“This is Hood Road. Tessa, how far along did you say it was?”
“Exactly halfway to Highfield Road. I’ve no idea how far that is I’m afraid. We’ll just have to keep our eyes peeled.”
She’s slowed to a crawl. It’s a good job no-one’s behind us.
“Gill says the façade is all face brick and glass, and that… There it is! On the left.”
Mum flicks the indicator on. A black youth in a red T-shirt and khaki shorts, about to cross the car park entrance, hesitates, mid-stride, one foot extended. She waves him across, turns into the gravelled area with much crunching and brakes in front of a set of broad concrete steps. They’re flanked by brickwork flower boxes, but they’re empty. I guess they’re awaiting re-planting for the new season. There is a lot of face brick and glass, just as Gill described, and ‘Concrete Structures Ltd’ in bronze letters that stand proud of the brickwork over the main doors. My hands are clasped together in my lap, palms sweaty.
“Well this is it. Wish me luck.”
“You’ll be all right.” She leans across and gives me a peck on my nose. “At least you know your interviewer. Not many people get that chance. He’ll put you at ease I’m sure. I’ll be waiting for you here.”
I’m sure I should be carrying something – a file or a folder or a briefcase. People who go for interviews on TV or in movies always carry some sort of important documents with them. But I have nothing. And I really wish I’d stood up to Mum and insisted on a proper outfit. I just hope I look suitably employable. Mind you, knowing Charles, I doubt he’d notice anything unusual if I turned up in my jodhpurs, boots and show jacket.
With one foot on the lowermost step, I take a second and try to visualise myself arriving here every morning for work. The image eludes me. I can’t quite get round the not-going-to-school-anymore thing.
The main entrance doors and side panels are made of that ochre smoked glass that you can see out of but not into. My own reflection and that of Mum’s car as she parks it on the far side of the gravel area are sharp and clear, if ochre coloured. I tug on the chrome handle but the door’s heavy and I have to take a couple of steps backwards to swing it open fully. Once inside, I try to pull it closed again but it resists me until I realise that if I just leave it alone it’ll close itself. Okay. Faux pas number one.
Don’t look at the receptionist behind her desk against the far wall yet. Don’t acknowledge that you’re making a spectacle of yourself. Take your time and survey the surroundings like you’re doing a critical appraisal. Like you’ve done this before.
The reception room is high ceilinged and bright from the light coming through the large glass panes. The entrance directly faces the sun so the room has a welcoming warmth after the cool winter air. A dark sage carpet stretches wall to wall, complementing the pale sage upholstery of four black-framed easy chairs. Similarly coloured vertical blinds clack together either side of the door following my entrance. In summer, they’ll be necessary to reduce the temperature in here, make it less like a greenhouse.
The plants in their low, black containers are dark, large-leafed and abundant Delicious Monsters, and they’re impressive, but it’s the oil painting above the reception desk that’s a magnet to my attention. It must be a metre high and more than that in length and its gilt frame is slim and unobtrusive, drawing the eye directly to the African highveld scene within. The artist has captured the infinitely subtle summer colours and has given the view such depth that I want to step through the frame into its inviting world. I want to know what lies around the bend in that soft, sandy road. There are wheel tracks in the sand. Someone’s been there already.
I drag my eyes away from it. The girl behind the desk is attractive, with long dark hair. She jingles a collection of silver bangles with a flick of her wrist and extracts a sheet of paper from her electric typewriter with long fingers that terminate in perfectly shaped, peach varnished ovals. I curl my own hands together in front of me to hide my clean but disgracefully stubby fingernails.
At a guess, she’s probably a few years my senior. She doesn’t return my smile; instead she inspects me from head to toe and back up again.
“Can I help you?” she drawls, and when I inform her that I’ve come for an interview, her expression rolls over quickly from apathy through amazement to deep suspicion.
“Are you sure? This is Concrete Structures Ltd.”
She’s pretty; the scowl hangs badly on her.
“Yes?” I make it a question because I’m not quite sure what her issue is.
“Interview for what?”
What, exactly? I’ve no idea what sort of description applies to my potential new job. What did Charles say to me?
Megan. I’m to start off by assisting his book-keeper, Megan Trent.
“Book-keeper.”
The head to toe and back up again inspection has a voice this time. It gasps, ‘In a school uniform?’
She sighs. “What’s your name?”
The flawless manicured hands lift the switchboard receiver and punch a two digit number. After a brief pause she announces, “A – er, Tessa Harmand – is here to see you, Charles.”
