Unsuitable Men (13 page)

‘Barely a day goes by that I don’t get a letter from a reader complaining about the new changes! Only today I had one asking what had happened to the Janet’s Country Ramblings
column,’ protested Martha.

‘Our Letters page is full of people who like the new changes,’ answered Amanda smoothly.

‘Letters that you’ve got Ticky Lytton-Finch to write!’

I stifled a gasp from my loo seat. Of course I knew that Ticky wrote half the letters that we published – if you saw the genuine postbag you would see why. I mean, who in their right mind
would bother writing to a magazine to say, ‘I was most impressed with your new layouts. Keep up the good work’? No one does – they only write to complain when they don’t
like something, or when they mistake us for the National Trust magazine and send fierce missives deploring the poor standard of cucumber sandwiches sold in the Knole Tea Rooms. But I thought we had
kept this fact from Martha, who would never have allowed such a thing when she was Acting-Editor.

‘Ticky merely steps into the breach when our correspondence hasn’t quite delivered what we need,’ said Amanda. ‘Much as the Betterton family appointed me when you had
failed to deliver what they needed.’

I smothered another gasp – although I thought Martha’s one-woman campaign to bring down Amanda was not only pointless but totally misguided, that was one hell of a smack-down. Martha
evidently thought so too, because she was stunned into silence.

‘Martha. I am as uncertain as you about Rory’s dating column. That is why it’s been relegated to the website. But I put you in charge of finding an agony aunt for the magazine
because I thought you might enjoy the challenge.’

I winced in my cubicle. I knew Amanda had doubts about my column, but it was still hard to hear her say so.

‘An agony aunt! Next you’ll be asking me to find an astrologer! It’s entirely inappropriate,’ snapped Martha.

‘I can always appoint someone else to do it,’ threatened Amanda. ‘And any other part of your job that you think “inappropriate”.’

I winced again; for Martha this time. As much as she was a complete nightmare, I couldn’t help but sympathize with her, nearing retirement age in her comfortable and not at all stylish
Weldon’s of Ludlow shoes, having her entire world turned upside-down by this glossy fortysomething in her Louboutins. Of course Amanda was right, of course Martha had to be made to see it,
but it was still painful to hear her be beaten down like this.

‘Fine,’ said Martha. ‘I’ll find you an agony aunt.’

‘Good,’ said Amanda. ‘And don’t bother asking Honor Blackman – she’s already said no.’

Her spiky heels clipped out of the bathroom and in a reflex action I found myself checking my watch – six minutes. Far off Amanda’s personal best, but an effective Martha-crushing
nonetheless.

Martha’s heavy shoes stomped over towards the sinks and I heard a low sigh, then a series of sniffs. I sat very still for a full five minutes until she left the room.

Back in our office, Ticky was counting out a handful of coins on her desk, and I knew she must have won the latest bet. She guiltily scooped the money off her desk as I came into the room.

‘Oh, Roars, it’s just you, thank God,’ she said. ‘Six minutes on the nose. Well done me, eh?’

‘Yeah, well done you,’ I said.

I wondered if I was losing my taste for the office games that had once helped to pass the time. Sniggering outside the bathroom door in the knowledge that Martha – who had once had such
power over all of us – was getting a pasting was totally different from hearing her being humiliated in person.
Country House
was far more than just a job to her; she visited
properties at the weekends, she stayed late in the office, she felt each Amanda-sanctioned change as a stab in the heart. She was too close to retirement to find a job elsewhere, but too far from
it to be able to look forward to her imminent escape. She was stuck, like a trapped animal, snapping and biting at everyone who approached her. I had the uncomfortable feeling that my sudden
sympathy for Martha’s situation was not unrelated to the recent unravelling of my personal life. It would have made me a better person to have felt simple empathy for a fellow human being,
but I couldn’t deny that my pity was tempered by a hefty dose of fear that, if I didn’t sort my own life out, Martha’s unhappy present might become my future.

‘Hello, ladies,’ drawled Lysander Honeywell, throwing himself into the chintz armchair that sat in the far corner of our office. It was clear that his usual clipped
courtesy had been loosened by a certain amount of alcohol.

‘Christ, Lysander,’ shrieked Ticky, pulling him up from the seat, ‘can’t you look before you land your drunken arse down? You’ve sat on Mummy’s new fascinator
that I just picked up from Fenwick’s. She’ll kill me.’

