Foursome (7 page)

When I get back from lunch Lorna, Melanie and Joshua are all standing there with their coats on. I feel pathetically left out when they all trip off to a restaurant together. Not that I want to have lunch with the bosses – in fact, they’ve offered many times but I always make an excuse – it’s just that my worst and most paranoid instincts take over when I am not invited but Lorna is. And guess what? This time it’s actually not paranoia. This time I’m right to worry because when they come back Lorna looks like the offspring of the Cheshire cat and the one that got the cream. Smiling cat squared.

‘Oh, Rebecca,’ she says before she even takes her coat off. ‘You’ll never guess what’s happened!’

As it goes, I don’t even need to try because she barely pauses for breath before she carries on.

‘I probably shouldn’t tell you. I think Joshua and Melanie want to tell you themselves, but if I don’t share it with someone I’ll burst and I can’t raise Alex on the phone.’

OK, it’s going to be bad. My mind leaps to the obvious – she’s pregnant. She’s having Alex’s baby and all of our lives are going to be inextricably linked forever. The twins are going to have a little brother or sister who is the product of Alex’s ill-judged relationship with the devil. Although exactly why Joshua and Melanie would want to be the ones to break that to me I can’t quite work out.

‘I’m going to be the new agent,’ she’s saying, but I’m having trouble processing the words. There has been a lot of talk lately about how there are now too many clients for Joshua and Melanie to handle between them, and how, perhaps, at some point in the future, they might begin to think about getting another pair of hands, expanding the agency. It always sounded very vague and very far off and I had always assumed that they meant bringing someone in from the outside. Someone with experience and a few loyal clients of their own to bring to the table. Someone who wasn’t Lorna.

I tune back in.

‘I’ll start off just helping out with the people we’ve got. And maybe I might take some of them over completely, the less successful ones, probably. I can even bring in clients of my own. In fact, they want me to start looking for promising new people right away. They said they’d been thinking about offering it to me for ages but they just had to make sure they had it all worked out properly, you know, because, of course I’ll get a raise…’

It’s not that I’m jealous. I’m not. I’ve never been ambitious. I don’t want any more responsibility. I don’t want some discontented actor calling me on a Sunday morning to complain about how hard he’s being worked. My dressing room is six inches smaller than hers or so and so got given six weeks off last year to do panto but they won’t even let me book a holiday. Oh no, what is eating away at me is far worse than mere envy. It’s the fact that suddenly my working life has changed forever. Lorna is going to be my boss.

10

‘I’m going to have to look for a new job,’ I say to Dan as he’s opening a bottle of wine in the kitchen. The second honeymoon period is most definitely over. One day spent with Lorna and I’m back to my old irritable glass-half-empty self.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he says. ‘You love your job.’

‘I used to.’

‘Where else are you going to find something as flexible? Where they’ll let you take a day off just because it’s one of the kids’ sports days and not count it as part of your holiday allowance? Where they’ll buy you champagne on your birthday and get you free tickets to the theatre?’

‘I know, I know,’ I say, and when I’m being rational I do know that I’m on to a good thing but I’m just not sure it’s possible that it can feel like that ever again.

‘I mean, it’s up to you,’ Dan says, ever reasonable. ‘I’m just saying.’

‘Can’t you have a word with Alex?’ I know I’m talking rubbish but I feel like I’m in a bad film. Why is this happening to me?

‘And say what? Could you dump your girlfriend because she’s ruining Rebecca’s life?’

Despite my misery I laugh. ‘It’d be a start,’ I say.

*

As luck would have it Alex and Lorna want to celebrate Lorna’s new found success and, who do they want to celebrate with? Their best friends of course. So at seven thirty all four of us are sitting in the bar of the York and Albany waiting for our table. Alex is raising his glass, proposing a toast.

‘To Lorna,’ he says, all smiles. ‘Congratulations and good luck. You’ll need it now you’re Rebecca’s boss.’

He looks at me, victorious. Touché. Lorna laughs out of all proportion to how funny his remark was.

‘I’m sure we’re going to be fine,’ she says. ‘After all, I know all her tricks now. Ha ha ha.’

Hilarious.