Her telephone voice is earnest and contains silk with no trace of her irritation. She keeps her mascara and shadow framed eyes directly on my face as she speaks and I wonder why it never even occurred to me to put on some make-up, today of all days.
“Mr Owen is coming now,” she tells me and then I cease to exist. She folds the sheet of paper she took from the typewriter into three and slides it into an envelope.
I’m more than happy to be non-existent. She hasn’t offered me a seat, but I perch on the edge of one of the chairs. Within a few moments a door on the right opens and Charles fills the room.
“Tess!” he booms around his habitual encompassing beam. “Through here, girl. Through here. God, Debs, I’m so sorry. I should’ve told you she was coming. But you know how disgracefully disorganised I am. Forgive me please!”
Debs flutters her lashes at him and silkily declares it’s no problem at all, while he ushers me towards the internal door. His body is between me and the reception desk so I’m able to scuttle past in its protective lee.
Only now do I realise I’ve forgotten all about Dad’s advice to bring an A4 pad and pen. That would’ve been a good substitution for the important documents I don’t have. Oh well. I’ll have to remember what he tells me and ask questions as they arise. Or just forget everything and have to ask him again later.
The sage carpet overflows into a short corridor and beyond into Charles’s office. This room is also furnished in pale sage and black but here the illusion of space ends, for very little of the carpet is visible around the stacks of box files, cabinets and pile upon pile of folded construction drawings. The drawing prints are neatly stacked and bound by rubber bands, but they’re everywhere – on the floor, on the long tables down each side of the office, on top of the metal filing cabinets and all over Charles’s huge desk. He shifts several bundles onto the floor before sitting down, so that we’ll be able to see each other across the desk.
“Sit! Sit!” he commands. “’Scuse the mess. You know how it is.”
I don’t yet, but I’m sure I’ll find out.
“Now then. Where did that blasted pen go? I only had it seconds ago. Oh, never mind. There’s another one in here, somewhere…?”
He opens a drawer by his side and, after much rummaging and rattling, produces a black Parker biro.
“Now then. When I interview someone for a position here, I normally start by asking them to tell me a bit about themselves. But I know all about you, what you do, how you ride a horse. So it’s not exactly relevant, is it?”
How I ride a horse?
“This doesn’t involve riding, does it?”
I must sound pathetically bewildered, because he spreads his arms wide as if he wants to take me into them.
“More like riding a desk, unfortunately, my love! But have no fear. You can tailor your working hours to get away early and get to your horse. No, what I meant is, I think I know enough about you as a person. You tell me you like maths, so that’s fortunate, although it’s good old fashioned arithmetic I need you to do I’m afraid. None of this calculus and trigonometry stuff.”
He stops and turns thoughtful eyes to the ceiling, then back to me.
“However, I did say you could ultimately have a go at different things within my business and work on site involves a fair bit of the old trig. Setting out and that. Nathan’s enrolled on a civil engineering course at the Polytech from next January that includes surveying. He’s pretty good with the theodolite already though.”
He smiles. I’m nonplussed.
The theo… what?
“So would you fancy that? Having a go at anything? We can get you trained, but it’s up to you. Keeping the books, getting involved in preparing tenders, site work, ordering materials. The sky’s the limit. The only things not available to you are reception work and making tea. Debs and Sylvester would kill me.”
I’m pretty sure Debs thinks I’m here to take her job anyway.
“Perhaps we’d better start with the book-keeping. At least I know more or less what that is.”
“Of course, of course.” He pulls a copy of the college prospectus across from the edge of the desk. It’s the one I gave him last week and it’s open at the page I dog-eared. He glances over it then pushes it aside.
“So, let’s see.” He makes a scribbled note on the desk calendar while intoning out loud, “Tessa. Lectures on Tuesdays and Thursdays during terms.”
The calendar itself is barely visible through the jumble of scrawled messages in his large, bold handwriting. There are notes in various colours of ink and at all angles, including some telephone numbers written upside down from his point of view so that I can read them from my side of the desk. Does he realise that he’s written the note on the present year’s calendar?
“I would have to enrol for January 1980,” I tell him, “so there’s quite a way to go yet.”
“Mmmm,” he replies. “Well come on and I’ll show you around the premises. Megs has already gone home but you’ll meet her soon enough. Sylvester should be doing tea about now. Want some?”
Sylvester is in the post room. His crissy hair is beginning to show a dusting of white, yet his features, in that ageless African way, are those of a much younger man.
Charles herds us both towards the kitchenette.
