Hush Hush (8 page)

Angela bridled.
‘
Why
would I want to steer him anywhere?’

‘And fancy meeting him on a
plane like that!’

‘Someone had to sit next to
me.’

‘Your sarky gene is
surfacing, lovey! Cheers.’

Sadie tipped a stream of wine
under her unreliable dentures.
‘
And
he came round with your luggage and asked you for a date? Well done,
Ange! I wouldn’t have thought you capable of such subtlety. You
were always a what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of girl.’ Sadie
pondered, then qualified this.
‘
You’re
honest.’

Angela decoded.
‘
You
think I left my bag behind to give him an excuse to look me up? A
variation on the dropped hanky? I’m afraid you were spot-on
with your original analysis. I’d never be that
“
subtle
”
,
or sad, as I prefer to call it.’

‘I liked him,’
prevaricated Sadie.
‘
I
liked him a lot.’

‘He’s a divorced
Irish Catholic with a teenage son and an ex-wife who fled to New York
to get away from him. How can you like him? Robert led a life of
blameless morality in comparison and all you did was berate him for
being a half-Prod Welshman with a suspected interest in ferrets.’

‘Angela!’ Sadie
looked genuinely shocked.
‘
I
wish you wouldn’t talk like that, twisting the facts.’

Angela found solace in her wine
glass.
‘
Be honest,
Ma. You’re giving Conor McGinlay the benefit of very large
doubts because he’s one of your own.’

‘I just think
…
’
Sadie hesitated.

‘Yes. Yes?’

‘If he rings, you should
hear him out. A social life beyond gossiping with Rachel wouldn’t
go amiss, Ange.’

‘I don’t see Rachel
doing that badly in her successful, single life.’

‘Rachel is
…’
Sadie eased off her shoes under the table and sought for words that
skittered away as wine seeped into her brain.
‘
Rachel
is a lovely girl, but she’s too cynical about men. I bet she
still cries into her cocoa over letting that nice doctor slip through
her net.’

‘She plucked him out of her
net and threw him back in the sea, where other fish are said to be
plentiful.’

‘My point, is, she’s
scared of commitment. You’ve already proved suited to it.’

‘I don’t know, Ma.’
This was sounding all too plausible.

Sadie chewed fish pie carefully.
‘
Make an effort on
your next date with Conor. Looking the part is so important, and your
glad rags are mostly rags these days. Will you let me buy you
something nice?’

‘No, Mum!’ Angela
shoved her plate to one side and stomped out to the kitchen. She
plunged her spoon into an M&S tiramisu, briefly wishing it was
Sadie.

In her teens, Angela had tried to
keep her dates a secret from Sadie. But once Sadie weevilled out the
truth, the advice was the same:
‘
Shoulders
back, chest out, tummy in. A man hates a girl who droops. Don’t
wear a skirt with a slit up the back in case he thinks you’re
easy.’ (Sadie pronounced it
‘
azey’.)
‘
Always have your
nails trimmed because a man notices bitten nails. Always carry a
hanky, spare tights and enough change to call for a taxi and tip the
driver. You should never, ever go on a date without a handbag of
essentials.’

Angela used to pause on her way
out the front door to tick off a checklist of handbag contents,
adding loudly,
‘C
ompass,
map, spirit level, Kendal mint cake, cuddly toy
…
’
until a goaded Sadie would fly out of the sitting room and shoo her
on her way.

Sadie had turned every first date
of Angela’s into an interview for a dream job that would never
be offered again. To rebel, Angela had probably gone too far the
other way, turning up for dates in scuffed shoes and trailing
hem-lines, round-shouldered and peering at her feet, even after the
duckling-to-swan transformation afforded by contact lenses. It had
been sheer chance that she’d met Robert at a wedding, when
she’d been competing with Rachel to look her best.

She carried the wobbly mounds of
tiramisu back into the dining room.
‘
It’s
too soon after Robert to start dating. And now I’ve got this
new job to cope with.’

‘Wouldn’t Conor be a
pleasant distraction?’ hazarded Sadie, with an answer and a new
question for everything.

