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‘Our reputation with whom, Deborah? Our clients… the ones who pay our fees and consequently your wages, or every down-and-out no-hoper… ?’
‘They aren’t no-hopers,’ Deborah protested angrily. ‘These people are out of work through no fault of their own; they…’
She stopped abruptly as she saw Ryan’s expression. It was a mixture of irritation and boredom, the impatient drumming of his fingers warning her that she had overstepped the boundaries he had drawn for her.
‘All I wanted to do was to make sure that the company’s ex-employees knew exactly what the situation was with regard to their financial position…’
‘And who the hell is going to pay for the extra time you spend doing that: the extra cost of writing individually to them; the—?’
‘We had a moral duty…’
‘Grow up, Deborah. This is the real world we’re living in. We’re here to make money, plain and simple, and if you can’t understand or accept that then you’re in the wrong job. I used to wonder what it was you saw in a wimp like Mark; now I think I know.
‘I thought you and I were two of a kind… that we’d make a good team. You know how much opposition there’s been from the senior partners about my wanting to promote you ahead of people who’ve been here far longer.’
Yes, she knew it, Deborah admitted. She hadn’t thought much at first about what the consequences of her promised promotion might be—she had been far too thrilled and excited—but it was already becoming evident that there was a certain amount of jealousy and resentment among her colleagues.
So far she had managed to ignore it, reminding herself that it was a simple fact of life that when one member of a group was elevated above the others it was bound to cause a certain amount of turbulent negative emotion—for a while. In fact she had optimistically told herself that such a reaction would prove a good learning process for her, that it would enable her to perfect her pe
ople-handling skills. But somehow it wasn’t working out.
Peer envy she could handle, or at least she had always thought she could, but when it was linked to an ambiguous and somehow elusive-to-pin-down awareness that those peers were putting her promotion down not to her professional skill, but to the fact that Ryan was showing her distinct favouritism, things were not quite so easy.
No one had directly put such a view to her yet, but it was there none the less. However, confronting it was like trying to reach out and grasp a handful of air. To ask outright among her ex-peers if her suspicions were correct would be an admission of insecurity—an admission to herself as well as to others that she did not have the professional skill to separate herself from their opinions. And it would be to admit to them, and to herself, that she did not have the ability to control and command, the ability to earn their respect even if it was given grudgingly.
And now it seemed that Ryan was turning against her as well, criticising the way she was handling the liquidation, undermining her self-confidence.
For a moment she was tempted to challenge him directly and ask him if he wanted her off the account. She had an odd feeling that for some reason Ryan was deliberately trying to unnerve and upset her, by focusing his criticism of her on the one area where women always felt the most vulnerable—her different emotional attitude from that of men.
Deborah had resolved when she’d first qualified that she was not going to allow the established hard core of old-fashioned chauvinistic men who still occupied so many positions of power within every aspect of the business world to trap her into the ultimately demeaning belief that the only way she, a woman, could survive and succeed in such a world was by accepting and adopting their code of behaviour.
She was proud of being a woman; of her femininity.
‘Look, perhaps I am going a bit over the top,’ she heard Ryan saying more calmly to her. ‘But don’t go and mess up on me, will you, there’s a good girl?’
A good girl; somehow Deborah just managed to swallow down the retort that sprang to her lips as Ryan walked out of her office.
After he had gone, she found her attention wandering from the work in front of her. Was it her imagination, or had Ryan actually been implying something more than the fact that he had selected her to handle the liquidation?
She got up and walked over to stare out of the window. She knew his reputation, of course, but she had made her position plain enough and basically she suspected that she wasn’t really his type. He could be good fun when he set his mind to it, but it was very obvious that he was the one who liked to hold centre-stage, who liked and needed to control those around him, and that kind of man, even if he had been available, even if she had been attracted to him, was not for her.
No… she could never become involved with a man like Ryan, not without losing her respect for him… and for herself.
Ryan had already made one or two taunting comments about her relationship with Mark, implying that she was the more dominant partner, but that simply wasn’t true. She and Mark respected as well as loved one another.
She had been so lucky to meet Mark. The depth of her love for him was something that sometimes surprised even her. He was quite literally the rock on which she had built the foundations of her life, and it hurt her unbearably when Ryan tried to put him down.
But, much as she longed to jump to his defence, she resisted doing so, knowing how Ryan would interpret such an action. In his view men did not need their woman to champion or protect them; they did that for themselves.
He was archaic really, a dinosaur, Deborah reflected, but these Chinese whispers infiltrating the office that he had promoted her as a means of getting her into his bed didn’t really have any truth to them, surely?
She knew, of course, that he wanted to bed her, but to promote her in order to put pressure on her to do so? No, he wouldn’t do anything like that. He must know that she would never give in to that kind of sexual blackmail.
It was just as well they had the Easter weekend coming up, Deborah reflected grimly as she focused her attention back on her work. The liquidation was proving rather more drawn-out than any of them had initially imagined, and she suspected that she was going to have to spend at least part of the weekend catching up with her other paperwork.
It worried her that Mark was taking the becalming of his own career so badly. She knew how he must feel, of course, but it was, after all, a logical effect of the recession and one which he surely must have been anticipating.
‘Have you any idea what it feels like sitting there at an empty desk three days out of five?’ he had demanded angrily two evenings ago. ‘No, of course you haven’t,’ he had gone on, answering his own question, ‘because you made the right choice, the clever, wise career decision… Ryan’s right—you are better than me, Deborah…’