“Sylvester’s a retired police constable. He’s sixty-five this year, aren’t you Sly? This is Tessa.”
“Welcome Tessa.” His voice is deep, warm. “Tea all round, Charles? Will you be coming from next week, Tessa?”
“Oh not till January, Sylvester. She doesn’t have sugar – just milk. We’ll have the tea in my office please Bwana.”
Charles sweeps me out and back to his office.
“Sylvester comes from Kenya, you know. Hence the Bwana bit. He’s the boss in the back office, y’see. He also does the posting and spends bloody hours in queues at Southerton Post Office, poor bloke. As you see, we’re all on first name terms.”
That’s just so Charles Owen.
Over tea, Charles suggests a starting date for me in the first week of January and casually informs me that my salary will be five hundred and fifty dollars a month, less PAYE and a small pension and medical aid society contribution.
“Is that okay?”
It’s five hundred and forty dollars more than I already receive. I have a stupid urge to giggle, my brain boggling at the thought of having all that money to myself and I start pulling some odd faces trying to suppress it. Charles doesn’t appear to notice. He swallows the last dregs of his tea, produces a few A4 sheets from a drawer below the one in which he found the pen and hands them to me. They’re stapled together and the heading states “Conditions of Employment”.
“Read the blurb – and you must, Tessa. Let your folks read it too. Talk about it. The position is for an Administrative Assistant. I hope you accept it all. If so, I’ll get an offer letter typed up. Sign and date the last page there and get it back to me sometime next week. There you go.”
So that’s it? Short of a signature, I’m employed?
He holds up a forefinger and goes, “Oh, no, wait. I’m afraid if you refuse to join in our annual Christmas meal at the Bombay Duck I can’t take you on.”
“My God, Charles, I’m in, in that case. My parents have never taken us there because my mother will never know what it’s like to be curious about foreign food, but I’ve eaten there with Danny’s family.”
“That’s it then.”
He escorts me back into the reception area. Debs ignores us both, her typewriter keys rattling with astonishing speed.
“I love the painting, by the way.”
I point, but he’s already looking up at it. At that tantalising road leading to who knows where. “Don’t you think the best paintings are the ones that make you want to get into them and be in that scene? Find out what else is there?”
He’s still for a few moments, his eyes roving over it. When he talks, his voice is softly un-Charles-like.
“My sister Annabelle. Nathan’s mother. She was only twenty when she did that one. Talented artist, that girlie. She got it from my father, and others in the family before him. I didn’t get it though. Like so many artistic people she struggled with herself – finding out who she was, what her purpose was, but she was interested in finding out. Then she never picked up a paintbrush again after that bastard married her and started knocking her about. The artist in her faded away.”
Debs has stopped typing and is watching Charles. He’s still absorbed in the painting. Then Debs has the grace to look embarrassed, stand up, gather some files in her arms and escape through the door leading to Charles’s office.
“I was hoping she’d get back into it eventually, once she got her life back, after he was gone. But then she was gone too. Brain tumour. She was dead within six months of the diagnosis so I suspect it had been present for some time and probably accounted for some of her irrational behaviour they put down to post-natal depression.”
“Does Nathan paint?”
Sometime in the distant past I’ve seen him painting fences, a large creosoting brush in his hand and black, sticky stuff all over his shirt.
Charles is once again the recognisable, jovial man I know. He guffaws and places a hand on my shoulder.
“No. But he used to draw horses very well as a child. He would draw them with everything correct – the positions of the legs depending on what pace they were supposed to be in, lines showing muscles and tendons, then colour them in. They were good – very lifelike. You should get him to show you sometime.”
I unlikely to ever do that, am I? We drift towards the entrance.
“Thank you for showing me round. And for interviewing me.”
“I’ll see you over the weekend, ja?” He winks and pushes open the glazed door for me. I wave at him as it begins to close behind me and skitter across the gravel to Mum’s car in the grip of a seriously weird mix of apprehension, excitement and sheer, utter relief.
*
It’s all a bit unreal, and the Chardonnay I’m managing to force down in between mouthfuls of veal in some sort of creamy sauce probably isn’t helping. The bottle is hovering over my glass again, the waiter’s eyes questioning. I cover the top of it with my hand and shake my head.
Rosie’s smiling and looking keen but Dad shoves his own glass out under the bottle.
“One’s enough for you, my girl.”
She doesn’t like it any more than I do, but unlike me she wants to be doing the done thing.
“Thanks for the meal, Dad.” I raise my glass and we all clink together.
“No problem, my love,” he says. “Next year you’re paying.”