Gloomily,
Angela shoved her glasses up her nose, leaving a cream-smeared
fingerprint on the plastic lens. Her verbal parrying was not at its
best in glasses. She bent her head to avoid Sadie’s beady eye,
studying formations raised by her spoon on the stippled texture of
beige mousse.

Conor drove uphill in fourth gear for a whole
minute before he even noticed. He changed down with a growl to match
the protesting gearbox. As unmitigated disasters went, he gave his
meeting with Angela Carbery a healthy nine out of ten. Despite a
retentive, incisive memory, he had only the vaguest recollection of
the phone number she’d tossed over her shoulder. She’d
surrendered it unwillingly, perhaps made it up on the spot. The
question was, should he bother taking things any further?

He pulled into the next service
station and topped up with petrol. As he stood in the queue to pay,
he noticed that the young woman behind the till had a beautiful
smile, flashed indiscriminately at every customer.

Conor decided that that was the
problem with women, or rather,
his
problem with women. Since
becoming single again, he couldn’t read between the lines of a
beautiful smile to distinguish between women who felt sorry for him,
women who liked him as a friend and women who fancied him.

He’d taken a chance on
Rosie. He’d only gone into her shoe shop to buy a pair of brown
nubuck shoes. But he hadn’t seen anything he liked, apart from
Rosie. At the door, he’d taken advantage of the fact that they
were alone in the shop and turned to blurt out,
‘
Fancy
coming out some time?’

He’d taken affirmative
action. It had worked
‒
and ended in disaster.

‘
Fifty-five
quid
,’ the woman behind the till said to him, and
ladled out her smile as if it came free with petrol tokens.

He handed over his debit card. He
saw the woman’s wedding ring on her finger and thought of
Angela. The ball was firmly in his court. If he wanted to see her
again, he’d have to take affirmative action again. It was a
watershed moment. Should he or shouldn’t he?

Back in the car, he thumped the
dashboard in frustration. Goddamit, there came a time to stop
worrying about the impression he made on the opposite sex, and just
go for it on the assumption that he had as much to offer as they had
to give. He’d have to make the next move. Which meant recalling
that number she’d given him
…
he found a pen and crumpled Post-it note in the glove compartment,
shut his eyes and gave it his best shot.

‘And this,’ said Val, ending her
guided tour,
‘
is the
sacred stationery cupboard of popular legend. Mandy in admin sleeps
with the key under her pillow. You have to fill out a form in
triplicate for a paper-clip, so if I were you, I’d label my
stapler,
mouse
and
anything that isn’t nailed down.’ Val’s voice
dropped an octave.
‘
People
here are so possessive. Petty, I know.’

Angela nodded sagely. It was her
first day, and office politics were thickening before her once again.
Could she even trust clear-eyed, blonde-rinsed Val, a mother of three
with thick ankles and guileless charm?
‘
Love
many, trust few, always paddle your own canoe,’ as Sadie had
it. Caution dictated that a serpent nestled in the bosom of the one
you felt most inclined to trust. Val was therefore a prime suspect.
She understood so well.

‘I understand just how you
feel, coming back to work after a few years off,’ she said,
leading Angela back to the subs’ end of the open-plan office.
‘
I took five years
out having Ricky and the twins, and Marla’s had a year off with
Barnaby.’ She dropped her voice again to add,
‘
Marla’s
a bit two-faced. All over you one minute, criticising your
time-keeping the next. Just be aware of it. She’s under strain
at home. I know people shouldn’t bring their private lives to
work, but Marla’s husband is unemployed and resents her success
as a woman. He spends all her earnings to highlight his
disaffection.’

‘Right,’ said Angela,
dropping into her swivel chair.

She made frantic mental notes.
Marla, keep on right side of. She clicked her mouse, calling up the
page they were easing her in with, and smiled at her fellow sub,
Pauline, across the desk. Pauline stared back.

Angela’s Mac said
‘
Oops!’
loudly. The machines were all equipped with irritating noises that
advertised your every mistake, your movement to a new document or
your opening of an e-mail.

‘Fuck, it’s crashed,’
panicked Angela, hammering the space bar with one finger.

‘Let me.’ Pauline
sprang forward like a darting eel and pressed the restart button on
Angela’s keyboard.

