“OMG! Harriet is hideous.”

JaneyBee is astonished at the turnaround. That can’t be bad, can it?

Waspeater, my other regular commentator, is also a little exercised:

“Well I never saw that coming. She seemed so good. Suddenly Raphael is a victim, not a leading man at all. She’s deliciously shocking and so violent with it. I want to get him out of that poisonous situation.”

“Don’t we all,” I thought to myself. “Don’t we all.”

*

Cortez and Kate came back from their illicit weekend glowing with post-coital pleasure.

“That,” she told me triumphantly, “is how a woman should spend two days. I can barely walk.”

“Did a lot of sight-seeing, then?” I asked.

“What did you tell Geoff?”

“That your phone had fallen from a twelfth floor window into the outdoor jacuzzi.”

“How did you know about the hot tub?”

“Well we lonely, washed-up, middle-aged women can only dream about the kind of life you alpha people lead.”

She scowled at me impatiently.

“What did he say to that?”

“He said he hoped you were still using it as it fell.”

She eyed me a moment then chose to ignore my facetiousness. (Of course, he’d believed every word I’d told him and she knew it.)

“Geoff is a little like you. Unnaturally innocent,” she told me. “Some people prefer to live off others. It can be very draining.”

“Can I be moved to a different department?”

She shrugged as if to say: “What do I care?” and sauntered off to her corner of the office to rest her legs, presumably.

 

*

 

“I need someone new, someone we can believe in,” I told my colleague, Amanda, soon afterwards.

She’s been reading the instalments of A Sordid Little Office Romance on Chapter by Chapter and we discuss it most of our working day.

“I agree,” she said breathlessly. “I know, shall we bring Mrs Baignton into the picture?”

“What Cortez’s wife? Nah. That wouldn’t work…though actually…”

I slid instantly into a reverie. It was ridiculous. I couldn’t just introduce the wife this far into the plot, could I? Anyway, the slighted missus is always damaged goods, with the suggestion that she had it coming. How could I make her sympathetic enough?

Now this is the bit you won’t believe but it was only an hour later that who should come into the office but Mrs Baignton herself. I know! For a moment I had to wonder if Amanda was somehow not only controlling me and my book, but perhaps the entire world.

“Hello,” said out visitor. She was tall and ordinary and had the whiff of exhaustion you get off the parents of small children (though, interestingly, her husband doesn’t have it.) “Cortez in?”

“I’ll just check on my diary?” I told her and rapidly typed a message to Amanda: “Windyarse isn’t in the meeting room with the boss, is she?”

“Just a moment,” I smiled up at our visitor.

Eventually I got a message back: “’Course she bloody is. I can hear them from here.”

I hesitated, bit my lip, sought out her eyes from under their drooping lids for some sign of deeper understanding and I got it. She knew. She bloody well knew.

“Ah yes,” I said. “He’s in the meeting room. Please go through.”

 

“So is Raphael straight or gay? I don’t get it. He’s lusted over everyone so far. Anyone got any views on this?”

To which I answered:

“It’s possible to fancy both men and women you know. Welcome to the 21^st Century.”

“But in a romantic novel? I’ve never heard of a bi romantic lead?”

I was still composing my response when someone else suddenly chimed in.

“I like it. Give it a chance. It’s traditional that you don’t know whether the hero and heroine get it together at the end. This version is even more tantalising.”

They’re very articulate, the members of the Chapter by Chapter online community. I wonder why I haven’t considered writing like this before. When you know you have someone actually waiting for the next instalment, you like to surprise.

Then someone called JaneyBee chipped in: “Loving Harriet! She’s so proper and English and old-fashioned and such a contrast to Raphael. Two worlds colliding. Am I right?”

I couldn’t resist diving back in. (It’s all going to go wrong anyway. You and I both know that.)

“I’m so glad you like Harriet. I love her. She’s so good and moral and decent. I wanted to create someone who was genuinely, thoroughly likeable. Someone we can all get behind.”

“Are there really people as decent as Harriet in this world?” asked JaneyBee.

“God yeah!” I told her. “There really, really are.”

*

Kate Knorr-Windlass, the junior partner in the tax department, looking sweet and unaffected in a plain grey suit and red, polka dot silk scarf, came over to my desk and leant down so that her left cheek was almost flat against my right.

