Chapter 3
Olivia enters the office reminding herself that she is OLIVIA GREENWOOD: FRANK, FEARLESS, FUNNY, even if she feels more Olivia Greenwood: harangued, humiliated, and horrifically blistered.
(Her cheap ballerina shoes are eating her feet alive.) She decides to send a quick WhatsApp to Stephen to let him know she’s ready whenever he is, although by ‘quick’ what she actually means is ‘constructing, agonizingly slowly, a perfectly bright, breezy and slightly bootlicking message that will give absolutely no hint of the deep detestation she feels for this man from the very bottom of her soul, nor the desperation she feels for him to acknowledge and validate her’.
Hey Stephen, just to say I’m free if you still wanted to have that chat. Hope you’re having a good morning! X
It’s the kiss that makes her wince the most. It’s a terrible throwback to when she first arrived in the Cotswolds during the noughties, and genuinely thought that an X at the end of a message made you look kind and trustworthy.
Over the years it’s become her thing, her trademark, the sign-off which marks her out as the nicest, most loyal person in the office.
She can hardly stop using it now. People might think her rude, and she doesn’t want that.
‘Look what the cat dragged in,’ says Joe, as Olivia sits down and immediately removes her ballet pumps under the desk, the air a balm for her soles.
‘You’re in early,’ sighs Olivia, turning on her computer.
‘Yeah, well I didn’t want to miss any of the drama from your meeting. It’s not just middle-aged women from Bromley who like to get in early, you know?’
‘I don’t live in Bromley,’ corrects Olivia. ‘That’s in Kent. I live in Sussex.’
‘Kent, Sussex, outer space, it’s all the same to a guy who lives in Lower Clapton, babes.
Wherever it is, it doesn’t change the fact that since you moved out to the sticks, the most interesting thing that ever happens to you is managing to claim compensation from the Fat Controller for all the time you spend standing on packed platforms, waiting for the delayed 18.
57 to turn up. It’s like a really dull version of your twenties, but at least then a clapped-out service would occasionally pull into the station. ’
‘Is “clapped-out service” a metaphor for Nick,’ replies Olivia, rubbing the back of her heels as her computer takes an age to power up, ‘and “station” a euphemism for my vagina?’
‘Liv, just the person!’ She hears Stephen’s voice, closes her eyes, hopes that by the time she has turned her chair around and opened them again, she will magically be the kind of person who is able to brazen out saying ‘vagina’ in front of her boss.
‘Here I am!’ She smiles her sweetest smile. ‘All the way from the suburbs.’
‘I’ve heard great things about Bromley,’ says Stephen, looking at his watch.
‘Yeah, it’s a really wonderful place to live.’
‘Got your message,’ he says, suddenly less interested in the delights of market towns. ‘Shall we get that chat out of the way? Won’t take a minute.’ He uses his arms to motion away from the slums of her desk.
‘Sure,’ says Olivia, slipping her ballet shoes back on before standing up, wincing at the pain on her heel. She follows Stephen towards the water cooler, where he stops, grabs a paper cup, and fills it up.
‘Would you like one?’ he says, offering the cup to her. Olivia hopes that cost-cutting hasn’t led to the end of the executive cold filtered water provided to all people important enough to have their own office, even if it’s absolutely ruined tap water for her.
‘I’m fine, thanks,’ smiles Olivia, ready to follow him on to his office. Instead, he leans on the water cooler as he drinks from the cup, before placing it back under the tap and refilling it.
‘So, Liv,’ he says, using the machine as a prop to lean on.
‘As you may well know, there’s some exciting changes taking place at The Morning in our centenary year.
’ Olivia wonders if, by choosing to stay at the water cooler instead of going on to his office, he is trying to signal to his staff that he is one of them.
That, together, he and Olivia are about to mark the start of a new, more egalitarian news organization, where the editor and senior columnist catch up at the water cooler, just like everyone else.
