The Time of Our Lives by Jane Costello Page B

regularly.
    But, all in all, I think we’re remarkably stoic – something that can partly be attributed to the profuse apologies, which are so relentless I’m not sure how many more I can
take.
    We finally settle in our new room with a working shower, and it is every bit as exquisite as I’d hoped. The result is that I am now bathed, relaxed, swaddled in a robe so fluffy you could
wear it while husky-sledging across an Alaskan glacier, and intending to spend a few blissful minutes on the balcony reading before I get ready for dinner.
    ‘
Here is a small fact
. . .’
    My phone rings. I pick it up and glance at its screen, noting the words ‘Private number’.
    If I were a better woman, I’d leave it, confident in the knowledge that 99 per cent of calls from an anonymous number are from somebody to whom you don’t want to speak. But it rings
and rings until I do what I always do – huff demonstratively, then answer.
    ‘Hello, Imogen Copeland.’
    ‘Hello, Ms Copeland. I’m SO sorry to bother you. It’s Laura Greenwood here.’
    Laura, our new office administrator, is a sweet but smart Geordie in her early twenties who is so vastly overqualified for the job I literally blush when I ask her to order new pencils.
    ‘You really don’t have to call me “Ms Copeland”, you know.’ I think of Laura as the sort of woman who, a few years ago, I’d have been drinking with in a
student union bar, yet she addresses me like I’m about to send her to sit outside the head teacher’s office.
    ‘Sorry,’ she replies.
    ‘It’s fine! Look, Laura, I’m actually away on holiday at the moment,’ I tell her.
    ‘I know. I’m so, so sorry. But Diana told me that there was no alternative to phoning you.’
    Diana, David’s secretary, is a strikingly attractive divorcée in her mid-forties with an MA in Business Studies, and a PhD in calling the management wankers. She despises her job
and is incapable of engaging in conversation with David, our esteemed leader, without rolling her eyes theatrically. I suspect he’s secretly terrified of her, which is probably why
she’s still there – I don’t think Stalin would have had the balls to sack her.
    ‘Did she not tell you that Roy’s deputising for me?’
    ‘She did. Well, I already knew. The problem is, he’s nowhere to be found.’
    It’s been brilliant having Roy as a deputy, partly because I’ve known him for ever. Despite the fact that his gentle personality means he has a tendency to blend into the background,
he’s actually good fun. Unlike me, he seems to have the balance of work–family life exactly right, judging by the fact that he’s been happily married since the age of twenty-one
and has more pictures of his three kids around his desk than I have Post-it notes (and that’s A LOT).
    I worried when I first got this job – given that he’s six years older than I am and has worked at Peebles for longer than I have – that he had every right to resent my luck.
But he’s been great to work with and, although I fretted about leaving him in charge while I was away, I know that is about my inability to let go rather than his competence.
    ‘Is he in a meeting?’ I ask.
    ‘I’ve no idea where he is, but this is urgent. So he said anyway.’
    ‘So who said?’
    ‘The journalist from the
Daily Sun
.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘I don’t know how to tell you this, but . . . they’re working on a front-page story about us.’
    My heart skips a beat. The last thing I did before I left was to authorise a press release from our PR agency about a new breakfast cereal we’re launching, aimed at the teenage market. I
hadn’t thought it overly newsworthy, so the idea that they might be considering it for the front is unbelievable.
    ‘The
Daily Sun
? As in, one of the UK’s biggest newspapers? Are you sure?’
    ‘That’s what the journalist said. I sent him to Ace Communications, obviously,’ she says eagerly.
    ‘Oh, that should be that then,’ I