Before We Met(6)

Except they weren’t. It had been five months, and though she’d had three final-round interviews, she hadn’t received a single offer. At first, feeling confident, she’d only applied for jobs on a level with her old one with Leon but, as three months and then four had passed, she’d started to lower her sights. She told herself that it was only logical – the UK was in recession, jobs were scarce, perhaps she’d been arrogant to think she could immediately be hired again into a similar position; after all, she’d worked her way up with Leon over the years – but when she didn’t get those jobs either, she’d started to think that she was the problem.

‘No,’ Mark had said last Sunday, while they were out walking in Richmond Park. He’d reached for her hand and tucked it in under his arm, pulling her against the heavy navy wool of his pea coat. She’d pressed closer and watched the two clouds of their breath as they mingled. Though it was only the beginning of November, there had been a heavy frost overnight and the ground was crisp underfoot. The tips of Mark’s ears were pink where they stuck out from under his woollen hat.

‘It’s just the recession,’ he said. ‘You know you’re good, and the right job will come along. It’s like everything – you wait and wait until you don’t think you can wait any more and then, just when you think you’re going to explode or jump off Beachy Head, it finally happens.’

‘What would you know about Beachy Head, Mr Tycoon by Twenty-five?’ she’d said, prodding him in the side with her elbow, but she knew he was right about the waiting game. She’d been lucky after university – ‘Luck had nothing to do with it,’ Mark always said – and got one of the few graduate places at J. Walter Thompson, but she’d been stuck in the job she’d had after that, with a smaller agency, for almost a year after she’d decided she had to leave or die of boredom. She couldn’t, she’d thought at the time, do another campaign for dog food without going off her nut. The job with Leon had rescued her from that, thank God, but now she was in the same situation again. Worse, actually: at least then she’d had a job, even if it had been peddling horsemeat. Now with every week that passed, she was conscious of the growing distance between her and paid employment, the diminishing relevance of her most recent campaigns. Her currency was devaluing.

Hannah’s breath came faster as she approached Eel Brook Common and picked up her pace. She wove around the double barrier that discouraged cyclists from using the park and went on to the grass. The ground was sodden and hard-going but she made herself do two sides of the rectangle before she stopped by the little playground in the top corner. She was getting better but she was never going to be a natural runner, one of those people zipping round now at twice her speed, their breathing barely audible. She was fit but she didn’t have the right body shape for it, that was her theory; she was sure that if she were one of these straight-up-and-down types, it would feel much easier. Mark had suggested she join a gym instead, but while she didn’t have a job, she didn’t feel comfortable paying £80 a month in membership fees. He’d laughed and told her to remember that they were married and what was his was hers, but she still couldn’t do it.

She unzipped her pocket and took out her phone to check if she’d missed a call. Nothing. She looked at the time: ten twenty. With the five-hour time difference it would be hours yet before she could reasonably ring any of their friends in New York to ask if they’d heard from him, especially on a Saturday. She’d have to wait until at least one thirty. She put the phone back in her pocket and stretched her arms behind her head, feeling the tension in her neck and shoulder muscles. Six feet away, a chunky black Labrador snuffled contentedly through an abandoned bag of chips until his owner looked up from her conversation and called him sharply away.

Conscious of the cold, she started moving again. In the week, exercise helped her feel like she had a purpose, or at least something to do. She spent hours every day reading the trade press, looking at other people’s new campaigns online, emailing her contacts to see if anyone had heard of new vacancies, but if she let her focus slip for longer than a few minutes, she felt the day become a long featureless slope of hours down which she could slide without anything to stop her. The same would happen today if she let it. She was disciplining herself not to job-search at the weekends, to maintain a distinction from the working week, however artificial, but she had to find something to do today to distract herself from the growing sense that something was wrong.