The High Flyer Read Free Page A

ninety, although nowadays they’re usually exterminated from the boardrooms before they hit sixtyfive. They’re in all the major professions, but the law provides them with an ideal environment. The legal dinosaurs talk loudly about modernising attitudes and they make token gestures when it comes to employing women, but this is yet another case of ‘the more things change, the more things remain the same.’ Even today the dinosaurs with the most power all went to the same schools and they all belong to the same clubs and they all share the same lifestyle—”
    “Which is?”
    “A pied-à-terre in the Temple or Clifford’s Inn or the Barbican. A plush home in leafy Surrey which is serviced by a Home Counties wife encased in pearls and twinsets—”
    “You’re describing the 1950s!”
    “As I said, the more things change, the more things remain the same. Anyone who’s truly ambitious soon finds he has to adopt a dinosaur’s lifestyle in order to make his dreams come true, so the lifestyle gets passed down intact from one generation to the next.”
    “But supposing,” said Kim, “a dinosaur gets bored with this fossilised English lifestyle? Supposing he wants to ditch the leafy lanes of Surrey and try something new?”
    “The desire to ditch would probably be just a passing whim. But there’s no reason, of course, why he shouldn’t occasionally take a holiday from all those leafy lanes.” Raising my glass I paused before saying blandly: “Cheers,” and as he smiled again, his eyes now a steamy blue, I knew at once that I’d hooked him.
    V
    I hardly need say that I was not a goddess. To have accumulated the necessary power, prestige and influence, goddesses had to be over fifty, and for me that milestone was still many years away. But my prospects were good. Having become a partner in my firm of solicitors I had now manoeuvred myself into a position where I could afford to take time out—briefly—for domesticity. According to the life-plan which I had designed for myself before my arrival in London, I had to marry at thirty-five. When I met Kim I was nearly thirty-four and already looking around so that I could complete the assignment on schedule. I supposed it was too much to hope that I would manage to follow Mrs. Thatcher’s example of having twins, a move that completed childbearing in a single nine-month tranche, but I certainly expected to be finished with pregnancies before I was forty. Then I would be free to focus on my career again in what would be the most challenging years of my professional life.
    The trouble with life-plans which look so neat on paper is that life itself is always trying to poke holes in them. As soon as I started to look around for a husband I realised there was a big problem: marriageable men were in short supply. My recent lover had spelled this out to me in no uncertain terms before ditching me for a nineteen-year-old fluffette. Unmarried career women in their mid-thirties were pathetic, I was informed, particularly when they were unable to figure out why no man wanted to be stuck with them on a permanent basis. Did they never once realise that there was always a new crop of nubile feminine flesh flowering for the delight of the older male? No man in his right mind, I was informed, wanted the kind of successful woman who had more balls than all the men in the boardroom.
    I did manage to laugh as I accused him of whipping himself into a frenzy of jealousy over the penis that I didn’t have, but after his departure I found myself fighting a major depression, and although I won through I emerged debilitated. I almost decided not to bother with marriage, but found this was a goal I was unwilling to abandon. The dinosaurs never truly respected a woman unless she had been a wife and mother. Society did appear to have changed in its attitude to unmarried women, but I often suspected the change was no more than a fantasy hyped up by the media while the attitudes of the men in