She imagines how cool she must look, just standing there shooting the breeze, the boss about to reward her many years of loyalty.
‘Big year for The Morning, big year for you, Liv.’ She feels her heart soar, while also trying to rub at the speck of smoothie she has just noticed on the left leg of her trousers.
‘The good ship Morning is sailing into the future, and I want you to be up on the captain’s deck with me for every moment of the journey. ’
She tries not to look too excited. ‘You’ve got what it takes to go really far at this paper,’ Stephen always said to her, every time she agreed to write a feature nobody else would go near because they had actual principles, or it would mean working overtime and they’d been very boundaried that they needed to be home by 6.
30 p.m. to relieve the childcare. Olivia had never let her position as a mother get in the way of her career.
That was what being a feminist meant, right?
She was a role model of ambition and hard work and dogged reliability.
And if her children were occasionally displaying the same signs of obsessive dysfunction that she herself had as a teenager, like a full-blown freak-out over a bagel, well that was normal, wasn’t it.
When her waters broke three weeks early with Saskia – catching her unawares as she hadn’t quite got round to writing up several months’ worth of interviews with celebrities about their day in diet form, which she had promised to get done ahead of going on maternity leave so that the department wouldn’t be inconvenienced by her having a baby – Olivia had sat in the living room on her birthing ball, Nick holding the Dictaphone whenever a contraction made it too tricky to copy down the life-altering news that the runner-up of Celebrity Ironman season four began each day with a squeeze of lemon in hot water and four small prunes (‘You don’t want any more than that unless you want to spend the day on the loo,’ transcribed Olivia, between waves of pain and nausea).
When Jack was three weeks old, she had agreed to write a piece about hypnobirthing, because apparently Kate Middleton had been bang into it and the features editor had heard Olivia talking about it once, in passing, during her pregnancy.
‘You’re The Morning’s very own Princess Kate!
’ her boss had explained on the phone, Olivia swallowing back the tears caused by hormones and mastitis and her freshly stinging emergency C-section scar so that she could accept the commission.
Her desire to be affable and easy-going outweighed anything as ridiculous as her need to lie on the sofa with her left tit ensconced in a frozen cabbage leaf; she had simply assumed that if they were asking her to do it, then it must have been reasonable.
Other people’s requirements always, always took precedence over her own clearly skewed judgement.
After all, she was forever hearing about that one woman who worked in the City and had managed to birth nine children while building her way to the top of the major FTSE 100 company, so surely Olivia could take a day out to write about the importance of golden-thread breathing while you were being torn apart from the inside?
A not-so-small, not-so-insignificant part of Olivia also liked the fact that she was needed, that the office clearly couldn’t do without her.
It made her feel valuable in a way that breastfeeding just didn’t, no matter how hard she tried to convince herself otherwise.
‘Anyway,’ says Stephen, loosening his tie.
She tries not to look too excited. Was he going to give her her own office?
Would there be a photo shoot to launch her, perhaps some sort of advertising campaign?
She’d have to go shopping. Given she was about to get a significant raise at The Morning, she might be able to finance this dream.
In fact, once she’s a columnist, she will only have to write once a week, so she’ll finally have more time and money to spend with Nick and the kids.
She’ll have to research her column if she wants to push the boundaries a bit, move it on a bit, but she won’t have to rely on Lily quite so much.
She loves seeing her sister, but she’d rather Lily came round just because she wants to.
‘There’s nobody like you when it comes to steering a boat through choppy waters.
’ Olivia hopes he won’t make some sort of Titanic analogy.
Too late. ‘You’ve always been a cheerful, solid presence when the good ship Morning has occasionally hit an iceberg, if you get what I’m saying.
’ He refills his cup for the third time.
‘You’re like the head of the orchestra on the Titanic, refusing to leave the deck while all around you, everyone is acting like a bit of a dickhead.
Do you get what I’m saying, Olivia?’ He downs the contents of the paper cup again, crushes it in his fist before throwing it in the bin next to the water cooler.