When She Was Bad (32 page)

Up until he died, which incidentally allowed me to step up to the position I have now, I admit I fantasized about him being held to account. Well, him and Oppenheimer. And now that day is finally here, and only Oppenheimer is left, I realize it’s not going to happen. Nothing can now discredit Professor Dan Oppenheimer, because all those years of success and fame in themselves create their own credibility, regardless of what went before.

37
Rachel

Rachel felt nervous, as if she was a home-owner preparing for a potential buyer, not a boss getting ready to host her own team. She ran a critical eye over her kitchen, taking in the wall of gleaming white units, its satin sheen unbroken by handles just as she’d envisioned when she first sat down with the kitchen designer. ‘No, it has to be clean,’ she’d insisted when he’d suggested breaking up the vast expanse of white with the odd splash of block colour or a textured finish, or even a mellower shade, ivory. He’d been disappointed when she’d stuck to her guns, but then he hadn’t come as far as she had come, hadn’t cooked in a kitchen so tiny it was as if the walls, with their imitation-wood units, doors hanging off hinges, were pressing in on you as you stood on a chair to stir baked beans on the hob. Hadn’t made a vow that if you ever avoided the crappy jobs your mother had no choice but to take, the parental absence that ground your brother’s ambition and self-respect to a dirty-grey powder to be snorted off cracked toilet cisterns, that meant your baby sister was permanently in your care, even though she was only two years younger than you . . . If you escaped all that, you’d live somewhere clean and light-filled that was all your own.

Rachel loved her home. When she and Ronan had first come to look around, it had been divided up badly into studio flats and he’d been put off by the layout and the sour smell of other people’s belongings, spilling out from the flimsy furniture. He thought it was too poky. His colleagues at the investment bank lived in penthouse apartments with river views or mansion blocks in Kensington or Notting Hill, so he’d had something more impressive in mind. But as soon as they’d pulled up in front of the house on the end of a row of white Georgian terraces in Islington, and she’d seen the perfect symmetry of its three tall windows on each level, and the wide steps leading up to a graceful doorway, she knew she wanted it.

‘We’ll pull down all these internal walls and restore the rooms to their original size,’ she’d said, knocking on plaster, looking for the answering hollow echo of a stud wall.

‘But then it won’t be big enough,’ he pointed out. ‘We’re looking for a family house, that was our criteria.’

It was a pointed reminder of the children they’d agreed they wanted, but that she kept putting off. There was always just one more career milestone she needed to reach before she was ready to take a break. Ronan knew better than to suggest she didn’t need to work. While he didn’t know exactly what she’d come from – no one did, she made sure of that – he knew enough to realize that when you’ve had to work that hard for everything you have, you don’t give it up without a struggle. When work has saved you, you owe it.

‘Space isn’t an issue,’ said the estate agent, clearly sensing a sale. ‘Half the houses in this street have extended down into the basements and added another one or even two storeys. You excavate from the back and put in as many windows as you like so it doesn’t feel dark. Most of them have a kitchen down there, and sometimes a gym or cinema room or even a swimming pool underneath that.’

Which is exactly what they’d done, and when it was finished even Ronan had had to admit she’d been right. The two airy upper floors with their floor-to-ceiling windows were complemented by a basement kitchen into which light flooded from a wall of windows giving out on to the newly dug back garden, and then underneath that, a gym area and sauna and wet room. As that level had no natural light, Rachel had decided to go for a cave-type atmosphere down there with natural black slate floors and walls made from rough dark stones. An inbuilt feature on one of the walls created a waterfall effect, with clear water running down the stone as if over subterranean rock. Low-energy bulbs hidden in the stone provided the only source of light in the room, adding to the intentionally claustrophobic ambience. Rachel had been against the gym to start with, fearing it would be out of keeping with the Georgian elegance of the rest of the house, but now she spent hours down there, pounding the treadmill in the semi-darkness, enjoying the feeling of being cut off from everyone and everything, buried in the bowels of her own beautiful home. Afterwards she’d strip off her clothes, toss water on the coals and fling herself down on the wooden bench in the sauna, sweating out the dirt and the impurities until she emerged twenty minutes later rejuvenated and reborn.

