Authors: Maeve Haran
‘How did it go?’ Liz heard herself asking, against her will.
‘Not bad. Not bad at all.’
Liz knew that was Claudia for
Why don’t you bow out now, you poor schmuckss, to avoid embarrassment
? and tried to concentrate on remembering what she was going to say.
She didn’t have long to wait. The door opened again and suddenly it was her turn to be rotated slowly on the spit while Metro’s Board threw barbed questions at her tender flesh.
There were five of them altogether, all male and, apart from Conrad who was in shirtsleeves and red braces, they looked grey and Cityfied. Money men. Everyone said it was the accountants who ran
television these days. The highest accolade was no longer winning an award, but coming in under budget.
As he sat her down she was struck again by Conrad’s presence. He might be small but you always knew when he’d come into a room, even before you saw him. It was as though the energy
quota somehow soared. Conrad gave the impression of millions and millions of atoms packed into too small a body, all of them bursting to get out. You felt you could warm your hands by him.
But as Conrad introduced her to Metro’s Chairman, Sir Derek Johnson, and two of the other members of the Board, she found her eyes drawn to the fifth man in the room. He was tall and suave
in a City sort of way, not the Porsche and carphone variety, but the sort who still wore navy chalk-stripe suits, subtle ties, and believed in keeping their promises. Liz hadn’t known there
were any of them still left.
He seemed somehow familiar and she was so busy staring at him that she didn’t hear the names of the two men in suits Conrad had just introduced to her. Finally he got round to the fifth
man.
‘Here is our most recent appointee to the Board, one of the square mile’s rising stars, financial whiz-kid and daring venture capitalist, Mark Rowley.’
Liz felt her neck go blotchy and red as it always did when she was suddenly embarrassed. Mark Rowley! It couldn’t be the same person! With frightening clarity the memory of a night sixteen
years ago flooded back to her in painful detail.
She’d met Mark Rowley at a dinner party not long after meeting David for the first time in Oxford. Mark was twenty, like she was, a public schoolboy who’d just joined Lloyds, polite,
shy, repressed. Mark didn’t seem very interested in the City, his only enthusiasm was for his hobby and passion, the Territorial Army. He was quiet and intense, completely at odds with David
who was burning to be a journalist and despised anyone who did a job they didn’t like, especially a public schoolboy who got his kicks playing soldiers.
But then Mark had asked her to a ceremonial dinner for his regiment at the Goldsmiths’ Hall and she’d accepted. David had been livid when he’d heard and she’d enjoyed his
jealousy.
She hadn’t much liked Mark’s friends, to her they seemed stuffy and boastful, but she’d liked Mark. She was touched by the way he didn’t hide his pride in her, kept
smiling delightedly that she was on his arm. Yet, at the same time, to her twenty-year-old eyes, there was something about his gaucheness and innocence she found off-putting, as though he might not
know how to kiss. And she’d found herself wondering if on the way home he would make some clumsy pass.
And then after dinner they’d come out into the beautiful courtyard, Mark’s friends and officers chatting on the pavement before they got into their cars to leave. She’d been
vaguely aware of a battered Mini drawing up, Van Morrison blaring on its stereo. Without looking at the wild curly hair or the challenging blue eyes, she knew David was behind the wheel.
And in an act of cruelty she still regretted, she had said good night to Mark and climbed into the car. Looking through the back window as he stood on the pavement, his friends standing round
either embarrassed or laughing, she saw a look of hurt that had stayed with her over the years.
He’d completely changed of course. The gauche shyness had long been buried under layers of cultivated charm. The public schoolboy who’d got his thrills from lying out on Salisbury
Plain on manoeuvres was into corporate raiding now. For a moment Liz wondered if it
was
the same person. After all he’d made not the slightest sign that he recognized her.
And then Mark looked in her direction, his gaze holding hers momentarily, before he scanned the other people in the room. He gave no sign of recognition but she knew it was him. And beneath the
veneer of sophistication she sensed that he remembered that night with even greater clarity than she did. Quickly she looked down at her notes.
‘So, Liz,’ Conrad’s voice cut through her memories, ‘why don’t you hit us with your strategy for the network?’
