“It’s truly warped. Like I should’ve put myself up for bids in a fair and open democratic process and not selfishly decided who I wanted to date myself. He painted you as borderline sex offender.”
Laurie knew she was being slightly indiscreet but she was rattled, and she wanted Jamie’s support. And Michael despising him was hardly unknown to Jamie.
“What a creep.” Jamie shook his head. “Imagine bullying and intimidating a woman about her choices in her private life and thinking you’re the one respecting her. I did warn you he had a thing for you.”
“I didn’t think it would turn so nasty. He and I have always got on, he knows I’m sound. We’ve worked together for six or seven years. One photo of me—well, two—looking cozy with you, and, boom, all gone.”
“Mmm. Welcome to being outside the circle of trust in this place. It’s like The Revenant without the snow.”
Laurie smiled. Jamie liked his film references.
“Why does Michael despise you so much?” she asked. Might as well get Jamie’s side, which she didn’t trust either.
“Oh, he’s loathed me from the word go. His big mate Anthony Barratt was off, I got given his caseload, and there was loads of stuff missing. I had to ask for documents from the CPS and get an adjournment. I mean he was sick, there’s no shame that he dropped the odd ball, but what was I supposed to do? Fuck the cases up and get marks against my name, five minutes after I joined, to spare Ant’s dignity?”
“It says too much about this place that I think the answer is yes. You are describing what they call a team player.”
“Huh. More like a fall guy for their macho bullshit.”
Subservience, that was the word, that was what they demanded from Laurie, from women, but also from Jamie. Maybe he wasn’t disgracefully cocky; maybe he’d simply not felt the need to tone down his self-assurance in order to be liked. Which was quite likable in itself—to thine own self be true.
Laurie combed her memory for any example of Jamie’s arrogance and could only come up with instances of him being hardworking, and unapologetic about the fact. Which irked people, and to Laurie’s chagrin, had irked her too.
The culture here depended so much on playing the game, they’d all ceased to notice that they were playing it.
“Shall I have a word?” he added.
“How? I mean . . . Why?”
“In this alt-verse”—Jamie lowered his voice—“you’re my girlfriend, and if a colleague was having a go at my girlfriend, I’d stick up for her. I’m minded to as a mate, anyway.”
“Thanks, but that would send Michael up like a Roman candle. I think we have to tough it out saying as little as we can.”
Jamie nodded.
“Also, the idea Michael has a right to an opinion here, full stop, makes me fume.”
“Erm . . .” Jamie looked at the ground and scratched his neck.
“What?”
Seconds later, Dan walked past with another colleague from civil. Catching sight of Laurie and Jamie, Dan boggled, wide-eyed in shock, and looked away.
“Hi,” Jamie said with a small, polite smile. Neither Dan, or the man he was with, spoke. Full blanking. Laurie didn’t acknowledge them, so she wasn’t sure she could legally claim blanking.
“If looks could kill, I’d be in the ICU at Manchester Royal right now,” Jamie said.
Laurie gave Jamie a wan smile, heart thumping.
This time, Laurie faced the fact there was no putting the genie back in the lamp. Even if she said SURPRISE, EARLY APRIL FOOL, GUYS, WE WEREN’T DATING! it wouldn’t help matters now.
She’d had a “fling” with the office scoundrel and that was on her record forever. Dan was perturbed. But not enough to say anything to her. Had she achieved her goal? Was this what she wanted?
“You’re OK, though?” Jamie said. “You’re not going to let Michael get to you?”
“Nah,” Laurie said with a rueful smile.
“Right. Here if you need me,” Jamie said, and squeezed her shoulder. It felt good to have an ally. Then they broke eye contact as it visibly crossed both their minds that this was a moment a real couple might quick kiss on parting, and Jamie beat a hasty retreat back into the building.
An uncomfortable thought occurred to Laurie, as she returned to her desk—this might benefit Jamie a lot more than her. Jamie’s reputation wasn’t taking any hit for his liaison with Laurie, and he might yet get his name above the door. Laurie, meanwhile, hadn’t priced the effect on hers into the policy of upsetting Dan.
