The Whiskerly Sisters (6 page)

Still humming to herself, she returned to her desk and got on with her work. She had a pile of travel expenses to complete for the Sales Team, some orders to process on the unwieldy purchase order system. Furthermore, she needed to plan the recruitment drive for the next tier of warehousemen and she had a pile of well overdue performance reviews to type up. That would take most of the morning and this afternoon would be taken up by the Marketing Team’s monthly meeting, followed by a visit to the nearby product store to collect the required list of toys to send down to photography.

She was halfway through the travel expenses when Patrick popped his head round the door and asked her, rather gruffly, to step into his office. Wondering what was amiss this time, she dutifully picked up her shorthand notepad, followed him smartly into his room and asked if she should make some coffee. Surprisingly, he declined.

“Come in and shut the door,” he ordered.

He wasted no time, not even giving her a moment to sit down.

“What’s all this I have been hearing about your being promoted to the job of Office Manager at the new build with a team of secretaries under you?” he threw at her angrily.

Celia’s eyes opened wide in alarm and her heart immediately dropped towards her stomach. To steady herself, she took a deep breath and held on to Patrick’s desk. There was no need to become defensive. Patrick and she had talked about this often. He knew that.

“You’ve told me several times that if I shape up now and work hard with the rest of the team to get us all smoothly settled into the new warehouse, you will promote me to the role of Office Manager and let me manage any new office staff that come on board,” she replied with spirit.

“I have what?” he exploded, staring at her as though she was completely insane. “I most certainly have not. Wherever you picked that up from, it was definitely not me.”

“You repeated it to me in my last performance review. I have it in writing that we agreed that my goal would be to work towards becoming Dumbleton’s new Office Manager.”

Patrick’s face relaxed, increasing the levels of anxiety Celia was feeling. He smiled thinly. “Work towards, yes,” he agreed, “but you are a long way from achieving it, my girl. There will be no immediate promotion for you once we move across town. There never was a role of Office Manager being offered and there never will be. There certainly won’t be any new administrators coming on line, not now, not ever. The Germans won’t countenance that; not with the meagre profits we are showing. They only just tolerate me having an assistant.”

“But,” Celia tried to interject. However, Patrick was in full flow and therefore unstoppable.

“Taking my words and making nonsense of them!” he spat at her disparagingly. “Get it into your head once and for all Celia. You are not going to be Office Manager at Dumbleton’s not now, not in the near future, possibly not ever. There are not going to be any new secretaries and, if there were, you would most certainly not be managing them. You are the only full time administrator here and, as far as the foreseeable future is concerned, you will continue to be so. Got it?”

“But who is going to act as administrator for the new staff at the warehouse?” cried Celia in dismay.

Patrick only looked at her, his refusal to budge written all over his face.

“There are forty of them,” reasoned Celia, emphasising the word ‘forty’.

Patrick still said nothing. He sat there, impassively, waiting for her to work it out.

Realisation dawned and the shock spread across her face as she took it in. “B-but I can’t take on the administration of a whole new team. I work at least ten hours unpaid overtime a week as it is.” stuttered a stunned Celia.

Patrick sat back in his chair and looked down. He slowly smoothed out the invisible creases in his expensive trousers while Celia stood in front of him aghast. He paused a heartbeat more and then, raising his eyes to her face, he smiled coldly, reminding his reeling secretary powerfully of a snake.

“Celia,” he said, gently, almost paternally, emphasising each word. “You know what your trouble is – you don’t believe in yourself. Trust me, you can do this. You are a very capable woman. If it helps, I believe you can do it and the Management Team believe you can do it. Believe in yourself Celia and you will, in fact, do it.”

He paused, turning to contemplate the bleak scenery outside his office window for a short while, allowing Celia to collapse into a nearby chair as she struggled to take in what Patrick had been saying.

Still staring out of the window, Patrick added mystifyingly “Ants and rubber tree plants, my girl. Ants and rubber tree plants.” He rose from his chair and, crossing the desk to stand beside Celia, he patted her on the shoulder and beamed encouragingly at the horrified woman.

As Celia listened to the sound of her dream job being swallowed up in the bark that was proving every bit as painful as Patrick’s bite, all she could think of was, “Ants and frigging rubber tree plants? What the hell have ants and bloody rubber tree plants got to do with anything?”

Still smiling winningly, Patrick opened the door to usher Celia out. The conversation was over and she was being dismissed. Crushed, Celia rose hesitantly from her chair and left the room. Humiliated didn’t even come close to what she was feeling.

“Oh and Celia,” called out Patrick, cheerfully, as the devastated secretary walked unsteadily towards the relative sanctuary of her office. “Pop the kettle on. I’d like that coffee now. There’s a good girl.”

I
f only she’d kept her damn mouth shut. If only, she’d thought it through. If only, she hadn’t acted so hastily. She wouldn’t be where she was now. She’d be where she was then – where she still very much wanted to be. Not that she felt her new life was terrible. She wasn’t bored or strapped for cash or out of work and her inconstant love life had continued inconstant throughout the entire debacle. No change there then.

It’s just that she wished she’d had the good sense to stay calm, to rise above it, to bite her tongue. Instead, she’d lost her temper, stood her ground and bitten off more than she could chew, which was why she now found herself sweating inside a bulky flak jacket directing football traffic in the middle of the high street on a warm Saturday afternoon.

But then it’s an ill wind.