No matter how stressful her day had been, Rachel would feel the tension lifting when she walked through her front door into the wide hallway with its broad limed floorboards and staircase that curved delicately up towards the first floor. So it had seemed natural to her to offer to hold this emergency staff meeting at her home. In her experience, very little in the way of air-clearing could productively be accomplished at work, where office politics and hierarchies wormed their way into every conversation. She hadn’t wanted to go on the team-bonding weekend, but she’d hoped it would at least sort out the issues within the department, shaking out the wheat from the chaff so those remaining would come back streamlined and re-energized. But it hadn’t worked out like that. There had been something unsettling afoot over that weekend, right from the beginning. Rachel had tried to chivvy everyone along, wanting to impress Mark as much as anything else, but the atmosphere had become increasingly unpleasant.

Rachel wasn’t the fanciful type. When you came from the background she did, you learned very early on that only the real and the tangible have value: nothing else is to be trusted. So she knew she hadn’t invented that feeling of something pushing against the small of her back as she stood on the bank of the stream. But could she be totally certain it was a hand and not someone brushing past, oblivious, or a strong gust of wind, or a trick her mind played on her as she passed out? Uncertainty was a condition Rachel found impossible to live with.

The poisonous office politics were getting to her. Rachel had always had to fight for everything and to her it was natural to view work as a competition. People didn’t produce their best unless they had something to lose. So she had always encouraged healthy rivalry between her staff members. But now Amira and Charlie had discovered she had been pitting them against each other, and were both openly hostile to her, while doe-eyed Sarah, without doubt the weakest link in the office, was now pregnant and therefore unsackable. Mark was pretending to be supportive, but had pointedly reminded her she was still on her probation period. It would be career disaster for her to be ‘let go’ so soon into a new job, particularly in view of what had happened in her last post.

Rachel pressed on the top edge of one of the sleek kitchen cupboards, causing it to slide soundlessly open. She reached in and withdrew two large Moroccan-style bowls, one orange, the other cobalt blue, which she proceeded to fill with crisps and nuts. She’d toyed with getting food delivered from the caterers she had sometimes used when she and Ronan were entertaining, but she didn’t want to appear to be showing off. It was important to strike the right note. Taste wasn’t hard, you copied it from other people, from magazines, until it became your own, or as near to it as made no difference. But this question of nuance, of judging social situations, of knowing when not to go charging in guns blazing, that was more complicated. And negotiation went against Rachel’s nature, as did holding back, knowing when to play your hand and when to hide it modestly away.

She was still learning. And she still got it wrong a lot of the time. To Rachel, the endless compromises and little niceties that went into fostering ‘harmonious office relationships’ (how she hated HR jargon) were tortuous. The world wasn’t like that. The world was dog eat dog, from the little kids in India scavenging on the rubbish heaps to survive, to the heads of state meeting at this very moment to discuss the worsening refugee crisis. So why should they have to pretend that working life was some tea party where they all ‘validated each other’s opinions’ and gave each other only ‘constructive feedback’? She came across so many Paulas and Sarahs, plodders and wimps, trailing their personal lives into the office like snails. They wouldn’t last a day in Ronan’s office, where the air was so thick with testosterone it left a residue on your fingers, in the back of your throat, and you had to grow a hard enough skin for fear to run right off it.

Of course, the downside of that was that Ronan had found it increasingly difficult to detach from the person he was at the office, bringing more and more of his brash office persona home with him at night. Rachel didn’t know if she would ever forget the way he’d said, ‘Don’t take it so personally,’ when she’d discovered the secret email account he’d been using to send texts and dick-pics to the twenty-two-year-old intern he’d been sleeping with for the last eight months. He’d left Rachel the week before she took up the new position at Mark Hamilton Recruitment.

