In Office Hours

by Lucy Kellaway

  Stella

  Stella and Rhys were lying in his bed. It had taken them forty minutes to get to his flat in a cab; they had spent forty-five in bed and in another five they would have to get up and go back to the office. She was lying on his chest, silent. It was not a silence of content, more one that comes when the words are too heavy to utter.

  – What’s the matter? he said.

  – Nothing.

  – Tell me.

  – No, no, she said, really, it’s nothing.

  But he persisted and eventually she said: This is going to be over soon, you will find a proper girlfriend, and I can’t bear that thought at all.

  – I think that is quite unlikely on recent form. You keep trying to dump me, but I refuse to be dumped.

  He laughed, but instead of feeling cheered Stella was made anxious by his good spirits. Rhys could only be feeling happy, Stella thought, if he didn’t notice how bad things were, or if he did notice and didn’t care. Both were equally depressing.

  – Can we have lunch tomorrow? she asked.

  – That would be lovely, he said, but it’ll have to be quick as James will be back from New York, and I’m behind with the presentation I’m working on.

  – What? said Stella, her melancholy turning into anger. What do you mean you’re behind?

  She sat up in bed, not bothering to pull the covers up, and stared at Rhys. He looked puzzled.

  – It’s not a big deal. I’m just saying I’m a bit behind with my work, and it bothers me.

  – Oh, great, said Stella, moving further away from him across the bed. Do you have any idea how ‘behind’ I am with my work? I have infinitely more work than you – not to mention two children and a husband and a mother-in-law and two houses and two huge jobs. I am bending over backwards to make time for you, meaning that everything else gets short-changed, and I don’t say one word about it, and you start moaning because you are a bit behind with one simple presentation.

  The words poured out of her in a fluent, angry torrent. Rhys shifted his body so that it was no longer touching hers.

  – Thanks for reminding me how fucking successful you are, he said coldly. You know what? My job matters to me. I might not be at your elevated level, but I’ve come a long way, and I did that by trying. Not by having contacts.

  Stella got herself out of bed and cast about for her tights, so hastily and happily discarded less than an hour earlier. She pulled them on, her toenail catching the nylon and making a hole.

  She was angry with him; but more than that, she was angry with herself – or with the person she was becoming. Never before in her life had she been needy; to be needy towards a young man who evidently didn’t give a shit about her was pathetic.

  She put on her coat, got her bag and closed the door of his flat without saying a word. She ran down the dirty staircase and out on to the street. Just as she turned the corner from his street into Seven Sisters Road, she heard her name and turned to see Rhys, running towards her in his socks, holding his tie and shoes in his hand.

  – I’m sorry, he said.

  – So am I, she said.

  And in relief she kissed him long and hard in the middle of the street.

  Bella

  The first day back from New York James had been busy and she had only glimpsed him once, from behind. She had even less idea of what he was thinking than usual and as the day went on she became increasingly anxious. She kept checking her phone to see if he had sent her a message, but there was none.

  Bella was meant to be writing up a report on the investor feedback from the New York trip, but instead she stared blankly at her screen. Why had he not sent her anything?

  Into her phone she typed:

  Where are you? X

  And as she sent it one from him arrived, crossing hers.

  It said:

  Plse come up to the boardroom asap.

  What was this, thought Bella. The message was more imperious than intimate. She wondered if they had been discovered, if Anthea had said something, and if he had chosen the theatrical surroundings of the boardroom to call it off. She went up to the fourteenth floor and stepped out of the lift on to a pale velvet carpet. The quiet seemed ominous to her, and she opened the heavy door into the boardroom. The room was almost entirely filled by a vast elliptical table, dark and gleaming, around which all twenty-two members of the AE board could sit comfortably.

  Bella had only been in this room once before, and that was when she had had to take something up to Julia, who was giving a presentation. But now, empty of people, it seemed even more intimidating than when full.

  James was standing facing her, with his back to the picture windows and the extravagant view over the City, looking at her with a fevered intensity.

  – My visitors have gone, he said, and I have this room booked for another fifteen minutes.

  He took the trolley on which the remainder of the visitors’ biscuits was sitting and wheeled it outside.

  – We don’t want to be disturbed by Catering, he said.

  He returned to the room, closed the door and then put a chair against it.

  – What are you doing? Bella asked.

  He held out his open arms to her.

  – We can’t, she said. Not here.

  – We can, he said. No one will come. Promise. I thought about you all last night when I got home, and all through a tedious meeting with environmentalists just now. Please.

  She remembered that he had said something to her when they were lying in bed in the hotel about having sex on the boardroom table but Bella had thought he was joking. She couldn’t imagine how anyone would prefer a hard, unyielding surface to a soft comfortable bed. And this sort of risk struck her as insane; she would have expected him, of all people, to deplore such madness.

  Yet as James put his arms around her, Bella felt his need for her, and again felt the shifting of power between them.

  – Please, he begged.

