‘I knew you would,’ said Oszkar, relieved.
In the open-plan office where staff took orders for ordinary bouquets and finalised details for big events, Lou stared blankly at her computer for a while. She could hear the bustle of the shop floor beneath her and hum of voices from the back room where the cooling room kept valuable flowers at their peak. Emails pinged in rapidly but she couldn’t make herself look at them. Not crying was taking up all her energy. She tried her deep breathing, but it felt suddenly impossible. She felt ... she searched around for the right word. Hurt, that was it. Hurt.
She did so much for Blossom, for Oszkar and Bettina. In the early days, she’d run the company single-handedly when her employers went on holiday. Twelve years she’d worked for them, did that mean anything? Her sister’s voice came into her head:But you never asked for anything, never asked for any position or share in the company, did you?
I shouldn’t have had to, Lou answered silently.
But still Toni’s voice was in her consciousness:Not everyone is as kind as you are, Lou. People let you down. You have to fight for things.
Toni had said this to her before. It was another of her sister’s mantras. Toni identified what she wanted and then went for it, like a heat-seeking missile.
Lou’s approach was more organic – what was for you, wouldn’t pass you by. There was a reason Oszkar hadn’t given her the job. Something better was coming along. She wasn’t ready to be an office manager. If it’s for you, it won’t pass you by, she told herself over and over. The universe would provide. Wouldn’t it?
Chapter Two
Fresh from her twice weekly early morning blow-dry, Toni Cooper led the way up the stairs past the indifferent watercolours on the walls and into the smaller of the upstairs offices of Women in Business. As a high-profile mentor for the charity, she could have asked for the bigger office but Toni, who’d worked for years in radio broadcasting and then TV – interviewing celebrities, business magnates, sports stars and politicians – knew that the size of a person’s office meant absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things. Big offices often just meant big egos.
It was a snug room, but the view made up for it: from the desk, Toni could see the whole of Dublin’s rooftops in what she called the art-and-market part of the city. WIB was a charitable organisation and had no money to spend on fancy offices, so their base was on the third floor and attic of an old warehouse, with a set designer and two sculpture studios beneath them and a herb importer across the road. Today, the scent of rosemary was palpable in the air, and Toni took in a deep breath as she placed two mugs of instant coffee on the low table and grabbed her notebook from the desk. Folding her long limbs elegantly, Toni settled herself into an armchair and looked at the woman opposite her.
Fragrant, fluttery and lipsticked, she decided.
Toni was good at coming up with three-word descriptors for people. Oliver, her husband, had thought it was like a party trick when they were first married and used to make her do it for all guests in their home. But nobody liked being reduced to three words, Toni had found. People liked to think they were mysterious and rounded, worthy of scores of adjectives, and so most of the time Toni kept the skill to herself.
The woman in the office smiled tentatively at Toni, who swapped ‘fluttery’ for ‘tentative’ and took a grim sip of coffee. It was not easy to be a success in business if you were tentative. Business success generally required ovaries of steel, a phrase which quite often shocked people when Toni said it aloud.
‘Nobody ever complains about “balls of steel”,’ Toni would regularly point out to her board. From the beginning, she had felt the board would all benefit if she didn’t mince her words, and in the past year and a half since she’d taken up her new role, they had been shocked non-stop.
Men thought that testicles were the strong bits and ovaries were delicate, while the actual possessors of ovaries knew that ovaries pumped out eggs that could grow into actual humans – it was incredible what the female body could do, Toni often thought, even though she had never grown a human herself and was glad of the fact because she still had a pelvic floor and could sneeze without wetting herself. But still. Balls and men were not made of steel. Women were.
Oliver loved it when she held forth at parties about how women were the stronger sex.
‘Did I rattle on too much about men not appreciating women?’ she’d asked in the taxi home after a particularly raucous dinner party some months ago. ‘It’s the mentoring. I get so annoyed at how women are treated. You wouldn’t believe the stories I hear.’
Oliver wrapped one long arm around his wife in response and leaned in, his patrician face looking effortlessly handsome, even after he’d let his greying hair grow long for the part of a detective on television.
‘You’re magnificent when you’re arguing, Toni,’ he murmured, nibbling her earlobe.
Toni felt the flutterings of desire in her belly. Nothing was more erotic than a man who loved you for who you were.
In the small Women in Business office, Toni’s mentee began to speak.
‘You see,’ began Ms Tentative, who was there for an hour-long mentoring session and had waited six months to get seen by Toni Cooper herself. ‘I want to be taken seriously in my company or else I have to move. I’ll have no option.’
Toni nodded. The woman, whose real name was Susanna, was fully stocked with intellect and degrees. On paper, she was perfect. In real life, she had long chestnut hair that gleamed silkily, was petite and had an undeniable beauty which she was trying to hide with heavy-framed glasses and a long skirt suit with a jacket a size too big – covering herself up like an antelope hiding from big cats at the watering hole, and Toni understood the impulse.
The twin attributes of being beautiful and petite could definitely be a problem. Tall people, like Toni herself, were taken more seriously. Unfair but true. Nobody would ever dream of sitting on the edge of Toni Cooper’s desk and smiling benignly down at her the way they did to so many other Women in Business. Any that tried were instantly sorry, and in consequence, some men called her a ball-breaker.
They weren’t real men like her husband, she thought. Oliver had never been emasculated by her success.
‘Tell me,’ she said now, looking at Susanna, who was watching her eagerly, a notebook on her lap, ready to write down the pearls of wisdom because, damnit, Toni Cooper was fabulous, and if she couldn’t help Susanna, nobody could. ‘What is the word you use most? In general conversation?’
‘Sorry?’ Susanna blinked.
Toni held up a hand.
‘You don’t have to say another word,’ she said. ‘Sorry– it’s the Woman’s Mantra—’
‘No, that’s not the word—’ began Susanna.
