'Here,' said Minty, my deputy, with one of her breathy laughs,
'the review has just come in. It's hilariously vindictive.' She
pushed towards me a book entitled A Thousand Olive Trees by
Hal Thorne with the review tucked into it.

For some reason, I picked up the book. Normally I avoided anything
to do with Hal but I did not think it mattered this once. I was
settled, busy, different, and I had made my choice a long time
ago.

When we first discussed my working on the books' pages, Nathan
argued that, if I ever achieved my ambition to become the books
editor, I would end up hating books. Familiarity bred contempt. But
I said that Mark Twain had got it better when he said that
familiarity breeds not so much contempt but children, and wasn't
Nathan's comment a reflection on his own feelings about his own
job? Nathan replied, 'Nonsense, have I ever been happier?' and 'You
wait and see'. (The latter was said with one of his lovely,
strong-man I know-better-than-you smiles, which I always enjoyed.)
So far, he had been wrong.

For me, books remained full of promise, and contained a sense of
possibility, any possibility. In rocky times, they were saviours
and lifebelts, and when I was younger they provided chapter and
verse when I had to make decisions. Over the years of working with
them, it had become second nature to categorize them by touch.
Thick, rough, cheaper paper denoted a paperback novel. Poetry
hovered on weightless and were decorated with wide white margins.
Biographies were heavy with photographs and the secrets of this
subjects' life.

A Thousand Olive Trees was slim and compact, a typical
travelogue whose cover photograph was of a hard, blue sky and a
rocky, isolated shoreline beneath. It looked hot and dry, the kind
of terrain where feet slithered over scree, and bruises sprouted
between the toes.

Minty was watching my reaction. She had a trick of fixing her dark,
slightly slanting eyes on whoever, and of appearing not to blink.
The effect was of rapt, sympathetic attention, which fascinated
people and also, I think, comforted them. That dark, intent gaze
had certainly comforted me many times during the three years we had
worked together in the office.

'"This man is a fraud,'" she cited from the review.

'" And his book is worse . . ."'

'What do you suppose he's done to deserve the vitriol?' I
murmured.

'Sold lots of copies,' Minty shot back.

I handed her A Thousand Olive Trees. 'You deal. Ring up his
agent, Dan Thomas, and see if he'll do a quickie.'

'Not up to it. Rose?' She spoke slowly and thoughtfully, but with
an edge I did not quite recognize. 'Don't you think you should be
by now?'

I smiled at her. I liked to think that Minty had become a friend,
and because she always spoke her mind I trusted her. 'No. It's not
a test. I just don't wish to handle Hal Thorne's books.'

'Fine.' She picked her way round the boxes on the floor, which was
packed with them, and sat down. 'Like you said, I know how to
deal.' I am not sure she approved. Neither did I, for it was not
professional behaviour to ignore a book, certainly not one that
would receive a lot of attention.

My attention was diverted by the internal phone. It was Steven from
Production. 'Rose, I'm very sorry but we are going to have to cut a
page from Books for the twenty-ninth.'

'Steven!'

'Sorry, Rose. Can you do it by this afternoon?'

'Twice running, Steve. Can't someone else be the sacrificial lamb?
Cookery? Travel?'

'No.'

Steven was harassed and impatient. In our business - getting a
paper out - time dictated our decisions and our reactions. After a
while, it became second nature, and we spoke to each other in a
shorthand. There was never time for the normal give and take of
argument. I glanced at Minty. She was typing away studiously, but
she was, I knew, listening in. I said reluctantly, 'I could manage
it by tomorrow morning.'

'No later.' Steven rang off.

'Bad luck.' Minty typed away 'How much?'

'A page.' I sat back to consider the problem, and my eye fell on
the photograph of Nathan and the children, which had a permanent
place on my desk. It had been taken on a bucket-and-spade holiday
in Cornwall when the children were ten and eight. They were on the
beach, with their backs to a grey, ruffled sea. Nathan had one arm
round Sam, who stood quietly in its shelter, while the other
restrained a squirming, joyous Poppy. Our children were as
different as chalk and cheese. I had just mentioned that a famous
novelist had also taken a house in Trebethan Bay for six months to
finish a novel. 'Good heavens.' Nathan had made one of his faces.
'I had no idea he was such a slow reader.' I had seized the camera
and caught the trio as the children howled with laughter at this
latest example of his terrible jokes. Nathan was laughing, too,
with pleasure and satisfaction. See? he was saying to the camera.
We are a happy family.

I leant over and touched Nathan's face in the photograph. Clever,
loving Nathan. He considered that the job of fatherhood was to keep
his children so amused that they did not notice the unpleasant side
of life until they were old enough to cope, but he also loved to
make them laugh for the pleasure of it. Sometimes, at mealtimes, I
had been driven to put my foot down: at best, Sam and Poppy's
appetites were as slight as their bodies and I worried about them.
'Mrs Worry, do you not know that people who eat less are healthier
and live longer?' demanded Nathan who, typically, had gone to some
pains to find out this fact to soothe my fears.

Back to the problem. As always with the paper, there were political
factors, none significant in isolation but, taken together, they
could add up. I said to Minty, 'I think I'd better go and fight.
Otherwise Timon might get into the habit of paring down Books.
Don't you think?' The 'don't you think' was cosmetic for I had made
up my mind, but I had fallen into the habit of treating Minty (just
a little) in the way I had treated the children. I thought it was
important to involve them on all levels.

Timon was the editor of the weekend paper in the Vistamax Group for
which we worked and his word was law. Minty had her back to me and
was searching for Dan Thomas's telephone number in her contacts
book. 'If you say so.'

