Cents and Sensibility

by Maggie Alderson

  I just stared back at him. Was he talking in general terms, or was he being specific? I certainly wasn’t going to ask him to elucidate. He did anyway.

  ‘Stella,’ he said, ‘I’m asking you to marry me.’

  He took my hand in both of his and kissed it. ‘I love you. Madly. I’ve never felt like this about anybody and I want to be with you. Always. Please marry me. Will you?’

  My stomach felt like a tumble dryer. Had he said those words to me at any other moment in the previous five weeks, I would have spontaneously combusted with joy, but at this moment, I knew it wasn’t right.

  I swallowed and spoke very quietly.

  ‘Could I still keep my job?’ I said.

  Jay slammed his hand down on to the little metal café table so hard it shook.

  ‘No,’ he said, letting his irritation show. ‘If you’re with me, you don’t need some tinpot hack shit job. Being with me would be your job. Full pension benefits, medical insurance, and fifty-two weeks’ holiday a year, on full pay. Don’t you get it?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  We just looked at each other, across that yawning gulf between us, now wider than ever. Where I couldn’t see how just being someone’s wife – not even the wife of the man you loved more than anyone on earth – could possibly be enough, and where he couldn’t imagine why anyone could feel defined by a job, rather than by the person they loved.

  ‘It’s the money, isn’t it?’ said Jay, eventually. ‘Turns out, you’re just like your dad, after all. Disgusted by inherited wealth. If I’d won it in a lottery would that be OK? Because, I did – a sperm lottery.’

  ‘It’s not the money, Jay,’ I said quietly. ‘The money’s fun, I get that, it’s fabulous – but it’s not enough. Just spending money and lying around all day is not a life. Not for me. And you know what,’ I said, standing up. ‘Deep down inside, you know it’s not enough for you either.’

  ‘I don’t do nothing, Stella,’ he said, quietly. ‘I’ve got the foundation…’

  I didn’t even let him finish.

  ‘That’s not a real job,’ I snorted, contemptuously. ‘That’s just a money-bunny guilt charity – it’s a play job. You don’t know what a real job is, Jay, or you might have a bit more respect for mine.’

  The words hung in the air, after I’d said them. I knew I’d gone too far – way too far – but I couldn’t take them back and I couldn’t apologize, because that’s what I really believed. And, in that crystalline moment, I realized it had been festering inside me like a tumour.

  For a couple of beats Jay just sat and looked up at me – in shock, I think – almost like he was seeing me for the first time. I could see in that look just how much I had hurt him and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.

  Then, he took hold of my hand, firmly, as though he was stopping me from walking away. Then he spoke very quietly.

  ‘I’ve never asked anyone to marry me before, Stella,’ he said. ‘And, you have to understand, that for someone like me, it’s a big deal, but after what you’ve just said, I take that as a no. But understand this – if you walk away from me now, that will be it. I’ve turned my soft belly to you and you’ve knifed me in it. If you go now, if you leave here, it’s the end. I don’t think I’ll ever get over it, but that’s the way it has to be.’

  I knew he was serious. I looked back into those dark blue eyes, for what felt like an eternity, but was probably only a moment. I could hear my fate rushing in my ears as I let go of his hand and walked away.

  I didn’t even cry as I packed my bag. I was just numb with shock. I did wonder, for a moment, what the etiquette was about keeping all the stuff he’d bought for me, but decided it would be nastier to leave it behind than to take it.

  I didn’t even worry about how I was going to get home, I knew I just had to get away from Sveti Stefan and Jay, to somewhere else – anywhere – and then find a way to get back to London from there. I had my credit cards, there was a cash point in the hotel lobby, it wasn’t complicated.

  I called the concierge to order me a taxi to the nearest airport and to send someone up to get my bag. And then I wound my way through the labyrinthine streets down to reception, with detours via the pool and the restaurant bar, for one last look at the views I had come to love.

  When I got there the concierge called me over and handed me a large envelope.

