One Day in May - Catherine Alliott [16]
‘But how d’you know you’ll like it?’ I’d demanded. ‘Selling toothpaste, shampoo – how d’you know you’ll be passionate about that?’
‘Why do I have to be passionate?’
‘Well, what’s the point, otherwise?’
Our tutor had sat back with a watchful smile.
Kirsten’s eyes, which already, it seemed to me, had been traded in for lightless, corporate ones, met mine coolly.
‘The point is it’s good money and it’s one of the best marketing training schemes around,’ she’d said in her thick Glaswegian accent. ‘And the fast track to management level is infinitely better than in most PLCs.’
The voids of my ignorance opened before me. Trainee, management… I didn’t even know what a PLC was. It seemed a long way from discussing the pastoral motifs in The Mill on the Floss. It also seemed to me that for four years we’d been encouraged to be idealistic in our work and hedonistic in our play, and overnight were expected to transform into thrusting, power-hungry executives. And it was typical of Kirsten, who was supremely organized – one of the reasons Hal and I lived with her was she had a fine line in acquiring decent student accommodation – to be ahead of the game. The public school contingent at Edinburgh, particularly the boys, called girls like Kirsten Wee Marys, whilst the Wee Marys in turn called them the Fucking Yahs. I didn’t belong in the Scots lass camp, but didn’t really fit into the other either, being a bit dubious socially: or as Kirsten sweetly and succinctly put it, ‘Yer not really posh enough, are ye?’ I lined up with the Yahs none the less. We were laid-back, nonchalant and cool. So cool we missed the employment boat.
‘I don’t have a clue,’ I’d wailed to Hal in the coffee bar as we’d slopped our drinks across to a table. ‘Everyone else seems to have a clear idea of where they’re going and what they’re going to do and I haven’t given it a thought.’
I’d been far too busy: having fun, partying, dyeing my hair unusual shades, wearing lurex tights, drinking, smoking, meeting boys – so many boys but never the right one. As I’d looked at Hal then in the coffee bar I’d thought what a shame it was he was quite so skinny and sallow-looking, and why did he stoop? If you’re tall, for heaven’s sake, stand up. And that annoying way he had of clearing his throat before he spoke. Laura was right – she’d breezed through Edinburgh on a shoot for Harper’s when Bailey had her draped around the castle walls in Givenchy – Hal was sweet enough, but drippy. Not in the ranks of the rugby-playing heroes I aspired to.
‘Well, what d’you think you want to do?’ Hal asked.
‘I don’t know, that’s just it! Something arty, I suppose, but I’m not creative. And I like old things,’ I said vaguely, staring bleakly into space. ‘You know, china, glass, that type of thing. French stuff, mostly.’
‘Like all that rubbish in your room.’ This, a reference to my precious and nearly complete Limoges tea set.
‘Antiques of tomorrow,’ I’d told him tartly, lest it be thought I was starting some sort of bottom drawer; lest it betray my only real – and shameful – ambition: to get married.
‘Well, how about working in a museum, then? Or a gallery?’
‘Ugh, too stuffy.’ I slumped forward miserably on the table, nose to the rim of my coffee cup. I tried to drink it without picking it up. ‘It’s all right for you, you know what you want to do.’ I wiped my chin as coffee dribbled down it. ‘Save the world.’
Hal was going to be a human rights lawyer.
‘I don’t know about that, but I wouldn’t mind trying to make it a better place, at any rate.’
‘You see?’ I sat up. ‘Caring, altruistic… and you’ll be at the