. If Ollie were to get the boot, then she would suffer the fallout as well because she had been the one who had brought him into Atlantic 1FM in the first place. “So – what exactly do you mean by the X-factor?” She hoped she didn’t sound sarcastic. But seriously?
The X-factor
?

“I’m not sure,” Paulina said vaguely. “It’s more I know what I
don’t
want.”

“Male, female, young, old, serious, zany?” Helene prompted, trying to catch Paulina’s eye for clues.

But Paulina simply shrugged. “I really can’t say. But I’d know if I saw it – or in this case
heard
it. Let’s call it instinct.”

Helene tried to keep her face expressionless as Paulina ate the last crumbs of her cake. She couldn’t help feeling annoyed that Paulina could sit there and be so bloody casual about it all. There were people’s livelihoods at stake here.

“Anyway, it doesn’t really matter what I think,” Paulina said, “because it’s Jack who will have the final say.”

“And does he make his decisions in the same way – on instinct?” Helene was finding it more and more difficult to sound neutral. To her mind, it was beyond bizarre that Jack and Paulina would make such important decisions on the basis of their own, very vague feelings. Where was their business plan, their strategy, their
lists
, for heaven’s sake?

“Well, Jack will own the place so I suppose he’s entitled to make his decisions in whatever way he chooses,” Paulina pointed out cheerily.

Helene flushed but pushed on. “There’s something I need to ask you about. I’m sure this is all just rumour, but we have heard that he may want new staff … who are … er … younger?”

“I’m not sure about
young
,” Paulina said pensively. “But if Jack feels that someone’s face doesn’t fit he wouldn’t be long in telling them. Although, he’d be pretty generous with severance payments,” she added reassuringly.

She glanced down at her phone just before it bleeped.

“That’s my next meeting, I’m afraid.” She raised her eyebrows in mock panic. “It’s all go these days. But it’s been good to meet you, Helene. And thanks for this.” She waved Helene’s report in the air.

“It’s been good to meet you too,” Helene said automatically. She watched while Paulina gathered her things and got up to leave, and she kept her composure intact until the blonde head had finally disappeared from sight.

Then she slumped in her chair, a feeling of foreboding flooding through her. ‘
If someone’s face doesn’t fit, Jack wouldn’t be long in telling them
.’ That’s what Paulina had said. Suddenly Helene was gripped by panic that it would be her face that didn’t fit into Jack McCabe’s vision for Atlantic 1 FM. What if she ended up unemployed? And alone, after Richard dumped her because she was a visible
failure
? And homeless because she wouldn’t be able to afford the mortgage? What if she ended up on the streets with all her stuff on a supermarket trolley, like a bag lady? What if …

Stop! A small, saner part of her mind intervened. She tried hard to obey it. She took deep slow breaths, trying to stop her thoughts from careering out of control. She would be okay. Of course she would. But she couldn’t stop herself from comparing her circumstances to Paulina’s. While the other woman had appeared to be sure of herself, and contented – fulfilled at work, financially secure, and able to eat huge chunks of cake without giving one thought to its calorie count – she, Helene, was looking at life through a much different lens. Up until now, she had always thought of herself as an independent career woman. She earned her own money. She had bought her own apartment. She even had staff working for her! But now, in the cold light of possible redundancy, she realised that in actual fact she only had enough money in the bank to maintain her present lifestyle for a few months at most. Paulina had said that Jack would be generous with severance payments but what good was that to her? Whatever he paid, it was hardly going to last the rest of her life. And what about her identity? If she wasn’t Helene Harper, Executive Editor of Atlantic 1FM, who was she? She was an almost-forty-year-old woman, that was who, in a complicated relationship with her married boss and with very little energy or inclination for starting over.

Helene looked around her, as if for inspiration, and her gaze rested on the bookshelves lining the walls of the Travel Café. Out of the blue she remembered a book she had read many years ago:
The Cinderella Complex
, by an author called Colette Dowling. It was all about how perfectly intelligent women failed to secure their own futures because they were still subconsciously waiting for a man to come and rescue them.

Helene had read it for work and she’d thought it was pretty interesting at the time. But not interesting enough, she thought ruefully, for her to have picked up on any of its tips or suggestions. But of course at that stage she hadn’t felt it held any special resonance for
her
.

It was only now, with the twenty-twenty vision of hindsight, that she realised that of course it had. Because here she was, a dozen years later, without the savings plan, the pension, the investments that Paulina had so casually listed earlier on.

In fact, Helene thought, panic rising up in her again, all she had to show for years of effort was a wall-to-wall wardrobe bulging with clothes and shoes and products
.
Anti-ageing serums, primers, hair stuff. They all promised miracles and delivered absolutely nothing apart from a short feel-good factor and lots of shiny boxes.

In truth, Helene had always thought Richard was going to be her pension. But was he? Or was she now that walking cliché: a woman having an affair with a married man who was having cold feet about leaving his wife?

The ringing of her phone interrupted her thoughts. She grabbed it out of her pocket, glad of the distraction, and checked caller ID: Richard. No doubt with another few tasks for her to-do list. She watched for several seconds as the phone flashed his name at her, wondering if he had been taking her for a fool all this time.

She pressed the reject button and shoved the phone into the bottom of her handbag. Then she ordered another coffee and settled back down to her brooding.

Chapter Five

Tess sat on the sofa in the bay window of her living room, looking pensively out at the waves breaking on the seashore and wondering what this latest bombshell was going to mean for her. Her laptop was open at a jobs site but it had taken her only a few minutes to see there was nothing suitable on it. And then she had become distracted by the view from the window. One of the silver linings of the recession was that she could afford to rent this apartment at a fraction of what it would have cost in the boom times and it was nicer than anywhere she had lived over the past decade. But now it looked like she might be moving on again sooner rather than later.

Apart from work, there was nothing for her in Killty. She and Andrea had been friends in college but now Andrea was married with two children and a husband who’d recently been made redundant. Socialising with Tess wasn’t high on her list of priorities, but Tess had been so focussed on getting to grips with the new job that it hadn’t bothered her too much. Weekdays flew by in a blur and at night she was too tired to care that she had nothing in her life except work. Her weekends were filled with trying to catch up with the chores she didn’t have time for during the week, and trying to prepare for the coming week.

The prospect of changes at Atlantic was forcing her to reassess her life once more. She could move somewhere else, she supposed. She was used to travelling on a shoestring. But where? Now that she was thirty, a big part of her felt it was time to settle down. To something.

She glanced at her laptop. Maybe she should go to this reunion after all. At the very least it would be a social outlet, and who knew – maybe she’d get a job lead there? Of course, it would mean meeting Chris Conroy again. She bit her lip. She had stopped thinking about Chris as the One Who Got Away long ago but that didn’t mean she wanted to see him any time soon. She glanced at the clock and saw it was time to go and see Grandma Rosa, the fortune teller. Resolving to look at Chris’s email again later on, she grabbed her coat and bag and set off.