Venus Envy (5 page)

I clip-clipped on my low heels, pretending to be that woman from the Kenco advert, only younger, and got in the lift for Seamus’s floor.

I stepped out prepared to receive Jenny’s congratulations.

‘Ah, there you are,’ she snapped, ‘finally arrived, I see, well, we’ve got a lot of work to do today and you can start with the filing.’

She reached behind her and lifted a huge pile of files on to my desk. Then she lifted a second pile. And then a third.

‘The filing room is down the hallway,’ Jenny said briskly, ‘and I’ve put the colour-coded date/time system on your clipboard. There. It’s really self explanatory. Don’t get it wrong, every item of correspondence is vital, you never know when the SEC

or the SIB might want it.’

I looked blank.

‘Come on, Alexandra, the SIB supervises the SFA and IMRO. They’re our SROs. Or is it RPBs? Come along, girl, don’t stand there gaping like a moron!’

‘But what about Mr Mahon?’ I asked timidly, feeling my lip-gloss get duller by the minute. ‘Won’t he need his letters typed, or something?’

Jenny gave my washed, made-up, scented self a

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quick once over. Something like frosty amusement registered on her face.

‘Never you mind about that, young woman,’ she

said. ‘Mr Mahon is away at an investment presentation all day.’

Bastard. Bastard. Bastard. Sorry about that, had to clear the system, it was just that five straight hours of filing had taken its toll on me. W-hen Dante wrote the Inferno, he didn’t mention filing in the lower circles of hell. He must have been having an off-day. Compared to filing, typing letters was a joyously exciting magic carpet ride through a Disney universe of love and laughter. Filing at Hamilton Kane involved carefully spreading out incomprehensible documents all over the floor and then trying to put them neatly into cardboard wallets suspended by little metal hooks in identical drawers. Only I couldn’t get them to fit in the little wallets, I didn’t understand the colour-coded labels (sample Jenny instruction:)

Blue is for October filings preceding Discovery motions on the fifteenth, but make sure Due Diligence motions from the seventeenth to twentieth inclusive are in Turquoise Sub-File

and I wasn’t sure which drawer was which, as after a while they started repeating the colours. The screaming boredom of this task was broken only by the fact that I crushed two lovingly tended nails, manicured at great expense only last week, Jenny screeching at me - ‘No! that’s not the Magenta file, Alexandra! Any fool can see that’s Cerise!’ - and the repeated excursions to the photocopier machine to make copies of Special documents.

Seeing my teary face, one of the other assistants took pity on me after I started sobbing as the copier .ate two

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priceless documents. I swear, I will never say catty things about secretaries again. Just because one dumped me by fax. And I am the slave of another one.

‘You feed them in like this,’ Melissa said kindly, ‘and they don’t get stuck. You must be Alex Wilde,

yeah? Lucky you, to work in Seamus Mahon’s office.’ ‘Yeah,’ I said dreamily, bucking up a little.

‘You get to work with Jenny Robins! Everybody loves Jenny.’

I stared at her. Obviously working here was dangerous to your mental health. Less than two days at work, and it had already started to affect mine.

Jenny came in at five p.m., when I was exhaustedly knocking off for the day, and surveyed my workload with a total lack of satisfaction.

‘You’ll have to finish the rest tomorrow. Things don’t file themselves, you know.’

‘No, Miss Robins,’ I said, biting my lip.

‘I’ll take care of Mr Mahon while you’re busy in here. At least you can’t make spelling mistakes when you’re filing,’ she pointed out with irrefutable logic.

‘Well, that’s all right, then,’ I said bitterly.

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It was a nasty time. Seamus Mahon was away at conferences and vital lunch meetings. Back home, the house was filled with a succession of men calling for Keisha (media and celeb types), Bronwen (disco dancing madheads bearing drugs), Gail (Tony and his high-earning friends) and me (meter reader, irate

, bank representative).

Across the hall, the builders were merrily knocking things down and playing Brian Ferry at top volume, while Bronwen and Keisha purred over the thought of Snowy. They were a whole lot nicer to Gail. I’d have thought they could have shown a little backbone, but Ktisha would sell her soul for a Gucci discount. After all, where Gucci leads, Joseph is sure to follow. And as for Bronwen, ask her the three most beautiful words in the English language, and she will say without hesitation, ‘Access All Areas.’

