Confessions of a Reluctant Recessionista (21 page)

‘Yah, terrible. For her honeymoon – she married a fabulous American, can’t remember his name now, anyway – for their honeymoon, they went to Kenya,’ she pronounced it Keenyaah, ‘and the poor girl got malaria despite taking the pills that the government tell you to. Doesn’t surprise me really, this government’s so useless. Get everything wrong, don’t they? Can’t wait till Dishy Dave takes over! Ha ha. Anyway, turns out that the bout she had is not as awful as they’d thought and she’s actually feeling much better, so she’s going to be coming in tomorrow.’ My heart sank. ‘So, awfully sorry, Cassie, but that’s it for you and me! Still. Been lovely to have you in. Do hope you enjoyed it.’

As I left her office, Becky was passing.

‘Oh, Becky,’ Stella called out. ‘Did you hear the good news? Ellie’s back tomorrow.’

‘That’s great, Stella.’

‘I know. God, hasn’t it been just awful without her?’

As I wandered through Canary Wharf on my way back to the DLR I passed half a dozen bars, full to bursting point with City boys, a sea of men in suits, drinking and shouting, talking over one another, flashing expensive watches, talking about expensive cars, betting on anything from who could down a pint the fastest to which one of them was mostly like to get that blonde with the long legs into bed that night. I made my way through the throng of smokers, braying about their latest deals, talking to the guy in front of them but always keeping an eye out for someone more interesting, someone more worthwhile speaking to.

It struck me that I didn’t miss this at all. I missed the perks. I missed the good salary. I missed hanging out with Ali after work, drinking cocktails. And thanks to the Frenchman, those days were over – for now at least – in any case. I didn’t miss the rest of it. The rest of it was awful. And, as far as I was concerned, boring. I was never interested in how the markets work, how the traders make their money. I didn’t care what a derivative was or whether Bank X merged with Bank Y and what the implications of that would be. My mother was right. Mothers usually are. I had to get myself a job in a field that I was at least vaguely interested in.

On the tube on the way home, squeezed into the carriage between overweight City boys in need of
some anti-perspirant, I made a mental list. Top six fields in which I would like to work, in one capacity or another, in descending order:

1. Fashion

2. Food or booze (catering, events, running my own organic food company, etc.)

3. Media (preferably glossy magazines or TV)

4. Interior design

5. Public relations

6. Showbiz (a girl can dream, can’t she?)

At home, I went back to the now all-too-familiar recruitment websites on which I spent my days. Nothing in fashion or interior design. Plenty in food, but you needed relevant experience. Ditto media. There were some interesting jobs in public relations, although I suspected that they would probably also go to more experienced people. Reed Recruitment don’t have a showbiz section.

Cassie Cavanagh
is on the breadline

Bank Balance: -£1,755
Overdraft limit: £1,800
Expected arrival date of payment for temp job: unknown

I was starting to think that I was destined to dog walk for the rest of my days when fate intervened, oddly enough as a direct result of dog walking. Mrs Bromell had told me a few days previously that Mrs Mellor, owner of Thierry and Theo, wanted to speak with me. I had never met Mrs Mellor – she worked, so I usually just returned the dogs to the grumpy housekeeper or the au pair.

I turned up on Mrs Mellor’s doorstep fully expecting either to be castigated for some transgression or another, or simply to be sacked. Once upon a time, in the not-too-distant past, I used to be a glass-half-f type of girl, but the past couple of months had persuaded me that whether the glass was half-f or half-empty, the milk was bound to be sour.

The door flew open almost the second I took my finger off the doorbell.

‘Hello!’ the woman who had opened the door said, beaming at me. ‘You must be Cassie.’ She didn’t look like a Mrs Mellor at all. She was quite exotic looking, with long, black hair, piercing green eyes and a somewhat left-field – though still elegant – choice in clothes. ‘Come inside, come inside,’ she said, ushering me into the elegant hallway. I noticed that she had a bit of an accent, something European, Spanish maybe, or Italian. I hadn’t noticed it before. I took off my parka while she fussed over the dogs.