  ‘Mr Fisher left this for you,’ he said.

  I looked at him blankly for a moment. There were multiple ways to get anywhere on that funny little island and I realized that Jay must have been walking along different paths, but so close to me, back to the room and down to the lobby.

  It was such a strange feeling and I realized that was how it would always be from then on. Jay and I both in the world, aware of each other, but travelling on parallel tracks. I felt tears starting to well up, as I opened the envelope. It contained a wad of $100 bills and a note.

  ‘You can still change your mind,’ it said. ‘But if you don’t this is just to get you home. I will always love you, but I won’t share you. J.’

  No kisses.

  I handed it back to the concierge and left.

  21

  The next day, Ned and I were sitting in Gino’s having lunch – at Peter’s table.

  We had ordered what he always had – veal parmigiana – and his usual bottle of Amarone. The only thing missing was Peter. Because by the time I had got into the office, the morning after leaving Sveti Stefan, he’d been sacked.

  It turned out that just half an hour or so after I had spoken to him on the Monday afternoon, Martin had called him up to the editor-in-chief’s office, where he was now ensconced, like a poisonous spider at the centre of his web, and told him he was being ‘made redundant’.

  What made it really sickening was that after forty-plus years on the paper, Martin had told him to leave immediately and not come back. He hadn’t even given him a traditional newsroom farewell.

  ‘It’s unbelievable, Stella,’ Ned was saying. ‘Martin told him that he had to leave immediately because he represented a competitive threat to the paper – because with his reputation he was bound to be snapped up by one of the Journal’s competitors. He didn’t even let him pack up his own desk, I did it for him last night. Jesus, Stella, the man’s barely a year from his sixty-fifth birthday, and he’s only ever worked here. He’s not getting a job anywhere.’

  I pushed my veal around the plate. I had never felt less hungry. I’d just walked out on the love of my life, and I’d come back to this. Peter wasn’t the only one who had been sacked. Far from it.

  Doughnut’s lovely PA, Sheila, had gone, and several of the long-standing reporters and section editors, who Martin clearly felt were Doughnut’s men and women, had been summarily ousted. Some had resigned after being offered alternative jobs on the paper insultingly below their levels of experience and expertise.

  The entire paper was in shock and when we got back from lunch the atmosphere in the office was positively toxic. Suspicion and paranoia filled the air and little clumps of people would gather to whisper and then disperse, before re-forming into new combinations. I couldn’t help smiling sadly to myself as I looked at them. ‘Clumping’, Peter used to call it.

  ‘Look, Stella,’ he’d say, half standing at his desk, so he could see the rest of the office, peering over the partition. ‘They’re clumping. Something’s going on. Go forth and seek intelligence, would you, my dear? Come back and tell me what’s afoot.’

  Misery is what I would have told him, if he’d been there to hear. But some people were happy. Jeanette had been promoted – she was now Deputy Editor, Features – and Rita was Chief Sub, Features. The two of them were positively strutting around the place.

  Jeanette didn’t even acknowledge me when she passed where I was sitting, back at my old desk. I know she’d seen me, though, because a small triumphant smile flickered at the edge of her mouth.

  I rang Peter at home that night but his wife, Renee, said he
had gone out and wouldn’t be back until late. I could tell by her voice that she was lying – and hating having to do it – and after several more attempts to make contact over the ensuing days were met with the same response, I could only conclude that he was so wounded, he couldn’t bear to speak to anyone from the paper.

  In the end, I sent him a note, saying how much I missed him and how grateful I was for everything he had done for me in our time working together and how much I would like to see him. He didn’t reply.

  Jay was equally incommunicado. Finally shocked out of my state of numbness about him, I’d rung him the second night I was back, to see if there was any way we could salvage the situation, but his mobile number just rang out.

  It didn’t even go to message and I realized, with a sickening lurch, that he had probably already changed his number, just like Amy had told me he would when he didn’t want to be found.

