Jacqueline brought the coffee (instant coffee made with coffee mate) . It seems to bizarre to me that a person can have all this money, hire full time staff and still not have decent coffee and a pint of green top milk in the fridge. The coffee was Valentino tan in colour with lumps of creamer bobbing on top. I smiled at Jacqueline in gratitude and took a sip out of politeness. The drink tasted like battery acid and I put the leopard print cup and saucer (Harvey Nicks) on the large polished Walnut table in front of me. A pile of expensively bound books sat in the middle of the table next to a silver framed out of focus photo of Michaels daughter Polo. The subject of each of the books was Michaels well known American philanthropic banking family.
Finally, Michael appeared at the top of the stairs. He stood over 6ft tall, handsome (in a plastic surgery kind of a way) dark haired and tanned rather like an enormous Ken doll. ‘Hey it’s good to see you – thank you for coming.’ I find it very hard to respond to enthusiasm with anything other than obvious distain and distrust but I stood up and let him kiss the air around my face.
He sat down beside me on the sofa and told me that he had to let Olympia his last PA go off to work in the office of an accessories business he was involved in. Naturally lacking in healthy social boundaries, he told me he had started fucking her and she had become increasingly difficult to handle. Wanting to do the right thing by her he had offered to fire her and keep her on as a no strings attached shag or end their sexual liaison and manoeuvre her into a position at his office in Mayfair. She took the job.
He went on to explain that he was really overwhelmed, that he had a business to run, a new girlfriend and a hostile divorce case to settle. His marriage to Tania had ended when she had been less than sympathetic to a major coke binge he had embarked on during her pregnancy with Polo. As he confided in me I stopped feeling nervous that I wouldn’t get the job and started to feel a real fear that he was actually going to hire me. The thing with Michael is that essentially he is a very kind man and the thing with me at that point is that I was essentially a very desperate woman.
We agreed my hours and pay (too many and not enough) and I said I’d see him the next day at 10.
