Past Secrets

‘Hi, Faye,’ said Jane cheerily and held up a sheaf of pink call slips. ‘I’ve got messages for you.’

The office was very high-tech and designed to impress. Nobody could fail to be dazzled by the glass lift, the stiletto-crunching black marble floors, or the enormous modern-art canvas that dominated the reception. Faye thought the picture looked like what two amorous whales might paint if they’d been covered in midnight-blue emulsion and left to thump around for a while on a massive canvas. But having an artistic daughter, she understood that this was probably not the effect the artist had anticipated.

‘People are scared of modern art,’ Grace said gleefully when the painting had first been hung.

‘It can be intimidating,’ Faye pointed out bluntly. ‘But this one’s a bit dull, to be honest.’

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ sighed Grace. ‘But it says we’ve arrived. We’ve come a long way from that awful dive of an office we started out in, remember.’

Faye remembered. Ten years ago, Faye had been broke after a series of dead-end jobs, and was desperately trying to get her foot on an employment ladder that didn’t involve late-night bar work. She’d been so grateful to Grace for taking a chance on her in the fledgling recruitment business she had made sure Grace never regretted it. Nobody in Little Island worked harder than Faye. The two had forged a professional friendship that grew stronger every year.

‘The ex-barmaid and the ex-banking queen, who’d have thought we’d make it?’ Faye used to say, smiling. She didn’t let many people past her barriers, but Grace was one of the few. What if Grace was a social butterfly, was married to the obnoxious Neil, and could air-kiss with the best of them? Despite all that, she was a real person. True, kind, honest. Faye trusted her, which made Grace part of a very small and exclusive club.

‘You should say “ex-beverage administrator”,’ Grace chided. ‘Besides, you should have been running that bar. If you’d had the childcare and the opportunity, you would have been.’

Grace knew Faye’s history and how she’d worked in dead-end jobs so she could take care of Amber herself. She knew most of Faye’s secrets, but not all.

Faye took her messages, walked past what was now dubbed ‘Flipper Does Dallas’, went up to her office and got ready for the afternoon meeting.

At three in the afternoon, on Mondays and Wednesdays, there was a staff meeting in Little Island Recruitment. Grace said it kept everyone in touch with what the whole company was doing.

They’d been holding it for nine years and it was a marvellous idea because it made every single member of staff feel both personally involved in the company and valued by it.

‘We’re only as good as our last job,’ Grace would remind the staff at the meeting, where there was always a buzz of conversation, until the apple and cinnamon muffins came in. ‘This is the think tank where we come up with ideas to improve what we do.’

The staff all believed the idea for the meeting had been Grace’s. After all, she’d been a banking hotshot for years before starting up the agency, and could write a book on how to get ahead in life.

It could be called Who Moved My Emery Board? joked Kevin who was in charge of accounts. Grace’s nails were things of beauty: ten glossy beige talons that clacked in a military tattoo on the conference-room desk when she was irritated.

Clack, clack, clack.

In fact, Faye had suggested the staff meeting shortly after she joined.

Grace felt that some benign presence had been on her side the day Faye walked into her life. Grace may have been the one with the financial acumen and the qualifications as long as her fake-tanned arms, but Faye was the one who’d made the agency work.

On this afternoon, nineteen members of staff sat around the conference table and worked their way through the agenda.

Today’s meeting focused on the few sticky accounts where the jobs and the jobseekers didn’t match. There were always a few. Little Island had an ever-growing client roster, with just three companies who created the problems, people for whom no applicant was good enough and who went through staff faster than Imelda Marcos went through shoe cream. Chief among the difficult clients, known as VIPs, in-house code for Very Ignorant People, was William Brooks.

It was wiser to transfer a call from him by saying, ‘It’s Mr Brooks, one of our VIP clients,’ and risk being overheard, than to say, ‘It’s that horrible bastard from Brooks FX Stockbroking on the phone and I’m not talking to him, so you’d better.’

William Brooks, the aforementioned company’s managing director, was yet again looking for a personal assistant. This was his third search in six months, the previous two assistants having decided to leave his employment abruptly.

Little Island also supplied temps, and only that morning, Faye had been on the phone to Mr Brooks’s current temp who said she was giving it a month more, ‘Because the money’s so good, Faye, but after that, I’m out of here. He’s a pig. No, strike that. Unfair to pigs.’

‘We have no PAs on our books that will do for him.’ Philippa, who was responsible for Mr Brooks, scanned through the file wearily. ‘Out of last week’s interviews, we found two wonderful candidates and he doesn’t like either of them. I don’t know what he wants.’