  Bella stepped out of her pants and tights and hoisted herself up on to the table, lifting her skirt and feeling so foolish that she started to laugh. It reminded her more than anything of her first ever sexual experience, when her nine-year-old friend Jenny had instructed her to pull down her pants while she inspected the various different holes.

  – Shh, said James.

  The table was slippery under her back, and hard under her head. The edge of it was cutting into her thighs most uncomfortably. James let out a groan of pleasure: it was all over quickly.

  – Thank you, beautiful Bella, he said, and kissed her forehead and her neck.

  – I adore you, he said.

  Bella lifted herself up, and got off the table, leaving a wet smear behind on its shiny surface.

  The expression of religious rapture had left James’s face and he stared at the mark, horrified.

  – Oh God, he said. We must clean that up.

  James left the room and Bella was getting back into her tights when he returned with a plastic bottle of bleach.

  – You can’t put that on the table, said Bella. It’s not meant for wood.

  But James had already poured the viscous liquid on to the table. Instantly the French polish crackled and bubbled.

  – Fucking hell, he shouted, scrubbing at it furiously and making the patch worse.

  – Shit, he shouted. Shit, shit.

  Bella, who had just about been keeping a giggling fit at bay, now succumbed to it.

  – Be quiet, James hissed at her, as he spread the corrosive bleach further out on the table. It’s not funny.

  Stella

  Stella had moved to the room two down from the CEO’s corner office. He had wanted her to be next door to him, but this would have involved the finance director moving, which could not be countenanced. Stella was now in the office next to James, and had eighteen more ceiling tiles than he had – a fact that he pointed out with a brave pretence at humour – along with two sofas and a splendid view down towards Canary Wharf. But for all this s
plendour she liked her new office less than the old one. It felt too big for her; too imposing.

  The new arrangement was making the logistics of her affair even more difficult. Early mornings were now impossible – Stephen got into work at 7 a.m. most days, and now that her office was next to his, Stella no longer felt able to roll up at nine.

  Evenings were no good either, as Stella really did need to be home. She had made a deal with herself: so long as her affair with Rhys was conducted in office hours and took no time away from Charles or Clem or Finn she could go on with it.

  As Seven Sisters was so far away, they had started to go to a hotel close to the office. This was not only faster, it was also safer. It was getting increasingly difficult to explain long absences during the day to Nathalie but going to the hotel for an hour was relatively easy: Stella simply said she was off to the gym. Nathalie even commented on how much weight Stella had lost through all her exercising, not understanding that love, guilt, insomnia and stress reduced her boss’s weight more effectively than any amount of work on the cross-trainer had ever done.

  Yet Stella disliked the hotel for being so impersonal. Some of her happiest moments had been watching Rhys in his black towelling dressing-gown, getting mugs out of cupboards in his tiny kitchen and making her a cup of tea, and then she could trick her mind into thinking he was really hers. The flat also freed them of an awkward skirmish over money. The hotel was £260 for a night, a sum that Stella could pay with ease and Rhys with considerable difficulty. However, he disliked being paid for, both as a matter of pride and because it reminded him of the difference in their circumstances.

  So they had reached the uneasy compromise that Rhys would make the booking, and Stella would give him the cash and he would go to the desk and pay at the end. Rhys was a born negotiator and had brazenly negotiated day rates – something that Stella would have been far too embarrassed to do – and then, when they turned out to be such regular customers, had negotiated another discount for loyalty. But even with the deductions they were paying £130 for what was often less than an hour.

  – That was £5 a minute, Stella had said that afternoon, when they had gone to the hotel for just half an hour. She had meant it as an idle observation, but Rhys had flown into a rage.

  How dare she try to measure his contribution to her life in terms of money, he had shouted.

  – I’ve put my whole life on hold for you. You just want young cock.

  The obscenity of the phrase sat between them.

  – I was joking, he said into the silence.

  But it didn’t feel like a joke, and neither of them was laughing.

  Stella put on her clothes, threw some £20 notes down on the bed and walked out of the hotel, leaving Rhys with one sock on and casting around for the other one.

  Bella

  Bella and James had got into a routine of sorts. Whenever he could clear a few hours he would send her a message and they would meet at a soulless hotel by Old Street roundabout.

  He said it was more convenient than the Great Eastern, but Bella suspected that it was more because it was cheaper and more anonymous. James had explained to the hotel’s manager that he needed somewhere to do some work during the day where he would not be disturbed.

  Bella had stopped finding his coyness sweet and found it irritating. If some hotel receptionist knew he was shagging his young researcher, so what? Half the City was probably doing it, too.

  The arrangement was that he would go to the hotel, check in, text her the room number, and she would wait five minutes and go straight to the room.

  The pattern was always the same. While they were together in their bubble they were perfectly happy. But as they were about to leave to go back to the office James became wooden and Bella increasingly miserable.

  – Why are you always like this afterwards? she asked him one afternoon as he was getting dressed in his usual businesslike fashion.

  – Like what? he asked.

  – You’re cold and unreachable.

  – I’m sorry, he said. I can’t help it. I have to prepare myself to go back to my normal life, and to do that I have to shut all feeling down. It’s the only way I can cope.

