The Interview, page 5
He watched her without responding, letting the pause go on so long he could tell she was debating whether to fill it or not. The pattern in her answers was blindingly obvious to him now. He’d been able to tell from the very beginning that she’d read one of those corny books on interview technique. She’d been concise. She’d given an example of something she’d achieved. She’d brought it back to Edge.
This time, when he leaned backwards, he scrubbed a hand over his face and took a prolonged glance at his watch. Time to crank things up a notch.
‘What skills do you think a good publicist needs, Kate?’
‘Enthusiasm. Commitment. I think you have to be a very organized person. You need to be able to think strategically. You also need resilience. And creativity, as I’ve mentioned.’
‘What else?’
‘Um . . .?’
‘Do you think you have to be a good liar, for instance?’
‘A liar?’
‘Yes.’
‘I . . . No, I think you have to be able to convey a level of enthusiasm for a product or a client you don’t always feel, but—’
‘Lying, in other words.’
His gaze bored into her. Her lips moved and he could see she was reckoning with how to respond, but he pressed on before she could.
‘What’s your opinion of Hayley?’
‘Hayley . . .?’
‘She brought you in here. You don’t remember her?’
‘No, of course I do. It’s just that—’
‘Just what, Kate?’
He saw the flash of disquiet in her eyes. She obviously understood this wasn’t something he should be asking her. After a moment’s consideration, she sat up a little straighter, raised her chin.
‘She seems nice.’
‘Does she?’
‘I think so, yes.’
‘And is “nice” all you think?’
‘Well . . . I’ve only just met her, obviously. But I’m sure she’s very good at her job.’
‘You are? Why?’
‘Because she struck me that way. You mentioned first impressions and that was my first impression of Hayley. She seemed confident in what she was doing. Relaxed. At ease.’
He drummed his thumbs against the edge of the desk, allowing more silence to develop. Did she realize that everything she’d just said was the exact opposite of the behaviour she was displaying right now? From the way she was shifting in her chair, rubbing her hands on her thighs, he was pretty sure she did. And now she glanced over her shoulder towards the door as if she was scoping out her exit.
‘Why don’t you tell me what you make of this place, Kate? The office layout. The pods. The refectory. All that. Your first impressions.’
‘It’s impressive.’
‘Impressive. OK. You don’t think it’s . . . I don’t know. Ridiculous?’
Again, she glanced towards the door. This time, she noticed that he’d caught her doing it and she tried to cover it up, straightening her shoulders, smoothing her hands across her skirt.
‘Do you think it’s ridiculous?’ she asked him, raising an eyebrow.
‘I’m asking you, Kate. I’m inviting your opinion.’
‘The truth?’
‘That’s what I’m here for.’
Somewhere in the universe, there was a distant ringing clang.
‘OK. Then I think it’s an aesthetic. I think it tells your staff and anybody else who walks in here exactly what Edge is about.’
‘And what is that, would you say?’
‘That you’re energetic. That you’re unconventional. Fun.’
‘You don’t think it looks like we’re wasting time?’
‘That would be impossible for me to say without spending more time here. But my guess is that in any given week most of the game-type stuff doesn’t get used very often.’
‘It’s all for show then?’
‘Doesn’t matter if it is. It still serves a purpose.’
‘Does it strike you as sinister at all?’
She hesitated, as if perhaps she expected him to backtrack.
‘You don’t know, or you don’t have an opinion?’ he pressed.
‘I’m . . . not really sure I understand what you mean.’
‘Well, what I suppose I mean is that having all these areas to have fun and relax, all this free food, perhaps it’s just a way to trick our staff into working longer hours. Like we don’t want them to leave, maybe.’
‘Is that what you’re doing?’
He sighed and broke eye contact, glancing down at her CV again.
‘Do you worry about your age, Kate?’
13
Friday 5.58 p.m.
‘Excuse me?’
I was reeling. How had things got so off track? I’d felt as if there was a real connection between us to begin with. Now I seemed to be under attack.
‘I’m asking if you think you’re too old for the role, Kate. Most of the staff you passed on your way in here today are already Account Managers or Elite Account Managers with us. By the time they’re your age, they’ll be looking for promotions, or moving on to start their own boutique firms, maybe thinking of starting families.’
For a second, I could almost picture Mark watching from the corner of the room. I could imagine him stepping forward to interject and shield me, tell Joel he was out of line.
‘I’m . . .’ Challenge him? Let it go? ‘I’m not sure that’s an appropriate question.’
‘Oh, it’s not. Clearly.’ He parted his hands. ‘But it is something I’m inevitably going to weigh up when I consider if I should offer you this job, whether I choose to admit it to you or not. Personally, for what it’s worth, I don’t think your age is anything you need to worry about. So you’re female and thirty-one. You could be twenty-five, and what’s the big difference? I suppose the question is, has it become a hang-up for you?’
Actually, I was starting to think a better question was, should I punch him in the nose or the mouth?
I knew I had a choice now. I could take clear offence at his sexist attitude and needling questions. Or I could treat it as harmless conjecture, play along, try to recreate the flirty rapport we’d traded earlier.