  I took that as a clear statement that he had meant it when he said he would never see me again and, in that moment, I knew my entire world had collapsed in on me.

  I cried until I fell into an exhausted sleep.

  After that the days came and went in a kind of daze of unpleasantness. Work was some kind of hell and I hated being at home even more, because the whole place reminded me so cruelly of the happy times I had spent there with Jay. I missed him so much, I felt like one of my limbs had been torn off.

  My little house was also uncomfortably close to Ham Central and, while I could hardly bear to admit it to myself, I knew if I saw him, I would not be able to keep up my wall of silence. I’d cave in the moment I saw his funny old face, so I just couldn’t allow myself to make contact. My pride wouldn’t let me.

  Because what was I going to tell him? That Jay and I had split up because of the great overbearing colossus of his inherited wealth and his playboy attitude to life? I couldn’t bear Ham to be right about that.

  But while I couldn’t bring myself to go up to the big house, I rang Chloe to tell her I was back, and she and Daisy would sneak down to see me quite often in the mornings. I think, in no small way, those visits got me through those dark days. Every time Daisy’s little blonde head bounced into my room, it was like the sun coming out.

  ‘Look, Stella,’ she said, one morning. ‘I can do a curtsy and I can walk like a princess.’

  She demonstrated.

  ‘Oh, very good, Daisy,’ I said. ‘That will be useful.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Daisy, nodding. ‘I’m going to do it at your wedding. When I’m your bridesmaid. Can I have a white dress and flowers in my hair? Can I have sparkly shoes?’

  Chloe pulled an embarrassed ‘sorry’ kind of face at me, but I didn’t mind, it gave me something to laugh about.

  Chloe was great. She didn’t pry about what had happened with Jay, although it was pretty obvious she knew we’d been together and had guessed that we now weren’t, and neither did she press me to make up with Ham. She was just there, and always willing to listen sympathetically while I told her what was going on at work. She really was a very good friend.

  Most evenings I went straight from the office to several work-related events. My usual response to a crisis was to work harder and I didn’t see how this one was any different – it just happened to involve all three major foundations of my life at once: family, love and career.

  And if my position was as insecure at the Journal as I felt it was, I needed to get my face out and about as much as possible. I might need to find a new job, at any moment.

  The way I felt, it was very hard being upbeat and employable, but I did my best and it really helped having Ned around. Even though the section had now been formally cancelled, we continued to go to events together and although he was as unhappy as me about what was going on at the office, he could always find a joke to lighten a situation and somehow we had fun together, despite it all.

  He didn’t know I had a broken heart and a major family crisis going on as well as all the work drama, and it was a relief, as I could stop thinking about the other stuff when I was with him. I just blanked it out. It was only when I was alone that it all got to me, so I tried not to be on my own.

  If there were no decent work parties to go to, Ned and I would see a film, and if we were feeling really restless, we’d go to two in one night, with a bowl of Vietnamese noodle soup in between.

  Those were strange days.

  Things finally reached a head at the office about four weeks after I had come back. A memo suddenly appeared in everyone’s pigeonholes one morning from the Journal’s legal department about pension rights. I didn’t even read it, and just stuffed it straight into a folder I kept for memos like that. The bin.

  I was rewriting – for the fourth time, at Jeanette’s insistence – a feature about the future of the Scottish cashmere industry, when I became aware of serious clumping going on around the office.

  The desk next to me was still empty, but I did what Peter would have wanted and ventured out to find out what was going on.

  I was on a spurious mission to the library, walking slowly, for maximum eavesdropping, when I ran into Ned.

  ‘Stella,’ he said, urgently. ‘I was looking for you. You’re not going to believe the latest. Meet me in the conference room in five.’

  He meant the emergency stairwell, of course, a secret Tim and I had long ago let him in on. I walked once around the office, with my ears flapping, and then met him there.

  ‘What’s going on now?’ I asked him, closing the fire door and leaning against it.

