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‘GET THE COFFEES IN.’
A lanky young man with wild, curly hair and braces sprung to his feet in the middle of the office.
Alexa watched as, to her surprise, the young man bounded towards her.
‘Nice t’meetcha,’ he said. He was Irish. ‘I’m Paddy.’
‘Nice to meet you too.’ Alexa smiled, grateful for the non-confrontational human contact. ‘What do you do here?’
‘Anything they tell me.’ He jerked a thumb in the direction of the man with the megaphone. ‘I’m the office gopher. D’you want a tea or coffee?’
‘I’m fine, but thanks for the offer.’
‘Not a problem.’
‘PADDY! COFFEES!’
Alexa risked a smile as she watched the lad spring off towards the kitchen. Again, her thoughts were drawn to what was probably happening two floors down. At Hers, they took turns to make the coffee. Nobody bellowed when they wanted a drink and the juniors were treated like valued members of the team. Still, Paddy didn’t seem to mind. He didn’t even look put-out when someone from the sports desk tried to garrotte him with an elf hat as he passed.
Alexa jumped as her phone buzzed on the desk.
Go get em, Lex!
Good luck with Day 1. Kx
She looked back at her empty inbox, trying not to let the situation get to her. She wondered how Kate would react, in her shoes. Alexa was pretending not to notice, but it was clear that the redheaded man on the next bank of desks was talking about her to one of his colleagues. They kept looking up at her and then nudging one another, muttering quietly and sniggering.
Would Kate put up with this? Would she have remained silent in response to Derek’s joke? It was unlikely. In fact, by now, Kate would probably have reprimanded the deputy editor and the redheaded man like a parent with a child, alienating them and anyone else who dared cross her path. That was the difference between Alexa and Kate. Kate didn’t care what people thought of her. Alexa cared too much.
The office continued to fill up. Alexa opened a browser, trying to decide the best way to get to know everyone. At Hers, she had held a company meeting and played ice-breaker games before holding a brainstorm to generate ideas for reviving the title. Somehow, that didn’t seem like a viable tactic here. She needed to meet the section teams individually. She needed some introductions.
Alexa leaned across the desk, catching the attention of the busty blonde.
‘Hi. Is it Sienna?’
The girl’s plump, red lips melted into a false-looking smile. ‘That’s right.’
Alexa swallowed. It was like talking to a lap dancer.
‘I’m Alexa. It’s nice to meet you.’
It was difficult to know whether a handshake was appropriate, given not only the volume of clutter between them but also the potential for a wardrobe malfunction on the part of Sienna’s low-cut top. Alexa opted for a cheery wave.
‘Can I ask a favour?’
‘Sure,’ she said, batting her eyelashes for the benefit of Derek, who was making no secret of the fact that his foot had worked its way over to Sienna’s side of the desk and was foraging for a playmate.
‘I . . .’ Alexa tried to focus. The deputy editor was playing footsie with his PA. ‘Can you tell me whether any meetings have been set up for this week?’
‘Meetings?’ She jerked sideways, trying not to smile.
‘Yes. You know, introductory . . .’
‘Oh. Right. Um . . .’ Sienna glared playfully at her male boss. ‘Not that I know, no. Ow!’
Alexa thought for a second. She didn’t want to start throwing her weight around but she really did need some help setting up meetings for all the departments. It would take hours to trawl through the names and send out blind invitations to all the people she had never met.
‘Could you . . . might you be able to help set some up for me? Introductions with each of the teams?’
For a moment it looked as though Sienna was too preoccupied with her under-the-desk tousle to hear the question. Then she looked up. Suddenly, she was no longer smiling.
‘With all due respect, Alexa, that’s not my job.’
‘Oh.’ Alexa recoiled, suddenly wondering whether she’d misread the credits. Perhaps Sienna wasn’t a PA after all. ‘I’m so sorry. I must have made a mistake. What . . . What is your role?’
Sienna glanced salaciously at Derek, who grinned back at her.
‘Editorial assistant.’
‘Oh.’ Alexa frowned. She wanted to grab a nearby copy of Banter to check. ‘I thought you were also the editor’s PA. Perhaps I—’
‘I was, but we agreed to drop the PA bit, didn’t we, Derek?’
Derek was no longer looking at Sienna, no longer grinning. His eyes were resolutely fixed on Alexa. ‘That’s right.’
‘But . . .’ Alexa was struggling to understand. ‘Who does the administrative work?’
Sienna shrugged slowly. ‘I guess we don’t really have much, do we, Derek? We all just muck in.’
Alexa was about to reply and then stopped herself. The situation was impossible to navigate. Derek had accepted Sienna’s effective promotion because, presumably, he was getting sexual favours in return. It was not in his interest to restore her official title and Alexa already knew that sexual favours or no sexual favours, Derek would not be siding with her in an argument. But she needed a PA.
