Page 8 of Behind Frenemy Lines

Kriya

Rosalind Wijanarko of Sanson followed me and Arthur when we moved to Swithin Watkins, but we had known she would. Rosalind was the one client I would have retained if I had refused to move with Arthur.

Rosalind was from a fabulously wealthy family, in accordance with the usual stereotypes about Chinese Indonesians. She could have afforded her Chelsea flat, her black cab habit, and her extensive collection of designer fashion even if she never did a day’s work.

With that kind of family money, I would happily have done my degree in obscure genres of wayang kulit and devoted the rest of my life to perfecting my kaya recipe.

But Rosalind was driven by different demons.

She worked maniacally hard as a senior compliance manager at Sanson, a multinational conglomerate that produced everything from highlighter pens to industrial laminates.

She treated me as a combination of typist, oracle, favourite niece, therapist, tax accountant, and spiritual confessor.

Besides listening to her dating woes, the main thing I’d done for Rosalind was draft a compliance protocol that she was trying to roll out across her company.

Eight months on, it hadn’t been implemented yet.

Rosalind was too busy arguing with her Board, as well as the seventy markets in which Sanson operated, most of which didn’t see why they should give a flying fuck about regulatory requirements in far-off Europe.

She relied heavily on me for support, which mostly consisted of me making soothing noises and drafting emails for her to send on to obstructive internal stakeholders.

It wasn’t exactly the sort of work I’d envisioned doing when I was studying for my law degree, but Rosalind seemed to find it helpful.

We spoke at least twice a week—sometimes twice a day, if her stakeholders were being particularly difficult.

She gave me a brief break after the firm move. But on the Wednesday of my second week at Swithin Watkins, Rosalind rang, raging about “those bastards in Malta.”

“I need you to write me an email citing chapter and verse of the legislation, so I can send it to that cow over there and copy her GM. You tell her—”

“Hold on. Give me a second.” As I was putting Rosalind on speaker so I could type, I caught a twitch of the lips from Charles.

Shit. I wasn’t used to having a roommate anymore. I couldn’t have long conference calls with Rosalind on speaker while poor Kawan Baik was trying to work.

“Wait,” I told Rosalind. I ducked under the desk to fumble in my bag for my headset.

Rosalind kept talking, ranting about the Maltese Head of Legal and her various deficiencies of personality, intellect, and appearance.

“Rosalind,” I hissed. “You can’t use that language. I share an office now!”

“Oh? With who?”

“With, um—” Where had I put that damn headset? It had to be in my bag somewhere, underneath the layers of crap it turned out I’d been carrying around. How many packets of tissues did one person need? “With, you know, another lawyer.”

“Male or female?”

“Why does it matter?” My fingers closed around the plastic band of my headset. I yanked it out of the bag, scattering forgotten receipts and Boots vouchers all over the floor.

Charles was sat straight-backed at his desk, pretending to be engrossed in his screen.

“It’s a bloke, is it?” said Rosalind knowingly. “Is he attractive?”

“He can hear you, ” I said.

“Ask him to give me his number if he’s between the ages of twenty-five and sixty-five,” said Rosalind, undeterred.

“I haven’t dated a lawyer in a while. He can Google me to see what I look like, I’m on LinkedIn.

My cousin took the photo. She did Photoshop it, but you can tell him I got fillers after the shot was taken, so it’s 99 percent accurate. ”

We were both laughing by now. Even Charles was grinning, his ears pink.

I plugged in my headset. “Thanks for that. Turning to the email…”

I ended up talking to Rosalind for an hour and getting a new instruction from her: I was to get our US colleagues to provide a note of advice, to help persuade her stakeholders over the pond that the protocol did not conflict with the laws of their jurisdiction.

I’d have to be careful telling Arthur about it.

He got dog-in-the-mangerish about new instructions, even for work he wasn’t remotely qualified to undertake.

But so long as I could figure out how to handle Arthur, being able to pass on business to my new colleagues at Swithin Watkins was a good thing.

It would help establish me as a desirable addition to the firm.

“Sorry about that,” I said to Charles, taking my headset off. “Rosalind’s incorrigible.”

“Long-standing client, I take it.”

“Yeah. She’s a real character. I apologise in advance for all the boundary-crossing conversations you’ll be overhearing.” I hesitated. “Actually, is there somewhere I can go to take her calls? Rosalind can go on for a bit. I don’t want to disturb you.”

Charles reflected. “There are meeting booths, but they’re always in demand. I wouldn’t bother. The point of having an office is so you don’t have to worry about taking calls.”

“It was your office first, though.”

“And now it’s yours as well,” said Charles. “I’ve got noise-cancelling headphones. I can put them on if I need to.”

“OK. Thanks. Just let me know if it gets too much,” I said. “I promise I won’t take it the wrong way.”

Charles smiled, shaking his head. The smile made him look totally different from his usual forbidding self—sweet, a little goofy, a little vulnerable.

Kawan Baik didn’t seem so bad. Maybe this office-sharing business was going to work out.

I was returning to my emails when Farah came into the office.

“Hello, Kriya, how are you? Settling in? Good.” She looked over at Charles. “Charles, what’s the rest of the day looking like for you? From, say, two p.m.?”