What do I have to lose? she’d asked in a devil-may-care manner. The answer: her good name.
And when she’d said she craved making Dan jealous, she’d omitted a crucial question, one Emily told her she used with her clients: What would success look and feel like to you? (“Expectation management is crucial, or they shoot the messenger every time,” she said. “That is rule number one. Get them to define it, so the result is provably what they ordered. You’d be amazed how many people aren’t careful what they wish for.”)
What did she need from this revenge campaign? Laurie knew. She absolutely knew, but because it was so silly, so ugly—given a blameless baby was involved—so desperate and beneath her, she had pushed the thought away. And yet. There it was.
She had to face it directly.
She wanted Dan to want her back.
23
It was half an hour until home time, and Laurie longed for 5:30 p.m. like a long-lost lover. She used to routinely work late, but she’d started to honor her official clocking off, to the minute. Who or what was going to stop her?
“She had a funeral, for her cat?” Bharat said.
“Noodle was twenty!” Di said. Laurie was Team Bharat on matters involving Di’s sister Kim, who did appear to be somewhat semidetached from reality, as a healing-crystal proponent and anti-vaxxer.
“It doesn’t get less ridiculous with each passing year.”
“Noodle was known in the area; she wanted to give people a chance to pay their respects.”
“Were there . . . readings?”
Di pursed her lips. “A couple of short ones.”
“Hahahaha! Oh, my life! Imagine if the neighbors looked over the fence. Oh, here I am, having a totally normal one, reciting a passage from Corinthians over the burial site of a Persian cat.”
The details of the passing of Noodle were interrupted by Kerry.
“Laurie. Mr. Salter wants to see you,” she said, wearing malignity and triumph like a heady perfume. “Are you free now?”
“Oh? Yeah.”
Laurie hard gulped and got up. This wa . . . not good. The timing suggested that he’d either heard about Jamie or the arsonist or both, and she was about to face a reckoning. Kerry was animated by an expectant energy that certainly suggested so.
“Go straight through,” Kerry said with a moue of her mouth, smoothing her pleated skirt under her behind as she sat back down at her desk.
Laurie knocked softly and waited for “Come in,” because Kerry was more than capable of sending Laurie in unannounced like that, to make her look bad.
Mr. Salter’s office was a strange separate realm, like being in Dumbledore’s.
You only ever saw this interior on hiring, firing, promotions, or significant bollockings, so it was impossible to disassociate it with quaking fear.
It probably looked a lot like many a provincial law partner’s lair—bookcases with deeply boring tomes on tort, a crystal water decanter, framed photos of privately schooled progeny. Mr. Salter had upright twenty-something identical twin sons, known among the workers as the Winklevosses. Mr. Salter himself was a ringer for Bernie Sanders.
“Ah, Laurie, hello,” he said, looking up from papers on his desk, putting down a pricy-looking pen. It remained a status symbol of fully private office space. If Laurie had a solid silver ballpoint, it’d mysteriously go missing within hours. He didn’t sound enraged. But then Salter never raised his voice; why would he, when his carefully chose
n words could slice you into slivers like sashimi.
“You wanted to see me?”
He gestured for her to sit. Jesus, had Michael been in to see him?
“Yes.” He leaned forward on his desk, arms folded. Mr. Salter was about five foot five, so he had a chair that must’ve been jacked to the highest level so that he could try for a vague looming when you sat opposite.
“Now I want you to understand that everything we are about to say to each other is both entirely confidential and entirely of a voluntary nature. You are not in any trouble.”
“Oh,” Laurie said.
“You sound surprised?” He smiled.
“Hah, well . . . you worry, don’t you.”
“What goes on outside these offices is by and large, none of mine or Mr. Rowson’s business. It only becomes our business if it has any significant bearing on the company’s operational ability or reputation.”
“Yes.” Not quite tallying with what Jamie said, but go on.
“Yet we also feel we have a duty of pastoral care toward long-standing employees of great value to us. Such as yourself.”
“Thank you.”
