Gemma Townley - When in Rome...

A very good-looking guy dressed in black and in Prada trainers grabbed my hand and called out really loudly “Candy, one of your guests is trying to sneak her wine out.” I turned a horrible puce color. I couldn’t remember his name even though we’d been introduced about five minutes ago, but decided I hated him already.

“Needs cooling,” I muttered, trying to get past him.

“Rubbish,” he said in his public school tones, prising the wine from my hand. “I think it’s already cold enough in Bulgaria, isn’t it?”

He was laughing and I smiled thinly. Everyone in the room had stopped talking at this point and was looking awkwardly at me, not quite sure what to say. And then someone came to my defense. A rather sweet-looking bloke wearing chinos with a shirt tucked in walked over.

“Bulgaria has actually won some major prizes for its wine-making recently,” he said seriously.

“And 1999 was a particularly good year in some regions.”

I smiled gratefully and took my bottle back from the Prada-wearing bastard who had mortified me in front of people I’d never met before. He laughed again and wandered off toward two girls who immediately kissed him and laughed loudly at everything he said. I realized that the guy in chinos was still standing next to me. “I’m David,” he said. “It’s very nice to meet you.”

Of course, it took another two and a half years before I started seeing David. That night I ended up sleeping with the guy who was rude about my wine. He was called Mike and we left halfway through the meal because his hand was inching under my skirt and I couldn’t believe that someone so gorgeous was interested in me.

David was very good about it. I bumped into him about six months after Mike left, and he asked me out to dinner. And then he asked me out again. He was so sweet! He called when he said he would. And now he’s helping me put my curtains up. I mean, how nice is that?

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It’s Monday morning and I’m ten minutes late for work—because the stupid ticket machine at Shepherds Bush Tube Station refused to take my ten-pound note and not because I couldn’t get out of bed this morning. I practice my excuses as I climb the escalator at Bond Street station—

very toning for the bottom and thighs. (I have given up my gym membership since I read somewhere that if you always take the stairs and walk everywhere, you could do a two-hour workout every day without knowing it.)

I buy a cappuccino to make Monday morning a bit more bearable, and then decide to get Nigel one, too, working on the same principle. It doesn’t seem to work. As I place the coffee on his desk, he looks up and I can see that his cheeks are slightly pink.

Nigel is my boss. He gets quite stressed when people are late, or don’t do things in an orderly fashion. I know this because once he nearly cried when I messed up his desk a bit by accident. I was doing some work on one of his projects while he was away, and I’m not the most organized person if I’m completely honest. I mean, neat piles on desks—what’s that all about? I like everything where I can see it, and if that means that every so often bits of paper get lost, well, that’s hardly my fault, is it? When Nigel got back and realized I’d completely decimated his filing system, he started off angry, but then I swear I saw a tear in his eye. I’ve been trying really hard to be tidy ever since.

Nigel and I work in publishing. Usually, when I tell people what I do, I leave it at that, because then it sounds like I could be working with literary geniuses and brilliant novels. But you may as well know the truth. I work at Leary Publishing, and we produce loose-leaf handbooks and CD-ROMs for accountants. Lawyers, too, sometimes. I research new product launches and spend time talking to accountants about their business needs. So really, David and I are made for each other.

Recently, though, things have been looking up a bit. To start with, we’ve got a new divisional director, Guy Jackson, who keeps calling Nigel into meetings, which means he isn’t breathing down my neck.

The other thing I have discovered to my amazement is that if you know a little bit about what you’re working on, it’s actually easier. It’s not like I’ve been swotting up or anything, but we’ve kind of got this Sunday-morning ritual going where David brings me breakfast in bed and then tries to read the business section of theTelegraph . I ask him stupid questions about the headlines just to get his attention, and he explains each story in detail, demonstrating each point by kissing or prodding my stomach as I giggle and snuggle into his chest. This generally lasts for about ten minutes and then the newspaper gets chucked to the floor and we shag each other’s brains out, spraying crumbs all over the bed linen.

But it works. Last week I actually had a conversation with Guy in the lift about risk management following Enron. I sort of dried up after telling him I thought risk management was important, but that’s okay because he went into overdrive saying how great it would be to launch a CD-ROM on the very subject. Nigel was livid, of course, because he didn’t think of it first, but I just explained to him that being creative is a talent and you either have it or you don’t. He didn’t like that very much either.

I decide to ignore Nigel’s “you’re late” look and head for my desk. “You just won’t believe the bloody Tube,” I begin, looking for a sympathetic audience in Denise, our administrative assistant. Denise, however, is on the phone with her long-suffering husband explaining that she has looked up “rising damp” on the Internet, and the work he’s done over the weekend is never going to clear up the problem. Nigel clears his throat.

“I have no doubt that you have a perfectly thought-out excuse for your tardiness this morning,”

he begins—Why alwaystardiness ? Why can’t he ever just use the wordlate like normal people?

—“but this is the third time in a ten-day period, and I’m afraid I’m going to have to file a report for personnel.”

Nigel loves filing reports. If you ever want to get round him on something, you just write a report, with lots of figures and a few words like “strategic game plan” or “cross-fertilization.” He salivates over it, files it, and you can pretty much do what you want for the rest of the day.

“So, good weekend?” I ask brightly. Nigel nods and looks a bit sheepish. I suddenly remember.

“Ah! Was it this weekend?” Nigel quickly looks over to Denise to check that she can’t hear. I lower my voice. “So, was it good?”

Nigel, like me, doesn’t really want to be working at Leary Publishing. Actually, Nigel doesn’t really want to be working in publishing at all. He kind of wants to save the world, but I’m never sure quite how he intends to do it. Nigel is a conspiracy theory nut. He thinks the government is watching us, he thinks things like the landing on the moon didn’t happen, and he thinks the majority of popular culture is a ploy to take our minds off the real issues and what’s actually going on. I haven’t managed to establish exactly what the real issues are, but Nigel spends hours and hours in Internet chat rooms and reading bizarre newsletters that debate the latest methods

“they” are using to throw us all off the scent. If you ever want to have a laugh, you just call him up and make a clicking noise down the phone. He starts thinking his phone is being tapped and he totally freaks out—sweating and everything.

So anyway, this weekend he went to a convention—of “X Files” nuts, paranoid freaks, computer nerds, and anyone else without anything to do, sitting round talking about security and freedom and stuff. I know this because two weeks ago, when creeping up on Nigel, I saw a brochure for the convention, and it was called Between Security and Freedom—Drawing the Battle Lines. Nigel only told me what it was because I threatened to tell everyone about it if he didn’t.