Andrew’s face was the first thing I saw when I regained consciousness. He was fast asleep in the chair next to me, his head pillowed on his wadded-up jacket, still holding my hand as if he had never let go. He looked drawn and grey and ten years older than when I had last seen him.
He opened his eyes as I stirred. ‘Louise?’
If I had ever had any doubt that he loved me, it vanished then. I had only ever seen him cry twice before: at the death of his mother, and the birth of our daughter. ‘Don’t try to speak,’ he’d said anxiously, leaping up and pouring me a cup of water from the jug beside my bed and holding it to my lips. ‘They had to intubate you. Your throat will feel sore for a while.’
‘The baby—’
‘He’s fine. At home with Min. She’s been looking after him while I’ve been here with you.’ He sat on the bed next to me and took my hand again, mindful of the IV line taped to the back of it. ‘I thought I’d lost you,’ he said thickly. ‘Oh, God, Lou, don’t ever do that to me again. I couldn’t bear it if I lost you. I love you so much.’
The room had suddenly filled with medics, checking charts and monitors and IV bags, making adjustments and tapping away on iPads, frowning in concentration. I’d leaned back against the pillows while they’d bustled around me, smiling exhaustedly as Andrew kissed the back of my fingers. Our son was safe. Our children wouldn’t have to face growing up without a mother. Our family had survived, and we’d be stronger than ever because of what we’d been through together. Everything was going to be OK.
A week later, Andrew left me.
Chapter 5
Caz
My right heel snaps as I step off the escalator at Sloane Square. I pitch forward, arms windmilling as I try to keep my balance. ‘Goddammit!’
The tide of commuters shows no mercy. I hobble to the side before I’m mown down, leaning one palm against the wall and hingeing my knee behind me to check my heel. It’s totally fucked. Even if there was a heel-bar nearby, which there isn’t, and I had time to wait for them to fix it, which I don’t, the heel hasn’t come unglued, it’s completely snapped in two. There’s no way it can be repaired. These are my sensible M&S granny shoes, the ones I can actually walk in. Now I’m going to have to spend the rest of the day teetering around in the four-inch stilettos I keep at work for date nights with Andy.
I hitch my bag back onto my shoulder and stumble unevenly down the King’s Road. I haven’t even had my first coffee and my day has already gone to shit. First the invitation, plopping onto our doormat this morning like a giant embossed turd, and now this. Bloody Celia Roberts. She probably jinxed me with some kind of voodoo spell over the invite involving chicken feathers and the blood of virgins.
AJ is waiting anxiously for me in reception. He falls into step with me as I swipe my card through the chrome barrier and head towards the elevators. ‘Where have you been?’
Grumpily, I jab the lift button. ‘Jesus. It’s not even eight. Where’s the fire?’
‘Patrick’s doing his best to contain it. You’ll see when you get to the conference room.’
‘AJ, I’m not in the mood for games.’
‘Tina Murdoch’s here.’
I look up sharply. ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. The client meeting’s not till next week.’
‘Tina brought it forward.’ He peers down at my shoe. ‘What happened to you?’
‘Don’t you read Vogue? Uneven heels are going to be huge next season. You wouldn’t believe the strings I had to pull to get these.’
‘Seriously?’
I love AJ, though he’s never been the brightest crayon in the box. But he seems particularly distracted this morning, and I suddenly notice his eyes are suspiciously red. ‘You all right?’ I ask.
‘I’m fine,’ he says quickly.
‘AJ—’
‘Wayne and I had a bit of a row. It’s nothing, really. Lover’s tiff. Come on, we’d better get a move on. Patrick’s waiting.’
Upstairs, the office has the deserted air of the Marie Celeste. Everyone is already gathered in the glassed-in conference room on the other side of the atrium. Patrick spots me as I change my shoes at my desk, and gesticulates for me to come and join them. I hate open-plan offices.
AJ thrusts a file into my hands and we hustle into the conference room. When Patrick assigned me this campaign, it never occurred to me I’d end up working for Tina. Seven years ago, when she was still working for Whitefish, she almost torpedoed my career. I was her assistant brand manager on Tetrotek, a major client, and we’d been working for months on a new pitch for them. Two days before we were due to deliver it, a rival advertising agency, JMVD, presented a pitch that was almost word for word the same as our own. Assuming we were the plagiarists, Tetrotek defected to JMVD, and there was a searching internal investigation at Whitefish to find the source of the leak.
I’d been the one seen lunching with JMVD’s Business Director twice in the preceding month; lunches Tina had personally asked me to take, and subsequently denied requesting. She deliberately set me up to take the fall to get back at me because she’d found out about me and Andy. Patrick came within a whisker of firing me, and it took me a long time to claw back my reputation and his respect.
‘OK, Caz,’ Patrick says, as I sit down, ‘why don’t you start us off with a general overview of where we are on the campaign?’
‘Well, it’s still early days,’ I stall. I haven’t even had a chance to speak to the creative team yet. I glance at Nolan Casey, our Creative Director, for help, but he’s studiously looking the other way. ‘Once we have a clearer idea as to what Univest are looking for on this—’
‘But you’re the Account Director,’ Tina coos. ‘Isn’t it your job to tell me what I want?’
I’ve had enough of this. ‘As you know, Univest has scored a few own goals recently,’ I say crisply. ‘That business with the sweatshops in India – it got a lot of media play. Then there was the scandal over the paraben-free shampoo, and the recall on the organic fabric softener—’
‘Obviously, that was all before my time as Marketing Director,’ Tina says testily.
‘What you need to do now is re-establish trust,’ I shoot back. ‘JMVD’s policy when they had the account was to ignore these PR disasters and focus on the quality of their brands, but I think they’re wrong. What we need to do is acknowledge the elephant in the room, apologise, and move on.’
‘Apologise?’
Patrick makes a calming motion to Tina. ‘Let’s hear her out.’
AJ nudges me and I open the folder he gave me, fanning a sheaf of bright graphs and pie charts onto the beech conference table. I have no idea what they’re supposed to show, since I haven’t yet had a chance to read them, but no one looks at them; they never do. ‘You’re not the only conglomerate to get caught up in a shit-storm like this. But the more you ignore it, the more the problem festers.’ I tap the graphs as if it’s all right in front of us. ‘After Barclays apologised to its customers for the role it played in the Libor rate-rigging scandal, the problem went away. Toyota, Goldman Sachs, even Facebook – they’ve all used the corporate apology as a means of addressing branding issues, and they’ve all bounced back quickly as a result.’