Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman

Minty still did not look round. ‘Perhaps better to leave it, Rose. We might need our ammunition.’

When it was a question of territorial battles, Minty was as defensive as I was. This made me suspicious. ‘Do you know something that I don’t, Minty?’ Not a silly question. People and events in the group changed all the time, which made it a rather dangerous place to work, and one had to become rather protean, undercover and dangerous to survive.

‘No. No, of course not.’

‘But…?’

Minty’s phone rang and she snatched it up. ‘Books.’

I waited a moment or two longer. Minty scribbled on a piece of paper, ‘An ego here bigger than your bottom,’ and slid it towards me.

This implied that she would be on the phone for several minutes, so I left her to it and walked out into the open-plan space that was called the office. The management reminded its employees, frequently and cheerily, that it had been designed with humans in mind, but the humans repaid this thoughtfulness with ingratitude and dislike: if it was light and airy, it was also unprivate and, funnily enough, despite the hum of conversation and the underlying whine of the computers, it gave an impression of glaucous silence.

Maeve Otley from the subs desk maintained, with a deep sense of grievance, that it was a voyeur’s paradise. It was true: there was nowhere for staff to shake themselves back into their skins, or to hide their griefs and despairs, only the fishbowl where the owners had not bothered to put in a rock or two. I grumbled with Maeve, who was another friend, against the imposition, the terrorism of our employers, but mostly, like everyone else, I had adapted and grown used to it.

On the floor below, Steven was surrounded by piles of computer printout and flat-plans, and looked frantic. A half-eaten chicken sandwich was resting in its container beside him with several small plastic bottles of mineral water. When he saw me bearing down on him, he raised a hand to ward me off. ‘Don’t, Rose. It’s not kind.’

‘It’s not kind to Books.’

He looked longingly at his sandwich. ‘Who cares, as long as I can get it done and dusted and into bed? You, Rose, are expendable.’

‘If I make a fuss with Timon?’

‘You won’t get diddly… ’

No headway there. ‘What is so important that it thieves my space? A shepherd’s pie?’

‘A nasty demolition job on a cabinet minister. I can’t tell you who.’ Steven looked important. ‘The usual story. A mistress with exotic tastes, cronyism, undeclared interests. Apparently, his family don’t know what’s coming, and it’s top secret.’

I felt a shudder brush through me, of distaste and worry. In the early days, I used to feel plain, unadorned guilt for the suffering that these exposes caused. Latterly, my reaction had dulled. Familiarity had made it commonplace, and it had lost its capacity to disturb me. Yet I hated to think of what exposure did to the families. How would I cope if I woke up one morning to discover that my everyday life had been built on a falsehood? Would I break into pieces? The effect on the children of these stories of deceit and betrayal did not bear too much thought either. But I accepted there was little I could do, except resign my job in protest. ‘And are you going to do that?’ asked Nathan, quite properly. ‘No.’ So my private doubts and occasional flashes of guilt remained private.

‘I feel sorry for them,’ I said to Steven. All the same, I ran through a list of possible candidates in my head. I was human.

‘Don’t. He probably deserves it.’

Steven took a bite of his sandwich. ‘Are you going to let me get on?’

By chance, Nathan stepped out of the lift with Peter Shaker, his managing editor, as I was going in. ‘Hallo, darling,’ I murmured. Nathan was preoccupied, and the two men conferred in an undertone. It always gave me a shock, a pleasurable one, to see Nathan operating. It was the chance to witness a different, disengaged aspect of the man I knew at home, and it held an erotic charge. It reminded me that he had a separate, distinct existence. And that I did too.

‘Nathan,’ I touched his arm, ‘I was going to ring. We’re due at the restaurant at eight.’

He started. ‘Rose. I was thinking of something else. Sorry. I’ll – I’ll see you later.’

‘Sure.’ I waved at him and Peter as the doors closed. He did not wave back.

I thought nothing of it. As deputy editor of a daily paper published by the Vistemax Group, Nathan was a busy man. Friday was a day packed with meetings and, more often than not, he stumbled back to Lakey Street wrung out and exhausted. Then it was my business to soothe him and to listen. If the look on his face was anything to go by, and after twenty-five years of marriage I knew Nathan, this was a bad Friday.

The lift bore me upwards. Jobs and spouses held things in common. With luck, you found the right one at the right time. You fell in love with a person, or a job, tied the knot and settled down to the muddle and routine that suited you. I admit it was not entirely an accident that Nathan and I worked for the same company – an electronics giant which also published several newspapers and magazines under its corporate umbrella – but I liked to think that I had won my job on my own merits. Or, if that was not precisely true, that I kept on my own merits.

Poppy hated what Nathan and I did. Now twenty-two, she had stopped laughing and believed that lives should be useful and lived for the greater good, or she did at the last time of asking. ‘Why contribute to a vast, wasteful process like a newspaper?’ she wanted to know. ‘An excuse to cut down trees and print hurtful rubbish.’ Poppy had always fought hard, harder than Sam, and her growing up had been like a glove being turned inside out, finger by finger. If you were lucky, it happened gently, the growing-up part, and Poppy had not fared too badly, but I worried that she had her wounds.

When I returned to the office, Minty was talking on the phone but when she saw me she ended the conversation. ‘I’ll talk to you later. ‘Bye.’ She resumed typing with a heightened colour.

I sat down at my desk and dialled Nathan’s private line. ‘I know you’re about to go into the meeting, but are you all right?’

‘Yes, of course I am.’

‘It’s just… well, you looked worried.’

‘No more or less than usual. Anyway, why the touching concern all of a sudden?’

‘I just wanted to make sure nothing had happened.’

‘You mean you wanted to be first with the gossip.’

‘Nathan!’ But he had put down the phone. ‘Sometimes,’ I addressed the photograph, ‘he is impossible.’

Normally Minty would have said something like: ‘Men? who needs them?’ Or: ‘I am your unpaid therapist, talk to me about it.’ And the dark, slanted eyes would have glinted at the comic spectacle of men and women and their battlegrounds. Instead, she took me by surprise and said sharply, ‘Nathan is a very nice man.’

Knocked off guard, I took a second or two to answer. ‘Nice people can be impossible.’

‘They can also be taken for granted.’

There was a short, uncomfortable silence, not because I had taken offence but because what she said held an element of truth. Nathan and I were busy people, Nathan increasingly so. Like damp in a basement, too much busyness can erode foundations. After a moment, I tried to smooth it over. ‘We’re losing a page because there’s a demolition job going in.’

‘Bad luck to them.’ Minty stared out of the window with a sauve qui peut expression. ‘So, it goes on.’

Again, it was unlike Minty not to demand, ‘Who – who?’ and I tried again. ‘Are you going shopping this evening?’ I smiled. ‘Bond Street?’

She made a visible effort. ‘I may be getting too fat.’

Private joke. Bond Street catered for size eight. Since Minty possessed fawn-like slender limbs, a tiny waist and no bosom, this was fine. No assistant fainted at the size of her arms. But I was forced to shop in Oxford Street where the stores grudgingly accepted that size fourteen did exist. Ergo, together we formulated the Law of Retail Therapy: the larger your size, the further from the city centre a woman is forced to forage. (Anyone requiring the largest sizes presumably had to head for the M25 and beyond.) Apart from that, Minty and I suffered – and, in our narrow retail culture, I mean suffered – from big feet, and the