'Fine.'
'Are you happy here?'
'Oh, completely.'
'Sure?'
'Positive. Why?'
'You aren't the woman I hired. You don't act like her or dress like her. You seem to have . . . lost yourself.'
'Oh, do I? I am the same person, I promise you.'
'You're exhausted. You haven't taken any leave since Easter. Take a week off, Sophie. Go to the coast, or the countryside, or just spend the week in bed if that's what it will take. I need you refreshed.'
'I'm fine,' I floundered, though I really wasn't. He wanted me to be a slut again? For . . . oh, I got it! The bar takings must have been down. That was all I was to him – a pound sign. A prostitute.
'You're not fine,' he insisted. 'I don't want to see you here after you finish this shift until next week.'
'Fine!' I said venomously. He gave me a startled and curious look. 'Whatever you say. You're the boss, after all.'
I set down my cup with a violent china clash and flounced out of the room.
'Jeez, Sophie, are you OK? Did he give you a hard time?'
'Go! Go home!' I said.
'Oh, right. See ya.' She left, with an uncertain backward glance at me. The words, 'Wouldn't wanna be ya' reached my acute ears despite the low muttering. Once she was through the door, I dropped to my knees behind the desk and began to cry all over the piles of leaflets underneath.
I took Chase's advice and got out of the city. Instead of photographing derelict factories and windswept underpasses, I captured bucolic scenes of sheep and cottage gardens. I ate cream teas in places with doilies on the tables and bought a National Trust season ticket. I wondered if I might be cut out for country living, imagining myself married to some rough-hewn son of the soil, frying freshly laid eggs on top of my Aga, wearing a Cath Kidston apron.
Chase would not be up for that, I was sure. Perhaps I just needed to adjust my fantasies, to let some other men into them. But the other men would not come. Chase blocked the way. I could keep him away during the day, warding him off with herbaceous borders and duckponds and elderflower cordial. But at night he seeped through the casement windows like toxic erotic fog, curling into my brain through my ears and nostrils.
'This isn't you, Sophie,' he would say in his rich, distinctive voice. 'Clean country air is for wholesome girls. You belong to the exhaust fumes and the roadside pizza stands and the cigarette smoke. You belong to the dark. You belong with me.'
He would lift my skirt and brace me against an alley wall or a railway bridge and have me in the street, his belt buckle jingling with each forward stroke, careless of the crowd of voyeurs that would build up around us. He had a lesson for me, and the lesson was that I was his.
It was no use. The longest holiday in the furthest-flung resort on Earth could not prise Chase off my consciousness. I might as well just get back to work. And order a new vibrator. Clearly I was going to need one.
A month later, I was grabbing a post-shift lunch in the bar. I was actually wearing a trouser suit for the first time in two years; if anything was symbolic of my new rule of chastity, that was it. Never more would I be felt up in the lift or bent over a washroom sink. One of my former 'client'/lovers was in the room, but he had learned not to approach me now. He peered moodily over his pint at me from time to time, but I ignored him and pretended extreme interest in the rocket salad on my plate.
So successful was my pretence that I did not even notice Chase crossing the room towards me until he had slipped into the seat opposite and adjusted his glasses for maximum staring-down-nose impact.
'Who are you?' he opened, somewhat confusingly.
'Um, Sophie Martin, your receptionist, last time I checked.' I hoped he wasn't having some form of brain seizure.
'Are you though?' No, it wasn't a brain seizure. He was making a point. He wanted to talk about me! I wanted to talk about us, but this was a start.
'What is the point you are making?' I asked, as politely neutral as I could be. 'Have I done something wrong?'
'No, no, nothing wrong as such. But when I hire a person, it's because they have particular and special qualities. I want those qualities to be sustained throughout their employment.'
'And . . . what were those qualities then?' I asked, holding my breath for his reply.
'Don't you remember?' He gazed at me wistfully; my heart began to pound. 'It was nothing to do with your telephone manner or your filing skills, was it?'
An ugly obstruction in my chest made my voice come out wrong. 'You hired me because I was good for business. You hired me to whore for you.'