Charles checked his computer screen. “Relatively free now Marcus has cancelled our three o’clock. I’ve got that note for DLP to finalise, but the client’s said tomorrow would be fine. Why?”

“I’ve got a favour to ask.” Farah paused. “Kriya, would you mind closing the door?”

I glanced from her to Charles. “Should I go out?”

“No, stay. I don’t want gossip spreading, that’s all.” Farah leaned back against a filing cabinet, sighing. Her shoulders slumped.

This was a new side to the unflappable Farah. Even Charles, who presumably knew her well, looked concerned.

“What’s happened?” he said.

“You know our work experience programme—oh, Kriya won’t know about this.

” Farah turned to me. “The firm runs an annual work experience programme for students from underrepresented backgrounds who are interested in law. First from the family to attend university, low SES and so on. Four weeks, they rotate around a couple of practice areas, they’re paired with a trainee, go to talks—Charles has kindly delivered a few in his time.

The feedback is very good and we’ve had a number of excellent trainees come to us through the programme. ”

“Sounds a great initiative,” I said.

“We have a new cohort starting today,” said Farah. “Fifteen students, all very promising. There was also an induction this morning for new canteen staff. The catering company did a recruitment drive recently, and there were fifteen new joiners.”

There was a silence as Charles and I joined the dots.

“Oh my God!” Charles coughed. “I mean…”

“Oh, I said much worse when I heard what had happened,” said Farah. “Apparently they had all been put in aprons and caps before the confusion was found out. I’ve got our DEI manager, Amy, lying flat on the floor of my office. She may never get up again, and she really is very good, you know.

“We must do something to remedy the situation before it all goes on RollOnFriday. And that,” said Farah, “is where you come in. Everyone has been put back in the right place. The work experience students are doing a moot this afternoon, but the partner who was going to be the judge has dropped out—wretched man. Can you step in? I’ll get Amy to peel herself off the floor to brief you, but there isn’t much to it.

You merely have to listen and be encouraging.

You won’t have to assess their performance, the Graduate Recruitment lot will do that. ”

“Of course,” said Charles.

“Great.” Farah went on, a little too casually, “We’ve laid on a nice dinner for them on fourteenth floor after the moot.

Once that’s over, I want you to take them to the wine bar across the street and charm them.

I’ll give you a firm credit card to put behind the bar and we’ll do our best to blot out their memories of the morning. Is that all right?”

“Oh,” said Charles, looking like a stuffed fish. “I, um, I might have something on this evening. Let me check my diary.”

“Charles.”

“But I’m not good at charming people,” Charles protested.

“You won’t have to do anything to charm them. They’re university students and you will be paying for their drinks. You can wrap things up by half nine, we don’t want them to bankrupt the firm.”

“But—”

“We have talked about the importance of soft skills,” said Farah. “Your technical skills can’t be faulted, but that’s not enough in a lawyer of your seniority. Isn’t that right, Kriya?”

I hesitated. If I said yes, wouldn’t that be an implied criticism of Charles? It didn’t seem fair to gang up on him with Farah.

Looking at his horrified face, I felt a surge of pity.

I already knew Charles had no problem pulling late nights.

Farah could have asked him to sacrifice his evening to the production of an advice note, or to a call with an overseas client, and he would have obliged without a murmur.

But it was clear he couldn’t imagine anything worse than being trapped in a wine bar with fifteen university students.

“I can do it,” I said.

They stared at me.

Farah recovered first. “Would you? Are you sure?”

“Yeah. I used to do a lot of outreach at my old firm,” I said. “Gave talks at schools, manned our stall at university careers fairs, that sort of thing.”

“You’re a star. That would be fabulous.”

“You don’t need to,” said Charles, looking stricken. “I don’t really—I mean, my evening plans can be rearranged.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “I’m not doing anything else this evening. You can go ahead with your plans.”

Charles made a show of looking at his phone. “Looks like I got it wrong. It was tomorrow I was thinking of. This evening is free.”

“Perfect! You can both go,” said Farah. “Two lawyers to fifteen students is a much better ratio. Thank you so much for volunteering, Kriya. I’ll go and tell Amy.

She’ll email you the details of the moot, Charles, and perhaps you can let Kriya know when you’re all done and ready to move across the road.

You should know,” she said gravely, “that you are making one DEI manager very happy.”

She swept out of the room, leaving us gaping after her.

“Is she always like this?” I said.

Charles looked resigned. “Pretty much. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean for you to lose your evening. I’m not very keen on networking events. As I’m sure you are astonished to hear.”

There was something endearing about how terrified he was at the prospect of having drinks with a bunch of twenty-year-olds. I’d always liked men who weren’t afraid of showing their emotions. That was one of the things I’d liked most about Tom, his open-heartedness.

Well. That hadn’t stopped Tom from sticking the knife in my heart.

At least I didn’t have to worry about that with Charles. I had thought him good-looking, once upon a time, but that was before he’d become Kawan Baik.

But the better I was getting to know Kawan Baik, the more I found myself liking the man beneath the nemesis. It had been nice of him to try to claw back my evening for me.

“It’s fine,” I said. “It’ll be fun. You’ll see.”