Violet feels she deserves a treat. She’s sat through an hour-long meeting with Marc this afternoon, avoiding his eyes and maintaining an air of utter cool throughout. Now she feels inexplicably sad, like she’s mourning for something inside her that has died. Though she’s still wearing the expensive uniform that goes with her job, her heart’s no longer in it. It’s not just Marc, it’s the whole idea of wealth preservation that once seemed so glamorous, and now just seems sleazy. She takes her laptop into Luigi’s to enjoy a real cappuccino while she checks her personal email and hunts for jobs online. There must be more worthwhile jobs out there.
She notices her eccentric neighbour Berthold is there too, sitting at a corner table deep in conversation with a pretty middle-aged woman with auburn hair. They both look a bit flushed. M-mm, she thinks. Something’s going on there.
‘Hi!’ she greets him, but he just smiles mysteriously. He is strange, but not half as weird as the old lady he lives with — who, according to Len the wheelchair man, is not his mother at all, but just pretends to be. His new love-interest looks nice though, despite her funny hairstyle.
She logs on. There are emails from Jessie and Laura asking how she’s getting on, and an invitation to a party at Billy’s tonight. And — her pulse quickens — here’s a response from a job she’d applied for, inviting her for an interview. It’s a junior position with an investment company based at Canary Wharf, a household name, at least in some kinds of households. Good pay; terrific prospects. It’s exactly what she’d been hoping for. But now she hesitates.
There’s also an email from an NGO promoting women’s enterprise in sub-Saharan Africa, inviting her for an interview. The pay is pitiful compared with the other, but the job is interesting and carries a lot of responsibility, and its African base is in Nairobi, so she’d be able to stay with her grandma. She can apply for both and make up her mind later.
Both jobs are asking for references, which is kind of awkward at the moment, but instead of just naming her professors at uni she writes an email to Gillian Chalmers, asking her to be a referee. She gets an automated ‘Out of Office’ response. Gillian Chalmers is in Bucharest but will attend to her message on her return; there is no indication when that will be. The closing date for both of the jobs is tomorrow. She takes her courage in both hands and fills in the forms online, naming Gillian Chalmers as her first referee.