  This answer mollified Bella a little. She was cheered by the idea that he had to shut all feeling down in order to go home.

  On that particular afternoon when she knocked at room 304, James was already in his underpants and holding out a Mappin & Webb carrier bag.

  – I’ve got something for you, he said.

  Since the Van Morrison CD he had bought her nothing, a fact that Bella sometimes remarked to herself, when she was in the mood for collecting grievances. She wasn’t in the least materialistic but she was romantic. She needed signs that he minded about her, and presents did that.

  Inside the bag was a black velvet box tied up with a pink velvet ribbon. Bella carefully undid the ribbon and opened the box. Lying on a padded bed of satin was a string of pinkish pearls with a gold clasp.

  – Are these for me? she said.

  – Who did you think they were for?

  Bella picked them up. Her mother had a string of pearls a bit like these that she had inherited from her great-aunt. She never wore them, on the grounds that they were too conservative. Bella stared at the pearls in horror.

  – Don’t you like them? he asked.

  – I love them, she said.

  He put them round her neck and kissed her.

  – Bella, he said, you look quite beautiful.

  Bella would have liked to feel gratitude that he had chosen something for her and had spent a lot of money. Instead she felt resentful that he didn’t know her better and frustrated at the waste. And cross with herself at having an even more unworthy thought: could she exchange them for money instead?

  He kissed her with such tenderness that Bella softened a little. She must stop being so spoilt: it was really rather nice to be given pearls in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon. She bent down to take her shoes off, and as she did so saw inside his briefcase. There was another identical gift bag that he was taking home. The second string of pearls must be for his wife.

  Stella

  Back in the office, Stella went into the ladies to put on make-up and to try to hide her distress. Looking at herself in the mirror, she saw that she was not wearing her earrings – she must have left them at the hotel. They were particularly precious to her: dangling drops of Venetian glass that Clemmie had given her for her last birthday.

  She called the hotel and was put through to housekeeping.

  – When did you vacate the room? the man on the other end asked.

  Stella told him, and then he asked: And how many nights did you stay?

  – I didn’t stay for a night, Stella said. I just needed an hour’s rest during the day.

  There was a slight snigger on the other end of the phone, but Stella, fresh from having been told she was after young cock, found that this additional humiliation did not move her at all.

  At home that evening she had resolved to be more present with the family. Rhys had texted her mid-afternoon to say sorry and that he loved her and she had said sorry in turn. She was relieved to have made it up, but felt exhausted at the emotional swings. She also despaired at the new pattern: that every time they had sex they ended up arguing. She did not understand how she could want to hurt so badly someone whom she thought she loved. Perhaps it was that they had so little time together that each second had to be intense. And if it could not be intense in a good way, the coin flipped, and it was intense in a nasty way.

  Stella had decided to spend the evening sewing name-tapes into Finn’s new rugby kit, a task that she would normally have given to the nanny, but that she was undertaking herself as a sort of pointless penance. Even though Finn could not have cared less about who sewed the tapes into his uniform, or even if it had tapes at all, the mindless stitching made Stella feel a little less horrible about herself.

  While she sewed, Finn started scrolling through th
e songs on her brand new iPod, peering at the names through his new Harry Potter glasses.

  – Wicked, Mum. Why have you got 50 Cent on your iPod?

  Stella looked at her son warily.

  – Oh, she said, her voice betraying how flustered she was feeling, I heard it on the radio and bought it on iTunes.

  – You couldn’t have done, he said calmly. When you download it the cover graphics come up. This one has been imported from a copied CD.

  – Well, I don’t understand these things, said Stella. Some of the things on my iPod I’ve bought, and others I haven’t. I don’t know which song that is. I don’t like it anyway.

  This last bit was true at least. She didn’t like 50 Cent, but she did like some of the other music Rhys had introduced her to. Her favourite was Coldplay’s ‘The Scientist’, which she had played again and again.

  Each time she and Rhys had a row she listened to the words, feeling that Chris Martin was singing them just for her.

  Finn put down the iPod, having lost interest in where his mother had got her songs from. He picked up his PSP instead and Stella went on stitching, resolving to be more careful.

  Later that evening, as Stella and the children were sitting down to dinner, her mobile went. It was in her bag on the floor, and Clemmie bent down and answered it. Stella felt no anxiety about this, as Rhys never ever called her in the evenings.

  – Yes, she could hear her daughter saying. No, I’m her daughter. Oh, OK. Yeah, fine, I’ll tell her.

  She put the phone down.

  – That was someone from housekeeping at the City Novotel, she said. They’ve got your green earrings.

  Stella stayed in hotels all the time, and to leave something in a hotel was not, in itself, suspicious. And ‘City’ didn’t reveal that the city was London.

  – What a relief, she said, I was so upset to have lost them.

  – But Mum, said Clemmie, you were wearing them this morning.

  – No, I wasn’t, said Stella evenly, I didn’t put on any this morning. And she pointed towards her earringless lobes.

  – Now can you clear the table?

  Clemmie looked puzzled but took it no further.