Confessions of a Reluctant Recessionista (24 page)

By the time everyone else had arrived in the office, I was installed in the meeting room with a passable knowledge of how the VO ordering system worked. Not that I was to need it that day. Instead, I was dispatched to deliver urgent mail to a number of London addresses – Rupert thought couriers were an unnecessary expense – so I spent most of the day on the underground.

Days three and four in the office passed in much the same fashion, with everyone else apparently incredibly busy while I carried out menial tasks. I revolutionised the chaotic filing system, first colour
coding different sections (pink for purchasing, green for research, blue for bills), then arranging the documents within those sections chronologically. Then I changed my mind and arranged them alphabetically. I rearranged furniture. I bought a map of the world into which I stuck pins to illustrate the vineyards from which Vintage Organics gets its wines. I tidied up other people’s desks while they were out at lunch.

It was really starting to get me down. Staring out of the office window I caught sight of a tall blonde girl walking a poodle and felt a sharp pang of regret. I missed them. I actually missed my hounds. I missed Thierry and Theo. After months out of work I had been looking forward to a challenge, something I could get my teeth into, and here I was, feeling more useless and insignificant than I had ever felt at Hamilton Churchill.

Perhaps it was because my self-esteem was pretty low at this point that I turned up to my first official date feeling ridiculously nervous. I had changed outfits fourteen times (a record, even for me), eventually deciding to go relatively low-key: jeans, heels and the Vivienne Westwood top I’d bought the day Dan dumped me. I was already out the door and halfway down the street when I decided that might be a bad omen. I retuned home and changed for the fifteenth time: different jeans, different heels and a top that had no Dan connotations whatsoever.

As a result of all the changing, I arrived at the bar on
the top floor of the Tate Modern twenty minutes late. Jake was sitting by the window, an untouched drink in front of him, checking his watch. Oh, crap, he was going to be annoyed about my lateness now. As soon as he saw me, he leapt to his feet, bumping the table and spilling beer everywhere. He then spent ages mopping it up with paper serviettes before eventually giving me a quick peck on the cheek.

‘Hi, Cassie,’ he said, not quite meeting my eye. ‘You look nice.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. We both stood there awkwardly for a moment.

‘I’ll get you a drink,’ he said, bumping into the table yet again as he moved past me towards the bar. I mopped up the beer while he got me a cocktail. So far, so disastrous.

Desperate to avoid any awkward silences, I launched into a ten-minute diatribe about how disappointing my job was the moment he returned to the table. Jake gulped his beer. I knocked back my cocktail. We ordered a couple more. I realised that I had barely paused for breath since I arrived.

‘God, I’m sorry,’ I said eventually. ‘I’m being rubbish company. I promise to stop whingeing about work.’

‘And I promise to stop spilling beer all over the place,’ he said. We both laughed. He leaned over the table and slipped his hand into mine. ‘You’re not being rubbish company at all. Feel free to moan all you like. It does sound like your employers are a bit disorganised.’

‘They are,’ I agreed, ‘and the thing is, I’m actually concerned that they’re not particularly good businessmen! It sounds ridiculous – Rupert was a corporate financier, for God’s sake, he should know what investors are after – but the whole thing just looks amateurish. I mean, I’m sure the business model is great, but the first impression that investors get when they come to that office is awful. They really need an extreme makeover on that place if they want to get anyone to put any money into the business.’

‘Have you told them that?’

‘No – I can’t. Not only am I the new girl, but I’m the nobody. The dogsbody. The coffee-making milk monitor.’

He laughed. ‘Your boss is an approachable guy, isn’t he?’ I nodded. ‘So you should speak to him. State your case. I bet he’d be prepared to listen. He’ll probably be impressed that you’re taking the initiative.’ He reached over and pushed my hair away from my face. ‘You shouldn’t sell yourself short.’

We didn’t talk about work after that. Well, not my work anyway. His work was much more interesting. Technically, Jake was still a student – he had six months to go of his digital media course at Goldsmiths – but he was spending around half his time working as a photographer.

