Woman of the Hour (11 page)

I spent an hour this afternoon, longer than I intended, discussing with Ziggy how her placement is going. We found a table in the Hub. When I chose her for the internship Southwark Council supported my decision but said it was possible that she would not last the course. They told me she had struggled in care and had a record of running away from her foster homes. She had a tendency to sabotage good things which were offered to her, they said. In fact, Ziggy is settling in well and she told me she likes working at StoryWorld. I asked her what she had learned so far about making TV programmes and her observations were interesting and original.

‘Is there any area of work you’re most interested in, either on the editorial or the technical side?’

‘I like watching the craft editors at work,’ she said.

‘Oh, me too. I love the editing process.’

‘It’s cool how they put the stories together.’

‘If you’re interested in editing I can look into some training opportunities. The first step would be to train up as a digital technician. Would you be OK with doing an evening course?’

‘Oh yeah, defo, thanks.’

She gave me a crooked smile and it made me feel warm inside. I think the aspect about her which touches me the most is the sense I get that she doesn’t feel she has a right to be loved. She expects to be rebuffed and when she is given any encouragement she is surprised and abashed by it. She’s a clever girl and I’m going to help her get the training she needs.

Chalk Farm flat, 7.45 p.m.

I had been on the edge of sadness all day because today is the anniversary of when my darling dad died. Dad was a professor at the University of East Anglia and his subject was medieval history. When he got the job at UEA he and Mum moved from London to a village outside Norwich and they bought a house which had this large garden, the size of a meadow. They were both so happy with this move to the country and Dad had started to keep bees. His beehives became one of the great passions of his life. He was at the bottom of the garden checking his hives on that Sunday afternoon when he suffered a catastrophic heart attack and died on the path. He was fifty-three years old. His sudden death caused an earthquake in our small family. I don’t think Mum and I have really ever got over it. It has made me more fearful and I know it affects the way I watch over Flo. I was twenty-three when Dad died and still studying for a masters. I was doing that to please him as he took great pride in my academic ability and it was he who had persuaded me to do a post-graduate degree. When Dad died there didn’t seem any point any more and I gave it up. A year later I was working at StoryWorld as a junior researcher. I’ve often thought that if Dad hadn’t died when he did I probably wouldn’t have gone into telly and I wouldn’t have got married so young.

My mum, who is a teacher, moved back to Scotland to live with her sister in Glasgow. She got herself a job in a large and demanding school and she thrives on it. She is due to retire soon. Mum has to have a purpose in life and she’s planning to do volunteering overseas. She has never said it in so many words but I feel that she doesn’t approve of my line of work. She thinks I’m capable of doing more serious work and I know she would prefer it if I was a teacher or a social worker.

There was such a heaviness inside me. I picked up my favourite photo of Dad, dusted the frame carefully, kissed his face and put it back by my bed. He had not lived to see Florence. She knows nothing about her granddad except the stories I tell her. There are so few people we truly love in our lives. I would call Mum to see how she was doing on this saddest of days.

StoryWorld TV station, London Bridge

Julius was back chairing the morning meeting. I was still thinking about what Simon told me about seeing him come out of that hospital. If it wasn’t Steven he was visiting then what was he doing there? The meeting was an ordeal because Julius and Bob both said that they thought the feature content of the show had been weak and they discussed their criticisms at some length. I was seething and kept waiting for Fizzy to say a few words in support of me but she stayed out of the discussion while the men held forth as they love to do. I felt then what I have often felt during my years at StoryWorld; an assertion of male power and a closing of male ranks.

There’s a place in every organisation where key decisions are made and it’s a place I cannot go. I’ve been in many a manager’s meeting and sometimes I’ve even chaired these discussions. And then, when it comes to the moment of decision, I am left out in an obscure way as if that moment has already taken place somewhere else. And that somewhere else is the gents’ toilet or, more precisely, the executive gents’ toilet.