The sound of the buzzer made her start. A glance at the video-com revealed Paula standing outside the solid black gate they’d had installed between the edge of the front garden and the pavement.
Fuck.
Rachel hadn’t been sure Paula would even come. Rachel was sorry that the quiet, doughy deputy had found out the way she had that she was surplus to requirements, but in a sense it was a relief. Far better to get things out in the open than all this whispering behind closed doors. More troublesome was the bad feeling it had engendered with Amira and Charlie. Those were the two staff members she least wanted to lose.

‘Come on through,’ she called into the intercom, and pressed the green key to open the gate. Before Paula passed out of sight, she scoured her face for hints as to her state of mind. Rachel didn’t scare easily, but something about the supernaturally calm way Paula had reacted to the whole business of finding out that two of her colleagues were being considered for her job had creeped her out. The woman hadn’t once come to her to ask questions or demand explanations, but instead had stayed at her desk, placidly working through her usual caseload while it was Amira and Charlie who’d raged behind her door, insisting she call Mark Hamilton down to hear their complaints.

‘Neither of you said “no”,’ Rachel had told them in the end. ‘It’s not the fact that I was offering you Paula’s job while she was still in it that offended you, it’s the fact you’ve now discovered you were not the only ones in the running. This is about your hurt pride and nothing more.’

That had shut them up.

But Paula’s strange closed-up silence, the way she’d ignored Rachel in the office as if she wasn’t even there . . . that was something else and it made her feel uneasy. As she ran up the flight of stairs leading from the basement kitchen to the front door, Rachel found herself hoping that one of the others would hurry up and arrive soon so she’d spend as little time alone with Paula as possible.

She was relieved to open the door and see Ewan slipping through the still-open gate behind Paula’s shoulder. She continued to count on him as an ally despite the atmosphere at the weekend. She’d been wrong to flirt with Will so blatantly. Ewan had felt humiliated, she knew that. Toyed with. But surely she was entitled to a little harmless flirtation after being so humiliatingly dumped by Ronan? She would just have to work on Ewan to win him back. Though he didn’t yet have the intelligence or maturity for a promotion, his ambition made him a valuable asset to her department.

As long as she played him properly.

But first there was the issue of Paula, standing here on her doorstep, gazing at her with unnervingly empty eyes.

‘Hello,’ said her deputy in her usual flat voice, giving nothing away. ‘I wasn’t sure this was it.’

Usually guests were more effusive on their first visit to the house. Ewan was more enthusiastic.

‘Oh wow. This is incredible,’ he said, entering the hallway and eyeing the two tall arched windows over the stairwell, which perfectly framed the two mature sycamores in the back garden, their branches silhouetted against the pale, washed-out blue of the early-winter sky. Rachel was relieved to see that all hint of the weekend’s sulkiness seemed to have dissipated. Ewan gazed around him – taking in the sculpture of a woman’s back carved out of white marble on the windowsill, and the original Peter Blake print opposite the front door – with a guilelessness that touched her. He was still such a boy, really.

‘Oi. Hands off. I’ll be checking your pockets when you leave.’

It was supposed to be a joke, but she realized instantly from the way his face darkened that she had wounded him. But just as she prepared to apologize, the buzzer sounded again and the others arrived, all in one clump as if they’d arranged to meet up beforehand. The idea that they might not have wanted to risk being the first and having to be alone with her was surprisingly hurtful. Rachel knew leadership was never going to be conducive to popularity, but still she was not a monster. She had little time for most of them, but Amira and Charlie she had thought, in other circumstances, might have been friends.

She ushered her team – a misnomer if ever there was one – down to the kitchen. She’d wondered about taking them up to the living room but decided against it. Though like the rest of the house it was decorated in clean whites, the perfect symmetry of the windows and the grand height of the room lent it a formality she worried would be counter-productive. The basement kitchen, running the full width of the house, with its wall of concertina glass doors that gave on to the newly dug-out patio with the Italian flagstones they’d had to have craned over the house, was less intimidating.

Rachel knew she’d gone too far.