The Flavours of Love (35 page)

Apparently, the Universe and Kevin had other plans for me.

I walk into Gideon, President and CEO’s outer office, which has dark wood panels on the walls, dark wood furniture and always inspires a reverential hush upon entering. His assistant, a new one since the last time I was up here, sits behind her expansive dark wood desk. She’s on the phone and is about to say, ‘Hang on’ to the person on the phone to talk to me but she doesn’t get a chance because I don’t stop to speak to her, I carry on going. I don’t want her to put me off by ‘pencilling’ me in to see Gideon at some other point. I don’t want to give her a chance to get Gideon to speak to Kevin. I want to find out what’s going on from someone I can trust to only focus on making as much money as possible for the business.

The new assistant is on her feet, her face an ‘O’ of horror that I am going straight in – it’s not the done thing. He could be in the middle of a high-level meeting, but I don’t care. In fact, it will show him how serious I am that I thought to interrupt rather than wait my turn. My knuckles tap briefly before I open the door and step in. I don’t care any more, I really don’t. I’ve given so much to this company and I’m still getting snide comments. I don’t care who they think they are, but I’m going to show them who I am.

The swirl of my indignation and outrage is halted in its tracks by a pair of tight white underpants covered in red lipstick marks. They’re at the top of tanned, hairy, flabby legs. At the bottom of the legs are black socks. Above the underpants is an open white shirt revealing a slightly paunched, tanned stomach, and a pair of man’s hands planted proudly on each hip, emphasising what is going on below the waist. What is going on below the waist, unfortunately for me, is an expectant bulge, straining against the tight material of the pants.

I rear up, horrified, and Gideon does the same. My body, thankfully not as frozen with alarm as my mind, steps back, swinging the door shut with me.

Brain bleach. I need brain bleach. I remember Phoebe said something about it the other day when Aunty Betty mentioned she’d snogged one of the members of a band Phoebe liked. I need some, desperately.

The new personal assistant is in the petrified position she’d adopted when I opened the door: phone in one hand, her other hand outstretched as it tried to stop me, her visage caught in its ‘O’ of fright.

I’ve met Gideon’s wife a few times. She’s a lovely woman who sent a personally written card after what happened to Joel. Poor woman. I wonder if she suspects? I doubt it. Gideon and his assistant could lock the door and do all sorts and he’d still be home for their children’s bedtimes. And his betrayed wife would think he didn’t have time or opportunity to have an affair.

Behind the door there are sounds of him scrabbling around. I should leave, walk away and pretend this never happened. I can’t, though. Actually, I won’t. No matter who he is fucking, I need this man to be honest with me.

I knock again and wait for a response this time before I enter.

‘Saffron,’ Gideon says. He is behind his desk, fully dressed and buttoned up, he even has a blue brocade tie around his neck. ‘Shut the door, come in, sit down. Please.’ As he speaks, his eyes are trained on the padded, black leather ink blotter on the desk in front of him.

I do as I’m told.

‘How, erm, how can I help you?’

He is, thankfully, opting for the ‘it never happened’ way forward. My mind tries to summon up the frothing mass of indignation and righteous fury that had driven me up here, but it does not come – the white pants image has dampened all that.

‘Do you have a problem with my work?’ I ask.

He faces me full-on – my question has sliced away the embarrassment. He’s always been about the business, the results, the making of money. He doesn’t much care about anything else. ‘Of course not, why would you ask?’

‘If I may speak frankly, I am sick of the comments about the hours I work in the office. I work at home and even if I didn’t, it’s not mandatory for me to give my whole life over to this job.’

‘No one has said you have to,’ he replies.

‘Yes, you have. Every day that I walk in this building and sit at my desk with my demotion hanging over my head, still doing Edgar’s job but with no money or recognition for it tells me I have to. Comments about the time I’m leaving tell me I have to. Snide remarks about events beyond my control meaning I have to take the day off say I have to. The fact I’m sitting here having this conversation at all tells me I have to.’

‘It’s not that bad,’ he says.