The question was, should she go in heavy-handed and demand that Sienna do what she was paid to do, or should she accept the situation and just muck in?
‘Look,’ she began, preparing to lay down some terms. Behind Sienna, she noticed, the redhead and colleagues were passing around pieces of paper, looking in her direction and collapsing in fits of hysterics. Alexa tried to concentrate. She opened her mouth to address the PA and as she did so, she thought of an alternative. ‘I’ll ask Peterson for the headcount to recruit a PA. Someone who can do the administrative work.’
For a fleeting moment, Sienna lost it. ‘Wait!’ she spluttered, before quickly recovering her composure. ‘There’s no need. I’ll do it. I’ll set up your meetings, no problem. I just meant, generally, we don’t have much admin.’
Alexa smiled. ‘Great. Thanks.’
She was about to set off on an introductory tour of the office when something occurred to her.
‘Sienna?’
The girl looked up with a fake, breezy smile. ‘Mmm?’
‘Can you please thank whoever gave me my gift?’ She nodded to the giant dildo on the window sill.
Sienna glanced sideways at Derek, then back at the pasty-faced redhead, both of whom were pretending not to be listening.
‘Sure,’ she said, with another false smile. ‘I’ll pass it on.’
Chapter 5
‘Just remember, don’t mention my job.’
Matt rolled his eyes, glancing sideways through a wisp of blond hair as they waited for the lights.
‘Sorry.’ Alexa waited for him to look round again, so she could show him how grateful she was for putting up with her neuroticism today, but the lights were about to change and Matt was clearly intent on making a quick getaway. Not that any getaway was ever slow in the Aston Martin DB9.
The lights went green and Alexa’s head jerked back against the seat. She wondered what her parents would think when they saw the car. Her mother would instantly want to know one thing: was it paid for with earnings or family money? She would probably spend the whole afternoon trying to work it out. Her father would probably pretend not to care, while secretly yearning for a ride. Maybe Alexa would engineer some sort of outing for Matt and her father, if the opportunity arose. That might give her a chance to break the news to her mother about the job, too.
‘Why are you so stressed, anyway?’
‘I’m not stressed.’
Matt gave a half-smile and put his foot down, propelling them onto the motorway.
Alexa closed her eyes, feeling slightly sick. Annoyingly, Matt was right. She felt stressed. It was partly the new job, but mainly, she knew, it was the prospect of telling her parents about the new job.
‘You’re jiggling,’ he pointed out.
Alexa looked down at her bare knees and clamped them together, forcing the involuntary movement to stop.
‘Why is it such an issue, telling your folks?’
Alexa shrugged. ‘It’s just . . .’ She tried to think of a way of putting it. ‘They’re quite old-fashioned.’
‘So? Shock them. No big deal.’
She said nothing. Matt hadn’t met her parents. He hadn’t met her mother, or witnessed the power that she still exerted over her daughter. To be fair, it was Alexa’s fault that Matt didn’t understand. She was the one who had put off the introduction for so long. It wasn’t that she was ashamed of her boyfriend. Nor was she ashamed of her parents – despite her mother’s overbearing manner and embarrassingly loud voice. No, she was ashamed of herself and the crushing sense of impending failure she felt every time she saw her mother. She knew how absurd it would seem to a handsome, confident city lawyer that a twenty-nine year old woman still lived by her mother’s rule book and that was why it had taken seven months for her to summon the courage.
‘Would it be better if I wasn’t here?’ asked Matt.
‘Of course not!’ Alexa recoiled at the thought. ‘That’s the whole point of the barbecue. Mum and Dad want to meet you. Anyway, I want them to meet you. I think Mum’s worried I might be gay.’
Matt whipped round, his blue eyes squinting at her in the sunlight. ‘Why would she think that?’
Alexa forced a shrug, wishing she hadn’t said anything. ‘I dunno.’
She did know, but she wasn’t going to tell him.
Matt accelerated up the slip road and onto the dual carriageway that led to her parents’ village. He still looked perplexed.
For a moment, Alexa considered explaining the truth – that he was the first boyfriend to meet her parents, the first to make it past the two-month mark. But she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Again, it was something she couldn’t explain – not just because she didn’t want to ruin her chances with Matt but because she didn’t know. She was as keen as her mother was to work out why her relationships had never lasted more than a few weeks in the past.
It wasn’t that Alexa chose to break up; she didn’t get through men in the same way that Kate did. This was something that happened to her. It was like a recurring nightmare, always ending the same way: a note or a text message or a painful conversation to say, ‘it’s not working out.’ Never a full explanation, never an opportunity to patch things up.
Alexa reached out and touched the sun-bleached hairs on Matt’s forearm, stroking it as he changed down a gear to turn into Elm Rise. This time, there would be no note or text message or painful conversation. This time, it was going to last.