Lorna’s new duties are effective immediately. Although we are still sharing a work space in the reception – waiting while Melanie negotiates with our landlord to acquire the office next door so that the new hot shot can have her own room – we both know that it is now out of the question that Lorna be expected to answer the phones. No one needs to say anything; it’s the New World Order. She’s now way too important. At least, in her own opinion. Without anyone to play Phone Wars with I expend far less energy just picking up the calls as and when they come than I did trying to avoid answering them.

Lorna spends all day calling around everyone she has ever met and telling them that she is now ‘AN AGENT!’ Then, once she knows that Joshua has called the four least successful and therefore least likely to complain clients to tell them the good news that Lorna will be looking after them from here on in, she calls them too and says isn’t it great that she’s now ‘THEIR AGENT!’ She instructs me in all seriousness that I am to make sure to tell anyone who calls up enquiring after any of her four clients (I won’t hold my breath), that those clients are under new representation and that, if they wish to discuss those clients, they must speak to Lorna and Lorna alone. I resist saying that no one has called up about any of those four clients in living memory, except when one of them had failed to pay their rent and their landlord tried to track them down through us.

In addition to her extensive client list Lorna will now be representing all of our boys and girls for voice-over work. In between phone calls she studies old contracts and badgers Melanie with questions, making copious notes in the brand-new notebook she is now using to keep track of her enormous empire.

By lunchtime I am exhausted from watching the energy she uses up doing not much really. At a quarter to one I stand up and put on my coat.

‘I’m going to lunch,’ I say. ‘Are you OK to wait?’

‘Oh,’ she says. ‘No. I mean, I think you’re just going to have to pick up a sandwich and bring it back here from now on. I can’t be worrying about coordinating my lunch break with yours any more. Not now I’m AN AGENT!’

‘I can’t do that every day,’ I say. ‘What about when I need to go shopping?’

‘I don’t know,’ she says haughtily. ‘You’ll have to speak to Josh or Melanie about it.’

I’m momentarily knocked off course. Did she just call Joshua Josh? I’ve never even heard Melanie call him that. I force myself back on track.

‘What’s more, I’m sure I must have a statutory right to some fresh air or something,’ I say, rather hysterically, but I can’t help myself.

‘Like I say, talk to Josh or Melanie. All I know is that I need to be able to take people out to lunch as and when I want without consulting you.’

‘Who are you having lunch with today?’ I ask, somewhat aggressively.

‘That’s beside the point.’

‘No, it isn’t. It is the point. If you have a lunch meeting today, then I can understand why you might want me to stay in the office but, if you haven’t, then I don’t see what difference it makes to you if I go out first and you stay and answer the phones and then you go out when I get back.’

‘It’s not my job to answer the phones any more,’ she says.

I breathe in slowly. ‘I know that. All I’m saying is that if someone needs to be here at all times to answer the phones then surely we need to work something out between us rather than you just telling me I can’t take a lunch break any more.’

‘I didn’t say you couldn’t have a lunch break, I just said that from now on you need to take it at your desk. There’s a big difference. So, you’ll have to get a sandwich and come straight back because I have to go out at one.’

‘This is ridiculous,’ I say, and I move towards the door. ‘You can’t tell me what to do.’

‘Actually,’ she says, ‘I think you’ll find I can.’

I go out anyway and, even though today I don’t really have anything to do, I make sure that I stay out for a full hour, sitting in the grounds of St James’s church, trying to concentrate on reading
Metro
. I make sure I’m back several minutes before my hour is up; I don’t want to give her any ammunition. She is sitting there angrily, bent over some papers on her desk. I don’t even bother asking what happened to her lunch date because I know she never had one.

As soon as Melanie gets back, I ask her if I can see her for a few minutes. While Lorna has Joshua wrapped around her little finger I still have hope that I can appeal to Melanie’s more rational personality.

‘I was wondering,’ I say, once she has closed the door, although I have no doubt that Lorna will be listening, ‘what was going to happen now about things like who’s going to answer the phones at lunchtime?’ I have already decided that I am not going to stoop to Lorna’s level of tale telling. No ‘she said this’ or ‘she did that’.

‘Well, why can’t you just carry on as normal?’ Melanie says, clearly not very interested in having this conversation.

‘Erm…’ I say. ‘Great, OK, if you think that’s what we should do.’

‘Good,’ she says, riffling through papers on her desk.

‘Do you think… well, could you mention that to Lorna if you get a chance? Just so that we all know where we are.’

‘Fine,’ she says, and I don’t want to push it so I leave it at that.