‘I do. He’s after a Charlize Theron doppelgänger who can type, operate Excel and doesn’t mind picking up his dry-cleaning or listening to his dirty jokes,’ said Faye.

‘If such a person existed, she wouldn’t want to work for a fat, balding executive who goes through secretaries faster than I get through Silk Cut Ultra,’ Philippa said with feeling. She hated William Brooks. The only person who seemed to be able to handle him was Faye, who somehow made William rein in the worst parts of his personality and who stared him down into submission. Philippa wished she could glare at men in the steely way Faye did. Mind you, the steely gaze seemed to scare guys off too, because in the years Philippa had known Faye, she’d never had a man around. She couldn’t imagine Faye with a guy, anyway. There was something about Faye, something about the look on her face when the computer repairman came in and flirted with everyone in the office, which suggested Faye was one of those women who had no interest in men.

‘It’s a prestigious account,’ Faye pointed out gently. ‘We’ve made a lot of money out of Brooks FX and having them as clients looks great on our prospectus. William is the fly in the ointment but it would be sensible to work with him.’

Recruitment was a delicate balance. Finding the right person for the right job didn’t sound too hard in principle, but, as Faye had discovered during her ten years in the industry, it could be impossible in practice. The right person in the right job might suddenly realise that her boss (sweet on recruitment day) was a control freak who insisted on just two loo breaks a day, didn’t allow hot drinks at the desk in case coffee spilled on the keyboard and thought that paying a salary meant he owned her, body and soul.

‘The right PA for William Brooks exists,’ Faye said. ‘And we’ll find her.’

‘Only if someone comes up with a PA robot,’ muttered Philippa. ‘They won’t complain if they get their bums pinched.’

‘He’s pinched somebody’s bum?’ This was news to Faye. Difficult clients were one thing, sexual harassment was another.

‘Well…’ Philippa squirmed. She wasn’t supposed to say. The second assistant they’d placed with William had phoned her up in tears.

Faye looked grim. ‘Tell me. Chapter and verse.’

Philippa told her and gained some satisfaction from the steely look on Faye’s face.

‘You’ll talk to him?’ Grace asked warily, also seeing the look.

‘I’ll talk to him,’ Faye agreed.

The women around the table grinned at each other. Mr Brooks was about to be taken down a peg or two. If only they could witness it, but they wouldn’t. Because Faye was so famously discreet.

After the meeting, Faye poured herself another coffee and shut the door to her sanctum.

She loved her job. Recruitment suited her perfectly because it was about placing the right person in the right job and to a woman who liked the towels in her airing cupboard folded just so and in the correct place, it was very satisfying indeed. People were not towels, but life might have been easier if they were.

Over the years, she’d discovered that the main skill was interviewing potential employees and working out whether a certain job and company would suit them. With no training whatsoever, Faye turned out to be a natural at it.

‘It’s like you can work out precisely what sort of person they are from just twenty questions,’ Grace said admiringly.

‘Yes, but you’ve got to know which twenty questions to ask,’ Faye said. She was justifiably proud of her ability, if a little amused. It was odd being successful in business by seeing through people’s façades to the character within, when the biggest problems in her private life had come from being unable to do just that.

‘It’s easy to suss people out when you’re not involved with them,’ she added. ‘You might never have met them before but it’s possible to gauge fairly soon whether someone is hard-working, easy-going, anxious, a team player, whatever.’

In the early days, they only recruited secretarial staff and the competition was vicious, but the combination of Faye’s talent and Grace’s business savvy meant the company took off. Then, there would have been no question of dropping difficult clients: they needed everyone they could get. But not any more, as William Brooks was about to find out. Recruitment was a small business where everybody knew everybody. Faye phoned a couple of her old colleagues, now with other agencies, and asked what the word was on William Brooks. Fifteen minutes later, she hung up the phone a lot wiser.

After a moment or two of deep thought, she dialled the number for Brooks FX. She was put straight through to Mr Brooks, probably because he thought she bore news of a suitable PA with the required Miss World physique.

‘Well,’ he snapped. ‘Found anyone?’

‘I’m not sure Little Island is the right recruitment agency for you,’ Faye began blandly.

‘What?’ He was instantly wrong-footed, she knew. Few agencies could afford to turn down business.

‘As you know, we work with Davidson’s and Marshal McGregor.’ She named the two biggest stockbroking firms in the country, both of which could buy and sell Brooks FX with the contents of their petty cash boxes. ‘And we have excellent relationships with both those companies, but you do appear to have peculiar requirements, Mr Brooks.’

‘I’m exacting, that’s all,’ he snapped. ‘You’ve been sending me morons. Call yourselves a recruitment agency…’