Chapter 19
A couple of hours later, as Olivia is about to dig into a luxury prawn sandwich from M&S, a message appears in her inbox. It’s from Nina.
Lunch in my office so we can really put the world to rights?
Olivia picks up her sandwich and coffee, sticks a finger up at Joe, and heads over to the glass box.
‘Apparently, my girl-power bikini piece is the most-read article on The Morning website today.’ Nina sits at her desk with a lunch that consists of a single boiled egg and a handful of spinach.
‘Incredibly, Stephen has just emailed with a breakdown of the figures and a self-congratulatory message which reads Good thing we went with my idea, eh?’
‘What a fucking prick.’ Olivia leans back in the other chair. ‘I really hope that his wife cheats on him and gives him an STI that makes his cock fall off.’
‘Poetic,’ nods Nina, holding her boiled egg between her fingers.
‘Just you wait until you hear the rest of it. He genuinely believes that the big numbers are because everyone hates what I’m saying so much that they’re all clicking on it to tell me.
And he’s over the moon that they’re trolling me.
If anything, he wants them to troll me even more.
’ Nina hands Olivia her phone, so that she can read his email for herself.
‘Brilliant numbers, you’re really keeping them on the site is his response to a load of people frothing in the comments about a sixty-year-old woman’s cellulite? What a time to be alive.’
‘Exactly why we became journalists, right?’ Nina looks conspiratorially at Olivia, who is increasingly unsure as to why she became a journalist at all.
‘Anyway, I appreciate you sticking up for me in conference. If only they actually listened to the women they so generously invite into the room, as opposed to just having us there as window dressing.’
‘It was a great piece, Nina. The most important thing is you managed to get it into The Morning, which is a miracle in itself. You heard the way their brains work. If you hadn’t had the guts to suggest that body-positive idea, you know they would have just commissioned someone to write the same old tripe.
’ Olivia affects the haughty accent she uses for her mum.
‘Why DO female celebrities of a certain age still insist on flashing the flesh? or some such crap. Forget about the trolls. Just be thrilled you’ve exposed them to some critical thinking on the subject of women’s bodies, no doubt for the first time in their lives. ’
‘You know, I reckon it’s all a bit of a game to Stephen,’ Nina says, when she’s finished chewing her egg.
‘He got me to write his stupid, bitchy piece even though he knew I didn’t want to, as a way of showing that he has all the power.
Then he reverted to the first idea I came up with, and passed it off as his own.
I don’t know why I thought being given this column would somehow make him treat me with respect.
If anything, it’s just exposed me to even more of his twattery. ’
‘Well, now you know why Selina Martin never came into the office.’ Olivia takes a breath, watches as her phone vibrates across the desk.
She picks it up, and there it is, the thing she’s been expecting ever since she fired off that message to her mother during dinner the night before last – a WhatsApp from her mum so long she has to press ‘more’ to get to the end of it.
Olivia – just how hard would it be for you to think about others for once? It’s your sister’s special birthday. And as for leaving the group, which is our one remaining bastion of togetherness … well, that’s just spiteful, I would say.
I have tried to be a good mother to you.
I had hoped that having children of your own might make you realize the emotional burden that comes from being a parent.
But perhaps you have got lucky with Jack and Saskia and can’t see how very painful it is when you have a child who seems to hate you.
I got many things wrong but I don’t think I deserve this treatment now that I am entering my dotage, and trying to carve out an independent life for myself after so many years of running around after your father.
I have apologized for my endless faults and think that by now we should all be grown up enough to move on from them.
I have gone out of my way to make sure Lily has a special day for her fortieth.
You know she doesn’t have the family or security that you have, that she gets very lonely.
You had lots of people to make a fuss over you when you turned forty, Lily just has you and me.
Please don’t make me feel like I am being difficult for simply requesting you fill in a RSVP card – one I have already been kind enough to pay the postage for (I know these things make you young people laugh, but this means a lot to me and you could at least humour me this once).
All that being said, I do love you, and hope that this finds you and the family well.
Olivia lets out a demented laugh that could also be a cry. ‘I hope this finds you well!’ she says in her haughty accent, doing a little curtsy in her seat.
‘Everything OK?’ Nina says, chewing on her spinach.
‘You know what, Nina?’ Olivia turns to her young colleague.
‘No, everything is not OK. It’s not OK that you’ve been made to feel like you’re reliant on casual misogyny to make a living, and it’s not OK how Stephen’s behaved in the last forty-eight hours.
Or ever.’ Olivia feels the tamped-down rage preparing to unleash, as Lily might say, dislodged once more by the message from her mother.
‘Do you know, I used to go out of my way to mollycoddle him? I was so scared of him that I’d tiptoe round him like some traumatized dog. ’
‘Err, I do know actually,’ Nina nods. ‘I mean, I’m here for this new version of you, Olivia, with your big-girl pants on, but I’m not going to lie and say it isn’t a surprise, given that your career advice has always been a teeny-tiny bit on the passive side up until now.’
‘Fair enough.’ Olivia stands up, pats down her thighs. ‘But now the big-girl pants are on, I’m in no hurry to take them off.’ She grabs her coffee, and heads in the direction of Stephen’s office.
Over the years, Olivia’s done this walk in her head what feels like a thousand times.
She’s done it in her demented, deluded fantasies in which Stephen made her his star columnist. But she’s also done it in her demented, deluded fantasies where she exposes him for his behaviour all those years ago, and he is dragged out, sacked, made an example of, The Morning becoming a meritocracy rather than a company based entirely on chauvinistic nepotism.
But she never at any point imagined this: her storming into his office in the middle of the day, to tell him off for being inappropriate and unprofessional.
Olivia imagines the remnants of the Erling Haaland gummy still working away, its tiny blue crystals taking root inside her.
She gulps her third cappuccino of the day down, shakes her body in some ludicrous attempt to release all the liquid anxiety she’s just drunk, and then marches with her head held high to Stephen’s glass box. No time like the present and all that.
‘Ah, Olivia,’ says Joanna, who is guarding Stephen’s office like a Rottweiler in an LK Bennett frock. ‘He’s just chatting to the letters editor, but he’ll be free in a moment if you want to take a seat.’
‘Thanks, Joanna,’ she says, raising her empty cup to Stephen’s ever-dutiful PA. ‘But I’m sure whatever he’s talking to Andrew about can wait.’
Joanna rises as if to stop Olivia but is not quick enough for the Anniversary Architect, who storms in and gets the editor’s attention by throwing her Gail’s cup towards the bin next to his giant oak desk.
For a moment it looks as if it is going to hit him in the head, but it sails past his astonished face, landing with a satisfying thwack in the centre of the waste-paper basket.
‘Hi, Stephen,’ she says, plonking her bum down and making herself comfortable on one of his many sofas. ‘Just need a moment with you to talk through a few things.’
‘Right.’ Stephen nods his head seriously, then ushers an incandescent Andrew out of the door, shutting it firmly behind him. He perches on the end of his desk and looks at Olivia with a pinched smile on his face. ‘Go ahead,’ he says, a note of irritation in his voice.
She swallows and tells herself she is more than capable of going toe to toe with this absolute moron.
‘Well, there’s a few things, Stephen,’ she begins. ‘And while I’m writing this People Displeaser feature, it seems the perfect time to raise them. For a start, I need you to know that I object to what happened in conference on Monday.’
‘You object?’ He begins laughing pompously. ‘Your Honour! Was there a particular moment you’d like to raise in court?’