In the meeting room, the senior sales team were already seated round the glass table, trading banter with one another. They glanced up uninterestedly when she walked in, muttering apologies. Graeme looked furious. Well, it was his fault, thought Issy mutinously. If he hadn’t left her to wade through a flood she’d have made it on time.
‘Late night?’ sniggered Billy Fanshawe, one of the youngest, cockiest salesmen, who thought he was irresistible to women. It was annoying how often his sheer persuasive belief in this proved it to be true.
Issy smiled without showing her teeth at him and sat down without grabbing a coffee, even though she desperately wanted one. She sat next to Callie Mehta, the only senior woman at Kalinga Deniki. She was director of Human Resources, and looked, as ever, immaculately groomed and unperturbed.
‘Right,’ said Graeme, clearing his throat. ‘Now we’re all finally here, I think we can start.’
Issy felt her face beam red. She didn’t expect Graeme to give her any special favours at work, of course she didn’t, but she didn’t want him thinking he could pick on her either. Fortunately nobody else noticed.
‘I spoke to the partners yesterday,’ said Graeme. KD was a Dutch international conglomerate with branches in most major cities in the world. Some partners were London-based but spent most of their time on aeroplanes, scoping out properties. They were elusive, and very powerful. Everyone sat up and listened attentively.
‘As you know, it’s been a bad year here …’
‘Not for me,’ said Billy with the self-satisfied look of a man who’d just bought his first Porsche. Issy decided not to minute that.
‘And we’ve been hit hard in the US and the Middle East. The rest of Europe is holding up, as is the Far East, but even so …’
Graeme had everyone’s attention now.
‘It doesn’t look like we can continue as we are. There are going to have to be … cutbacks.’
Beside Issy, Callie Mehta nodded. She must have known already, thought Issy, with a sudden beat of alarm inside her. And if she knew, that meant ‘cutbacks’ would be staff cutbacks. And staff cutbacks meant … redundancies.
She felt a coldness grip at her heart. It wouldn’t be her, would it? But then, it certainly wouldn’t be the Billys of the operation, they were too important. And accounts, well, you couldn’t do without accounts, and …
Issy found her mind racing ahead of her.
‘Now this will be strictly confidential. I don’t want these minutes circulated,’ said Graeme, looking at her pointedly. ‘But I think it’s fair to say they’re looking for a staff reduction of round about five per cent.’
Panicking, Issy did the figures in her head. If they had two hundred staff, that was ten redundancies. It didn’t sound like a lot, but where did you trim the fat? The new press assistant could go, probably, but would the salesmen have to get rid of their PAs? Or would there be fewer salesmen? No, that didn’t make sense, fewer salesmen and the same amount of admin support was a stupid business model. She realized Graeme was still talking.
‘… but I think we can show them we can do better than that, aim for seven, even eight per cent. Show Rotterdam that KD is a twenty-first-century lean, mean business machine.’
‘Yeah,’ said Billy.
‘All right,’ said somebody else.
But if it was her … how would she pay the mortgage? How would she live? She was thirty-one years old but she didn’t really have any savings; it had taken her years to pay off her student loan and then she’d wanted to enjoy London … She thought with regret of all the meals out, all the nights in cocktail bars and splurge trips to Topshop. Why didn’t she have more put by? Why? She couldn’t go to Florida to live with her mum, she couldn’t. Where would she go? What would she do? Issy suddenly thought she was going to cry.
‘Are you getting this down, Issy?’ Graeme snapped at her, as Callie started discussing packages and exit strategies. She looked up at him, almost unaware of where she was. Suddenly she realized he was looking back at her like she was a total stranger.
Chapter Three
Issy hadn’t had enough cakes left over from the bus queue for the office the day before, and anyway she would have felt hypocritical handing them out in a jaunty fashion after what she’d overheard in the meeting. However, the entire team had gathered round, demanding a treat after the break, and were horrified.
‘You are why Ah come to work,’ François, the young ad designer, had said. ‘You bake like aha, the patissiers of Toulon. C’est vrai.’
Issy had blushed bright red at the compliment, and searched among the recipes her grandfather posted to her for something new to try. And although she felt slightly sneaky doing it, she wore her smartest, most businesslike navy dress with the swingy hem, and a neat jacket. Just to look like a professional.
It wasn’t raining quite so hard today, but a chill wind still cut through the bus queue. Linda, concerned about Issy’s anxious expression – she was developing a little furrow between her eyebrows, Linda had noticed – wanted to suggest a cream, but didn’t dare. Instead she found herself babbling about how haberdashery had never been so busy – something to do with everyone taking on a huge dose of austerity and starting to knit their own jumpers – but she could tell Issy was barely listening. She was staring at a very sleek blonde woman being shown the outside of the little shop by a man she vaguely recognized as one of the many local estate agents she’d met when she bought her flat.
The woman was talking loudly, and Issy edged a little closer to hear what she was saying. Her professional curiosity was piqued.
‘This area doesn’t know what it needs!’ the woman was saying. She had a loud, carrying voice. ‘There’s too much fried chicken and not enough organic produce. Do you know,’ she said earnestly to the estate agent, who was nodding happily and agreeing with everything she said, ‘that Britain eats more sugar per head than any country in the world except America and Tonga?’
‘Tonga, huh?’ said the estate agent. Issy clasped the large Tupperware carton of cupcakes closer to her chest, in case the woman turned her laser gaze on her.
‘I don’t consider myself to be a mere foodie,’ said the woman. ‘I consider myself to be more of a prophet, yah? Spreading the message. That wholegrain, raw cooking is the only way forward.’