‘That’s a big challenge, but I’m ready for a challenge now,’ said Sam thoughtfully, speaking as she would to an equal, a fact which she subsequently decided had secured her the job.
‘I liked you,’ said Andrew later when he offered her the job. ‘You were straight up, didn’t talk any bullshit. I like that in a person.’
Sam had heard those words before. Various bosses over the years had said they liked her straightforwardness and then it would turn out that they hadn’t liked her straightforwardness. In men, yes. In women – no, no, no.
Men who were straightforward were strong and leadership material. Women were just bitches.
But Andrew bucked the trend. It transpired that he genuinely liked her ideas and her directness.
She’d only been in the job two months when she learned she was pregnant, and had instantly rung Andrew to tell him.
‘You’re not fired – it’s not legal, anyway,’ he said, in the blunt way she was becoming accustomed to. It made a lot of sense to her that Andrew was not married.
‘I know the law, Andrew,’ she said patiently. ‘But I have waited a long time for this baby and I don’t want to sully my pregnancy or my work here with stress or any question that I’ve conned you by coming in and immediately getting pregnant.’
‘You were the best person for the job,’ he said simply. ‘We’ll work it out, you’re good at this. You’ll need a deputy for when you’re off. Organise it. Bye.’
Which was as good as a balloon-filled Congratulations On Getting Pregnant! baby shower from anyone else.
Since then, she’d been doing her very best to turn around the rather archaic ship that was Cineáltas and transform it into something entirely new.
There was so much Sam wanted to do, because the more she worked there, the more she saw the potential for greatness: fundraising in the corporate world to put dementia on an emotional par with searching for a cure for cancer.
‘Because people of all ages get cancer,’ she’d said to Ted earnestly. ‘They put their hands in their pockets to pay for research for cancer, but dementia . . . it’s something that happens in the distance. People don’t like to think about it. They might think about their parents maybe or their grandparents getting it. They honestly don’t think about themselves getting it. To use marketing-speak, which sounds hideous in this context, it’s not “sexy”. But imagine if research we’d helped to fund finally managed to do something to reverse dementia, a philanthropic cure – that would be spectacular.’
She only had a few days left of work before her maternity leave kicked in. She’d found a wonderful guy, a former Red Cross guy called Dave, to take over when she was off, but she still had so much work to do before she left.
The offices of Cineáltas were deserted at eight when she got there, so she flicked on the lights, went into her office and surveyed her perfectly tidy desk.
Sam’s mother had taught her the value of neatness in the office.
‘I hate mess,’ her mother used to say.
When Sam had been a teenager and had, unhappily and inevitably, been a pupil in the school of which her mother was headmistress, she had been into the head’s office many times, never in trouble, though. She knew better than that.
‘I expect the absolute best from you, Samantha,’ her mother liked to say, an uncoded warning.
‘Should we get that chiselled on a piece of stone for her gift?’ Joanne joked one Christmas.
‘No point,’ Sam had replied. ‘Mother would fail to see the irony and hang it up in her office.’
‘No, at home,’ Joanne said gleefully. ‘It could be the family motto.’
On those trips into her mother’s office, everything had been just so. No photos of her family because her mother did not believe in displaying personal photographs.
‘Family pictures in an office are unprofessional,’ she’d say and briefly mention a time when women were second-class citizens in the field of work and how no chance should be given to naysayers to accuse them of sentimentality.
Sam reflected now, as she looked at her perfect desk, that she owed her sense of organisation to her mother.
Today, she was interviewing for a digital marketing manager.
By quarter to nine, Rosalind, the grey-haired ladylike assistant she shared with Maurice, was in.
‘Can I make you a cup of tea? One must mind baby,’ Rosaline said.
‘One of my herbal ones, perhaps,’ Sam said, grimacing at the thought of more herbal tea.
‘Shall I bring you some biscuits?’
‘That would be lovely, Rosalind, thank you.’
Sam was grateful that at least her assistant was not one of the many who felt that they alone knew all the information about babies – from feeding them when they were in the womb to feeding them when they were out of the womb. If Sam got one more email from someone recommending a book about baby food/sleep/toilet training/good schools to apply to, she’d scream.
Biscuits and herbal tea arrived and Sam prepared herself for the first interview.
By the third one, Sam was wondering had the recruitment agency had a bit of a breakdown. All of these people were spectacularly qualified as digital marketing managers, but she didn’t see a hint of charitable nature in any of them.
Not that you had to want to live in an organically grown yurt on the side of a windswept hill and wear hair shirts to work in a charity, but it helped if you had a desire to make the world a better place.
The charity was paying a reasonable salary, but possibly people could get more in other sectors, so this would have to be a job for somebody who wanted to give something back. That was certainly why Sam had done it.
That and the desire to step off the treadmill of all those years in the higher echelons of banking, where life was something to be measured out in hours and slivers of weekends.
No wonder, she sometimes thought darkly, it had taken leaving her old job to get pregnant. Mother Nature had clearly decided that anyone who worked quite as hard as she did would not have the energy or the heart to conceive a baby. She knew plenty of female executives who were wishing they could work part-time because the exhaustion of parenting, work and housework was draining them as successfully as vampires did in horror movies.
‘The slow disintegration of the “doing it all” generation,’ one banking friend had called it. ‘Which won’t end until guys have the babies.’
‘The last candidate is waiting,’ announced Rosalind formally.
‘Thank you,’ said Sam.
‘Shall I tell him you have been a bit delayed, and you could possibly lie down for a minute?’ Rosalind pinked up at this blurring of professional lines. ‘You do look a little peaky.’