Keeping her eyes glued to Conrad’s Liz managed to find her voice. And as she outlined her proposals for drama and comedy and her plans for current affairs and documentary, she could feel
her enthusiasm begin to cut through the stiff formality of the occasion and she even won the odd smile of encouragement. What’s more they really seemed to be listening and she could tell from
their questions that they were taking her seriously. She breathed a silent sigh of relief.
‘Fine, Liz,’ Conrad finally cut in. ‘I don’t think there’s any question that you’re very impressive creatively speaking but television in the nineties is
going to be tough. Independent television doesn’t have a monopoly of ad revenue any more. We’re fighting on all sides: the BBC, video and now satellite is beginning to take a big bite
of the cherry. We’ll only survive if we can be competitive.’ He paused and she knew the big one was coming up. ‘Tell me, Liz, what kind of programme budget would you have in mind?
Roughly speaking, of course.’
Liz tried desperately to keep her finger off the Erase button in her brain, born of broken nights and continual tiredness, which sometimes blanked out what she was going to say at crucial
moments. After all, she’d been expecting this. She’d spent half of last night with a calculator so that she’d know what she was talking about.
She’d always known that programme ideas would be the easy bit. They were her strength. But money was the acid test. You could be Steven Spielberg but if you didn’t have the financial
skills of an accountant, you wouldn’t get the job.
She looked round the serious pin-striped group and it struck her that they weren’t really interested in television. All they cared about was the bottom line, how much profit Metro could
keep once it had disposed of the tiresome job of making programmes. Television was just another commodity to them, like property or stocks and shares. Only Conrad had ever worked in television, if
you could call producing gameshows that made
The Price Is Right
look sophisticated working in television.
She knew they wanted a figure, a ballpark at least. And she also knew that it would be crazy to give it to them, a hostage to fortune she’d bitterly regret if she got the job.
‘I know times are tough, Conrad, but boxing myself into a corner at this stage would be stupid. Let’s just say the figure would be realistic.’
It was a fudge and they knew it.
She sensed that the interview was at an end. Conrad stood up. ‘Thank you, Liz, that’s most helpful.’
She got to her feet and shook hands. Mark Rowley still hadn’t given the slightest acknowledgement that they knew each other. Liz began to wonder if perhaps it wasn’t the same person
after all.
Andrew smiled at her sympathetically as she came out. Claudia had gone, presumably to alert the gossip columnists of her imminent success.
It was only when she was halfway down the corridor that she realized she’d left her bag in Conrad’s office and cursed herself for her ridiculous female obsession with carrying it
around everywhere.
She listened at the door to make sure it wasn’t an embarrassing moment, her hand poised to knock. Through the thin partition walls, which were a source of annoyance to all who worked at
Metro and which everyone said were the result of Conrad employing the cheapest contractors because they gave him a kickback, she heard them discussing her performance. To her surprise the reaction
from everyone seemed to be favourable. Except one person.
In his measured suave tones, Mark Rowley was announcing that he thought she was a bullshitter.
Liz stood rigid with fury. From his tone she could tell that she hadn’t been mistaken. He was the man she’d snubbed all those years ago. And he had a long memory.
Her first instinct, born of her dislike of confrontations, was to forget her bag and leave. And then she wondered how she could possibly tell David that she’d run away.
Without even knocking, she opened the door and strode in, leaving them no time to adjust their conversation.
‘Hello again, gentlemen. Please excuse me. I forgot this.’ She reached down and picked up her bag. ‘And may I say one thing?’ She glanced round the group keeping her tone
deliberately pleasant and even. ‘I am not a bullshitter.’ She smiled. ‘Of course I would say that, wouldn’t I? So there’s only one way to find out. Give me the
job.’
She reached into her bag and pulled out the sheaf of figures she’d been working on last night and placed them in Mark Rowley’s hands. ‘Here’s a detailed breakdown of the
budget I need to make Metro the top TV station in London. Anything more I’ll raise myself from sponsorship and co-production.’
As she reached the door she turned and smiled.
‘See. No bullshit.’