One night I gained entry. I had been working late and the building was empty. I walked past Julius’s corner office and saw the locked door of the executive gents’ toilet with its security button pad on the wall. I knew the code and on impulse I tapped in the four numbers and opened the door. An overhead light came on as I walked in. It was large and bright with an abundance of white tiles striding up the walls and there was the gurgling of water. I looked around. There were three pristine urinals in a row and three cubicles and three washbasins. On the wall were three Dyson hand dryers. Three! No one had to wait here to dry their hands. I used one of the cubicles, flushed it, washed my hands and used one of the dryers. I looked into the mirror. I was the image of a successful executive woman but oh, my fearful eyes.

With Simon away and Molly and Harriet over at St Eanswythe’s hospital with the crew, it fell to me to go through the viewers’ emails with Betty to select the ones for discussion. We did this in my room and I sent Ziggy to get Betty her usual hot chocolate. Just as Gerry had done, Betty was also angling for the station to buy her some pastel-coloured outfits.

‘I found these on the Jaeger site. They’d fit the bill nicely, wouldn’t they?’ she said.

She had printed off images of two blouses, one in an apple green and one in a shade of peach. To my eyes they looked matronly and they cost a hundred and twenty pounds each.

‘Don’t you have any light-coloured tops at home?’ I asked.

‘Not that would be smart enough to work on camera.’

‘I’ll see what I can do.’

Julius’s Great Pastel Colour Edict was costing the station dear. Betty said she had come up with the idea of running a themed discussion for the next few weeks which she wanted to call Focus on Life Crises.

‘Life Crises? That sounds a bit ominous,’ I said.

‘Hear me out. Good things as well as bad things can throw people into crisis. Getting married, having a baby, moving into your first house. These are all nice events but they stress people out.’

‘That’s true,’ I said, thinking about the move to our flat in Chalk Farm. I recalled feeling empowered that Flo and I would have our own place but also fearful at the huge mortgage I was taking on.

‘And then there are the difficult life events which most of us will go through at some point in our lives. I’m thinking here of divorce, of facing redundancy or retirement and of bereavement.’

I nodded. Losing my dad had been my first and my worst life crisis, far worse than my divorce from Ben.

‘I get letters on these topics all the time and I feel I don’t do them justice. So my idea is to run with this as a theme for several weeks, with letters on a single topic each week.’

She sat back in her chair and looked at me.

‘Will it work with you doing a whole session on a single topic? We usually cover at least two topics a week to try to appeal to as wide an audience as possible,’ I said.

‘But that’s the whole point. There’s a lot to say on each of these areas.’

I couldn’t pinpoint why the idea was making me feel uncomfortable or why I was resisting her. We were going through a bad patch, ever since the John of Sheffield incident. These were all important areas to discuss. Betty gave me a steely look, the kind of look I imagined she would once have given a prisoner who was misbehaving.

‘I want to go deeper this time,’ she said.

Simon is better at managing Betty than I am.

‘OK, let’s give it a go,’ I said.

We turned to the mound of emails on my desk which Ziggy had printed for us and divided them into subject piles.

Todd called at lunchtime. I haven’t seen him for several weeks. We arranged to spend Saturday night together as Flo would be in Portsmouth with her dad. We agreed to meet at his flat in Balham. It was on one of our first dates in Balham that I had talent-spotted Ledley. We had gone to his Jamaican restaurant, the Caribbean Shack, for dinner, had drunk rum punch and eaten his celebrated Brown Stew Fish. I had watched how Ledley moved around his small cheerful eaterie and made his customers laugh.

‘He’s a legend in Balham,’ Todd said.

I got Ledley’s details as we were paying the bill and told him I’d be in touch. Todd and I walked back to his flat arm in arm. He told me something then which made me want to go on seeing him. He said at night when he walks home, if it’s late and dark and he sees a lone woman approaching him on the street, he makes a point of crossing the road so that she has the pavement to herself.

‘I’m a big fella and I think I can look intimidating, so I get out of the way.’

‘That’s such a good thing to do.’