‘I think I’m going to resign,’ I say, my mouth running away with me. I need to be at home more, I need to supervise Phoebe better, and if I’m home it’ll be better for when Zane comes back – he’ll know I’ll have more time for him.

‘Resign?’ Gideon leans forwards over his desk.

‘Yes, resign.’ This is absolutely the right thing to do. I can be there, too, during the day, when the letters arrive. I can see her face, I can maybe catch her at it and … I don’t know. It might not make her stop, but for once in all of this I’ll be in control.

‘Can you afford to do that?’

‘No, but that doesn’t mean I should stay here and get treated like something Kevin stepped in.’

‘If you think you’re being bullied—’

‘It’s not bullying, it’s unrelenting disrespect. It’s the constantly being made to feel small and useless when I actually do a good job, and the– Actually, I suppose it is bullying now I’ve said that out loud. I don’t want to deal with it any more, Gideon. Life is too short.’ That’s the first time I’ve said that since Joel died. I used to say it all the time when he was alive, probably even to him. I would utter those words when I was telling myself to do something that I knew technically I shouldn’t do. Or if I wanted to appear cool and enlightened like all the other would-be hedonists I met. I never let those words slip from my lips because I meant them – back then, as far as I was concerned, I was always going to live for ever. I said it because I could, because I’d never experienced the brevity of life. When it was proved to me in the most hideous way possible, I realised that I didn’t believe life was too short. I simply believed that the succinctness of life would never have anything to do with me.

‘How about a leave of absence?’ he suggests.

‘And come back to this, in fact, probably come back to worse because I won’t have been here and there’ll be a whole store of comments? No, thank you, it’s a very kind offer, but I think I’ll pass.’

He is silent, obviously thinking something over. ‘Don’t leave, Saffron. It doesn’t sit easy with me that you felt you had to take a demotion when you had recently lost your husband.’

‘I didn’t feel I had to take a demotion, I suggested it so I still had a job at a time when my whole world was imploding.’

‘Please. Please consider a leave of absence of a month and while you’re off, think through your options properly. You don’t have to come back, just consider your options.’

Ah, right. I see. ‘I’m not going to go blabbing my mouth off the second I leave here,’ I state. ‘I don’t care what you do. You don’t have to keep me here so you can keep an eye on me.’
Although I’m not going to lie for you: if anyone asks, I’m not going to plead ignorance
.

A red that is dark and potent, the colour of the jumper I wore the day I dropped the blackberries, bleeds into Gideon’s cheeks. ‘That’s not what this is about,’ he replies. ‘I would like you to consider taking a leave of absence, and thinking through your options. I think you’re a good worker. I will do my best to speak to the people who run your department about their general attitude towards all staff. I have heard rumblings, but it’s difficult to do something if no one will speak out first. This is the first time someone has officially told me about what is going on, therefore, now that I am aware of there being a problem, I have a duty of care to my employees to investigate it. I will sit down with the head of HR and we will look through the issues, see what people have said in their exit interviews and then work out how to tackle the problem.

‘I am asking you,
begging
you, if need be, to give me time to address this problem. If you still feel after your leave of absence that you would like to resign, I will not argue with you. I will accept it with regret and we shall all move on. What do you say?’ Once again, he considers every word so he does not commit himself to something he cannot see through.

‘Fine,’ I say.

His relief is evident. It’s not me, I’m sure, employees are lining up to get work, it must be the company’s reputation – maybe the people who have left recently and there have been a few, aren’t keeping quiet about how they’re treated. A business that works to help other companies successfully brand and market themselves survives on its reputation as well as its work. ‘I’ll have HR go over the contract with you and you can start as soon as possible.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Oh, Saffron?’ he calls as I’m about to leave.

‘Yes?’ I brace myself to be admonished for walking in without knocking earlier, to be asked to pretend I had seen nothing.

‘I’m assuming if we need any back-up in the next month or so you won’t mind helping out?’ I like Gideon, really I do. Although I like him a whole lot less now that I know he’s a cheating scumbag, but
if I didn’t know that, I’d like him because he’s very straightforward. He’s all about the business, all about the making money and all about trying to get me to work for free as well, it seems.