“We all think you’re a wonderful asset,” she told me, and she sounded thrilled to tell me so.

My heart was bursting. It meant so much from someone like her.

“Thanks very much,” I said.

“I’ve recommended you for a bonus.”

“That’s… that’s very kind. Wow.”

Her perfume was rather headier than I’d expected from such a sensible, down-to-earth kind of girl, rather sultry, far too much jasmine in it. It made my nose run.

She turned herself round so that she could face me and gave me a swift but huge and maternal hug.

“Excellent,” she said.

“Thanks,” I told her.

She didn’t move.

“Great, thanks,” I said, waiting. “Was there anything I could do for you?”

“Since you’re asking,” she said at once, before I’d even ended the ‘oo’ of ‘you’. “There is a job you could do for me and right now please.”

I watched the fascinating transformation of her expression. She didn’t seem so maternal any more.

“Fire away,” I said.

She was writing something on the pad beside my phone.

“Here’s the number for my partner Geoff’s work place. Ring him up right now and tell him that I’ve been called away urgently to finalise a deal abroad and can’t come home tonight. Then call him from your home tomorrow and tell him that you’ve just heard that my flight has been delayed and that I’m staying on an extra day.”

“Tomorrow’s Saturday,” I said.

“So? You can call from home can’t you?”

“But can’t you call him and tell him?”

“No I can’t. I want you to do it. You want that bonus, don’t you? Then the odd bit of work at the weekends is worth it.”

“I’d rather not have the bonus,” I told her.

“Yeah, right. Like someone in your position would turn down some cash. It’s not like you have much else going for you. I heard you live with your mother.”

“What do I tell him when he asks why you can’t call him?”

“Earn your bonus,” she said with crisp authority and was off.

*

The impossibly good Harriet is about to show her true colours.

 

My new boss is about six foot two, steel grey of hair, as finickity as a Dickensian clerk but in fact American and called Cortez Baignton. Isn’t that great? Cortez!

This morning he said to me:

“You in brown again? Didn’t anyone tell you the seventies are so OV-ER?”

“I like brown actually,” I told him (we get on ever so well). “It’s very forgiving with my skin tone.”

“Not on any chart I’m looking at, sister.”

He handles the tax affairs of immensely wealthy clients. I wonder if he comments on their colour choices, too. I wonder a lot about him during the day. He’s one of those people that gets on with absolutely everybody (the polar opposite of me, in other words). I think he may bat for both sides, what’s more.

I’m also beginning to think that he and one of the other partners in the department, a Kate Knorr-Windlass, are a little sweet on each other. She’s the only other solicitor in the whole place with whom he’s tongue-tied and awkward. (There’s a partner in property called Carmen Boynton who would be a much better match in name terms but love doesn’t work like that, does it.)

Both are married or at least in relationships their partners must assume are safely permanent. When they are in the same room, Cortez is very gallant and old-fashioned and asks her if she wants to sit down or bids me fetch coffee for her whether she wants it or not. Her eyes glow in his presence and she grins a lot at anyone who’ll receive it.

“It’s a sordid little office romance,” my colleague Amanda told me this lunchtime.

“Oh no!” I protested. “I’m sure that nothing has happened between them. It’s probably all so chaste. Why should that be sordid?”

“Office romances always are,” she huffed.

“Maybe no one will get hurt,” I tried. You see I’m very fond of Cortez already. He’s the only reason I’m sticking to this awful bloody job. He can do no wrong.

But all the way home I couldn’t get him and Kate Knorr-Windlass out of my mind, the innocence of all that shyness, the fun of it, the wonderful risk of utter disaster. That’s a spectator sport if ever there was one and it’s free! But also I thought: what if an office fling was presented as a huge romance? What if it was soaring rather than sordid?

Wouldn’t that be funny.

I sat down after dinner in the new-found silence of my home and clicked on to a site called Chapter by Chapter. I’ve never written like this before – for an immediate audience. It’s just not me. But then I wasn’t going to be me. I was going to be Danby Houghton (Male? Female? Who knows?) and I was going to set out the opening chapter of A Sordid Little Office Romance.