Ticky reached behind Lysander for a Fenwick’s bag and pulled out a sad-looking jumble of wires and feathers hanging limply from a tiny circle of fabric. I have never got the whole
fascinator thing – is it a hat? Is it a hairclip? – but I think that is because I am not of a class that considers the highest possible praise for an item of clothing to be
‘fun’. As in ‘Gosh, Jocasta, yellow tights! What
fun
!’ Instead of, ‘Gosh, Jocasta, yellow tights! You have never looked more ridiculously like a garden
bird.’ But fascinators were indisputably ‘fun’; even the most formidable dowager, corseted in stern upholstery, let society know that she was a spirited slip of a gel underneath
it all just by wearing one on her steely locks. No posh country wedding was complete unless the congregation fairly bristled with them.

‘Yikes, awfully sorry, Victoria,’ said Lysander, blushing, or perhaps it was just a boozy flush. ‘If your ma complains, tell her I’ll buy her a new one. Throw in lunch,
too. Haven’t seen her for ages.’ He slumped back down in the seat while Ticky huffed and sighed as she tried to restore the fascinator back to its maximum fun setting.

‘Bloody ruined,’ she muttered under her breath.

‘Nice lunch?’ I asked him. His pale-pink shirt was unbuttoned a bit too low, which almost certainly meant he’d had lunch with a pretty young book publicist. He was of the Simon
Cowell generation which confidently believed the sight of an expanse of manly chest inspired as much lust in women as an exposed female cleavage did in men. The bared chest was an incongruous look
for a book editor who, I always thought, would surely have come across better literary heroes to emulate than the Mills & Boon cover model. Still, I guessed it worked for him in a way; although
he never got anywhere with the publicists, who were all half his age, he rarely seemed to be short of a lady companion.

‘Lovely young gel from the Pendragon Press,’ he said, settling back into his chair as if he planned to spend the whole afternoon there. Which he probably did. After a long lunch,
Lysander rarely returned to his own desk, preferring to while away the rest of the day in idle gossip and office-hopping.

‘Where’d you go?’ I asked, less out of interest than to prompt the monologue that I knew was already prepared.

Lysander lay back, his hands folded across his stomach, legs outstretched. His eyes were half closed in fond reminiscence already.

‘Just a small place I know, run by an old chum of mine . . .’

I prepared for the clang of a name being dropped.

‘Jeremy Wells? L’Ecluse?’

‘Oooh,’ I said politely, as I knew was expected of me. I had been to L’Ecluse for a drink before, but it was a little out of my lunchtime price range, and Lysander’s.
Pendragon must have been picking up the bill. I wondered how soon I could turn my attention back to the computer screen without being noticed.

‘I began with the soup of Jerusalem artichokes and bacon, while Leticia had . . .’ Lysander rambled on, going through every dish in immense detail and giving an account of his
conversation which, if true, must have bored poor Leticia to tears as it was mostly designed to make her aware of his great importance and his close personal friendships with her bosses and
authors.

I let him declaim from the depths of the chintzy chair while I quietly got on with my work. Even though it was he who had got her the job at
Country Life
, Ticky had no patience with
Lysander; having known him since childhood she had suffered his monologues for too long already. But I didn’t especially mind having him drone on in the background. He was just a rather
lonely man who needed an audience and, since he didn’t particularly mind if the audience was an attentive one, it felt a bit like having the radio on: you could tune in if it got interesting,
and straight back out again when it tailed off.

He had been going for a good ten minutes when Ticky, with her usual want of tact, spoke loudly over him.

‘Roars, these unsuitable men. I’m just trying to think if I can set you up with anyone to kick you off. Do you have, like, an age range you want to stick to or just keep it wide
open?’

I rolled my eyes in the direction of Lysander, who was looking a little put out at the interruption.

‘Lysander, can you just, like, put a cork in it for five minutes while I get on with some actual work over here? Yah, Rory, age range. What do you say?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, having not really given it any thought before. ‘Er, probably around my age?’

‘Oh no,’ said Lysander, leaning forward in his chair and clutching at the corner of my desk. ‘Oh but my dear, you would be ruling out so many interesting men. Men of an older
generation have so much to teach younger women.’ He pressed a hand to his exposed chest and Ticky stuck two fingers down her throat.

