thirty-six-year-olds have to make the most of our meagre causes for celebration.’
‘I guess you do,’ he said, and walked on.
Tina glanced down at her notepad, and the list of questions she’d put together to ask the woman she was due to phone any minute now. She knew she needed to focus. Nevertheless, she found herself watching Dan as he trudged towards his desk, which was just as messy and disorganized as you’d expect. Probably a health hazard. He obviously wasn’t looking where he was going – hungover? – because he almost walked straight into the fresh-faced Scottish girl who’d just started working on the features section.
Tina had bonded with Julia McMahon, or so she thought. They’d had a chat about Edinburgh University, which Julia had graduated from a decade after Tina, and Tina had hoped that Julia might make a suitable protégée, someone she could take under her wing. She needed a lunch-break pal to take the place of the colleagues who had abandoned her for well-to-do husbands and new lives growing organic vegetables in Norfolk, or bonding with other bankers’ wives in Zurich, or making hats in Bath.
There was no doubt that Julia was luscious: she had flawless milkmaid skin and long, thick, heavy, shiny, coppery-red hair, and up until this point Tina had admired these attributes. But as Julia smiled up at Dan her friendly feelings immediately dissolved.
How irritating! Just look at her, batting her eyelashes and shaking out her hair, as if reassuring Dan that he would be perfectly welcome to walk into her any time he wanted to! She might as well just wrap herself up in a big red ribbon and invite him to untie it. Somewomen were so . . . so unsubtle! Hadn’t she figured out that you had to be careful about these things? That an overt flirtation with a colleague was a surefire way to turn yourself into a laughing-stock? Hadn’t she realized that Dan, the jack-of-all-trades newshound, was much too low in the office hierarchy to be worth making a play for? Oh well, Julia would learn, by the time she got her marching orders if not before. These young women – they were all so clueless! They all carried on as if they still believed, deep down, that a man really could be the solution to all of life’s problems!
Tina forced herself back to her list of interview questions and got ready to make the call. At the other end of the line, a tired female voice said, ‘Hello, hello?’ as a baby wailed in the background. As Tina introduced herself and reminded the woman about the article she was writing, everything that had bothered or annoyed or troubled her that morning – Dan, Justin, the flirty redhead, the
Post
’s falling circulation, the response to the Vixen Letters, her 36-year-old reproductive system, being single for real after all those years of being surreptitiously attached – all of it just disappeared, like so much audience chitchat silenced by the clarity of a lone performer stepping out on to a stage and beginning to speak.
The interview was for an article about tokophobia: fear of giving birth. This was a new subject for Tina, who had written various articles over the years about the cost to the NHS of women who were too posh to push, but nothing at all about women who were tooscared to. When she’d wound up the call and was looking through her notes, she was prompted to think of Natalie for the first time that day.
She wasn’t feeling great about how she’d left things with Natalie – their last, chance meeting had been kind of weird. Natalie had been pretty grumpy for someone who never usually had a sharp word to say about anyone:
You know what us middle-class mothers are like. Obsessed with swotting up for that all-important practical birth exam . . .
And the last time they’d got together properly had been a disaster, thanks to Lucy:
Another couple of years and it’ll be too late for you to have a baby even if you do meet someone!
Obviously Lucy had been way out of line,
‘I guess you do,’ he said, and walked on.
Tina glanced down at her notepad, and the list of questions she’d put together to ask the woman she was due to phone any minute now. She knew she needed to focus. Nevertheless, she found herself watching Dan as he trudged towards his desk, which was just as messy and disorganized as you’d expect. Probably a health hazard. He obviously wasn’t looking where he was going – hungover? – because he almost walked straight into the fresh-faced Scottish girl who’d just started working on the features section.
Tina had bonded with Julia McMahon, or so she thought. They’d had a chat about Edinburgh University, which Julia had graduated from a decade after Tina, and Tina had hoped that Julia might make a suitable protégée, someone she could take under her wing. She needed a lunch-break pal to take the place of the colleagues who had abandoned her for well-to-do husbands and new lives growing organic vegetables in Norfolk, or bonding with other bankers’ wives in Zurich, or making hats in Bath.
There was no doubt that Julia was luscious: she had flawless milkmaid skin and long, thick, heavy, shiny, coppery-red hair, and up until this point Tina had admired these attributes. But as Julia smiled up at Dan her friendly feelings immediately dissolved.
How irritating! Just look at her, batting her eyelashes and shaking out her hair, as if reassuring Dan that he would be perfectly welcome to walk into her any time he wanted to! She might as well just wrap herself up in a big red ribbon and invite him to untie it. Somewomen were so . . . so unsubtle! Hadn’t she figured out that you had to be careful about these things? That an overt flirtation with a colleague was a surefire way to turn yourself into a laughing-stock? Hadn’t she realized that Dan, the jack-of-all-trades newshound, was much too low in the office hierarchy to be worth making a play for? Oh well, Julia would learn, by the time she got her marching orders if not before. These young women – they were all so clueless! They all carried on as if they still believed, deep down, that a man really could be the solution to all of life’s problems!
Tina forced herself back to her list of interview questions and got ready to make the call. At the other end of the line, a tired female voice said, ‘Hello, hello?’ as a baby wailed in the background. As Tina introduced herself and reminded the woman about the article she was writing, everything that had bothered or annoyed or troubled her that morning – Dan, Justin, the flirty redhead, the
Post
’s falling circulation, the response to the Vixen Letters, her 36-year-old reproductive system, being single for real after all those years of being surreptitiously attached – all of it just disappeared, like so much audience chitchat silenced by the clarity of a lone performer stepping out on to a stage and beginning to speak.
The interview was for an article about tokophobia: fear of giving birth. This was a new subject for Tina, who had written various articles over the years about the cost to the NHS of women who were too posh to push, but nothing at all about women who were tooscared to. When she’d wound up the call and was looking through her notes, she was prompted to think of Natalie for the first time that day.
She wasn’t feeling great about how she’d left things with Natalie – their last, chance meeting had been kind of weird. Natalie had been pretty grumpy for someone who never usually had a sharp word to say about anyone:
You know what us middle-class mothers are like. Obsessed with swotting up for that all-important practical birth exam . . .
And the last time they’d got together properly had been a disaster, thanks to Lucy:
Another couple of years and it’ll be too late for you to have a baby even if you do meet someone!
Obviously Lucy had been way out of line,
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