The satnav was lost, she noted, smiling. There was no reception of any kind in the village. Usually, that annoyed her, but today it seemed like a blessing. Her mother thought Alexa’s BlackBerry addiction was bad, but she hadn’t seen Matt’s.
They drew up outside the pebbledash exterior of number twelve.
‘So.’ Matt turned to her. ‘If in doubt, talk Girl Guides or band camp, right?’
Alexa smiled. He had obviously been listening. Her mother was involved in just about every community activity within a twenty-mile radius of the village: Averley Youth Club, the Green Streets project, North Surrey YMCA, Kids’ Canoe Club and the local nature reserve. And those were just the ones that Alexa could remember. She secretly wondered whether her mother was attempting to fulfil her own ambitions through the members of her various groups in the same way she had done with Alexa.
‘I don’t think there’s a band camp, but I may be wrong.’
‘Can’t hurt to ask.’ Matt pulled on the handbrake, smiling. Then he placed a hand on her thigh, pinned her back against the seat and gave her a quick, hard kiss. ‘You should wear dresses more often,’ he said, glancing down at her legs before swinging himself out of the car.
The front door opened before they’d even reached the garden gate. Alexa’s mother had clearly been waiting.
‘Hi!’ she cried, at a volume that might, thought Alexa, feeling anxious and paranoid, have been more for the benefit of alerting the neighbours to the expensive car than for greeting them. Averley was a reasonably affluent village, but nobody here drove an Aston Martin.
Alexa raised her right hand, feeling grateful for Matt’s hot, strong grip around her left. Her mother had had her hair done for the occasion, she noted, taking in the flash of auburn between the wands of wisteria around the door.
‘How are you, darling?’ cooed her mother, before they had even made contact. ‘And you must be Matthew? Lovely to meet you! Did you have a good journey?’ There was the briefest of pauses for air-kissing. ‘Goodness! Is that your car out there? Super! Is it new? Are you hungry? Shall we go through to the garden? Let’s go through to the garden.’
Alexa squeezed Matt’s hand as her mother led the way through to the small patio at the back of the house, which appeared to be filling with a bluish smoke. She tightened her grip on Matt’s hand and felt her way over to where her dad was haphazardly fanning flames on the barbecue.
‘Hi, Dad.’ She put her spare arm round his shoulders and squeezed. She was taller than him now, she noted. Either he was shrinking or – God forbid – she was still growing. ‘This is Matt. Need a hand?’
‘Darling! Come and meet Matthew!’ cried Alexa’s mother, unnecessarily, adding, in a noisy hiss, ‘I think you’ve used too much charcoal!’
Alexa grimaced, wondering why her mother had been so intent on holding a barbecue in the first place. A pub lunch would have been perfectly adequate and they all knew that Dad wasn’t famous for his culinary skills. In fact, thought Alexa, he wasn’t famous for much at all, now that he was retired – except perhaps being the most hen-pecked man in Averley.
Poor Dad. She didn’t remember things being like this before, when she was growing up. Although, thinking about it, Alexa realised that this was probably because he’d spent most of his time at the office, preferring company accounts to the company of his wife. Alexa felt bad for thinking such things, but it was true. Her mother was a control freak. She had never been able to trust other people to get things done. Alexa had learned this at an early age. One of her earliest memories was of her mother dropping her off at a gym lesson and then reappearing in the doorway, giving pointers to her daughter from the back of the room. Eventually, the instructor had asked her to leave, but that hadn’t seemed to deter her. Music, swimming, art and virtually every other extra-curricular activity that had featured in Alexa’s privileged upbringing – as well as most academic ones – had involved input from her mother. She meant well, Alexa knew that, but she had trouble letting go.
Matt had moved over to the barbecue and was talking quietly to her dad.
‘. . . the air vents . . .’
‘. . . wasn’t sure . . .’
‘. . . slide that along?’
Alexa smiled as the air began to clear.
‘Well! Marvellous!’ Alexa’s mum clasped her hands together in jubilation. ‘I’ll go and get the drinks! What would people like?’
Drinks were served, with only a small mishap involving the wobbly garden table, and after a couple of glasses of Pimm’s, Alexa felt herself starting to unwind. Her dad also looked more relaxed, she noted. In unspoken agreement, Matt had taken the seat nearest to the barbecue and was discreetly tending to the smouldering coals as he sipped his drink.
‘So, Matthew! That’s a very nice car out the front. Is that a family heirloom?’
Alexa felt like screaming. She wanted to launch herself at her mother and tell her to stop being so obvious. How could a DB9 be a family heirloom? How, mathematically, given the model of car, would that be possible?
‘No,’ replied Matt, unable to resist a little smile. ‘I bought it with my bonus last year.’