I squeezed his arm and I knew I was going to sleep with him. His flat is above a greengrocer’s and there’s a smell of cabbage as you walk up the narrow staircase to his door. Inside it’s rather basic because Todd doesn’t care about home comforts; he’s the kind of man for whom home is where he hangs his hat, though he does possess a huge state-of-the-art TV for watching sport with one big easy chair positioned in front of it.

That first date was over two years ago. As I put down the phone I realised that our relationship has hardly evolved at all since then.

I spent the afternoon clearing my backlog of admin, checking expenses and assessing proposals from independent production companies. I researched possible courses for Ziggy which would start her on the path to becoming a digital technician. It was strange not having any of my team sitting outside my office. I was locking up when Molly came back from the day’s shoot. She dumped her rucksack on her desk.

‘You’ve had a long day. Where are the others?’

‘Zig is helping out in reception and Harry had to get away early.’

‘How did it go with Naomi?’

Molly turned a glowing face to me.

‘It was amazing. She’s so brave and so inspirational. I think you’re going to love it. Do you want to see the rushes now?’

‘I need to get home. We’ll watch them tomorrow. And Dirk, how was he?’

‘He was excellent too; showed us his prosthetic leg and it’s kind of high-tech and made specially for him. He said he’s determined not to go into a wheelchair. I made sure we got lots of cutaways as he strapped on the leg. I think Simon will like what I got.’

‘And the ICU nurse?’

We had got permission from Connie Mears to interview an intensive care nurse who worked in the unit at St Eanswythe’s as there was no way we would be allowed to film in there on the day of the broadcast.

‘Another winner, I think. I don’t envy her that job. Every case in that unit is life and death.’

‘Well done, Moll.’

Chalk Farm flat, 7.45 p.m.

The Paige influence continues. Janis told me tonight that Flo has asked her to get in some oven chips. I have always had a down on oven chips. I tapped and popped my head round the door and Flo was talking to one of her friends on her mobile so we just waved at each other and I backed out of her room.

As I was seeing Todd on Saturday night I hand-washed my best red satin bra and knickers. I bought this expensive set a few weeks into my relationship with Todd and when I brought them back to the flat I sneaked them into my bedroom as if I had done something a bit illicit. They were in a fancy bag with ribbon handles and wrapped in swathes of tissue paper and I pushed the bag under my bed. Later that evening, when Flo was asleep, I had stripped off, unwrapped them from their tissue paper and put them on. I stood and looked at myself in the long mirror. The bra pushed my breasts up nicely. Just wearing them made me feel sexy and made me want to have sex. The door opened and Flo walked in.

‘Mum!’

I was instantly embarrassed and grabbed my dressing gown and pulled it on.

‘Why did you buy those?’

I was actually blushing.

‘Even mums need a treat sometimes.’

She sat down on my bed and pushed the tissue paper onto the floor.

‘I had a nightmare,’ she said.

*

Ben called at nine and said Flo can come down on Friday night. We had a civil conversation with no reference to our last row. One of my lasting regrets is how I behaved towards him when he started to struggle against his addiction to poker. He tried to talk to me about it early on. He came back late one night looking awful. He must have had a big loss. He slumped at the kitchen table and I asked him what was wrong, where had he been?

‘I played a game of poker and I lost a bit of money; a lot of money.’

‘How much money?’

‘Too much,’ he said.

I felt frightened then.

‘Why are you doing this?’

‘I don’t know.’

He looked so lost and I had no idea how to help him. But the time I feel most ashamed about was months later when his addiction was escalating. He came home ashen-faced and by then I knew what that meant. I had seen our latest bank statement and the amounts of money he was withdrawing were excessive. I was out of my depth. How could you get a grown man to change his behaviour? I recall that I didn’t feel a shred of sympathy that time, just anger.

‘You’re jeopardising our entire future with this crazy, stupid game!’

I pulled the bank statement out of my bag and held it up to him. He wouldn’t look at it; he turned his face away.

‘Look at these sums.’ I was jabbing my finger at the withdrawals listed on the statement.

‘You’ve changed, Liz. You’ve changed so much since we got together.’