Dan is meeting Alex and Lorna in the pub, but I have the perfect excuse in that I promised to take William and Zoe over to Isabel’s and, of course, there’s no question that we could all join up. Isabel doesn’t seem to be home so I let myself in and I get the kids a drink from the kitchen. It’s a beautiful house, a Victorian terrace with as many original features as you could wish for, bought, of course, with a mortgage based on Isabel’s income because Alex doesn’t have one, although I’m sure he stumped up the deposit saved from one of his not inconsiderable City bonuses. It’s feeling a bit unloved at the moment, though, not so much like a home. It’s amazing how one person’s absence can do that, take some of the life out of a place. Usually it smells of freshly baked bread and Diptyque candles and all the other little touches Isabel used to do to make it feel homely. I guess she doesn’t feel like bothering at the moment.

I hear her key in the lock. The twins bowl in before she does and they don’t even raise an eyebrow at the sight of us already making ourselves at home in their kitchen. It has always been such a common occurrence.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ she says once the kids have all gone off to the twins’ room. ‘He’d taken them swimming.’

‘Without telling you?’ She nods. ‘He can’t do that.’

‘I’m scared to make too much fuss,’ she says. ‘In case he starts demanding that the girls go and live with him. After all, he has been their primary carer for most of their lives.’

‘Only till they were old enough to go to school,’ I say. ‘He wouldn’t do that, surely?’ I’m not sure I have a firm grasp on just exactly what Alex would or wouldn’t do these days, actually. He seems to be capable of just about anything. ‘And anyway I can’t believe any court would put two kids with their father rather than their mother.’

‘It happens all the time,’ she says. ‘And why not? Sometimes the father can look after them better.’

‘Not this time,’ I say. It worries me, though, this talk of who will get the children.

‘Are you going to get a divorce, then?’

‘He wants to,’ she says. ‘He says it’d be better for everyone, a clean break.’

‘Gosh,’ I say. Gosh seems to have become my new favourite word in my self-imposed swearing embargo. Golly! Jeeps! Crikey! ‘That seems so final.’

Isabel laughs unconvincingly. ‘I think that’s the idea.’

So that’s it. Just like that all hope for the future is lost. I’m not so pessimistic that I think Alex asking for a divorce is going to mean that Lorna is in my social life forever. I have no doubt that he’ll get bored soon enough, once he’s made his point, but it’s definitely the end of an era. The end of ‘life as we know it’. Alex and Isabel are finished and there’s no going back. Deep down – well, not even that deep, to be really honest – I was sure that Alex would come to his senses and go home. It just never really occurred to me that he wouldn’t. And I think that Isabel thought it too. Rebecca and Daniel, Alex and Isabel, that’s just how it is.

I’m feeling depressed by the time I get home.

‘Alex is going to ask Isabel for a divorce,’ I say to Dan, thinking he might understand.

‘I had a feeling he would,’ he says. ‘I suppose it makes sense. A clean break.’

‘That’s what she said. Aren’t you sad about it, though?’ I ask accusingly.

‘Of course,’ he says, putting an arm round my shoulders. ‘But things have to change.’

‘I don’t see why,’ I say.

‘Because that’s how life is. It doesn’t matter if you don’t like it.’

‘Not everything. Not us,’ I say, feeling suddenly needy.

‘No stupid,’ he laughs. ‘Not us.’

Oh God. Any minute now I’m going to start asking him if he still loves me and making him promise he’ll never leave me. I get a grip quickly. There’s nothing more guaranteed to frighten even the most loyal partner off than asking for reassurance that they’re not going anywhere.

It’s like he can sense my insecurity (which hardly makes him telepathic; it’s oozing out of me, all over the nice smoked-oak floor) and, being Dan, he adds, ‘You’re stuck with me, I’m afraid,’ so that I don’t have to ’fess up what a pitiful wimp I am.

‘I know,’ I say, a well-rehearsed routine. ‘If only we hadn’t had the kids, I could still be young, free and single.’

‘Well, free and single at any rate,’ he says, and we laugh like we always do, safe in the knowledge that everything’s OK in our little world.

Dan never suffers from insecurities. Or, if he does, he keeps them to himself. He knows that I love him and that’s good enough. He doesn’t need me to keep reassuring him that I haven’t changed my mind. He’ll take it as read that it’s still true until I tell him it isn’t. I envy him his certainty.