‘Thanks,’ smiled
Angela. Officious cow! She’d been about to press the restart
button herself.

‘It’s never a good
idea to bash one key like that,’ said Pauline, still staring.
Then she twisted round to accost Marla, who was frowning over folio
sheets spread on top of a metal cabinet.
‘
Marla,
d’you think we should send Angela on a
Mac
refresher course?’

Do you think Angela would like to
be asked, muttered Angela silently.

Marla looked up, still frowning.
‘
I understood Angela
was conversant with Macs and the software we use.’

‘Angela is,’ said
Angela, with a humble, ingratiating smile, the one she’d have
to wear for at least a month until she could safely mothball it and
reserve it for the elite who had to be humoured on a permanent basis.
Butt out and stop showing me up, she silently addressed Pauline’s
chestnut cowlick.

Peering at the words onscreen,
Angela surreptitiously enlarged them. Her Deirdre glasses were crap.
Her ailing contact lenses had refused to go in at a quarter to seven
that morning, so she was saving them for a midweek entrée to
the office.

At eleven o’clock, she
decided to risk a coffee.
‘
Anyone
for a drink?’ she asked brightly, knowing that the quickest
route to ingratiation was to volunteer for active service on beverage
and snack runs. A chorus of
‘
Ooh,
yes please,’ went up, and team
Goss!
offered up their
dirty mugs for her to rinse and replenish.

The
kitchenette was a biohazard area. Five women lounging round the
fridge broke off a heated discussion as Angela clattered in with her
cups.
‘
So
I said,’ resumed one of the five,
‘
say
that again to me, you dirt bird, and I’ll knock your fucking
molars through the back of your turkey-veined neck.’

‘
I’d
have said the same,’ nodded a fellow-hag.

‘Excuse me,’ said a
third, as Angela burrowed in the fridge for milk.
‘
You
are going to use your own departmental milk, aren’t you?’

‘That’s the idea,’
grinned Angela, extracting a carton that lacked possessive markings
of any kind. Fuck knew which department owned it. Silently, the fetid
five watched her splash microscopic amounts of milk into each mug.
Angela tensed, waiting to be physically assaulted, trussed up and
cast out into corporate darkness, via a liftshaft.

‘Anyway,’ resumed she
of teeth-bashing tendencies,
‘
I
told loverboy he was welcome to her, told, him I wouldn’t touch
hers with a ten-foot willy dipped in Dettol.’

Angela staggered out with her
tray of mugs. What a place! She obviously just wasn’t ballsy
enough for a world that had coarsened so noticeably in her four-year
absence. Should she hand in her notice today or wait till the end of
the week?

‘Verdict on your first
day?’ asked Val kindly, as they travelled down in the lift
together at five-thirty.

The urge to blab was too much.
‘
I
don’t know if I’ll hack it,’ blabbed Angela.
‘
I
read somewhere that it takes up to six months to settle into a job,
longer if you’ve been out of circulation.’ This was an
appeal to Val to confirm her long-term prospects if she didn’t
cut the mustard within a week.
She
was slow at editing pages, she knew that. Painfully slow.
She
kept apologising to Marla when Pauline was away from her desk, and
Marla kept conjuring a smile out of her perpetual careworn frown, and
saying she’d get the hang of it, and no one expected miracles
on her first day. But what about her second?

‘You’ve nothing to
worry about,’ Val assured her, hurrying with her to Victoria
station.
‘
We’ve
had complete dorks in freelancing while they advertised your job, and
none of them got the push.’

This was only vaguely comforting.

‘One thing though,’
said Val, turning to her at the station entrance,
‘
tread
carefully with Pauline. You may have noticed, she’s a bit
intense.’

Angela nodded eagerly. She wanted
the full low-down on Pauline, but realised she’d have to make
do with a whetted appetite, as Val had a train to catch.
‘
Just
watch your back,’ advised Val, poised to rush.
‘
She’s
one of those people who takes for or against you, five seconds after
meeting. No second chances given. She’s been here for aeons, so
doesn’t suffer fools gladly and can’t remember what new
job nerves are like.’