No Place For a Man by Judy Astley Page B

they got together for lunch and a gossip, suddenly seemed like a carefully calculated ruse. It was a trap. Jess put her fork down, suddenly shaky with the foreknowledge that she, like Matt, was about to be fired. His-and-hers dole cheques looked more than likely. After all, things went wrong in threes, didn’t they? There’d be this, and then something would happen to Oliver in Australia, or the girls would be expelled from school.
    ‘Oooh. This is delicious . Such a treat.’ Paula’s usual smile reappeared as she munched a delicate mouthful of duck with a coriander and lime dressing. ‘How’s yours?’ she asked, her social skills back in place and the fleeting moment of seriousness gone.
    ‘Fine.’ Jess tried to rekindle her appetite, taking too large a mouthful of white wine and almost choking. She could have been wrong – Paula’s mind might simply be full of which new-age diets to select for the next issue, or whether to commission someone to do a piece on Smart Cats.
    ‘It’s occurred to me lately,’ Paula then began, playing nervously with her silver Tiffany bracelet, ‘that perhaps the time has come for us to take a little trot down a different bridleway with your input at the Gazette , workwise.’
    Here it comes, Jess thought, trying to maintain her breathing at a rate steady enough to keep her from faintness.
    ‘You mean, change the format?’ she prompted, praying that Paula didn’t mean ‘change the writer’.
    ‘Mm.’ With infuriating slowness, Paula worked her way through some more of her lunch. Jess was finding it hard to swallow a tiny piece of a French bean.
    ‘Of course we love your column. Wouldn’t be without it. Sweetly domestic chaos. Readers like that, makes them feel better about their own dysfunctional lives.’
    ‘Glad to provide a service.’
    ‘And you have, sweetie, you have, quite admirably. And for such a long time.’ She reached out and gave Jess’s wrist an electric little stroke. Her fingernails were perfectly manicured: evenly square-ended to look businesslike, but frosted candy pink for a hint of the girl within.
    ‘Of course we absolutely don’t want to lose you,’ she went on. Jess’s heart sank still further. The words sounded like a guillotine being jacked up ready for a long and vicious drop. ‘We’d like to keep Nelson’s Column going for at least another six months. There’d be sackfuls of letters to the Ed if we suddenly cut you out.’ Paula giggled prettily. ‘People look forward to your page, they need a kind of running-down phase, wean them off slowly.’
    Jess pushed her food around with her fork, arranging the delicate pink of the prawns in a circle around the beans. Paula munched her way through her plate of warm duck salad and Jess watched fascinated: Paula had started with the lower left segment of the plate and was eating steadily across towards the top right. Shereminded Jess of a termite, and she wondered if Paula approached other things in her life in the same way. She succumbed to the irresistible vision of her editor in bed with some gym-toned hunk, nuzzling her way down his body from right earlobe to left big toe, with a few savouring stops along the way.
    About halfway across the plate Paula resumed her speech. ‘I would like to run a few new ideas past you, Jess, see if you feel up to something a little more challenging. We had a meeting and thought it could be a good idea to send you out to do new things, and then you report back, the kind of thing which might strike the average reader in terms of, “Oh I’ve always fancied having a go at that.” And if it works, well super . What do you think?’
    ‘Sounds interesting. What kind of thing did you have in mind? Not abseiling down Canary Wharf, Paula, please.’ Jess tried to sound perky and to look as if being ‘challenged’ was something that she was keen to rise to. The gnawing dread was still there though, along with a mild feeling of being cheated: if she’d suspected