Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

‘Listen – don’t go getting sidetracked from your project with all this new job and birthday party nonsense. There’s a task in hand, and you need to remain focused on it. Faint heart never won fair chap, you know. Imagine if you were to provide me with a handsome, appropriate son-in-law, Eleanor. That would be normal, darling, wouldn’t it? We’d be a normal family then.’

She laughed, and I did too – the concept was just too bizarre to contemplate.

‘I was cursed with daughters,’ she said sadly, ‘and yet I always wanted a son. A son-in-law will do at a push – so long as he’s suitable. You know: polite, thoughtful, considerate, well-behaved. He is all of those things, isn’t he, this project of yours, Eleanor? A well-dressed man? Well-spoken? You know I’ve always tried to impress upon you how appropriate it is to talk properly and look the part.’

‘He seems very nice, Mummy,’ I said. ‘Very suitable. Handsome and talented and successful. Glamorous!’ I said, warming to my theme. Obviously, I knew next to nothing about him, so I was embellishing the scant information I’d gleaned about Johnnie Lomond from my research. It was quite fun.

Her tone was dismissive, with an undercurrent of menace. The default tone.

‘Oh God, I’m bored now. I’m bored of this conversation, and I’m bored of waiting for you to complete this project. Off you trot, Eleanor. For heaven’s sake, please don’t trouble yourself by being proactive and pushing forward with it. Oh no, heaven forfend. Please – continue to do nothing. Go and sit in your empty little flat and watch television on your own, just like you do Every. Single. Night.’

I heard her shout, ‘I’m coming! Dinnae start without me!’ The click of a lighter, an intake of breath.

‘Must dash, Eleanor. Toodle-oo!’

Dead air.

I sat down and watched television alone, like I do Every. Single. Night.

I suppose one of the reasons we’re all able to continue to exist for our allotted span in this green and blue vale of tears is that there is always, however remote it might seem, the possibility of change. I never thought, in my strangest imaginings, that I would find my job anything other than eight hours of drudgery. It was a source of astonishment to me that, on many days of the week now, I’d check my watch and see that hours had gone by without my noticing. The office manager role involved numerous new tasks that I had to learn and perfect. None of them was beyond the wit of man, obviously, but some were reasonably complex, and I was surprised at how enthusiastically my brain responded to the new challenges placed before it. My colleagues had appeared somewhat underwhelmed upon hearing the news that I would be managing them, but, thus far at least, there had been no sign of mutiny or insubordination. I kept myself to myself, as always, and allowed them to get on with their jobs (or what passed for doing their jobs, insofar as they never actually did very much, and tended to make a mess of the few tasks they actually attempted). For the time being, at least, the status quo prevailed, and they were, so far, no more ineffectual than they’d been prior to my installation.

The new role meant interacting with Bob more frequently, and I discovered that he was actually quite an amusing interlocutor. He shared a lot of details about the day-to-day running of the business with me, and was delightfully indiscreet about clients. Clients, I soon learned, could be very demanding; I still had limited direct contact with them, which suited me just fine.

From what I could gather, they would routinely be completely unable to articulate their requirements, at which point, in desperation, the designers would create some artwork for them based on the few vague hints they had managed to elicit. After many hours of work, involving a full team of staff, the work would be submitted to the client for approval. At that point, the client would say, ‘No. That’s exactly what I don’t want.’

There would be several tortuous iterations of this process before the client finally declared his- or herself satisfied with the end results. Inevitably, Bob said, the artwork that was signed off at the end of the process was virtually identical to the first piece of work submitted, which the client had immediately dismissed as unsuitable. It was no wonder, I thought, that he kept the staffroom well stocked with beer, wine and chocolate, and that the art team availed themselves of it quite so frequently.

I’d started planning the Christmas lunch too. I had only vague ideas at the moment, but, like our clients, I was very clear as to what I didn’t want. No chain restaurants or hotels, no turkey, no Santa; nowhere that said ‘corporate entertainment’ or ‘office party’ on their website. It would take time to track down the perfect venue and plan the perfect event, but I had months yet.