Chapter twenty-one
Iwon’t lie, the next few days were not good.
I got through a lot of mug cakes – or rather, I made them compulsively, ate a single spoonful, then felt too sick to eat any more.
I wanted to sleep, to stop the unwanted looping of Sunday’s humiliation in my head, but I couldn’t: my brain kept jabbing me awake with fresh takes.
I alternated between lying on the sofa feeling so suffocated with unhappiness that my muscles were like lead, then feeling a furious need to move, to not be anywhere that might remind me of Fraser, and the ridiculous assumptions I’d made.
Which meant dog walks, obviously. Tomsk was fine with that.
The misery swamping me was hard to deal with because it wasn’t just one emotion.
I pinballed between several, each more unpleasant than the last. There was the agony of Fraser’s rejection all over again, but this time it was edged with a masochistic fury, knowing that I’d inflicted this entirely on myself, plus a new shame, of knowing that my worst imaginings had been true – it was me that he didn’t want.
He’d found someone else almost immediately, and not only that, he was happy enough with her, and their future, to start parenting instantly.
That meant there had to be something wrong with me. What other explanation was there?
How had I done this to myself? I felt as if I’d woken up in the wrong life, the goalposts now somewhere totally different.
Fraser was not my future. There would be no happy ending for us, no journey of discovery ending in a magical reunion.
I didn’t even know what my ending looked like now.
I didn’t know what I wanted anymore. And I was nearly forty, which didn’t leave me much time to work it out.
I cancelled my Rosemount sessions for the week; I texted Pam to say I had a bug I didn’t want to pass on.
Her reply was so kind, wishing me better soon ‘because we all miss you!’.
I burst into tears. And I told Martine I had laryngitis (I had to come up with a reason not to talk on the phone) and she actually came round with a hot toddy in a Thermos, knocking on the door while I pretended to be asleep.
I turned off my phone. I didn’t want to deal with anything. I didn’t want to be me.
Eventually, though, I had to turn my phone back on, and almost as if my subconscious brain was still operating on a professional level, it rang while it was still in my hand.
I sat up in bed, startled. It was Friday morning. No one rang me on a Friday morning. No one rang me this early, full stop.
‘Hello?’
‘Hi, Beth, it’s Sophie from Christian’s office. Just wanted to check in before this morning’s meeting – do you need a parking space and a desk?’
I struggled upright, trying to process this sudden and unwanted information.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Our new desk policy? It started on Monday, and I noticed you hadn’t reserved a desk space or a parking space.’ She paused. ‘I did send a whole staff reminder last Wednesday but maybe you missed it.’
‘Ah, I have my catch-up meetings on Teams.’ I tried to make my voice confident.
Sophie was about thirteen. I had no reason to be intimidated by Sophie, I told myself.
I’d debated Brexit with Nigel Callaghan, an actual BBC reporter.
‘I don’t have anything specific I need to discuss, in any case.
It’s just a check in, I can’t see it taking more than five minutes, tops. ’
‘Did you get Christian’s agenda?’
‘No?’
‘OK. Well, I’m sending it to you – now. Can you make sure my emails are going into your priority folder, please?
There are some proposed evolutions to your role that he wants to discuss with you.
’ She left a pause exactly long enough for me to open my email, had I been at my desk, then said, ‘You’ve got it? ’
‘Yes, I can see it,’ I lied.
‘Good. So would you like me to book you a desk and a parking space?’
Why did I have to go in? Did Christian need to see me to sack me?
A high-speed montage of the last meeting flashed across my mind’s eye – the receptionist who didn’t recognise me, the whispering when I walked in, Natasha, the photo in the kitchen, the sniggering new people – and the anxiety turned into a solid lump at the pit of my stomach.
But interestingly, it was edged with something new. Fury.
Why should I have to go into the office? Why was I suddenly not trusted to work unsupervised? Why should I have to dance to Christian’s stupid new tunes?
I was taken aback by how furious I was.
‘Beth? Are you still there?’
‘I can’t come in,’ I said. ‘It’s too short notice.’
There was a long pause. ‘I can reschedule your meeting for two this afternoon? Would that give you time to make arrangements? Otherwise we’re looking at the end of the week and I know Christian wants to see everyone before he goes to Manchester.’
‘Why’s he going to Manchester?’
‘Accountex International,’ said Sophie, as if I should have known.