Gail let me know about it too. She flashed me looks

of triumph as she sat there with her captive audience, extolling her mate Snowy White.

So there was nothing to do except go to work. But I couldn’t get the Reservoir Dogs vibe about this fact. For a start, I had no threads (Keisha’s Donna Karan being a never-repeated, once-in-a-lifetime offer). For a second, I had no motivation. The glorious Seamus was gloriously absent morning after morning. I ask you! I started to burn with resentment. How dare he show up on day one, like a glimmering mirage of lemonade in the desert, and then vanish into thin air!

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‘AMAB,’ I would mutter under my breath around the office, ‘bloody AMAB,’ which was Bronwen’s cunning code for All Men Are Bastards. Something we said so often it was good to have a shortcut. And thirdly, Jenny Robins was clearly a sadist.

‘I’m going to be on-site with Mr Mahon,’ she would announce importantly, ‘so you will be answering his calls today.’

I had spent one afternoon doing that and paled in fear. Answering Seamus’s phones was a job for a world-class traffic controller, not a klutz like me. You had to rack ‘em, pack ‘em and stack ‘em while you took their incomprehensible messages, decided which ones to forward to the mobile - which they all insisted on, and woe betide me when I got it wrong - fax out the right documents, and sort the ones spewing in, whilst hokling the phone with one hand and writing messages with a pen cramped between your toes. Or something like that.

I would have cried but I didn’t have time.

I got it so wrong the first day I’d hoped Jenny might

insist on doing it herself henceforth.

‘You’ve got to learn, Alex.’

‘Where will you two be on-site today?’ I asked, preparing to set the speed-dial.

Jenny smiled. ‘Corfu.’.

So I did it’. I answered the phones and scrawled the messages and filed the files and faxed the faxes. After a while it even got less terrifying and just Settled into boredom. I never took a lunch hour, just ate a sandwich on my desk when anyone could be bothered to get me one, or bought something from the lunchtime office hawker who came round with a big basket full of goodies for sale. By the time it got to me, the goodies usually consisted of:

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x bruised apple brown banana

x soggy cheese and pickle bap (spilt orange juice flavour).

I then would miss lunch and spend an irritable. afternoon with hunger screeching audibly in my gut, like the Shreddies advert.

At any other time I would have quit. I was seriously thinking about quitting when I got a phone call. Or

more accurately, took a phone call.

‘Mr Mahon’s office.’

‘Is he there, please? This is the Carrefour Trust calling.’

‘I’m afraid he’s not available at the moment,’ I said,

slightly less bored than usual, since something about

, the voice was pricking at my memory lobes. Low, masculine and well modulated, an accent that the wideboys in here were always emulating and never quite getting right.

There was a fractional pause on the other end. ‘Who am I speaking to?’ ,’His assistant,’ I said warily.

Another pause, then politely, ‘That wouldn’t by any chance be Alex Wilde?’

‘Tom!’ I almost shouted. I forgot I didn’t want him to know what had become of me. I was so happy to hear a friendly voice.

‘So, you decided to go into the City, eh?’ Tom was asking. ‘Very wise, I should think, get a bit of life experience to feed into the art …’

I let that ‘ generous assessment stand uncorrected. ‘So what are you doing?’

‘This and that,’ Tom said vaguely. Tom was the type of man who thought it was vulgar to get too specific. ‘I expect you’re loving it at Hamilton Kane, Alex …’

That was enough. The floodgates opened. Poor Tom, he called to talk about high finance and instead got me practically blubbing at him down the receiver.

4°

And with infinite patience, he didn’t hang up or suggest that we talk later, maybe one Sunday in the year zooo.

‘You can’t quit,’ Tom said firmly when I’d finished. ‘Why bloody not?’ I demanded.

‘Because you’re not the quitting type, Alex. It’ll get easier. You’ll learn something. And you’ll have some money of your own.’

‘Money doesn’t buy happiness,’ I said sulkily.

‘No.’ He sounded rather heavy. ‘But it does buy independence.’

We rang off, promising to meet up for lunch so he could insult New Labour as much as he wanted. Another one of those things I wuld never get round to doing, like putting up the picture-hooks in my bedroom, or visiting the National Gallery. But I didn’t quit. I would never have heard the end of it.

