Meg left the village hall for the trudge back across the fields to Orchard Cottage.
Sarah
Sarah had been at her new job in London for approximately three hours and already felt mentally drained. It had been a long morning. She wondered what to have for lunch and where she would get it from. She wondered if the coffee machine in the corner of the office was free or whether you had to pay for it. She wondered why she had not returned to her former career sooner as she was absolutely loving it.
She’d let herself out of the flat at eight o’clock this morning, quite a civilized hour, she’d reasoned, then travelled the four stops on the Tube feeling extremely nervous, and worrying about how she looked. When she’d laid her clothes out on Meg’s bed early this morning, she’d realized her black skirt and white blouse was going to make her look like a waitress, so she’d rooted around in her sister’s wardrobe for something less Service Industry. Everything Meg had hanging up was so glamorous, but she’d found a navy shift dress which, though far too tight, she hoped she could tone down, glamourwise, when she added her boring black courts.
It was weird wearing Meg’s dress, she’d thought, as she looked in the mirror. This was what her sister wore, when she did her glamorous job and lived her glamorous life. How jealous Sarah had been of it over the years, while she’d changed nappies, and got divorced, and picked up pieces of fish finger from the floor, and wept over Harry’s affairs, and had endless nights on her own, watching telly, and trudged over the fields in the rain with two whingeing children, to nursery in the village hall. Now here she was, in London, doing a job that called for a dress like this.
Her hair didn’t match, Sarah had decided; it looked so mumsy she felt she was going to a PTA meeting from the neck up, so she’d consulted Meg’s many expensive-looking lotions and potions in the bathroom and ended up slicking back her hair into a kind of wet look quiff with some trendy hair gel. Not bad, she’d thought, as she’d looked back in the mirror. She did look rather accidentally sexy, though, and hoped nobody would notice.
Her heart was thumping as she’d travelled down the escalator at her final Tube stop, realizing she’d forgotten the rule about not standing on the left – she’d had to move over when she got a giant tut from somebody behind trying to power climb. She stood on the right and stared at the posters she was gliding past: West End shows, new book releases, weight loss programmes – all in identical oblongs framed in chrome. They had changed since she’d been here last – lots of these moved, and videos advertising all sorts talked at her as she descended.
The office for House Events had also moved, from a dark and poky office above a cigarette and magazine kiosk in Soho, to a gleaming glass-fronted office, just off Tinder Street. As she stood outside, Sarah realized House Events was now impossibly trendy and wondered how she would possibly fit in. Taking a deep breath, she opened the door and walked into the marble lobby. Ahead of her was an opaque reception desk with a shiny silver lift glinting beyond it, and the receptionist behind it looked about eighteen.
‘Good morning, welcome to House Events, London. How may I help you?’
‘Good morning. I’m Sarah Oxbury,’ said Sarah, her voice wavering. ‘I’m starting work here today.’
‘Sarah, welcome. We’ve been expecting you. I’m Joanna. Let me just give you a pack’ – she reached into her desk for a coloured file –‘and then we’ll get you whisked upstairs.’
Joanna handed Sarah the file and then buzzed through to someone on her snazzy-looking phone: ‘About to bring Sarah Oxbury up.’
Joanna escorted Sarah to the lift. Its surfaces reflected all parts of her like an exposing kaleidoscope. Her bum looked big in this outfit and Meg’s dress suddenly looked not only tight and a tad too short but also indecent – Accidental Office Sex Bomb was really not a role Sarah wanted to inhabit. She realized she was shaking in her courts as the lift rose one floor and the doors whooshed open. Waiting outside it was a very tall, thin girl – early twenties? – with poker-straight white-blonde hair tucked behind her ears. She had a tight little smile, eyes that looked like turquoise precious stones, a tan drape-y dress with yards of material spun all around her, so she resembled a spindly chrysalis, and nude platform heels three sizes too big. She thrust out an arm at Sarah as though it were a baseball bat.
‘Sarah. I’m Felicity. Welcome back to House Events, London.’
‘Thank you, Felicity,’ said Sarah, reaching for the end of the bat and shaking it with a clammy hand.
‘I look forward to working with you.’ Felicity’s voice was clipped and brittle.
‘You, too. I mean, me too.’
‘Let’s walk.’ Felicity set off away from the lift and Sarah shakily followed her, on her heels. Forty-something Jessica Rabbit with a quiff. ‘I know they’ve been looking for someone to fill Verity’s role for quite some time,’ said Felicity, her smile barely making an impression on her doll-like face and her oversized shoes skittering across the floor. ‘I’m glad it’s a woman. I don’t want some man bossing me about when I’m quite capable of doing the job myself.’
‘No, of course not,’ said Sarah. She wasn’t sure what else to say. The office was sleek, streamlined. Gone were the family photos and cosy clutter from the Soho office of her day. This one just had three desks, an opaque glass corner office, a chrome water dispenser and an air of corporate cool.
‘I’ll show you to your desk.’
They walked over to the far end of the office where a steel and glass desk with a posh-looking white leather chair awaited.
‘I’m so sorry, I’ll just move that. I’ve been keeping your seat warm until you arrived, so to speak,’ said Felicity, swiping a pretty notepad with a matching pen off the corner of the desk. ‘I liked the view.’ There was a window to the right of the desk and Sarah looked out of it to see Londoners blithely going about their business: a cyclist in a headset, three tourists huddled over a map; and two striding women in suits and heels brandishing Starbucks cups. ‘There you are. It’s all yours,’ Felicity said, motioning at the chair for Sarah to sit down. ‘Ah, good, here’s Michael.’
‘Sarah!’ said a warm voice and Sarah looked round. Michael Tremaine, her old boss, was standing there, and he didn’t look much different to before. He had been fifty-something when she last knew him, making him seventy-something now, but he still had that warm, dancing merriment in his eye and an air of mischief, despite hair that was now almost completely snowy white. He held out his hand and when Sarah took it, pulled her in for a warm, fatherly hug. ‘It really is wonderful to see you again.’
She’d had her interview with Michael, all those years before. He’d taken her under his wing when she’d first started. He’d said he was really sorry when she had to leave London and go home.
‘I can’t believe you’re still here! It’s lovely to see you, too,’ she said, into his comforting, well-suited shoulder and she not only felt a strange and overwhelming sense of relief, but she had a sudden, mortifying urge to cry, which she had to rapidly swallow down.
‘Yes, I’m still here,’ Michael said, releasing her. ‘Ginny showed me your CV and said she’d interviewed you. I pretty much begged her to hire you.’ He grinned. ‘Look at you!’ he added. He was taking in her wrinkles, she thought, and the dress and the hair; last time he’d seen her she’d had a brown bob and had been dressed in bootleg trousers and ankle boots, accompanied by a sensible blouse. ‘I like the hair.’
‘Thanks,’ said Sarah, self-consciously reaching up to smooth the back of it with her left hand. She was so different now, wasn’t she, from the earnest, young twenty-something she had been? She hoped they liked the new version of her, whatever that was.