Was that a conference? Allen never went to conferences. He hated other accountants.
I bit my lip. I felt like one of those cartoons where someone’s hanging on to a doorframe with their fingertips as an unseen force drags them by the feet, then scoring deep grooves in the lino with their nails as they resist with every ounce of their being.
‘Beth? I’m allocating you car parking space nine and desk four,’ said Sophie, losing patience.
‘I don’t want to tell Christian you’re not coming in.
You didn’t hear this from me, but two people are already on warnings and he’s got a new HR consultant looking over everyone’s contracts. So just be here for five to two.’
‘OK,’ I said, but I didn’t add the final, ‘Fine!’ until I was sure she’d hung up.
I don’t honestly remember how I got into work.
I necked eight herbal calm tablets with two double espressos, begged Rachel to make room for Tomsk in her daycare, and squeezed the grey suit jacket over my least pyjama-like lounge trousers.
I found, once I opened my wardrobe to put together a work outfit, that my fury didn’t care what I looked like, so long as my body was covered up.
Meanwhile my brain was struggling to focus on anything other than snippets of conversation with Fraser, repeating over and over in a masochistic punishment loop.
Iwona.
We’re like planets.
Iwona’s adorable children.
You had a calculator in your handbag. A bit tragic.
Iwona and Fraser, family skiing.
I looked at Christian’s agenda once; it was in business jargon so oblique it might as well have been encrypted.
It only added to the distracting cacophony in my head.
To block it all out, I put on a playlist of songs I’d curated for Bill Horrobin, at Linda’s request – songs they’d danced to in their youth, which she thought he might enjoy when she was having a nap.
Then I turned it up, really loud, and made myself sing all the way to Jacobs’. ‘Yeh Yeh’. ‘Ruby Tuesday’. ‘The Last Time’.
Thirty minutes later, when I pulled on the handbrake in parking space nine, I was fully immersed in a toxic blend of calming herbs coagulating with caffeine, shame, regret, Mick Jagger, and lack of sleep. I was simultaneously hyperfocused and trippily detached from myself.
The building receptionist tried to stop me as I nipped through the barriers behind a workman – obviously I hadn’t been to HR to get my new photo ID – but I pretended I hadn’t heard her and went into the office to find desk number four, which turned out to be my old desk, but with a large plastic four on the corner.
‘It’s like working in the café at Morrisons,’ muttered the stranger on desk number five, and I laughed so hard he edged away.
Three minutes later I was in Christian’s office.
(It was a bit like being hungover: one moment I was here, the next I was there. How many calming tablets had I taken?)
Christian immediately took charge of the meeting, which was perhaps just as well, and I tried to keep up with what he was saying.
He spoke quickly, scattering acronyms I didn’t recognise, in a slick business-school dialect that Allen had done his best to knock out of us.
It reminded me of my French GCSE listening comprehension exercise where I understood most of the words but they were passing too quickly for me to grab any sense of what they might mean together.
I found I could not be bothered with any of it.
The gist emerged, however. In the great Jacobs’ reboot, Christian was offering me a choice: work from home on what he called ‘essential support system projects’ (i.e.
, data entry) or return to the office and, effectively, do the job I was doing before, with additional targets for business creation.
But reporting to Natasha and someone called Xavier who he’d brought with him from his previous team.
‘. . . it’s up to you,’ Christian concluded.
I looked across the desk at him. How could I phrase this?
I didn’t want to work there anymore. I just didn’t. It was as simple as that. A tremendous weight lifted off my shoulders. Although that might have been the herbal calm tablets kicking in again.
‘Just to clarify, is this a demotion?’ I asked. ‘Or am I being moved sideways?’
‘We’ve thrown out the previous structure,’ he said. ‘No one’s being moved anywhere. It’s a whole new chessboard. You don’t have to make a decision immediately,’ he went on smoothly, checking his screen for his next meeting. ‘But we’d like to start implementing change within the next week.’
The next week? I couldn’t remember what my notice period was. Could you force someone out of their job in a week?
‘So I’ll leave it with you,’ Christian repeated, and nodded at the door.
Numbly, because I genuinely couldn’t force the wheels of my brain round fast enough, I got up and left.
Instantly, I bumped into Natasha who was standing suspiciously close to the door.
The out-of-body me observed that this probably wasn’t a coincidence.
‘Are you OK?’ Natasha tipped her head.