‘Any more fashion shoots?’ I asked him.

‘Not this week. The
InStyle
shoot was fun, but fashion isn’t actually what I’m interested in. I’d much rather do reportage photography, you know, real world stuff.’

‘Are you saying fashion isn’t the real world? Sacrilege.’

‘Don’t get me wrong – I wouldn’t turn down more shoots if they offered them to me. And not just because I get to spend the day hanging out with hot naked girls,’ he grinned. ‘The money’s really good.’

‘What about paparazzi-type stuff? Not interested in hanging around outside Chinawhites in the hopes of getting a few pics of Big Brother contestants and glamour models?’

He pulled a face. ‘Definitely not. I’d be hopeless at that anyway – I wouldn’t recognise a Big Brother contestant if they slapped me in the face. I don’t watch that crap.’

I remembered how Dan used to have Big Brother on all the time, even when he wasn’t really watching it, just as background. I think he had it on just in case one of the girls took their tops off. Sitting there with Jake – gorgeous, interesting, intelligent Jake – I suddenly couldn’t remember a single good thing about Dan. What was it I had liked about him so much? It couldn’t just have been the fact that he was good-looking and bought me stuff. Surely it couldn’t have been that. I’m not
that
shallow.

‘What are you thinking about?’ Jake asked. ‘You’re staring into the middle distance there. Am I boring you?’

‘Not at all,’ I said, leaning in to give him a kiss. ‘I’m having a brilliant time.’

We talked about his family: his parents were English
but lived in Wales. His father had been a journalist on
The Times
, now he taught journalism at Cardiff University; his mother was a curator at the National Museum. He had one sister (older, a sculptor) and one brother (younger, studying engineering in Manchester). They all sounded terrifyingly interesting. I dreaded the inevitable ‘And what about your family?’ question.

‘What about your family?’ he asked, right on cue. ‘Any brothers or sisters?’

‘One older sister, Celia.’

‘What does she do?’

‘She’s a mum.’

‘Really?’ he sounded genuinely interested. ‘You’re an aunt? You don’t look like an aunt. You’re much too young and beautiful.’ I rolled my eyes at him. ‘Seriously, how many kids?’

‘Three. Tom’s five, Rosie’s three and Monty is … oh, about nine months now. They’re all really gorgeous actually. Well, I would say that, wouldn’t I? But they are.’

‘You and your sister get on well?’

‘Not really. Well … I don’t know. We’re very different. There’s a lot about her that annoys me – and vice versa – but I do admire her sometimes. She’s incredibly grown up. Very sorted.’

‘I’d like to meet her,’ he said. And he meant it. And I realised that I wouldn’t mind introducing Jake to my family at all. I wouldn’t be embarrassed. OK, so his family sounded much more interesting than mine, but
I just knew that he wouldn’t care about that. He’d be kind and polite and interested and he’d chat to my dad about gardening.

In the taxi on the way home (alone, I was still being a good girl, taking it slow), I made a mental list of things I like about Jake:

His hands. He has long, delicate fingers, a pianist’s hands.

The way he gesticulates wildly when he’s explaining something.

He laughs all the time.

He makes me laugh all the time.

He has perfect skin.

He’s kind.

When I’m with him, I’m feel like I’m a better version of myself.

I took Jake’s advice. When I got to work on Monday, I knocked on Rupert’s office door.

‘Brought you a coffee,’ I said, putting it down on his desk.

‘Oh, thank you, Cassie. When you’re done with the post will you do the invoicing? There’s a list of customers here who need statements sent out.’

‘Of course,’ I said, taking the list. ‘But I was wondering whether I could have a brief word first?’

‘By all means. Sit down. Is everything all right?’ He leaned forward, placing his elbows on the desk and pressing his fingertips together. ‘I know you haven’t had the ideal introduction to the company. Things have
been a bit chaotic – as soon as things calm down a bit we’ll be able to discuss your role more thoroughly.’

