‘A woman can be a tailor and a man a dressmaker,’ replied the receptionist. ‘In those cases, it refers to the clothes that are being made, not who’s making them.’
‘Yes, that’s true, I suppose.’ He paused and thought about it. ‘Steward and stewardess, there’s another. On a plane, you know? Although a pilot can be either sex. I’ve actually flown on planes where the pilot was a woman.’
‘And you remained on board?’ asked the receptionist in a dry tone.
‘Nothing I could do,’ replied George with a shrug. ‘By the time they start announcing themselves over the tannoy you’re already taxiing towards the runway. Now, I have to say that I’ve never approved of the word poetess. I think it’s pretentious and, let’s face it, poets don’t need any encouragement on that front. And then there’s fireman. We don’t say firewoman, do we? Although there probably aren’t any. That’s more of a job for men, I think.’
‘Actually, these days, we say firefighter,’ replied the young woman. ‘It’s a gender-neutral term. And yes, there are plenty of women employed in that field. My cousin, in fact, is a firefighter.’
‘And is she a woman?’
‘Well, no,’ she admitted. ‘But there are women there. In the fire station.’
‘Cleaners, perhaps.’
‘Not cleaners, no,’ she snapped.
‘Office personnel, then. Organizing the rotas and what have you. I wouldn’t be keen on my daughter being a firefighter, I have to say.’
‘And what does your daughter do?’
‘Absolutely nothing,’ he said. ‘Well, I say nothing, but she claims to help out at soup kitchens and places like that. I’m not sure that she really puts in a lot of effort, though. The homeless. That’s gender neutral too, isn’t it? That phrase gets bandied around a lot these days, doesn’t it? They’re talking about having gender-neutral toilets at the BBC. It doesn’t bother me in the slightest; it’s the women I feel sorry for. I don’t believe they really want to go to the loo when there’s a nasty, smelly man in the next stall, do they? I said that to one of my colleagues and she accused me of being sexist, but I was genuinely trying to help. Then she told me that I was helping in the wrong way, which made no sense to me at all. I try to keep up, I really do, but every day something else has changed and it’s impossible to stay abreast of it all, don’t you agree?’
‘I haven’t given it much thought,’ she said, leafing through some papers.
‘And who makes these random determinations, I wonder? About what we should and shouldn’t say.’
‘Society.’
‘Well, you know what Mrs Thatcher said about society, don’t you? That there’s no such thing, just individual men and women and families.’
The receptionist ignored this remark and George glanced at his watch. Really, this was too much. The last time he’d been kept waiting this long was on one of his visits to Highgrove, and one expected it there. Welcomed it, even.
‘Well, if you’re talking to him, tell him I said hello,’ he said eventually.
‘Talking to who?’
‘To Aidan.’
‘Aidan doesn’t exist,’ replied the young woman, taking a folder from her drawer and putting some papers in it before staring across at him defiantly.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘I said, Aidan doesn’t exist,’ she repeated. ‘He never did, really.’
George laughed. ‘What a peculiar thing to say,’ he said. ‘Are you telling me that he was a figment of my imagination?’
‘Not yours, mine,’ she replied, standing up and disappearing into a sort of kitchen area located to the rear of the room.
George stared at where she might have been had she not had the rudeness to walk out on him and blinked a few times. There had been an Aidan, hadn’t there? That hadn’t been somewhere else, like his agent’s office, or the Salford studio or his doctor’s surgery? But no, he was sure of it. He could picture the chap sitting right there behind that same desk. They’d spoken a hundred times.
The receptionist returned now with a cup of coffee, having not offered to bring him one, and took her seat again, and George felt a burst of resentment building inside him. Who the hell did she think she was to condescend to him like this? He was George Cleverley, after all. The fourth-highest-paid presenter on the BBC. One of the few television personalities over the age of fifty without a criminal record.
‘I don’t mean to be rude,’ he said, leaning forward and glaring at her. ‘Nor do I wish to labour the point, but I can categorically tell you that a chap named Aidan had your job before you.’
‘Aidan never existed,’ repeated the receptionist, and this time his irritation blew up into a full-blown rage.
‘No, of course you’re right,’ he said, throwing his hands in the air. ‘I’m making it all up. There never was an Aidan. I’ve completely invented him. And the Berlin Wall is still standing too. As is the USSR. And Al Gore won the presidency.’
The receptionist frowned. ‘What’s the Berlin Wall?’ she asked. ‘And who’s Al Gore?’
He sighed and sat back in his seat. This was ridiculous. He wasn’t going to continue engaging with her if she was going to be so obtuse. It was a waste of everyone’s time. Fortunately, at that same moment, Jeremy appeared from behind a glass door and George rose from his seat with some difficulty and rather a lot of indecorous grunting.
‘Finally,’ said George, feeling petulant now as he shook the solicitor’s hand.
‘Are you all right?’ asked Jeremy. ‘If you don’t mind me saying so, you look a little peaky.’
‘I’m fine,’ he replied. ‘Let’s go to your office. We’ll talk there. And you,’ he added, turning to the young woman. ‘Well, I don’t know what to say to you. But I assure you that I am right, and you are wrong, and that’s the end of the matter. Also, the water out of that machine is tepid. If it has a blue tap and a red tap, then the blue should be cold. Otherwise, it’s false advertising, and this is a firm of solicitors, after all. You wouldn’t want to get sued.’
ARCHIBALD ORMSBY-GORE
‘I should probably say from the outset that I know who you are,’ said Angela Gosebourne, taking a seat opposite Nelson in the same consulting room that Dr Oristo had used. Although the setting was a familiar one to him, he didn’t feel quite as comfortable as he once had, perhaps because the walls had, overnight, been stripped of their artwork, while the bookcases, which until recently had overflowed with volumes on psychotherapy, nutrition and Caribbean cooking, now lay empty. There was no soft music playing either, no flowers on the cabinet by the window, no box of tissues resting on the table between them. Even the scent in the air was different, for where Dr Oristo had favoured a soothing fragrance of orange and lemon, Dr Gosebourne seemed more partial to Dettol, which made Nelson want to put on a pair of rubber gloves and find a sink to clean. Looking around, he felt as if he’d wandered into a crime scene where most of the evidence had already been taken away by forensics. ‘So, if you’d prefer to work with someone else,’ she continued, ‘then I’m happy to make a referral.’