‘You may laugh, Victoria Lytton-Finch,’ said Lysander with great authority, ‘but an older man knows how to spoil a woman, how to treat her
like
a woman. And, my dear
Rory, if you don’t mind my saying, you look like you could do with a bit of spoiling right now.’

My hand crept to my hair; I knew I looked terrible. He smiled at me with a surprising sweetness. But surely he wasn’t suggesting . . . ?

‘Lysander, you dirty old perv, there is, like, no way Roars is going out on a date with
you
,’ said Ticky, completely disgusted. ‘She’s young enough to be your
daughter.’

Lysander sniffed and sat up very straight. ‘Victoria,’ he said, ‘I will thank you not to speak to me in this manner. I am not a dirty old perv, as you so revoltingly put it,
nor am I proposing anything untoward with Aurora.’

I breathed a huge sigh of relief. I mean, there was nominally unsuitable and then there was please-tell-me-you-are-joking-how-would-I-ever-live-this-down unsuitable.

‘I am merely suggesting,’ said Lysander, turning his back on Ticky to face me fully, ‘that by ruling out the older gentlemen, you may be ruling out some perfectly pleasant
evenings.’

‘Well in that case, you can’t rule out the young ones either, Roars,’ said Ticky. ‘Like, you’re going to have to be an equal opportunities dater? And do admit a hot
young boy is quite a lot more appealing than one of Lysander’s wrinkled old cronies.’

‘Er, right,’ I said, feeling that actually neither of them was as appealing as someone my own age, someone with a decent job and a home and a shared history. Someone who was the
youngest board director at Fairfax Accounting. Someone with a new girlfriend, I reminded myself.

Ticky decided that I should be seeking unsuitable men within an age range of twenty to seventy, which we all finally agreed was quite wide enough to encompass all kinds of unsuitability.
Satisfied with her afternoon’s work, she decided to pop out of the office to spend her sweepstake winnings on chocolate. Lysander stayed behind, unusually silent in his floral armchair.

‘Aurora,’ he said, finally. ‘I wouldn’t normally suggest such a thing, but you are specifically looking for unsuitable men for your column, aren’t you?’

‘I am,’ I said hesitantly.

‘Only my cousin Ethelred—’

‘Ethelred?’

‘We all have unusual names in our family, Aurora,’ sniffed Lysander. ‘I would have thought
you
would sympathize.’

‘Sorry, do carry on,’ I said.

‘My cousin Ethelred is visiting London from the Highlands this week. Charming fellow, never married. Red-haired, just like you. I’m supposed to be meeting him for dinner at
Wilton’s tomorrow night, but something has come up – a situation with a lady, if you understand my meaning.’

Oh God, I really hoped Lysander didn’t think that, just because I let him run his mouth off in our office, I was offering myself as some sort of confidante for his dirty dalliances.

‘Umm, right?’ I said.

‘So why don’tIring Ethelred and suggest he has dinner with you instead? I can promise he’ll be delighted – the old duffer barely sees a woman for weeks on end up on his
ruddy estate, let alone a pretty girl of your age. And he’s rich as Croesus so you don’t need to worry about paying.’

‘Oh gosh, Lysander, that’s very kind of you,’ I said, thinking that really it was anything but; clearly he was just looking for someone on whom to dump an unwanted relation for
the evening. ‘I think I might be busy tomorrow night.’

‘Doing what?’ asked Lysander.

I flushed guiltily, as if he could see straight into my pathetically empty diary, its pages free of all social engagements that didn’t involve the senior-citizen residents of Elgin
Square.

‘Oh, just things,’ I answered airily, trying to convey such a packed schedule that it was hard for me to remember the specifics. There was no way I was going to allow Lysander to
manipulate me into this; there was a significant difference between dating a sophisticated urbane older man of, perhaps, forty, and being forced into proximity to an aged rustic whose only regular
female company was, I imagined, a wheezing and arthritic Border terrier.

‘Aurora, my dear, I suggest you rearrange those “things”. Ethelred may not set your young heart a-flutter but I can guarantee that, firstly, he is, unlike your first date,
entirely heterosexual. And secondly, may I suggest that you need to consider your readership? A rich, mature land-owning bachelor would be like manna from heaven to them. Manna from heaven. Think
of your column and be a professional for goodness’ sake.’