Romy added an extra squirt of Arpège and assessed herself in the mirror. There weren’t too many lines around her eyes and her blonde hair was naturally thick. Her figure was still trim, even after two natural births in her thirties.
The smell of pancakes was wafting under the door of the bathroom and she heard the yelps of competitive male conversation about football and action scenes in movies, her boys trying to outdo each other in front of their beloved father. She smiled to herself; they were both slightly flat when he went away, and yet all he had to do was turn up for breakfast and Oliver and Patrick would come alive like flowers turning to the sun.
She felt torn about the boys—they knew there was something special about their father, and they tried to play to it when they could, even if they knew her reticence about her husband’s macho side. She’d gone along with the karate lessons, although she wasn’t totally comfortable about Sensei John’s nostrums for life. But she had succeeded in persuading Alec to sell his motorbike before Patrick was born, and she’d warned her sons off rugby, even though they were fascinated with the game their father had played at boarding school.
She applied lipstick, staring at herself and wondering what she was going to do about this family. Her eruption on the beach at Deauville had taken her by surprise as much as it had hurt Alec. She’d known a reckoning was coming as her PhD had drawn to its conclusion and Oliver had started school. But she hadn’t grappled with how much bitterness she felt until she was sitting on that beach destroying him. She’d gone too far, said too much. But she was alone, and angry with Alec for making her feel so weak. Becoming immersed in her dream job hadn’t helped. And neither had her attraction to her boss, David. It wasn’t just his looks and his easy sense of humour. He was an intellectual with plans to improve the world. He shared his thoughts with Romy, while her own husband kept everything to himself, occasionally creeping around the apartment at night, or breaking into paranoia as he challenged her about conversations she’d had. Romy needed to speak about her husband—as every woman did—and in Ana she’d found someone who understood what she was going through and offered her unconditional support.
‘Coffee’s ready,’ Alec called from the kitchen.
Romy stood straight, flattened her blouse against her belly and smacked her lips at the mirror.
She turned to go then looked back. Then she added one more squirt of Arpège to her décolletage, before walking out to join her men.
■
The WIP meeting finished at 10.29 sharp, the Tirol Council think-tankers being mindful of David’s edict that no meeting should last longer than half an hour.
Romy took a photo of the whiteboard that contained her green energy financing plan, before wiping it clean.
‘Excellent presentation, Romy,’ came a male voice from behind her, as the participants left the meeting room. ‘I hope Gerard took notes; he might learn how to stop sending us all to sleep.’
Romy turned with a smile to face David. He was an athletic, handsome man in his early forties who wore expensive suits and no tie.
‘Gerard needs to have PowerPoint taken away from him,’ she joked. ‘It’s become his security blanket.’
‘I need to remind people that we’re not Americans,’ said David, with a flash of good dentistry. ‘Not everything has to be a slideshow.’
He pushed his hands into his pockets, as Romy collected her laptop from the conference table. ‘Your matrix of how the energy transition will be financed?’ continued David. ‘It’s going to be an influential white paper, but I’d like the OECD to see it first.’
Romy looked at him, aware she was holding her laptop between them as if it were a barrier. ‘I’d like that.’
‘When I mentioned it to Klaus last week, he was excited and thought he’d like to prioritise it into the OECD agenda,’ said David. ‘I think this is something we can get into a briefing format for him before we publish it.’
‘Sounds great,’ said Romy.
David nodded and smiled. ‘I’d like you to present to Klaus, perhaps at the end of the week? If he finds it as impressive as I do, we might get an OECD mandate for our energy projects.’
‘Okay,’ she said, slightly bashful. She’d been out of the workforce long enough to have lost her youthful confidence, and now she found it hard to take praise. Ana had chided her for it, reminding her that a PhD from the Sorbonne put her in a select group of people who were expected to be thought leaders.
‘I think we should go over it together,’ said David, with a full-beam smile. ‘How about dinner?’