‘No, youngmenfrom cold countries,’ said Sam, snuggling closer. ‘Ones who do extreme gym time and are spectacularly handsome but have no idea of how gorgeous they are, and spend all their time having showers and walking round afterwards with towels hanging off their hips, showing off ... what’s that bit of muscle just below the abs, the deep V if someone works out a lot?’
‘Maybe no lodgers, then ...?’
Sam laughed, delighted with her teasing. ‘Deal. But really, money ...?’
‘We’ll manage. If you hate charity work, you can always prostrate yourself on the altar of big banking again. You are eminently employable. Plus, you have the iPhone footage of your boss at the Christmas party three years ago, right?’ he joked.
Sam laughed again. She loved this man. ‘Blackmail my boss if I hate charity work? Me likee. Now that’s a working plan.’
They had savings and a financial portfolio that Sam managed herself. Their only big spending over the past few years had been fertility treatments and Sam would never allow herself to see it as wasted money. Trying for a beloved child had been their dream: to belittle the money spent on it would be to belittle that lovely, but failed dream.
Sam’s search for a new life led to her discreetly checking out which charities were hiring.
Then she heard about Cineáltas. A forty-five-year-old charity set up to help sufferers with dementia, Cineáltas meant kindness in the Irish language and had been established by Edward Beveldon, a wealthy Anglo-Irish man whose beloved wife, Maud, had been ravaged by the disease. Edward had long gone and his son, Maurice, now past seventy, ran the charity himself.
By all accounts, Maurice’s father had been a fabulous man – able to persuade rich people to put vast sums into the charity. But under Maurice’s aegis, the organisation had fallen apart. Until the hugely successful but highly reclusive businessman, Andrew Doyle, had come along.
Joanne had pushed her to apply for the top job.
‘I’m a newbie at this. Presumably he’s hiring more than a chief executive,’ Sam said.
‘Sure he is, but you should aim high,’ Joanne said. ‘Go for the big job. Get your power red lipstick out and go in all guns blazing.’
In her interview, Sam had found herself almost talking herself out of a job.
‘What I want to know,’ she said, facing down Andrew, who was the entire interview panel, ‘is why you don’t try to merge Cineáltas with the Alzheimer’s Society of Ireland. That makes more sense.’
Andrew gave her the cool look she had already read about in many business magazines, a look that was supposed to send executives scurrying away with fear.
‘It’s because I want to set up an entirely new sort of charity,’ he said. ‘I want to focus on serious corporate fundraising for research as well as offering the sort of support that my parents got in the final days. I want to link up with research teams all over the world so we can make a difference worldwide.’
‘That’s a big challenge, but I’m ready for a challenge now,’ said Sam thoughtfully, speaking as she would to an equal, a fact which she subsequently decided had secured her the job.
‘I liked you,’ said Andrew later when he offered her the job. ‘You were straight up, didn’t talk any bullshit. I like that in a person.’
Sam had heard those words before. Various bosses over the years had said they liked her straightforwardness and then it would turn out that they hadn’t liked her straightforwardness. In men, yes. In women – no, no, no.
Men who were straightforward were strong and leadership material. Women were just bitches.
But Andrew bucked the trend. It transpired that he genuinely liked her ideas and her directness.
She’d only been in the job two months when she learned she was pregnant, and had instantly rung Andrew to tell him.
‘You’re not fired – it’s not legal, anyway,’ he said, in the blunt way she was becoming accustomed to. It made a lot of sense to her that Andrew was not married.
‘I know the law, Andrew,’ she said patiently. ‘But I have waited a long time for this baby and I don’t want to sully my pregnancy or my work here with stress or any question that I’ve conned you by coming in and immediately getting pregnant.’
‘You were the best person for the job,’ he said simply. ‘We’ll work it out, you’re good at this. You’ll need a deputy for when you’re off. Organise it. Bye.’
Which was as good as a balloon-filledCongratulations On Getting Pregnant!baby shower from anyone else.
Since then, she’d been doing her very best to turn around the rather archaic ship that was Cineáltas and transform it into something entirely new.
There was so much Sam wanted to do, because the more she worked there, the more she saw the potential for greatness: fundraising in the corporate world to put dementia on an emotional par with searching for a cure for cancer.
‘Because people of all ages get cancer,’ she’d said to Ted earnestly. ‘They put their hands in their pockets to pay for research for cancer, but dementia ... it’s something that happens in the distance. People don’t like to think about it. They might think about their parents maybe or their grandparents getting it. They honestly don’t think about themselves getting it. To use marketing-speak, which sounds hideous in this context, it’s not “sexy”. But imagine if research we’d helped to fund finally managed to do something to reverse dementia, a philanthropic cure – that would be spectacular.’
She only had a few days left of work before her maternity leave kicked in. She’d found a wonderful guy, a former Red Cross guy called Dave, to take over when she was off, but she still had so much work to do before she left.