I was sitting at my desk morosely typing out the analyst’s report on Dyson Electrics when a large shadow loomed over my desk.

‘I’ve nearly finished, Miss Robins,’ I muttered through clenched teeth. God, the woman wanted blood. She was like that sergeant in An Officer and A Gentleman, screaming at Richard Gere that he wanted his Drop On Request. I had ink-stains on my palms, it had been another missed-lunch day, and I was caught in the grip of a crushing tension headache.

‘Now why would you want to be calling me that?’ a soft voice enquired.

I looked up to see Seamus Mah0n glancing merrily

down at my one-handed typing technique.

‘It’s easier this way,’ I said defensively.

‘Sure, and it’s very original,’ Seamus said sweetly, ‘.just think, if you lop your left hand off in a freak gardening accident, you’ll still be able to come in to work.’

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I smiled slightly. But only slightly. Maybe he was standing there in a slouchy suit with those glittering green eyes, cracking jokes and generally improving any view, but I wasn’t fooled. Any moment now he would shimmer away and leave nothing but a huge pile of paperwork and a teasing waft of aftershave.

‘We’ll have to be giving you an efficiency award.’ ‘Ummm,’ I grunted.

‘Maybe we should be giving -you one of those anyway. All the work you’ve been doing while I’ve been away. You never told me you were Wonder Woman in disguise.’

At this I really did start to perk up. I couldn’t actually believe it. Somebody had just given me a compliment; bothered to thank me and told me I was doing a good job. Wonder Woman? Invisible Woman, more like. Or Incredible Shrinking Ego Woman. A bit of a grin slipped out before I could stop it.

‘There you go, gorgeous,’ Seamus Mahon said happily, ‘I was thinking the weather forecast was indefinite gloom and now it’s all sunny.’

I caught the eye of Jenny Robins across the desk.

Her back had stiffened and she was sending a world

class death stare in our direction.

I resisted the impulse to give her a jaunty wink. ‘Now I haven’t had a chance to get to know you at all,’ Seamus said decisively, ‘and it’s highly important to be acquainted with everybody on the team. Isn’t that what Alex Ferguson says to Manchester United?’

“Course it is. And you and I are part of a team,’ Seamus added, waving one bronzed hand at our surroundings as though to somehow make me feel that the nuclear bomb site that was my cubbyhole, and the immaculately gleaming universe that was his inner office, were in some way connected. ‘And I’m betting you haven’t had any lunch.’

4z

‘I don’t really have time for lunch,’ I said very reluctantly. Jenny’s death stares were increasing in intensity. I knew I’d be paying for this later today.

‘Nonsense. If you don’t eat, your concentration wanders, biological fact,’ Seamus said slowly. Really, his voice was like warm brandy on a St Bernard, thawing you out and bringing you slowly .back to life. He was looking at me so intensely I couldn’t stop a raspberry blush spreading right across my face. His eyes were locked on to mine.

Rudolph Valentino had nothing on this guy. ‘Jenny, hold the fort for an hour or two, could you?’ Seamus ordered, raising his voice peremptorily. ‘I’m taking Alex out to lunch.’

We exited the building via a back entrance I’d never seen before, where a monster black limo was waiting.

‘I thought we’d go to the Pont de la Tour,’ Seamus said, holding open the door for me, ‘if you’ve no objection?’

‘None at all,’ I said, pretending that I got asked to swanky Conran restaurants every day of the week.

When we arrived the waiter greeted Seamus with fawning deference and led us to a marvellous table outside in the sun, overlooking the river. Then he made the mistake of handing me a menu. The descriptions of the delicious, non-soggy-bap meals were just too much. My stomach set off a volley of cannon fire that could have caused a security alert in Downing Street. I flushed crimson.

‘Well now,’ said Seamus with supreme unconcern, ‘it’s nice to hear a girl with a healthy appetite for a change.’

He ordered for us both. Large helpings of everything. ‘Sure, and then we’ll try the chocolate souffl with the ice-cream, why not? And bring me som

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sticky toffee pudding while you’re at it. And for drinks …’

‘Oh, drinks,’ said the waiter, as though this was a dangerously novel idea, ‘let me just get the wine waiter for you, sir.’

I cringed, but my boss was having none of it.