‘No, no – it’s fine. Everything’s fine. I was just thinking … I was wondering … it’s about the office. Basically, I was wondering whether you would allow me to give it a bit of a makeover. I just think that investors might be getting the wrong impression when they come here.’

Rupert frowned. ‘It’s not that bad …’ he said, casting an eye over the office. He looked almost hurt.

‘Not that bad, no,’ I said hastily, ‘but it’s not that great either. I just don’t think the place looks … well, it’s not slick. We don’t look like a professional outfit.’

There was a moment of silence. I wondered whether I had gone too far. Had I just called him unprofessional?

‘I can see where you’re coming from, Cassie,’ he said, nodding sagely. ‘Presentation
is
important. But we just don’t have the budget for a fancy office just yet …’

‘I’m not saying fancy …’

‘No, no, let me finish. You’re used to working for very rich investment banks – or investment banks that used to be very rich, anyway – which have gleaming, steel and glass corporate headquarters with gyms in the basement and coffee shops in the foyer. We’re a long, long way from that.’ He got to his feet and began to pace the short distance from his desk to the window and back again. ‘Eventually, yes, I would like to get this place spruced up. But we have more pressing
issues to deal with just now. And I can assure you that when investors take a look at the business plan, they will know that we’re a professional outfit.’

Oh, God, I had gone too far. I’d pissed him off. I slunk out of the office and into the meeting room, where I got back to sorting through the post.

I stayed late that evening, re-ordering the office filing system for the umpteenth time. It didn’t really need doing, but I thought that perhaps by staying late and showing willing I might make up for that morning’s faux pas. Rupert had barely spoken to me all day. He hadn’t been rude, but he had certainly not been his usual garrulous self.

When everyone else had gone home, I took a good look around. I examined the blinds over the windows, once white, now a nicotine yellow. They had probably been there for so long, they
were
remnants of a time when you could still smoke in offices. Behind the blinds the windows were grimy. The office furniture was cheap, tired and unmatched: it looked as thought it had been recovered from a skip. The carpets were a dirty beige, worn thin in patches. The entire place looked as though it hadn’t been redecorated since the early 1980s. In the corner of the meeting room, I pulled up a bit of carpet. There was parquet tiling underneath. Good, solid oak parquet tiling. And someone had stuck a nasty beige carpet on top of it.

I started to calculate what it would take – in terms of money and time – to give the place a facelift. All I needed, I reasoned, was to replace the ugly office
furniture, pull up the carpet, get new blinds, reorganise a bit, and give everything a really good clean. It could probably be done in a weekend. And it really wouldn’t cost that much.

I flipped open my laptop and started to do a bit of research. I figured out that I could get a completely new set of passable – and matching – office furniture for a couple of thousand pounds and new blinds for a couple of hundred. If you tossed in a few nice desk lamps and pulled the carpets up the place would look pretty damn presentable. And it wouldn’t take long either. I really thought Rupert was being short-sighted about the whole thing.

A sentiment I expressed when Ali rang me a moment or two later to tell me that she had discovered the meaning of life: peach yoghurt and sardine sandwiches.

‘Ugh,’ I replied.

‘Honestly,’ she mumbled, her mouth clearly full of the foul mixture, ‘I can’t stop eating them.’ She agreed with me about the whole office thing. ‘You’re totally right. Investors are going to be put off straight away if it looks like an unprofessional outfit. You should do something about it. Particularly if it’s only going to cost a few grand.’

‘If I had a few grand, I might just go ahead and do it anyway,’ I said, pulling down one of the filthy blinds. ‘I could do the work myself and I reckon it wouldn’t take longer than a weekend.’

Ali laughed. ‘But you wouldn’t really do that,
would you? Go against what the boss says?’

‘I would if I had the money,’ I said. ‘After all, what have I got to lose? It’s only a three-month stint anyway, and the way things are going round here, the company might well not be here in three months.’

I could hear Ali chewing on the other end of the line.