Little Bee

Really I just wanted my staff to be happy. At their age I’d been fresh out of my journalism degree and intoxicated with the job. Exposing corruption, brandishing truth. How well it had suited me, that absolute license to march up to evildoers and demand who, what, where, when, and why? But now, standing in the lobby of the Home Office building in Marsham Street, waiting for a ten o’clock interview, I realized I wasn’t looking forward to it. Perhaps at twenty, one is naturally curious about life, but at thirty, simply suspicious of anyone who still has one. I clutched my brand-new notepad and Dictaphone in the hope that some of their youthful predisillusionment would rub off on me.

I was angry with Andrew. I couldn’t focus. I didn’t even look the part of a reporter—my spiral notepad was virginal white. While I waited, I besmirched it with notes from a fictitious interview. Through the lobby of the Home Office building, the public sector shuffled past in its scuffed shoes, balancing its morning coffee on cardboard carry trays. The women bulged out of M&S trouser suits, wattles wobbling and bangles clacking. The men seemed limp and hypoxic—half-garroted by their ties. Everyone stooped, or scuttled, or nervously ticked. They carried themselves like weather presenters preparing to lower expectations for the bank-holiday weekend.

I tried to concentrate on the article I wanted to write. An optimistic piece was what I needed; something bright and positive. Something absolutely unlike anything Andrew would write in his Times column, in other words. Andrew and I had been arguing. His copy was getting gloomier and gloomier. I think he had truly started to believe that Britain was sinking into the sea. Crime was spreading, schools were failing, immigration was creeping, and public morals were slipping. It seemed as if everything was seeping and sprawling and oozing, and I hated it. Now that Charlie was almost two I suppose I was looking into the future my child would have to inhabit, and realizing that bitching about it might possibly not be the most constructive strategy. Why do you always have to be so bloody negative? I asked Andrew. If the country really is on the slide, then why not write about the people who are doing something about it?

—Oh yeah? Like whom?

—Well, like the Home Office, for example. They’re the ones on the front line, after all.

—Oh that’s genius Sarah, that really is. Because people really trust the Home Office, don’t they? And what will you call your fine uplifting piece?

—You mean what’s my title? Well how about “The Battle for Britain”?

I know, I know. Andrew exploded with laughter. We had a blazing row. I told him I was finally doing something constructive with my magazine. He told me I was finally growing out of my magazine’s demographic. Not only was I getting old, in other words, but everything I had worked on for the last decade was puerile. How almost surgically hurtful.

I was still furious when I arrived at the Home Office building. Always the Surrey girl, aren’t you? That had been Andrew’s parting shot. What exactly do you require the Home Office to do about this bloody country, Sarah? Strafe the lowlifes with Spitfires? Andrew had a gift for deepening the incisions he began. It wasn’t our first row since Charlie was born, and he always did this at the end—brought the argument back to my upbringing, which infuriated me as it was the one thing I couldn’t help.

I stood in the lobby as the dowdy clerks flowed all around me. I blinked, looked down at my shoes, and had my first sensible thought for days. I realized I hadn’t come out into the world today to make a point to my editorial staff. Senior editors didn’t really go back to reporting to shave a few pounds from their commissioning budgets. I was there, I realized, entirely to make a point to Andrew.

And when Lawrence Osborn came down and introduced himself on the dot of ten o’clock—tall, grinning, not conspicuously handsome—I understood that the point I was making to Andrew was not necessarily going to be an editorial one.

Lawrence looked down at his clipboard.

“That’s odd,” he said. “They’ve marked down this interview as ‘nonhostile.’”

I realized I was looking at him fiercely. I blushed.

“Oh god, I’m sorry. Bad morning.”

“Don’t mention it. Just tell me you’ll try to be nice to me. All you journalists seem to have it in for us these days.”

I smiled.

“I am going to be nice to you. I think you people do a terrific job.”

“Ah, that’s because you haven’t seen the statistics we’ve seen.”

I laughed, and Lawrence raised his eyebrows.

“You think I’m joking,” he said.