The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy Read Online Free PDF Page B

give Kingsbridge a few months, then I’d move on. I thought my life would be very different by late summer.
    ‘I’m here to be your new accountant.’
    ‘You?’ said a scrappy figure in a shiny three-piece suit. It was Napier. He stopped at the door to his office and stared at me across the anteroom. ‘But you’re a woman.’
    I studied myself, the bump of my breasts, the neatness of my hands, as if I hadn’t noticed these things before. ‘My God,’ I said. ‘So I am.’
    My remark was supposed to be funny. I liked to laugh. ApparentlyNapier didn’t. He looked appalled, followed by furious. It’s a shame short men don’t wear heels; it would save the world a lot of trouble. ‘Fuck off,’ he said. He practically collided with a tinsel Christmas tree in his rush to get away from me.
    ‘You at least have to interview me,’ I called out. ‘Equal rights and so on.’
    This, it seemed, was funny after all. Napier turned and bared his teeth. Then he gave a high-pitched laugh. Yap, yap, yap . I could see the gold points of his molars. It was not very festive.
    ‘But you’re not the person I want for the job,’ he screeched.
    It was in me to get up and leave. The smell of the brewery was so nauseating I had to keep pinching the colour into my cheeks. But something about the way that man stared at me and laughed, as if I weren’t good enough, as if I never would be, brought out the stubbornness in me. ‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘I’ll wait until you change your mind.’ Now it was my turn to produce a smile. Only, mine hurt.
    I waited all morning. Every time Napier opened his office door, I was still there. ‘Any applicants?’ he’d call to his secretary.
    ‘Miss Hennessy,’ she’d say. The door would slam again.
    Around lunchtime, Napier went slinking along the corridor, almost appended to the polished wood panelling. His secretary asked if I was all right, if I wanted water, but I said no. ‘Maybe this job is not for you,’ she said softly. We listened to him scream at someone in another part of the building before he reappeared, casting round anxiously to check if my chair was empty yet. I stood and waved. ‘Here I am, Mr Napier.’ I was weak with the lack of food.
    ‘Do you like sex and travel, Miss Hennessy?’
    At last. An interview, albeit unconventional. I blushed, but I wasn’t going to be bullied. ‘I do, actually.’
    ‘Then fuck off.’ The door slammed.
    I asked the secretary if her boss liked women, and she said he did, but mainly in the back of his car. Also Margaret Thatcher, along with the Queen, though not in the back of the car. Those two were in silver frames. I said something like ‘Well, never mind,’ but the irony was possibly lost on her.
    By five o’clock, no one else had turned up. Napier’s secretary put on her coat and turned off the lights. ‘There will be other work,’ she said. ‘When the tourist season starts in Kingsbridge, there will be waitressing and stuff.’ I explained to her that I needed an office job, one that didn’t involve lifting, and that I was almost penniless. I had no time to wait. ‘Well, good luck,’ she said. I sat in silence for another half-hour. The brewery was quiet in the way an old building can be, as if silence is made up of creaks and ticks that are no longer to do with people but only with the things they’ve left behind.
    I knocked on Napier’s door and waited. Had he leapt out of the window to escape me? Had I spent all day waiting only to be tricked at the last minute? It was too much. I swung open the door and walked through the gloom of smoke. I took in a collection of Murano glass clowns glowing dimly on his desk, about twenty in all, blue and orange and yellow, like a band of melting musicians in smog. And there was Napier behind them. Swivelling anxiously from side to side on a leather and mahogany desk chair.
    ‘Don’t touch the glass clowns,’ he snarled. (As if I was going to.) I’m sorry to have to