A Silver Lining Read Free Page A

of a sense of humour, which made it doubly miraculous that she managed to work with someone like him. He walked across the hall, his expensive Italian shoes clicking elegantly off the marble floor. He walked straight across the shot, causing Kim to mutter an expletive under her breath.
    ‘Where do you want me?’ Calvin asked Mollie.
    ‘I’m sorry?’ she asked. She had handed him a treatment for the video around an hour ago. Her team had agreed that a professional voice over would suffice, as well as a couple of interviews with last year’s intake and some of the more senior members of staff, just for sound bites. They were scheduled to interview Calvin the next day, so she had no idea why he was here.
    ‘Where do you want me?’ he repeated. ‘For the introduction.’
    ‘If you look at our treatment you’ll see that we don’t actually need you until tomorrow,’ said Mollie politely.
    Calvin waved her words away as if they were wind. ‘I’ve looked at it and I still think it needs something. Some punch. Some pizzazz. So I thought I’d come down and help you all out.’
    This was a nightmare, said Mollie. She’d love to wake up in her bed and discover that it had all been a horrible dream and she wasn’t in fact working with a madman.
    ‘Look, I know you’re a busy man. While we’d love to make use of your expertise, we know we can’t monopolise you,’ she said as genuinely as she could manage. ‘You have much more important stuff to do. Why don’t you just give us a few pointers and leave us to it?’
    ‘Mollie, you’re a sweetheart to think of it,’ said Calvin. ‘But there’s no need to be shy about asking for a little help when it’s needed. In fact, being able to ask for help is one of the things we look for from new employees!’
    ‘But,’ said Mollie desperately, ‘Surely you’re too busy.’
    ‘Here’s the thing, kid,’ he began. Again Mollie got the feeling that he had been overdosing on Turner’s Classic Movies. ‘There’s this fallacy that when you’ve climbed to the top of the greasy pole you’re somehow above the little people. I like my little people to know that they’re just as important to me as the clever guys. Once you start neglecting the little people in your corporation, the little jobs, then everything falls apart. Do you get me?’
    She sighed. There was no way that she was going to be able to cut him off now he was in full flow.
    ‘My father was the most famed bullock farmer in west Monaghan,’ he began, his eyes misted up as he focused on a fixed point in the middle distance. ‘A lot of people thought that it was down to luck, or that he’d used his family connections to get good animals. And yeah, that was part of it. But he also made a point of getting to know everyone. From the people who shovelled the manure to the veterinarians to the men who made up the feed.
    There was certainly a smell of shit anyway.
    Mollie wasn’t exactly sure which of these Calvin saw her as.
    ‘When Bart the bull won the rosette for best stud animal, it was because my father never underestimated the fact that he wasn’t just a bullock farmer, he was a team leader.’
    What precisely this had to do with shooting a publicity video Mollie had no idea. She was trying to work out a way out of this situation when she saw a familiar face at the back of the melee. Fuck.
    Not only was she having the worst day possible, and being lectured on bovine behaviour as applied to business practice from a lunatic, but James was witnessing the entire thing.
    James had been her junior momentarily when they’d started off at a small media business years ago. He’d been promoted quickly, and had it hadn’t taken long before their relationship had developed from a purely business one to something more. Unfortunately, she wasn’t the only one to see the potential in him. Glenda was the boss’ daughter, and her main responsibility seemed to be sitting in on meetings in her immaculately cut