I talk too much. I know I do but I just can’t help myself. I chatter endlessly on and I can see people’s eyes glaze over but I still keep talking. I talk about work, mostly, because that’s the most important thing in my life right now. It’s been the most important thing in my life since I left school, actually, and I suppose that now you’re thinking I’m some hot-shot businesswoman with her picture on the front of Business Week or something but I’m not. I’m the PA to Richard Brewer who’s a multi-millionaire entrepreneur. I quite like telling people that I’m the PA to a multi-millionaire entrepreneur because I can see them looking at me with a new respect. Everyone’s heard of Richard Brewer (well, maybe not everyone but he has had his picture on the front of Business Week) and they know, don’t they, that multi-millionaire entrepreneurs don’t employ idiots to be their PAs. And so they know that, despite the fact that I’m here on my own, I can’t be an idiot.
Ron called me an idiot once. Not to my face, though. I overheard him talking to my mother – arguing with my mother, actually – and what he said was ‘I’ve had just about enough of you and that idiot child.’ I’d been sitting on the roof of the garden shed, out of sight, when he said it. I froze, not knowing what he might say next but what happened was that mum spoke to him in the soft voice she uses when she wants to diffuse a difficult situation and suddenly Ron laughed and I knew that everything was OK.

Anyway, that’s not important. It’s really not. It’s just me talking too much again, rambling off into different directions. It’s just as well I have the job. It keeps me focussed.
I like working with Richard Brewin. He’s a fantastic boss and I’ve been with him for nearly ten years. The company is called Global Investments and it’s a financial services group. When I got the job first my mother asked me what exactly they did and, you know, I found it really hard to explain because there are times when I’m not entirely sure myself. Richard trades on the world’s money markets. He buys and sells currencies and interest rate futures (don’t ask!) and precious metals. He makes money doing this although he once told me that it was a zero-sum game which means that for every winner there’s a loser. He said that the key is to win more times than you lose. He seems to be good at that because I see the profit and loss figures every day and more often they show profits than losses. With the money he makes from trading he does what he calls ‘strategic’ investments. He buys shareholdings in public companies. Or he invests money into start-up firms. Or he finances companies that are trying to break through to a new level of business. Sometimes he says that his investments are philanthropic but I’ve never really known him to do anything without thinking that he could make money out of it afterwards.
Except maybe sending me on holiday every year and even that’s not entirely philanthropic. After all, he sends me away at the least busy time for him, the time when he goes skiing in Canada with his gorgeous wife Genevieve and their two children Carlotta and Jack. When I come back I work harder than ever.

Richard has a wonderful family. Genevieve is a power-lady-who-lunches. She’s tall and graceful, with caramel and honey hair and perfectly buffed and moisturised skin. Although we’re basically the same age, she always makes me feel dowdy by comparison. But then she has regular appointments with the kind of beauticians who come to your home and turn you into a gorgeous creature. I pretty much make do with occasional visits to Glow which is the salon nearest to where I live. It’s run by two great women called Elmarie and Tanya who are forever trying to talk me into changing my hair colour or getting the latest facial treatment. Elmarie, the beautician, tells me that I have wonderful bone structure and that my skin has the elasticity of someone ten years younger. And she says that my broken nose makes my face look interesting instead of beautiful, even though she did give me the name of a cosmetic surgeon who could fix it.
I don’t want my nose fixed. It’s part of me the way it is.

Tanya wants me to cut my hair and have it coloured. She’s suggested highlights and lowlights and a selection of tints. She’s given me books to study at with each season’s new look. Personally I think that every look is more or less the same. Tanya thinks that my appearance would be improved immeasurably by lopping a few feet off my hair.
She exaggerates, of course. My hair is shoulder length but its thick and wiry and I do honestly understand when she says that it hides my face. But I’m comfortable with it the way it is. I take her point about the colour, though. My natural hair colour is a kind of dirty blonde and so you don’t really see the greys that much. But they’re starting to multiply and I do think that one day I’ll have to make a decision on the colour. If I do that, though, I’ll have to make a decision on the cut too and I don’t want to.

Sometimes Richard and Genevieve’s children come into the office with him – I’ll see them again at Easter when Global Investments does an Easter Egg treasure hunt for the kids of the employees. Everyone loves it. The eggs are hidden in the staff restaurant (it’s not really a restaurant because we bring in our own food, but there’s an oven, a microwave and an American style fridge) and the kids go wild. They totally trash the place but that’s OK because we deliberately put extra cupboards and desks and plastic plants in there the day before to hide the stuff and we clear it all up afterwards. Each child is allowed to find three eggs. It’s good fun. I’m in charge of organising it and I love to see them running wild and emerging triumphant with their eggs.
Am I talking too much again? I think I must be. It’s because I live alone.

I bought the apartment nine years ago, after I started working for Richard. He put me in touch with a bank that gave me 100% mortgage because at that time I wasn’t exactly well off. I am now, though. Not rolling in it, of course. Nothing like Richard and Genevieve’s wealth, but I have a fair amount in my bank account because he’s a generous employer and he pays me well.
It’s not that I’m mean, but I don’t spend a lot of money. I buy nice things for the apartment – I have the latest in technological gadgets (because Richard invests a lot in companies that produce them and I like to keep up with what’s going on; besides, I love cool technology!); I also spend a lot of money on good furniture and nice things for my home. But I’m really not into clothes and make-up and girly things. (Which is, I guess, why Elmarie and Tanya despair of me.)