In the Ladies, Liz splashed cold water in her face and tried to calm down. What did it matter that she’d made a fool of herself and broken every rule in the book by
walking back in there? She wasn’t the type to be Programme Controller anyway. She’d admitted it to David and it was the truth. The last few days had been a fantasy. The world of
boardrooms belonged to people like Claudia who would walk all over people and Mark who could bear grudges and exact his pound of flesh sixteen years later. And they were welcome to it!
Maybe she’d go home and have lunch with Jamie and Daisy. She needed a breath of fresh innocent air to blow away the anger and outrage that were still boiling inside her.
‘Who wants to be Programme Controller? Eyeee . . . don’t!’ Sounding not at all like Frank Sinatra in
High Society
, Liz’s secretary tried to comfort her with
coffee and a doughnut that looked like a dieter’s entire daily calorie allocation. Liz smiled gratefully and reached for the phone to dial home. Blast! The answering machine was on and her
own voice, much posher than she knew it actually to be in real life, invited her to leave a message. She asked Susie to call back if they were going to be in for lunch.
Five minutes later the phone rang and she jumped on it eagerly, hoping Susie had just got in. If she hurried she could be home in half an hour.
But it wasn’t Susie. It was Conrad asking her if she could come upstairs for five minutes and informing her that they’d come to a decision.
When Liz got to Conrad’s office Andrew was already waiting outside but to her surprise there was no sign of Claudia. Conrad put his head round the door and asked Andrew
to come in first.
There was a pile of glossy magazines on the coffee table in front of her reinforcing the unpleasant atmosphere of the dentist’s waiting room. Liz had stopped reading magazines the day she
found herself reaching for
Good Housekeeping
instead of
Cosmopolitan
in W. H. Smith’s, but to avoid getting too nervous she flicked through one all the same.
Halfway through a riveting article about career women who make incisions in their arms as some unorthodox form of stress release, the full horror of her position struck Liz. There wasn’t a
chance in hell that Andrew would get the job. It was Claudia’s. And while Andrew might be able to bring himself to stay on and work for Claudia, she couldn’t. The truth was, she was
going to have to resign.
In less than five minutes the door opened and Conrad appeared with his arm around Andrew’s slumped shoulders. She couldn’t help thinking of Fred Flintstone putting out the cat.
Except that Andrew had none of the cat’s spunky deviousness. Once he’d been put out he’d stay out.
Conrad looked round, surprised, clearly expecting to see Claudia. But Claudia obviously knew the results would be in reverse order and was playing it cool. He looked at his watch and
shrugged.
And now it was her turn. Liz stood up, took a deep breath and walked slowly into the room, looking straight ahead, and avoiding Mark Rowley’s eyes. She’d spent the last couple of
minutes unscrambling her brain and by now her resignation speech was planned and ready in her head.
‘Please sit down, Liz.’ To her surprise Conrad indicated a place on the sofa next to him instead of the chair she’d sat in for the interview. She sat down, trying to keep her
speech clear in her head and telling herself that after this she would rush home and see her children.
Suddenly she felt furiously angry with the cosy, clubby manner of these five men who would give the job to Claudia, the boss’s girlfriend, because she conformed to the tough-bitch image
which both scared and excited them, but would pass her over and dismiss her, who was far more talented, as a bullshitter.
It might be another disastrous mistake which would brand her ‘hysterical’ or ‘aggressive’, the two usual words that dismissed any female signs of insubordination but she
didn’t care. She wasn’t leaving the room before she had given as good as she’d got. She would enjoy telling them a thing or two about how male values were not the only, or even
the best, way to run a business.
‘Conrad.’ She raised her chin combatively. ‘I know what you’re going to tell me. But there are one or two things I’d like to say first.’
‘By all means. We’ll all have to listen to you from now on.’
‘What I wanted to say was –’ She stopped, taking in the meaning of his words for the first time. ‘You mean . . .’
‘Certainly. Don’t look so surprised. I always knew you were a real talent at programme-making, that’s why I hired you, for Christ’s sake. But those figures you put
together took us all by surprise. Especially Mark here.’ He grinned at Mark who smiled sheepishly back. ‘Congratulations. We’d like to offer you the job as Metro TV’s new
Programme Controller.’