It was Monday morning and time for work.
Felicity Appleby looked in the mirror at the office-suitable clothes she’d bought herself in Oxford Street on Saturday. The grey jacket felt too small and the pockets weren’t large enough for anything useful, like a packet of tissues or a phone. The matching skirt was too tight, and the high-heeled shoes pinched her toes.
“How could this be happening?” she wondered.
Felicity had left university with an excellent degree in English literature and found that nobody in London was interested in what she knew about plot development in Charles Dickens’s novels or the economic realities behind marriages in Jane Austen’s novels. After several weeks of being rejected for any positions that sounded interesting, she was forced to take a job at Ruff, Tumble & Bounderby Associates, an investment bank that had been founded in the 19th century and had stayed in the same building near St Paul’s Cathedral ever since.
Although she liked the offices and the location, she was not so impressed with the job. She was called a “director’s assistant”, but the impressive title really meant “secretary”. Pay and status were very unimpressive. As if that wasn’t bad enough, she quickly learned that the clothes she favoured — floral dresses combined with Doc Martens shoes and a black leather jacket with large pockets — were not seen as suitable office wear.
“Now, I don’t mean to be rude,” the office manager Tricia had said, fully intending to be extremely rude, “but our directors expect a certain level of style and elegance from us in the office. I mean, they’re all dressed up in suits, aren’t they? We can’t go around looking like hobos!”
Felicity would like to have walked out of the job at that point, but she had a large student loan to pay back and no alternative sources of finance. So, she had swallowed her pride, studied the others and put together an office wardrobe.
She turned from her mirror with a sigh, put on a respectable raincoat, gave her leather jacket a sad little pat and went down to catch the first of two buses that would take her all the way from north London down to the bank.
It was a long ride and quite pleasant when sunny. She liked sitting upstairs, seeing how the streets changed as the bus approached St Paul’s. She liked imagining the lives of the other passengers or the people who were walking to work. But today, it was rainy, windy and cold, the other passengers smelled damp and the streets were mostly empty. Things didn’t improve when she got to work. Tricia called her and the other two director’s assistants into her office.
“Mr Ripov told me something dreadful this morning, girls. Can you imagine what he discovered when he sat down in his business-class seat on the flight back from Moscow yesterday afternoon?”
There was a silence as everybody tried to imagine.
“A seat belt?” guessed Felicity finally. Somebody laughed but stopped as Tricia gave them an icy stare.
“No, Felicity, and I’ll thank you all to take this seriously. He found that one of you had booked him a seat next to the toilet. The toilet! Now, I…”
After a 30-minute lecture on the importance of making sure directors were booked seats where they wouldn’t be offended by airplane plumbing, they were allowed to get back to their work.
Felicity had just finished checking a document about the sale and development of some building to Russian investors, when one of the directors, Mr Twobit, put his head out the door of his office.
“Could you pop out and get me a pastry?” he asked. “The usual, please, and make me a coffee when you get back. Here’s a tenner. Get yourself something, too.”
The rain had stopped, and a winter sun made the task quite a pleasant one. She liked the streets around St Paul’s. They were very old, with names like “Blackfriars Lane”, “Wardrobe Hill” or “Puddle Dock”, and walking down them, she could imagine she was a character in one of the Victorian novels she loved.
“Felicity Appleby hurried along Watling Street, her hand firmly pressing her new bonnet to her head to stop the wind from removing it. The fresh air raised her spirits and, as she entered Madame Hortense’s Patisserie in Garlick Hill, it was with a sparkle in her eye and a smile upon her lips, which did not go unnoticed by the elegant gentleman with the side whiskers and a black frock coat holding the door…”
How strange! There really was a man in an old-fashioned black coat holding the door for her as she went into the pastry shop. He raised his hat (a top hat!) to her before crossing the street.
“Did you see that man in the funny clothes?” she said as she paid for the pastries. “Is he an actor or something?”
“Man? Didn’t notice,” said the man behind the counter. “That will be £8.75, please.”
Back in the office, she delivered pastry and coffee to Mr Twobit and was in the kitchen with one of the other assistants emptying the dishwasher when Tricia walked in.
“Now, that’s enough chatting. You get back to work when you’ve finished in here. And make sure you shut all these top cupboard doors properly. I hit my head on one of them earlier this week. Wouldn’t want that to happen to any of our directors, would we?”
It was a long day. Felicity had a lot to do and nearly everybody had left the office before she was finished. She put some things away in the kitchen and was just bending down to close the dishwasher when…
“Miss Appleby, could you spare a moment? We need your help to…” said a voice.
Felicity jumped up with a little cry of surprise, banged her head on an open cupboard door above her and landed with a crash on the floor.