Her thin lips didn’t so much as twitch at Rachel’s approach.God, this was going to be painful…
‘Hi, Olivia – thank you for coming to us this morning. It’s lovely to meet you,’ Rachel said. Somehow it all came out sounding like a question: as if she wasn’t sure who Olivia was, let alone whether she was happy to be making her acquaintance.
‘Likewise,’ Olivia said, her voice clipped and her mouth jerking almost imperceptibly in what Rachel assumed must pass for a smile.
Olivia extended a hand for Rachel to shake – cool, slender fingers with a sandpapery palm.
‘Can I get you anything to drink?’ Rachel asked her. ‘Tea? Coffee? Water?’
‘Nothing, thank you,’ Olivia replied, settling back into her armchair again. Rachel perched on the neighbouring seat, oppressed by the silence Olivia seemed determined to maintain.
‘Have you had far to come this morning?’Ugh–fail.
‘No.’
Rachel suppressed a sigh. She should have tried an open-ended question.
They sat side by side for minutes that seemed to stretch into months. Rachel kept looking over towards the meeting room, shuffling in her seat to try to work out whether Jack was ready for them. What the hell was taking so long?
Then he was striding across the room, his face bright and confident, smiling so warmly at Olivia that Rachel felt sure her chilly veneer would melt.
‘Olivia! I’m so sorry we’ve kept you waiting,’ Jack said, as if it was their fault and not hers that she’d been twiddling her thumbs for twenty minutes. He was great at this, Rachel thought, for about the thousandth time since January. If she hadn’t already known that Jack was annoyed by Olivia’s early arrival, she’d definitely have believed his apology was sincere.
Olivia stood up and shook his hand, as she had done Rachel’s, and gave him the same anaemic smile. ‘Jack. Nice to see you.’
‘Let me show you to the meeting room,’ Jack said. ‘Rachel, would you mind giving Isaac the nod that we’re about to begin? And perhaps letting Greg know? I’m sure that as our overall head of client services he’d like to meet you, Olivia – though of course it would be me or someone else here on the pro-social side of the business handling your account, should we be so lucky.’
Rachel didn’t appreciate being sent off on this errand. Jack wasn’t her boss; he didn’t tell her what to do. She glared at him but did as he’d asked for the sake of appearances, watching him lead Olivia in the opposite direction. As she loitered by Isaac’s desk, she noticed Jack and Olivia were suddenly chatting quite comfortably. ‘How the bloody hell did he managethat?’ she muttered.
Isaac was beside her before she could make sense of it, waving his arms at Greg as they headed towards the meeting room. Greg rolled his eyes in understanding at the situation and started walking over.
‘Sorry, what was that, Rachel?’ Isaac asked, turning his face a little.
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Let’s get in there and get this done.’
While Olivia’s face betrayed no reaction during Rachel and Jack’s presentation, the Lighthouse UK pitch went well. Rachel felt like she was an actress playing the part of a disinterested professional: someone who was capable of treating this as just another project, rather than a woman with first-hand experience of losing a family member too young.
She knew the stage choreography – which chair she should sit in to make sure co-presenting with Jack went seamlessly. She arranged her face just so, softening her mouth and eyes so she looked calm and obliging.
Rachel knew her lines, and how she needed to say them in order to convince Olivia that R/C could deliver her vision for the new Lighthouse website, enhancing the platform she’d imagined without deviating too far from her ideas.
In a way, Rachel realised, this was really nothing new. She’d been pretending for years that she wasn’t exactly the kind of person Lighthouse sought to help – lying by omission whenever she was asked if she had any brothers and sisters.
It wasn’t exactly untruthful to say no, was it? And it was easier –so mucheasier – not to open the door in her head that led to Lizzy. Better not to think about the things she’d felt, done and said during her sister’s long illness, and the nagging sense that she’d got so many things wrong. Better not to dwell on the knowledge that she’d never be able to fix it all now.
Olivia struck out the extra editorial ideas Rachel had included in the content plan – literally put lines through them on the paper copy of the presentation that lay on the table in front of her. She might not know it, Rachel thought, but she was crossing out people’s pain; scribbling over their messiest, least convenient emotions as if she didn’t believe they were real. As if they didn’tmatter. Frustration flared in Rachel’s chest – a flame threatening to lick up her throat and out of her mouth.
Rachel knew the advice guides she’d suggested would have been useful – vital reading, even – for some of the people Lighthouse was supposed to support. What was more, the charity’s own research confirmed the need for them. Rachel wanted to snatch Olivia’s Montblanc pen out of her thin, parched fingers; to stop its progress across the printout she was carelessly defacing.
At the very least Rachel wanted to argue – but she was afraid to make a scene. Somehow Olivia’s coolness guaranteed that gainsaying her would seem dramatic. Rachel would look like she was ranting even if she stuck to discussing the data and kept her personal feelings locked up. She sealed her lips, pressing them into a tight, straight line.
Jack didn’t react at all to Olivia’s brusque dismissal of the points Rachel had tacked on to the strategy. He’d told her when they test-ran the pitch that he didn’t expect they’d make it onto the final site map – so she shouldn’t have been surprised that he didn’t defend them. He caught Rachel’s eye and nodded his head at her, so slightly that nobody else would notice. It wasn’t anI told you solook – more an acknowledgement that she’d tried, and commiseration that she’d failed. A gesture that meantNow we move on.
Isaac and Greg congratulated the two of them on a job well done after Olivia had left. Greg hadn’t stuck around for the whole meeting, and joked that as an Aussie he couldn’t cope with the sub-zero temperature in the room. ‘You didn’t need me,’ he said, ‘and that woman iscold. It’s like she has her own personal weather system: if I’d stuck around for the whole hour I’d have needed two weeks on Bondi Beach just to warm back up.’
Olivia had said she’d be in touch once she’d made a final decision on which agency to instruct. Isaac and Jack were confident, but Rachel mostly felt indifferent – relieved that the pitch was done and glad that, even if it went their way, her part in the Lighthouse project was now over.
‘Lunch?’ Jack said as Isaac walked away from them, already on his phone.