‘Go on through to the living room, have a seat,’ she said. ‘I’ll be with you in a minute.’

She disappeared with the dogs in tow, leaving me perched incongruously on the edge of her beautiful white leather Corbusier sofa which I was convinced I was going to get dirty. She reappeared a little while later clutching two glasses.

‘Do you like sherry?’ she asked, then she laughed. ‘I know, it sounds like an old lady’s drink, but this is good stuff, it’s amontillado, it’s really very nice.’

‘Sounds lovely.’ She handed me a glass and I took a sip. It was delicious – dry, smooth and chilled. ‘This is a lovely place, Mrs Mellor,’ I said, wondering what on earth I was doing here. She laughed again.

‘Mrs Mellor! It sounds so awful, doesn’t it? As though I am married to a fat Tory MP. Call me Gabriella.’

Over two glasses of sherry, Gabriella told me that
she was half Spanish, half Italian. She was the manager of an art gallery on Great Titchfield Street and was married to an Englishman she’d met when she was running a bar in a ski resort in Pragelato, in the Italian Alps.

‘You have been there?’ she asked me.

‘I haven’t, I’m afraid.’

‘You must go, it’s wonderful. You ski? I thought you City types were always off skiing. You did used to work in the City, didn’t you?’

‘That’s right. I was made redundant a couple of months ago. Cutbacks, you know.’

‘I know. It’s terrible. My husband works for a bank – commercial not investment – but even for them it is very bad at the moment. But this, what you are doing now, walking dogs, that is just … for a little while?’

‘Hopefully,’ I said a bit sheepishly. ‘I’ve been looking for other things, but I haven’t found much yet.’

‘Well. You must come round for drinks on Saturday. I am having a party, there will be lots and lots of people there who work in all sorts of different fields. Interesting people.’

‘Um …’ I didn’t know what to say. ‘OK. That would be … very nice.’

‘You think I am strange, asking you for drinks when I don’t even know you!’ she laughed. ‘It’s just … I would like to have some young people there. We are all so old. I have children, but they are too young. Eleven and nine. I am just trying to bring down the average age, you see?
And I think you do a good job with my lovely dogs, and I feel bad that I haven’t made the time to get to know you. So there you go. No ulterior motives.’

Gabriella was, without a doubt, the nicest and most interesting person I’d met in ages. The fact that she had been so warm and welcoming meant that I turned up at the drinks party on Saturday with my glass half-f and my guard down. I had not been fretting about who would be there or what they would be wearing, I’d just been imagining myself chatting away happily to cool, arty yet wonderfully friendly people all night. So I was somewhat taken aback when almost the first person I encountered at the party was none other than Nicholas Hawksworth.

‘Hello there!’ he said, clearly just as surprised to see me as I was him. ‘How
are
you?’ He kissed me on both cheeks. Surely he couldn’t be drunk already, it wasn’t yet eight o’clock. ‘What a surprise! How do you know Bill and Gabs?’

Oh, God, this was the point at which I had to admit that I was part of the hired help, along with the au pair and the gardener. I wondered whether they were invited, too?

‘Actually, I haven’t met Bill,’ I said. ‘I … um … I know Gabriella a bit …’ I tailed off.

‘How did you meet? At her gallery?’

‘No, um … I haven’t been to her gallery yet.’ I took a deep breath. ‘I walk the dogs,’ I said, slightly louder than I had intended to. ‘That’s what I do these days. I’m walking dogs.’ There, I said it.

‘Good for you,’ Nicholas said. ‘Tough market out there now. Got to roll up your sleeves and just get on with it, haven’t you? Good for you, Cassie.’ I was just trying to get over the weirdness of Nicholas being so nice to me when Gabriella appeared at his elbow.

‘So glad you could make it, Cassie, you look lovely. I see you’ve met Nick?’

‘We used to work together, Gabs, would you believe it?’

Work
together
? Not exactly the way I’d have put it. Not exactly the way I imagined he’d have put it either.

‘Fantastic secretary, Cassie was. When the firm made her redundant it was like they’d cut off my right arm.’ He patted me on the back heartily. Forget drunk, was he on drugs?

