Foursome by Jane Fallon Read Free Book Online Page B

and falling over.’
    Now I’ve started I can’t stop.
    ‘And, just for your information, that happened months ago and was a complete one-off. Now they’ll think it happens all the time. Like I go out every night and drink myself stupid.’
    Lorna is looking at me like a puppy who has just been told off for chewing up the carpet. What? What have I done? I’m innocent!
    ‘I heard you,’ I say, as if that isn’t obvious. What am I, clairvoyant?
    ‘I just thought it was a funny story,’ she says, all big eyes.
    I’m terrified she’s going to cry on me. She has a habit of turning on the tears when it suits her. She does it all the time with Joshua in particular. It always works. It somehow seems to make him forget she’s a forty-two-year-old woman with a mortgage and an eating disorder, and he comes over all paternal and completely forgets whatever it was he was having a go at her for. I put it down to the fact that his only daughter left home last year to go to university and he’s feeling a bit unneeded. Anyway, I need to divert the tear train before it gets to the station because there’s no way I’m going to be getting on board.
    ‘Fine,’ I say. ‘I was just saying, maybe in future, you know…’
    ‘OK,’ she says in a pained voice. ‘I’m sorry.’
    ‘I said it’s fine. Don’t worry about it, OK?’
    So she sits snivelling at her computer for a few minutes and then flounces off in the direction of the ladies,’ almost bumping into Joshua who is coming out of the kitchen, clearly having given up on waiting for one of us to offer him a cup of tea.
    ‘Are you all right?’ he says, all concerned.
    ‘Yes, I’m OK,’ Lorna says in a voice that manages to convey ‘no, I’m not, that nasty bitch upset me’. Joshua shoots me an accusatory look. Round one to Lorna.
    Lorna has been at Mortimer and Sheedy for ten years, since she was thirty-two. She had been drifting around in a variety of secretarial jobs and junior management positions ever since she left college, never finding anything that made her feel passionate, until she walked into the little attic rooms of Mortimer and Sheedy for an interview and fell in love. Now she had found her niche she was fiercely ambitious. She decided that she would stay there for three years or so, learning everything there was to learn about contracts and castings and how to keep clients happy as well as earning them money, then look for a position as an agent at one of the larger, better known, theatrical agencies. But before she knew it Mortimer and Sheedy felt like home, Joshua and Melanie like family. Now she couldn’t imagine working anywhere else, even if it meant that her career had stalled. How do I know this? She told me, breathlessly recounting the whole story of her life, in the first thirty seconds of meeting me, while I nervously sipped my bottle of water and waited for my interview. I was going back to work for the first time since Zoe was born, seven years before. I wanted to work two days a week from nine thirty till six, and I wanted my office to be on the Piccadilly line. Those were the only criteria. I would have walked the streets if the hours and location were right. William had just started school and I wanted a no-pressure job where a day taken off because a child had a temperature wouldn’t be viewed as a disaster.
    Like Lorna, I guess I never realized how much I would come to love what I do. I’ve been here six years. Six years of listening to her prattle on. Sometimes it feels like a lifetime.
    We sit in subtext-laden silence for most of the afternoon. Lorna in the wounded corner, me in the righteously indignant. As you know, I take no pleasure from upsetting her but it does, at least, shut her up. Which means that I can get all my calls and callbacks made and, by five thirty, I have cajoled all our boys into parting with their money and I’m heading out the door. Lorna has barely looked up from her work all day and I’m feeling bad