Fanny Blake - What Women Want

Puzzling over how someone could say the things he had without meaning them, her fury was compounded when she found the bathroom door locked. Could it be? Her hopes rose for a moment as she knocked – quite gently so as not to wake Ben. No reply. She tried again, louder this time.

‘What d’you want?’ Ben’s voice boomed through the glass panel.

Disguising her disappointment, Bea yelled, ‘For God’s sake, hurry up. You know I’ve got to go to work.’

Work. The day ahead rushed towards her, tsunami-like. This morning she was having her first official meeting with Adam to discuss ‘the future of the editorial department’. Being late was not an option. A headache that had until that moment been distant thunder on the horizon began to rumble unerringly in her direction.

‘Ben!’ she yelled again, rapping on the glass.

‘OK, Mum. OK.’ Ben unlocked the door and shambled out. ‘Chillax.’

‘If you say that to me once more, I’ll . . .’ For once words failed her as she pushed past him into the room that, minutes ago, had looked unused. Now it looked as if a whirlwind had blown through it. The pile of towels had been knocked to the floor beside an open magazine that lay half hidden by Ben’s discarded T-shirt and pants. The basin was dotted with black stubble, the razor left lying by the toothpaste tube, which was leaking into the soap dish. Bea started the shower and, with a heavy sigh, pulled off a bit of loo paper to mop up the splashes on the floor round the toilet where Ben had missed – again. No amount of asking, telling, shouting or begging seemed to make any difference. Every day started in the same old way, except that this one was even worse than usual, thanks to Mr bloody Castle.

By the time she was strap-hanging on the tube, already wilting in the heat, Bea realised she had made a big mistake in the wardrobe department. The cotton shirt she remembered looking so great on her the previous summer and that had still looked great when she was standing quite still in front of the mirror this morning was now straining dangerously across her bust while her shoes, fashionably pointed, gripped the joints of both her big toes in separate agonising vices. However, her Nicole Farhi deep blue cotton jersey skirt was nothing short of perfect.

The insult (which was how she now saw it) dealt by Tony Castle had insinuated its way to the back of her mind where it lay temporarily dormant as she concentrated on the morning ahead, going over how she was to protect her staff’s and her own jobs. Equally dormant were her concerns about how Ben might be spending his day and about her mother. She couldn’t afford to let anything or anyone deflect her focus. As she saw it, everyone who worked with her did a valuable job and didn’t deserve to lose it. They were relying on her to speak up for them and she would.

*

With the shirt problem righted with a large safety-pin (unpleasantly reminiscent of a nappy-pin) supplied by one of her younger colleagues, and unable to feel her feet, Bea knocked on Adam’s door and went in to face the enemy as the ten o’clock reminder beeped on her phone.

He barely glanced up. ‘Just one moment while I finish going through these figures.’

Rude, but at least it gave Bea time to sit down and assess her surroundings. In the couple of days he’d been there, Adam Palmer had made his mark, insisting that he take over Stephen’s office from day one. Not a popular decision with the rest of the staff, who felt that after so long with the company Stephen hardly deserved to be so humiliated. He, however, had been unbothered by the move. ‘What does it matter to me, Bea? It’s just an office. I’ll be out of here in a few weeks. I can see that he wants to make an impression and, let’s face it, I did have the best office in the building.’ Over the weekend, Stephen had moved into a smaller one on the other side of the open plan. Now that the axe had fallen, a change had come over him. Already, he looked like a man with a weight removed from his shoulders. He no longer wore a slightly anxious, distracted expression, as if something terrible was about to happen unless he did something to divert it. All those budgetary worries he had carried about with him for years had been parcelled up and passed on to Adam. He had been in the office as little as he could get away with as he silently prepared his exit. Bea was already missing his ready friendship.

She looked across the empty table to the bookshelves, where Stephen’s accumulation of Coldharbour’s titles had already been thinned so that the recent better-selling ones were standing face out to impress any visitor. Beside them were a select few that Adam had presumably been responsible for at Pennant, all having had an enviable stint on the bestseller list. Nothing like driving your success home where it’s not wanted, thought Bea. On the walls he’d hung a couple of modern prints and on his desk stood a large, framed snapshot of an attractive woman, all blonde pony-tail and cheekbones, and a freckle-faced curly-haired boy of six or seven.

So, like attracts like, thought Bea, as at last Adam looked up from his papers. She saw a lean aquiline face with steely grey eyes that appraised her for a moment before a slight smile was allowed to cross his lips. Beneath his casual but expensive striped open-necked shirt there was the suggestion of a well-worked-out body. A copper wristband sat just below the dark leather strap of his square-faced TAG Heuer watch. As he stood up to walk round the desk to join her at the table, she couldn’t help noticing his jeans (with a crease), silk socks and soft tan leather loafers.

‘So, you’re Bea Wilde.’ Far from unfriendly, his tone was more matter-of-fact.

Bea braced herself. ‘Yes. I’m the publishing director, as I think you probably know.’

‘I certainly do.’ He leaned across the table towards her and got straight to the point. ‘Would you say you’ve done a good job here?’

‘Yes, I would.’ Bea’s hackles rose in preparation to defend herself.

‘Let’s see. What was the last book you were responsible for that made the bestseller list? Remind me.’ He leaned forward. No smile now.

‘Jan Flinder’s A Certain Heart .’

‘My point. That was spring last year. Why nothing since then?’

‘You know as well as I do that that’s an impossible question to answer. We’ve had a couple that made it close, others we had high hopes for. But everyone knows that publishing’s not an exact science. If it was we’d all be rich.’

‘Of course I know that. But, these days, one would hope for more success on a list than you’ve had here.’ Adam smacked the palm of his hand on the table as he stood up to pace the room. For a few moments, he stared out of the wide plate-glass window across London. Then he turned to her. ‘We’ve got to do some drastic housekeeping. I’ve been going through the figures and, of course, talking everything through with Piers. He agrees with me that we have to reduce our overheads if we’re going forward. There’s no alternative but to lose the slack from every department.’

Bea’s stomach plummeted but she kept looking straight in his eye. This was what she’d been dreading. ‘What are you suggesting?’

‘Redundancies.’

‘But we need everyone we’ve got in Editorial,’ she protested. ‘There are only six of us. There really isn’t any slack. Everyone’s working to their full capacity.’

‘I know that. So I’m also proposing that we cut down the number of titles we publish per year. I want you to do fewer better. You won’t need as many staff.’ He tapped his chin with a manicured finger.

Already Bea was running through the people in the department. Stuart and Jade were indispensable. As for Alice, the managing editor who commissioned a few of her own non-fiction titles, and the two assistants, Becky and Warren, Bea couldn’t reward their loyalty and enthusiasm by putting them out of work.