‘You’re beginning to sound like you think you’re my therapist.’
‘Do you have a therapist, Kate?’
So I wasn’t imagining it. This was targeted. It was deliberate. Not unlike some of the more out-there questions on the psychometric test, I wondered if it was a tactic that was designed to push me off balance, see how I reacted.
‘If I did have a therapist, it wouldn’t be any of your business.’
‘No?’
‘Definitely not.’
‘OK.’ He rolled out his bottom lip, bobbed his head. ‘This company you work for at the moment. Simple PR. Do they know you’re here today?’
‘I took the day off.’
‘But see, that’s not answering my question, Kate.’
Arsehole.
‘Then, no. I didn’t tell them directly.’
‘So just to get this straight, what you’re saying is they don’t know you’re here today. You’re lying to them.’
This again.
‘I’m . . . They’ve been good to me. They’re a small firm and when I decided to move on from MarshJet, they basically created a role for me. I didn’t want to upset them by telling them I was interviewing for another position unless—’
‘Unless you get the job. I understand. But your omission is a type of lie, isn’t it? You must be able to see that. They think you have a day off. They probably think you’re running errands, or maybe you’ve gone away for the weekend, or—’
‘I told them I’m having a spa day.’
‘A spa day?’
‘I told them I had to use up a voucher my brother had given me for my birthday. Which I do, as it happens.’
‘Except not today. Because today you’re here. With me.’
Me. I didn’t like that. His focus should be on Edge.
There was something different about his smile now, too. Something almost taunting. His eyes seemed oddly disconnected from it, but deliberately so, as if he wanted me to see how insincere he was being. I sensed again that he was trying to needle me. That there was another agenda here he was working towards.
‘Suppose I call them, Kate.’ He nodded towards the telephone. ‘Suppose I pick up that phone right now and call them and tell them you’re here with me. How do you think they would feel about that?’
I instinctively tightened my hands around the arms of my chair, wondering for a second if I should treat it as a rhetorical question. But then I thought once more of the pep talk Maggie had given me. I’d told him a good PR had to be resilient.
Prove it.
‘I’m sure they wouldn’t be happy about it.’
‘Because?’
He watched me again. Those eyes. I could feel them scrabbling over my skin.
‘Because they rely on me.’
‘And because you lied to them.’
‘No. It’s not like that. I—’
‘Who does know you’re here today?’
14
‘No one,’ she said. ‘Other than my recruitment agent.’
Joel’s blood was up. He could feel it thrumming through his veins. That burning again, mixed in with the buzzing in his chest. He was so dialled in to her now that he could tell it was another lie immediately.
But an unusual one. He had to give her that.
She didn’t look up or look down. She didn’t fidget, or swallow. She held herself preternaturally still. It was only in the vaguest twitching of her cheek and the very depths of her pupils that he caught the slightest hint of a tell.
She was good. Better than average, anyway. Joel had dealt with countless CEOs and board members who would have blown up at him by now. There was that one management candidate in Tokyo he’d never forget – the one who got so distressed when Joel challenged him about embellishing sales figures that he began weeping and tearing at his clothes, ripping his shirt clean open in a desperate act of corporate self-flagellation.
‘Really?’ he said. ‘You’ve told me how badly you want this job, Kate. You’ve talked many times about how excited you are to work at Edge. And yet you’re telling me you weren’t excited enough to tell anyone close to you about this interview?’
He watched her lips press together as she pondered her next move. Would she admit to the lie, or double down on it?
‘You seem flustered, Kate.’
‘I suppose I’m just wondering what this all has to do with my ability to do the job I’m here to interview for.’
Deflection. Also interesting.
He felt a wave of heat move through him as he lowered his eyes to the folio case again, tracing his finger down over her CV. The lie about swimming was an obvious and depressingly common one, but he no longer felt the need to go there. Rather, he allowed the silence to develop for so long that she opted to fill it.
‘Perhaps you could tell me something more about the details of the role I’d be doing here at Edge. If I was offered the job, I mean.’
‘No, right now I’d much rather you told me about this gap on your CV, Kate.’
‘I don’t—’
‘There’s a gap on your CV, Kate. You started working for this agency, Simple, nine months ago. You stopped working at MarshJet six months before that. Now, my maths isn’t brilliant, but even I can see that there’s a gap.’
Silence.
She stared at him. The wave of heat pulsed outwards towards his extremities as he saw the muscles in her jaw bunch and tighten. Again, her gaze flicked to the door. A kind of desperation in it now.
‘It’s OK if you quit and it took you a while to land a new job, Kate. Or perhaps it wasn’t your decision to leave MarshJet in the first place. You’d been with them, what, almost seven years? Maybe they – you know.’
He made a pushing gesture with the heel of his hand. A squawking noise in his throat.
He noticed that she was physically trembling now. Her lips had thinned, her nostrils were pinched.
‘That wasn’t what happened,’ she shot back, her fingers digging into the arms of her chair.
One more nudge.