Not that long ago, Tiffany had been very satisfied with her job as Training Advisor for the Joint Emergency Services. She spent some of her time organising and developing bespoke training courses for a discrete group of clients; she spent some of her time training the good, the bad and the downright useless in management skills and she spent some of her time coaching and mentoring the supposedly up and coming. Her particular skill lay in helping others to get the best out of themselves, which was ironic really given the outcome.

She had sat on the Development Committees of several groups, working alongside the Local Authority, the Police, the Health Service and the Fire Brigade. She had considered herself very fortunate to be able to spend quite a lot of her time out of the office, sourcing venues, delivering training or meeting clients, on top of which she was able to work from home writing course objectives, needs analyses and learning outcomes. She was particularly proud of her developmental work with the County Council around Risk Assessment and Disaster Management. She had developed a good working relationship with the different personalities within the group. She found that, on the whole, they were a good laugh – down to earth, friendly and professional. She felt it a privilege to be able to work alongside them. She had felt completely secure in her role so she had never quite been able to understand what had gone so disastrously wrong. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it. She suspected it was her rejection of Fat Taff.

At a three day event at a hotel in Durham, he’d had one too many on the last night of the course and had made a pass at her. Tiffany, very aware of her glorious, good looks and tiny frame, was very used to more than her share of masculine attention and had thought nothing of giving him the brush off. It was something she did on a very regular basis. Besides, she felt it was highly unprofessional to mix business with pleasure. Worse, this particular guy was fat, Welsh and up his own arse and, whilst Tiffany was always partial to a little rarebit, she most definitely did not do fat or up the arse.

To Tiffany’s surprise, Fat Taff seemed to take her rejection as some kind of personal affront to his masculinity and could not believe she’d had the temerity to give him the knock back. He seemed unable to accept she’d turned him down – a well set up Abergevenian with a four by four and no mortgage. What was she thinking of, the stupid cow? He’d show her. At that point, he’d pulled himself together and stormed off, leaving Tiffany slightly bemused and embarrassed by his onslaught. She decided it was best to shrug it off and leave the idiot to get over himself.

However, that confrontation signalled the beginning of the end for Tiffany. At each meeting of the Development Group, there would be an aside, a sneer, a put down or a contention. He found fault with her work, criticised her approach, laughed at her skill and mocked her enthusiasm. He refused to listen to her professional critique of his presentations and cancelled his coaching sessions. He stared out of the window, seemingly bored, whenever she began to speak. The gentle, flirtatious, admiring taffy was clearly showing the darker side of his nature, turning almost overnight, into a bombastic, belligerent, blinkered bastard. Yet no one else in the group cared, no one batted an eyelid, no one came to her defence. In fact, no one actually seemed to notice that anything was different.

Until it was too late.

It was just another course; just another overnighter with another gala dinner; just another excuse for a booze-up at an impersonal hotel. And yet, it was totally and completely different to any other training course she’d ever run before.

It had begun ordinarily enough. The average number of delegates were late, the average number of delegates were lost, the average number of delegates failed to show. There was the usual mix of the upwardly mobile and the downright reclusive. There was the usual melee of the know-it-all, done-it-all and seen-it-all mulched together with the don’t know, don’t care and don’t ask brigade.

From Tiffany’s perspective, the morning sessions seemed to go smoothly. There was the general rush for coffee and a crafty fag in the designated area during the first break. There was the usual complaint that there was no honey and lemongrass tea or gluten free, dairy free, taste free biscuits from the inevitable lacto-intolerant, hyperglycaemic, lipid averse, nut allergenic vegetarian, but nothing Tiffany wasn’t able to handle.

The guest speaker in the afternoon had been late, but nevertheless had thankfully managed to cover all thirty of his power point slides, dismiss the company into break out rooms for a practical, gather feedback, sum up and disappear in record time, meaning that they only went slightly over schedule.

The Chair of the Faculty rounded off the day with a brief overview of the learning points so that the group was dismissed a mere thirty minutes over time, eager to head towards the bar for a quick drink before they trudged to their rooms to get themselves ready for the main event of the day, the Gala Dinner.

Tiffany breathed a sigh of relief as the door closed behind the final delegate. She wriggled out of her shoes and sat down for a few minutes, reflecting on how quickly the day had gone. She only had to pack up the data projector, tidy up the room in preparation for the following morning’s closing session and lock up. Then she could sneak off to her room, avoiding the crowd at the bar and reward herself with a welcome soak in the tub before getting ready for the long evening ahead. Rubbing her aching feet, she congratulated herself on a job well done. She was beginning to believe that her particular star was in the ascendant so, of course, it was just at that moment that things took a spectacular nosedive.

Back in her room, just in her underwear, Tiffany spent a little time deciding what to wear. Over time, she had gathered a small collection of good quality evening wear, especially chosen for these occasions. Nothing too bright yet nothing too dull, nothing too revealing, yet nothing too severe, nothing too long, yet nothing too short, nothing too smart, yet nothing too casual. An outfit designed to get her noticed, but not so as to make her the centre of attention.

Satisfied with her reflection in the mirror, and with her shining, blonde bob straightened to perfection, Tiffany made her way to the dining room. It had become her custom to arrive there first since it gave her the opportunity to check that everything was ready, that the room was properly set out and looked welcoming. As the delegates began to assemble in the dining room, Tiffany made sure that she greeted each of her guests by name, working the room with practiced grace and charm, drawing the different individuals out of themselves, putting them at their ease, feeling herself to be the ultimate professional; so on top of her game.