Iris paused outside the kitchen door and scanned the notice-board for something new to read; she did not want to go in while they were in there, and get dragged into whatever silliness they were gossiping about. Instead she eavesdropped, idly, and wondered with an increasing horror who they were talking about.

Apparently she drives him to work, but he makes her wait in the car for ten minutes so no-one notices them going in together, Stephanie was saying in her heavy Devonshire accent, which Iris privately thought made her sound rather simple.

Sally replied too quietly for Iris to hear, but they both broke into squeaking laughter. Iris could feel her face flushing a warm grenadine pink, and wanted to sneak off before she was spotted. What they said was not true, but in her experience, truth was never a mandatory element of gossip.

What d�you think, Nathan? Never dip your nib in the company ink, eh?

With a slow sense of shock, Iris became aware that she had been holding her breath; she had not realised that Nathan was also in the kitchen, although she had read the details of the office Christmas party three times without absorbing them.

She�s an idiot, Sally pronounced. If a relationship begins in bed, it�ll never be more than sex.

You should know, love, Stephanie teased.

I dunno, girls. Why should having sex with someone mean you can�t fall in love with them?

The girls jeered good-naturedly at Nathan and ushered him out of the kitchen, carrying the tray of drinks for their department. Iris stared at him stupidly as he passed; he met her eyes, but then his glance flickered sheepishly away.

Iris was uncomfortably aware of her own voice in the quiet office, and lacked the confidence not to care if other people were listening. She was good enough at her job, but newish, and shy, and the furniture had been rearranged recently, and she was not yet accustomed to the change in acoustics.

She tucked a thread of long, red-gold hair behind her ear and rested her chin on her elbow, watching the slight ripple of activity at the other end of the room, where a door opened into the tiny kitchen. She felt out of place here, as she felt almost wherever she was. She was too tall, too plain, too slow-moving. At school she had been teased for her low-pitched voice and her spectacles, and she had never quite lost that sense that someone was about to tell her how stupid she was, in their opinion. Years had passed and that had continued not to happen, now that she was grown up, but she still felt an echo of it, making her blush when she walked around a crowd of schoolgirls at the station, or crossed the road to avoid someone who might look her up and down with a sneer curling their lip.

Iris always dressed conservatively for work; plain clothes, dark colours, to blend with the filing cabinets. There were people who she had conversations with, but she often wished they would not bother her; at lunchtime she occupied a corner of the blue-painted staff lounge and opened a heavy book, which usually prevented any danger of social overture. She was not completely anti-social; she went along to office parties, usually wearing black; she even danced at the Christmas do, tipsy and fending off advances from Dave in IT.

It wasn�t even that shyness stopped her being a party animal; just that she preferred to deal with people on her own territory, at her own pace, and at a time of her own choosing. She was not unpopular, either; but as people respected her obvious desire for privacy and solitude, she was unable to reckon the number of people who were happy to spend time with her.

She had been in the job, for six months; after university, she had spent several years selling advertising space and doing various other lowly media-related tasks. She was not pushy enough to be a journalist, but she could spot an undotted i at 50 paces, so copy-editing was her fate, and one day if she was lucky she might get to be a chief copy-editor. She liked being paid to read all day, even on days when she ended up with the money pages on her desk. Read the rest of this entry »