When Gabriella threaded her arm through mine and escorted me away to meet some of the other guests, I was mightily relieved. Nicholas was being so nice it was starting to scare me. I met Gabriella’s husband, Bill, a tall and distinguished-looking man in an immaculately cut blue suit, and Gabriella’s ‘oldest and dearest friend’, Milena, a voluptuous Bulgarian who ran her own catering company. I was relieved (and touched) to be introduced as Gabriella’s ‘new friend, Cassie’ rather than ‘Thierry and Theo’s new dog walker, Cassie’.

‘Cassie used to work in the City, but she is looking for new opportunities, yes?’ Gabriella said.

‘That’s right, I’m just … between jobs at the moment.’

‘What did you do in the City?’ Bill asked.

‘Oh, I was just a PA.’

‘Not
just
a PA,’ Gabriella cut in. ‘She worked for Nick Hawksworth and he says she was fantastic.’

‘Christ, coming from Nick that’s high praise indeed. Nick’s one of my oldest friends but I can think of few things worse than having to work for him,’ Bill said with a grin. ‘I bet you’ve got some stories to tell.’

‘Not at all,’ I lied, ‘he was a great boss.’

They all laughed heartily.

‘Discretion, you see,’ Milena said. ‘This is what you want in an assistant. You must call me,’ she said to me, giving me her business card. ‘My company must be one of the only ones in the UK that is expanding at the moment. I am not taking on anyone full-time right now, but we often have need for people to come in, just from time to time, you know? Ring me on Monday.’

This was turning from a good into a great party.

The guests were an eclectic mix, media types and entrepreneurs rubbing shoulders with bankers and artists. Fortunately, Nicholas aside, I didn’t spot any of the Hamilton Churchill crowd. I was chatting to Gabriella and Milena, who were commenting on the fact that, judging by the quality of the champagne people bring to parties, it would appear that the artists were making more money than the bankers these days. And so the conversation turned, as it so often does now, to the state of the economy. There was, unsurprisingly, a certain amount of gloating from the more arty guests at the party that the bankers were
‘finally getting their comeuppance’.

‘Sorry, Bill, sorry, Nick, but you boys have had it too good for too long,’ a man with a goatee and Red or Dead glasses said. ‘The bonuses you people earn for gambling with other people’s money are ridiculous. The whole culture of the City needs to change.’

‘Absolutely,’ his wife agreed. ‘It really is difficult to feel sorry for all those boys in two thousand pound suits driving their Maseratis home after they’ve been laid off.’

‘But it’s not just boys in two thousand pound suits who drive Maseratis,’ I piped up. Everyone turned to look at me. ‘I worked in the City – I was an assistant on a trading floor. I earned a modest salary, I certainly didn’t earn a bonus, and I lost my job a couple of months ago. I’m still out of work. It’s not only the City boys in their flash cars who are feeling the pain, you know.’ There was a moment of awkward silence. ‘I’m just saying …’ I mumbled.

‘Too right,’ Nicholas chipped in, relieved that the focus had been taken off him and his alleged fat-cattery.

‘Aren’t you angry, then?’ the woman asked. ‘With your bosses, with the way the whole system works?’

‘Well, obviously a lot of mistakes have been made,’ I said, ‘but it’s actually fairly difficult to apportion blame, isn’t it? You can blame the government, you can blame the regulators, you can call the bankers greedy, certainly, but you also have to remember that it was part of their job description to make money for
their masters as fast as they could. One theory holds that it’s all the fault of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.’

They looked at me curiously.

‘Well, they were the ones who pushed for a massive expansion of home ownership in the UK and the States – mortgage companies were under a lot of pressure to extend lending, and they began to start lending to people who couldn’t necessarily afford to repay the loans. You can argue that all the trouble started with the mortgage market.’

Even as I was saying this I was surprising myself. I really
had
been paying attention to the newspapers lately. Even so I clearly wasn’t half as surprised as Nicholas, who was regarding me, open-mouthed, but definitely with greater respect than he had done before.