‘We’ll see, shall we?’ I say.

His shamefaced personal assistant is glaring a hole into her computer screen when I exit his office, silently agreeing that I saw nothing.

It’s like a scar, a jagged-edged, shiny, bright scar that runs the length of the driver’s side of my car. Made by
her
, probably with a screwdriver, sometime between the hours of nine-thirty and five-fifty-five.

She’s slipped in here and done this. She’s placed it below the handle so I can’t miss it. So she can make her point. She’s following me to work – to make sure I don’t decide to drop into a police station at any point, I’m sure. Well, at least that’s one bonus – if she’s here, watching me, she won’t be in London with Zane, she won’t be in Queen’s Park with Aunty Betty, and she won’t be in Hove with Phoebe. She’ll be wherever I am. There’s an odd, unsettling comfort in that. It removes a layer of rawness to the vat of sickness at the pit of my stomach.

I am not going to freak out. If she’s watching, then what she wants is for me to break down or to start screaming (what I’d like to do) because what she is desperate for is a reaction. A way to know she’s got to me, especially because I’ve refused to open the blinds.

I cast a cursory glance around the car park, searching briefly in the gloom for any additional shadows beside the squat pillars; for someone lurking behind the other parked cars; for anyone breathing in the quiet of the underground level of this car park. I’m trying to sense someone, anyone,
anything
. I should be able to, especially now that I can experience the world in full, but there’s nothing there. It’s almost as if a ghost is doing this. Someone who leaves no trace of themselves is stalking me without actually being real.

*

There’s traffic, which I think is odd for a Monday evening.

Cars stretch bumper to bumper along Dyke Road: the red lights,
like a line of glassy, blinking eyes, are extinguished as the cars move and then lit up again as the cars have to stop. I’ve been calling Phoebe with the hands-free and there’s no answer. I don’t have the number for the teacher who is covering library duty.

I could call Mr Bromsgrove, but I’m loath to give him more reason to talk to my daughter than necessary. She’ll be fine. She’ll wait outside for me and it’ll be fine. The panic that is fuelling the frenzied stirring of nausea in my stomach is only from general anxiety about being imprisoned here in traffic. It’s not the worry that
she
might not have stayed to see my reaction to scarring my car, that she might have gone after Phoebe now. It’s not fear that Phoebe will see her and will freak out that this person is around again.

I hit the call button on my steering wheel and my daughter’s phone clicks straight to answer machine. There’s nothing unusual about that. She’s probably run out of battery since she’s never off the damn thing – apart from the past couple of days when she doesn’t seem to want to pick it up at all.

The car in front of me is a huge people carrier type affair that holds one driver and three passengers. Joel had been angling for us to get a campervan not long before
that day
. He’d been willing to sell his BMW because we’d only be allowed two residential parking permits. I’d had to remind him several times that I wasn’t the camping sort. ‘I’ll take the kids on my own, then,’ he’d say happily. I wonder if the four people, two adults at the front, two child seats just seen over the top of the back seats, are a family in the traditional sense? Two children, two parents? I wonder if they go camping? I wonder, if Joel was alive, if we’d have gone camping?

There’s a surge forwards as we come up to new traffic lights where Dyke Road becomes Old Shoreham Road. I pull my car onto it and the knot of anxiety loosens in my chest, it won’t be long before I’m there. Probably around six-fifteen. Late, but not too late. She’ll be fine. She’ll be there. She knows not to go off with anyone else.

I pull up outside the school and park on the double yellows, not caring that I might get a ticket – the parking inspectors being that
conscientious until eight o’clock. As I exit the car, the way the school is in darkness, with no sign of Phoebe outside, whisks up that terror inside to a new level. It’s like those times you’re looking for something you’ve forgotten. You look and you look but even as you’re turning everything upside-down, and opening every drawer and cupboard you
know
deep in your soul that it’s gone. I used to do that in the early days with Joel. I would walk around the kitchen looking for something, looking for him, even though deep down inside I knew he was gone.