Love Postponed

Thursday. Interview day.

Dad drove me and sat with me outside Farnells before I went in. It was a modern building — red brick, stretching further along the street than you’d expect, the kind of building that suggests the company inside takes itself seriously. I sat in the car and said nothing and dad, who had a gift for reading a room, let the silence sit for a moment before speaking.

‘Just be yourself. They like that. And be honest — they like honest.’

I nodded, and thought briefly about Dan’s entirely fabricated CV and how it had landed him the first job he’d applied for. I suspected Dan had only taken that card from the job centre because he had a thing for the woman at the desk. I returned my thoughts to the matter at hand.

‘What if I don’t like the sound of the job?’ I said.

‘Then don’t take it. There’s no rush. Find something you actually want to do. You spend a lot of your life working — this is your chance now to make sure it doesn’t make you miserable.’

I looked at him. ‘Like Aunty Glenda?’

‘Exactly,’ he said.

I got out of the car and walked in.

Dad’s words had settled something in me. No pressure. Just be honest. The interview itself, however, had other ideas about how relaxed I was going to be.

The factory manager, Derek Winters — the man who’d rung me — conducted the opening pleasantries and explained that he’d be joined shortly by the human resources manager. He mentioned her name.

Julia Snowball.

I sat with this for a moment. Snowball. I bet she’d had the piss taken out of her at school. I bet it had been relentless. The mind briefly and involuntarily produced a series of scenarios before I pulled it back to the room.

Winters was making polite conversation about public transport when the door opened and in walked Julia Snowball.

Now. I want to be clear that I had not formed any mental image of a woman called Julia Snowball. But whatever vague impression I might have assembled, it was not this. She was — and I am choosing my words with care here — genuinely, remarkably, almost unreasonably beautiful. The sort of beauty that makes you momentarily forget what you were saying mid-sentence because the sentence no longer seems important.

She leaned across and offered her hand.

‘Hello — I’m Julia. Human Resources. Nice to meet you.’

‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Tony. Tony Richards. Nice to meet you. To meet you nice.’

There was a silence of approximately one second.

I had intended to say ‘nice to meet you too.’ What emerged instead was a Bruce Forsyth catchphrase, delivered without irony, in a job interview, to a woman who had done nothing to deserve it.

Julia produced a very small laugh that lasted less than a second. She was clearly working out whether this had been a deliberate and sophisticated attempt to break the ice.

It had not.

And then, as if the universe had decided that the situation required further complication, I noticed — as Julia settled into her chair and reached for her notepad — that a button on her blouse had come undone. Not dramatically. Not catastrophically. Just enough. Just enough to create a small but undeniable porthole to her slightly tanned cleavage and the lacy edge of a white bra.

‘So,’ said Derek Winters pleasantly. ‘What do you know about our company?’

I began to speak. I recited what I knew — which was, in truth, mostly what my dad had told me — and I did so while conducting the most sustained act of visual discipline of my eighteen years on earth. The window. The ceiling. Winters’ left ear. Anywhere that was not the small and completely accidental porthole in Julia Snowball’s blouse and the lacy edge of the white bra visible within it.

More questions followed. I answered them. I found myself tilting my head back occasionally, or directing a thoughtful gaze out of the window, in the manner of a man wrestling with a deep philosophical point rather than a man desperately trying to look anywhere other than where his eyes kept wanting to look. If either of them noticed, they were too professional to say so.

At the end they both shook my hand, thanked me for coming in, and said they’d be in touch. I walked out into the car park with the relief of a man who has made it through something without disgracing himself — and the immense gratitude that no further buttons had come undone, or that her boobs hadn’t bounced outwards like Barbara Windsor’s in Carry On Camping — boing — and me coming out with a helpless ‘Ooh, matron!’

My first interview. Done.