As she spoke to a few of her co-workers in the foyer, she saw Frank paying for his items and leaving. She walked outside and saw him get onto a pushbike, his photographs piled into a courier bin on the back.
Grace sighed.
Frank turned and waved to her as he rode off, missing being hit by a car by a few inches. Grace winced as she waved back. A bike courier, she thought. God help me Birdie, you didn’t mention that!
Grace didn’t have any taste in men, as mostly she avoided them. They assumed a lot about her from her family and education, even the way she dressed. The blue bloods that asked for her number were probably perfect in Birdie’s eye in terms of pedigree, but there was something she found lacking in them. Honesty, integrity, work ethic, she noted more often than not.
But the bike courier had charmed her and she admired him for wanting lovely things on his walls. At least he was trying to better himself, she thought and she went about her last day with a heavy heart, trying to not think about the bottle of wine in the refrigerator at home, waiting for her.
8
‘I know you don’t want to be here but you said you were the knight on a horse, so either listen or fuck off.’
‘You can’t speak to me like that,’ screamed Carlotta.
‘I can and I will. Suck it up and sit your ass down.’
Carlotta hated Chris more and more each time she sat with him to go over the company’s financial statements. The meeting with the bank was a mere week away. Besides Violetta turning up when she felt like it to swan around the design area with her TV crew, and Grace finishing off her work at Cranfields and only at Pajaro a few days a week, Carlotta felt she was the only one who was putting in the hours. She hadn’t been able to ride her horse, which she had brought down from Connecticut and had housed at a private stable just outside of the city. And John wasn’t returning her calls.
Instead, she was stuck in an office with Chris, who reminded her of a monkey with an unusual talent for wielding a calculator and an obsession with triple bottom lines.
Chris wasn’t faring any better with Carlotta. After Violetta's moving speech in the boardroom he had hoped for a moment that Leon’s daughters might pull it together. But so far Carlotta was the only one putting in, and she had no interest in her subject, a huge amount of attitude, and an apparent dislike for her teacher as well as the subject matter.
‘You’re impossible,’ she said, standing up and pacing the room.
She was so tall next to Chris, almost a full head higher than him, not that he seemed to mind.
‘Sit the fuck down,’ he ordered.
‘Why do you say fuck all the time?’ she asked, her arms crossed. ‘Swearing isn’t necessary to make your point.’
‘I only say it when I’m fucked off. And right now, you are fucking me off.’
Carlotta sat down. No one ever spoke to her like that and she didn’t like it, not a bit.
‘I am still one of the owners of this company,’ she said imperiously.
‘Get over yourself,’ he said, dismissing her.
Carlotta pursed her lips, like she had seen her mother do when she was cross with one of the girls.
‘Can I continue?’ Chris asked her.
Carlotta shrugged.
Chris bit his tongue. Carlotta was infuriating, he had decided. Her lack of grace and arrogance was frustrating, and she gave Chris no credit for his knowledge or the time he had been spending with her. The way she spoke to him and the other staff at Pajaro was insulting and embarrassing. It was a shame, he decided. She could have been an interesting woman, if she wasn’t such a bitch. Her hardness gave her an ugly quality that endeared her to no one. The staff ran the other way when Carlotta strode into Pajaro and he was left with the short straw to educate and occupy her. Grace and Violetta weren’t faring any better with their reputations either. After the initial boardroom pep talk, they had been noticeable by their absence, Chris had noticed.
‘So, we need to get the overheads down, a pay freeze across the board has been recommended and we need to get sales up. It’s quite simple. We need to spend less and make more money.’
‘Well, it’s simple when you put it like that but when you start showing me pie charts and graphs and bloody equations on Excel, you lose me. Plain language works best for me,’ she said.
Chris sighed. It had been a long hour. Trying to keep a thread of pleasantry between them, he changed the subject. ‘So, how’s your riding going?’ he asked.
‘It’s not,’ said Carlotta sulkily. Didn’t he know he was the reason that she wasn’t out on her horse right now, where she could stop thinking about spreadsheets and her mother who still hadn’t made any improvement. Surgery was next, the doctor had told her sister, and she was devastated at the thought of her mother on the operating table.
‘My daughter rides horses,’ said Chris brightly.
‘That’s nice.’