'Do I hear cheers of support?'

Minty still did not look round. 'Perhaps better to leave it. Rose.
We might need our ammunition.'

When it was a question of territorial battles, Minty was as
defensive as I was. This made me suspicious. 'Do you know something
that I don't, Minty?' Not a silly question. People and
events in the group changed all the time, which made it a rather
dangerous place to work, and one had to become rather protean,
undercover and dangerous to survive.
'No. No, of course not.'

'But. . .?'

Minty's phone rang and she snatched it up. 'Books.'

I waited a moment or two longer. Minty scribbled on a piece of
paper, 'An ego here bigger than your bottom,' and slid it towards
me.

This implied that she would be on the phone for several minutes, so
I left her to it and walked out into the open-plan space that was
called the office. The management reminded its employees,
frequently and cheerily, that it had been designed with humans in
mind, but the humans repaid this thoughtfulness with ingratitude
and dislike: if it was light and airy, it was also unprivate and,
funnily enough, despite the hum of conversation and the under-lying
whine of the computers, it gave an impression of glaucous
silence.

Maeve Otley from the subs desk maintained, with a deep sense of
grievance, that it was a voyeur's paradise. It was true: there was
nowhere for staff to shake themselves back into their skins, or to
hide their griefs and despairs, only the fishbowl where the owners
had not bothered to put in a rock or two. I grumbled with Maeve,
who was another friend, against the imposition, the terrorism of
our employers, but mostly, like everyone else, I had adapted and
grown used to it.

On the floor below, Steven was surrounded by piles of computer
printout and flat-plans, and looked frantic. A half-eaten chicken
sandwich was resting in its container beside him with several small
plastic bottles of mineral water. When he saw me bearing down on
him, he raised a hand to ward me off. 'Don't, Rose. It's not
kind.'

'It's not kind to Books.'

He looked longingly at his sandwich. 'Who cares, as long as I can
get it done and dusted and into bed? You, Rose, are
expendable.'

'If I make a fuss with Timon?'

'You won't get diddly . . .'

No headway there. 'What is so important that it thieves my space? A
shepherd's pie?'

'A nasty demolition job on a cabinet minister. I can't tell you
who.' Steven looked important. 'The usual story. A mistress with
exotic tastes, cronyism, undeclared interests. Apparently, his
family don't know what's coming, and it's top secret.'
I felt a shudder brush through me, of distaste and worry. In the
early days, I used to feel plain, unadorned guilt for the suffering
that these exposes caused. Latterly, my reaction had dulled.
Familiarity had made it commonplace, and it had lost its capacity
to disturb me. Yet I hated to think of what exposure did to the
families. How would I cope if I woke up one morning to discover
that my everyday life had been built on a falsehood? Would I break
into pieces? The effect on the children of these stories of deceit
and betrayal did not bear too much thought either. But I accepted
there was little I could do, except resign my job in protest. And
are you going to do that?' asked Nathan, quite properly.
'No.' So my private doubts and occasional flashes of guilt
remained private.

'I feel sorry for them; I said to Steven. All the same, I ran
through a list of possible candidates in my head. I was
human.
'Don't. He probably deserves it.'

'Or is it a she?'

Steven took a bite of his sandwich. 'Are you going to let me get
on?'

By chance, Nathan stepped out of the lift with Peter Shaker, the
managing editor, as I was going in. 'Hallo, darling,' I murmured.
Nathan was preoccupied, and the two men conferred in an undertone.
It always gave me a shock, a pleasurable one, to see Nathan
operating. It was the chance to witness a different, disengaged
aspect of the man I knew at home, and it held an erotic charge. It
reminded me that he had a separate, distinct existence. And that I
did too.

'Nathan,' I touched his arm, 'I was going to ring. We're due at the
restaurant at eight.' He started. 'Rose. I was thinking of
something else. Sorry. I'll - I'll see you later.'

'Sure.' I waved at him and Peter as the doors closed. He did not
wave back.

I thought nothing of it. As deputy editor of a daily paper
published by the Vistamax Group, Nathan was a busy man. Friday was
a day packed with meetings and, more often than not, he stumbled
back to Lakey Street wrung out and exhausted. Then it was my
business to soothe him and to listen. If the look on his face was
anything to go by, and after twenty-five years of marriage I knew
Nathan, this was a bad Friday.

The lift bore me upwards. Jobs and spouses held things in common.
With luck, you found the right one at the right time. You fell in
love with a person, or a job, tied the knot and settled down to the
muddle and routine that suited you. I admit it was not entirely an
accident that Nathan and I worked for the same company - an
electronics giant which also published three newspapers and several
magazines under its corporate umbrella — but I liked to think
that I had won my job on my own merits. Or, if that was not
precisely true, that I kept on my own merits.

Poppy hated what Nathan and I did. At twenty-two, she had stopped
laughing and believed that lives should be useful and lived for the
greater good, or she did at the last time of asking. 'Why
contribute to a vast, wasteful process like a newspaper?' she
wanted to know. 'An excuse to cut down trees and print hurtful
rubbish.' Poppy had always fought hard, harder than Sam, and her
growing up had been like a glove being turned inside out, finger by
finger. If you were lucky, it happened gently, the growing-up part,
and Poppy had not fared too badly, but I worried that she had her
wounds.

Excerpted from REVENGE OF THE MIDDLE-AGED WOMAN ©
Copyright 2005 by Elizabeth Buchan. Reprinted with permission by
Penguin Books. All rights reserved.