Page 27 of If I Never Met You

She got up and strode out quickly, looking neither left nor right, trying to keep a poker face. She could still sense the heads snapping up and whispers from receptionist’s viewing gallery as she passed.

A WhatsApp from Bharat.

V sorry if that was an insensitive question Loz, I blurted, wasn’t thinking. Are you OK? Xx

Laurie

Yep, thanks, don’t worry. As much as is possible, can you reassure people I’m fine? You & I can talk in private sometime. Can’t face Team Kerry’s gang of lookalike raptors in Charlotte Tilbury descending on me Xx

Bharat

LOL. Perfect descriptionSure Xxx

Bharat was raucous and silly, but he was good people, and she was deeply grateful for his friendship at that moment. He loved drama, but he was ethical about it: not at the expense of the feelings of those he liked.

Her phone rang with a call from Dan as she neared the mags court. He was breathless and discomposed, as well he might be.

‘Laurie, Laurie, I didn’t decide to tell everyone. Someone at Rawlings saw Louise Hatherley from ours at the cop shop and she came straight back and blabbed it, and I had to face it down as best I could.’

‘Megan’s told people at her place?’

‘She’s got morning sickness and refused a drink at some do last week and apparently someone guessed.’

‘Megan didn’t have to say it was true? Or tell people you were the dad, did she? Fuck, Dan, is this why you only told me this weekend?’

‘She said she panicked, it came tumbling out. I was going to talk to you about how we handled it here … fuck.’

‘Know something about your mistress, and soon-to-be mother of your child, Dan? She’s a fucking lying bitch,’ Laurie said.

As she spoke, she felt a tap on her shoulder, and turned. The pasty pale, grinning face of Darren Dooley was in front of her.

‘Alright, brief? Want me to sort her out for you?’

Trudging back to the office from court that afternoon was the longest walk. Darren Dooley pleaded guilty and got off with community service and a suspended sentence. By contrast to Laurie’s gloom, he was cock-a-hoop.

Coming second in a happiness contest with a boy who’d thumped a newsagent in a row over a resealable pouch of mini Wispas, what even was life? Laurie offered him a wan smile as they parted.

‘Don’t rough up any more pensioners, from now on. OK?’

Laurie had never felt the truth of the idea of work being a comfort before, and many people wouldn’t have found hers a comfort. But she was good at her job, and it always felt like an absorbing, necessary thing to be doing.

And she had high standing at Salter & Rowson. Laurie was not only talented, she was diligent, and never rested on her laurels. Usually it was the plodders who were hard working and careful, and the naturally gifted who did an Icarus. Not Laurie. She quickly learned that the scariness of standing in front of magistrates was directly proportional to how thoroughly you’d done your homework. She was often up against worse-for-wear posh lads for the prosecution, almost proud of winging it, using cut-glass vowels like a scythe. Well, Laurie thought it was way more rock’n’roll to know your case back to front and wipe the floor with them.

‘Your Honour, I think you’ll find that, IN FACT…’ was the most overused phrase in her work vocabulary.

Mr Salter didn’t build an empire without being able to spot talent, and he had seen something in Laurie from the start.

‘You have that rare adaptability,’ he’d said at a Christmasdo of years past. ‘You’re able to speak authoritatively in court and yet stay approachable with clients. Nor do you let the moreribaldof your colleagues get a rise out of you, and without ever stooping to their level. You’re a one-woman masterclass in how to handle this job.’

Bharat had mimed two fingers down his throat behind Salter’s back, segueing into an audacious blow job mime that only Bharat would risk, an inch from his boss.

Whenever Dan admired her dedication in this way, she’d joke that as a woman of colour in a man’s world you had to work three times as hard to be thought of as half as good. A joke, except it was true. And she’d never got into trouble, she never fell over at the Christmas do.

Laurie also never asked for anything, perks or pay rises. Some male colleagues muttered that this was the key reason for her popularity with the bosses. But Dan getting ahead had been the win for both of them. Laurie had coached him and supported him and urged him on to get his departmental headship. She felt vaguely daft about that now, as a self-sufficient woman – it had never occurred to her that he might leave her, and she should be looking for advancement for her own sake. She’d not exploited her professional potential because her fulfilment was in her personal life.

Though in honesty, as much as Laurie knew Salter & Rowson thought the world of her, she still doubted they wanted the ethnic bird in board meetings. Dan used to joke that you wouldn’t mistake them for a Benetton poster.

God, she missed him. Or, a version of him that was now consigned to history.

---