more tactful and polite to have retrieved the thing in private. The nurse stared at it as if to say, “And you want me to touch that now?” before going off to get some rubber gloves and a bargepole.
My God, I can’t believe I’ve just spent half an hour writing about taking sperm to a clinic! If I could only be half this committed and energetic at work I might not be in the shit I’m in. Things are still very edgy at the office. It seems to me only a matter of time before Nigel finds a way to get rid of me, and if I’m honest I’m really not particularly employable. Lunch-eating is not a skill for which there is much demand these days, it’s not the eighties.
Lucy keeps saying I need to start writing again. Touching, really, how she still believes in me.
I sent another note to Tosser (this time I checked the envelope three times) to try asking him again about a job. I didn’t bother with any matey-matey, beating-about-the-bush stuff this time. I just basically asked the bastard for a job. Hope I didn’t sound desperate. Does “Give us a job, you bastard,” sound desperate, I wonder? Depends on the tone, I suppose. But how does one imply tone in a letter? You can’t write “Not to be read in desperate manner” because that really would sound desperate.
Looking back over the last few pages I’ve written, I’ve come to the surprising conclusion that the American expert Lucy’s friend Sheila saw on Oprah was right: writing letters to yourself is actually a very good idea. I came home today all fired up with my success at delivering the sample on time and looking forward to telling Lucy the story (particularly the bit about hailing the cab), but she seemed all distant and distracted. She said it had been a difficult day at work and she didn’t feel like talking. Fair enough. I almost always feel like that. Still, it’s helped to write it down. Perhaps I should bash it all out into some kind of article and send it to the Observer Health section. I bet they’d give me a hundred quid for it, but Lucy would probably not approve. Besides which, I was forgetting, I can’t write.
Strange, Lucy not wanting to talk. I hope she isn’t working too hard. Actors can be such pains.
Dearest Penny
I have to tell you that something very strange happened at work today, which I hardly like to write about. I was on my own again. Sheila is still bronchial (self-prescribed cure: forty cigarettes a day) and Joanna is in LA with our one other big name, Trudi Hobson. Trudi is playing the icy British bitch in some dreadful action film. It’s a sequel called, well, can’t remember what it’s called actually. Shit Two, I should imagine. Anyway, there I am on my own and who should turn up but, yes! Carl Phipps, all brooding and Byronic looking in a big coat. Well, before I know it he’s telling me that fame is a lonely burden and asking me out to lunch! Extraordinary. I can’t imagine why he picked on me. I’m sure I haven’t given him the slightest indication that I enjoy his company or find him remotely attractive.
Well, as it happened I couldn’t go out with him anyway because I was all alone and who would man the phones? (Lots of voiceover work coming in this week, almost every chocolate manufacturer in the country seems to want one of our chaps to say “When you need a big, satisfying block in your gob…”). So I told him that I was too busy, and I said it slightly hoitily. I rather resent the assumption that mine is the sort of job that you can just drift in and out of, even though it is. “Fair enough,” says Lord Phipps and off he goes in a flurry of brooding, wuthering menace, and I thought that was the end of it.
Well! Ten minutes later he’s back with a positive hamper from Fortnum’s (perhaps not a hamper, but certainly a large plastic bag), full of fantastic stuff from their food hall. Oysters, olives, foreign nibbles and champagne no less! He said he was celebrating getting a recall for a very big American film. Usual thing, dastardly Brit to play villain. Actually, I must just say that for all that we hate political correctness, it has been a godsend for our posh actors. It seems that the English are the only racial group left on earth whom absolutely nobody minds seeing marmalized. Honestly, ten years ago it was costume drama or nothing for our boys. If nobody was making Robin Hood or Ivanhoe, they didn’t work. Now they get to crash helicopters into Bruce Willis!
Anyway, so there we were in the office, just the two of us, and I asked Heathcliff if he was celebrating, didn’t he have someone special to celebrate with? Do you want to know what he said to that, Penny? He said that that was exactly what he was doing!!!! Arggh!
Oh, my God! I could feel myself going beetroot and that rash on my neck coming back (when I was a teenager, if ever a boy asked me out I invariably instantly looked as though my throat had just been cut). My knees became the knees of a jelly lady and the cheese straw I had been toying with disintegrated and fell into the photocopier (and completely buggered it).
Anyway, of course I told him not to be silly and asked him what he meant by such familiarities. I put on my best snooty, posh “we are not at home to callers” telephone voice and said that I was a respectable woman. Well, he didn’t say anything, he just smiled in a sort of soft way that he knew brought out his dimples and took my hand.
Yes!
Smouldering eyes, shy dimples and holding my hand. Sorry about the breathless style, Penny, but I am much moved.
Because here, I’m afraid, is the terrible thing (none but you must ever know, Penny). I did not withdraw my hand! Not for a moment, anyway, or perhaps even a bit longer than a moment. A minute or two, possibly, not more than three, I’m sure of that. I left it there and we just sort of, well, looked at each other and his eyes went all melty (just like his close-ups in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall when he really was very good). He looked like the dispossessed lord of a bleak moorland estate. I swear his aftershave smelt of heather. God knows what I looked like – an electrified rabbit with a rash, no doubt.
Anyway, time felt as if it had been frozen as I became lost in his eyes. Then, and I don’t know if I imagined it, but I think, in fact I’m sure, I felt his finger playing in the palm of my hand which, as far as I know, is silent code for “I would not be averse to rogering you, ma’am.”
If this is true, I just can’t BELIEVE the man’s cheek. He knows I’m married. Married to a good, solid, honest, ordinary, boring, far better man than he, if not quite so dishy, bloke.
Anyway, after a bit I did take my hand away, thank God. I don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t. I think he would have kissed me. His face certainly seemed to be a lot closer to mine than it had been a moment or two before. And then short of making a scene I don’t know what I would have done. He is our biggest client, after all. I probably would have had to kiss him back, which would have been terrible! Anyway, instead I thanked him for the lunch in an extremely cold “not today, thank you” voice and said that I had to get on with my work. To which he shrugged, smiled a knowing little smile, picked up his fan mail and left.
I must say, I feel most peculiar.
But also very angry.
Yes, all right, he’s good looking and famous but that doesn’t mean that every girl is going to fall at his feet for a glass of champagne and a cheesy nibble! I love my husband, dull, sexless bore though he may be. What is more, I want to have his children, something which is not proving easy, and I can do without arrogant actors trying to interfere with my already unbalanced hormones.
Dear Sam
No news on sperm.
No reply from Tosser re him giving me an important new job.
No further communications from the Channel Controller.
My life is on tenterhooks, whatever tenterhooks may be.
One good thing is that everyone has been impressed by my visit to Downing Street. Except Nigel the Controller, of course, who still hasn’t talked to me about it. Lots of people are trying to get tickets to the show but I’m being ruthless. I say, “You didn’t want tickets when it was just Mr Blob Blob and the two puppet monsters. What’s changed?” and they say, “The fucking Prime Minister’s going to be there! That’s what’s changed,” which I suppose is fair.
I saw Nigel the Controller today and he didn’t remind me about my appalling faux pas over the letters, which I think is a good sign. Mind you, he didn’t really have an opportunity because it wasn’t just him and me, he’d