‘You sound offended, Kate. I’m not sure why. Maybe you need a refresher on what my role is here today. It’s my responsibility to look at the information you provided to us, and the answers you give me, and identify any areas of possible concern. Which brings us to this gap. The one I noticed. Now, it’s possible you don’t want to talk about it because you’re embarrassed, or ashamed, or because you’re hiding something, or—’
‘That’s enough.’ The wavering pitch of her voice caught them both by surprise. ‘I’ve played your games. But that is enough.’
‘Is it? Shouldn’t I be the judge of that?’
Her eyes were reddening, wet. She bit her cheek and shook her head. A wounded look of hurt and defiance on her face. Of disgust.
‘My husband died,’ she said.
15
Friday 6.07 p.m.
There. I’d said it.
And it hurt.
Damn him.
Hot tears pricked my eyes. There was a lump in my throat. My nails scraped against the upholstery of my chair.
I wouldn’t cry in front of this man. I refused to cry in front of him.
But the emotion was welling up in me and when it hit like this – especially when I didn’t want it to – it wasn’t anything I could control.
I blinked, taking hold of my wedding ring, rolling it around and around my finger. Mark and I had chosen it together, on a weekend trip to Chicago. It was an inexpensive platinum band but there were so many memories wrapped up in it. A whole future we couldn’t now share.
My eyes stung. I glanced down at my hands as if somehow they could help me to hold everything in.
‘Mark was killed in the Global Air disaster,’ I whispered. ‘He was one of the victims.’
I still couldn’t say the words out loud without wanting to scream. Mark was everything to me and now he was gone. Taken from me in the most harrowing way imaginable. His plane had gone down in the mid-Atlantic, one of 210 passengers who perished.
In the silence that followed, I waited for Joel to apologize. I expected him to act appalled, backtrack, try to repair the damage he’d done.
He did none of those things.
He just watched me without speaking, his eyes like two misted pools, no hint of contrition on his face.
That’s when my anger really kicked in, hot and fast. It was the same futile rage that had engulfed me again and again since the tragedy.
I couldn’t believe I’d been made to feel this way during a job interview. I should never have been put in this position.
I looked up towards the corner of the room, blinking. I bit the insides of my mouth until it stung. To think, I’d actually wanted this job. I’d wanted it for all the reasons it was going to be so hard for me to take. A radically different environment. A complete change. Moving on. But I didn’t want it enough to be poked and prodded and turned inside out for someone else’s entertainment.
‘Forgive me, Kate.’
Something in the way he said it – the detached quality of his voice – told me he didn’t really mean it. Not even close.
I glared at him.
It was too little, too late anyway.
Keep your dignity. You still have that.
‘That was insensitive of me.’ Again, his words were robotic, lacking any genuine compassion, edging towards contempt. He closed the folio case and lifted it from the desk. ‘Kate, I’m going to step out for a moment, get some paperwork, give you some space.’
My breathing had grown ragged. There was a ringing in my ears. I turned and looked away from him as he stood up from behind the desk and came around to pause beside me.
I could smell his cologne again. Was that the scent Mark had worn?
My head swam. I choked back tears.
Then his hand reached out suddenly and for an awful second I thought he was going to touch me, until he swerved at the last moment and lifted the plastic folder containing my answers to the psychometric test.
‘Drink some water if you need to, Kate. I won’t be long.’
16
Fifteen months ago
‘Have a drink of water, Kate. Take your time.’
Time was the last thing I needed. I craved answers and information. I wanted someone to burst into the room and tell me this was all a horrible mistake.
Staring at the water in the glass in front of me, I tried to shut out everything else. My body felt rigid with terror and shock, my heart swollen painfully. My hand was clutching my mobile phone so tightly I could hear the plastic creak.
‘This can’t be happening,’ I murmured.
‘We were only notified moments ago, Kate. There’s nothing in the media yet and the information we have from the airline is sketchy, at best. There could be other explanations, but with Mark and the others on that flight we called you in here as soon as we heard.’
I nodded vaguely, tears quivering in my eyes. Sir Fergus Marsh, the founder and majority owner of MarshJet, was sitting across his vast teak desk from me. His shirtsleeves were rolled up on his forearms, his tie loosened off. It was quarter to nine in the morning inside the MarshJet headquarters close to Gatwick, but his anguished, red-eyed expression made it look as if it was the middle of the night in a military campaign room.
Mark had been flying home on a late-night flight from New York with five other MarshJet employees. They’d been part of a pitch team sent to make a presentation to an American airline. Three of the team were colleagues of mine from PR.
There was a click to my left and Sir Fergus glanced towards the man who had just set down a phone on a breakout table in the corner of his office. Dominic North, his CFO, was rail-thin and prematurely balding with sunken eyes and a mouth that was pressed into a thin line. He was a withdrawn, taciturn figure, known for watching from the wings while Sir Fergus took the spotlight, but his presence told me how serious things were. In my time at the company, I’d learned that Sir Fergus never made any major decisions without Dominic’s backing – or, as Mark sometimes cynically suggested, his say-so. The expectation among most of us was that when Sir Fergus eventually retired, Dominic would take over.