“In the spirit of that care, not in feeling we are owed an account—I’m told that you and my head of civil Daniel Price are no longer in a relationship?” He waved at Laurie not to speak yet as she opened her mouth. “And that yourself and Jamie Carter are now involved. As a boss who would also like to think of himself as a friend . . .”
Whoa. Laurie had known she had a “favorite” status, but Salter getting so gooey as to claim himself her friend was, as Bharat would say, some next-level shit.
“I’d like to think that you feel you’re being treated well by young Mr. Carter. I think he’s very fortunate if he has secured your affections.”
“Thank you. Yes, very well. He’s great and we have a lot in common.” Laurie blathered this off the top of her head, as she’d rather die a thousand deaths than say anything to Salter that could be construed as code for rampant boffing.
“Do you?” he said, with a tone that was a real question, not courtesy.
“Yes, we’re both very serious about our work . . .” Laurie smiled. “And equally serious about eating and drinking well at the weekend.”
“Haha! Amen to that.”
Laurie’s main point of bonding with Mr. Salter when they had to make Christmas party small talk was always his wine cellar, and botched attempts at cooking.
“OK, good. Good. I’d never have put you two together, but if it’s working well for both of you, good. You’re attending the Christmas party, I hope?”
“Oh, yes, absolutely,” Laurie said. Gah.
“Good, good. Well, that was all. Marvelous stuff with the Brandon case.”
“Oh, thank you!” That was a Found Innocent of All Charges of weeks back.
Laurie beamed as she passed Kerry on her way out, who glared back with barely concealed disappointment and irritation. Hah, Kerry wasn’t as clued up as she liked to pretend, then, if she hadn’t known that was going to be benign.
Laurie waited until she was leaving for the day to WhatsApp Jamie and say she might’ve just given him a major boost to his hopes of promotion.
Jamie
Seriously? YOU BEAUTY. Thanks, L. Jx
Still glowing, she was stopped in the lobby by the office junior, Jasmine, their trainee legal clerk.
“Are you seeing Jamie Carter?” she said, pushing strands of her long, thin hair out of her moonlike face. She had hunted eyes and a tremulous demeanor that made Laurie worry for her.
“I’m not quite sure you’ve got the right to ask me that, Jasmine,” Laurie said, taken aback.
“No, sorry. Everyone is talking about that photo of you . . . together.” Jasmine somehow managed to make it sound like it was worthy of Pornhub.
“Well . . . yes,” Laurie said, shrugging.
“I didn’t think you liked him?”
“Hah, why?”
“You said he was, uh, untrustworthy. You said he could never be trusted. You said he was like a tomcat that had not been neutered.”
Jasmine sounded as if she was reading a translation from the original Turkish and Laurie bit back the impulse to shrug: Did I, so what? as this clearly mattered to Jasmine.
“Ah. Snap judgment, I suppose? Don’t pay too much attention to me.”
Jasmine’s expression spelled confusion and betrayal and she searched Laurie’s face intently for something. Oh, no. Laurie realized what Jasmine was searching for—nothing about Laurie, per se, but what specifically Jamie Carter had fallen for. Thanks to Laurie verbalizing her antipathy to Jamie, Jasmine’s fevered imaginings had never gauged her as a threat, and yet there Laurie was, suddenly by his side.
Poor Jasmine. She had the strained look on her face of the stricken boy band groupie who was about to let out a primordial howl of longing and be wrestled away by burly security.
“He’s nice . . . but it’s very new,” Laurie said. “Who knows where it’ll go. If anywhere.”
“Oh?” Jasmine said, at first in surprise, and her look of horror deepened. Laurie was messing with Jasmine’s future husband and captain of her heart for nothing serious, the facetious whore!
What was left to Laurie to say, as comfort?
“I’m sure he’d say the same,” Laurie said.
“Actually, he told Jemma you were the funniest, cleverest person he’d ever met.”
“Aw, did he?” Laurie said, genuinely touched.
“Don’t hurt him!” Jasmine said in a sudden impassioned cry, and rushed out, apparently with “something in her eye.”
