No matter how stressful her day had been, Rachel would feel the tension lifting when she walked through her front door into the wide hallway with its broad limed floorboards and staircase that curved delicately up towards the first floor. So it had seemed natural to her to offer to hold this emergency staff meeting at her home. In her experience, very little in the way of air-clearing could productively be accomplished at work, where office politics and hierarchies wormed their way into every conversation. She hadn’t wanted to go on the team-bonding weekend, but she’d hoped it would at least sort out the issues within the department, shaking out the wheat from the chaff so those remaining would come back streamlined and re-energized. But it hadn’t worked out like that. There had been something unsettling afoot over that weekend, right from the beginning. Rachel had tried to chivvy everyone along, wanting to impress Mark as much as anything else, but the atmosphere had become increasingly unpleasant.
Rachel wasn’t the fanciful type. When you came from the background she did, you learned very early on that only the real and the tangible have value: nothing else is to be trusted. So she knew she hadn’t invented that feeling of something pushing against the small of her back as she stood on the bank of the stream. But could she be totally certain it was a hand and not someone brushing past, oblivious, or a strong gust of wind, or a trick her mind played on her as she passed out? Uncertainty was a condition Rachel found impossible to live with.
The poisonous office politics were getting to her. Rachel had always had to fight for everything and to her it was natural to view work as a competition. People didn’t produce their best unless they had something to lose. So she had always encouraged healthy rivalry between her staff members. But now Amira and Charlie had discovered she had been pitting them against each other, and were both openly hostile to her, while doe-eyed Sarah, without doubt the weakest link in the office, was now pregnant and therefore unsackable. Mark was pretending to be supportive, but had pointedly reminded her she was still on her probation period. It would be career disaster for her to be ‘let go’ so soon into a new job, particularly in view of what had happened in her last post.
Rachel pressed on the top edge of one of the sleek kitchen cupboards, causing it to slide soundlessly open. She reached in and withdrew two large Moroccan-style bowls, one orange, the other cobalt blue, which she proceeded to fill with crisps and nuts. She’d toyed with getting food delivered from the caterers she had sometimes used when she and Ronan were entertaining, but she didn’t want to appear to be showing off. It was important to strike the right note. Taste wasn’t hard, you copied it from other people, from magazines, until it became your own, or as near to it as made no difference. But this question of nuance, of judging social situations, of knowing when not to go charging in guns blazing, that was more complicated. And negotiation went against Rachel’s nature, as did holding back, knowing when to play your hand and when to hide it modestly away.
She was still learning. And she still got it wrong a lot of the time. To Rachel, the endless compromises and little niceties that went into fostering ‘harmonious office relationships’ (how she hated HR jargon) were tortuous. The world wasn’t like that. The world was dog eat dog, from the little kids in India scavenging on the rubbish heaps to survive, to the heads of state meeting at this very moment to discuss the worsening refugee crisis. So why should they have to pretend that working life was some tea party where they all ‘validated each other’s opinions’ and gave each other only ‘constructive feedback’? She came across so many Paulas and Sarahs, plodders and wimps, trailing their personal lives into the office like snails. They wouldn’t last a day in Ronan’s office, where the air was so thick with testosterone it left a residue on your fingers, in the back of your throat, and you had to grow a hard enough skin for fear to run right off it.
Of course, the downside of that was that Ronan had found it increasingly difficult to detach from the person he was at the office, bringing more and more of his brash office persona home with him at night. Rachel didn’t know if she would ever forget the way he’d said, ‘Don’t take it so personally,’ when she’d discovered the secret email account he’d been using to send texts and dick-pics to the twenty-two-year-old intern he’d been sleeping with for the last eight months. He’d left Rachel the week before she took up the new position at Mark Hamilton Recruitment.
The sound of the buzzer made her start. A glance at the video-com revealed Paula standing outside the solid black gate they’d had installed between the edge of the front garden and the pavement. Fuck. Rachel hadn’t been sure Paula would even come. Rachel was sorry that the quiet, doughy deputy had found out the way she had that she was surplus to requirements, but in a sense it was a relief. Far better to get things out in the open than all this whispering behind closed doors. More troublesome was the bad feeling it had engendered with Amira and Charlie. Those were the two staff members she least wanted to lose.