things (the idea that a few plants make us more ‘green’) I even voted for canaries, at some meeting, only to be outvoted on the grounds of canary shit.
It is the kind of place where the lift is big enough to bring your bike upstairs, and the coffee is all fair trade. There is an amount of sex in the air, I suppose, but we’re not that pushed. We’re all pretty young. We are big on ideas: the guys who have a bed in their office are sad techie bastards who really do fold them out for a sleep.
He was sitting in the meeting room, that first morning. I saw him through the glass wall before he saw me and I couldn’t think what was wrong with him. He was using a fountain pen – but that was all right, wasn’t it? – his BlackBerry was neatly displayed on the table beside him. The suit was maybe a bit sharp, his tie a bit restrained – but I mean, he’s a consultant, he is supposed to wear a suit. Maybe it was his hair, which seemed straighter than before, and flopped forward. Had he dyed it? There was, at least, an amount of gel involved. He looked up from under this youthful mop as I walked in and he said, ‘Hello, you.’
‘Hi.’
He had a pair of Ray-Bans hooked on to the idle forefinger of his left hand.
‘You got here,’ I said.
He let the glasses swing.
‘So it would appear.’
He seemed so sure we would sleep together that I decided against it on the spot, or wished, at least, for darkness to take it away, this unexpected weakness he had for props.
I sat down, smiled neatly, and said, ‘So, how would you like to be introduced?’
The room filled and the meeting went ahead and it was all very much as you might expect. There was the usual blather from Frank, who was being edged out to blather elsewhere. This was followed by a little posturing from my young colleagues, David and Fiachra, who were maddened by the potential gap. The boss was excited; you could tell he was excited because he seemed so bored. And I – well, I, as ever, smiled, facilitated, and kept clear, because I was the girl who would win in the end, despite the fact that girls so rarely do.
Sean looked from one speaker to the next, asked some questions, and kept his opinions to himself. This surprised me a little. I had expected more of the flamboyance we saw at the whiteboard in Montreux, but Sean at work – I have always loved Sean at work – used no more energy than was needful. It reminded me a little of Evie, this ability he had to be simple, in the middle of much fuss. So I managed to forget the hair gel and the horrible architect’s watch, and I just looked at him thinking, for a while; his grey eyes moving from one person to the next. And – it might have been a work thing, this sensible, almost offhand way we had of speaking about, let’s face it, a lot of money; it might have been the fact that he was sitting in the place where I spend most of my waking hours; but it was very intimate and slightly dreamlike to see him there – like having a movie star in your kitchen, drinking tea – and I really wanted to fuck him, then. There was, for the first time, no other word for it. I wanted to make him real. A man I would cross the street to avoid at nine o’clock – by nine twenty-five I wanted to fuck him until he wept. My legs trembled with it. My voice floated out of my mouth when I opened it to speak.
The glass wall of the meeting room was huge and suddenly too transparent, I felt so exposed.
Not that things always go the way you might expect. Six months later Frank – who still does nothing but blather – was, for reasons I can’t quite fathom, running much of the show; it was David who had been edged out, to do his posturing elsewhere. Fiachra, meanwhile, had got himself a new baby, an ecstatic look in his eye and a tendency to fall asleep while sitting on the toilet, much to the delight of the entire company who tiptoed in, girls included, to listen to the sound of his snoring on the other side of the cubicle door. I was still cheerful and useful and altogether indispensable, and still going nowhere in Rathlin Communications, despite the fact I had slept with the management consultant – something neither of us found particularly relevant: I mean, no one would ever accuse Sean of securing the contract with his dick. Six months later, I was talking to the bank about going out on my own and the bank was licking me slowly all over – as were, now that I pause to think of it, both Sean Vallely and Conor Shiels. I am not an extraordinary woman but this was my life that year, and yes, it felt astonishing. It also felt like a mess. The opposite of a nervous breakdown, whatever you might call that.
But I am getting ahead of myself here.
The office game was another game for us to play, after the suburban couples game, and before the game of hotel assignations and fabulous, illicit lust, and neither of us thought there might come a moment when all the games would stop.
It was a lot of fun.
They say consultants always recommend that you lose thirty per cent – that this is what they are actually hired to say – so when Sean was finished his report, we might be moved up, or out. People found it exciting when he walked out of the lift. You knew he was there. I followed his presence through the glades of rubber plant and bamboo, listened to the click of his briefcase opening two desks down and waited for his soft voice on the phone. He might have just put his head around my partition of fern, but his courtship was close and elaborate. Every time we spoke, it was as though we were rehearsing the lie.
‘Is that you?’ he might say, when I picked up.
‘Yes.’
I had never had an affair before. I did not realise how sexy it was to be clandestine. The secret was everything.
‘Are you at your desk?’
‘What do you think?’
I could hear him move and murmur a few metres away, but his real words were close, almost warm in my ear.
‘Busy?’
‘I am now…’
‘What are you doing?
‘Well, I’m talking to you.’
The intimacy between us was so formal, so completely erotic.
‘I thought we might do that better over lunch.’
‘Lovely.’
Mind you, there was a certain key-jangling element to it, too; the idea that he might be reaching rather ardently into his pocket to check for spare change. The whole thing played surprisingly close to farce. I’m not sure how many people around us knew what was going on – at a guess, they all did, and they were all hugely amused by it. But we were pretty amused too – I mean, the rutting aside, the fierce and fleeting idea of it that ran across our minds (I must confess) from time to time – we also found it slightly hilarious; the thought that we might, for once, just
Meanwhile, I saw him at the coffee maker and the beauty of his tie did not offend me. I even got to like his fountain pen. I was with him all the time. He knew I was there – I was getting inside his skin. The tap of his hand on the side of his thigh. The way he leaned back in the chair and rubbed his nipple, for comfort or reward; he saw me noticing this, and stopped.
Oh, the game. The game.
The little surges of irritation, of contempt: from him, from me.
If Sean were less of a tactical person, the thing might have gone sour before we’d even begun, but he knew his pleasures – more than I did, it has to be said. He knew when to put the phone down. When to go home. When to turn away.
It is no wonder I became obsessed.
We had lunch every Friday for five weeks; it was our de-brief. We went to La Stampa – fancy but not too fancy – and talked business. He was good, as I keep saying, at his job. He had no interest in complication. He looked at the company carefully, trying to split the rock with just one tap. And after business, came charm. He told a story, he told another. Really funny stories. He ordered dessert wine. He teased me about the ‘posh’ school I went to, about the height of my heels, he made me fight and flirt. I thought, by week three, that there was something wrong with
