One day Jake asked me if there was any point in my paying rent for my room, since I was never there. I hemmed and hawed, worried, and didn’t come to any firm decision. My cousin, Julie, came down for the summer to work before starting college and I suggested that she could park in my place. I had to move more of my stuff out to give her room. Then at the end of August – it was a hot early Sunday evening and we were at a pub looking over the river at St Paul’s – Julie talked and talked and talked about looking for somewhere permanent, and I suggested she stay there permanently. So Jake and I were together and the only anniversary we had was the first sexual encounter.
But after the celebration, there was the reckoning. If you don’t want to go to a meeting and you are worried about doing yourself justice or having injustice done to you, make sure that your outfit is ironed and get there on time. These are not exactly in the managerial ten commandments, but on that dark morning when I couldn’t face anything but tea, they seemed like a survival strategy. I tried to collect my thoughts on the tube. I should have prepared myself better, made some notes or something. I remained standing in the hope that it would keep my new suit smooth. A couple of polite men offered me a seat and looked embarrassed when I refused. They probably thought it was ideological.
What were they all going to do, my fellow passengers? I bet myself silently that it wasn’t as odd as what I was going to do. I was going to the office of a small division of a very large multinational drug company in order to have a meeting about a small plastic and copper object that looked like a New Age brooch but was in fact the unsatisfactory prototype of a new intrauterine device.
I had seen my boss, Mike, being successively baffled, furious, frustrated and confused by our lack of progress with the Drakloop IV, Drakon Pharmaceutical Company’s IUD, which was going to revolutionize intrauterine contraceptives if it ever made it out of the laboratory. I had been recruited to the project six months ago, but had become gradually sucked into the bureaucratic quagmire of budget plans, marketing objectives, shortfalls, clinical trials, specifications, departmental meetings, regional meetings, meetings about meetings, and the whole impossible hierarchy of the decision-making process. I had almost forgotten that I was a scientist who had been working in a project on the fringes of female fertility. I had taken the job because the idea of creating a product and selling it had seemed like a holiday from the rest of my life.
This Thursday morning, Mike just seemed sullen, but I recognized the mood as dangerous. He was like a rusty old Second World War mine that had been washed up on a beach. It seemed harmless but the person who prodded it in the wrong place would get blown up. It wasn’t going to be me, not today.
People filed into the conference room. I had already seated myself with my back to the door so that I could look out of the window. The office lay just south of the Thames in a maze of narrow streets named after spices and the distant lands where they had come from. At the rear of our offices, always on the verge of being acquired and redeveloped, was a recycling facility. A rubbish dump. In one corner there was a giant mountain of bottles. On sunny days it glittered magically but even on a horrid day like this there was a chance that I might get to see the digger come along and shovel the bottles into an even larger pile. That was more interesting than anything that was likely to happen inside Conference Room C. I looked around. There were three slightly ill-at-ease men who had come down from the Northbridge lab just for this meeting and evidently resented the time away. There was Philip Ingalls from upstairs, my so-called assistant Claudia, and Mike’s assistant Fiona. There were several people missing. Mike’s frown deepened, and he pulled on his earlobes furiously. I looked out of the window. Good. The digger was approaching the bottle mountain. That made me feel better.
‘Is Giovanna coming?’ Mike asked.
‘No,’ said one of the researchers, Neil, I think he was called. ‘She asked me to stand in for her.’
Mike shrugged in ominous acceptance. I sat up straighter, fixed an alert expression on my face and picked up my pen optimistically. The meeting began with references to the previous meeting and various droning routine matters. I doodled on my pad, then tried a sketch of Neil’s face, which looked rather like a bloodhound’s, with sad eyes. Then I tuned out and looked at the digger, which was now well at its work. Unfortunately the windows cut out the sound of the breaking glass but it was satisfying all the same. With an effort I tuned back into the meeting when Mike asked about plans for February. Neil started saying something about anovulatory bleeding and I suddenly and absurdly got irritated by the thought of a male scientist talking to a male manager about technology for the female anatomy. I took a deep breath to speak, changed my mind, and turned my attention back to the recycling centre. The digger was retreating now, its job done. I wondered how you could get a job driving something like that.
‘And as for you…’ I became aware of my surroundings, as if I had suddenly been disturbed from sleep. Mike had directed his attention to me and everybody had turned to survey the imminent damage. ‘You’ve got to take this in hand, Alice. There’s a malaise in this department.’
Could I be bothered to argue? No.
‘Yes, Mike,’ I said sweetly. I winked at him, though, just to let him know I wasn’t letting myself be bullied, and saw his face redden.
‘And could someone get this fucking light fixed?’ he shouted.
I looked up. There was an almost subliminal nicker from one of the fluorescent light tubes. Once you became aware of it, it was like having somebody scratch inside your brain. Scratch, scratch, scratch.
‘I’ll do it,’ I said. ‘I mean, I’ll get someone to do it.’
I was drafting a report that Mike could send to Pittsburgh at the end of the month, which left plenty of time, so I was able to spend the rest of the day doing not very much. I spent an important half an hour going through two mail-order clothes catalogues I’d been sent. I turned the page back on a pair of neat ankle boots, a long velvet shirt, which was described as ‘essential’, and a short dove-grey satin skirt. It would put me £137 further into debt. After lunch with a press officer – a nice woman, whose small pale face was dominated by her narrow, rectangular, black-framed spectacles – I shut myself into my office and put on my headphones.
‘Je suis dans la salle de bains,’ said a voice, too brightly, into my ear.
‘Je suis dans la salle de bains,’ I repeated obediently.
‘Je suis en haut!’
What did ‘en haut’ mean? I couldn’t remember. ‘Je suis en haut,’ I said.
The phone rang, and I pulled off the headphones. I was away from the world of sunshine and fields of lavender and outdoor cafés and back in dockland in January. It was Julie, with a problem about the flat. I suggested we meet for a drink after work. She was already seeing a couple of people so I rang Jake on his mobile and suggested he come to the Vine as well. No. He was out of town. He had gone to look at progress on a tunnel that was being dug through a site that was both beautiful and sacred to several religions. My day was nearly done.
Julie and Sylvie were there, at a corner table with Clive, when I arrived. Behind them were some wall plants. There was a vine motif in the Vine.
‘You look awful,’ Sylvie said sympathetically. ‘Hangover?’
‘I’m not sure,’ I said, cautiously. ‘But I could do with a hangover cure anyway. I’ll get you one as well.’
Clive had been talking about a woman he had met at a party last night.