I know that they think I’m a bit of an old bat in Global. There are a lot of young employees, all mad keen to get on in the thrusting, pulsating world of high finance. There are guys that come in fresh faced from their Masters degrees in some kind of business studies. They wear expensive suits that they can’t yet afford and crisp shirts with cufflinks. Their hair is short and their expressions are serious. The girls (women, I suppose, I never know what to call females in their twenties and thirties; girl sounds young and silly and woman sounds middle-aged!) are equally serious and they wear conservative suits by names like Donna Karan. Chocolate brown was last season’s big look and Global investments was a sea of men walking around in navy and women swathed in chocolate brown.
They might think I’m a bit of a bat but they respect me because I’m Richard’s PA and I control access to him. Nobody can contact him without speaking to me first. That makes it sound as though Richard runs an autocratic organisation but he doesn’t. It’s just that if he took every phone call that came in for him he’d be on the phone every second of the day and he wouldn’t have time to do his investing thing. I am the guardian of his business life. And, to a large extent, his personal life too. I remind him of things like birthdays and anniversaries and occasions when he has to be home at a certain time. I placate Genevieve when he’s working late and I know she’s going to be annoyed. He rings her himself, of course (he’s a good husband – not a great husband – but a good one), but sometimes I ring her too to reassure her that he does, absolutely, need to stay in the office. I want their relationship to work because I like both of them so much but I know that it can be difficult being married to a successful man. It’s one thing getting Maseratis as birthday presents but you like to think that the man who gave it to you will be home for dinner that night too.

I am not in love with my boss.
I have never had an affair with him.
I admire him and respect him and he respects me too.
I think that’s a good way to have it.
I panic a bit when the holiday season comes around. Not for them, of course, because they love their visit to Lake Louise and their follow on trip to Vancouver which is where Genevieve comes from. I went to Vancouver with Richard once and I do sometimes wonder how she could bear to leave it. I love the way the mountains sweep down to the sea and I love the big-city small-town atmosphere of the place. After that trip I bought an apartment there as an investment. I was five years into my employment with Richard at the time and I was able to borrow the money. I rent it out and it’s a nice, steady income for me. I think maybe that when I retire I might move to Vancouver. It’s a safe place.

I could, I suppose, retire here to the island which is also a safe place. But although I like the sun at this time of the year I couldn’t put up with it all the time. What makes the island so wonderful is that my stay here is always a perfect moment in time. A warm, indolent moment when it’s cold back home and when I don’t have to think about anything more taxing than what I’m going to have for dinner.
Because I’m on my own people talk to me. And that’s when I talk too much in return. They invite me to join them for dinner or for cocktails and I don’t want to appear to be rude and horrible so I agree. Then they ask me questions about myself and I start to talk about Richard and Global Investments and how I met the President of the United States at a G8 conference and how I once had to take notes for Richard at a meeting held on board a yacht anchored off St Tropez and I know that people are stunned by what they think is my glittering life.
They probably also wonder why Richard Brewer, who could have the most glamorous PA in the world, actually has me. But the thing is, you see, I’m not a threat. Genevieve is a lovely, lovely person but I bet she’d feel uneasy if the woman who accompanied her husband around the world was drop-dead gorgeous.
I tried to explain this to Elmarie and Tanya once but they looked at me in disbelief.

‘Global Investments isn’t your life,’ Elmarie told me. ‘You can’t choose how you look based on worrying about whether the boss’s wife would find you too attractive! Get sense, Dee.’
‘Are you insane?’ demanded Tanya. ‘What happens when you stop working for them? You want to look your best now, woman.’
I don’t. I’m quite happy with how I look. Broken nose and all.
Ron broke it. He didn’t mean to. I know that. But he pushed me away in anger one evening and I stumbled and fell, cracking my face against the arm of the chair. That’s what broke my nose. Ron looked at me in horror and said he’d take me to the doctor. But I didn’t want to go. Ron told me that I’d be disfigured if I didn’t get me nose seen to and I said that it didn’t matter. He was about to say something else when my mother walked into the room. She worked in a call centre and her shift was over
‘She fell,’ said Ron.

My mother looked at the blood running from my broken nose and dripping onto the carpet.
‘She’s clumsy,’ he told her. ‘You’d think that by now she’d be better able to look after herself.’
My mother said nothing.
‘I want to bring her to the hospital,’ said Ron. ‘But she won’t let me.’
‘I’ll bring her,’ said my mother.
‘No,’ said Ron. ‘She comes with me.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ I said through my stuffed nose. ‘I’m going to bed.’
He didn’t come to my room that night. I lay there and waited for him but he didn’t come. I think it was because I wasn’t beautiful any more. When I looked at myself in the mirror the next day I could see that I wasn’t beautiful any more too. My nose was misshapen and ugly. There were two bruises under my eyes. My blonde hair hung limply around my face. It was weird, I thought, but I liked the way I looked now. The day before I’d been perfect. Everyone thought so. Perfectly beautiful. Everyone looked at me and told me that I was stunning, even at eleven years old.
Ron especially.

We left him, my mother and me, after that. I don’t blame her for what happened. At the time she met him she’d been down and he’d seemed so great. He hadn’t minded the fact that she was a single mother with a child. He’d told her that he loved children. She believed him.
I don’t talk about that when I talk to everyone at the White Sands Hotel. I talk about Richard and Genevieve and how great my life is now. I don’t want to think about the past. I don’t want to think about a time when I was beautiful. Beauty didn’t work for me.
I talk too much. But only about the things I want to talk about in the first place.