She left a bemused Laurie staring at three receptionists, for whom Christmas had come early.
24
“Strike one, he had empty champagne bottles used as decor in his room,” Emily said. “Strike two, he has seen Mumford and Sons”—she paused—“live.”
“He was unlikely to have seen them dead,” Laurie said, shifting the glacé cherry on the cocktail stick out of the way to drink from her glass of rum and crushed ice.
“More respect if he had, and was holding a dripping cutlass when the police arrived. Strike three, had a tattoo of the Coca-Cola logo. I asked him why and he said it was a private joke about his love of coke. I fucking mean. Rock and roll. Shine on, you crazy diamond. Farewell, Josh. It was like the ‘financial advisor has it large’ starter pack.”
Emily was holding court on her latest Tinder calamity, having organized a night at the Liars Club, a subterranean tiki bar and “tropical hideaway” of kitsch. It was all uplighters and downlighters and murals of palm trees on brickwork, and Laurie was sure she was meant to scorn it as naff, but she loved it.
Emily had invited Nadia, her radical feminist, medieval history lecturer friend who always wore a cloche hat and a scowl.
Emily was like this, an effortless collector of people, though not in a status-led or meretricious way. Just as an enthusiast. People seemed to attach themselves to her, as if she was Velcro. Emily had worked on an account at the university and come away with friends in academia.
Dan had met Nadia once and wasn’t a fan. “Like walking directly behind a sand truck,” was his view.
“She’s a lot,” Emily had said when making this plan. “Can you cope with her ‘kill all men’ stance at the moment?”
“Cope with it? I welcome it,” Laurie said.
“This is my view,” Nadia said now, after further crimes of Josh being selfish in bed had been enumerated. “Involvement with a man in our patriarchal society is like expecting homeopathic medicine to cure you. You’re not going to get better by taking a tiny dose of the thing that made you sick in the first place.”
Nadia was “self-loathing straight,” according to Emily and tried to resist entanglements on the basis of it conflicting with her politics. Some people—OK, most—would call Nadia a demented fundamentalist, but Laurie rather liked the courage of her conviction.
When Nadia was in the loo, Laurie expla
ined the latest on Project Revenge and that, so far, she had not got the twisted pleasure from it that she was supposed to.
“I did try to warn you. You’re the wrong fit for this, because you’re overburdened with conscience,” Emily said. “I’d be cackling while looking into my Disney queen mirror, whispering to my albino pet about it, but that’s not you.”
“It’s made me wonder if . . .” Laurie paused. “If I’d still take Dan back.” It was hard and debasing to admit. Not least as that would now affect an innocent child. Laurie never had a dad around—was she really going to pay that forward?
“Would you?” Emily said.
“I don’t know.”
“The point when it’s a definite no, that’s when you’re cured.”
Laurie nodded. She knew that day would come, but she was sure it would feel like pissed-on sizzling ashes and defeat, not closure or jubilation.
“Be honest with me. Was this all written when I didn’t chuck him over the one-night stand? Is this my payback for being a walkover?”
“He said it was a horrible mistake and asked for forgiveness and you trusted him. That was a big thing to do. You have to have trust in a relationship, or what’s the point?”
Laurie nodded. “I’m never going to trust on that scale again. One strike, out.” She sounded as vehement as she felt.
It was highly secret, that detail of their past. It was so long buried and unspoken about it, Laurie occasionally forgot it had ever happened at all. Only Emily, and the lads of Hugo’s stag do from ten years ago, knew about it. Well, and Alexandra from Totnes, who had spent a quarter of an hour atop him. It was in a castle in Ireland, and a cadaverous-looking Dan had crashed back through the door on Sunday night, wailing to Laurie that he had done something so, so, so awful. Laurie assumed he’d put a round of aged malts on his credit card. He told her, then promptly ran to the kitchen and vomited in the sink.
Laurie was aghast, hurt, confused. But faced with his abject contrition, his protestations that he’d rather never drink again than do anything like that, it didn’t cross her mind it would be the end of them.
If I Never Met You Page 18