  ‘You know how that shit Martin Ryan dressed Peter’s sacking up as some kind of bogus redundancy?’ said Ned, pacing restlessly on the concrete half landing.

  I nodded. ‘Yes, that’s why the desk next to me is still very ostentatiously empty.’

  ‘Well, through some kind of hideous small print in Peter’s contract Martin has found a way of voiding most of his pension rights.’

  I just stared at Ned.

  ‘You’re kidding,’ I said.

  Ned shook his head. He was holding a copy of the pensions memo in his hand, I realized. He held it up and shook it.

  ‘That’s what this piece of shit is all about, they’re covering themselves so they can do it to anyone here.’

  ‘Are you telling me that they have cancelled Peter’s pension when he is nearly sixty-five and has worked here for over forty years?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘That’s despicable,’ I said. ‘Can they really do it?’

  ‘It looks like they can, that’s the terrible thing. We’re on to the union, but most people here aren’t members any more anyway. It will just be up to Peter, whether he takes them on or not. He’d have to pay his own legal fees out of the three months’ redundancy money they gave him.’

  Suddenly, my head felt clearer than it had for weeks.

  ‘That’s it,’ I said, setting off down the thirty-one flights of concrete stairs to the ground floor. ‘I’m done with this place. I’m going to resign. Right now.’

  And I did.

  I wasn’t the only one. Even as I was composing my resignation letter, intraoffice messages kept flashing up on the screen, with the name of the latest person who had taken the plunge. I pressed ‘Print’ on my letter and then posted a message about my own resignation.

  I didn’t even wait for a response from Martin, after I’d dropped my letter with his new secretary, I just started packing up my things, ready to be sent on to me at home. Then I did a mass email to all the PRs I dealt with regularly, and got ready to leave. As I was writing that, an internal message flashed up announcing that Ned had resigned too. I smiled.

  I was sitting at my desk, wondering if I should just get up and go, when Ned appeared to tell me that everyone who had resigned was going to walk out together, to make more of a point of it, and that we were to meet in the sports department as soon as possible.

  The brains behind this protest, was the Journal’s greyhound racing correspondent, Jim Flynn. I’d ne
ver really talked to him, but I knew who he was and that he’d worked at the paper for years.

  Like Peter, he was one of the old guard of characters who’d come over to the new building from Fleet Street, and his racing tips – on the doggies and the ponies, as he called them – were legendary.

  He was about five foot two, and sported a classic wide-boy trilby, and you’d see him outside the main doors, smoking like a squaddie, with the glowing ember turned into his palm.

  By the time I got round to the sports department, Jim had several bottles of whisky, a bottle of gin and a bottle of Tia Maria on the go. It was strictly against Journal rules for any journalist to have alcohol on their desk, you could get sacked for it, but Jim had the bottles all lined up on his like a bar, and was serving the drinks in mugs.

  ‘They can’t sack me now for boozing,’ he was saying. ‘Because I’m already walking… Walking, after midnight,’ he sang cheerily. ‘Allo, darling,’ he said when he saw me. ‘You coming out for Peter, are ya? Good girl, that’s what I like to see – solidarity. Now what can I get you, young lady? A nice Tia?’

  I had whisky – he filled the mug halfway to the top – and we had quite a little party. There were about ten of us, all up, which was pretty impressive, and would leave a satisfying hole in the Journal’s staff, especially as we came from such diverse parts of the paper.

  One of the major leader writers was leaving, which was a big deal; as was the deputy-chief news sub; one of the main crime reporters; and the environmental correspondent. We were a rum crew, but we were united by our affection and respect for Peter, and a sense of disgust about the direction the paper’s management was taking.

  While our odd little wake was in full swing I heard my mobile phone beep; it was a text from Tim. He had just arrived back at Heathrow from somewhere and after hearing what was happening at the paper from the news subs, he had resigned too – and he wanted me to tell everyone. I stood on a chair to make the announcement and a huge cheer went up.